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I grew up Christian then quickly transitioned into atheism and became a pretty hard skeptic slowly transitioning to that we can't know anything. I did find nonduality in the past year or so and I just had this deep "knowing" that this is the truth despite my critical approach to everything before. I had all these experiences that showed it to me. Yet I always have these questions of "How do I know I can trust this feeling, these writings and teachings?" Nonduality makes logical sense but that isn't inherently evident that it is the answer yet I feel this feeling of just wanting to accept it. If I accept it as truth then I come off as indoctrinated and ideological. Especially when trying to explain it to people. One person would say "The kyballion is about as correct as elmo being God" How do I know and trust a mind that constantly morphs data and hallucinates what I see? My mind could easily trick me into thinking I "know" the truth.

I second that. I arrived to this forum one year ago as an orange stage college science professor with resistance to evolving up to green. I embraced the multi-cultural aspect of green, yet I was strongly attached to rational thinking within a scientific paradigm. (Deepak Chopra was a whoo-whoo pseudo-scientist in my mind). Perhaps it was Leo's more cerebral approach that was able to get through to me that a relative framework is more advanced than a logical framework. I can now see how ideological I was with science and how much it contracted me. In the last year I dropped the textbook for my neuroscience course. I broadened the course to include psychology, philosophy, awareness and nonduality. We do brief periods of meditation in class, We discuss self-awareness, spiral dynamics and I have students keep contemplation / inquiry journals. I experienced strong fear and resistance to doing this. What would my colleagues think of me? Could I lose my job? Will the students laugh at me and think I'm some kind of joke? Will I lose respect? . . . Yet, I feel so much more grounded and confident - and I'm so much more genuine. It's no longer about me. It's about *us* and the students having awakenings. And the students have embraced it. I no longer need to take attendance. Today, the students asked if I could bring a meditation bell to our class. They come to my office to chat about life and reality. Today I had a long discussion with a student about her paranormal abilities. She told me I was only the third person in her life she felt comfortable sharing it with. It feels so good to be free of the scientific walls around me. I'm excited to evolve into Yellow and make my courses even more holistic and integrated. So @Leo Gura , please know that your message expands beyond this forum and into the minds of some college students.

@Samra Similar to your friend, during my Aya ceremonies I had strong CEVs yet virtually no OEVs. During two of three ceremonies, I experienced nonduality and a collective empathy with the group. I found that lying down intensifies the experience. As well, if my mind is still in a rational/logical mindset I would drink a second serving.

Interesting expression, juxtaposed with love and light, this guy just goes straight to the business.

@Strikr You can't see infinite moves ahead unlike an infinitely intelligent mind. Its really that simple. And no I didn't attribute lots of writing to emotional charge. I attributed previous posts of yours such as "If god created me, he is a piece of shit to curse me with "life experience". He never even give me insight about "love" in fucking 25 years, this god is full of shit, and If I m god, I m full of shit, I would never enter a game that I don't know shit about. I never loved "hardcore mode"." You can't fathom why anything is the way it is now and so you just deny it all together. Unfortunately, every possibility includes all of the ones we decide as shitty. And actually I would consider modernized religions like Islam and Christianity a rebranding of nonduality corrupted. Nonduality isn't new by any means. Everything that Leo is teaching is actually written in hermetic philosophy. Something that was around during ancient Egypt eras. To be fully enlightened would be equivalent of drawing back into the all.

