Leo Gura

I once showed a video of Sadhguru explaining Mahasamadhi. Ralston said it was stupid nonsense. Who is right? And more importantly, how do you decide that? What happened to me is that I studied so many different gurus and traditions that their contradictions became unbearable to me.

Saying they will lead you off a cliff is too extreme. It's hard to deny that such teachings are helpful for many people. It's just that it won't lead to the highest possible consciousness. But that's also not the goal. You have to be very careful here not to be too dismissive of these spiritual teachings. A lot of nuance is required to see where they are good and where they are limited.

I was exaggerating a bit. You can find some guys who agree -- especially if they are all from a similar tradition or school -- but you can also find lots of disagreement. Especially if you actually forced these guys to sit down and have a serious discussion about it between themselves. Often the disagreements are buried and require a lot of experience to start to notice. If you're new to this work it all tends to sound the same. Just as an example, if you ask Ralston about Sadhguru he will say he's not enlightened and that yoga will not produce enlightenment. Rupert Spira says that solpsism is madness. Ramana Maharshi says there are no others. Rupert Spira says consciousness is love, Ralston says love is just an emotion. So who is right?

That's just not the case. This issue goes beyond pointers, to substance.

@Benton You are right that all those teachers have valid things to teach you.

No, it's not merely that. What he says about psychedelics and love is simply wrong. You are being too charitable to him. I've fallen into that trap myself in the past, but no more. At some point you will just hit a point of disagreement with a spiritual teacher which will never be resolved and then you just gotta move on. You will never get 100% agreement with spiritual masters. None of them even agree with each other. That's been my experience. I don't think I've ever found 2 spiritual masters who fully agree with each other. What does that tell you?

@MarkKol I don't regret my work on Actualized. It was all part of my path. I don't function like typical business leaders. Many of them can do what they do and not burn out. I'm just not built like that and the kind of work I do is very different from traditional business leadership. Although some of them can burn out too. I have a somewhat unique situation given my genetics, health, and personality type. So you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from my situation to yours. But in general, doing great work requires great health. The reason who leaders are able to work so hard for so long is because they were lucky to have great health and energy. If they lost that they would burn out and not be able to keep their jobs. Your ability to keep a job hinges entirely on your health. And health is a very individual thing. So you have to get in touch with your own health situation. Also keep in mind there are different kinds of stress and not everyone handles the same stresses as well. So you need to find your niche. Running your own company is usually very labor intensive and requires unlimited energy and great health. If you look at typical successful CEOs the one thing they all have in common is exceptionally high energy levels and solid health. Which is the only way they can sustain their jobs. That is a rare quality, which is why CEOs are rare people. The average joe does not have what it takes to be a CEO. Some jobs you gotta be born for. People are born suited to some jobs and not others. So, again, it's all about finding your niche. Steve Jobs is a good example. In the end his health just gave out. It wasn't in his control.

So apply that logic to unimagining all the spiritual teachers you took. But even so, if you take DMT your consciousness will increase more than anything else you do. And that's the only point here which is being obscured. I don't like when a bunch of spiritual logic results in the obstruction of simple facts like that. Which is what Ralston's position amounts to. Frankly it baffles me how people do this.

We have a thread on that here:

@Breakingthewall A better way to put it is that there is a very wide and deep scope to the comprehension and experience of Consciousness, and Buddhism is tapping into a narrow band of that. And if you want to access more you will have to free yourself of it. I'm getting tired of talking about this.

There's the rub.

I am saying something deeper which you and all your Buddhists are missing. Because you're not seriously thinking. When you say you have transcended or negated Buddhism, you haven't. It still runs your whole mind and worldview.

@Water by the River Those platitudes and cliches are not the same thing as seeing through Buddhism. See, you had to think just to generate those defenses. And it wasn't any kind of deep, serious, original thinking.

This is precisely false. DMT will take you to consciousness. End of story.

This is where I would suggest that you contemplate and think deeper. Buddhism is a sneaky and strong thought system, despite its pretenses to "no-mind" and so on. The irony is that it takes a lot of thinking to convince yourself that Buddhism is the ultimate path to Truth. And if you didn't do that then you wouldn't be a Buddhist nor would you hold Buddhism in high regard. You have to think in order to admire Buddhism. And then when I come along and viciously attack your Buddhist ways, you gotta do a lot of thinking to defend yourself. So this is very, very sneaky.

You guys sure do love to attribute some crazy things to fapping. Like if you fap or don't reality is so fragile that the Earth will fly off its orbit.

It is a common misconception that just because you're Awake that you will be healthy. But that's just not necessarily the case. So it's good to hear of examples where these assumptions are demolished.

Whether they are or aren't, they are still not talking about what I am talking about. We're just talking about different things. No doubt that deeply embodied, masterful spiritual teachers are rare. But that's not what I'm talking about or concerned with. Buddhism places such as strong emphasis on training people to act pious and spiritual that once they have been so trained it comes very difficult for a student to look at that and say, "But that's not getting to the core of CONSCIOUSNESS!" It requires a whole course to explain. Which I'm half-way done with outlining. But ultimately you can still use what I said to guide yourself beyond Buddhism. The bottom line is, Buddhism is imaginary and you can go beyond it if you just start questioning it deeply and using psychedelics. My ultimate advice is to tell you to question everything, of which Buddhism is just one part. There's nothing special about Buddhism. It must be questioned just like every other system of human thought. My method is just the insane questioning of everything that exists, and really using your mind in that questioning rather than shutting it off. How do you even know the Buddha was Conscious? People don't question these things.

That video does not even describe what you say: zooming out for infinity. It's equating samadhi with something like remote viewing. Which is a strange characterization of samadhi and it has little to do with 5-MeO. I've never had remote viewing or visions on 5-MeO-DMT but it can affect you differently.

I have no idea what this means.

The point is that even if he is not doing that it doesn't say anything about his understanding of consciousness. You can train yourself to act moral and pious without actually being very conscious. That's what Buddhists tend to do. It's a brute force behavioral training. Like training a dog to follow.

I studied Shinzen's work a lot and personally asked him a ton of questions. In the end I came to the conclusion that his understanding of Consciousness is not as deep as what I have experienced, and that is because it cannot be done with meditation. But it took me many years to realize that because Buddhists know how to play a great spiritual game. It takes so much consciousness and independence-of-mind to see through Buddhism. Which is why I warn about it. I am vocal about it because no one else is and it's so easy to overlook.

How did his ideas change? He's a sweet guy. It's just that his techniques will not yield a high understanding of God.

Unfortunately Peter is not the type to do much discussing. He's pretty set in his ideas.

I have gone back and forth a lot in my views of Ralston. In certain ways he's an utter genius. But in other ways perhaps I put his work on too high of a pedestal. For a long time I had a deep positive bias towards his work. But sometimes I wonder if I give him too much credit. I've been torn on that. I have discovered aspects of spirituality which are completely beyond his teachings. But there is still a lot of value in his teachings. That's a very good question. I don't have any answer. I just know for a fact that they do. At least for most people. For some people they don't work. Maybe Ralston is one of those few.