kurt

Dont believe what I say, just think about this - "spirituality" is a correction. Thats ALL it is. When the job is done, when you understand who you are, and there is no chance of falling back into delusion, then you leave and walk away. You throw away the books, the CD's, the DVDs and you cancel your subscriptions. You return to life as you were before MINUS the ignorance that compelled you to become a spiritual seeker in the first place . You dont make a lifestyle out of spirituality, that is just another identity, and a false one. Think about it. This is what this path is about. Its not about non existent "growth".

A couple of points, "Guru" means remover of ignorance. If you have a genuine enlightenment teaching and dont mess with it by throwing in a mish mash of dualistic processes then you can become your own "guru" and remove the thorn from your own eye. Thats part of enlightenment, making you not dependent on a teacher in any way shape or form. Secondly, youre correct, there are no levels to enlightenment, what a silly concept. That is nothing but a spiritual status game. There are no awakenings, stirrings, realizations, insights, there is only a process of the mind undoing its own ignorance until one day the seeking stops and you rest in complete understanding. After all the psychological work (which needs to take place BEFORE realization happens, because enlightenment proper can only take place in a very specifically cultured mind, otherwise its not enlightenment, its just a glimpse) thats all that is left and enlightenment is, understanding that happens in the intellect - oh, I am this, I knew that all along. Then all you do is stop falling into the traps again, its too simple to mess up, yet the mind makes it into something so complicated and mysterious, mystical. Load of nonsense. Its very very simple, so simple that it takes years to realize that it was there under your nose all that time. There is absolutely nothing to do, thats the point, there never was anything to do, anything to master, all mastery is based on this assumption that we need to do something in order to become complete. These desires go away if enlightenment is what youre after.

Is there really such a thing as human development, or is it a fantasy? I've never met one psychologically developed person in my life. You try to develop the person for years and its still there nagging i want, i want, i want, i want... why not just wake up and be done with it? End of story? In fact, if you wake up you know there is nothing there to develop, no people, no others, no world, no human race, nothing, just you deluded by your own body and mind billions of times over. That's enlightenment, there is no development, there is only collecting knowledge about crap that only meant something to you when you thought you were stuck in a world full of others and survival and getting what you want mattered. I don't think people actually really understand what enlightenment really is, because if they did they would know that there is no need to develop the person. People would not be seeking the divine if they were able to get what they wanted in the world, it does not work, every gain you make there is an equal loss, you cant win and you cant loose, its an eternally frustrating zero sum game DESIGNED to support you finding your true self, its not here to give us what we want. Just be who you are God dammit, you are beautiful as you are already, thats the damn point, to stop chasing after shit you never needed! This Zen Devilry thing is a complete fantasy, its looking at life through the messed up lens of deficiency, enlightened people dont seek perfection, they are perfection.

OK, hahah

This has gone over my head, thank the Lord! Ignorance is bliss

Enlightenment is not about development. Consciousness does not develop. What you mistake for "consciousness" is awareness deluded by ignorance. The only thing you need to concentrate on is removing ignorance, then all your problems dissolve.

First, mediation is not about getting into high states. Secondly, there is a you and noises are indeed happening to you. A good start is to quit your denial, stop listening to neo-advaita and learn how to cope with your mind. Your mind is a tool, an instrument, and if you welcome it, and welcome your ego you can learn how to train them to your benefit instead of denying them and trying to transcend them or escape them using spirituality. Thirdly, there is indeed free will, and you need to exercise it if you want to become free. Thats what its there for You have a slither of influence and you need to employ it to work in your favour. Again, listening to neo advaita and other stupid non dual teachers on youtube will not make your problems go away. Stop hiding your head in the sand and face reality. Reality is you have a mind, an ego. The notion that you dont have free will belongs to awareness, because awareness is choiceless and not bothered with life. Until you are that stop parroting the notion that you as an ego have no free will. Thats just absurd. Fourth, understand that the stomping is there because it is there and no matter what you do you cannot change that, you can only change your internal response to it. Your attitude towards it. You have no control over anything except how you interpret life, so better to start to use your thinking mind and ego to turn your conditioned attitude around. No need to do metta towards your neighbour. Its not like hes murdered a bus full of schoolchildren, is it? The very fact you are thinking about sending metta to your neighbour for stomping indicates you probably need more than Vipassana to sort your attitude out. How can you just see noise as noise? Just tell your mind "its just noise". Your mind is not you, its your mind, you can tell it what you want. Tell it that noise is just noise, and relax, and welcome the noise as an opportunity to practice patience. Good luck!

