Leo Gura

That is a classic appeal to nature fallacy. Nature does not care what you do. Nature has no rules. Mahasamadhi is a classic spiritual tradition and practice. Comparing spiritual behavior of humans with animals is very misleading, because animals do not do advanced spiritual work. Animals also don't suffer in the same ways humans do. Trust me, if your suffering became great enough, you would kill yourself.

As I told Connor Murphy when he was trying to tell me that I was afraid of his crazy antics, I told him to make a distinction between fear and caution. If some self-help book tells you to be fearless, does that mean you should disable the break peddle in your car? You see how easy it is to take an innocent piece of advice such as: "Be fearless" and twist it into: "So I should never use the break peddle and never use condoms." It's very hard to make advice that fool-proof.

That's also not necessarily true. If he was truly ready to move on from material existence, then staying back for the sake of others would not be proper. Sadhguru's wife committed Mahasamadhi when they had a young daughter. You could say it was selfish of her, but that's your judgment. You don't know what was right for her. My guess is that Sadhguru does not regard her a selfish. He himself told his followers that he would do Mahasamadhi some time ago. These things are not as black and white as they seem. But this much is very clear: IF you care about survival, don't do things which remove every last preference against survival. Otherwise, what will keep you alive? Every one of you has to decide what is the bare minimum survival you're willing to accept. And if that bare minimum hits zero, realize that you are as good as dead. So either change your mind quick or prepare to meet your maker. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam tell you that if you die you are going to heaven. But who interprets that as an invitation to jump off a bridge?

We actually don't know this. Maybe it was lack of fear. If one completely ignores all fear, and all caution, there is little stopping you from jumping off a bridge. Fear is there for a reason: to keep you alive.

He didn't need to have depression or even suffering to do what he did. He may simply have wanted to transcend material reality. Of course that's very rare, but this seems like one of those extra rare situations. Which is what makes it difficult to preempt such things. Out of a million people, one guy might think jumping off a bridge is a good idea to get closer to God. In a certain sense, the only thing that keeps you alive in the material world is fear. Fear of what would happen if you quit survival. But of course if you quit survival you will not survive! And SoonHei's messages clearly show he understood that, but just didn't care. Fear of death is precisely what keeps you alive. If you lose your preference of life over death, there is literally nothing stopping you from dying. Even someone who is let's say full enlightened, still must have a preference for life over death, otherwise they would not be around to talk to you. Those people who completely lose their preference for material life will simply disappear from material life. That's how life works. If you don't want it, you lose it. Because life and survival are very active processes. You gotta keep working on survival every day to stay alive. Even if you are woke as fuck. Chop wood, carry water, do laundry.

A video on the much misunderstood notion of solipsism has been planned for a long time. I am taking my time with it because it requires a lot of thought.

Safeguards had already been in place, and more will be put in place. I fully agree with having safeguards. For example, I recorded a video about the dangers of psychedelics last week specifically as a safeguard against abuse. It's in the publishing queue, although now it will have to be delayed. I have no passion to share ideas with people that will cause harm. The point here is improve one's life.

@charlie cho Warning: Tread lightly here. A) I told you that that last video was the most advanced communication I ever made. Things were spoken there that few teachers understand. It is very radical. You are still not appreciating that the things I spoke about in that video are not what you learn from other teachers. There is a tendency to dismiss what I said as, "Oh, Leo is just acting like he's better than others, that's just him acting out, nothing to see here." If that is your attitude, then you did not understand the communication. "There are no others" is an advanced truth you still do not have an understanding of. Like really! You don't get it. You don't get how radical it is. No guru will be there to hold your hand the day you get it. It will send you into an existential spiral despair and horror. Then maybe you will understand. B) I certainly have much spiritual work left to do. I shoot the video as I am, at whatever development level I am at. I cannot do otherwise. And I have never made any promises or guarantees to you about my embodiment or energy or stage or whatever other standards you evaluate me on. In the end, I'm just a guy sharing his ideas with you. I am not your guru, we have no formal relationship. I'm a YT philosopher. I am on a spiritual journey and I share my insights. That's what Actualized.org is. So set your expectations appropriately. Remember, when I started Actualized.org I was a self-help life coach. Today I am where I am. And who knows where I will be in 5 or 10 years. I make no pretenses about my embodiment or the like. I share my realizations and insights as they come to me. I am also not infallible and not immune to self-deception, as I have stressed many times in the past. So you should think for yourself and verify everything in your direct experience.

