Leo Gura

By not making a choice, you've made a choice.

Sure it can help

Radically changing my diet, cutting out junk food Gym, exercise, losing weight Pickup, learning how to attract women, learning to socialize, developing a sense of humor Starting a biz, becoming financially independent. Learning marketing and sales. Figuring out my life purpose Reading basic self-help books and taking basic self-help and business/marketing courses Education in science, history, philosophy, psychology, etc. The core pillars for my Orange were: Biz, pickup, gym, nutrition, education Success in all the above will create a solid foundation for a good life.

@impulse9 Are you conscious that you are creating yourself? That reality is your Will?

What's being explored is not external forms, what's being explored is God itself. To claim this is some tangent or distraction is precisely incorrect. You cannot know what God is without exploring what God is. And it becomes extremely evident to me that Buddhists, Vipassana meditators, self-inquirers, Neo-Advaita folk, and their ilk do not understand what God is. Because they haven't explored it. You cannot understand God simply by shutting down your mind and accessing some Jnana or cessation. That is not what God is. Nor can you understand what God is via Vipassana-like deconstruction of sensory experience. None of that is it. Loss of ego is not it. No-self is not it. Nothingness is not it. Emptiness is not it. Liberation is not it. I love Casteneda's work, but God-realization it is not, like at all.

I have done over 150 trips and my depth of understanding of God has not plateaued. It keeps going deeper. This stuff is way deeper than any teacher or school leads on. If I had stopped after 50 trips, I would have been a fool.

I don't think he's anywhere at that stage. He's doubting just starting the path. You are talking about some Dark Night of the Soul stuff.

Going out solo consistently for a newbie is honestly, next to an impossible task. Invest time to find wings and friends who will give you a morale boost when you feel like quitting. Wings are CRUCIAL! You need to build up a decent experience base before you are ready to handle serious solo excursions. Even when you are experienced, solo is HARD.

It's just very silly to compare a full-time Hindu yogi to people here doing spiritual work. That Hindu yogi was like a one in a billion spiritually gifted person. That's like giving a shot of testosterone to a dude with a natural testosterone level of 2000. So what? This is not you. Those kind of stories are fun, but they do nothing to help people actually realize God. In fact, they are very misleading. Yes, if you take Jesus Christ and you give him some LSD, maybe he doesn't need it. So what?

Embodiment is the bitch, and I consider it distinct from realization/understanding.

I've heard that silly story many times before and it has never impressed me. Some people are simply tolerant or immune to psychedelics. It doesn't mean shit. If a psychedelic has no effect on you, the test demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate how woke you are. I know some people who smoke DMT and it decreases their consciousness. So what?

Statistically speaking most people won't get it. But that's because most people don't really want it. If you want it, you can get it. Be careful with your limiting beliefs which create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you'll fail then you've already failed. You need to have 100% confidence here. It needs to be non-negotiable for you. Don't even allow your mind to entertain the idea that you won't get it. Then again, if you don't really want it (be honest), then maybe just focus on other things. It's okay if you don't want it.

It's not a matter of openmindedness. I am extremely openminded, but years of meditation had gotten me little closer to understanding God or Love. If only it was as easy as openmindedness. One's baseline state of consciousness and genetics have a lot to do with it. There is no way my understanding of reality could be what it is today if all I did was meditation or Vipassana. No way in hell. Like not even 5% of the way. Maybe not even 1%. That's my experience after years of meditation. Your results may vary. I think a hybrid approach of hardcore psychedelics and hardcore meditation will yield the best results. Of course that's double the work. Psychedelics will get you the highest understanding, but they will leave you unsatisfied with your embodiment of it.

Great. A nice intro trip. The best is yet ahead.

Keep in mind, you probably have exceptional talent/giftedness in this area underneath all your efforts and work. This is not the case for most people.

Because it is more physiological and I think physiological rewiring of the nervous system is more powerful in shifting one's baseline level of consciousness. It is also more foolproof than meditation. For meditation to be effective it must be done with extreme rigor and precision which is very difficult for most people to execute on. It's difficult to be that rigorous even for me. And also, for meditation to be effective is really needs to be done in intense, long retreat settings. An hour every day will get the average person nowhere. You really need to meditate for weeks at a time to get somewhere interesting.

You are God. You created yourself to experience being exactly however you are.

The problem is deeper than that because the teacher or guru himself isn't fully God-realized. For example, I don't consider Shinzen Young God-realized yet he has done Vipassana for 40+ years. So obviously Vipassana is not enough. I interrogated Shinzen intensively and I was not satisfied with his answers. That is the trap I am most concerned about avoiding. I don't want people investing 40 years into a practice and still not understand what God/Reality is.

Of course I am talking about the Infinite Intellect of God in a superhuman state of consciousness, not the little human mind.

I agree that psychedelics alone will not produce the embodiment we ultimately want. Some kind of daily mindfulness practice is still necessary and I personally do that. I think a hybrid approach is best. Or, in other words, find whatever produces the best results for you. You can't argue with results.

It's clear to me that people who object to that terminology simply have not awoken to Love or God. There is nothing else you could call it but Love and God. It's so obvious that when you finally awaken to it you will be screaming from the top of your lungs: OH MY GAWD!!!! OF-FUCKING-COURSE GOD IS LOVE!!!!!

I agree with this. Certainly meditation can be used to access facets of God. But to me, actually, to fully grasp God, intellect is crucial, and it gets demonized too much in most meditative approaches. Thus ultimate understanding is missing even if very high states are reached. Reaching a high state is not the same as understanding. And for me the key for God-realization is understanding. God completely understands itself. It is absolutely omniscient. This aspect is not really taught in meditative schools.

That's fine but... 1) Those results are not typical. And I know many so-called enlightened people who outright deny Love or God. Which to me is just laughable. 2) I still highly doubt that your mother is conscious of herself as God. Saying the words is not enough. 3) I think that for some people meditation is much more effective than most people, because of their genetics, personality type, baseline, whatever. So just because it works for some people does not make it effective for most people. 4) 40 years is a lot of fucking work.

Of course his politics is cartoonishly self-biased. He holds his worldview because it finacially benefits him to do so. He has little intellectual depth or systemic understanding. His focus is very material and practical.

@Consilience I don't mind your perspective. I don't doubt meditation has been powerful for you. I'll just ask you this: how come when I talk to people who have done Vipassana or self-inquiry for years and decades, they still have no clue what God/reality/Love is? How is that explained?