Leo Gura

Draw a distinction between 1) absolute truth, 2) relative truths, and 3) pure fabrications.

@Ramu Sounds about right. Keep digging deeper and deeper into that. There are MANY levels of depth to that insight, and your goal is to make it more or less a permanent feature of your life. Try to translate that insight into emotional reactions. So you're not reacting against reality so much.

@Happiness Practice surrender. A feminine trait that becomes very important in enlightenment work. In the end, enlightenment basically fucks you in the ass, and you need to be okay with that. Again psychedelics can be helpful here. They will teach you the meaning of surrender.

I used to have a girlfriend who was afraid to take a shit at my house because it wasn't lady-like. And while I appreciate that personally, it probably wasn't too comfortable for her, and certainly not authentic.

@Key Elements The experiences are not that important. Keep doing the work and go for the Absolute Truth. Powerful experiences will come up as you do this. Set them aside, be mindful that they are experiences, and keep working toward Absolute Truth. What are you? The Absolute Truth is beyond all experiences, thoughts, emotions, and states. If you identify with anything experiential or phenomenal in any way, you've got further to go. Experiences of whiteness, blackness, darkness, lightness, love, stars, space, etc. That is NOT it.

You're questioning the boundaries of the self. If you do that successfully, (and it seems like you did for a while) then a lot of fear will arise, because you're literally on the brink of discovering that the self you've always believed you were, isn't real. Which of course means the ego dies. You die. Hence the fear. It's a legit fear because we are talking about the end of you as you've known yourself all your life. Keep going. This is just the tip of the iceberg. What you really are is so crazy, it's unbelievable. There's nothing really to fear. All of that is just scare-tactics of the ego. Discovering your true nature is an amazingly positive thing. To truly find yourself, you have to kill the image of yourself.

@Key Elements I notice you're obsessed with this Ox's tail, riding backwards stuff. Maybe it's time to let these images go and focus on actually direct experience.

Use it as motivation to study hard, work hard, get your shit together and move out. And in the meantime, alchemize the negative emotions as best you can by practicing mindfulness and growing yourself stronger internally. Later in life this will all be invaluable experience and skills you're developing. Don't get distracted by other people's bullshit. That's the most important thing.

"Bad stuff" = lack of gratitude

Farting! You know you ladies do it!

This channel here is legit: There's also a book on my book list that gives you EVERY SINGLE secret Kriya Yoga technique and tells you exactly how to practice them. But it's HIGHLY technical and demands serious commitment to get anywhere. Most schools of Yoga are secretive and don't share their techniques with laymen. Which is why I love that book. It spills all the beans.

Vipassana can definitely be used to attain enlightenment. That's it's entire purpose. The problem occurs when people just sit and blindly meditate for decades without questioning the self, or get lost in Buddhist dogma. As you do Vipassana, toss all the dogma out the window, and you should also inquire into What am I? The two methods work great together. My first direct consciousness experience occurred during Vipassana. But that's probably because I did over one year of self-inquiry and was doing it during Vipassana practice that day. And of course ignore all those fools who think enlightenment takes 30 years. Or who don't even know what enlightenment means. I have been to Vipassana retreats where half the people there don't even know what enlightenment is! WTF? Ignore those kinds of folk.

@LifeLife It will not make you enlightened. But it can help with meditation, especially if you're a newbie.

@Key Elements It was for having an experience of psychedelics.

"I truly attained nothing from complete enlightenment." -- Buddha

@Key Elements There's no you now. There's just an ever-changing flux of phenomena. Doesn't matter what the phenomena is from the point of view of absolute truth. Whether you're sipping a cup of coffee, floating through astral realms, visiting aliens via a DMT trip, meditating your ass off, or whatever, it's all just phenomena and none of it has any permanence. After the body dies, who the hell knows what might happen? But I would conservatively bet my money that it's the same thing as before you were born. Whatever stuff you cling to now, including your "soul" or any aspect of personality, identity, or being, will be gone. But Absolute Nothingness will remain. So it's a good idea to switch your identity to it, otherwise you're screwed.

