Leo Gura

I spend most of my time alone. If I worked at Starbucks, yeah, maybe I'd have to hide it. I'm fortunate in that regard. Most days there are moments of such deep love and profound understanding that tears cannot be stopped. For me this whole thing is not just about the state of consciousness but the profound understandings that pour nonstop. Reality is understood at higher and higher levels. Everything becomes so interconnected. I can watch a guy flick his cigarette out of the car driving at 40 miles per hour, catch a quick glimpse of the cigarette as it bounces off the asphalt and realize that in that cigarette butt lies an entire universe, as deep and infinite as the celestial universe our astronomers explore. Stuff like that all day long. I think there's quite a range of variability in how people experience nonduality. For some it will be more heart-centered and feeling-based, for others more head-centered and intellectual, for other more visual, for others more visionary, for others more wacky & paranormal, etc.

I wouldn't say I feel it. I would phrase it as: I understand my body is the imagination of God. Sometimes I look at my hands and see them as magic. Most of the day, however, when I'm on autopilot, I lose sight of the magic, simply residing in the mundaneness of everyday human life. There are moments throughout the day where I stop and consciously reconnect with the magic. Like, "Oh yeah! These hands are the hands of God!" But then I usually go back into functional living. I know I can deepen this a lot more with more work. I still need more work to calm the body and mind down to be still for long periods of time. I'm not so good at that because I am constantly bombarded with wisdom. Wisdom and insights pour all day long. I run out of energy just verbalizing them all for the benefit of mankind. I feel it is my duty to be a mouthpiece for God's infinite wisdom. And I enjoy it.

It's hard to say. For me, the awakening experienced on 5-MeO-DMT represents the purest form of nondual consciousness. I'm not sure what it takes to turn that into an unbroken state. It's total God-mode. You would be a walking God with that level of consciousness and you would transform the entire planet simply through the power of your presence. You could look a charging elephant in the eye and get him to bow before you. It is truly superhuman. At that level I could no longer teach verbally. My teaching would be to walk around town blessing crowds of homeless people, children, and throngs of followers, and performing miracles. Grown men would be brought to tears from the radiance of my love. Birds would land in my hand. People would write myths about it a 1000 years later. I am nowhere near that level.

There are degrees of it. The highest degrees of it are certainly not my perpetual state. At the highest degrees it would be hard to walk. I'm generally aware that everything I'm looking at is God. But I also have many moments throughout that day where I'm just running on autopilot and sucked into the dualistic world. I certainly cannot sustain a 5-MeO-DMT peak. That level of consciousness is just off the hook. The physical body struggles to cope with it.

Yes, of course psychedelics cause your visual field to melt. That's what you call distortions. This is mostly a distraction. It's a cool effect but not too spiritually significant. Focus on probing the luminosity instead. What's really happening is that the psychedelic is lubricating your mind, softening it up from its usual concrete stranglehold. As the mind softens up like warm clay, it becomes malleable, wavy, and flexible. Taking a psychedelic is like melting an ice cube from solid to liquid to gas. As your mind becomes more liquid your visual field starts to melt. It becomes unstable, giving you access to Infinite Imagination. This is why you start seeing faces in the carpet and so forth. As the mind becomes more fluid your literally start to materialize your thoughts. If you think of demons you will start to see demon faces in the carpet, and so forth.

If you're having sexual dreams about me, that's how you know you should take a break from Actualized.org

Funnily enough, I have been resisting stickying this because I feel that most people ignore stickied threads over time. Life is so counter-intuitive that stickying a thread makes it less visible. What a sick world God has created! But if you guys still want me to sticky it, I can.

@Farnaby Yup If you probe deeper into what that luminosity actually is, you'll discover it's pure Emptiness, Nothingness, or Void. That is the Groundless Ground or Buddhamind. Your Original Face. Mushrooms make you very aware of this Void. Basically all psychedelics do. Technically it's not a sensation. It is Truth or Pure Consciousness. You gotta probe deeper into it next time you trip. Contemplate: What is this luminosity? while you trip. You will eventually realize that it's totally empty and indistinct. This is pure existence devoid of form. This is the Absolute Formless, the Godhead. BTW, this luminosity is present right now in your direct experience! The Now IS pure formless luminosity! So you don't even need to be tripping on mushrooms to access it. It's always here and NOW. Mushrooms just make it easier to notice.

Your thinking is very black and white. You don't need to living totally in the truth to enjoy life. You gotta find some ways to enjoy life. All of this spiritual work is ultimately just a way of learning how to enjoy life. It's not about living in some cave and being a hardcore monk. That is only done for a temporary period as a means to an end. You can practice enjoying life right now. You don't have to finish your enlightenment. Structure your life in ways that make you feel good about yourself. I don't mean shooting up heroin or partying every night. I mean more simple pleasures, like the pleasures of reading a good book, cooking a nice meal, going fishing on the weekend, going for a road trip, listening to some good music, practicing some cool hobby, etc. There are many ashrams around the world. In India, in Costa Rica, and elsewhere. You could also try to find a more laid back job which is either more enjoyable to do or gives you more free time. When you have a business that you enjoy doing, life becomes a lot sweeter. I spend a lot of time on my work, but I love it so it rarely feels like work. That's the key to work. You gotta do something you find meaningful.