Pre-rational >> rational >> trans-rational Trans-rational it NOT irrational. Be careful with this classic pre/trans fallacy. Genuine spirituality is more than rational. Consciousness makes you more intelligent, not less.

I understand some of you feel that way, but I am not here to be who you think I should be. I see that many of you are into this idea and are frustrated that I don't indulge your ideas of how an ideal guru is supposed to behave. But at some point you will understand that consciousness and love can be expressed in many different ways, not just as a bleeding heart. To me, mind IS heart. But I know what you mean and I understand why you want it. But from my POV what you want of me would not be true to who I authentically am. The more conscious I become the more authentic I act, but the more it turns some of you off because it does not fit your image of some happy go lucky blissed out feminine guru who personally loves you. I don't personally love you. I love you in a deeply metaphysical way which you probably do not feel or understand. And I am not going to try to fake a personal love for you to fit some stereotype of the ideal guru.

Unfortunately that does not stop the trolls and cynics. But we shall see. I expect backlash over all this regardless. We will try to make the best of it. The problem with running any kind of spiritual community is that scandals like this will happen because humans are humans and collective ego dynamics are at play. I notice plenty of you have grievances with me and we will probably need separate thread to let you air them out.

Maybe. Still contemplating how to speak about this. The issue here is that people love to use such cases as an excuse to demonize the work. So I'm in a position where on the one hand I have to speak about the dangers of spiritual work, but on the other hand I have to do it in a way where devils don't weaponize my words against me. It's a challenging position to be in because there is PR aspect to all this and I'm not here with a PR team. People are itching to demonize Actualized.org in any way they can and so I have to be mindful of that while also being sensitive Soonhei's family and so forth. This issue is serious but it also needs to be framed correctly because I already see people using this as an excuse to let their projections and criticisms of my teachings run wild. I have a lot of nuanced things to say on the matter but the nature of this beast is that people don't like to hear nuanced things, they like to demonize and smear reputations.

That post only looks like a suicide post in retrospect. If he hadn't jumped you would never know he was seriously considering it. I will definitely make a video. I actually already recorded a video last week about nihilism which will be released some time in the next few weeks. That video clears up common misconceptions and mistakes of nihilism. But I will make a video specifically about misinterpretation of the teachings and the dangers of deconstructing one's mind. I am happy to make such a video because it is core to what I teach. Actually it doesn't matter. But that is not a truth most people are willing to understand or accept. The thing is, Truth is a very radical and dangerous thing. Which is why Truth has been suppressed from mankind for thousands of years. The thing is, when the rubber meets the road, you will not care about Truth, you will care about survival and your feelings. This is how life works. It is a game, but its a very brutal game, and when you get brutalized you will not care that it is a game because you are too hurt to care.

