Osaid

Not really. Dude was obviously stuck in stories about how other people are zombies or something of the sort. Tends to be what happens when you try to turn truth into a language. It was basically one of those solipsism threads you see around here. I found it by the way:

On the one hand you say Ralston is correct for not saying "Love", but then you fault him for not telling his students "By the way, other people don't exist." It's the exact same fallacy on both ends. Both will confuse the students. The former will probably do even worse, and it has, look at all the rampant solipsism threads on this forum. And it's not even that good of a way of describing it, a poetic half-truth at best. Someone did ask him, it was posted on this forum, and he had a good response. Can't be asked to look for it though. He basically said, "dude, you're stuck in intellectualizations about how other people are just zombies, wake up and do the work." The guy was a follower of Leo as well, that's where he got the idea from in the first place. So, case in point. It's nothing like that, it's just that Ralston is enlightened and Leo isn't.

Correct. If you are not conscious of an alien squirrel right now, you are disconnected from truth. Such is the tragic humor of God. (sarcasm)

No, big misconception spawned from a misinterpretation of enlightenment. Awakenings happen many times. They hint at or give insight into truth, God, reality, etc. You can have an infinite amount of awakenings. Every single time you take a psychedelic you will instantly have an awakening. Enlightenment is just truth and what is always the case, and being conscious of that. It is one thing experienced forever. You don't learn more insights about yourself afterwards, and you don't gain more clarity afterwards, because all of these imply "more truth." You don't have multiple enlightenments, because that means you are becoming conscious of multiple truths, which is not possible. Enlightenment happens once. Awakenings can happen basically until the day you die.

Because it can never be understood by anything, wrong medium. Any concepts or communications are simply tools for pointing you "there", but they are absolutely not the thing itself and don't have much to do with it, in the same way that your understanding of the color red has nothing to do with the color red. You don't need any logic or understanding about the color red to see red. You might feel like whenever enlightenment is described it feels like the description is jumping around something, and this makes perfect sense when you consider the above. For example, try describing the color red to someone who can't see, and then look at what your description looks like. It's always "jumping around" the experience itself, because of course you cannot convert it into a communication. This is not to say that it is complex or out of reach, I am saying the opposite. It is super simple, and you literally need zero intellect for it. Cats are enlightened, worms are enlightened, babies are enlightened. It is precisely not intellect, in the same way that the color red is not intellect. When humans develop the capability to imagine strongly, they extend that imagination as an "extra limb" so to speak, and they begin to act as if they are not infinite because they believe so. If you imagine that there is an alligator under your bed and you believe it, you will panic. If you imagine you are "a human" who is "this" and "that" and then believe it, you will panic. You will imagine tomorrow and be affected by it. You will imagine bills that need to be paid and be affected by it. You will imagine things that never happen and be affected by it. Enlightenment, or the end result, is purely an experiential phenomenon, as if you are perceiving the color red or listening to music. No need to integrate any ideas or philosophies. It's just experienced. Either you're experiencing it or you aren't. There are no levels to it. Any "levels" experienced are not enlightenment and are instead awakenings/hints/breadcrumbs towards it, or just something else altogether. Relatively, it is a permanent psychological recontextualization of your experience that is triggered by something, and then you just stay there forever. Not that it is inherently related to something relative like a brain, but that is how the universe "dreams up" the experience, so to speak. Perhaps, to put it more succinctly, you are confused about spirituality because 99% of people who talk about it are also confused about it. Straight up, if you are not enlightened, you have no idea or clue what it is, and anything you claim about it is going to be from memory or imagination. This is why private workshops are done, where there is a teacher-student dynamic with someone who is confirmed to be enlightened. It has come to a point where people care more about their ideas about enlightenment rather than enlightenment itself.

You are mistaking truth and enlightenment for imagination. Of course there is one truth. As said before, you are perceiving "multiple infinities" and "multiple truths" through memory and imagination, this couldn't be happening any other way. Existentially it is just human imagination. Again, you are treating the phenomenon of human imagination as some existential truth which applies to infinity, but of course this is not the case. Anything distinguished is imagination. It's never anything else. Nothing is actually being distinguished. You are existentially perceiving imagination, a relative phenomenon. Imagination is equal to distinguishing, but it never happens outside of imagination, it is just trapped in that medium. I am not saying that imagination does not exist, I am saying that it has nothing to do with you or infinity, and that it actually occurs inside of infinity. Anything distinguished is always a subset of experience. So when you distinguish multiple truths, of course that is not the case, because you are distinguishing experience. The only way you are experiencing two truths is through memory and imagination, which means that if someone were to have their memory and imagination removed, this "truth" would literally stop existing, so there is a serious discrepancy happening here.

