Leo Gura

How is anything possible at all? That is the question.

In practice what will happen is you will stop doing personal dev and you will start to stagnate. Doesn't matter how enlightened you get, there is always more work to do on yourself and your life. It never ends. That's life in a nutshell: evolution. The key here is to just make growth and learning an everyday part of your life. Besides enlightenment you should be working of your career, your infrastructure, your education, your health, your nutrition, your relationships, your moral inadequecies, your skills, etc, etc.

@xist Which is why I rarely talk purely about enlightenment. Most of my talks are about more minor things. There is really nothing to say about enlightenment. You just do your self-inquiry (or whatever method) and you either experience it or not. Talking about it is pointless and counter-productive in most cases.

@ajasatya That IS a kind of understanding. I've already had an understanding of the ultimate WHY of reality. So it is possible. I just want to take it deeper and broader.

@PretentiousHuman So if they are beyond your control, your options are: A) accept them, B) resist them. If you choose B, you will suffer extra but still accomplish nothing. So what is the point of resisting? Actually think through what you are doing. Because it's like you're shooting yourself in the foot without realizing it.

Nothing and infinity are identical. It's a bit tricky to quantify it. The more work I do, the more I am able to recognize that I am inside infinity. Full nondual awareness I haven't experienced for longer than 60 mins. But my overall understanding of how consciousness works and why it works the way it works has increased significantly in the last year from all my trips. I am still going with that approach, although I'm in no rush. There are many other psychedelics I want to explore. I'm not committed to only taking 5-MeO, and I've gotten very important work accomplished with AL-LAD and 2C-B. And I got more to explore. My job as I see it is to find tools for people and find new things. If you wanted to just use 5-MeO, you certainly could. It would grow you faster than you could handle, most likely.

Permanent nondual awareness is my end-goal, and a full understanding of why reality is the way it is. I want to be able to be conscious of infinity everywhere I look, and be solidly disidentified from my body and my personal story. I don't really know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But my guess is, it goes much deeper than most so-called enlightened Westerners realize.

@Blissout We are saying the exact same thing. Careful not to get lost in langauge.

@Blue is the sea Just sit and observe what is the case. Start doing self-inquiry. Nothing is hidden. Nothing anyone tells you can ever substitute for personal investigation. If there is a me, point to it. What is this "me" of which we speak? What is it exactly?

@Bichu Krishnan What is a who??? Ain't no such thing. Stop assuming whos exist. Remove the words "who" and "I" from your vocabulary.

@Dodo You assume there's a you, but there isn't.

Once you understand that people's minds, personalities, and brains vary quite a bit, you will understand why there are so many different paths, and why they love to misunderstand each other.

@stevegan928 It's useful in the sense that it can create motivation and discipline. It's also possible to visualize your way to God itself, as they do in Tantra yoga or Tibetan forms of Buddhism, but that requires some serious training.

@OBEler I don't really feel a need to ask him any questions.

@Markus Nowhere is that codified. How abiding it is, varies greatly. All these terms generally mean the same thing, with different teachers prefering different terms and defining them differently.

@egoless You can enjoy being without chasing, manipulation, or the kind of neurotic self-obsessive thoughts which predominate most of the average person's day. That is the point. I think you're a little too hung up on this idea of eliminating ego, so much so that you mistake it for elimating all good feelings, all emotions. That's not the goal here. The goal is to liberate yourself from self-obssesed, neurotic, overly-conceptual living.

You guess correct. But the whole point of this path is that you do not know how deep it goes, and you cannot know until you walk it all the way. It's sort of like you're doing scientific research and you ask, "How deep will this research go?" You can't know before you complete the research! The problem here is that you wanna know conceptually without walking the path into the unknown. That is the wrong attitude. Instead, you wanna keep things open. Let your inquiry be open-ended, rather than saying, "Okay, now I am at stage B, then will come stage C, and finally my goal is to get to stage Z." No! You don't know that! The only way you could get such an idea is if you get it through hearsay, but since you don't know which hearsay is correct, you cannot trust anyone but your direct experience. It's safest to assume the path goes on forever with infinite stages. Then you just keep walking it and see what the view looks like. If you assume there are 5 stages, you will stop at stage 5. But there might be a stage 6 which you will then never reach because you were not really being open to the unknown. The whole point here is to be humble and admit that you don't know, but you're curious enough to explore to the fullest. It's really like being the first person to explore a new planet. You cannot depend on any external authority. Just because some guy claims to have seen everything that planet has to offer, doesn't make it true. You might discover a totally new thing there. The nature of knowledge is that it's always incomplete.

Also, I notice some of you guys are holding enlightenment as different from self-realization as different from awakening. This is creating needless confusion. These are all identical terms. Just different terms pointing to the same thing. There are a hundred different lables you can use to speak about this stuff. That doesn't mean each is a different thing.

Selfishness is not separate from enlightenment. The relative is the absolute, and the absolute is the relative. There is no difference between enlightenment and non-enlightenment. Of course you can still feel selfish emotions after enlightenment. Enlightenment doesn't remove any capabilities from you.

You aren't to trust anyone, least of all yourself. Hence self-inquiry.

Exactly. But you're not yet grasping the full consequences of this. If a thing is limitless, it is one, which leaves nothing beyond it. The Truth is massive. It's like you're an ant crawling on an elephant trying to see the whole thing. You will have to crawl around for a long time to see all the parts even though it's just one elephant. The Absolute isn't a logical conclusion. You cannot get to it through logic.

If there was a point to doing good, it wouldn't be good, it would be manipulation. Good is its own end. It is pointless precisely so that people only do it out of the joy of doing it. Rather than to get something out of it. If you're still looking to get something out of it, you're operating at a low level of consciousness. Being > Acquiring

The easiest and best way to become financially independent is to find your LP and work on your skillset until you are able to provide the world with lots of value. Your goal should be to provide so much value in your line of work that even a 0.1% return would be enough to retire on. Living cheap isn't a good strategy. Produce more! Then live however you want without hurting the envirnment too much. When it comes to financial independence, you want a good offense more than a good defence. All the energy you put into pinching pennies is energy you could have invested in producing more for the world. Help people in a powerful way, and they will pay for all your expenses. It's also more enjoyable to help people than pinching pennies.

Mixing and matching IS what produces original ideas! You're selling consciousness short. It is a creative force that creates new orginal insights based off past acheivements. It's literally intelligent evolution! And here you are discounting it as mere mixing and matching. Well, this mixing and matching has created the dinosaurs, the bird wing, the eye, the automobile, your smart phone, your dog, your brain, Albert Einstein, Michangelo, and every piece of art every produced. Evolution is NOT random. Your brain isn't random. It functions by way of infinite creative intelligence! You have no idea yet just how intelligent it is. It would take your breath away if you only knew. You want original ideas? Become conscious of reality.

Dark Night is when you have a deep spiritual breakthrough, you see God, and you realize everything you've known was wrong. It's not your run of the mill depression. Dark Night is something a fundamentalist Christian or Trump might experience if he snorts some 5-MeO for example.