If it had you would have heard about it. We do have suicidal people on these forums pretty regularly though. Which is why I added the following warning to the Forum Guidelines some time ago: I added this warning precisely because I expected someone at some point to do something suicidal and then blame this community for it. This was not unexpected given the thousands of weird people we get coming through here. It is important for people here to understand that dealing with suicide prevention requires a certain trained skill set and that neither I nor our Mods are trained to talk people down from suicide. That is beyond the scope of our jobs here. If we see someone who is suicidal, we generally try to talk them down from it, but we may not be skillful at it nor do we have the time and energy to catch every case of it. This forum is not a professional clinic or the like. This is a community of people casually discussing spiritual stuff. So it's important to set the right expectations. The Mods are not here to save every lost soul. They are mostly here to police against spammers and trolls. Generally we are too busy here combating trolls and spammers to offer serious one-on-one counseling or therapeutic help. Any such help is given pro-bono, without warranty, as our time and energy allows. But even so, from what I have seen, any time our Mods or even regular members hear of someone considering suicide, they do not hesitate to talk them down with compassion. Our members are actually great at that. Had Soonhei made a public post where he said he was considering jumping off a cliff, I have no doubt whatsoever that our members would have stepped in and talked him down -- assuming he was willing to listen. And I would certainly have reprimanded him for even considering such a thing seriously if my eyes caught glance of such a thread. But you also have to understand, I cannot personally see or supervise every thread on this forum. There's just too much volume of stuff here. And if you say, "Well, then shut the forum down!" Oh yeah? But then how many people will lose their lives by not having any spiritual community to talk to at all? So you see, it's not so simple. There are inherent pros and cons to running an online spiritual community. There will be good times and bad. There will be wonderful people and crazy people. There will many lives saved and a few lives lost. The nature of spiritual and personal development work is that is tends to attract some people who are struggling to get their minds straight. And sometimes you get people with really crooked minds -- where you don't even know how to begin straightening them out. It is also important to keep in mind how many lonely and lost people there on in the world who find this community and use it to improve themselves and actually save themselves from suicide. I have had plenty of people message me and tell me that if not for this community or finding my videos, they would have committed suicide or been stuck in some horrible depression or psychosis or some cult. But of course, not everyone's story will end so positively. Some people may find this forum and use it to spiral completely out of control. And you also don't know what other forums and videos and sources they are consuming besides Actualized.org. Spiritual knowledge is a very powerful tool. It can be used for the highest good, the greatest of evils, and everything in between.

Just to clarify, this forum does not track editing history of posts or PMs. So whatever edits happened are lost. This is one of the reasons why editing of posts is only allowed for the first 48 hours. No edits after that. In the past some members have abused editing to change the substance of their posts, which is why editing is automatically locked after 48 hours. I am actually not sure if PM editing is locked at all. I assume it's a 48 hour lock, but maybe even not. Mods and Admins don't have locks like normal accounts.

@SoonHei I understand your grief and emotional turmoil, and you just wish things had unfolded differently so SoonHei would still be alive. I totally get that. However, it is important to be factually and historically accurate about "long-established religions". The amount of death, torture, hatred, pedophilia, suicide, etc caused by classical religions is orders of magnitude beyond any new age spirituality. Classical religion is not "safe" in that way, it only seems safe because it is so baked into the social fabric of society. Many people kill themselves every year from holding Christian and Islamic beliefs about homosexuality being a sin. Or from other kinds of guilt. Or they kill others out of religious hatred. Again, this is because any large scale spiritual teaching will be corrupted and misused by self-deceived ego-minds. The things I teach are tools for leading a good, moral life -- without dogmatic moralization. But a good moral life cannot be guaranteed by following any set of mechanical rules. Genuine goodness and morality requires consciousness, wisdom, intelligence, responsibility, and balance. I teach all of these things more than any religion. Classical religion teaches mechanical rules, which is not sufficient to eliminate suffering, evil, corruption, misunderstanding, or suicide. Misunderstanding within classical religion is very high. All classical religions also have esoteric and mystical cores which teach radical truths about God, Love, Heaven, Death, and Awakening. Because Truth is radical by its nature. So my point is this: be careful not to conclude that new age spirituality is the root issue here. The root issue is the tricky nature of how the mind works. The mind is extremely self-deceptive by its nature, and then it will use whatever system of ideas/beliefs to behave however it wants. Those ideas/beliefs can be atheist, theist, Christian, Islamic, New Age, Buddhist, nondual, rationalist, nihilist, capitalist, socialist, nationalist, liberal, conservative, or whatever. I know this logic doesn't take your pain away. But thinking that "the grass is greener on the other side" can add to your pain.

