Mongu9719

@Gili Trawangan wow. I had the same experience. I got mentally obliterated and psychologically broken down by my narcissist. The only way out of the suffering was spirituality. That’s how I discovered Leo and this forum. I used to hold a lot of hatred for her but now I see how sad and petty her life is. Yet I will feel great relief when she is gone. The strange part about my narcissist is that she is obsessed with Sadhguru, who is a pretty enlightened individual. It’s weird because she is the complete opposite of someone like him. I’ve also come to the conclusion that she could never become enlightened or if she did, she would go crazy. It seems like everything a narcissist stands for opposes The Truth. They are the living embodiment of the devil. It is deep in the marrow of who they are.

This explanation points to a materialistic origin of conciousness. The human mind creates a self model in its mind to remember previous experiences and then areas of the brain corresponding to that experience light up when the person encounters the same experience. Why is this self-model theory not adequate to explain conciousness?

@JonasVE12 It seems like you are trying to rationalise your weed use.Have you ever heard of diminishing returns? The more you get high the less pleasurable it will be. It will also make your mental state really bad, which is an issue you are clearly facing. It will be very difficult to develop yourself in this state. I know a lot of people that smoke weed regularly. Their life is a complete mess. Chasing pleasure or highs is not the way. Do you know any enlightened people or highly functioning people like Tony Robbins or athletes where all they do is smoke weed? I doubt it. Stop smoking ASAP that shit is addictive and it’s bad to get addicted to any substance to matter what it might be.

@Serotoninluv so your answer is that conciousness is not self-awareness? Then what is self-awareness? What is conciousness? My brain hurts. Think I’m gonna rest for a bit.

@Leo Gura not for personal development but for practical purposes. For example, if my neighbor is killed and they need to do an investigation of the crime. The police could take a psychedelic and travel back in time to the moment the crime took place to identify the suspects. We could also predict future natural disasters or terrorist attacks. As you said, science will make more progress in 1 decade with psychedelics than any other field. I don’t see why it can’t be applied practically.

@Serotoninluv so self-awareness is NOT conciousness?

@Serotoninluv so instead of trying to make explicit distinctions which creates further dualities I should have an implicit “experience” by observation or connecting with Being. I will try this with the question “what is physical vs non-physical” and get back to you.

@Inliytened1 @Leo Gura can you as God, imagine what being a rock is like? Can you limit yourself if you wanted to? People become all kinds of things on salvia. One guy become Beyoncé’s birth certificate. Can we manufacture a psychedelic which creates the experience of you being Beyoncé’s birth certificate? We can target neurotransmitters in the brain which can create the experience of being that. Could we also create a psychedelic in which you can speed up time for yourself and see future events? Can we create one in which I reverse time and become 10 years old? Are the possibilities truly endless or can our stream of conciousness only be altered in specific ways? Are there limits to what a psychedelic can do?

@Leo Gura My examination of different paradigms, my research, and my intellectualisation all distract me from becoming concious of conciousness. I can get lost in conceptualisation because the mind doesn’t want to turn inwards. Abandoning all concepts and ideas is necessary then to become concious of what conciousness is. This is what marks the transition from stage yellow to turquoise. As I long as I continue to distract myself on this forum by trying to understand awakening and conciousness the farther I get away from The Truth. The next step for me is to do the practices and stop distracting myself on this forum.

@Leo Gura hmm ok. I guess there is no point in trying to intellectualise this beyond a certain point. Might as well just ask the machine elves to show me or start doing the enlightenment work.

@Serotoninluv isint “personal conciousness” just an aspect of the “absolute conciousness”? So making that distinction is actually false but useful nonetheless. We can transcend our self-illusory “personal conciousness” and become one with the “absolute conciousness” because ultimately everything collapses into one. Right?

@Serotoninluv so are you saying that there is a second-order level of conciousness which is material which is what this scientific explanation is pointing to, and a first order which is immaterial which is what Leo is talking about? Ultimately both are part of the first order or absolute conciousness . Right?

