Leo Gura

@Space Just to be clear, I believe it's possible to go deeper with meditation/yoga than with psychedelics. It just requires exceptional talent and enormous amounts of grinding work. We're talking 10,000+ hours of it, done in large consecutive chunks. Read Om Swami's accounts of how hard he meditates, for example. It's an insane, super-human feat he does. It's just not realistic for most people. This is the kind of stuff only monks have time to do. This is like Olympic level meditation. The reason I talk about psychedelics is because they offer ordinary people a glimpse of what a 40 year enlightened master or full-time monk experiences. Imagine if you could take a pill and experience what it is like to play golf at Tiger Wood's level, or to play the piano at Mozart's level, or play chess at Gary Kasparov's level. That would be awesome, and highly useful to normal people. Well, psychedelics are just that. For example, I've had insights on 5-MeO that Shinzen Young has yet to have, and he's like 80 years old and has been teaching this stuff for 50 years. I can see that Shinzen is not fully enlightened. This would be totally impossible for me to see without 5-MeO. I've talked to students of his who have been practicing with him for 10-15 years, and they are still not enlightened, or even close. (BTW, nothing against Shinzen. I think he's a great teacher.) It's almost impossible to convey how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Yup "Matter" is a precipitate of Infinite Mind.

Nonduality is NOT solipsism. But the ego-mind may not see it that way at first. It is true that you are the only thing in existence. You created every human being that exists. Of course the trick is, we're talking about the universal YOU, not the personal you. It's very simple logic: if nonduality is true, there is no division between anything. There is certainly no division between you/other. You are your own mother. You created Actualized.org to help you awaken. You even wrote this sentence. You are God in every literal sense. The ego is of course afraid of this. And it may be a shock to the system when you first start to realize how radical nonduality really it. It may feel like madness. Of course it's not madness. It's TRUTH. But TRUTH is a radical thing. It requires a very deep surrender. In the end, once you fully surrender, it will be fine. Great even. Nonduality, at the highest degrees of it, is extremely radical. It will shock and terrify the ego-mind. That is the #1 obstacle which keeps people unenlightened. You have to surrender to the radicalness of it. You have to surrender to the madness. It's not really madness. But it will appear to be madness relative to the normie paradigm you are used to. Enlightened people are basically insane by all conventional standards. They just happen to be insane in a functional way. And they don't frame it that way because it would scare off newbies. The lite degrees of nonduality can feel pleasant and nice. The deepest degrees of nonduality can feel downright terrifying and depressing. And the final stage is peace and wonder.

Isn't that the whole point? Of course don't overdo it. Ramp it up gradually over weeks and months. But 6 pranayama is really nothing. People do up to 72 or even 100+ pranayamas a day. Most of you will need to do 10,000s of pranayamas to start seeing serious results. Some will need less, depending on your spiritual attunement.

@Salvijus Have you ever done 2 weeks of nonstop self-inquiry?

@Kode13 Yes, of course all theory and teaching is concepts. If you become really conscious, you will not need my teachings. But it will probably take you much longer to reach that stage than you think. Hell, you can walk this entire path all by yourself, without reading a single book or watching a single video. But if you were the kind of person who was going to do that, you wouldn't be here, would you?

@herghly Yeah, 60 mins is good. But it will end up longer than that pretty soon because you need to aim for 36x Pranayamas + 20 mins of breath of fire + 10 mins at least of concentration. It will start to grow upwards of 90 mins in the end. But do it gradually, over time. 90 mins is tough.

@herghly If I were you I'd just ditch the first two techniques and add in more Pranayama. It's important to optimize the routine because you only have so much time in the day. Keep it tight and super-potent is my philosophy. 70 mins is a long time.

"I have an important decision to make." There's your story. But you probably don't want to hear that.

The teaching of detachment is probably just too advanced for you right now. Go ahead and fix up your life and earn some success. Then you can revisit the importance of detachment (once you have a bunch of attachments and you can appreciate how much they make you suffer). You need to climb Maslow's Hierarchy a bit before you get into the nonduality stuff. Learn how to function in the world effectively first. Learn how to feed yourself. There will be a lot of personal development lessons there for you.

Amen, lol Gives a whole new meaning to "You can't handle the Truth". When you signed up for this truthseeking journey, you never imagined that you'd find it up your ass. Then again, where else would it be?

You're conscious. You tell me.

@Bandit Everything is related to consciousness because consciousness makes up everything. It's sort of like you're asking, "What if the clouds in Super Mario World are related to the TV screen?" It's almost trivial. What the precise nature of that relationship is, that's highly non-trivial, requiring serious investigation. And in the end, everything in infinitely interconnected and inter-caused. Everything is the cause of everything else from the biggest picture perspective.

@Saumaya There is an important practical difference though: People can realize one part of enlightenment without realizing another part. This not a hypothetical point. It happens very commonly. For example, one can realize no-self but not realize Absolute Infinity. Or one can realize no-self but fail to have an insight about the nature of love or the nature of other beings. So, even if in your particular case you managed to somehow realize all the facets of enlightenment in one fell swoop. Which I highly, highly doubt. That would be a special case. The more general case for people pursuing enlightenment is that they will have to access each facet individually, and then all of them collectively, at various times. Otherwise, people will have one profound insight and think: "That's it! That's all there is. I'm done." When in fact they have only scratched the surface, nowhere even close to done. Take some strong psychedelics and see how many different levels and facets of consciousness there are. Of course in the end it's all ONE consciousness. But consciousness manifests itself in various ways, for example: dreaming vs waking consciousness. You can say that dreaming and awaking are ultimately the same, because everything is ultimately nondual, but this is not true from the unawakened person's POV -- and that's who your teachings should be aimed at.

@WildeChilde For you, enlightenment is just an idea. So definitely, it can be an illusion from your POV. There is no one you can trust to tell you the Truth, because you are it. Truth-seekers don't have the luxury of a tit to suck on. Hence truth-seeking is not a popular hobby. As the Buddha once said, "The only way you can know if you have an ass, is by bending over and looking at it."

@Saumaya God is not a confusing word to one who has directly experienced God. There is no mistaking it for something else. You don't need a PhD to experience God. But you do need an exceptional, almost super-human degree of consciousness. What is God? is like the question, What am I? It does little good to here the answer. You gotta experience the answer directly for yourself. The classic definition of God is very precise: an omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful, all-loving, eternal, formless, infinite intelligence which created itself.

Proves my point. There's deeper levels you've yet to access.

@Saumaya No-self ain't the only insight in town. You can realize no-self, but still have no clue what existence is, or what God is, or what another is, or what intelligence is, or what love is, etc.

It's not so easy to distinguish facts from theory. If only it were so simple. All facts are theory-laden.

@The Don 1) You can only speak effectively about topics which you are well-versed in. So lots of research, study, and practice with the topic you're talking about is key. 2) You must also be genuinely passionate and interested in the topic. 3) Practice, practice, practice. Don't think too much, just let your mouth move and say whatever it feels like saying. You can polish it up with more practice.

@REALNEGA As the book says, only after a few years of practice. Don't worry about them. You don't need them. The basic Kriyas should be enough if you just do them seriously.

@Nick5050 Shamanic breathing is not a substitute for meditation. Also, don't expect shamanic breathing to fix all your bad habits for you. It can help you release some of the low consciousness motives driven them, but you'll have to consciously and proactively put an end to them. Try starting a Kriya yoga practice. It should be better than meditation.

@Shroomdoctor Don't call it everlasting. Nothing is everlasting.

-- The Buddha

@sarapr Correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawhid