Leo Gura

@A way to Actualize Haven't watched that one. But Matt's teachings appear like a great addition to cut-and-dried self-inquiry, sure.

Sure, you could look at all the schools and all the different teachings as ultimately being one. That's just a matter of how zoomed-out of a perspective you want to take. Practically speaking, there are a lot of differences though between schools. Some schools are far more effective than others and the actual techniques will feel very different to you when you're doing them. It also all depends on your goals. Some people want purification. Others only want truth. Others only want to see God. Others want all the above. Others want special healing powers and psychic abilities. And others want something else entirely.

Sit down and ask yourself what is it that this fear is hiding? You can intuit that it's hiding something important, right?

@A way to Actualize I don't know what you mean by "teaching of self-love".

Ordinary knowledge is still useful. Just because you are enlightened doesn't mean you will know how to change the oil in your car. If you want that oil changed, you might crack open a book and read how it's done. Don't make this a battle between enlightenment vs success. You should be able to do both if you want. Be careful about this stereotype of enlightened people being bums who live in caves. Most of them actually are not. Many of them go on to achieve success. Because there's nothing inherently wrong with success, when it's done from a genuine place. Enlightenment itself can be considered a form of success. And to be enlightened, having those 27 qualities would be quite helpful. Mediocre people rarely get enlightenment.

Be careful of falling into the trap of: my way to enlightenment is the ONLY way to enlightenment. No! There are dozens if not hundreds of totally different ways to reach enlightenment. The problem is that most people (even enlightenment ones) are too ignorant of the wide diversity of successful enlightenment teachers.

Because you can study the esoteric core of every religious tradition, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam and you clearly see mystics describing the EXACT same phenomena of enlightenment, spirit, consciousness, no-self, God, Nothingness, and divine love. The convergence is uncanny. Christian and Jewish mystics describe God as Nothingness, just like Buddhists do. Old school prayer = contemplation = merging with God = Samadhi = enlightenment

Well... the Buddha's legacy is that is basically pioneered the process of enlightenment through mindfulness -- just sitting silently and observing reality exactly as it appears. This is the essence of meditation. How do you we know? Well we can't really know for sure if Buddha even existed, but if you study the Buddhist history and the Buddha's teachings then it should become quite obvious how things went down. The essence of Buddhism teachings is mindfulness practice, AKA meditation.

Hehehe... That's because YOU ARE NOT HUMAN! That you are human is just a silly belief you've been told from birth. It has no basis in reality. What you're experiencing is Spirit, AKA consciousness, AKA the True Self << Which is what you actually are. You are a formless, empty, infinite field of awareness which is omnipresent. Sounds kinda like God, huh? Well, that's exactly right. That's what you are. This experience scares the shit out the ego of course. I recommend you start doing self-inquiry, if you aren't already. It will gradually clarify these experiences for you. The problem right now is that you're having these experiences but your mind is unprepared to process them or recognize them for what they are. Don't get lost in all that aura business. You need to sit down and deconstruct this illusory entity called "Sarah". Sarah is a lie. And she's starting to crumble. Don't bother trying to glue here back together. Help hasten the process instead.

@tryingforfreedom Well... that's the nature of this work. The mind resists truth in 1000 sneaky ways. Proper realization has to start somewhere. And it starts with opening the mind to the possibility that one may not exist. The possibility for self-deception has to really be grokked. Will it get through to everyone? No. It will only get through to 1 in 1000 or worse. But again, that's the nature of this work. The person hearing that message has to have some innate capacity or intuition for truth. Without that, it's hopeless. Over 100,000 people have viewed my videos explaining spiritual enlightenment. I seriously doubt a single one of them has become enlightened yet. So the odds are really really bad here. The level of depth at which this one simple communication (You do not exist) needs to be grasped at is unimaginably deep. I myself still find value in being rudely interrupted sometimes and told, "Leo! What the fuck are you doing? You don't exist, remember?" And then I'm like, "Oh yeah..... What was I thinking?"

