Leo Gura

Check out Roger Love.

You're offended because there is some deeper truth you're denying. The offensive emotion you feel IS the denial mechanism in action. So to stop it, you have to ask, "What is the truth here that I'm resisting? And WHY am I resisting what is true?" I find that people who get offended easily simply don't value truth. They go about life valuing other things. So one high-level solution is to move TRUTH to the top of your value hierarchy. And force yourself to always be loyal to truth vs other stuff. This of course means being disloyal to the ego, because the ego's agenda is fundamentally based on falsehood. The core falsehood is that you are special and deserve special treatment (namely, you deserve to survive). This is false, and the sooner you face up to it, the smoother your life will flow. But of course it's all very counter-intuitive and the ego doesn't like this kind of talk. It gets offended!

Good, but don't forget that GENUINE relationship is possible. As is GENUINE love. What is that? Good question. That requires some serious investigating.

I think it was Shinzen Young who I heard once say that some Eastern master told him that when he awakens in the morning he should remember whether he fell asleep that night on an in-breath, or on an out-breath. Hehe, those crazy Buddhists

@cetus56 If you ever actually experience absolute infinity, it will take your breath away. Best experience EVER!

I remember hearing of reports of people having an enlightenment experience in their sleep. It's possible if you do lots of self-inquiry and carry the inquiry with you into bed. Try doing inquiry for 5 days straight, day and night, 24/7, no matter what you're doing. I've tried it. It's fucking brutal. Even in my dreams I was inquiring. Don't really care to repeat that, but it can be very effective.

MDMA is more empathogenic than entheogenic. Try a true entheogen if you really want to open your mind. MDMA will blow out your brain's seritonin, so you can't take it often. And eventually it should stop working for you because the brain adapts to it. In this regard it's more of a drug than a psychedelic. This is not the case with true entheogens, which you can take hundreds of times. Also be careful about purity. I would never take MDMA without checking its purity first with a drug test kit. MDMA is notoriously impure. Don't let bad trip reports scare you. You can always take a very low dose to prove that nothing bad will happen. Chances are mushrooms will make you feel more amazing than you've ever felt in your life, and they won't blow out your brain's seritonin. Funny you quote Osho, who seems to have killed himself with a nitrous oxide habit.

Study nonduality and study Islam. Have an enlightenment experience or two. It's obvious. The Sufi's have a great description of Enlightenment/Nothingness: fana al fana (the passing away of the passing away.) In the case of the Bible, it was written by followers who were clearly never enlightenment. Jesus did not write the Bible. The Bible is also contaminated by many political agendas. But even so, you can still find many references to enlightenment in the Bible if you understand what enlightenment is. Spiritual books are not written for modern scientific materialist rationalist minds. Your rationalist mindset is in many ways a modern disease. Modern humans have lost the ability to interpret symbols and metaphors, which is what all spiritual teachings are. They are not meant to be scientific because you CANNOT scientifically model Truth or God or any other deep spiritual insights. Be careful about imposing your own modern-era mindsets and biases onto cultures and peoples of 2000 years ago. They were in many ways far more advanced that we are. They were much more open to direct consciousness, whereas our heads are filled with "scientific" beliefs and models, none of which are absolutely true, and leave the mind closed to direct consciousness. Just because YOU want the Bible to say, "THIS IS ENLIGHTENMENT" doesn't mean it should. If a painting of Jesus with a halo around his head isn't glaringly obvious to you, then you really have a lot of research to do. The laws are actually not cruel but merciful, relative to the time of human history we are talking about. In those days, you could get you head chopped off on a whim. Religion actually established humane rules by which to structure civilization. Of course, in 2016, some of those laws look outdated.

To get a human mind to interface with computer software is hundreds of years away. To even speak about that would require a complete understanding of consciousness. No AI that you write, no matter how good, will interface with the human mind unless you first crack the code of what the human mind is. And judging by the lack of serious consciousness students in this thread, it will take thousands of years, not hundreds. Because you aren't even looking in the right place. You can build AIs all you want. But that has nothing to do with downloading yourself into a computer. The notion itself is ridiculous. The thing you're trying to download doesn't even exist! The problem is that you don't understand that yet. If ever you do come to understand it, you'll just start laughing your ass off at how silly this whole notion is. It's like a child developing a scheme to suck the imaginary monster from under his bed into a vacuum cleaner, Ghostbusters-style. To a conscious adult, it's obviously a deluded scheme based on deeply flawed assumptions about reality. One day robots may kill us all. But you ain't downloading yourself into a PC. And even if you could, the desire to do so is based completely on ignorance. It would be a step backward, not forward. It's like you're stuck in a low security prison for 30 years, and in your infinite wisdom you decide, "Hey, guys, let's break out of this prison and escape into a max security prison indefinitely."

I was asking myself how it was possible for ME to have a bad trip on mushrooms, not the general population. I can easily see how the general population gets bad trips. Doesn't surprise me at all when I read the stupid things people do in their trip reports, like dosing potent psychedelics by eyeball without a scale, or drinking and smoking weed at the same time.

@strwbrycough Because it's so radical. How can something grasp Nothing or Infinity? How can you grasp that you and reality are literally an infinite self-conscious singularity? There is no way. It's utterly baffling. And yet the truth is that you are that. Knowing is NOT sufficient. You have to become it.

