Leo Gura

@PhilGR Good, keep at it. Contemplation is life-transforming. It takes some practice to do it well. Keep pushing for more depth. Get metaphysical on that bitch

You are God, just like everyone else.

@tsuki The trick is that the notion of "facts" is itself already theory-laden. To believe in "facts" is already to buy into the false idea that there is an external objective reality independent of the subject. What is a fact? That is a good thing to contemplate. The problem with facts is that they are always entangled with one's mode of perception or the questions one asks. This was the fundamental discovery of quantum mechanics: there are no actual facts. There are only responses to measurements. Change your measuring stick and the facts will also change. Facts are in a casual strange loop relationship with who you are and your perceptual system. Such that if we change your perceptual system, or your beliefs, we can change everything you consider a fact. The reason people disagree with and misunderstand each other so much is because they naively assume that everyone shares the same facts. This is false. A person at one level of development & consciousness will literally inhabit a different reality than a person at another level of development & consciousness. The mind is co-creating "the facts", but denies that it does so. This is a radical paradigm shift from the conventional materialist notion of reality. To put this very starkly, when you look at an object like a tree, there is in fact no tree there. You only see a tree because that's what your perceptual system pulls out of it. If you had a different perceptual system you would see something radically different in its place. The "actual" tree is in fact a cloud of infinite potential which crystallizes based on how your nervous system pings "it". You can get a taste for this by just walking around the tree and noticing that that tree "object" contains every possible angle from which you're viewing it. Such that what the tree really is, is all the infinite ways one can look at it (not just human, but all possible creatures).

Why mention the brain or chemicals? Whatever you do, you're using concepts to make sense of reality.

To the amateur, mastery and excellence look like randomness.

That is correct. The bias runs very deep. It is existential. But not so deep it cannot be undone. Our life's work is undoing this knot of self-bias.

Since it is infinite, there are no bad directions. All directions are equally great to it. I keep telling you guys that "bad" is a projection for your ego. Sit down and contemplate what "bad" really means when you say that word. It is an egoic word. Things only appear bad to you because you have a horse in the race. You are biased. But God has no biases because it has bet on every horse in the universe. But you bet on only one horse. If you bet on every horse in the universe, would you care which one wins? P.S. If it was not free to evolve in all the "bad" directions, it would not be truly free.

For you, a double dose of Green!

@herghly It doesn't matter. You don't focus on that. You focus all your attention on doing a nice slow quality breath. The timing will take care of itself. It takes however long it takes. Don't do yoga mindlessly. You must understand the intention and purpose of each technique. Learn WHY you are doing it, so then the technical details becomes far less relevant. The point of pranayama is to pull the prana up the spine. Everything else is secondary and must serve this end. Whatever that takes. Your top goal is to do the highest quality pull possible with each breath. Learn to think about yoga as though you are inventing it for the first time.

@NoSelfSelf Is looking into a microscope pure luck? Is weightlifting pure luck? Is doing math pure luck? Is learning to play guitar pure luck?

You blindly believe other people exist. 99% of all your beliefs are blind faith. So what's one more gonna do? No one is asking you to believe in chakras. Yoga is a practice. You do it and see what happens. It's like looking inside a microscope. No one cares what you believe. You just look in the damn thing with enough openmindness to accept whatever shows up. It might take you a few years of looking to really see what's there. In the meantime, be radically openminded. Notice, you never asked this question about all the current nonsense you believe. You just swallowed it gullibly. You never asked: "Why should I believe in the number 5? Does it really exist?" 99% of the things you think exist, don't. So what? Somehow you are still able to wake up in the morning and get things done.

@WorknMan That's not contemplation, that's mental masturbation. Contemplate that which is in your direct experience, like, What is suffering? And stop infecting your contemplations with scientific concepts. You have never seen estrogen. You may as well be talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You are not being asked to quantify anything. Looking at what a thing is is not the same thing as quantifying it. These are two very different activities.

Right I visualize the prana flowing up to the crown chakra (very top of the skull). And that's where I try to focus. Although sometimes I just defocus instead of focusing up there. I don't count anything. I keep track of my pranayamas using the fingers on my hand. 4 fingers x 3 parts each = 12 = 1 set of pranayama. Use the thumb to point to each part of the fingers. I am not doing Navi or Om Japa as they take too much time and my routine is already over an hour long. I prefer to do more pranayamas instead. Navi might be good later on if you feel like you have an energy block in your 3rd chakra.