@SoonHei To his sister, thank you for replying and confirming his death. As of now, I am inclined to believe you that it is true. Although I have no further proof of it. I'm sorry for your loss and I understand it is confusing why a spiritual and happy person would do such a gratuitous thing. There is nothing spiritual about jumping off a bridge. It's clear from his messages that he understood his dream would end. So that's exactly what happens. The dream of life ends. The dream of life is a beautiful gift and ending it prematurely for no good reason (such as extreme suffering) is a ridiculously unnecessary thing to do. Life is meant to be lived out, not ended prematurely. Spiritual awakening can be had here and now, without need of any physical harm to the body. That is the entire point of spiritual work and practice. If jumping off a bridge was valid spiritual practice, then there wouldn't need to be any teachings. The teaching would just be: go jump off a bridge. And obviously no spiritual person teaches that. It frustrates me when people misuse spiritual teachings in such gross and obvious ways. Connor is mentally ill, batshit crazy, and has no integrity. Do not associate my teachings with Connor in any way. He broke everything I told him and I warned him about. I warned him back in December 2020 by phone that what he was doing was antithetical to my teachings. The things he was doing went against the core of what I teach and warned about in my Become A Zen Devil video, and many other videos. He was chronically abusing psychedelics in ways that I warned against from day 1 in my video: How To Use Psychedelics For Personal Development, and elsewhere. He also lied to me multiple times. He lied to me about his chronic psychedelic use, he lied about mental illness, and more. You need to distinguish between what is true and what is convenient from a social POV. It is true that everything is Good and Love. This truth make zero prescriptive claims. It does not justify anything and it does not tell you what you should or shouldn't do. Do not frame this situation such that speaking truth is discouraged or impossible. Myself and others are not going to lie about what is true just because someone might jump off a bridge. The idea that reality is a dream/illusion has been spoke of by mystics and sages for thousands of years, and this understanding is commonly available to anyone who reads spiritual literature. Do not act like Actualized.org invented this notion. All of the spiritual masters you revere and love: Ramana Maharishi, Eckhart Tolle, and whoever else -- have told you that reality is an illusion/dream. Again, this is absolutely true. This is what serious spirituality claims. But it makes no prescriptive claims. It is not like Actualized.org is the first to say that reality is Perfection. This has been said by spiritual teachers and mystics across time. In all of my work I have never acted like relative truths and social issues are unimportant. In fact, I embody the opposite. I speak about Conscious Politics so much because relative social issues are very important. Nobody following my work should get the idea that a healthy society is unimportant or that criminality or doing suffering to others is acceptable. This is so obvious that to even shoot a video stating so would be seen as needlessly obvious. Do I really need to release a video in which I say: "Being a criminal is not good and you should not harm other people? Do not rape or torture others. Do not jump off a bridge." Would anyone who was serious about criminality, rape, torture, or jumping off a bridge watch such a video and listen to it? You see, this is a game that cannot be won. Also, much of my work is not about spirituality but personal development, building a good life, being active in life, living a life purpose, and improving your health. I have never discounted the importance of building a good life, even as I talked about awakening and God and so forth. In fact I have warned against using spirituality as an escape from mastering survival. I talk about the importance of building a Stage Blue foundation. But in the end, if someone decides that they don't want to play the game of survival any more and just want to rest with God, who are we to stop them? From our POV that seems foolish and unnecessary, but if a spiritual seeker wants to end his dream, that is his right and I will not invent some fantasy for why he is morally wrong in doing so. He is not wrong. I would just tell him not to do it because life is a precious gift and ought to be enjoyed, not escaped. A) Truth, consciousness, and awakening are not philosophies. And it has been stated ad nausea not to take them as beliefs or philosophy. The dangers of ideology have been explained by me perhaps more than any other spiritual teacher. All I do is talk about the dangers of ideology. B) Great detail is put into the teachings/videos to explain how self-deceptive the ego-mind is, how selfish it is, how many traps in this work there are, and further elaborations. The fact is that the ego-mind will use whatever stories it wants to justify its selfish actions. If someone wants to blow themselves up for Jihad, they will find a way to justify it in their minds. My work goes into so much length about the ease with which the ego-mind will justify selfish activity and corrupt and co-opt spiritual truths. In the case of Jihad, I specifically teach about the difference between Lesser Jihad and Greater Jihad. There is no contradiction at all. It is simply true that