Leo Gura

@BeginnerActualizer I suggest you do a meditation or enlightenment retreat. Where you can sit and focus for 100 hours straight. It's hard to breakthrough by doing 1-hour daily sits. That's generally not nearly enough. That's just basic maintenance work.

@Costa7 I would assume they are copyrighted.

@ZeN Psychedelics are definitely a bit random. Sort of a pipe-bomb vs sniper rifle approach to spirituality. Since psychedelics have been used for thousands of years by shamans all over the world, I'm not too worried about it. They are one tool in the toolbox, and they certainly aren't the sole solution. Meditation and contemplative practices are still required.

@Carlos It would have a mind-blowing strong effect no matter what. There is some risk with doing any psychedelic. If you are doing it with the help of a provider, like Dr Octavio Rettig in Mexico, he's an expert, so you'd be in good hands. If you wanna do it on your own, try some mushrooms first.

Not nearly as farfetched as mainstream folks would believe. Try going to a local healer in your area who does energy body-work (like Reiki). Put your skepticism to the test. Or check out the work of Mantak Chia: http://amzn.to/2h0CO4B http://amzn.to/2i4Zj5T

@J I would look into the following things if I were you: Seeking out professional psychological care and getting a clinical diagnosis if there is one. Reading books about your condition, so you have background knowledge Starting to change your habits one habit at a time. Drop some bad ones, add one healthy ones. Meditation habit every day for the rest of your life, no exceptions Reprogramming your subconscious mind (I'm hoping to release a course on that sometime next year) Life coaching (if it's within your budget) Being more social, going out more, making new friends, dating. Clean up your diet. Cut out wheat, sugar, all processed foods, all soda, all alcohol, all coffee. Get full bloodwork done to identify any problems that might be physiological Consider changing your environment, like by moving to a new city or new apartment. For a clean slate. And lastly, if you stay tuned, I will be releasing a video that will share a powerful new technology for unwiring stuff like depression, ADD, and aspergers. I also have a book on my book list that discusses research about autism and aspergers. So you understand your situation better.

Sure, up to their limit. They do have limits, which are worth knowing. Here's a decent book discussing the limits of scientific method, written by a scientist and philosopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method His core point: Science cannot have a method. Any science claiming to have a method is not real science. Because you cannot know ahead of time what you don't know. EVER! And the history of science clearly bears this out. I take the lessons of history and apply them to my epistemic process. Which means I have to hold everything loosely. Study of history is also extremely important. Or you will blunder.

@electroBeam Yes, basically. As Ra says somewhere in Book I (and I'm paraphrasing): the fastest way for humans to grow is through interaction with other humans. This is why the most conscious entities on Earth are highly social chimps. Interdependence spurs conscious development. A tree doesn't need to push itself to be highly-conscious. Humans do, or we kill ourselves. This rang very true for me. Relationships grow you A LOT. Business grows you A LOT. Pickup grows you A LOT. Being a leader of a community grows you A LOT. The trick is to engage all these with the INTENT and PRIME DIRECTIVE to raise one's consciousness. Most people in business or in pickup or in politics do NOT do that, so they waste tons of growth opportunity. Could you imagine starting a business whose main function was to raise YOUR consciousness vs making you money? Now that would be radically counter-intuitive. But also a genius strategic move.

@Motus I have not personally met any such people, but I wouldn't be surprised if they existed and were outwardly humble about their abilities due to rampant ignorance and fear of misunderstanding.

@Valentin I'm well aware of Bashar. Fun guy. Useful advice, regardless of what you may think of his, shall we say, style or existential claims. Fits great with my life purpose course actually. He basically shows you how to follow your passion.

@hundreth False equivalency. Don't conflate openmindedness with stupidity, or lack of discernment. Just because one does research and is willing to accept some deadends, doesn't mean one is open to researching every irrelevant thing. By that logic, research couldn't happen, as it would get lost in a never-ending sea of possible research targets. It helps to actually study how scientific method works. Philosophy of science is very useful here.

@electroBeam That is an excellent question. I intend to shoot a video about that. What I've learned from my study of epistemology is that the best approach is: Digest as many diverse sources as humanly possible (being sure to include books, videos, and face-to-face contact) Seek diverse life experience through travel, psychedelics, relationships, business, etc. Then throw all of it away as you contemplate reality via direct experience. Then behold, as your understanding of reality blossoms, as your subconscious mind integrates everything automatically, producing the biggest picture possible. Unfortunately I see many people very resistant to this approach. They like to pick one thing and only do that while poo-pooing everything else. And I'm not surprised by their lack of understanding of reality, despite whatever attainments they've made. Their ignorance is obvious when I then interact with them. They lack holistic understanding.

Have you been able to accomplish yourself? If you have a practical technique for cultivating spoon-bending, I'm all ears.

@hundreth If you keep growing, all your "logic" will melt away. You will be like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, slowly but surely transforming into a New Age hippy. Much to your own horror. Turns out it's not so bad after all Love and consciousness make logic look like a rusty unicycle. And then you'll become like a New Age vampire, lurking in the shadows of the self-help world. But happy as fuck about it.