Hello! This is going to be a very drug oriented post. Psychedelics are highly regarded as being capable of being tools for personal development and getting introduced into nonduality. My first experience of the nondual paradigm was on 1mg of LSD. An absurdly high dose. I was basically on the floor most of the time but during my come down it was pure bliss in which it clicked like a lightbulb that everything is one. I didn't know why. I just knew. It took such a high dose I think because I've grown up as a highly logical and connected person to my perceived reality. Although I don't know if autism has any role in that as I was told that I am a high functioning autistic when I was young, No idea if I was diagnosed. I also expressed many attributed behaviors as a child to this. But I digress. I stumbled upon DXM in OTC cough medicine soon after graduating high school and the idea of a dissociative intrigued me so I began to experiment. I ended up going into 3rd and 4th plateau territory in which you can perceive landscapes in darkness, tons of shapes and images. I remember visually seeing time come to a halt and seeing what I perceived as God. If you decide to experiment yourself after seeing this post, beware that high amounts of dissociation can be scary if you don't know how to handle it. Its also very habit forming. I had a bit of a problem for a little bit, but fortunately wasn't very hard for me to correct. Always do research! To the meat of the story: this one instance I decided to combine DXM with LSD. 300mg of DXM and about an hour in I took 500ug of LSD. I was also in a call with a friend for this. and OH BOY was it a ride. Its a very hard experience to recall. The first thing that happened was my mind went to heavily focus on the electrical sounds of my computer. Almost like I was tuning into it. It was then I knew I was in for a ride. Visuals and colors were cycling on everything I saw, the colors blended like a smooth gradient, the visuals like the tracers were SO intense that I felt like I could create my own reality as if my hand was a paintbrush. I remember perceiving the universe being built up from its most fundamental form up. It was as if LSD made me hyperfocused on my perceived reality but DXM was the key I needed to take my mind out enough to really let the LSD lead my mind. I remember talking to my friend about reality once I was able to get myself together to talk and I was in awe at the sheer infinite scale of reality and I just started laughing and said "IT JUST WORKS" A full near 8 hours stuck to my bed and my mind like pushed me off a cliff straight into nonduality at hyperspeed. It was this trip that meditation made perfect sense to me and I questioned why I was even confused by it. It was realization after realization. It shattered what I had thought before and I spent a long time after it just trying to fathom the knowledge I had received. This trip was also when I was shown Leo's video "The magnitude of reality" and was introduced to Actualized. This sole trip was what caused my entire paradigm shift unexpectedly when I kept doing LSD before to try and understand what all these guys on these psychedelic forums were talking about. Now it all made sense. So this has made me question. We see so much about psychedelics for nonduality purposes, but can dissociatives be a tool for such too? Has anyone had any profound experiences due to dissociatives? Maybe I just found the drug combination that worked for me? But still it blows my mind to see just adding a low dose of DXM what it can do for me that high doses of lsd was nowhere near close to doing. (I have no experience of 5-meo but DMT will be soon )

People use words differently. For some it is just an experience. For some it would be the same as "enlightenment", for some it is just "mystical union" that can appear as a state of consciousness which can be easily mistaken for nonduality. Nisargadatta Maharaj, Adyashanti and Bernadette Roberts write and speak on the latter all the time that "unity consciousness" or "universal consciousness" is not the final state although it is in itself relatively deep.

I've tried explaining this a few times, the few people I told seem receptive to it, but it takes a bit for them to wrap their mind around it. Although I always started by saying everything in its most fundamental form is mind. This is because it doesn't really force them to think too differently, you know the world still is what it is, but it just recontextualizes everything. Like how you can have a sand castle but its still sand despite its shape. Its just another step forward from everything being energy. The core point of nonduality of everything being one, I think one good way is to get them to look at you and ask "What separates you from me?" The shape of our atoms? The way they move? The distance of how far apart they are? These are all very arbitrary rules. There is really no definitive factor that separates anything. We can say there are multiple chairs in a room yet we have a singular universe which can highlight how our mind likes to group things up and is an illusion. So the conclusion is there is no separation, it is all one. Don't present it as an absolute truth or else they will get defensive and feel challenged. Propose it as some sort of theory. I like to pull many quotes from modern day phrases and religion to show them that nonduality is an ancient idea and exists in many areas. Especially the word universe deriving from a latin word meaning "all is one"

Distinction is a very tricky issue because distinction is the very nature of being. If you fully understood what a distinction was, you would understand the ultimate nature of reality, and you would be deeply enlightened. Distinction is NOT a concept! Distinction is the "substance" of reality. And what then is the nature of a distinction? Nothing! Yes, paradox here is not a mistake. What you're starting to intuit is that reality has no substance. It's a set of distinct appearances which are actually just a hallucination. Reality is not made out of matter or atoms or energy. Reality is made out of distinctions! Creation is distinction. Without distinction you have pure formless Infinity. And with distinction, you also have pure Infinity! The formed side of Infinity. Form is formlessness. Formlessness is form. Duality is none other than nonduality. Infinity contains an infinite number of distinctions. It's highly worthwhile to contemplate: What is a distinction? ------- Mind vs not-mind = a distinction Automatic vs not automatic = a distinction Consciousness vs unconsciousness = a distinction Real vs unreal = a distinction Subjective vs objective = a distinction Truth vs falsehood = a distinction Creation vs destruction = a distinction The universe vs me = a distinction ------ Consciousness is the substanceless substance within which all of these distinctions occur. Like an LCD screen on which images are rendered. Everything you've ever seen or thought or experienced is a distinction. Including existence itself.