@Serotoninluv One has to arise from the other. According to Leo everything arises from conciousness. Pure software with no hardware. Perhaps what you are talking about dualism, which is different from materialism and nondualism.

@Leo Gura didn’t you say that there were relative levels of conciousness? That’s what spiral dynamics is right? But also everything is conciousness. Do these relative levels only exist because I think I’m a human being? If I erased that distinction then I would realise that everything is conciousness? I think I’m finally begin to grasp what you have been saying for so long.

@Serotoninluv hmm ok I think I understand now. A materialist can’t pinpoint what material aspect of the brain actually produces conciousness. They can point to neurons but that doesn’t actually explain anything, because regardless of how the brain is arranged, it still doesn’t explain the subjective experience of conciousness. Even if they can point to a specific arrangements of neurons and and all of the neurotransmitters involved, it would only explain the appearance of conciousness but not conciousness itself. The only conclusion you can arrive at then is that any material explanation for conciousness is insufficient because it leads to a strange loop or “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” The main reason I posted this was so I could get a better understanding of the materialist paradigm and think it through myself. Thanks for the response. This is really tricky for my mind to grasp but I think I understand it better now.

@Serotoninluv our “isness” is just an illusion created by the brain. Just like how our brain creates an internal-model of “white-light” even though “white-light” is much more complex than our human brain can process. It is an outline, a rough estimate. That is what conciousness is to us. A rough model of our internal subjective experience which can be clinically demonstrated as is the case with patients that have brain damage, damaging their ability to be concious. Just as there are neural correlates for “white light” in the visual cortex, there are an entire arrangement of neurons which model conciousness in our brains. It is self-contained and self explanatory.

@Serotoninluv I would say that the brain creates the concious experience through self-modeling. Conciousness itself is the physical brain or you could say a property emerging out of the brain. I don’t actually believe this, I am just playing devils advocate to get a better understanding.

@Leo Gura why is it foolish? Wouldn’t it be necessary to understand all perspectives to get the most accurate picture. I’m not saying that this model is absolutely true but it is illuminating. Studying and understanding our neurophysiology gives us a deeper understanding of ourselves. We shouldn’t rule out any possibility even if it comes from a materialistic, reductionist viewpoint.

@Serotoninluv According to this theory, it is a self-model. Just as we have a self-model which remembers the physical location of our limbs, or the part of our brain which codes white light with brightness without colour. The brain creates a self-model of subjective internal experience. This explains why someone who has damage to a certain part of their brain, are not concious that a ball is being thrown at them yet they still dodge it. The brain recognises that there is a ball and the areas which process visual input light up, but because they have damage to the area of the brain which makes them aware of it, they have no idea that they even dodged it. If this area is damaged even further, it leads to a vegetative state. If the brain is capable of make internal models of external objects and is able to make a self-model of its own attention, then it is not a far stretch to say that it could make a self-model of its own internal experience. What remains to be understood is how these neurons responsible for conciousness compute information.

@Leo Gura then does a rock have an infinite capacity for self-awareness? It is also made of conciousness.

I am aware right now that I am a human being.When I go to sleep I am not aware of it. Is conciousness different from this? Is being concious simply the fact that I exist without any self-awareness and it is inherent?

Are you still aware that you are a human being in no-self? What about god-self? What is the difference between the two?

@Leo Gura in one of your videos you said that we can become aware of no-self and then we can become aware of god-self. What did you mean by this?

I know Leo said that consciousness has different dials which can change different aspects of consciousness. So during a DMT trip your entire visual field gets distorted and you encounter entities. What does this mean for your state of consciousness?

As users of this forum and YouTube channel, what do you wish was different about this community and also Leo’s content? What criticisms do you have of both? What has rubbed you the wrong way? Constructive criticism is required for any community to advance, so don’t take this personally. Leo is a human just like us and has flaws, and we should understand that. I just want to get the opinions of users so we can broadly understand what needs to be changed about Leo’s content and the community mindset as a whole so that we can evolve.