@tryingforfreedom It can be a big help because the first step in this journey is to REALLY grasp the possibility that you might not exist. If this possibility is not REALLY considered, then there's a very slim chance in hell that anything will happen. The mind will get lost in fantasies and arguments and theories. For this reason, I often like to stress to newbies: YOU DO NOT EXIST! It's a real wake up call. And if there's any spiritual wisdom in the person, something in him will stir upon being directly confronted in this way. And then the possibility free will not existing will become plausible. And then an honest self-investigation can begin. Even when I tell people very clearly: YOU DO NOT EXIST! most of them do not actually grasp this as a possibility. Their mind just skips over it like some bit of esoteric science-fiction.

Hehehe.... The selfish escape fantasy is your current mode of living, seeking "progress" and results for what? To feel slightly better about yourself. That's why you seek progress. To make your life feels more full, when deep down your ego knows it is empty. There is zero use of you being enlightened. You are not real. You're a total fiction. You have no use whatsoever. Something that doesn't exist cannot have a use. This is a radical, 180 degree paradigm shift for your mind. You don't like hearing any of this, which is exactly why I'm saying it. Because you've accepted this bullshit idea that society has indoctrinated you with of "be useful, be good, don't be selfish, advance the cause of humanity, etc". All of that is a lie and is in fact the root of selfishness. I would encourage you to sit and really contemplate the possibility of living life without any use or good deeds or value whatsoever. Like you just sit there for 70 years, do nothing, and then you die. << This is something you need to stop resisting, and in fact embrace. Imagine if you believed that this kind of life was the BEST kind of life, most rich and most excellent. Does this mean you won't ever do anything external with your life? No. You can. No one is stopping you. But you have to start to get wise to the deeper issue here, which is that 99% of your current motivations and wants in life are sourced from falsehood, including your desire to be selfless or valuable or productive. When you are enlightened, and a genuine desire or motivation arises to create something, you'll find that you are able to execute on it WAY more productively than any unenlightened person could. Because you have zero internal resistance and your actions are 100% aligned with your motivations, and your motivations are aligned with truth.

Not only is there no free will, THERE IS NO YOU! The second part of this statement should have you way more puzzled and freaked out than the first part. What this means is: literally, the one who thinks he's reading this sentence right now (TruthSeeker), does not exist! Can you fathom the gravity of this claim? It's a REALLY serious claim! This isn't a joke. We're not kidding around. We're not being poetic. We're not using analogies or metaphor. When this claim is made, it's made like a hard physical scientific claim. There is no such entity as TruthSeeker. TruthSeeker is as real as Santa Claus. Now, how can that be? How can it be that you've lived your whole life believing you exist even though you've never existed? And even more embarrassingly, how can you still continue to assert your existence after you've been told you don't exist and you start to suspect that it's true?

@TruthSeeker Truth = Being. No, it cannot be explained because the explanation is itself truth. How can one piece of being explain another? Does one atom explain another atom? Does the color blue explain the color red? Does the smell of roses explain the taste of oranges? Facts cannot explain facts. Facts merely are. The whole exercise of explanation is founded upon delusion. Symbols are being used without proper awareness of what symbols actually are.

Yes it is. Then again, it's possible to become enlightened sitting on the toilet taking a crap. Do Nothing is a great technique, but I would supplement it with self-inquiry. There are MANY different ways to become enlightened. No one way is best for everyone. You gotta find what will work for you.

Enlightenment cannot be explained, period. Being cannot be explained. Being merely is. All explanations are ultimately delusions.

Self-inquiry is extremely simple (and therefore extremely difficult): Step 1: Sit down in a quiet place Step 2: Create a possibility in your mind that you do not actually know who or what you are. Step 3: Ask yourself, "Who or what am I?" Step 4: Genuinely wonder what you could be other than a body/mind. Probe your direct experience for answers. Discard all verbal or rational answers. Try to burn through all your beliefs, assumptions, and images of who you are. Drop all of them over time. Step 5: Enlightenment spontaneously dawns after tens or hundreds of thousands of times of asking the question. That's basically all there is to it. But of course, in practice, it will feel 1000x more complicated and more challenging.

@Aldo Marchand Technically enlightenment IS science. The problem is that mainstream academic science refuses to acknowledge it because there is a bias against first-person phenomena and a bias towards rational explanations and modeling -- which are fundamentally incompatible with the truth of enlightenment. But I agree that more integration is called for, and we are definitely headed in that direction as a society.