everything is Good and Perfect. This is what awakening reveals. But how you behave has consequences and there are relative truths. If you stick your hand in a fire, it will burn. What Connor did was "bad" only in a relative sense, from a social POV. There is no contradiction here. It's not that I tell him whatever fits my agenda. It's that his ego-mind says whatever it wants to justify however it wants to behave. And this is have taught a lot: that your own mind will trick you and justify whatever selfishness is wants without limit. I also teach how there are many POVs and perspectives, absolute and relative, and that absolute and relative should be not be conflated. It is simply true that reality is a dream. I will say this and teach this whether you decide to torture someone or not. If you decide to torture someone, those consequence are 100% on you, even though its all a dream. Dreams have consequences. It is important to give people warnings about misunderstanding the teachings. And will certainly do more of that in the future, as I have in the past. BUT, all spiritual work has inherent risks, especially when done at mass scale, this is unavoidable and such teachings cannot be made fool-proof. I have also said that many times in the past. No matter what is taught about spirituality, there will always come along some fool, mentally ill person, or criminal who takes the teaching and uses to justify whatever selfish action he wants. When Eckhart Tolle teaches something, "Just be in the now", some fool somewhere will take that to mean, "I can just off a cliff and just be in the now and things should go okay for me". Or when some Christian mystic says, "God forgives all sins and doesn't judge you", some criminal will take that to mean, "Okay, so if I kill my neighbor God will just forgive me and there will be on consequences." Where does it end? How many disclaimers and warnings must be given? The problem is that an ego-mind who is self-deceived will not be interested in any warnings or disclaimers or even reason. Meanwhile reasonable people will find the disclaimers tedious and so obvious as to be unnecessary. The mind has an infinite capacity for denial and it will do whatever it wants to do. We should take measure to prevent genuine misunderstanding of the teachings by reasonable and well-rounded people, but we cannot foolproof this work against people who are criminal, insane, or simply desire to end their life. - - - - - - - I want to make it clear that I take this issue seriously and I am not just here to issue some blanket, self-serving defense. I want to make my teachings safe for all reasonable people, and I want to make clear to people the inherent risks of spiritual work. I have done that in the past in my videos, but I am also interested in being even more clear and explicit about it in the future precisely because the relative social consequences have always mattered to me, and my teachings are meant to reduce suffering and selfishness in the world. It disappoints and frustrates me when spiritual teachings are corrupted or misused, and when spirituality or psychedelics are given a bad name by irresponsible people. But the fact is that corruption and misuse of spiritual teachings is not anything new or unique to Actualized.org. Mankind has been corrupting and abusing spiritual teachings for 2000 year. And that is not going to stop in our lifetimes. But that is not a reason to stop teaching. But I will definitely teach with greater care to preempt misinterpretation as much as possible. It's just not easy to anticipate every possible misinterpretation. It never even crossed my mind that someone would decide to "consciously jump off a bridge". It's hard to even take such an action seriously unless after it occurs. I have said in the past that my teachings will be corrupted. Because that's what the mind does. And this will not be the last time my teachings are corrupted. The reason I record long videos is to provide sufficient depth and detail to avoid future corruption. But the nature of the beast is such that people will still find ways to corrupt my teachings and the longer the videos, the more excuse they will have to say, "But your videos are too long, so I didn't watch them." I have never been under any illusions that my teachers will be corrupted by some minds. That is how this works. I have videos explaining why this corruption is inevitable. But again, this is not an excuse. I will adjust my teachings to make them clearer and more foolproof in the future. - - - - - - - A final important point: Let us not overlook that there is the possibility that SoonHei made a sober, conscious, sovereign choice to end his dream. In which case, as much as we might disagree or not like that, that is really not our call. And it is not correct to automatically assume that what he did was wrong or delusional. It could have been delusional, but it also could have been a conscious choice he made which was right for him. There is no way for us to know. This is not an excuse or a justification for anything. Rather, given his own words, if we are to take his own words seriously and give him the benefit of the doubt, then there is the possibility he made a conscious, sovereign choice to move on into the next dream, or into Infinity, or whatever he imagined. Personally I think it was not a good choice and if he asked me about it I would have told him to not do something so stupid. But who am I to know what is right for him? So the point is, this situation is more complex than it seems.