There will be more enlightenment stuff in the future. I don't want to talk about it too much because in the end it all depends on you doing the work. Just talking enlightenment theory isn't very helpful. Make sure you have a very solid practice. Make sure you go to retreats where you can spend hundreds of hours contemplating. That's about it. Deconstruct yourself. No body else can do it for you. It's long and boring work, and there's no way around that. Except maybe with psychedelics, which I will be talking a lot more about soon in mind-blowing ways!

@Key Elements I just don't see what spiral dynamics has to do with afterlife. Spiral dynamics is about THIS life. So is nonduality. It's about the NOW. Speculating about the afterlife isn't very practical or wise. You are still speaking from a position of duality. "There was blackness... I was pulled through a black hole... etc". That's all duality. That's all phenomena. This is the trap of spiritualism and powerful mystical experiences, they tend to create some sort of Cosmic Other, and then fantasies about it. What I would say it that if you delved deeper into exploring the NOW, deconstructing the ego and all phenomenal experience, you would stop talking about afterlives and all questions would be answered in a way that you cannot presently imagine. And this would seem far superior to you than all the speculations and illusions you subscribed to before.

@Key Elements Once you become conscious that everything is nondual, you can have all the phenomena and lives and deaths you want, and it doesn't matter because it's all you. You don't think of yourself as a body or soul or mind at that point. All of that is seen as illusion. Every single phenomena is seen through. You have to first experience that consciousness is Absolutely Infinite. Then you'll understand. Until then, you will not, and you will get attached to various phenomena, whether it be this life or a past life or some idea you have of a future life. These kinds of considerations only make sense in a dualistic model, which is utterly false. If Coral stage means anything, it should resemble something like the realization and embodiment of complete nonduality. Which means the end of all questioning and speculating about past or future lives. Nonduality is the ultimate end of the road. EVERYTHING BECOMES YOU! The completeness is TOTAL! ABSOLUTELY INFINITE! The significance of this realization cannot be overstated. Not only did you have past lives, and future lives, you LITERALLY ARE absolutely EVERYTHING that ever existed or could possibly exist, all of it SIMULTANEOUSLY. From every bacteria and virus to all the dinosaurs in history, to every creature and non-creature that will ever be born or imagined in all the fiction novels written by all the humans and non-humans until the heat-death of this universe, and all the universes that could ever exist. EVERYTHING IS YOU! And nothing is you. What else is there to know? It's everything you could have possibly wanted. It's infinity!

@Key Elements There are no stages. It's all concepts. Do not forget that a model is just a model, and not reality. Sounds like you're trying to conceptualize enlightenment too much and getting lost in the fallout of such a silly endeavor.

I find do-nothing to actually still be manipulative, because you're sorta trying to do nothing. Whereas if you phrase it as: stop manipulating, just experience what is -- then your mind will get it: "Oh! They really mean: do nothing and just be aware." Of course the actual practice pointed to is the same. But it's a matter of your mind actually grasping what that practice feels like in practice. Which isn't easy to communicate no matter which language or technique is given, because the mind doesn't want to understand it.

1) Do retreats where you have nothing else to do but contemplate/meditate 2) Psychedelics are extremely helpful 3) Eliminate distractions in your daily life so you have time to focus 4) Have a daily concentration practice that trains up your focus and patience 5) Be more persistent. You will fall off the path hundreds of times. The trick is to get back on.

@Epiphany_Inspired Doing psychedelics with a trained professional, as part of therapy, is a sound strategy. Although hard to find that since it's mostly illegal. MAPS does good work.

Role for what? They rob you of the illusion of roles or goals. There is a very large variety of direct consciousness experiences possible, whether using psychedelics or concentration practices. They range in usefulness for personal development from 0 to infinity. One psychedelic session could be more life-transforming that 10 years of therapy. Although that's not guaranteed. They go way beyond mere motivation. They can produce genuine enlightenment-like insights. For example you can become conscious that life and death are not real. Or that there is no such thing as a separate ego self. Enlightenment can be defined in various ways. A single enlightenment insight or experience is usually not enough to actually become enlightened. I tend to equate enlightenment with a permanent realization that what you are is Absolute Nothingness, and not the body, mind, or personal identity you presently believe you are. And for me enlightenment means that you no longer believe that what you really are can die, because your true nature transcends time, space, and existence.