@Razard86 Let's assume you did the sensible thing and answered no to the question (and not the definition). Why? Is it that rape as a general activity probably doesn't help people to awaken to the truth? Is it that rape perpetrated at the hands of the guru reflects something about the guru and not the truth? Now, given that proposition, if your desire is to help people awaken to the truth, why do you need to be an asshole to do that? Does your need to be an asshole reflect something about the truth, or does it reflect something about you? Does you need to be an asshole reflect the needs of the people you're supposedly helping, or does it reflect something about you? Is the truth suddenly not the truth if it doesn't entail hurting somebody's feelings; calling them "delusional", "liar", "idiot", "stupid"; in full caps and with three exclamation marks? I don't think so. I think that to claim that these things are inextricably tied to the truth would only be a corruption of the truth, and it's highly possible to teach it in another way.

Back when Leo used to be based:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What happened? Did he get sloppy with his language? Did he stop giving a fuck? Did 5-MeO fry his brain? Did he become AWAKE? Or did he conclude that he couldn't achieve persistent non-dual awareness and instead opted to remake his brand into psychedelic mysticism ("God-realization") and started shitting on classical non-duality, other spiritual teachers and Buddhism, effectively separating himself from the traditions that make these fine distinctions between awakening and solipsism? That's a rhetorical question. I wonder if that will be in Leo's biography 

I just realized that my experience of being unable to think random useless thoughts after my awakenings is actually just relevance realization being refined. This also made me think about my hypothesis that the reduction of self-referential thoughts associated with meditation could partially be explained by memory re-consolidation.
To recap: sitting in a physiologically calm context (lower heart rate, slower breathing, etc.) and with psychological detachment (the ability to see your emotional reactions as an appearance rather than the emotional content) means that the memories which are recalled in that setting get re-written with a weaker emotional load, and over time, the thoughts become less threatening and are less likely to cause rumination.
And now I can better explain why: it's because less emotional memories are less likely to be relevant. If there is an important problem that needs to be fixed, your mind will load it with emotions and bring it to your conscious attention (because emotions exist to tell you what is relevant to your survival). But when a thought is less emotionally loaded, it will become less likely to occupy your attention, hence meditation reduces the time spent thinking in general. Pretty cool.

Of course the concept of the ontological unknown is just a concept that the intellect makes up, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't pointing to something in reality.
It's the same thing with the concept of non-duality: it's a concept pointing to something in reality. I guess what the non-dual tradition is saying is "just don't concern yourself with the ontological unknown; concern yourself with what is experienced directly". That is why it rejects things like matter, because nobody has directly seen matter, only direct experience. But that doesn't in principle invalidate the existence of the ontological unknown. It's just an ontological preference to say you only care about the known. Therefore, "the absolute" is only absolute in the realm of the known.
It can also be the case that the unknown is just a fantasy, or a kind of artefact of the functioning of the intellect (which is to ask questions; "what if?"). In other words, for the intellect to ponder the unknown is self-serving to its very existence. Of course it will do that — it's in its nature. If the known is "this", it will ponder "not-this". If the known is non-dual, it will ponder duality.
Also, I guess the non-dual tradition focuses on accepting the unknown, to make peace with it, rather than rejecting it. Because when you're obsessing about the unknown, you keep projecting "what ifs" all the time, which is the root of suffering. It doesn't get you anywhere other than existential OCD. So if you care about reducing suffering, accepting the unknown by letting it remain unknown and living in the known is the way to.

Imagine a parasitic life form that speeds up evolution and maximizes the diversification of life, but it also speeds up the process of dying, because dying is a part of evolution, hence you add a relative propensity towards annihilation, expressed through the human avatar as a dysfunctional hazed-out state of wanting to return to the creator (like some freaky out-of-control LSD trip). That is just evolution or God doing its thing, but it's a perplexing thing for humans who are comfortable in their paradigm of living semi-long lives as civilized Martini-drinking drones, but yes, that is just a humancentric bias. There is no reason why life couldn't work like that (and why the ultimate expression of that can't be some kind of hyper-dimensional DMT elf that floats across galaxies and nests on various planets).

I would actually say that most New Age spiritual teachers do not provide proper guidance, as they're not grounded in a tradition with an ecology of practices or a holistic understanding of the human organism (e.g. the Eightfold path). Besides, the accessibility problem is a real problem. No people I know in real life know anything about spirituality. It drastically reduces the chances of getting help. How would they help me with things like working through spontaneous ego deaths or kundalini symptoms? What do they know about the dangers of misapplying spiritual concepts or techniques?
If I had always been under the supervision of a teacher in my local community who draws upon a well-established tradition, maybe I wouldn't have spent 2 years spiritually bypassing or another 2 years in absolute terror and rapture from overdoing meditation. It's interesting how we praise our institutions and traditions when it comes to politics and democracy, while pointing out how the alternative would be pure chaos and anarchy, but when it comes to something like spirituality, we're in the dark ages.

