Leo Gura

Thanks for the review

@Shane597 Sure, it can be a good learning experience. Don't think of it as the end-all-be-all. At your age you need experience with many aspects of life, including expressing yourself. Don't make the blog about your personal views of life. Make it something more objective and useful to people. That way you aren't just ranting and blabbermouthing away like some radio talk show host. Try to offer people value in all your work rather than just serving your self, or creating an echo chamber for your ego.

Only the entirety of creation.

@kieranperez The Truth of reality doesn't depend on your medications. It's always there to be seen. It's like empty space. Space is always present, even if you're sick. But your psychological ability to contemplate might be impaired by all sorts of things, from medication to bad food to watching cable news. You've probably got months of groundwork inquiring to do before you even have a hope of enlightenment. So start there and start now. If you start to feel psychologically unstable, then just back off the work for a while.

@Timotheus Don't worry about that. Enlightenment is more than you could ever ask for. All your worries will melt away. At least until you have to clean the stinky litter box

@username Have your first enlightenment experience, and then you'll be able to reason about all this more clearly. Enlightenment will obliterate your whole paradigm of what reality and life are, to such a degree, that all your past metaphysical questions will become pointless to a large extent. If you still have doubts after that, we can talk. My motive is making sense of life.

@jimrich At his stage, it's not something one does or tries. It's permanent.

But what if there's more beyond that? Just because we can't imagine an alternative, doesn't say much about reality. It merely reaffirms that our imaginations are limited.

Of course we already know he's done it. I'm talking about giving 5-meo to an enlightened master to see if it will reveal anything more for him. That would be an important scientific achievement.

I am open to any possibility. But I must admit, the Absolute sure feels Absolute. But then again, if reality really wanted to fuck with us, it would create an Absolute, and then something more beyond that which we cannot imagine or access in any way. Maybe everything is not one? Maybe everything is 359,458,134? After all, if the most you could access was one, you'd have no clue about anything else beyond. And you'd feel like you've accessed everything without any possible exception. Enlightenment could be the ultimate epistemic trap. One from which you will never escape. An enlightened master will of course deny all this. But then again, that's exactly what he would do if he was epistemically trapped beyond all escape. And the craziest thing about it is, even if you became fully enlightened, this would still not resolve the problem. You'd certainly feel like you attain the Absolute and nothing more could be. But that might merely be your delusion. You could end up as epistemically lost as your enlightened master, and you'd never know it. It really is like a form of insanity or living in another reality from which there is no return. Or falling through a black hole.

The definition of a hallucination is something which is actually nothing. Hence, I like: world = hallucination.

Nothing of substance about his response that I can recall.

@Wouter Yes, that sounds like a small Samadhi experience. Definitely a good sign. You want to not only have an experience here, but to understand what it is that's going on. Why did it happen? What does it mean? Where did it go? Enlightenment is the knowing behind the mystical experience. You gotta get very clear about what the hell is going on.

@Afonso It's not ideal. Your spine is probably not too straight and your knees are probably above your legs. I meditate on my couch too sometimes, but it's not ideal for formal meditation. You can start there, but then you wanna evolve to more strict practices.

@Afonso Direct questions are the only ones worth asking

@Afonso Ask him if he's personally encountered people with paranormal abilities and how he makes sense of that. Ask him why most people are not enlightened, and aren't even close. Whatever they lack, why do they lack it when others don't? Ask him if he's willing to try 5-meo-dmt in the name of science. Ask him, what if enlightenment itself is just a dream within a dream? And his conviction that this isn't possible, is also a dream. Ask him why science works if it's a conceptual activity of the mind and doesn't track truth.

@Outer Public/private is a conceptual distinction which you invented. If the self/other distinction is conceptual and unreal, surely the public/private distinction is so. Meaning is something you also invented. Being has no meaning. That is nonduality. Meaning only exits for egos.

@wavydude Just look around you. What do you see? Chimpery. How you gonna avoid being a chimp? It won't happen by accident. By accident is what created all the chimps in the first place. Maybe nature gave you a brain so you could use it to stop being a chimp

@Shan I can tell just from looking at it that that foam pillow thing will be painful for your shins and ass if you plan to sit for longer than 20 minutes. You're gonna need way more padding, or just brave through the pain. A Seiza bench would work just as well, if not better: http://amzn.to/2sWaliM Although even a well-padded bench will get very painful after 40 minutes. @Gabriel Antonio It really is worthwhile to learn proper cross-legged sitting. It's superior to using a chair. It just requires training and flexibility development. Full-lotus isn't necessary. Siddhasana isn't so hard to do and works great with a bit of training.

@Outer A "public" experience is just a private experience which your mind labels "public experience". See? Everything is literally a hallucination. Because the substance of everything is nothing. The various categories humans invent just attempt to hide this fact through sleight of hand.

This is true not only of the news, but of virtually EVERYTHING sold in the marketplace. Take a close look. It's very hard to make a commercially viable product/service without doing this. This is the true evil of rampant capitalism.

@Loreena Identity doesn't exist. It's a hallucination. Does Santa Claus exist? Or is he just an idea? Ditto for you. You have the exact same physical status as Santa Claus.

@Socrates Nobody controls it, of course! Who controls the sun? How could anything control anything else? There cannot be any controllers in existence. Because who would control the ultimate controller? This is the essence of mysticism. Nothingness is in control. Of course it's weird. It's irreducibly mystical! An infinite chain of groundless surfaces.

@Gneumatics Think about this now... It's very simple: Maybe you are the body, but if you are not the body, then you are mistaken about what you're taking the word "you" to refer to. See? So when you say, "Why do I follow it (the body) everywhere its ever been" what are you actually saying? What is following the body? If you're the body, as you insist, then there's nothing to follow the body. There's just the body being you. Nonduality doesn't say you follow the body. Nonduality says, You do not exist! The body just walks around like a zombie on its own. The problem is, it thinks there's someone inside it. You are like a robot who's been programmed to believe it's a human. When you think, "But I'm a real human." << that's just a program running. That program has no one behind it. In the same way that when you look at your computer, you don't think of it as having a "soul" in there somewhere. It's just a bunch of mechanics. What you REALLY are is the empty field of Nothingness within which the body walks around.

It's hard to escape the rat race without working for yourself. The catch-22 is, when you start working for yourself, you will be working longer hours for the first 5 years than you worked for your boss. But once you succeed, you'll have the possibility to truly be free. Of course the next catch-22 is that by that point, you will have become so addicted to success that you will likely never go minimalist. At least not until after another 5 or 10 or 20 years of really feeling the pain of it. This issue is veritable Sarlacc pit. Freedom ain't free. All that said, deciding to work for myself was one of the best decisions I've made in my life.