Consider that actually you haven't see the Absolute Truth, and that the Truth is SO radical you cannot even imagine it in your wildest dreams during your wildest trips. The mind cannot really hold Absolute Truth. It seems like it has to dip into it, then come back down to the human level and integrate the Truth is limited human ways. At least it's like that until you've REALLY done TONS of work. Then it seems like it can stick. Don't underestimate the power of the ego-mind. It will take more than one enlightenment to make a significant dent in it. And a regular psychedelic trip is not even enlightenment. So yeah...

You have no idea yet how radical enlightenment insights are. They will utterly transform your entire relationship to reality. You cannot judge enlightenment from your current position AT ALL. Like ZERO. You have no idea how radical it is. Your wildest imaginations of it are still infinitely far away from the majesty of Absolute Truth. It's more radical than being abducted by aliens and taken to live on an alien planet. Everything gets turned upside down. The pursuit of anything becomes laughable. You are already 100% complete, infinite! There is nothing to pursue, and nothing to avoid. Imagine you became God. Now... do you still care about pleasure & pain? Do you care about anything human at all? What can you do but just cry and laugh in delight at your own infinite magnificence and limitless, boundless being?

Mystical experiences can be had. But they ain't enlightenment. I can't articulate it better than that until I'm actually enlightened. But I know enough to know that these experiences ain't it. Enlightenment is much more radical, and it doesn't go away. Sometimes I say "enlightenment experience" in a loose way, which is actually more like mystical experience, because enlightenment isn't an experience. But you can certainly have samadhi experiences of union. They are really cool, although not enlightenment. I haven't really seen any teachers explain this well. And I've talked to many highly enlightened teachers. I'll try to explain it better when I get there myself.

If you can't handle AP classes, how you gonna handle self-actualizing? I loved AP classes in high school. Best decision I made back then was to enroll in them. Regular classes will make you lazy and dumb. I found regular classes harder than AP classes because of all the foolish kids and dumbed-down subject matter. But that's just me. I dunno what your goals are in life.

@ChimpBrain It's a life-changer. David Deida knows his shit.

Ain't no girl care that you hit on her at the nightclub while she's tipsy. That's what nightclubs were invented for! Definition of a nightclub: place to go to get drunk, listen to music, and get laid. Girls know this.

Seems like you're taking the rejections too personally, and that's because you probably aren't talking to nearly enough other girls. You gotta realize that MOST girls will NOT like you. It's that way with every guy. It's not just you. You don't need every girl to like you, you only need a handful. Focus on the variables you can control, which are: How many new girls you meet per week Improving your mood, self-esteem, and life Construct a great life for yourself, so you're happy without girls at all. And then you'll notice girls start to be more interested in you and it's much easier to attract them when you feel great about your life.

No, enlightenment is a whole nother ballpark. Be careful about the delusions possible in this work. Enlightenment is not any kind of experience at all.

@actualized1 Superficial? The depth of that book is astounding. You gotta learn how to digest great books properly.

@David1 The whole idea is moot. There is no universe. Reality is nothing at all, and it's already a perfect unity. It always has been and it always will be. You don't need a technological revolution for that to happen. It's already the case. You just need to wake up from the dream you call life. Kurzweil is speaking about consciousness but he has no idea at all how consciousness really works. It doesn't work at all the way he assumes. The funny thing is, if Kurzweil just dropped all the singularity talk and just sat down and became enlightened, he would achieve the very thing he is seeking, minus the silly sci-fi technology. But then of course he would have to write a massive "sorry" letter to all his readers, apologizing for the nonsense he's been telling them for decades. Still, it would be worth it for him, given how keen he is on immortality.

@Samuel Garcia You will NEVER understand it with the mind. NEVER! It's utterly speechless. It's beyond anything you can imagine. Imagine actual aliens showed up at your house tonight, abducted you, and flew you to another galaxy. Well... that's peanuts compared to what we're talking about here. Aliens would seem normal by comparison. At least you can imagine aliens. Stop listening to scholars. They have no clue what reality is. A million scholars working for a million years would still not know. That's how radical this stuff is. I don't know how enlightened Muhammad was. My guess is, he had some deep mystical experiences but not full proper enlightenment. Which would explain the Quran. The universe is an idea in your mind. There is no such thing. The ultimate conscious being is Nothingness. Something can ONLY come out of Nothing. Nothing is NOT an experience. It's Nothing!

Where did I say that? I dunno. It's a tricky issue. The depth that consciousness goes to is staggering. I don't know where it ends. If your entire reality hasn't been turned inside-out forever, I'd hesitate to call it enlightenment. Haven't watched that much of him.

Because your mind will otherwise totally delude you. You will never even understand what enlightenment is. It's nothing you can imagine, and you won't know that unless you study the shit out of this topic. The only reason I haven't gotten lost so far is because I've literally researched 100s of perspectives. If you're not doing that, you basically haven't got a chance. You're gonna get deluded one way or another, and you will never even know it. That is why I started doing psychedelics. Everything has to be considered and seriously investigated. No stone can be left unturned. It's really a deep admission of ignorance. Which most people cannot humble themselves to do.

Yes, of course! That means you're growing. It takes a while for a snake has to shed its skin.