Leo Gura

All things are ultimately One. Reality is composed of imaginary differences. Yes, the difference between your Mom and a dog is imaginary. However, don't forget, imagination IS reality.

@StarStruck You are so stuck on Tate. Others are not even thinking about these stories you project and make so central to your worldview.

There's criticism of nonduality from above, and from below. So watch out.

It is not shameful, but also keep in mind that it does cause harm to others. Which is why they will shame you for it. Just because a child is not developed does not mean people will be happy when he starts throwing shit on the walls, even though he doesn't know better.

@PeaceOut96 I cannot really say what I could say, because people would consider it dangerous. So I will keep my mouth shut, for now.

Who is this guy?

When I die I am taking the whole Universe with me

@Yimpa I put my foot down on issues of highest importance for reaching the highest levels of consciousness. I see my role as helping people transcend the illusions created by Buddhism and nonduality, which have become so popular today, and go unquestioned because students do not have the balls nor intelligence to question it. But follow whatever path resonates with you most. Just don't expect me to follow any human teachings. I am playing a much deeper game.

I'm not going to play your Buddhist games. I know what Consciousness is, beyond anything any human can fathom.

I am not one of those. I just know there's even better stuff ahead.

I don't remember. You pull wherever is most likely to succeed. It should not matter. As a default, in Vegas, you try for her hotel room first. Because it is closest. If her hotel room is not available, then you pull to your place.

@Flyboy Well, the problem is that you think you understand me. I didn't do what you call "the work", because I realized it leads to a state of self-deception. Of which Frank Yang, Shinzen Young, and Daniel Ingram are prime examples. These people do not fathom God or Consciousness. And you will follow in their footsteps.

And I have a strong feeling that if I asked almost every Buddhist to explain God to me, they could not. That's a moment worthy of self-reflection.

Lol This is YOUR framing. You are defining those words in your own quirky way. Nothing about "spirituality" means that you must transcend suffering. You are right that that is not a focus of my work. At least as this time. Maybe in the future I will focus on that more, but right now I'm just not interested in that. No. This is a highly misleading frame which will cause problems for you down the road. In your mind, disconnect spirituality from suffering. You can be spiritual with suffering, you can be spiritual without suffering. You can be mystical without suffering, you can mystical with suffering. BTW, I can pretty much bet you that any spiritual teach you know, if I hit him in the head with a hammer, he will suffer. Don't kid yourself. I don't think I know of a single person on this planet who has transcended suffering. Maybe a few exist, but they are so rare that it's highly unlikely you'll ever reach that. To me this is a silly goal. You're gonna be chasing something you'll never truly attain, and ironically you'll create enormous suffering for yourself in the process. Properly speaking, spirituality is the pursuit of God. Any suffering along that way is just a sideshow. It is irrelevant when it comes to connecting with God. What you really want isn't to end suffering, it's to connect with God. Generally speaking, as a byproduct of connecting to God, you will suffer less and experience more joy.

I'm not sure about that. If I shoot you in the foot, I wouldn't call your suffering in this case a misunderstanding of anything. You understand it all right, but that doesn't remove the suffering. Removing suffering requires retraining your nervous system. Period. There are many spiritual paths and practices which no doubt will bestow benefits to you. Various kinds of benefits, from better sex to more money to less suffering, etc. I'm not telling you that my way is the only way. To understand the stuff I am talking about you will have to work out a lot of your karmic crap. I consider Vipassana to be a form of reductionism. There are benefits to that, but ultimately it's gonna be limited. You will not get the big picture understanding of God. You cannot understand God through any kind of reduction. Which is why these Vipassana monkeys can't speak about God very well, and will even dare to deny that God exists. God doesn't really exist for them because they have spent 20 years reducing Consciousness down into component parts. This doesn't generate high-level comprehension. Depends on what your goals are. Again, there will no doubt be benefits to his path. Will you understand God the way I do? No. If you add psychedelics, that changes things significantly. 10 days of non-stop concentration in total silence, without any other humans, is about as powerful a practice as there can be. Although you still will never be as conscious that way as through a psychedelic. But you can do both. A Ralston workshop works in a different way. It gets you thinking about reality in new ways. This is handy. But it doesn't replace a solo meditation retreat. Ideally you'd do all the above and optimize it to suit your tastes and needs.

