Leo Gura

@Dino D The problem is, you still assume you exist. For all of your talking and emoting and theorizing -- you still fundamentally assume there is a you. But there isn't. And until that is understood, nothing will really change. "OHHHHHHHH!!!! There is no ME!!!! Duh!!! OF COURSE!!!!!" No Self No Self No Self No Self No Self No Self No Self ....

Universe/mind is a duality. The ultimate Truth is nondual. You cannot grasp nonduality via dualistic distinctions. You can try, but all you will get is paradox and strange loops due to the self-reference problem. You are the universe trying to ask itself, "What is the universe?" If you don't know, who else can tell you but yourself?

@Prabhaker Thanks, good stuff!

@Rilles And that was in Oregon! Full of left-wing pot-smoking hippies.

@Aimblack I never said you can't do it. I merely pointed out that by your logic, you can practice mindfulness meditation at a strip club. There is a reason spiritual teachers like to be hardcore and orthodox. Because otherwise noobs come in and start to corrupt the teachings with their sloppy and egotistical ways. "Let's do yoga while listening to heavy metal music. What could go wrong?" "Let's do SDS while masturbating to porn." "Let's lock each other in a room and beat each other with sticks to help us get enlightened." (This actually happened in Osho's commune.) Etc. You can always break the rules. But the rules are there to keep you from kidding yourself. And the ego loves to kid itself in this work. The ego will look for every way possible to defang the techniques.

Genetically modify snails with DNA from the Bufo Alvarius toads so that snails produce 5-MeO-DMT in their slime. Then sell the snails to people as pets which they can keep at home, harvest their slime, and trip their balls off in a legal way. Patent pending Or hire a chemist to invent a totally new psychedelic compound which is not on any banned substances lists.

@Power If you're doing SDS, mindfully feel into your whole body. It's a great practice for developing body awareness. And this will get you out of your head.

@Geromekevin Can't speak to any particular document, but there's been much evidence that has surfaced of government intelligence agencies, including the Russian KGB, experimenting with paranormal abilities. Frankly, they would be irresponsible not to. If the KGB had paranormal capabilities but the CIA didn't, that would be a huge problem for America. So obviously both sides would need to do research into it. And if they did develop such paranormal capabilities, they surely wouldn't tell us about it.

How would you know?

Eckhart Tolle never tells you about how evil Transformers may land on the planet from another galaxy and battle you for domination of the world. Why! Why! Why did you not warn me of the Transformers, Tolle????! Damn you! And the dinosaurs!!! Why did you not warn me about the genetically engineered dinosaurs what would break loose from their cages and prevent me from reaching enlightenment??? Tolleeeeee!!!!

At least we can rest assured that we now have a confirmed torturer as head of the CIA. I have a good idea for how to torture people: give them 10 tabs of LSD. At least then maybe they will come back loving you. I should patent that method. "Leo's Psychedelic Torture Recipe" (tm) As a bonus, it leaves no trail of evidence that later needs to be destroyed.

@vanish Haha, sounds intense man. Welcome to true spirituality There is still deeper to go though. Realizing no-self is but one facet of this thing.

@Angelo John Gage Yeah, I've skimmed over that one before. Good thing that high levels of consciousness are not much compatible with the evil shit the CIA is up to. They tried to use psychedelics too to create super-soldiers, without much success. The soldiers started loving everyone too much to shoot them. Lol

If done improperly, yes, that is a trap. The ego mind tries to "materialize" all spiritual pursuits. It can't help itself. The devil is not going to surrender to God easily. He will first try to get God to surrender to the devil. The devil doesn't want to ascend to God's level, he wants to drag God down to his level. It's not gonna work, but he'll still try.

No, don't bastardize spiritual techniques with laziness. "Leo, can I do mindfulness meditation with labeling while eating a Big Mac and snorting cocaine off a stripper's tits?"

That's a good start. The most profound levels of happiness come from ego loss and selflessness.

