Leo Gura

Because ego corrupts all spiritual endeavors. It's only a question of degree and style. The more popular a spiritual teaching becomes, the more it gets corrupted by ego. Christianity and Islam have both becomes their own worse enemies. The devil has co-opted both long ago. The first thing the devil does is co-opt truth and turn it into falsehood. In the same way that the first thing a cuckoo bird does after it hatches is kill all the other eggs, so it can pretend to be the genuine article.

Leo is an illusion, but thank you for the sentiment. Keep being me

Just don't tell the Christian right-wingers, or they will blow a gasket.

Self-inquiry will not take most people very far into embodiment. Yoga is far superior for that. It is crazy how effective yoga can be.

For an ex-heroin addict, he's doing REALLY good! Go Russell!

Islam is not about laws. Islam literally means "surrender". Surrender to God. "Jihad" is the inner battle to escape Maya, slay the ego, and become Infinite. Actualized.org is Jihad. Ta-da!

@SpaceCowboy Yes, video can work too.

Authentic anger is a rare thing. Any emotion felt with full consciousness is no problem. Authentic anger has little to do with what most people call "anger", even though the two might look similar. The key element to make everything healthy is consciousness. An enlightened yogi could inject heroin consciously and it would be okay.

@mohdanas If you are that skeptical, yoga may not be right for you. You are not ready yet. There cannot be deep spirituality without utterly radical openmindedness. Yoga is not a rational system. It will make no logical or rational sense. And you must be okay with that for many months as you carry on your daily practices rigorously.

No, he has a vague conceptual understanding, but conceptual understanding does not produce liberation and happiness. Conceptual understanding is NOT consciousness. All academics suffer from the same predictable problem: Confusing the map for the territory. Is such a simple trap, but almost impossible to escape once you've fallen into it.

Lol... You ARE Jesus! Jesus is Nothingness.

@Vignan You're not getting it. Yoga is not done for that. Yoga is your escape from all that monkey business. You're not doing yoga to become a more effective monkey.

No, it's more like life purpose IS you acting out your karma, but in a more healthy way. You can think of LP as Karma yoga.

Jordan Peterson on anti-depressants? For fuck sakes! Oh the irony... Do NOT take anti-depressants! They will screw up your entire system and are difficult to quit and they solve nothing. Psychedelics will actually treat the root cause, like your dysfunctional psychology, your rationalism, and your energetic blockages. Yoga too. Of course fixing even ALL the aspects of your life will never make you satisfied. It is impossible. Real satisfaction only comes with ego-death. Which is something Peterson doesn't understand because he's too busy waging an intellectual war with his favorite enemy, the post-modernists. It would be funny, but for the fact that he has to take anti-depressants to feel satisfied and is encouraging his followers to do the same. This speaks to the fundamental incorrectness of his method and his understanding of the human psyche. This is the kind of bullshit that academia and rationalism produces. If you want happiness, do not trust academics to deliver it to you. They have no idea what happiness is. They are lost in a world of mental concepts, which is a breeding-ground for depression. There is only one way to happiness: consciousness to the point of ego-death. P.S. You will be far better off micro-dosing LSD or mushrooms than taking anti-depressants.

Good stuff!

@Elisabeth There is no point is entering a field for which you have no passion. It would as silly as entering a marriage when you already know you don't love the person. That cannot possibly end well. And it will affect your mental and physical health. Look, it is already happening. Going through with this PhD will ruin you psychologically. If you could construct any dream job your imagination could muster, without any limits, what would it be? What would you do if you had zero chance of failing and all the money in the world? P.S. I quit a 2 year degree in engineering for the same reason: it was too dry. It was a huge relief. That would have been a disaster if I didn't quit, even though I was a straight A student. P.P.S. Why don't you become a sage and awaken the world? This doesn't have to be complicated Some mushroom or LSD will show you the way.

@Noah Do a forum search. Someone asked your exact same question before and I gave some detailed answers. The username who started that thread was: Seed

@Epiphany_Inspired For you the doctor is prescribing a 30 days no-music challenge. Wear earplugs when you go the store, so no music enters.

@Vignan You will die, and so will all your goals.

As always, both.

That's cause you're still addicted to stimulation and that ego of yours is looking for some kind of escape hatch. Enlightenment is silence. Face it head on. FYI, some Kriya techniques will actually have you close off your eyes and ears with your fingers to deepen the silence. Some Kriya schools actually give you a specially-designed armrest to hold up your arms as you block off your ears. Or just use earplugs.

@TimeGoat If your goal is to start a Kriya yoga practice, start with the Kriya book. If you want to raise kundalini and open chakras without doing yoga, read the kundalini book. These are two very different approaches to the same basic thing. When it comes to spirituality, there are many ways to skin a cat.

By dying. There is only one thing which all humans fear: loss of self. And then that gets manifested in a million different ways. To overcome a fear is to die (surrender) to that fear. To accept it. To realize that your true nature is beyond it.

@electroBeam That is because your general level of awareness is still so low. It's sort of like you've walked into a dark room full of objects and complain, "Am I expected to see anything in here? Are you actually telling me there are real objects in this room?" To which the reply is, "Yes! Once you turn up the dial on the light dimmer switch." At the start of Kriya your awareness of your body and spine is so poor that you cannot even feel you have a spine. "Spine" is just an idea for you. You only believe you have a "spine" because some human told you so. After some months of Kriya, you will discover, "Holy shit! I have a spine! I can feel my spine for the first time in my life!" I find that even more important that visualizing (in Kriya) is feeling into things. Feel into your spine. Feel into your chakras. You're just extremely numb to feeling. That's the problem. You cannot feel anything subtle. In the same way that a heroin addict cannot feel subtle emotions of joy and love and beauty because he's zonked out of his mind on heroin.

Yup, that's how it starts. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.