Enlightenment is not something to do with mind. It's like I'm experiencing the color red and you're saying "keep an open mind that you might actually be experiencing something that isn't red and instead it is actually greater than red." It's just not something that having an open mind would affect at all because it has nothing to do with mind, it doesn't exist in that medium. That's enlightenment. The final recontextualization is just becoming conscious of what you always are, which is what being enlightened is. There won't be another, because there aren't two truths.

I personally wouldn't describe it as nothingness as I also find that term a bit misleading, and I assure you I am not clinging naively to some state of "no imagination" or "lack of thoughts" or some such thing. Enlightenment is just knowing what you are, that's it. You either get it or you don't. And there is no further truths that come after that, because as mentioned before, that creates duality and separates truth from other experiences.

No difference between "single" and "infinite" and "one." No, you are multiplying infinity into multiple infinities. Experience is always one and infinite. "Infinite ways" is accessed through memory and imagination, as is all duality. Truth won't change in that state either. You are really trying hard to multiply truth. But it really is just one thing. More intelligence and understanding as you say might be the case. But that is not truth or enlightenment. Because you are claiming to experience more of it. You're not gonna experience "more" truth, because that is duality and separates truth from other states. Not true. You exist without difference right now, and you are typing, you just believe that you aren't existing as that, hence unenlightenment. The unenlightened person believes that they are not infinite and thus they will act as if they are not infinite, even though they still are. This is how beliefs operate in the human experience. And those beliefs occur within infinity. There is never any actual lack of infinity or disconnect from infinity, that is always experientially just a belief that can be unimagined. Beliefs can occur inside of infinity. There is ultimately no discrepancy. The point of this sentiment "you are always enlightened" is simply to highlight that what is being pointed to is present in your experience right now, whether you believe or don't believe that it is. Difference is always accessed through imagination of course, but it's important to understand that only humans are capable of non-enlightenment because of their strong imaginative intelligence. So there is a relative aspect to this "journey", and it might seem like the end result is related to some relative process, but the end result truly has nothing to do with any of that. Humans have a certain capability in the form of imagination which is able to create the perceptual illusion of being disconnected from infinity. Pretty much all other animals cannot experience this, because they do not have the capability to accomplish such a thing. A worm is not going to imagine itself as finite, for example.

When you actually reach "it" you will realize that there was just one singular truth this entire time and you just stay there forever. Of course its a single realization. You're not gonna realize truth twice! Biggest plot twist ever. There's no degrees of enlightenment. Those are just awakenings/breadcrumbs hinting at enlightenment. Enlightenment is just one singular realization that has been referred to across history. There's no "he didn't integrate this as much as that teacher." It is a singular binary thing. You either get it or you don't. There's no guessing, there's no going back to experiences to make sure you were correct, and there's no changing your ideas of reality. It's just something you are immediately and permanently aware of forever, and then you're done with "it."

That clinging and suffering is by definition what non-enlightenment is. So it absolutely has to happen, or else they would be enlightened. The psychedelics wear off, thus the ego has to come back, and the ego forms an identity using the memory of the experience, and then it nests itself in there.

"intense", "emotions", "me", "sick", "body", "in body", "out of body", "frightening", "disorienting", "never felt before", "drawn to a power source", "it's not like anything humans feel" All of the above are core phrases used to describe this experience/love. You cannot look at that in good faith and tell me that it is not dualistic, temporal, and anthropomorphic. You cannot tell me that the above is something that could exist in the experience of a spider, or even in your current experience, and if you concede to the fact that it can't, then that means it was simply an ephemeral state, not truth. This is a very anthropomorphic interpretation of an experience. A very profound and illuminating experience, perhaps. But just a shifting of intensity and content ultimately. You can see that all those terms are baked with dichotomies and dualities. Existentially, this is similar to experiencing a poem about love, or a song about love, or a movie about love. It's an experience ABOUT something, and then after that experience, that "something" is gone, and it is converted to memory, and then existentially you are back to where you were before. As said at the beginning of the thread, the fallacy of clinging to enlightenment-inducing states is very strong, and it is rampant throughout this forum.