Firstly, that is NOT open borders. Our borders are enforced and always have been enforced, even under liberal presidents. The threat of deportation and other problems are always there for illegals. Amnesty + citizenship is the same issue. Amnesty was done under Regan and even many conservatives are okay with amnesty as long as the border is enforced. The problem of amnesty isn't really a liberal one, it's a practical one. What do you do with 10 million+ illegals who've been here for years? Deporting them all would be unworkable, expensive, damaging to the economy, and cruel. So that leaves us with 2 options: 1) do nothing, 2) amnesty. Amnesty usually involves paying fines and making other contributions to society. Illegals pay sales tax, local tax, and payroll taxes while not receiving social security, Medicare, or other benefits. So to say that they will get free medical benefits is not quite right. And if illegals are given amnesty, they then pay into the system just like everyone else, so their medical benefits are not free. And finally, it's not like you have a solution to illegals coming to the USA. They will come anyway. Most illegals are visa overstays from airports, not border crossings. No wall is going to stop it. Walls will just be climbed over or under, or flown around. So the problem of illegals will remain. If you really want to stop illegals then the only workable solution is to provide massive help to their home countries to boost their governments and economies. That would be a great long-term strategy. The US could loan those countries money similar to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe. The only other option is a heavily militarized border like North/South Korea. But that's quite barbaric. Policing that entire border rigorously would waste more money than it's worth.

That's a serious misunderstanding of Spiral Dynamics. SD stages are not good or evil. It's just relative degrees of awareness and development. The reason some people don't like SD is if they find themselves low on the scale and then judge themselves that that is bad and unacceptable. But SD never said you are bad for being at a lower level. There's nothing evil about saying that person X is in 3rd grade while person Y is in 12th grade. Development Psychology and Spiral Dynamics help us understand one another better. It's the exactly opposite of calling people evil.

No major left-wing political candidate is advocating open borders. This is some bogeyman the right wing created. Also, applying for asylum is LEGAL. I have no problem with border enforcement as long as it's humane.

@Bryanbrax Too many wacky visuals in that video -- gives the wrong impression. Think of it as nothing changes visually. Just awareness increases and sense of self collapses or expands. It feels like being hyper-present. You become so present & aware that you literally see through the substance of physical reality. What once looked physical now seems like a hologram. Physical objects appear empty, like a hallucination or a mirage. You can see them still, but they lack reality. It can also feel like the air got sucked out of the room. Everything becomes crystal clear and luminous. It also feels like divinity and pure magic.

@Angelite What does that have to do with retreats? When doing a retreat, be crystal clear about what you're doing and what the parameters are. Don't be jerking off in your Mom's basement and calling that a retreat. A retreat is when you're meditating/inquiring 24/7. Or in the case of psychedelic retreats it's back to back days of deep tripping.

@cetus56

@Zizzero Discussions about the fundamental structures of government and society is not a culture war. This is very substantive and important stuff. Be careful with such sloppy false equivalencies. If you think that what I'm doing here is just the ideological opposite of what Fox News is doing, you've got much to learn and you are contributing to the problem. Just because a topic is polarizing and emotional does not make it any less important. In fact it's all the more important because people do not know how to think properly about polarizing issues. They tend to either take one side or do a sloppy false equivalency, both of which are dangerous. Ignoring poltical questions is not an option if we care about consciousness. Actualized.org could not exist under a regressive government. When monsters come to power they tend to silence and repress the intellectuals and wisest people.

Your position is not quite racist but it is enthocentric. Small minds think ethnocentricly. What you're doing is defending an identity you constructed. But you want to deny it. But I am pointing it out to you that you are in denial about it. But the nature of denial is that you will deny that you are in denial. So here we are. You are stuck in Tier 1. I am trying to communicate to you from Tier 2. But you do not understand Tier 2 because you have an enormous amount of consciousness work to do. And of course you do not want to do it, so you make this about me. If your mind succeeds in making this about me, then you won't have to grow. Which is just perfect for your ego's survival. Do not underestimate the sophistication with which your own mind is tricking you. Nothing your mind says can be trusted. Your mind is a blind survival machine and it spins your ideology.

In Vegas, during the summer months, the Luxor hotel's giant beam of light at night attracts the fattest moths ever. They circle around the beam like eagles.