Now that's some hardcore meditatin' Less keyboard-jockeying, more being like that kid.

@stevegan928 Lol, the joys of eclecticism AKA being a self-help slut

Good question. In truth, I don't really know. My best guess at this point -- given much more research and much deeper direct experiences -- is that thought goes beyond mere mechanical manipulation of the body. That said, I think some New Agers might over-state the metaphysical aspects of thought. Much of how law of attraction works is simply by programming your mind with better thought patterns and directing focus to things that really matter. In other words, we can explain it with Western psychology and neuroscience. But there are probably some "paranormal" qualities to thought as well. You will probably only start to experience them as your consciousness significantly rises. All of this has to be understood in the context of there not being a physical reality at all! So imagine zero physical reality, imagine an infinitely vast tangle of potential states instead. And imagine that all of it is infinitely interconnected such that there are no hard or fast distinctions between thought, consciousness, matter, energy, time, space, or anything else. This will give you a bit of a better picture, and make "paranormal" characteristics seem completely plausible. It would not shock me for example, if I was able to bend a metal spoon with thought alone. I'm not saying I CAN, I'm saying it wouldn't surprise me if it was trainable at high degrees of consciousness (which I don't presently have). My paradigm of reality no longer prohibits such a possibility, because I've experienced things that are utterly impossible, beyond all human comprehension or scientific modeling.

@Vinsanity This technique is a bit challenging to apply to watching TV because TV sucks you in for hours and you lose awareness. The key to this technique is to maintain CONTINUOUS awareness of how the activity is damaging you. At the very least you can apply it to the start and end of your watching session. Notice how dirty it makes you feel.

@hundreth So now here is an important intellectual point: It's possible to hold partial perspectives. It's possible, for example, to read this entire series of books, vehemently disagree with parts of it, but still get personal growth value out of it, AND hold the entire thing as just another partial perspective out of many. No one perspective being true. That would be a great test of Stage Yellow Spiral Dynamics thinking. Stage Orange would be the way you're doing it: look for one contradiction and throw the whole thing in the trash bin. The reason I brought this book to you guys is not because I think it to be all true. What's interesting to me, is that Ra's descriptions of Absolute Infinity are DEAD ON based on my direct experience. So if nothing else, you could learn about that. But also Ra's discussions of more practical matters like meditation, service to others vs service to self, chakras, etc can all be super-useful in your growth. And perhaps most useful of all is that this book can be used as an antidote against your materialist, naive realist paradigm of reality. I'll tell you this much: your current paradigm of what reality is, is more wrong than Ra's. And what's worse is, you're so stuck in it, you can't break out even if you wanted to. I've personally found this book a great way to dislodge my unfounded beliefs about reality, consciousness, life, afterlife, reincarnation, evolution, good vs evil, free will, UFOs, the purpose of life, etc -- leaving me in a nice state of not-knowing. The problem is, you don't yet realize how much of your "scientific" knowledge is just groundless belief in hearsay. So falling back to that default position by vehemently disbelieving this book doesn't advance you much. You're still stuck in a web of belief -- one you feel is "actually real" -- which is in a way the worst place to be. "The better the model, the bigger the problem." I've personally grown from this book, even though I find it hard to believe in some of the more far-fetched things in it, like Big Foot. I will actually be able to glean insights from this book and shoot videos about the insights, without ever mentioning Ra, and people watching will say, "OMG! That was amazingly helpful. Thank you for changing my life." Sometimes you gotta be pragmatic more than ideological. Growing up is a messy business. And sometimes you should be happy to get whatever scraps you can scavenge. So in a nutshell, be a self-help vulture

Great quote, wish I included in my video.

If people don't think you're a bit insane, you're not sane enough If you understand the Graves Spiral Dynamics model, you'll be fascinated to know this one little bonus prediction of the model: Anyone 3 stages of consciousness or more below you will think you're insane.

I would caution you guys to refrain from judging unless you're actually willing to put your money where your mouth is and take a 30g dose. It's easy to sit back and philosophize. It's much harder to put your own balls on the chopping block. Remember: EXPERIENCE IS KING! You cannot evaluate a thing such as this without ACTUALLY experiencing it. What's beautiful about psychedelics is that they are REAL. You can very easily run this little science experiment and get back REAL tangible data within a matter of hours. No philosophy or speculation necessary.

@bobbyward There is only one way to know for sure. Try both and report back your results. From my understanding, every psychedelic has it's own properties and characteristics. I bet that a 30 gram dose of mushrooms would be twisted beyond imagination, perhaps more powerful than a 30mg dose of 5-meo. You might discover spiritual realms you never knew existed.

Okay, I figured out how to split off that removed block of posts into a separate thread. You can find it in the Meditation, Consciousness, Enlightenment, Spirituality subforum.

The last few portions of this thread have been modified to remove tangents subjects. A block of about 20 posts have been removed, including some of my own. Let's keep things on point please. No more wild speculation about everything under the sun. This thread is meant to be specifically about the book. You can start separate threads about any topic you wish. Forum functionality is limited, so I was not able to split off the tangent topics in a sensible way into their own thread. Feel free to re-create that discussion in a new thread.