Leo Gura

Thanks. I am working on being more gentle and humane with you guys.

Yes. The million dollar question is what result will it produce? For me, what turned me off from Sadhguru's yoga is when I found out he teaches a weak-sauce version of yoga to newbies and then plans to upsell you on the serious yoga years later. I could not stomach that. But I don't want to discourage you. Follow thru on your plan if you feel it is right. I hope you see great results.

I have edited my original reply to tone it down and be less pessmistic and dismissive.

Absolutely.

My video: How Happiness Works is my best understanding of happiness so far. I think that's the most realistic approach for most people. I suspect that the highest path to hardcore sustainable happiness is something like becoming a full-time monk or yogi. But few people are that serious or suitable for it. And if you aren't suitable it may make you extra miserable. I've experimented with that path and as much as I liked the idea of it I don't think is suits me. At least not right now. Maybe when I'm older. I incur suffering and unhappiness for myself through the ambitions I have for my life and work. If I dropped all my ambitions I would probably find greater happiness but I don't want to drop all my ambitions. So it's a tricky balancing act.

In the end if something works for you, I encourage you to keep doing it. And in the future I will continue testing out new methods on myself. I can't know what I'll find. I will try to be more accomodating to you guys in the future. I don't want to limit your growth with my own limits. The biggest issue is that not everyone is like me. And sometimes I forget that. This is a very sneaky trap in this work. We judge the effectiveness of things based on our personal experiences.

Sure, that kind of test is good to do. I have done those kinds of tests with various techniques. But many times they didn't produce the promised great results, which leads to disappointment and frustration. Sadhguru doesn't like you experimenting with his techniques. He wants you to do them religiously without even explaining how or why they work and why they fail to work if they fail.

Staying in your comfort zone might make you pretty happy in a lame sort of way. I'm not sure what the optimal path to happiness is. It will certainly vary from person to person and also luck will be a factor. And there are different kinds of happiness. One kind of happiness will not satisfy certain kinds of people. Some people could be happy just working at the post office for 40 years and just raising a small family. But, for example, I could never be happy with that. Other people will be happy working on Wall Street for 40 years, raking in billions. So you have to discover what you need that makes you happy. For me happiness comes from understanding reality. Although this has its limits and can become a trap. Most pursuits of happiness can easily turn into hell. Even sitting doing nothing under a tree can become a trap.

I can confirm that if I do 1-2 hrs of Kriya yoga I do sleep less. But not 2-4hrs less.

When it comes to Sadhguru's work, what I saw when I went to his workshop is that everyone there is following him like a sheep. And for me that is a dealbreaker. But with that said, you may love his work and it may benefit you. But in the last analysis I will have to ask, How much understanding of Consciousness did it give you? But again, that is my bias. You may have other goals.

@Javfly33 I do tend to have a pessmistic/realistic bias in my attitude towards this work. My apologies. It can be hard to strike a good balance between stuff like wild claims of sleeping 2-4hrs per day vs not. On the one hand sleeping 2-4hrs per day is a very unrealistic result. On the other hand a few people may someday achieve it. So what is to be said? I try to steer people away from going on spiritual wild goose chases. But then maybe I steer a few people away from a real wild goose. It's hard to give concrete actionable advice that works for everyone. And on the other hand if I always say stuff like: "Anything is possible. Go try it." Then such advice isn't very helpful. In the end anything is possible and you won't know until you try it. Which makes this work such a bitch. There's too much stuff to try and too little time. The problem will all spiritual techniques is that we don't have good data on how effective it is across all types of people. And spiritual teachers love to deny that their fave technique is ineffective for someone by blaming the person for whom it didn't work.

I am here to be real with you, not to spread spiritual fantasies. Newbies should understand that this path of self-development is not undertaken because it is the easy path. It is the more difficult path. It certainly has its rewards but it has its costs. I don't do the work that I do because it is the optimal path to happiness. With great consciousness come great burdens. Be careful assuming that just by doing a ton of personal development that you will reach max happiness. Things aren't so simple.

Yes, he is. That is one way. There are other ways. The problem with the gradual approach is that it simply doesn't produce enough of a shift in consciousness to crack the illusion spun by Consciousness. That's what 10 years of spiritual study has shown me. This a very controversial claim. Many would disagree with me. You can test it for yourself.

The conclusion is to severely limit your intake of chocolate. Or do a lot of annual chelation.

Most guys who get into pickup have some kind of developmental block. Of course trauma is common.

Cheers! Just be careful to keep your protocols safe. Don't get sloppy with it. Don't accidentally injure yourself.

