Leo Gura

@Serotoninluv Awesome!

@Tom T Wow! Very cool to hear. Happy for ya

@brugluiz You should be very careful and clear by what you mean when you say "psychosis". Spiral Dynamics is not a model for diagnosing or understanding legit mental disorders. So watch out. Spiral Dynamics is based on "normal" or "average" people.

@kieranperez Christian monks famously wore hairshirts -- shirts made out of coarse, itchy, irritating animal hair -- as a means of self-inflicted suffering for purpose of spiritual purification. The reason spiritual traditions all over the world use suffering as spiritual practice is because it awakens the mind, while pleasure and comfort usually dulls the mind into unconsciousness. Same idea as cold showers. Of course this is often done is a dysfunction, pathological, moralistic manner, which is the opposite of consciousness.

Depends of course on the particular skill. There are so many! Lynda.com is great for all sorts of technical computer skills. You can pretty reliably create a six-figure income just from mastering a handful of the skills on Lynda.com

You're lucky you're not in a Zen monastery, as that kind of question would get you a hard kick in the nuts. Like I said, you haven't really suffered yet.

Cough... Cough...

@Scholar There is no reason to avoid anything. Rather, you are being invited to become conscious of how you are creating suffering. That is all. Don't turn consciousness work into some sort of normative morality guilt trip. You don't have to do anything. If you want to kill yourself, you are free to do so. There are no shoulds here. It's a question of how you want to live life. It would be pretty stupid to live life kicking yourself in the nuts everyday. But of course you are free to do so. Just think about how stupid what you are saying is. If you had to power to stop your own suffering, you would do so without hesitation. It sounds like you live a cushy life without having suffered deeply. One day, you will face suffering so deep you will rethink your compacent position about it. You have no good sense yet how deep humans can suffer. Let's see how you will feel after you get into a car crash and half your face burns off in the fire. At which point you post your whiney victim story here and we will respond with: "How is this any different than joy? Why is suffering bad?" Then you will rethink your position. The ego loves to talk shit and act aloof while it is safe and comfy. But then, as soon as it gets a scratch, it cries and whines about how life is terrible and unfair.

Yes, it still has its old memories, beliefs, langauge, etc. You don't all the sudden start thinking in Chinese.

People seem to enjoy playing FPSes, which always ends with a bullet in the head and a respawn. Maybe God enjoys FPSes too?

I'll release a video about cults in the future.

Depends on why you're doing it. What is the point of your investing? Also, keep in mind that just because something qualifies as a life purpose doesn't mean it should be YOUR life purpose. Your LP needs to fit you like a glove.

@kieranperez Sweet! Happy for ya

Not really. It's best to just treat them arbitrary.

Strong Determination Sitting is a good way to work on consciousness of pain. This isn't easy to do, but try to sit for so long that you get to the point where the excruciating pain of your sit turns into pleasure. It's a very distinct inflection point that happens during long, serious sits. As you sit there in pain for an hour or more, you have ample time to contemplate: What is pain? What is suffering? With pain and suffering it's very important to try to contemplate it WHILE IT IS HAPPENING, not after the fact. This cuts through speculation and theorizing. My guess is, you'd have to be pretty deeply enlightened to be able to deconstruct pain in the way Ralston talks about. Because so long as the ego is intact it will bitch and whine and moan and resist too much. A deep surrender is required. Ralston is talking about super-human levels of consciousness. So don't be discouraged if you can't get it fast.

It might be easier to do this using a much simpler image, like a red triangle or white circle or the yin-yang. Yes, these might bore you, but if you get bored easily then that's precisely what you must work through. Boredom is the ego-mind's resistance to truth and higher consciousness. Boredom is not easy to work through, but therein lies the spiritual purification.