Yup, that's nonduality. What else can be said?

Real and false is an illusion of duality, transcend that misperception of the mind which manifests as the concept of real and false to perceive nonduality as it is.

When I started experiencing epidsodes of nonduality I had difficulty communicating with people. I withdrew and spent a lot of time in nature. It's been an ongoing process of adjustment to interact with others.

I think this thread is getting away from my point. I'm not talking about Jesus's teachings per say or the nonduality component. I'm talking about the man himself, his story, studying his own development and he came to be relatively. I actually have thought about it and I'm glad you brought up the open-mindedness component as I think that would be the key to get the larger and more important juice out of something like that and really to put into context what's being said and also to weed out the bullshit from the nuggets of wisdom.

This is a good article that compares Jesus and Buddha. http://www.spiritofthescripture.com/id1869-jesus-and-buddha-a-raw-comparison.html#more-1869 I encourage you to go through the archives as well... The man who runs the website and writes most of the articles is well versed in nonduality, but the main purpose of the site is to interpret the Bible allegorically and esoterically, as it is a roadmap to enlightenment and not supposed to be a religious book

@Rilles The practices are not adding anything, or ‘increasing consciousness’, but relinquishing filters of cognitive dissonance. Practices are periods of time spent without all of the sensory content in typical day to day living, and with attention to the “contentless / emptiness”. If general misunderstandings of duality / nonduality have not been rooted out, then after ‘practice time’, upon returning to ‘the rest of the day’, misunderstanding is retriggered via mental reactions, the “separate I” is mentally reconstructed, and the giddy is gone. Stomach breathing can bridge the practice time into the rest of the day because attention is kept to the breath, allowing thought to come and freely go, revealing thought’s ‘just things’ (Maya / Illusionary) nature. Mental processes resolved, new ‘frequencies of observation’ (access of self) are revealed as being incomprehensible, which is why thinking was preventing access. An example would be the all too easily overlooked simplicity in the power of your attention, prior to focus, prior to thought, prior to verbalization, prior to reaction, etc. Just, attention. Easier to see with love first, and then literal creation of your own reality. So consider there is not a ‘withdrawal’ at play, but the opposite, the ‘adding of things’ (thoughts).

I see you guys are not actually contemplating what ideology is. Ideology is NOT the entire domain of thought! One can think and conceptualize without being ideological about it. Be careful with lumping all thought and speech into ideology, as if there is only nonduality or ideology.