That is why hardcore relativism is a midway point between naive realism and pragmatism. You get hung up in the fact that there aren't absolutes (because you've discovered pluralism and relativism), and absolutes is what the naive realist wants, and you want to critique that, but you sort of forget that it's possible to be pragmatic and choose something that works relatively well, or is relatively wise. But you can't go back to absolutism, so the logical choice is to marry pragmatism with pluralism: take a meta-theoretic approach, see common trends in a large selection of wisdom traditions, and boil it down to the basics (find the "systemic" principles). That is how you re-introduce order and hierarchy in a meta-modern framework, and when it comes to wisdom, that is where concepts like holism and balance come in.

It's more like a blank void, but it's not even a void, because it doesn't really extend anywhere. There is no point separate from another point. There is one point, a pure emanation. But yes, the descriptions are ultimately futile and don't make the experience justice.
 
I did LSD 3 times and weed ~1000 times, and then at one point after I discovered the concept of mindfulness, I spent a week in the mountains with my family doing active mindfulness 24/7 sober (with heavy weed withdrawals, which also meant no desire to masturbate), and at the tail end of that week, I did my 3 first seated meditations ever, and on the 3rd meditation, I awoke.
The thing about psychedelics, meditation, or any temporary change in state, is that it's a so-called "disruptive practice". It disrupts habitual functioning and allows for a constrast to arise, which allows you to become more aware of deeply ingrained mechanisms. Imagine being a fish that has only been in water all of his life. The fish doesn't feel the water at all. It doesn't know what it is, because it has always been in water and is fully habituated to the constant stimuli. If the fish is then suddenly lifted out of the water, they'll experience the constrast between water and non-water for the first time, and then as it re-immerses itself, it'll become more aware of the true nature of water. That is the essence of a disruptive practice.
The explanation for why I awoke when I did is not mainly the fact that I had smoked weed so many times or done LSD a couple of times, but that I had spent a week where I didn't smoke weed and also where I did something completely new (active mindfulness practice). This was in fact a massive confounding of several disruptive practices. And then on top of that, at the end of the week, I didn't go back to weed, but instead I did something I've also never done before: seated meditation. Essentially, that week was like a huge active meditation retreat with a chronic pharmacological disruption (weed withdrawal) as well as nofap (another disruption), as well as being in a different environment than my usual daily habits (skiing in the mountains), which then finally culminated in another completely new practice (seated meditation). This is what it takes to truly get underneath your own skin. You have to see how it's like without it, and sometimes you have to go to the extremes.

Could add that word to the list  
 
It's quite logical as well. Fundamentally, it solves "the paradox of hedonism" (chasing pleasures makes the pleasures less pleasurable). Why does the paradox of hedonism exist? Because what gives you pleasure is not a static thing. It's constantly changing depending on what is salient to your survival right now. If you eat food when you're hungry, that is pleasurable. If you keep eating food when you're stuffed, that starts become not so pleasurable. It's like this with everything in excess, whether it's masturbation, entertainment, or even exercise, and it's the foundation of virtues like "nothing in excess", "discipline", "courage". You need to be constantly moving, adapting to what your body tells you and what the environment craves of you.

Basically, you can boil it down to concepts like balance, holism and meaning: do just enough of the right things, don't neglect any aspect of yourself, and do what is meaningful, either with respect to the particular situation or just as a guiding principle. These principles extend far into abstract realms like healthy daily routines, having a disciplined work schedule, creating your life purpose, etc. It all adds up to maximizing net enjoyment in the end. Enjoyment is not just pleasure as a physical sensation. It's the experience of meaning, purpose, understanding, love, truth; connectedness, beingness, aliveness. There is a richness to life that is only experienced by participating deeply in it in all of its manifestations, and that requires something from you. You don't just receive life. You uncover it as a growing organism in the game called life, and you need to play it well in order to truly enjoy it.

Hedonism is literally degenerate. It only leads to a degeneration of your being; physically, mentally, spiritually.
Eudaimonia, vitality, virtue, functionality, resilience, and health is better, because it is self-sustaining, self-improving, regenerative.