For me I can only speak for myself. Because I barely stand to be here as it is I got some bad news for ya: ego death will not actually free up your consciousness to reach the highest levels. Ego isn't the only issue here, and far from the most important factor. Your human life places the most severe limits on Consciousness. Even if you removed 100% of the ego, as a human your consciousness will still be very low. Egoless humans are not that conscious. The point of physical death is that it eliminates the restrictions of being human. You can't be as conscious as an alien when you're stuck in a human meat suit.

How did it acquire total understanding in the first place? Consciousness has to explore itself to achieve it. Consciousness is like a computer program that has to execute in order to see what the program does. So here you are, executing.

The lights completely turn on.

This is 100% wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. Experience is Absolute Truth. Reality is an illusion, but not in the way Hoffman says. The illusion is the notion of any kind of physical objective substrate beyond your experience, and the notion of others or science. You cannot unravel the illusion of reality with science. Because science is the illusion!

He says plenty of insightful and wise things. You just have to filter his right-wing biases out.

Ah, yes... the left famously created the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, the Ukraine War, WW2, and WW1.

Very good!

It's not just that Ralston has autism or whatever, he's a freak of nature. Woe onto whoever assumes some commonality with Ralston on a genetic level. As far as you're concerned, you may as well consider him a reptilian. He's not your average human. So his experience of reality could be drastically different than yours. There is plenty of stuff which he says which does not align with my experience of reality, God, and Consciousness. And it's not just that he's right and I'm wrong. I've exhaustively re-verified these points.

1) There is no guarantee those dogmatic practices will get you any ultimate understanding. 2) Manual practices are still useful and important. I don't agree with such a distinction/framing. I consider what I do and teach to be the highest form of spirituality, the very heart of it. Any spiritual practice which doesn't result in a deep understanding of what Consciousness is, is criminally negligent. And people need to be made aware of this. It does no one any good if you get tricked into doing 40 years of Buddhist practice, only to finally be told: "Ah, well, but it was not designed to produce and understanding of Consciousness." If your spiritual practice doesn't produce consciousness into the nature of God, then it's a bad practice, regardless of how much is frees you of suffering or any other perks. The yoga rabbit hole is deep. However, all I said is that doing dogmatic practice offers you no guarantees of understanding. If you want to gamble on it, that's up to you. My fundamental problem with such spirituality is that it's based on blind adherence to a set of practices for decades without any idea what the result will be and what gaps you will end up with in your understanding. It's equivalent to stumbling upon a map and deciding to devote your whole life to following it, because you believe it will bring you to the promise land. But in fact you have no way of knowing where that map will take you. It might take you to stupid land. I have never taken his martial arts workshops. His consciousness workshops are a combo of theory and a bunch of class exercises with partners. Each workshop lasts about 1 week. They are very good. I don't know. I'd have to think about that. I like Vernon Howard. I like David Hawkins. And others. Although that doesn't mean I agree with everything they teach. My claim is that the entire purpose of Consciousness is self-understanding. There is no other game in town. Everything else is just entertainment until you die. Yes, eventually Consciousness's understanding of itself becomes so high that it reaches Omniscience and physical existence itself becomes unnecessary. The downside of the understanding path is that there is no guarantee that you will become free of suffering and full of bliss. In fact, without training for those things I pretty much guarantee you won't get them.

Death doesn't have a special status. Death is not a state of light-off as you imagine. That's something you're currently dreaming. Death is actually the freeing of Consciousness from having to be bound to any particular form. Consciousness under anesthesia is not highly intelligent at all.