Hi @Leo Gura, I've been watching your videos for years now and I have been reading everything that you are posting on this forum yet I have never participated. Today, I made the decision to change that. I'd like to ask for guidance if that is okay. I have asked you for advice two years ago. That was in the comment section under this video: Back then I was not into nonduality at all and I did not understand the importance of raising my consciousness. I thought my life purpose is to make video games so the concepts that you shared in that video did not resonate with me and confused me. So I asked you for advice on how to deal with that because I knew that you used to be a professional game designer. You said: You also told me to take the life purpose course…which was the last thing I wanted to hear. Obviously, I was not very happy with your reply. So I kept working on my game projects. But I never stopped watching your videos, although I was close to stopping due to the new vision for Actualized.org which did not resonate with me back then. The habit of watching your videos every Sunday was too strong and that's the only thing that made me keep watching them, even though I did not understand what the hell you were talking about. Eventually, I started doing my own research, started becoming more open-minded, bought your booklist and started reading the books listed in the consciousness section, started learning from many other teachers, started having my first psychedelic experiences, started doing the techniques, and one day I finally realized: "Oh my god, this is the most important thing that one could do." I had some profound experiences and glimpses with and without psychedelics. It took me two years to understand the importance of your advice. I finally broadened my horizons and took your life purpose course. (I sold my PS4 to afford it.) Today, I know that I want to become a modern mystic. What could be more important than that? What could be more important than reaching the ultimate levels of consciousness? For me, there is nothing else. But the thing is this: The dream must go on. It was really a painful thing to realize. To realize that I can't keep focusing on this. To realize that I have to go back. Go back where? To the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in order to fill some holes… I realized that I had worked my way up way too fast thanks to your work and the comfort that comes with living at home with my parents (I'm 19-years-old and a "college student". There is no such thing as college in Germany but I guess it's the equivalent to it). I know that I need to go back down and build a proper foundation. I know that because otherwise, it would not be very strategic. The freedom I have now will not stay for I will not be a student forever and I have no intention of staying with my parents forever either. I learned the importance of having an ultimate outcome from this video: My ultimate outcome is to have a simple but independent lifestyle that gives me the ability to focus on what really matters. And what really matters is raising your consciousness. But no one pays you for sitting in darkness, meditating for months or years to wake up from the dream. So I realized that I need to get to a good place within the dream first before I can continue to try to wake up from it. In other words, I learned the importance of financial freedom. I firmly believe that financial freedom is an important fundament to implement in your life. I have always admired your lifestyle Leo and my goal is to design a similar lifestyle for myself. I really loved the first videos in your LP course. It's more personal than your usual videos. I liked your stories and I could see a lot of similarities between you and me. In one normal Actualized.org video - I do not remember which one it was - you mentioned that you were able to quit your 9 - 5 after five months of starting your internet marketing business. Internet marketing is what I'm getting into lately. I'd like to create a passive income as it is described in this video: One of your replies on this forum was this: I have actually saved that paragraph in my OneNote so it can serve as an inspiration and as a reminder. My teenage years were not completely wasted. I started writing when I was 7. I thought I'm gonna become a novelist. I started making video games when I was 12. I thought I'm gonna become a game designer and eventually become a game director/writer. Then an internship revealed to me that this 9 - 5 thing is not for me and that I need to do my own thing. So at 14, I started getting into digital art. Particularly 3D-Art. I decided I'd have my own game company in order to keep my creative freedom and control. Doing all these things allowed me to learn about work ethic, creating websites, content, project management, team management, being a producer and creator instead of being a consumer, and a lot of other things. So I kept going in that direction until this whole nonduality thing happened. I outgrew a lot of my old interests or skipped many things that I need to go back to and properly implement it in my life. That's when I realized that the video game company is the wrong battle to fight. This is a really powerful question from the strategic motherfucker video which helped me a lot: My teenage years were about exploration. I want to make my early twenties about financial freedom. And my thirties about hardcore nonduality. It's similar to how Om Swami did it. Or how you did it. I am willing to work 18 hours a day, every day even if it's not what I love doing. I'd rather do that for a few years and get my financial freedom instead of a 9 - 5 for 50 years and never get to focus on reaching the highest levels of consciousness that a human being can reach. I want to master the human experience holistically. Not in a "I just want enlightenment and nothing else matters" way. Yes, it's the most important thing to master but there is still health, relationships, and money. Lately, I have been working on my mindset when it comes to money. I have never really cared about money. I care about Truth, art, beauty, consciousness, mastery & excellence. So I had to learn to look at money from a different perspective and the books on your booklist regarding money and the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" helped a lot with that. It taught me that things that I care about are not profitable. You too said that a life purpose is usually not profitable and that passive income can enable one to follow one's life purpose. As I have already mentioned I've been learning about internet marketing and all the different possibilities that exist out there. I'm learning about copywriting, marketing, sales and I'm reading books like "Dotcom Secrets". It's not easy to study this unconscious stuff once you have gone beyond that and found something deeper. I know that what I'm getting into is completely against everything you taught us in this Video: But anything else would not be very strategic. My question to you Leo is this: What have you been doing? You mentioned your internet marketing business often but never went into detail about it. Did you promote other people's products through affiliate marketing? That's how it sounds like in the very first Actualized.org video where you talked about creating all the backlinks. Did you use ClickBank? ClickFunnels? On Gamasutra, you also talked about having employees and customer services. Did you sell physical products? E-Commerce? Dropshipping? Did you work for other businesses? I know it sounds like I'm just trying to find the most lucrative, fastest, and easiest way to make as much money as possible. But that's not it. I'm willing to work hard. But I'm a little bit lost and scared of committing 100% before I have a proper understanding of what I'm getting myself into. And I do not want to commit only 99%. I know what worked for you almost a decade ago would probably not work today. The internet has changed. Besides that, you are not interested in this kind of stuff anymore. That's totally understandable. I don't expect you to go into much detail about your "internet marketing days". I'm not asking you to become my mentor, hold my hand, and lead me to my financial freedom. I will have to walk this path alone. But you as someone who has already been through this, and has already achieved financial freedom, and has designed an awesome lifestyle, do you think you can give advice and point out pitfalls to look out for and avoid? The reason why I went into so much detail and told you about my background is because I really wanted you to understand my situation and where I'm coming from so that you can look at this from my perspective and hopefully give advice accordingly. And maybe because of fear as well… It's the fear of spending money unwisely. I have not much and I don't want to lose everything on Facebook ads or invest in the wrong projects or courses. If you choose to give me advice again, I will not repeat the same mistake. This time I will listen more carefully. If you read all of this: Thank you! If you choose to ignore this: Thank you, anyway. Your work has already impacted me in amazing ways and I'm grateful for that. I hope to contribute to this forum from now on and add value. PS: One last thing...don't you think it's funny that you quit working on BioShock Infinite and at Irrational Games only to become irrational and discover Infinity later on? I think that's awesome. Great events are often foreshadowed.