I know projection is your biggest hurdle. I've been watching your activity on here and I know a sick mind when I see one. Get into a proper path, it will help remove the tamasic worldview you are holding onto, the sense of otherness you cling to, healthy minds attack ideas, not people.

@WelcometoReality The question should be this: What do you think is so right with it? The problem is, Ken Wilber has misrepresented most of these paths and therapies because when you start digging deeper into the theory you find that a lot of it doesnt correlate to the actual paths hes drawing the knowledge from. When you start your own spiritual path, I assume you dont have one, you will begin to see how these integral ideas dont work because the defy common sense. Wilber has tried to catalogue everything to make it fit onto one map, but hes twisted a lot of the information in order to fit it in. Most spiritual paths dont agree with each other for very good reasons, this is why you have all these different schools of Buddhism and Hinduism, etc because of the fact they dont actually agree on the nature of reality. Once you see that, you can see easily how you people are deluding themselves thinking they are getting somewhere with this collection of fancy ideas pulled from different sources. All Leo has done has copied somebody elses work, by the looks of it its Ken Wilber. If you can see the holes in Wilbers work then everything that comes after falls. Its like dominoes stacked up, fish rots at the head first, once you adopt a integral system you have missed the point. The main point of contention is that Aurobindo and Wilber both assume that we are somehow different people and that we need to evolve the spiritual path. But people have had the same psychology since day one, it has not changed one bit, perhaps only cognitively, but no spiritual path addresses the cognitive aspect of people, its SPIRITUAL and psychological, it not cognitive nor are the spiritual paths even socially conditioned, they truths inherent in the paths are much deeper than social conditioning (if you take the time and bother to study them properly - which Wilber has not done, he has merely parroted Aurobindo and Clare Graves). It sounds very appealing on paper but its a massive flop. Do your homework guys before buying into everything Leo tells you, hes the proprietor of a youtube channel that started 3 years ago piggybacking off the work of other people, this is your health youre messing with. The final straw for me is when hes bragging about "teaching non duality" in his latest video. An unenlightened person "teaching" non duality? Give me a break. No ego is above the effects of 500k subscribers, half of which think youre some kind of prophet, who are on their first time in the scene and who has read that many books and had the 5meo experience. This sort of thing creates very big egos indeed. Now all of a sudden hes teaching non duality to the masses on the back of a few snorts of frog powder? People are idiots if they want to put their trust in a person like this. Complete idiots.

@MHarris Well I dont know if you should take the cookery course, but I do think this is the sort of information Leo needs to be handing out rather than telling people how to become enlightened. I'd like to learn how to cook an omelette, and would rather watch Leo demonstrating that than listen to another video on the perennial philosophy and how I need to study 45 million books on religion just to find out that none of them agree with each other, even the non dual aspects of them.

This is true, and one of the reasons I am discrediting Leos advice to people. Ive come with the logic behind the perennial philosophy theory that he is married to. The Ken Wilber/Spirial Dynamics stuff he is also identified with, and trashed most of it with simple common sense. If people are wise they will take what Gura says with a bucketfull of salt because he does not know anything about enlightenment. Im glad you are one of the first (possibly) to see this. Go to experts if you want to free yourself, dont listen to people who are not even enlightened, yet think they "have the path thats right for you" . Be sensible because this is your mental health youre messing with folks.

@Babybat If you resonate with a religion you should try it out. You self is always giving you opportunities to realize freedom, putting you into situations that resonate with your inquiry vasanas. If youre attracted to Tibetean Buddhism then you must try it out because even on a common sense level, if you just did what Leo told you to do, and followed his beliefs then you would be walking HIS path, and that is not going to work. So it is common sense to follow your heart, its trying to open doors for you. I looked at the website, it looks good, I didnt have time to research it, but as always look for how the teachers live their teachings. If they are not living their own teachings then investigate more. Do some inquiry on yourself too. In the first 4-5 months I had projections onto my teacher. After looking into them along with checking the teacher out I resolved the issue, now things are fine and I'm absorbing the material well, and its working! Joining church is cool, now Im on my path Im open to other religions because I am firmly established in my practices my mind is strong enough to be able to have a healthy interest in other paths, but I dont mix the two, I stick to my path because mixing will confuse you, because not all paths speak about the same truth, they are different. The thing is to be on a path, doing the practices (and trust me a proper path will give you practices this lot arent even aware of and they will blow your mind), then as a byproduct of having your values in place your mind will become curious to investigate others and see what they are doing. Obviously you wil have your cult radar on, and a proper path will give you information about how to avoid those situations. Your personal morals and values are fine, as long as they dont cause you suffering. If they delude you and cause you suffering then you need to let them go and find the healthy version of the value that doesnt impose itself on others. Usually adpoting a value of "accommodation" for all opinions sorts this out. If you value peace of mind then accommodation will naturally be next on the list of values to assimilate. If you have peace of mind at the top, then all your thoughts and behaviours should align themselves with that core value. If your core value is destruction, then your thoughts and behaviours will reflect that value. The mind is like a computer, if you programme it a certain way, it just churns out produce aligned with its programme. All minds work the same way, they kick out thoughts which creates experience. So just programme it to churn out what you want it to churn out and you will be fine. No religion worth its salt will be asking you to ditch spiritual values. However, if you value, say, making money at the cost of others then you probably will be discouraged to continue with that value, because its not going to create conditions in the mind for spiritual growth, even tho there is nothing inherently wrong with dog eat dog ways of making money, it will impact your mind in negative ways.