"Discarding" or "getting rid" is not a conclusion, it's an action. In the same way that exercise is an action. No, this itself is a model. You've created a model saying that reality is a model. Models are models. They're good when they're used as models. When you try to extrapolate the model into the thing that it is modeling (reality), that's where it can get messy, because the model itself is a subset of reality or experience. I'm not holding a philosophical position. There's nothing to transcend or be mature about. I am not saying whether you should or shouldn't use models. I am saying that the color red is not a thought about the color red. They are just different existentially.

No, it's not. Discarding conclusion doesn't bring you to a conclusion, it gets rid of the medium altogether and brings you to experience, which is not conclusion. Conclusion only happens in thoughts. Models, systems, and paradigms are exactly NOT reality. They are symbols that represent reality but aren't reality. So it is not a reality to be trapped in at all. It's like I'm trying to tell you that you that your description of the color red is not the color red, and you're like "Nah, you have no choice but to live with and work with models and mental constructs." It's just not what I'm pointing to, at all, existentially. And this is also exactly how enlightenment works. Enlightenment is not a model or anything to intellectually integrate. So the usage for such things simply does not apply here.

This is on the right track. If this "Love" is truth, then any experience should have the capacity for it. The reason Leo feels the need to call it love is because there is a fundamental and existential aspect of existence which DOES tie into human emotions and love, and it turns it into something which is all-encompassing (since reality is one), to the point where even something like a glass of water is imbued with it. But no one who hears "love" is going to imagine a glass of water, so it really does fall short. It truly is like trying to describe color. It just does not matter that someone puts ideas of love inside of your head, and this has actually become a big distraction. The spider is actually experiencing it, but it cannot conceptualize it like Leo is doing, because it's a spider. Note that on the flipside, the spider does not experience any kind of hate or lack of love, and this is kind of how the spider experiences this "love", which is just an absence of the ability to hate. The spider has never hated anything in its entire existence, because it literally can't. When there is no imagined self, experience is unable to hate itself. Leo is confusing conceptual understanding with the actual thing itself, in the same way you can have a conceptual understanding about the color red, but it is not the color red itself. The spider does not need the capacity to think to experience Love, because it is not something you think, it is an experience, in the EXACT same way how the spider experiences the tactile sensation of the floor it crawls on without thinking about it. It's just simply not something you have to put a conscious effort in understanding, you're either aware of this love or you aren't, like a binary. Because the spider does not have the capacity to imagine a partitioned version of itself, it is experiencing this love, but obviously it is unable to fantasize about it or even think about it, because it truly is just something to be experienced and not thought of. Only humans are capable of becoming unenlightened. When you're comparing this to animals, you need to understand that you are anthropomorphizing them because a lot of them have no experience where they experienced a lack of love simply due to their inability to use imagination with the same intelligence that humans do. There's no contrast of "I used to hate experience, but now I love experience!" for them. This is not a dialogue or revelation that happens in the mind of spiders or most animals.

He's the only one that got it right, all the other teachers are wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because that's what a person is. You just defined it. You are encountering things which are NOT "person controlling a body", but you distinguish this as "not me" and "not a person."

Any description of love is enticement, of course, because it's a description. It's not the actual thing. So it's not necessary at all. The universe has no problem being exactly what it is and it doesn't need you to turn it into a description. It's like describing the color red, a description is never the color red, and so it is ultimately not necessary for perceiving red, and when you DO perceive red, the color itself is of course TOTALLY different than the description. Ralston said he doesn't want to give his students answers. Yes. Exactly. You don't exist as an answer. The search for answers and conclusions and meanings is the "problem" to begin with. All these teachings are just serving the purpose of pointing at reality and saying "look, you fool, it's right here, this is you, you are this." Any conclusion or answer is instantly metabolized by the unenlightened mind and turned into a belief system, as is rampant across the forum. Existence is not a conclusion. Really grock this: Leo had no idea about this "Love" when he discovered it. It came to him out of nowhere. Now, why is it your standard that all teachers must mention this word prior to your own discovery? Because Leo said so? Because you want someone to coddle to your beliefs and experiences about love? Or maybe you're scared that enlightenment has nothing to do with love? How are you projecting this standard onto enlightenment when you yourself aren't enlightened in the first place? It must be belief.