Haha, ego will not allow that. See, ego is insatiable. Ego is trying to become infinite via materialism, which will never work. Which is why you have billionaires working morning till night to earning another billion. Because once you have everything material that you've ever wanted, you will still be just as miserable as before. You're right, that inspirational videos alone are not every effective. A good teacher must go much further than just making inspirational videos. The point of teaching is to help the mind uncover its own self-deceptions. Good teachers are rare. And the world could sure use more of them. Raising your consciousness has little to do with being a teacher as your career. Everyone can benefit enormously from raising their consciousness. But not everyone needs to become a teacher. Also, being a great teacher is not as easy as it seems. Shooting good videos consistently is pretty challenging. And for that matter, creating a good inspirational video is pretty challenging.

As a METAPHOR, it's good. If you want to go beyond the metaphor, the real thing is happening all around you. Just look around your room. That's it! That precisely what actual Infinity looks like. If you see your dog licking its nuts in the corner of your room, that's infinity.

Think of it this way: if you went to a college calculus lecture where the professor was talking about integrals and derivatives, but you were a 2nd grader who didn't even understand negative numbers, fractions, decimals, long division, algebra, polynomials, geometry, and trigonometry -- you would be so lost that it would seem to you like the professor was talking nonsense and just writing scribbles on the wall. You might even think the professor is insane. And any questions you asked would be coming from such a deep place of ignorance and inexperience that there would be no way to easily explain to you the error of your understanding, because each answer would only raise a dozen more questions. Because complex and nuanced topics require a deep foundation of prior experience. Asking questions about consciousness or infinity without at least a few years of meditation experience is as silly as a 2nd grader asking about calculus.

The issue isn't earning a bit more money. Any money psychedelics earned would be a drop in the bucket. The collapse would come because psychedelics reveal that all of society and culture is built on lies of the grossest sort. The entire military-industrial complex, Wall street, Big Pharma, entertainment industries, the medical industry, science, academia, the school system, factory farming, intelligence agencies, government surveillance programs, government torture programs, pollution, oil and gas industries, and all of religion would be debunked and undermined, shown to be evil and corrupt beyond repair. If people actually knew how corrupt and false our culture/society is, they would stage a revolution. That would only be AFTER the collapse of all the entrenched corrupt capitalist institutions mentioned above. They would created a bloody crackdown before they let that happen.

This is false. Awareness can and does exist in isolation. Awareness is precisely NOT the thing being awared. You can experience awareness with no object. The reason you say all of these falsehoods is because you're not very conscious, and haven't actually done any hardcore awareness practices. Spend 5 years meditating, then let's talk. You are not going to understand awareness/consciousness from within your materialist paradigm and without doing serious awareness practices. You don't realize yet how deep of a rabbit hole this awareness business is. It doesn't work like anything your culture taught you.

@WildeChilde The logic is, if you let people have free access to psychedelics, mainstream capitalist society will soon collapse.

The paradox is, if your #1 priority is happiness, you will never reach enlightenment. Your #1 priority must be truth. Then, as you go down the rabbit hole of truth, it will end up killing you, and then happiness will dawn. Happiness is incompatible with being a "you". That's problem. You want happiness, but to get happiness, you must first die. But the whole reason you're unhappy in the first place is because you're busy avoiding death. So you say you want happiness, but to get it, you will have go through the thing you fear the most. Which is why it's best to pursue enlightenment not for happiness, but for truth. Because you will have to surrender your notions of personal happiness to get to true happiness. What you currently think of as happiness isn't true happiness, which is why you're unhappy with it! If what you thought was happiness was real happiness, you'd be happy by now and this whole conversation would be moot. You wouldn't be here looking at Actualized.org Happiness is a very tricky thing, which is why almost no one has it. Also notice, truth too is a very tricky thing which very few people have. Hmmmmm.... might these two be connected??

A) No, it doesn't. B) Nonduality means there is no difference between ego and enlightenment. You are conflating being a good person with enlightenment. Those are two very different things. That's your ego's judgment. From the enlightenment perspective, there is no such thing as egoism or dysfunction. Devil = God

Lol