You're talking about the mystical experience of pure oneness. Spirituality has beliefs and practices just like religion. I subscribe to the understanding of Kenneth Pargament and Brian Zinnbauer. They both agree on their definition of spirituality: "an individual or collective search for the sacred". They disagree on the definition of religion. Pargament defines it as "a search for significance in ways related to the sacred", while Zinnbauer defines it as "a search for the sacred within a traditional context". In any case, spirituality is treated as a central sub-component of religion.
My and others' wish to revitalize religion is just to replace the collective/traditional components with something that is more relevant to current society, and attempts at establishing universalized ethics that is grounded in some of society's values is a step in this direction. The growing popularity of a hyper-individualistic spirituality is a byproduct of our culture evolving past the rigidity of old institutions, and it's only a transitory period. The end result is necessary and inevitable.
The mental and social isolation that modern spiritual people are subjected to is hugely detrimental, and that is why we flock to this forum. The insistance that individualism will keep the teachings pure or unridden from dogma is short-sighted, because it's really only a question about scale. Dogma is inevitable when people have an innate need to seek guidance and grounding from outside sources. There are only two choices — culture or cults, roughly speaking.

Now I want to create an obscure internet spirituality iceberg with Sam Harris and Joe Rogan at level 1 ?. (Joe "have you heard about DMT?" Rogan and Sam "have you heard about meditation?" Harris ?). Level 2 could be Eckhart Tolle, Sadhguru, Terrence McKenna, Alan Watts, Ram Dass (world famous gurus). Level 3: Rupert Spira, Leo Gura (youtube famous). Level 4: BATGAP, Martin Ball, Jan Essman (small youtube channels). Level 5: Rali from Naked Reality (dead youtube channels). Level 6: some weird shit.

Unless you're already implementing what I'm about to tell you, I think this is potentially harmful. You'll be actively corrupting the only mechanism that makes you able to self-correct. Before employing any such techniques, just actually do the things that your mind tells you to do. Have you actually tried going a whole day without ignoring your mind (procrastinating etc.)?
Try this: sit down and meditate. Every time your mind says "this is something you should do", write it down. Keep writing things down, and write down everything; small things, big things. Then when your mind is out of suggestions, revise what you've written. Look if there are things you can do right now (e.g. doing the dishes, doing your homework) or if there are more long-term goals which you should aim at (e.g. being more social, starting a business).
Create a designated list for all these long-term goals and make a decision: decide if, when and how you're going to work to fulfill them. Make a list for short-term stuff as well which you'll use daily. When this is done, your mind will have way less reasons to bother you. If it does bother you, it's usually to self-correct, and by writing those as well into your lists, your corrections will be saved and your mind will shut up again.
Now, when you've implemented these steps but your mind still bothers you at times, repeating the same ideas that you've already written down, THEN it's maybe time to use the mantra. However, my bet is that you won't need to do that.

@thisintegrated
As for myths having some grounding in reality, I think it's reasonable to assume that the ancient flood myths could be referring to some traumatic real-life memories, the Younger Dryas being a likely contender. But again, I think the problem starts when you make very specific interpretations with many premises, e.g. "this man who possessed x qualities traveled over y sea during t time and taught z lessons", or even just "the flood was a global event". Groups of humans were probably traumatized thousands of times throughout history by more local phenomena, which is still worth entries into the mythos. But that is the problem with literal interpretations in general: they're too specific. It's much safer to stick to metaphors (e.g. "the flood represents great cataclysm"), which by the way, is something Jordan Peterson does. Following that tangent, you can't really go wrong with metaphors, certainly when inquiring into the mechanics of cognition, because in a very deep sense, metaphor lies at the foundations of thinking (mental associations, synchronicity). It precedes notions like causality or logic.

There are two main assumptions here: 1. the idea that the human experience is reducible to the brain, and 2. the idea that the brain is reducible to neuronal connections.
1. Is the human experience really the result of the brain, or is it the result of the process of becoming human; of being born, growing up and being exposed to various impressions? We haven't produced brains in vats yet. In all cases where we observe functional human behavior, we have humans who grew up inside a body, inside a healthy environment.
2. The brain consists of more structures than neurons (glial cells, neurotransmitters etc.). Why should the relevant processing stop at the level of neuronal connections? What about the configuration of the neuron itself, or the interneuronal structures, or the neurochemicals? The neuron is not an island. It's a part of an interconnected whole.
The view I subscribe to says that the best inferences we have currently is that biology is what thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions 'look like' from an outside perspective. The experience of abstract thinking does not make sense outside of an organism that is also capable of emotions, perceptions and lower behavioral operations. The higher levels have the lower levels nested inside of them, and you can't reverse engineer any one of them in a reductionistic way. You have to engineer the whole thing. So what conscious AI looks like is what abiogenesis looks like.