Well, it's very simple. All that nihilism really boils down to is that being is meaningless. Which is what nonduality reveals. That's all. But the ego-mind don't want to accept that. To the ego-mind it seems negative or depressing or chaotic. You gotta be very careful though. Meaninglessness does not mean what you think it means! You don't need to dive deep into nihilism per se. You just need to become conscious that ego-mind constructs all meaning for the purpose of its survival. Once you become deeply conscious of this, life will cease to have meaning for you (at least for a while) and it will feel like a deep depressing nihilism as you realize that all your life motivations were predicated upon lies and illusions of the deepest sort. But keep pushing past that, surrender all your illusions, and you will eventually get to pure being, liberation, divinity. This is what they call the dark night of the soul. It's really more accurate to call it: the final death-throes of the ego.

It does. One vs two is a distinction, a duality. Nonduality is both one and two. All distinctions are embraced at once, creating one unified field containing an infinite number of distinctions. Oneness and many-ness are in fact identical. Notice that a carton of eggs is both one and many at the same time. There is no contradiction because number is a relative projection of your mind. You're the one deciding whether you see the carton as 1 carton or a dozen eggs.

I repeatedly stated that there are many facets and levels of depth to nonduality, and also all kinds of mystical and non-ordinary states of consciousness. But this is actually a case for using more psychedelics, not less. It's precisely because there are so many facets and various kinds of states and levels of depth that without psychedelics you will almost never explore even a small percentage of them. There is also a confusion happening here between stages of development vs states of consciousness. They not the same thing. Also, NDEs are not permanent. By definition, an NDE is a near death EXPERIENCE. And I've never conflated NDEs with awakening. They are very different things. I have repeatedly told you guys that this entire field is much more nuanced and complex than most people assume. And therefore, psychedelics are a great tool to explore this vast landscape and see what's up. The only problem is that people don't want to do it. They want one simple solution rather than doing 100s of trips and dealing with all the questions they will raise in your mind. No one is suggesting that you trip once and close your mind down. Just the opposite. You trip more and more, with each trip your mind opens more and more. It's sort of like you're being told, "Hey, go travel to Africa, there's cool stuff to see there." and you say, "No way, it's too dangerous!" or you say, "I've been to Africa once and seen everything there is to see." Both attitudes are deeply misguided. You could trip 100 times and still not see everything there is to see. People who have tripped less than 50 times, I can't even take them seriously. They have a massive lack of experience. So before you ask people for advice on psychedelics, first ask them, how many times have you tripped, and on how many different substances and at which dosages and under which conditions? That will shut most people up as it would be embarrassing for them to admit their lack of experience. Before you even think of hanging up the phone, answer it 100 times. You never know who's calling. Whatever excuses you have for not doing psychedelics, that's just what they are, excuses. Are there dangers? Of course! Exploration of any kind is dangerous. If you want to be safe, stay in the middle of mindless herd. Exploration is for daring souls. The mindless herd will always whine and complain about why exploration is evil. Don't ask a sheep for advice on how to be a lion.

