Leo Gura

@username Good, keep going. The edit button only appears for 48 hours per post. Then editing is locked.

Those of you pursuing enlightenment, really need to study it a lot more. Don't just blindly stumble into this. You should know all the common traps and phase of the spiritual path so you don't get blindsided. I see too many people here not knowing the basics about it. That's no gonna fly. Read all the books in my book list in the Consciousness category, and then you'll have a decent grasp of the basics. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. People have been doing this work for 1000s of years and everything about it is known and written about. You just gotta bother to do your research. If you don't do that, you'll end up with problems of various kinds like DP, or Zen Devilry, etc.

@Scholar Sounds like a few dust particles off the ox's tail hairs. Good, but it goes WAY deeper. So just keep at it.

@Martin123 At that depth level it gets tricky because all words break down. It all depends on how you want to conceptualize and communicate about it. Don't get lost in terminological disputes. They are mostly meaningless and distract from your work.

Keep in mind that the Dark Night Of The Soul is pretty typical for people pursuing enlightenment, by any means. So this phenomena is not limited to psychedelics. You could have exactly the same thing happen with meditation. The key to overcoming depersonalization is to have a good conceptual understanding of enlightenment and the spiritual path, and very importantly, to develop a strong mindfulness practice. Depersonalization is basically an incomplete, misinterpreted, half-baked enlightenment. The mistake people with DP make is that they get it, and then they just sit with it, not taking up any serious kind of spiritual practice. Yeah, if you do that, you'll suffer a lot. I imagine it's like spiritual blue-balls. You gotta go all the way.

Even a sub-breakthrough experience will rock your world and is worth the panic attack. Can you avoid the panic? That's dicey. When you do psychedelics, you gotta muster up some balls. It's a learning experience.

Perfect description of what 5-meo reveals in 15 minutes: infinity.

@FirstglimpseOMG Just slip a thumbprint of LSD in the ol' morning cereal bowl

Get to work. (Notice: nowhere in the guide does it say to use psychedelics.)

When you've hit the wall, you sit there keep pushing for the breakthrough. It's not easy. You may have to spend 1000 hours without any answers. And still keep going. One practical thing you might do is: spend larger blocks of time inquiring. If you're doing, say, 60 minutes per day, that's not enough. You may need to do 100 hours straight to build up the necessary momentum. Your daily 60 min practice is really just for maintenance. The real work happens when you do LOOOOOONG sits. The mind needs dozens of hours to get into the groove of really deep inquiry. Go do a meditation retreat to build up some experience in serious focusing. This is not easy stuff! The Buddah is said to have sat under a tree and inquired for 7 to 40 days without moving to achieve his enlightenment. That's probably not far from the truth. You must slowly build your mind and body up for serious sitting. Be strategic about it.

@Mondsee This inquiry process will take hundreds of hours at least. So get comfy and keep at it. Don't waste your time discussing or arguing the matter with other people. This is like a mathematical proof. You gotta sit down by yourself and carefully sort through the nuances until something clicks. The facts are all right there. The only problem is, it's painful to face them. The mind desperately wants a way to distract itself from inquiry. Hence all this back-and-forth.

What's wrong is that you suffer from your own ignorance. If you want to keep suffering, then there's nothing wrong. Go right ahead.

@username Yes... watch yourself like a hawk. The mind gets extra-sneaky as the days go on. The excuses it creates will be ingenious.

@Mondsee Quiet down that monkey mind and notice the voice goes silent and therefore cannot be you. How insane would you say I am if I told you that my dog is its voice? So when the dog barks, that's really him! I could butcher the dog and tell you that, "It's okay, I didn't really kill him. His voice is just silent. And his body wasn't really the dog because the dog was the voice. And a silent voice is just resting. So really, he's just fine, even though his meat is now in my refrigerator waiting to be cooked for dinner."

@Galyna But you're lying! You DO have a firm belief that you know who you are. Which is your whole problem. If I put a loaded gun to your head, would you say to me, "Go ahead, I don't know who I am anyway"? No! You'd be very sure you're gonna die. If you ACTUALLY didn't know who you are, that would be a great place to be. You'd be seconds away from enlightenment. The problem is that your belief is SO firm you cannot see anything past it. You're trying to fill a cup that's already full. Why do you believe so blindly that that body is you? It's ridiculous! It makes absolutely no sense! How can you be a body any more than you can be a chair or a tree? What is perceiving the body?

@Mondsee Good... that's a good start. But you'll need to hammer at it a lot more until your model of what you are starts to look patently absurd. For example: If you are the voice, do you stop existing when the voice is silent? If you are the voice, how can a voice see a tree? Can voices see things? If you are the voice, who/what is hearing the voice? Aren't you the hearer of the voice? How can a voice hear itself? If you are the voice, would you be a different you if the voice spoke a different language? Do you really believe you're the voice? So if we put a gun to your head, about the pull the trigger, is the thing you'd really be afraid of is that the voice would die? Or something more? Why are you the voice and not something else like an ear, or a finger, or a chair? Who said the voice is any more special than anything else? See, your model of reality makes no sense even with a cursory investigation. It's baloney. Look deeper. How is perception possible at all? What's is the exact mechanism? Find it in your direct experience. Don't appeal to scientific models, as they are all wrong, mere ideas.