@Someone here I had an interesting dream last night which is very likely related to this. First some backstory:
One of my roommates last year (who I no longer live with) was at that time a very disorganized stoner in the midst of a downward spiral, extremely similar to me back when I was very much a drug addict. He was smoking weed 24/7, stopped going to his job, and started getting into benzodiazepines (which I did a little bit but which wasn't a central part of my story). Now a few months later, after moving to a new place with one of my current roommates who also lived at that old place, this current roommate told me that the guy has started taking heroin after his girlfriend broke up with him, and that he has been in and out of rehab trying to sell drugs to the guys in there (like fucking Jesse Pinkman).
 
The dream
Anyways, so the dream consisted of this guy being with me, my mom and my little brother in my mom's dining room. We had set the table and were ready to eat. My mom and my brother were sitting at the table and I was about to sit down. I was looking at the guy, telling him: "come, it's time to eat!", but he was just standing there a bit further away from us, staring at us with a distraught look on his face. Then he was overcome by some kind of suicidal rage, picked up a kitchen knife and started stabbing himself violently in the gut. We were all just staring in disbelief as he continued stabbing himself. The thing was that the knife was for some reason very dull, so it didn't really do much. As he noticed the failure of his efforts, he instead tried to slit his wrists, but that didn't work either. I then tried to grab the knife from him and eventually pinned him to the ground and started beating the living shit out of him to get him to drop the knife. Finally he did, and after that, I spent the next part of the dream on the run frantically trying to avoid him, as he was hunting me down trying to kill me.
 
Interpretation
One way to interpret this dream is that he represented a version of me that didn't make the transition out of the downwards spiral, and that him doing everything he could to hurt himself right in front of my family was a symbol of how the downward spiral consists of you constantly hurting yourself while your family is watching you in disbelief without knowing what to do. Me having to attack and disarm myself symbolizes how it's ultimately only me who can stop hurting myself. And finally, me spending the next parts of the dream trying to avoid myself symbolizes how I'm still trying to avoid that aspect of myself to this day. Also, I felt that the distraught look on his face came from a feeling of jealousy, of how this current version of myself is now absolutely loved by my family, while he was getting all these looks of concern and pity, this pathetic drug addict in front of them who is not able to come to the table.

Cognition is the finite mind. Consciousness is the infinite mind.

Nope. You have literal brain areas dedicated to these things. If your brain is not well-integrated across hierarchies and lateralization, that's when you get inner conflict (what Freud called neurosis: conflict between different psychic structures). All psychological problems show some kind failure of integration of different brain areas. Plato put this as the man taming the lion and the lion taming the monster. The man is the neocortex (self-actualization/esteem needs), the lion is the limbic system (social/belonging needs), and the monster is the basal ganglia or the reptilian brain (safety and physiological needs). For Plato, Freud, Maslow, neuroscience, etc.; health, functionality and wisdom means your psychological structures are well-integrated. Spiritual bypassing, which is what you're advocating for, is one trap that hinders this process.

iT wAs a jOke, mAn

If you go for a very long time without fapping while believing very strongly that fapping is not a good thing, and then you finally do fap, of course you're going to feel like shit. The longer you go, the bigger the crash, and the more mental energy you invest into that project, when the project fails, of course you'll feel bad. On the other hand, if you find a stable and healthy rhythm of fapping and you also don't waste any mental energy thinking about it afterwards, it's completely different.
 
I promise you that this will help for the escalation problem: learn how to differentiate between "the organic feeling of sexual energy" vs. "short bursts of arousal driven by mental images". The organic feeling is in some way present all the time, and it builds up progressively day by day, while the short bursts of arousal go up and down quickly based on the mental images in your mind.
If you can learn to pinpoint exactly where your organic feeling is usually at a high point and where going any further starts to become disproportionally uncomfortable (for me it's every 3-4 days), in my experience, that is where you'll find the optimal fapping frequency with respect to brain fog and energy issues.
I promise you, it's so much better than the alternative for so many reasons. Also, one big thing is that when you actually do fap, you'll not be overwhelmed by lethargy and brain fog, but instead you'll be sitting blissed out for 1-2 hours while your mind is crystal clear. It's actually amazing how much your body rewards you when you do the right thing at exactly the right time. If you keep hitting the optimal balance head-on; straight in the bulls eye, every time; that is what health is, and it feels amazing.

