Leo Gura

@Salomon Tolosa 12mg is a baby dose. It won't alter consciousness very much.

The forum IS the chat room. We don't want to dilute the discussions across multiple platforms because we are still a small community.

Of course once the supernatural and paranormal become a part of your worldview, they are held at perfectly natural and normal. Words like "supernatural", "paranormal", "mystical", and "pseudoscience" are just dismissals/demonizations of various phenomena of which one is ignorant. They are always circular definitions whose function is to preserve the old paradigm. Once the ignorance is removed, those words become meaningless.

@John Do a 10 day Vipassana retreat, and you will understand what mindfulness is.

Sure you can. Learn to lucid dream and use it work on various aspects of yourself. Don't expect it to be easy.

The problem only rises if you have false expectations. A psychedelic is a temporary glimpse into Truth. Temporary of course. But not without lingering shifts in your mind. If you expect one trip to change you much, of course that's foolish. No one has seriously made that claim. So all this talk against psychedelics because they don't cause an instant permanent enlightenment is a straw man. Meditation or self-inquiry doesn't cause instant permanent enlightenment either. So that kind of expectation is silly in all cases. And the idea that just because you do some psychedelics that now you can't also simultaneously be working hard towards enlightenment is also a straw man. If you meditated or self-inquired for as few number of hours as you tripped on psychedelics, you would NEVER get enlightened. So it's really an unfair comparison. If you did 5000 hours of psychedelics for example (which might be analogous to 5000 hours of self-inquiry), well... who knows where you'd get. So be careful comparing apples and oranges. It's very easy to poo-poo any spiritual technique simply by pointing out all the ways people fail to get enlightened. All enlightenment techniques are 99.9% ineffective. Not because of the technique. But because the person using it is ignorant. Osho, Mooji, Eckhart, Buddha, Jesus, etc. all have 99.9% failure rates with their students. It couldn't be otherwise.

@The Universe Everything isn't a paradigm. A paradigm is ultimately just a set of concepts, and is itself a concept. There is an entire reality out there which is independent of concepts. Go find it. It's right there under your nose.

@jse Wouldn't it be nice if enlightenment was an infectious disease, like herpes?

@SC GM Ain't nothing "reasonable" or "logical" about your life. 99% of everything you do is emotional. Including any considerations of suicide. The problem is that you don't have sufficient awareness yet of just how powerfully your emotions control you. You are like a puppet of your emotions. And you are never going to change that with logic. Logic is the backwards rationalization you make for your emotional prejudices.

The Dalai Lama once came to my university to give a speech. I was gonna go but then got lazy and didn't.

Yes, basically. Although technically being and experience are different. If you stopped holding experience as separate from you, you would literally be it.

You are not going to enter nonduality until you deeply realize that duality produces suffering by design. Sounds like you're being shown this important lesson, but are sort of discounting its importance. The trap would be to sink back down into your old materialistic paradigm. The challenge of course is facing the truth head-on, without deflecting it. Chasing material objects will never satisfy you. This would be true even if you never started on the path to enlightenment. At least you know what to do about it if you are serious about ending suffering. Otherwise, suffer away and enjoy it. BTW, nonduality does not preclude success, money, sex, or relationships.

Consider... it's possible to be married and take marriage as a dogma -- a paradigm of do's and dont's. And it's possible to be married yet not make a big dogmatic thing out of it. You can create whatever kind of relationship you want. The difference is, are you making a whole ideology out of it? For example, I can eat a carrot without creating a "vegan" identity out of this activity. If I say to drop the vegan paradigm, does that mean rabbits now have to stop eating carrots and must now start eating meat? If you want to go to a club and flirt with girls, have at it. But be clear about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you're justifying it to yourself.

@100rockets Maybe there's nothing left to do but to enjoy being, until you aren't any more.

@Bronsoval Breaking out the paradigm of language has little to do with stopping physical speech or writing. Those are external behaviors which don't address the root paradigm at all. You can not speak for 10 years, but that doesn't mean you've escaped the language paradigm. Seeing through the paradigm is the key. There is nothing wrong with speech or writing as long as you understand what they are; that they are constructions; that these constructions come with certain consequences and shape your perception of reality. So the difference is between a person who is fully conscious that language is a paradigm vs a person who is not (99.9999% of people). Breaking out of a paradigm does NOT mean you stop all behaviors commonly associated with it. You can still eat, sleep, shop, write, reason, believe, speak, teach, read, learn, do math, do science, pray, etc. No external action is ever prohibited by reality.