No, it is not beyond. It is just that. But there are many facets to that insight and many degrees of depth to it. I merely said that enlightenment teachers do not understand that 5-MeO can go there as directly as it does. If there was a pill you could take which would give you the level of consciousness of a Zen master with 40 years of daily practice, 5-MeO would take you there in 15 minutes and possibly even give you a deeper insight into that than that Zen master has had. Of course, the difference is, after 60 minutes, you'd be back to normal. Whereas the Zen master is stabilized in his insight. The purpose of 5-MeO is to give you a very deep glimpse of total nonduality. To show you how little you know and how worthwhile it is to pursue.

This seems to suggest I am a blank screen and external stimuli enter to color the blank screen with images, sounds etc. This feels like a degree of separation. An anolgy closer to nonduality would be there is a blank screen from which pixels arise. The screen and pixels are one. Rupert Spira uses screen analogies a lot.

@hundreth I really appreciate that you went out of your way to find the sources which you were referencing. However, I do want to note that Leo is still more or less right about his assessments of JP. JP MAY talk about eastern religions and myths, but he always finds a way to sneak his agenda into them, westernizing them without realizing it. For example, he talks about ying and yang quite a lot. Every single time he will proclaim that "it symbolizes order and chaos!" No. No it doesn't. Ok, maybe you COULD interpret it that way, but the origins of Taoism don't give a shit about hard dualities like "order" and "chaos." The whole point of the symbol is to point to the fact that "all is one." It tries to convey that seemingly opposite things are one and the same. The symbol is a glaring signpost for nonduality. JP, however, relentlessly uses it as "proof" that "even the eastern people agree with me about order and chaos!" Man, I really used to like that guy (followed him for a solid year before he got famous) but as I've started to grow and develop myself, It's becoming more and more clear to me that JP is stuck in his own paradigm. Again, he MAY find sources from halfway across the world, but he will warp their meanings to fit the overwhelmingly western map that he wants to see.

Uh oh. Make sure you're not just regurgitating nonduality jargon Leo's told you. If you've had profound awakenings of your own, awesome. But I can see some ego doing the talking here Don't make the mistake of proclaiming outright that existence is "not real." You don't actually know this. It's real and unreal superimposed upon each other at the same time. If you experience this directly, you might find it delightfully simple. But that in itself is complexity. Remember, we're talking about literal infinity here! OF COURSE it's complex. And OF COURSE it's simple. It HAS to be both! Try not to settle on definitive conclusions about reality, that's a telltale sign of delusion.

Ok, so I feel a little destabilized. Maybe you can help me resolve the confusion somehow. So let's say you work as a cashier at a supermarket and you have all these metaphysical concepts in your head (that Leo keeps talking about), like god is nothingness and all that. You go to work and the mind keeps repeating: This product doesn't actually exist etc. Sometimes maybe the ego gets into a fearful state and you need to take a pause because the mind needs some cooling. Is the problem here too much inquiry/contemplation and too little meditation? Leo said somewhere that most people need a few years of meditation before they are able to do even 5 minutes of inquiry, because their mind is so rampant. I am 21,tried to cut back the inquiry/contemplation to focus on mindfulness meditation and emotional mastery as I have frequent anxiety attacks, but as I'm working from home all day, my mind naturally tends to go towards existential questioning, which most of the time freaks the ego out and can't focus on work. What should one do in this case? Is avoiding spirituality for a while but keeping a meditation practice the way to go for a while until the mind becomes more equanimous? Or am I just resisting feelings too much? Or am I not going out enough and just lost in the mind all day, losing touch with what is actually in front of me? I calm down a whole lot when I hang out with people or when I have a dog nearby that reminds me that I take things way too seriously, or when I workout at the gym and not think about nonduality for a while. As a personal assessement of my case in the spiral dynamics, I suppose I'm halfway into Green but needing to focus a lot on Orange as there is not nearly enough integration done there. I was much more loving, calm, easygoing, at peace with life and generally flowing, not taking any problem too seriously and comfortable with confusion before having all these spiritual concepts in the mind. Even my meditation was much more powerful before having a lot of nondual concepts making the mind restless. I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. Any help would be appreciated.