Leo Gura

It's not personal, but it's not mechanical either, and it's infinitely intimate. It's as intelligent as a motherfucker too. Hence it's called God. It really feels like experiencing God, not some dry mechanical void. It's full of life. It's full of love. It's organic-feeling. Like being inside a giant infinite mind. If you took the minds of every single genius human being who has ever lived in the last 5000 years and multiplied them all together and raised that by a power of a million, you would not even have 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of its intelligence. It's intelligence is infinite. Divinity is the best word to describe it. Nothingness is literally divine. The very fabric of reality is self-seeing.

@cetus56 Sweet!

That's the beauty of Absolute Truth. The Absolute is none other than the Relative. Form is formlessness. Formless is form. The Absolute is not anything other than what's in your direct experience right this second. But it's also none of it. This very sentence you're reading right now is Absolutely Infinite. And also Relative. There are many illusions of separation (egos) within Nothingness. Like vortexes within one pool of water.

Contemplating one's own death is very different from speculating about what happens after death.

@Costa7 There is nothing to say about Neti Neti. You either do it, or you don't. It's like a mathematical proof. You must do it to see the truth. There is no trick to it. You just sit and do it for many many hours, very patiently. Do not expect quick results. You're gonna have to burn through a lot of beliefs, paradigms, and assumptions which you never even knew existed in you. All of it will come up as you just do the method. Psychedelics can help a lot in clearing out your false attachments. Them plus Neti Neti make for a powerful combo. My version of Self-Inquiry is very similar to Neti Neti. You cannot get a leg up on self-inquiry or Neti Neti by talking about it. Only by doing. The truth is, you don't wanna do it. Nobody wants to do it. Hence all the questions and blah, blah, blah...

@egoless The problem you're having here with understanding "how" the truth is grasped is because you're forgetting the possibility that you ARE the truth. Absolute Truth is not something you know or experience or intuit or prove. It's too Absolute for all such relative and limited methods. You must BECOME it. By literally becoming it, it is you, with no separation. Being knows itself by being itself. Being is being. The most direct proof of truth is not a proof at all, it's a tautology: A = A Even that is too indirect! It's more like just: A You do not look upon the truth or grasp it with your mind. YOU BECOME IT. This mode of "knowing" is unknown to you because you've never experienced it before. And because our culture does not recognize that it is possible. Which is why this stuff is mostly just talked about in Zen monasteries and the like. Absolute Truth just IS. It's like a global constant in a computer program, which permeates every possible thing, and accessible all the time. YOU ARE IT RIGHT THIS SECOND. You're just not aware you are it. Because it is nothing, but you are attached to "somethingness".

@egoless Since ego was an illusion the whole time, it had really nothing to do with anything. Including character, passions, etc. It's like asking, what would happen if we amputated your 3rd arm? Nothing! Because you never had a 3rd arm to begin with. You just got confused and thought you did.

@Sukhpaal Tis the feeling of the Devil leaving your body Maintaining consistency of practice and mindfulness is the key. If it gets real bad, take a short break, then return to it.

@LaucherJunge A) Don't underestimate life's ability to fuck you up. Life is very creative about that. B) Enlightenment is not pursued for the sake of happiness. It's pursued for the sake of Truth. If you don't care about Truth, then enlightenment isn't for you. C) If you haven't actually awoken, you have no idea what you're missing.

Life is PLAY. It's a game. Why do you play games? For fun. What do you expect me to do? Sit around and cry? The point of life is to live it. I don't need some God to offer me cookies for living well. The motivation is INTRINSIC. Life is absolutely groundless, and that's the most beautiful design imaginable. @kieranperez The key it to become deeply conscious that "worth" is an illusion. Everything is ultimately worthless. But it's not enough to believe me. You have to actually SEE that this is true in your direct experience. If you want a more "practical" fix, you can do Nathaniel Branden's Self-Esteem Sentence Completion exercises. His book is on my book list. They are very effective for fixing low self-esteem, which is what you're describing. P.S. When your ex leaves you and you suffer, that's not "meaningless", that DEEPLY meaning to you. Which is the whole problem! If it was truly meaningless, it wouldn't even register in your consciousness. You're being manipulated by your concepts of reality. If you truly realized meaninglessness, you'd be the happiness person on the planet. Nothing could bother you. Not even your death. The problem is that you're assigning meaning to a bunch of stuff which is meaningless, and then you're suffering the consequences of living in this conceptual matrix of meaning. What you need to ultimately do is discover the beauty of being.

