Leo Gura

It's the exact same perspective. This perspective is called nonduality/enlightenment. What's really life-changing to actually experience enlightenment, not to believe in it or to think about it. Actual enlightenment will totally blow your socks off. So work towards it. You cannot do what Tolle talks about without actually experiencing enlightenment.

Go to bars & clubs, meetup.com, Toastmasters, and other groups/organizations. It's easiest to make friends when there is a common theme or interest, like if you get involved in golf, bowling, tennis, soccer, public speaking, meeting girls, church, meditation, yoga, chess, hiking, fishing, etc.

@Sky The spider is also just a sensation. It's a sensation first, and a spider only a distant second, after the mind has had a chance to interpret the sensation and give it value. In fact there is no spider there at all. All it ever is, is a sensation.

Different people resonant with different modes of inquiry or meditation. So you'll have to do some trial and error to find the technique you like the best. Mixing up various techniques can create lots of confusion in the mind. But also it can give you a broader, wider understanding of the enlightenment domain. If you only go with 1 technique, you might find it isn't effective for you. Although you might also use it to breakthrough and go all the way. You won't know until you try a lot. Yes, you should study the theory of enlightenment to some degree. You need to understand conceptually what enlightenment is and what enlightenment is not, so you don't get trapped. Watching the videos is helpful because it will reveal many traps to you and answer many questions you have about the path. Watch the videos. Watch them multiple times. But don't get lost in theory. Follow it up with lots of practice.

This is the correct answer. I notice a lot of the other responses are talking about thoughts as brain activity and whatnot. That's NOT what thoughts actually are. Those are just more thoughts about thoughts. The best way to think of a thought is simply as a sensation. What is an itch? It's exactly what an itch feels like, and nothing else. An itch is NOT nerve activity in the body << that's a thought! Likewise, what is a thought? It's that vague image or sound that arises in your awareness. That's it. Don't try to make more out of it than it is. Experience the thought literally, not figuratively. When experienced fully literally, a thought has no story, no content, no meaning. It's purely a sensation. Try listening to a thought in a foreign language. Does it have any meaning to you? No? In this case it's very easy for you to notice its literal being, because you cannot get lost in the content, because you have no idea what the content is. So a foreign thought, to you, is just a sensation. And that's all thoughts are.

Sounds like you got too little going on in your own life. Focus on building a better life for yourself (career, life purpose, health, wealth, friends, self-improvement, reading, etc), until all of it becomes more exciting and interesting than flirting with boys. Create a larger vision for your life, and get to work on it. Guys will come and go.

Women with abusive relationships? It always boils down to low self-esteem. Check out Nathaniel Branden's work. You will NEVER be able to have a healthy relationship until you solve the self-esteem issue. It would really be worth the effort for you.

That's not an interface. That's like stimulating a muscle by attaching an electrode to it. A far cry from understanding how the muscle actually works. There will need to be a full understanding of the brain's functions on a micro scale if you're gonna do anything meaningful with consciousness. And the complexity of it will be far far greater than the human genome, which, even though it has been decoded, tells scientists virtually nothing about how to construct a living organism from scratch. The complexity of these things is WAY underappreciated. It's likely that decoding every neuron in the brain will still not be enough, because the brain seems to have billions of sub-neural processes, perhaps even down to resonance on the quantum level. The reality is that by 2100 we'll still probably not have flying cars. So don't hold your breath.

Lol Guess I'll be seeing her in the Youtube comment section in 20 years

Personality is NOT a function of ego. Personality is the natural, authentic mannerisms and tendencies of the organism once all the SHOULDS, fears, neuroses, repressions, and affectations are removed. Without ego, personality gets STRONGER. In the same way that a diamond ring shines brighter once you clean off all the dust and gunk on it. You have a natural personality in the same way that a baby or a cat or a dog has a unique personality.

It fits in precisely as follows: Once it's realized that you are not the body/mind (enlightenment), the structures of the ego-mind will still largely remain intact. Your job then, for the rest of your life, is to become more and more conscious of the ego-mind structures and disassemble them one by one. That is the bulk of spiritual work, and that is the deepest form of personal development that exists. So for example, if you still have confidence issues after enlightenment, you would penetrate with your awareness the structures of the ego-mind that are fueling this dynamic, and thereby eliminate them. So personal development is the process of shedding every last vestige of self, until there is no longer anything that you are attached to as yourself, including your life, your body, your work, your possessions, your relationships, and your ideas. If you do all that, you will be unimaginably happy and your life will be complete.

You're not even in college yet!! So you got nothing to worry about.

It will take longer than anticipated to release because I've made some personal discoveries that are forcing me to re-evaluate my life and my work. But it's still planned.

It's best not to think of those experiences as enlightenment. If it was an experience, and you still don't know what you are, then it wasn't enlightenment, it was something else. In which case, you gotta drop it and start from scratch in the NOW. You're not going to find enlightenment in your memory banks. You gotta find it NOW in the present experience. And old memories of experiences tend to only get in the way, because a memory is not what you are. In this regard, psychedelics are problematic. This is the delusional aspect of psychedelics that I warned about. No psychedelic experience equals enlightenment, even though the experience might have been very profound and "spiritual".

There isn't really a path to enlightenment. All you are doing is asking, "What am I?" That's pretty much it. You sit and try to become aware of what you really are, assuming all phenomena (sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts) are not you. There's no need to wait to do this. Do it right now! Don't you wanna know what you are?

This is the answer: Sit down and do this, over and over again. Keep your enlightenment practices very simple and consistent. With as little thinking & theorizing as possible. The simplicity of it is what makes it so hard.

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."