@Timotheus The entire universe is infinitely intelligent. Look, it's reading this sentence right now and understanding it! But that's just the tip of the iceberg of how smart the universe is. It was smart enough to create itself. Think about that for a moment. Then notice, you are the universe thinking about how it created itself! It really helps to reframe your entire metaphysics of what reality is. Rather than thinking of reality as a dumb box of bouncing balls, think of it as an infinitely intelligent disembodied mind. Once you make that reframe, it's no longer puzzling that the universe should be intelligent. Intelligence is just fundamentally what minds do. The universe was not born as dumb matter. It was born fully intelligent. Because that's what reality is! There is no option for reality to dumb, other than by acting stupid through application of infinite intelligence to trick itself. Rather than thinking of the universe as a thing which starts out at 0%, think of it as a thing which starts out at 100% and dumbs itself down. So it's not that intelligent apes evolved, but rather than infinite intelligence was dumbed down to create apes, ants, humans, etc. Imagine that God is a really good method actor playing an ape. That's you! The method actor is so good he can dumb himself down to any level below infinity, precisely because he is infinitely good. Another way to think of it this: try to imagine why the universe wouldn't be infinitely intelligent. And then realize, there's nothing that would stop it. So it became infinitely intelligent. And here we are. Everything exists because there is no one to enforce any rules upon reality. So reality overflows into an infinite number of directions and dimensions. When you realize that dumbness is equally as impossible as infinite intelligence, you'll understand why infinite intelligence exists. The question you should really be asking yourself is: Why did I ever assume the universe was dumb? Your mind might protest: "But how was intelligence created?" To which you should tell it: "But how was dumbness created?"

That's not a rule, that's a loose generalization. Careful not to turn Maslow (or any model) into a limiting belief.

@see_on_see Gamana's techniques are very condensed Kriya. The original Kriya involves visualizing prana moving up and down the spine, which I think is very important. Just breathing while focusing one the 3rd eye or crown is not good enough for me. It feels more powerful to focus on moving the prana up the spine. But that's my take. You could be different. Gamana's books are not designed to teach you Kriya from scratch. They are designed for people who are already well-versed in the core practices. The original Kriya book I recommended is important.

Do your pranayamas slow and deep. When you get good, one inhale should last like 30 seconds, then 30 seconds for the exhale. You want to slow your breath down as much as possible. In certain meditative traditions they try to slow down the breath down to 1 breath per minute. That's sorta the goal here. Make each breath count. Really visualize & feel that prana flowing up the spine, through each chakra and up the brain stem. That's the key IMO. You are rewiring the brain stem, the reptilian part of your brain which keeps egoic consciousness locked in. As your practice improves your breathing should slow down and deepen, your visualization should become more clear and precise and filled with feeling. Practice slowing down your intake of air as much as possible, and practice perfecting your visualization. That should give you 80% of your results.

I would just start it where you're at, and you will work up to 90 seconds pretty easily within a month of practice. Don't let perfectionism get in the way of learning the practices. Tis better to do yoga poorly than not at all. Within a few months all of these complicated-seeming techniques will become second-nature.

@PhilGR You're not going deep enough yet. You still haven't realized the depth of the question you are contemplating. Wipe the slate clean and start your contemplation on this question again. Do that every day for 7 days and see what happens. You could contemplate that question every day for the next year and still not exhaust it.

@Girzo Sounds like you burned it. There is a fine line between smoking and vaporizing. Proper vaporization is tricky to acheive. Which is why I prefer plugging. Placing the 5-MeO on some herb (not weed but something neutral like mullein) will make vaporizing a lot easier. A glass pipe like the Glass Vapor Genie is ideal for that. I'm doubt 5-MeO will vaporize in a cheap electronic vaporizor.

Infinity contains all finities. So here you are. Infinity cannot stop itself. It creates every possible thing, to infinity. Like an infinite runaway chain reaction.

@Serotoninluv After 30 mins of contemplating you should have at least 2 full pages of writings. I usually ponder for a minute, then write a bit down. Then ponder for another minute, then write a few more sentences. Etc. You can write quite a lot once you're on a roll. But be careful not to write blindly without contemplating. Your writing must be grounded in direct experience, or it will devolve into spectualation and grand theory-building. Don't just ponder in your head, also ponder on the page.

Content and context are actually distinct things. But that is a challenging topic for another day. In that video I didn't actually get into what context is. I only defined it loosely for the purposes of explaining the phenomenon of recontextualization. To really understand context, you will have to contemplate: What is context? It's a lot more profound than people realize. In the ultimate end, everything is ONE, but it is very good to look at context in isolation.

No marketing trick. I was very fat. But I don't have any photos. My Mom does. I keep forgetting to ask her for one. I'll post it on the blog someday. When I do, you guys will not believe your eyes.

@kieranperez Great example. Notice how differently Deepak responds to Trump vs the way Green might respond to Trump: by hating Trumping. Green hates on haters. Turquoise loves on haters. That's a very significant paradigm shift and takes a lot of consciousness, development, and selflessness to embody. Green is not there yet. Green's ego is still too triggered by Blue/Orange to see the bigger picture.