@TeamBills That's how this stuff works. It's not easy. Which is why it's so rarely done. You have to slog it out. In the link I posted above, there is a sub-section called: Most Important Habits To Build

When you trip, you drop all that monkey-mind and be TOTALLY open to ANYTHING. Your fear of delusion is -- ironically -- keeping you stuck in delusion. All that's required to access Absolute Truth is a 100% GENUINE intent for Truth. Set it as your highest priority to be shown the Truth. Drop all your judgments, worries, expectations, pet theories, ideologies, rationalizations, etc. Just the GENUINE intent for Truth. That's all that's required. Then you'll be shown the stairway to heaven. But first your cup must be emptied. You just have to learn to be epistemically very humble. Which is a topic I've covered a lot in past episodes. When you hear me speak or make claims about anything, you have to understand that that's just the surface. Deep down, I don't hold any of it as true. Reality is beyond all that. I think it happened for me on the 3rd dose, which was 30mg. Vaporizing is more powerful than snorting. You certainly can over do it. You have to be much more careful and skilled with vaporizing. The technique requires some trial and error to get right.

It's a good thread idea. Keep adding more to it. There are 1000s of inspiring examples to be found.

@Michael569 The most important and hardest part of blogging is CONSISTENCY! If you decide to blog, you need to commit to doing it every single week, for years into the future. Like clockwork. No one visits a blogger who blogs randomly once a month whenever he feels like it. Pick a topic you're deeply passionate about and could write on every day for 10 years to come. That is the key.

That's when you know you're making real progress

@kieranperez Well of course it's true: you don't matter. So what? Life goes on. Your problem is not that you don't matter. It's all the social and cultural expectations you've got about who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do, which have got you tangled up. Culture fills our minds with stupid, unquestioned notions like: "I'm supposed to matter", or, "mattering is good whereas not mattering is bad.", etc. These all need to be questioned deeply until they are seen to be the groundless absurdities that they always were. Meaning is a projection of the human mind. It does not really exist. You can project any kind of meaning you want unto the work. The world is like a blank canvas. Which means you're free to paint whatever kind of life you want. It's precisely because nothing matters, that life is great, and that anything can matter to you if you choose it.

@sleeperstakes That's all perfectly normal and how it should be. Have you seen this? https://www.actualized.org/start Sounds like you're doing good. You just now need to balance out your intake of theory with installing concrete daily habits. See above link for ideas on the highest leverage habits. Pick one and implement for 1-2 months, then repeat. All you need to start to see big changes is 1 high leverage habit successfully installed every few months. At that rate, in 2-5 years, you'll be killing it.

I would strongly disagree with that as well. I've spent over $20,000 on workshops and retreats in the last few years. Best money I've ever spent. But then again, I love this stuff and I've got some money to burn.

Binaural beats def work. The question is: what are you expecting them to do? If you're hoping they do all your personal development work for you, you'll be disappointed. If you're hoping they will make you enlightened, you'll be disappointed.

@username You gotta put this into proper context. Any industry you might want to work in -- not just academia -- is corrupted with unconsciousness. The whole world is! You're gonna have to deal with some constraints no matter where you go. There do exist some amazing academics. Of course they are rare. Anything amazing is rare by definition. If you wanna be an academic, go show them how it ought to be done by leading by example. The only way to stamp out corruption is from the inside out. Then again, maybe academia isn't for you. I just know that for me, for example, I would never fit in there. But that's just me. You gotta figure that out for yourself by closely examining your values and other options. There are so many options available. Martin Ball makes it work because he's found a nice liberal-as-fuck community there in Ashland Oregon. They're pretty much all hippies and New Agers around there. That's his niche. And if you read his autobiography, he struggled though hell just to barely get by as a part-time professor. The system screwed up his whole career.

That's the thing. It's impossible to imagine. That's the most amazing part of this whole journey. It's infinitely more than you ever expected to get out of life.

@cetus56 Imagine that lollipop is your head. Now we take a nuclear bomb and detonate it inside there, and the candy shards scatter out into space and to the edge of the known universe. That would still be infinitely smaller than Absolute Infinity as seen on a breakthrough dose of 5-MeO

@egoless Start with 1g of mushrooms or half a tab of LSD. So you get some idea of what psychedelics can do. Then you won't worry so much about "fatal side effects". It is not like psychedelics are some unknown quantity. They have been empirically tested by tens of millions of people all over the world, for over 5000 years, both in clinical settings and in real life settings. Psychedelic deaths are extremely rare, and almost always trace down to ridiculous levels of improper protocol, like taking mushroom on a rooftop.

There's no hard rule here. It would probably be wise for you to first do a guided meditation retreat first, like Vipassana, where you will have peer pressure on you to stick through the whole 10 days. Solo retreats require lots of self-discipline and planning. Otherwise you'll just quit when the going gets tough. Start to unaddict yourself from all forms of media: TV, internet, phone, news, magazines, etc.

If you want that, you need a very deep enlightenment. Start with daily self-inquiry and meditation, and then start doing 10 day solo retreats. By the end of one retreat, you should start to get hints of magic. Your mind needs to become very very present.