For most people yes. For a minority of people their suffering is so bad that perhaps death is better. But this is a small minority. Suffering very much depends on environmental factors that you cannot control. And some people are just very unlucky to be born at the wrong time and the wrong place. The idea that suffering is just all in the mind is hogwash. This is said by lucky people who never truly experienced bad luck, like getting hit by a bus. Luck and external conditions matter very much. Even just your genetic luck plays a huge role. You could have been born with some horrible chronic disease through no fault of your own and with no cure. But these are rare exceptions. Aside from this bad luck, suffering is very beneficial for your development and survival. Which is why it exists.

It think it mostly depends on your brain type and personality type. If you are a very intellectually creative person then meditation may just not suit your style of mind. Minds comes in many different styles with various pros and cons. Some minds simply never shut off because they are busy working on deep matters. What I have found in myself is that I become very unhappy if my creative mind isn't on and having new ideas. My mind was born to invent thousands of new deas and to always be questioning. So meditation does not suit me. But contemplation does. Probably that, plus yoga may have worked so well for him that he doesn't need much else. Sadhguru has a huge cultural and yogic bias. He teaches from a Hindu perspective and there's plenty of dogma in any such tradition. Few traditions appreciate psychedelics because they are very dangerous and because they are difficult to access. It's not like Sadhguru can hand out bags of DMT at his retreats. So there is little reason for him to explore it deeply. Psychedelics are too much of a modern technology for them to be widely adopted by traditional mainstream spirituality. 95% of spirituality is very traditional and sheep-like. And I don't even mean religion. I mean non-religious forms.

The bottom line is that you can't use logic to resolve this issue. Either you believe the 1000s of eyewitness reports or you do not. If you do not then none of this will ever make sense to you and it will seem ridiculous. In general I find that scientifically minded people do not take eyewitness reports seriously enough, always dismissing them somehow in their mind for the sake of "being rational".

There are better chemicals for that purpose. 5-MeO-MIPT, 2C-B, MDMA, LSD, etc. You'd have to test them out and see what works best for you. It's hard to give you one clear answer.

@Salvijus It certainly has a lot to do with genetics. All those monks and yogis go through an insane screening and self-selection process. It's like you went to MIT, picked the top 5 mathematicians, showed them solving insane math equations in their heads, and said: see, this has nothing to do with genetics, you can do this too. That's how misleading such examples are. All the world's top mathemeticians have been genetically gifted. And in addition to that they trained like hell. But training alone will never get you to worldclass levels of performance in any field. To claim otherwise is harmful and very misleading.

Certainly yoga can have benefits. If it works for you, keep doing it. But I would never tell a yoga student to expect to cut his sleep down to 2-4 hrs. Such results, if possible, are extremely rare and should not be expected. It is very important in this work to set realistic expectations otherwise you will create a lot of needless suffering for yourself.

Yes, that's definitely the case. However, even so, even when it works really well it still doesn't work as well as a psychedelic works on me. I do have a bias here in that meditation has never been effective for me, even with intense effort. If meditation is effective for you, definitely use it. My advice is simpy this: find what works best for you and don't waste time on stuff that doesn't because you will drive yourself nuts. I have wasted years on stuff that simply didn't work on me.

Just remove the concept of evil from your worldview and everything makes sense. Suffering is not evil, it is necessary for all life to stay alive. Just because something doesn't feel good doesn't make it evil. And selfishness is absolutely necessary for life too.

In a certain sense that's true. I am pretty unique in how psychedelics work on me. Which is why I say you must test everything on yourself and see if it works. I don't expect everyone to get the same results from psychedelics as me. Psychedelic effectiveness is highly dependent on genetics and metabolism. I just find the idea that you will achieve Sadhguru's results in sleep nearly impossible. This will only happen if you have the right genetics. You will not be able to manipulate your way into it. Maybe if you meditate all day long every day you can reduce your sleep requirement somewhat. But in my experience even that doesn't work well. Expecting such outlandish results from this work is likely to cause more suffering than good. But hey, it's your time and your life. Test whatever methods you want. The reason I recommend psychedelics is because they are statistically very effective for many people in producing direct experiences of God. Way more effective than meditation. It's that simple. Yes, my work is not designed for people with serious mental illness. And also, my work is designed to take your mind down some hardcore, dark alleys. I have a bias toward hardcore methods. Which is not suitable for people who are mentally unstable or weak. And even if you are mentally stable my work still comes with real risks and dangers so it must be done very carefully.