It does little good for someone who is suffering to tell them that suffering isn't real. They are in no place to care about such distinctions. You also have no idea how much suffering they are in. You assume they can enjoy life like you, but if they seriously want to kill themselves then obviously they do not enjoy life like you. So it's a very difficult situation.

Guys, before you get too carried away with this, we need some evidence or confirmation that this suicide actually happened. It is not a given that it did. Suicidal and mentally ill people can often threaten suicide for attention and other reasons. OP, please provide further evidence or explanation of how you know this suicide actually happened. I take this issue seriously and we need to be clear about facts vs assumptions and speculation. Keep in mind that people on this forum do lie and manipulate sometimes. Sometimes we get people with serious mental illnesses here who behave in erratic and irrational ways, or play games.

Yes, this is one of the challenges of doing deep videos as is my style. I cannot possibly address every misconception people could have in every video. This would only make them longer. The bottom line is that this is advanced work and it cannot be made fool-proof.

You can have some degree of wokeness while keeping those fantasies. But you won't reach the highest levels of wokeness unless you're willing to surrender them. Look, in the end it's very simple. Do you want to know Truth? If you do, you'll be willing to surrender all your ideas to attain it. Whatever is True, is True. There's really no need to worry about it. If solipsism is false, then why you worried about it? And if it's true, why are you worried about it? Subjectively, relatively, I've experienced it as melting into Infinite Love. It feels like you melt into the entire Universe. But even this is not quite correct because from the Absolute POV death simply never even happens. It cannot happen. There is only Consciousness and nothing else. Death is imaginary.

@Tetcher @Hello from Russia Do not derail this topic with petty bickering.

I stressed the point about making a commitment to never harm one's body recently in this video: https://www.actualized.org/articles/is-actualized-a-cult

https://www.actualized.org/articles/the-dangers-of-spiritual-work

Keep in mind that suicide is not so rare in the general population. 48,000 suicides in the USA in 2018. My videos have nearly 100 million views. With numbers like that, some of our members will at some point commit suicide. This is inevitable. And ultimately, people have the sovereignty to kill themselves. You cannot stop them if they are set on it. Nor do you even have the right to stop them as that is you imposing your agenda and will on them. What's important to underscore is that spirituality and enlightenment has nothing to do with physically harming the body. I've said that in the past and I will stress it more in the future. A few weeks ago I started to add larger disclaimers to my videos stressing the point that enlightenment has nothing to do with harming of the body. You can find the new, larger, clearer disclaimers under my recent videos on YT. These larger, clearer disclaimers will soon also be added to the Actualized Clips channel. It is very important that people who follow these teachings clearly understand that these teachings have nothing to do with physical harm of one's body or prematurely ending one's life. Which is really obvious, but it must be stressed regardless because some people get very foolish ideas. Life is a dream and a game, but if you jump off a bridge, this dream will end and you will probably regret it. Not only should you not harm your physical body, you should take good care of it, being extra responsible with your health. A spiritual person must treat their health with more care than the average person.