@cetus56 Haha Wherever you go, there you are

When a racist demagogue hijacks government, to point it out is not an obsession nor a culture war. As a conscious citizen I have a responsibility to speak up when unconsciousness runs rampant. That was the key lesson of Nazism. You keep projecting projection onto me. LOL. Funny how that works, isn't it? You do it without knowing you're doing it. That's how projection works. When you do it, you tell yourself the other is doing it to you. The perfect self-deception.

I love road trips. They just aren't retreats.

I address libertarianism a lot because no mater how extreme or moderate it is, the people who hold such an ideology are very common today. Especially stage Orange young males. They get trapped by this ideology because they have a deep lack of experience and understanding of political history and they want to assert their individualism come what may. I have yet to find one libertarian who has a keen sense of history or how government works. It's an ideology based on ignorance. It is thoroughly ahistorical. There certainly are some excesses to stage Green. But to use those excesses to demonize Green and stay stuck in Blue/Orange is even more pathological. I am not arguing for extreme Green. You are projecting that onto what I'm saying. We need healthy Green & Tier 2. We can't get people to Tier 2 without passing through Green. You're getting distracted by all the culture wars. What I am talking about has nothing to do with culture wars. That is a media-created distraction. What I'm talking about is educating people about how government really works. There are many degrees of being full of shit. And Trump & Fox News are the masters of it.

Mindlessness is relative thing. People here are way more mindful, on average, than the general population or Trump voters. The important difference is that people here are interested in being more mindful. Trump supports are generally not. Being ignorant or mindless is not so bad. What's really bad is being aggressive and stubborn in one's ignorance and mindlessness. And Trump is promoting a culture of aggressive mindlessness & selfishness. People actually feel righteous about being so ignorant. This is a dangerous and pathological development which must be challenged. What you're overlooking is that without a bureaucracy there cannot be a highway at all. A highway is a very complex thing. It requires complex social structures to exist. You cannot just build a highway in the middle of the jungle and have it work. Highways only exist in advanced, complex, modern societies. That's your projection. The things I'm saying you are not capable of comprehending or appreciating yet. Of course! That's the whole point! Not privileged but you must develop through the lower stages by meeting and integrating various low level needs. The fruits of Blue & Orange are definitely necessary. The problem is that Blue & Orange are becoming pathological to the point where the whole planet is in danger. The problem with a desperate homeless person is precisely that he cannot take any higher level concerns seriously because he's so needy he can only care about himself. So the solution is help elevate as many such people as possible by helping them to meet their basic needs, so they stop being desperate. That desperation is making them unconscious and unable to consider larger ecological issues. Ecological concerns are not a privilege. If the planet's ecology crashes, millions of the poorest and more desperate people will die. It's already happening, you're just not aware of it because you haven't studied these issues seriously enough. Drop your ideological opposition and maybe you can learn something here and advance to a whole new level of understanding.

I didn't say he was enlightened. I said God-like. God-like comes in many degrees and is relative to one's era and culture. Also don't conflate Spiral stages with enlightenment. Many Zen masters in Japan or yogis in India are enlightened but only at stage Blue of the Spiral. You don't have to be enlightened to be a good #2 leader. Bernie Sanders is a good example. He's far from enlightened but he is more God-like (i.e., selfless & compassionate) than most politicians of his time. Nuance, nuance, nuance.

But that's the sick twisted irony of this whole situation. Trump is financially irresponsible so electing him reduces economic stability in the same way Bush crashed the economy with deregulation & tax cuts. Trump's tariffs, tax cuts, and deregulation hurt many of the poorest people. The people who vote for Trump are mindless precisely in the sense that they have an economic ideology which ends up shooting itself in the foot. They assume that unfettered capitalism will solve all problems (as their ideology promises them), but this just isn't the case because society and the economy are complex systems which work in counter-intuitive ways. People do not vote for Trump due to economics. They vote for him based on their gut feeling, because they resonate with his values and level of consciousness. Economics is a retroactive rationalization. The economy was improving and doing well under Obama. This is irrelevant to the Trump voter because economics is just an excuse. What drives them is their stage of cognitive and moral development. Don't let their retroactive rationalizations fool you. They themselves do not actually understand why they voted for Trump or are attracted to him. What they tell themselves are pleasant stories. It is very important to see through these stories and excuses. The poorest people actually voted more for Hilary than Trump. Trump's voters are in it for the culture war. Which is why Trump and Fox News are always playing up the culture war. Trump voters do not have a keen sense of policy. A vote for Trump is really a way for people who detest liberalism to spit in the eye of liberals. That's the whole emotional appeal of Trump. Trump is a "fuck you" to the "global elites". But of course the sick irony is that Trump is the fattest, greediest global elite there is because he loves money, sex, fame, power, and success no matter the cost. Poor people voting for a man who has a golden toilet in his house and lost $400 million dollars of daddy's money is the devil's sickest joke.