@Echoes God is not nothingness or emptiness. These two words emptiness and nothingness are taken from a religion called Buddhism, which is an atheist system of thought. Buddhist dont subscribe to the concept of God a creator, they are stuck inside the material universe and the aim is to free the relative person from dualistic "thinking" and call this void in the mind "emptiness" . Buddhism is a humanistic philosophy that has been subject to many changes over its history, meaning that is a man made religion. It is essentially based on pantajalis yoga sturas, and is related to a bunch of religious ideas floating around at the time, one of which was the popular enlightenment misconception "chitti vritti narhodha" - which means that in order to reveal the nature of reality, one must rid themselves of their mind. Nobody has ever become enlightened using this method. It is good for preparing the mind for enlightenment, but its not quite right as a statement of enlightenment itself, because the enlightened self is beyond thought, is beyond the person, is beyond experience, it is nir-guna (free FROM experience) whereas nir-vana is the extinction of experience itself. So God is actually "fullness" it is the Self, and the Bhraman which you mentioned. Brahman is the one sentiency that pervades existence, the knower, the SEER, the conscious indweller behind the mind, witnessing the mind of all sentient beings (Atman). It is not human specific, it is the all pervading substrate, the knower in all subtle bodies - animals and plants all have subtle bodies, and therefore are all Atma. Atma refers to Brahman when we look at the world through the conventional perspective that there are many "Atmans". Brahman is when you look at life from the perspective of the one self, when you understand that YOU ARE the sentiency, the all pervasive consciousness that looks out through every "other" apparent beings eyes. Brahman realization is when you understand that there are no others, that there is only one principle operating here - you, consciousness associated with and deluded by many different bodies and minds. We dont know, we will never know the why or how, that is for Bhraman as the creator to know. Human beings will never know this because really we will always only ever be Atmans, the knowers of self knowledge revealed in a specific subtle body. Enlightenment takes place in the psyche of the human being, so we are bound by that instrument and its limitations. But your confusion lies in the fact that you confuse the Buddhist No-thing with the Hindu Bhraman, Bhraman is not no-thing, it is the witness with the power to create. Same answer to previous question, we dont know why. Donald Trump and Ramana Maharshi, from the perspective of Brahman are the same Bhraman, the individual stories of each person are irrelevant. They are forms appearing in Bhraman, they arise, are sustained, and dissolve like everything else. IF you are ignorant and take these two characters to be their individual stories and dont see them as yourself, then there is a duality between them, but when we die we just die, reincarnation is not actually a thing, it is just being "reborn" into another ignorant thought that has been generated by believing in yourself as a separate person with separate karmas to live out. Once you realize who you are, you will understand that you were never born ad you dont die, only the physical bodies and the thought stories associated with these characters are the things that die. But it doesnt matter because all the material aspects are just mechanics.

@Raquel Quick question about pranayama Raquel. And that is, what do you hope to achieve with the method? From what I understand the practice is learned to be able to eventually control the elements so that when you are ready your subtle body can leave your body and "merge" with consciousness. You will die of course, but you will have "attained enlightenment". Which Im sure was one of pantajilis fantasies. There are quite a few of them in the yoga sutras if you care to read it. I think just taking 3 yogic breaths as an entrance to a sit is enough "pranayama" for anyone, no?

Its easy to read a million books and twist them all to suit how one sees the world. Thatd what Leo has done, you can sense it in almost every video he releases these days, you can feel it palpably when a belief is defended with an excerpt taken out of context from a body of knowledge, a body of knowledge that has not even been researched properly but just taken as "evidence" to support his delusions. I like you Leo, but you know nothing about enlightenment. Sorry : (

Truth being spoken here.