Of course it is relatively experienced. You know, love with a lowercase l, which is different from enlightenment. When something is tangled up in ego it's hard to call it universal love, it is quite relative. Relative love is like a constricted method of siphoning a small part of universal love, so to speak. For the most part it's based on reason and feeling, and it comes from loving ideas about reality rather than reality itself. He says for most people it is, and this is entirely true. When you tell someone who is not conscious of "Love" what love is, they will NOT understand what it is, they will entice themselves and mislead themselves through their own imagination because they are NOT conscious of "absolute love" and they are not enlightened. His position is that he doesn't want to entice people. If you tell someone who is not enlightened or conscious about "universal love" what love is, their minds will 100% warp it, because whatever their mind comes up with is not it. Ralston teaches enlightenment. Not ideas about love as you do. You do not need to know about love or be taught about love to achieve enlightenment. It's just a singular secular thing that happens in your experience, and then as a side effect all your emotions including love and what else become recontextualized. This love with a capital L is not a teaching, and you don't need to be taught it to experience it, I know you know this because you have experienced it. So it makes no sense for you to fault Ralston for not teaching it, because if you're not directly conscious of "Love" then any description of this love will just exist as an enticement, nothing else.

You get it.

This video is pretty damn clear

Enlightenment is really not a teaching. Any teaching is not it, it just leads up to it. Enlightenment is a permanent recontextualization of your experience. It's like seeing the color red, you can't teach the color red, it's just something you get to experience. So whatever description or teaching that comes before it doesn't matter as long as it actually gets you there. I can assure you that Ralston is conscious enough to exist in a state where he is incapable of hating himself, and that he would not affirm for you to do the opposite. There's no need for him to tell you that. So you know he's achieved SOME state of peace/equilibrium within himself. He just wants you to figure that out at the moment of realization because that's really the only accurate way of figuring it out. I'm sure there are profound communications about the mechanics of love which are pointing to something true, but they are just communications and ideas, so they will never be as holistic as the real singular thing which is just enlightenment/consciousness as Ralston calls it. Those communications, as beautiful as they may be, are just breadcrumbs leading to the actual thing. Anyways, good luck.

Ah okay, cool. Wait, when do I hurt people? I'm just an innocent little kitty.

Why do I get a cactus? ?

Good thing it's not a belief. And it's good that you don't believe it, because that would be delusion, since belief isn't it. The reason you don't see it is exactly because it's just a belief for you. Reality is not belief, even when the belief is related to enlightenment. When you notice it or see it then there is no need to believe it. It would really fall short if it was just a belief. There won't be any integration or philosophizing required, you'll just be it. And so alluding to it and describing it is not even that important, the important part is just getting it, and then being that oneness/love/truth forever. That's much better than someone describing it for you or telling you it exists, actually, this can become a massive distraction, and it HAS become a massive distraction, because it just stimulates imagination. You are not imagination. You are "love", whatever that is, and no imagination or description that Leo or Ralston gives you will ever be that. Actually achieving it is that really matters. And there is no potential for idealizing or delusion once you actually become it. It actually does not matter at all that someone does or doesn't describe this to you when it comes to becoming enlightened. It has nothing to do with the actual thing itself. It just stimulates imagination. The ONLY thing it's useful for is motivating you to look for it, that's it. You don't need to think about love or know about love to actually achieve love/enlightenment, that just happens perfectly and naturally by itself. So it's perfectly fair on Ralston's part IMO. Ramana, Christ, Rumi, Rupert, Sadghuru, Adyashanti, etc. did not need someone preaching about love for them to reach enlightenment. They just instantly realized it once they got it, and that was it. Not deluded necessarily, they're just speaking more poetically but pointing to the same thing. To its effect, part of you moves towards this poeticism, because you have been loving different things all your life, and you can sense that there is something profound about it. You can kind of think of it as hearing a good song in the distance, it's just natural to listen to it and come closer to it. Is the song communicating a truth about reality? Not necessarily, but it is enticing something inside you which perhaps might be linked to it. Love does get recontextualized in a pretty profound way once you're enlightened, as does most other emotions, so of course the enlightened folk talk about it a lot. But seriously, don't get lost in your own ideas about it before you reach it, because of course the ideas are always not it. Just look at it and think: "Woah, what are they pointing to?" It really truly is irrelevant how they describe it, the most relevant part is just actually achieving it. No one can describe it, no matter how enlightened they are. Do you see how arbitrary this term "love" is? Really, it's just a word inside of a language. And it is synonymous with the entirety of existence. It is synonymous with other terms like "oneness", "unity", "God", etc. Now, if you think about it, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Ralston has simply decided to encompass all of these terms inside of a singular few terms like "enlightenment" and "consciousness." Can you see how using the words "love", "God", "oneness", etc. are actually purely an arbitrary artistic flair? Discrediting a teacher for not using the same word as you starts to become silly when you realize this.