Physics and enlightenment sort of work in two different domains. Enlightenment will not reveal facts about the big bang to you. But it will answer the ultimate question of what existence is in a way that physics really can't because physics is ultimately a map of the territory, not the territory itself. All models of reality, no matter how good or accurate, are ultimately fictitious. Your should really watch this video. It will save you years of dead-end searching: http://www.actualized.org/articles/the-ultimate-model-of-human-knowledge If you care about understanding what existence literally is, physics will be of limited value. The only way to answer that question is to become directly conscious of your true nature. Because as it turns out, you are existence itself. Does this mean physics doesn't have value? No, physics has it's purposes and it's useful. The question is more about what you're really after. Enlightenment will help the human race far more than physical discoveries will. And don't forget that even if you knew all the physics in the world, your life would still be miserable if you neglect enlightenment. Physics cannot help your personal life or significantly raise your fulfillment levels while enlightenment can.

Awareness is Nothingness. It's what you actually are. An empty, formless, infinite transparent field. It cannot be seen or thought. It is the empty space within which reality occurs and your body/mind exist in. Awareness = consciousness = spirit = God = you To get a real clear taste of it requires an enlightenment experience. In that moment you see everything as made out of awareness.

The effort is in overcoming the boredom and your internal resistances to relaxing (to use Matt Kahn's word). Ironically, for most people, this will be a great struggle. After all, what could be easier than sitting on your ass literally doing nothing for 4 hours straight? Yet in practice this is one of the most difficult things you'll ever do in your life. Proof? Try sitting for 4 hours doing nothing. To even hear and understand Matt would already mean you've gone through a lot of internal resistance and done much hard work. If you hadn't, you probably would never even believe him and you wouldn't practice the teaching seriously. I think his videos are great. Thanks for sharing it. Also, like with every spiritual teaching, keep in mind that this is just ONE path out of many. Thousands of people have become enlightened by doing the exact opposite of relaxation. In the end, both paths lead to the same destination. The aim of stressing yourself very hard is to ultimately trigger a surrender or relaxation. Each path has its pros and cons. The cons of the relaxation path is that people will just relax into watching TV and never even catch a whiff of enlightenment. Enlightenment can be attained through a path of pleasure or a path of discomfort and pain. The path of pleasure is actually harder because pleasure naturally causes people to lose consciousness, whereas pain necessarily spurs the mind awake. Which is why there is a long tradition of torturous meditation and yogic practices in the East.

Success can be had at any stage of the Graves model, although stage Orange is the one that's predominantly focused on acquisition of material success.

Most of my important decisions are based on intuition. It's the best thing you can base decisions on. Logical decisions result in poor alignment with ones values and authentic passions. The monkey mind should not be used to make decisions. The mind is like an accountant. You don't let the account decide how to run a cutting edge company. You do that based on the founder's or CEO's wisdom, passion, and vision (i.e., intuition.)

Jed's views of meditation are too myopic and dogmatic. He is being dramatic to stress the point that self-inquiry is the more direct path to enlightenment than regular-old meditation, and this is generally true. However meditation is still a valid path to enlightenment -- many people have become enlightened through meditation -- and it also has MANY other positive benefits. For fuck's sake, the Buddha got enlightened through meditation. Hundreds of yogi's have become enlightened through meditation. The entire Soto Zen tradition is grounded in meditation (zazen). To discount the validity of meditation is just ignorance. Jed speaks from only his own personal experiences with enlightenment. He has not done a broader survey of all the rich spiritual traditions in existence which DO IN FACT WORK, despite a lot of dogma and abuses. Also, enlightenment is NOT the only issue. There are many others issues beyond enlightenment. Self-mastery is really the goal. And meditation is a very powerful tool for developing awareness and emotional intelligence. I still meditate every day. The only thing you should take away from Jed is that self-inquiry is a powerful method which is a good adjunct to meditation.

Fundamentally, the body's prime concern is self-survival. So it naturally tends to occupy itself with this aim to the exclusion of truth and reality. And so it is lost in thoughts about the self. Also our culture is designed to keep you asleep. As explained in this video: http://www.actualized.org/articles/30-ways-society-fucks-you-in-the-ass