@Consept Working out psychological issues IS self-actualizing. We call carry a bag of shit around with us, some more, some less. Working through it is what grows you. Just don't get too caught up in making the motivation for this work negative. You should be self-actualizing for positive reasons, but in the process you'll have plenty of negative personal shit to clear up. For example: if you have depression, don't make "not being depressed any more" your goal. Your goal must be bigger than that. But as you self-actualize, of course you'll need to address your depression. But you're doing that because it holds you back from achieving your bigger goal.

@Kloof No, you're not taking me literally enough! Ask yourself, What does "physical" mean? Who is the judge of what is and is not physical? Who is even making a distinction between "my body" and "a leaf". If you investigate all that deeply, you'll clearly see that it's all a construction of your mind. There is no such thing as "physical" or even "reality". You invented these things in order to come into "existence". These things are conceptual in nature. Who told you what constitutes the criteria for judging physicality? You say "But if I'm not physical, then the leaf didn't actually crunch" << How do you know that? Notice, that's just an arbitrary conceptual construction you made. Why can't a leaf crunch in a non-physical reality? Do leaves crunch in your dreams? Do leaves crunch in a video game? Is a dream physical or virtual? Is a video game reality physical or virtual? And for that matter, how could you even distinguish between reality existing vs not-existing? Consider... that there may be zero difference between reality existing vs not-existing. It could in fact be doing both things simultaneously. The only reason reality feels "real" is because you say it does. If you stopped believing that, reality might cease to be "real" and instead become just an illusion or a dream. This is all very tricky stuff that requires deep levels of inquiry to grasp. It cannot be believed at all. You also cannot "reason it out" with logic. Logic itself is a construction.

@The Universe The way you're holding it, yes. But that has nothing to do with actual enlightenment. Actual enlightenment is beyond anything that's possible for the mind to comprehend or imagine or speak. The problem here, is that you've never experienced what Absolute is before. You only know relative reality/truth. Absolute reality blows all your reasonings from within relative reality upside down. So you're stuck, until you experience what Absolute means. And then you'll see that paradigms don't operate on that level because thought and language are not Absolute. At the Absolute level, you couldn't even construct a paradigm.

@Franz Good work. Use it to take your meditation, self-inquiry, and personal development deeper.

@Hardik jain Just keep being very mindful of your emotions and thoughts, so you don't get sucked into them too much. Or at least so you can see that you getting sucked into them. Grounding activities like physical exercise or sports can be helpful too. Otherwise, just keep meditating. That's always the solution unless you're totally stressed out and need a rest. But after a rest, back into meditation! Emotional upheaval is THE POINT of meditation (in a way). It's like muscle burn at the gym.

Your ego isn't directly causing it (if we disregard your potential voting record or lack thereof), but if you were placed in a position of power, your ego would also abuse it by acting selfishly. Unless you took uncommon measures to develop yourself. Yes, collective ego is a big problem.

If someone gifted you a beautiful boutique of colorful flowers, you wouldn't piss all over it right in front of them and throw it into the trash. So why are you doing that with life?

@Alex K You're trying to make logical sense of the very fabric of reality, which just cannot succeed because you are not aware yet that reality doesn't care at all about logical sense. Reality is UNLIMITED. Which makes it highly paradoxical and illogical. Your line of questioning makes many taken-for-granted assumptions. For example, you assume you exist. You assume others exist. You assume you are an experience. You assume others are experience. You assume reality is an experience. You assume Nothing is nothing. You assume Nothing is a state. You assume Nothing and You and Other are separate. You assume existence/non-existence is a given, rather than a construction of the mind. You assume reality exists. You assume existence exits. You assume non-existence doesn't exist. You assume reality is mechanistic. And you are not aware that all of the above is concept. All of these assumptions are false. You're underestimating just how radical this shift of consciousness called "enlightenment" is. Imagine as though everything you ever believed became unreal, just a story, including all logic, science, and physical reality itself.

@Wind How can corruption be anything other than ego? << That's the better question. Why does corruption exist? Why are you corrupt yourself? Because your ego's job is to serve its own agenda at the cost of others. Should be pretty obvious stuff. People with low quality consciousness act to serve themselves. What else would they do?

@100rockets This is where you gotta be very mindful. Can you see that when you hold that reality is meaningless, and that's a problem for you, that's only a problem because you're actually giving meaninglessness a negative meaning? So you're actually not being true to meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is meaningless. Which means it can't be negative or bad. Investigate this issue until your mind grasps that it's still creating negative meaning, but calling it "meaningless". But that is actually very meaningful. Which is untrue. It's important that you don't allow the mind to misinterpret or warp existential truths. The mind can do that all day long and drive itself nuts.