I'm not making any prescriptions for Leo's spiritual pursuits, only for how he talks about them. I've tried to delineate out a few key ways in which his focus differs from those he considers "not awake", and why a clearer language is needed when referring to these people. Like I mentioned in an earlier comment, Leo hasn't had great success with increasing his baseline consciousness in any traditional sense (the focus of traditional spirituality), and he has instead opted for exploring deeper and deeper psychedelic states (psychonautics). He has stated that he has probably gone deeper on psychedelics than any other person before him, and that he is better wired for that than the alternative. He is playing to his strengths.

We evolved spoken language to increase our capacity to think and process information, cooperate with each other, create culture and survive across different environments and niches.
We then invented writing as a technology to increase our capacity to edit our thinking, and then not long after that, we invented alphabetic writing to make that process even more effective.
We then experienced the Axial revolution: the birth place of Western thought; ancient Greek philosophy and the new world religions. From there, we got various insights: the necessity of law and order (politics), of personal discipline, of a social duty to the larger society (ethics), of a transcendent purpose outside mere power and conquest (morality, aesthetics, spirituality; the Good, the Beautiful, the Sacred), etc.
All this laid the groundwork for how our society functions today. Now, do we even have to ask why that was important? Do we even have to ask why it's still important? We're not the least bit over the challenges that God is throwing at us.

@zurew The last couple of years I've been working on identifying and expressing emotions when they arise. I used to be super-agreeable and would hide emotions like anger. Now I see those emotions as tools to stand up for myself, but they're defensive and reactive rather than proactive. This energy I'm talking about is more like a drive which is always there. It's assertive in a forward-moving sense. It's the energy that makes you approach a girl, or address a conflict, or claim what is yours.

I went for an evening walk some days ago and felt like truly laying down my defenses and experience my authentic self at that moment. What I felt as my heart opened up was a flood of memories and moods from a very specific time of my life, before I was a teenager, and along with it a feeling of emotional vulnerability and the need for intimacy.
Then last night, I watched this video of Ken Wilber talking about shadows and explaining them through an evolutionary lens that I've previously not seen the full implications of:
 
 
He talked about how all evolution follows the motions of "transcend and include", and that either one of those can get out of order (you can either transcend too much and forget to include, or vice versa). If you transcend too fast without properly including earlier aspects of yourself, you'll split off that part of yourself as an unconscious sub-personality, which will actually have that age of when it split off.
So then it clicked, that what I experienced that evening as I peeled back my defenses, was that former piece of myself that I had split off: the emotionally vulnerable part of myself that desired personal connection and intimacy. It was visceral, as I literally felt like I wanted to hug and hold someone, and again, as a rather young version of myself, around the time I actually had girlfriends.
Then I started thinking about why I split it off. Then I started thinking about how I've been trying to integrate what I call "Red Andrew Tate energy", which I also know I've been repressing, but not in the same way (it goes much deeper). Was maybe my path to asserting my need for vulnerability through exactly that — assertiveness? How counterintuitive is that? Maybe I was always too vulnerable and too lacking in assertiveness, and the defense mechanism was to close it off and hide it away, rather than letting it flow outwards ("internalizing" instead of "externalizing"; a classic pattern for me).
So then, my path of integrating the shadow (my understanding of it and how it has been shaping my life), has become even more clear: I have to develop my assertiveness in order to regain my vulnerability. It's almost paradoxical, but it makes the most sense that way.

@thisintegrated I was lying in bed and I had this insight I have to write down so I can go to sleep. I've noticed that after our MBTI arc, I started to feel ashamed of my Te, feeling that you calling me FiTe and lacking in Ti was questioning my intelligence (which I've always been insecure about). So over the summer, I consciously and somewhat unconsciously tried to repress my Te and focused on using Ti (which I've learned a lot from as well). I noticed this lately when writing, that I'll stop myself from going into too much detail or using too many fancy words, and that I think I'm repressing my natural self. I've been missing the usual flow states I get from writing exactly what is on my mind. So from now on, I'll start to write so much Te that it will make your head spin! My Te ego backlash, affiliative redemption has begun, and you can't stop me! ?
And by the way, I think one big reason why I generally shy away from Ti, is because I see single lines of logic and intuition as very limited (due to my mystical experiences, context/construct awareness, psychology knowledge about cognitive biases etc.), so I'll prefer listening to other people much smarter than me who have spent much more time thinking over a subject than me. And because I'm aware of those aforementioned limitations, I'm likewise aware of the limitations of relying on these outside sources. So when I reference someone else, I do so with the knowledge that it's just one potentially highly flawed perspective and not absolute truth. And when you see me arguing strongly in defense for one such perspective, it's also not proof otherwise. We're supposed to be a Tier 2 forum, god damnit!