The "brain" is just a part of the material world, its got nothing to do with consciousness. The brain controls the physical body and the mind, but the mind and body is not conscious. You can understand this instantly if you want because you can see for yourself that the mind is an object appearing to you, you can SEE the mind, you can EXPERIENCE your mind, because the mind is just is dead, inert, its a programme, a mechanical product of the physical body and its conditioning. Its not "sentient". The sentiency we are talking about, the SEER, the aspect that witnesses the mind, is consciousness, is you. Consciousness is what is illumining this life, this body, it is the "life force" that makes the material world possible. When the mechanics of the body stop working consciousness does not leave the body, it remains because it is everywhere, it is all pervading. The body and mind just dies because it has malfunctioned or come to the end of its programmed life span. Its not a problem, because it is just a machine, it is not "self". Self does not die, self is the one consciousness that lights up the material world, the material world cannot exist without self, but self exists without matter. The brain is real, it exists, it just does not exist IN OUR EXPERIENTIAL body (the subtle body), it can only exist as a thought there. But there is indeed a material universe. Understand?

Yes. If you understand what religion is actually FOR then you will be all over it like a rash. Religion will get you enlightened, neo advaita wont. But you need a science based religion because "religion" is just practices that prepare the mind to accept and hold the knowledge you had for a while. If you continue to lead a non religious life you wont become enlightened. Its as simple as that. Meet Ganesh. Ganesh is a religious symbol, most people dont know what Ganesh stands for, if you can see through the delusions we hold about religion, you can cut straight to the core of what it is, and you will understand how practicing religion (properly) is really the only way to realization. Most direct paths leave us wanting because they just dismiss most of the goood stuff as religious or cultural dogma.

The desire to experience enlightened states is a distraction. It should be sublimated into the desire to understand what you already are. We dont have an experience problem, we have a knowledge problem, the removal of ignorance solves the knowledge problem, no spiritual experience will suffice.

This is why its so difficult. We need to be able to recondition the mind to stay introverted, to the task of understanding what it's true nature is. Good work

We get the teachers we deserve. If you can see past the negativity associated with Teal you can extract the wisdom from her teachings that you need. If you continue to let your ego decide for you, then you will get what your ego extracts from her teachings, that will feed your ego. Its a very simple formula, you get out of it what you put into it.

You have a value for valuing other peoples opinion of you. Drop the value, it will hurt for a while. You will most certainly become paranoid for a while because you are letting go of a control feature that protected you from imaginary attacks from others in your environment. It will feel out of character for a while, basically it will create chaos and all you will want to do is return to the behaviour to stop the agony of insecurity. Dont do it. Remain vigilant and dismiss this value every time it rears its ugly, sick, mentally deranged head until you feel safe, until you see that the world is benign and it is not interested in making you submit to its will. This is probably born of a domineering insecure parent, or family environment where you were shamed to comply. Its hard to dissolve, but it will. If you need help, then PM me for support.

@Deep The ego is just the "I" thought that claims the cause and effect chain of experience. For example, you happen to be pretty darn good looking, well, thats a gift from "awareness" itself, its not got anything to do with the individual, but the ego identifies with this quality and when the quality changes or deteriorates over time it suffers. This is the basis for all the suffering in life, this ownership of experience that is destined to change. The ego itself is not really a problem, its not knowing who we essentially are that is the problem. Once you awaken to the truth, the ego, the person, the individual is understood as a notion inside you, the exact same notion inside all other people. So its the dis identification with ego that is the final step. After that the ego can do all the claiming it wants, its just that you are there observing its delusional game. No problem.

@Pauline Bureau Enlightenment is not a belief, it is a way of interpreting experience, an alternative way to see the world, existence. There is only one sentient awareness here, it is the same sentient awareness in all people, it is the substrate of all phenomena. you mind is an instrument, but most of us are conditioned to believe that we are this mind and this body, and therefore we miss this background witnessing consciousness. The matters to question is your beliefs and conditioning that brought you to the conclusion that you are a mind, in a body, separate from other minds and bodies. If you can understand that you are not the body or the mind, then there is only one "thing" left that you can be - awareness. And this awareness is the same awareness in all sentient beings. That realization is the "truth", that there is only you here, one sentiency "deluded" by many different minds and bodies. If you can see that you are enlightened (well, youre already "enlightened" but to be able to hold that knowledge and not forget it is a different matter. Thats where the work comes in).

Kyle, the way to get girls is to sort your life out first. Then you will not need a bunch of strategies or worry about rejection because when you sort your life out then the right thing for you comes along at the right time you need it. Life is a mystical experience, and the guys who are good with women have their minds sorted out and their lives sorted out. Work on yourself and you will discover that you get everything you need, I know you want to experiment, and thats fine, just go the right way about it first.