All thoughts are meaningless. Just empty sensations pointing to nothing. Ponder that for a while. "Billions of people on the planet" << just a story "Can only realize through a thought" << just another story "I was born" << just another story "I will die" << just another story "Behind the scenes" << just another story In this work, you have to realize that nothing is real unless it's happening RIGHT NOW directly within experience. Any other ideas you have about reality are just that, ideas. And ideas are real, but they are not their content. An idea of your birth is not actually your birth, it's a sensation occurring in the now. An idea of Santa Claus is real if it's occurring right now for you, but Santa Claus himself (the content of the idea) is never real. This is the case EVEN with so-called "true ideas". For example, for you, that the Earth is round, is just another idea. The problem is that you're getting lost in the content of ideas, without being aware that all ideas are sensations occurring in the now. You're literally mesmerized by idea to the point where you can't see straight. Unless you grasp this basic point deep in your bones, your self-inquiry will go nowhere. You will waste 1000s of hours and be no closer to enlightenment.

@mp22 Yes, the video is called Mindfulness Meditation.

@username Good self-honesty here. Keep it up. Don't get too distracted by the journaling process or explaining yourself. Put all focus into the inquiry.

Depends how deep your enlightenment is. It will definitely help. But you'll require a lot more additional work beyond your first enlightenment experience. Years and years, thousands and thousands of hours. But on the bright side, you got nothing better to do, so why not get started? In the meantime, learn to enjoy your suffering. That's all enlightenment will really teach you in the end: how to enjoy being. The deep awareness of the suffering of duality is an important step towards the peace of nonduality. Keep noticing how much you suffer, over and over again.

@blazed That's like saying, I'm interested to see if you will reach a state where you no longer need the use of a screwdriver. You're welcome to screw things in with your bare fingers at any time. Then you can pride yourself on how "natural" you are. While you're at it you can also cut out electricity, computers, cars, medicine, shoes, clothes, toilet paper, grocery stores, etc. A real man doesn't need any of those crutches After all, I know someone who got killed by electricity or a car. QED.

@strwbrycough It is what it is. I'm not sure what you want me do. It's not in my power to be or to think or not think. If you're trying to guide people towards enlightenment or whatever, I'd suggest you actually try your advice out on folks face-to-face to see if simple solutions like: "You're already enlightened. Just be." are helpful to them.

@Steph1988 You'll find this is a general problem with ANY business niche you want to enter. This is the problem of marketing. How do you differentiate yourself in a very crowded marketplace and offer something new and worthwhile? That's THE KEY question you'll have to solve with ANY business niche, be it personal dev, making cars, selling drugs, or running a casino. All worthwhile marketplaces are crowded and highly competitive. And no one will answer this question for you. Only you can answer it. This is what makes or breaks an entrepreneur. You cannot be an entrepreneur with a me-too, I'll-just-do-what-that-guy-is-doing attitude. This doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means it's very challenging, which means you need every advantage you can get, which means you need to be rock fucking solid about your life purpose. You cannot compete when you aren't clear about your passions and you have no spiritual connection to your work. Your work must have a sense of destiny about it. As in: "I will do this no matter what! I will solve every obstacle that comes my way. Nothing will stop me from success in this field because I love it too much!!!" << That's the point of finding your life purpose. That's what the hero's journey is about. It's not a pragmatic calculation about which marketplace is easiest or most lucrative, or whatever is most natural to your socially programmed self (i.e., personal dev). It's about what YOU LOVE MOST. The love is what carries you through the torment of the journey. The journey will be long and treacherous. The stakes are real. So don't screw around and REALLY nail down your purpose now. The problem with personal development is that too many people want to take it on as a life purpose just because it's all they know. They're not thinking enough outside the box. It does you no good to adopt my life purpose for example. That will only hurt you. When I see people doing that, and taking this sort of me-too attitude with personal develop YouTube channels, it makes me sorry for them, because I know they will fail. Because they are doing it like a zombie because they haven't thought of anything better. They are totally underestimating the difficulty. And they're not being authentic enough with themselves. They're not thinking about their purpose deeply enough. Adopting a purpose based on social conditioning is a really huge trap. When you REALLY connect with your life purpose, no competition will deter you. Your love will defeat all obstacles. It will take you some trial and error to connect with your purpose to such a degree. Have patience and really work the issue with faith. Once you have your purpose, you'll be on a path to creating original work which will stand out. No one can out-you you.

@blazed Consider the possibility that there are depths of consciousness you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams.

@JKG Ah yessss... the good old familiar ego backlash, AKA temptations of the devil, AKA homeostasis, AKA backsliding. It's the only thing that's really standing between you and full consciousness. You can't go to the gym without expecting some resistance. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. The ego will fight enlightenment to its very last breath, with every trick imaginable. You will get fooled into quitting, over and over and over again. Which is why a strong blast of psychedelics can be a good re-energizer. This path is very difficult if you aren't getting any tastes of the absolute for years. It's just too likely that you'll fall back asleep unless you're serious as hell about this. You're gonna have to sacrifice a lot. That's the cost of becoming God. Now you know why so few people do it. On the upside, you will become fucking GOD! So it's really a bargain