@Andrea Maffioletti That's the mindfuck of it: perception does not really exist. What you presently think of as perception will eventually -- at high levels of consciousness -- get recontextualized into Absolute being. Perception only appears to exist because the ego is co-opting Absolute being as its own "perceptions". In truth, you are not perceiving anything. Absolute Infinity is being itself but because you believe you were born, you are misinterpreting Absolute being as "my perceptions of reality". Without a belief in a separate self, there is no perception. The notion of perception carries with it a hidden implicit metaphysics: subject/object (duality). When you become really conscious, this duality collapses and you realize that perception was never taking place. Absolute being was taking place. This may sound like a semantic word game, but I assure you its not. It's a very radical and palpable shift in consciousness. You will feel it like getting struck with a lightning bolt. Your whole sense of reality will flip inside out as your consciousness up-shifts from relative perception to Absolute being. Visually, nothing may change, but your understanding of what you thought your visual field was will radically change. It's like if what you thought was a shrub swaying in the wind, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a creeping grizzly bear

@NoSelfSelf Only buy from places that get great reviews. Never buy from an unknown source. And on top of that, use drug testing kits to verify your substance is a genuine indole. Be especially suspicious of substances which don't look pure (brown, grey, yellow, pink, dirty-looking, chunky, etc.).

As far as interpreting imagery goes, the human mind can only understand reality via images and symbols. That's what understanding is regardless of whether it is scientific or spiritual understanding, literal or poetic. There really isn't a difference between literal and poetic understanding. So the mind, especially during a trip, will use whatever images it can to understand the vast complexity of reality. All sorts of strange symbols and images can arise, and they are all relative to that mind's intellectual framework. Truth and wisdom will be communicated in whatever way works FOR THAT MIND. To a Christian mind it might be the face of Jesus, to a Hindu mind it might be the face of Vishnu, to an atheist mind it might be a mathematical formula or a logical axiom, etc. All of it is just arbitrary symbols which only have meaning relatively, WITHIN the framework of that person's mind. It's like a language, which only makes sense and has meaning to those people who speak the language. To an outsider, it is just noise.

Of course dissociatives can be used for accessing profound mystical states. The only problem is, they tend to be physically harmful to the body, and also addictive. Ketamine can become very addictive and prolonged usages destroys the kidneys I believe. Which is why I do not recommend them. Why take those risks when you can have mindblowing mystical experiences on totally safe and non-addictive substances like LSD, mushrooms, or DMT? After a 5-MeO breakthrough, even small doses of LSD or mushrooms will be fully nondual, infinite experiences. I don't need more than 125ug of LSD to take to me to full God-mode. With so many safe psychedelics to explore, I would leave dissociatives for last on the list, after you've explored 2C-B, DMT, 5-MeO, MDMA, mushrooms, etc. BTW, once you try 5-MeO, you will not want anything else. It is a psychedelic in a league of its own. It makes LSD seem like a toy (and LSD is no toy).

There are healthy and unhealthy ways to be socially withdrawn. In the healthy version, you desire isolation so that you can focus on working on your consciousness. Many sages have socially withdrawn themselves to high degrees that would seem unhealthy to most people. But they were just hardcore in their practices. This isn't strictly necessary, but it may be for some people for some period of time until they finish their work. In the end, there is only the one Self, so all those other people are none other than you. So whether you are with people or not, you are still always alone. There is no problem being alone as long as you enjoy it and you are not becoming more and more depressed or mentally unstable.

Hehehe... That will have to fly out the window. Did you really think that the ultimate nature of existence can be understood without taking a toll on you? The cost of admission is your life.

@MadisonAlyssa Well... sit down and contemplate why you are so attached to vanity and appearance. When contemplating this stuff, you must probe beneath the stories and excuses like, "My Dad caused this", or "It was because of my childhood" and get to the root of why you are still attached to it. Attachments like this are always rooted in your survival needs. So what do you fear will happen to you if you let go of vanity and appearance? What would happen if you became ugly and everyone thought you were a cheap nasty whore? How would that hurt your ego/survival? Why are you giving people that power over you? What is vanity/appearance REALLY giving you? Love? Happiness? Success? Self-esteem? Hint: it's giving you something positive, otherwise you wouldn't keep doing it. What if your self-esteem was completely independent of your appearance? What would be bad about that? What if you were ugly and yet you still loved yourself just as much as when you were pretty? Sit down and really contemplate all that in a brutally honesty manner. Also, get very specific and clear about what you mean by "vanity" and "appearance", as these are very vague notions.

@tentacion There's actually nothing behind this physical reality. That nothingness is what you are, what God is Nothingness and Infinity are identical. So this Nothingness is infinitely intelligent. That's what you are intuiting but not yet fully grasping. P.S. LSD or mushrooms are very good alternatives to 5-MeO. They can show you this too.