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Leo, your life purpose course is excellent! A couple months after implementing your advice I'm already making more money doing what I enjoy (programming) than I'd have ever expected. 100% worth it. I have some questions though: Can nonduality be a domain of mastery? If so, what kind of life purpose can mastery over nonduality lead to (meditation teacher, for example)? What fields can one create big breakthroughs and innovate by mastering nonduality? When you interviewed Peter Ralston, he mentioned that more people would be enlightened if they were more open minded and contemplated. Is there any fundamental reason why one couldn't create a technology that would modify humans to have more of those qualities (through gene editing for example) so that we could get almost everyone enlightened? If there are ways, what fields would be best to investigate to create these technologies? The quickedt catalyst for this path seems to be psychedelics, and very few do them let alone for spirituality. @Leo Gura

I agree with that, but I'm open-minded enough to entertain such things anyway. Well, in my own understanding awareness as we're describing it here boils down to the degree of lucidity of the entity. Or basically, if you realize that you've been interacting with your own mind and that's what reality is, or whether you realize yourself to be God. So nonduality probably isn't necessary for awakening, certainly it wasn't in my own experience anyway. They're like two different aspects of higher consciousness experience, though because most people will awaken through psychedelics which tend to produce non-dual experiences, it seems probable that you'll experience both at some point, and because of that the two are likely to be conflated.

This is not my version, that's just what nonduality means. You are probably talking about some kind of subtle or causal states of consciousness or some higher level of self-recognition or awakening or whatever the heck you are talking about.

Why don't you enlighten us then? Nonduality is really just being aware without the ego mediating the experience. I can relax my mind right now and make it happen. That's what it is. Get over it.

I don't see how nonduality has anything to with this, other than it being used as a telos to imply that development ultimately leads to self-transcendence. Also, how does the experience differ from it being your baseline? I experience nonduality everyday, and I find it hard to believe that you could permanently lock this awareness, unless you become some kind of monk (it's really just "being;" once you're "doing," you will not have nondual awareness); also there are much more profound states of consciousness than nonduality that feel a lot more like "higher cognition."

@Gesundheit2 Muhammad was gifted spiritually. He didn't need anyone to teach him nonduality, he discovered it himself and that's the point. I think Muhammad went so deep that it became clear to him that he was God. Yet I think it took him decades to do that.

This is about the Cook-Greuter analogy; I think the relevant stages to understand there are the "Autonomous" and the "Construct Aware" stages. I think the 1st person, 2nd person... nth person framework is quite useful (although Im not sure I fully comprehend it) and I will try to lay it out here briefly. 1st person: Bascially unable to take other perspectives but ones own 2nd person: Now able to see that others also see me 3rd person: Now able to see self and other as separate persons and thus able to compare self and other 4th person: Now able to see the 3rd person self as embedded in history 5th person: Now able to see the 4th person self as but one way of making sense of live (this is where language and science is really questioned) nth person: the nth level of abstraction that one takes on making sense of life So the Strategist (Autonomous; 4th person; what I would consider to be the equivalent of Yellow) is the last stage where one understands oneself as a separate self. The strategist is able to look at his own historical context and thus his own developmental arc, so he understands that different people are at different stages of development and therefore is able to treat others appropriate to their levels of awareness. The Strategist believes that each person is responsible for themselves and their own growth (this tracks quite well with your hypothesis of Yellow caring primarily about itself). This stage to me seems to capture the whole Stoa/Rebel Wisdom kind of paradigm quite well. The Magician (Construct Aware; 5th-nth person; which I want to make the case for, is potentially what were looking for to be Turquoise) is able to see that his way of understanding and meaning-making is only one out of an infinite possible ways. For the Magician, the separate self is an abstraction - an idea rather than a literal reality. Language is understood as a way to freeze existence, to understand existence by containing it in bite sized chunks of knowledge - in an attempt to both make sense of the impermanence of the human self and to understand the reality of human existence; this is seen as beneficial in daily functioning, but as ultimately illusory. The experience of the self now includes both knowledge of ones connection to everything else, as well as the actual experience of those connections as the self. This tracks quite well with Turquoise which is described as "Self as part of larger, conscious, spiritual whle that also serves self." This is NOT non-duality yet, as it kicks this can down the road to the literal nth degree. I think it is inevitable to set nonduality as some kind of ultimate telos for cognitive development and then just keep adding new, more complex stages in between, as they emerge and are comprehensible. Its always hard for me to self-reflect how much of that view is just the nature of how development unfolds and how much is informed by my own spiritual pursuit (which should not be a given in a developmental model).

So, I am 2 years in my philosophy major and on some disciplines I am starting to not see the value of studying and writing papers about. I do like to study things like social and political philosophy, which really do bring my perspectives into a new light, but things like modern philosophy starting from Locke and going on to Hume, Kant, Hegel etc. and philosophy of language create knee jerk reactions in me and even though I read them, I feel that they don't bring me any value. They bring me just some nice fantasies of how people thought the world works in the past and I see how most of the problems they raise would be solved with a nondual approach. Their theoretical base seems shaky to me. I do not condemn them for thinking that way. They did the best they could in their time, but it's really hard for me to entertain or make myself read about them. Although, if I would write papers on these by bringing non duality to the table, my teachers would just think I am nuts, except one, who may entertain the idea. Writing papers becomes hard when you know about nonduality. My teachers are so caught in the rationalist trap that they dismiss nonduality entirely and see it as a dogma where some mystics do pseudo-science/pseudo-philosophy and have some funny experiences. Actually, I would dare say that my teachers are just running in circles trying to find truth when it's been there for thousands of years, hidding in the background, tainted by eastern cultural baggage. I would personally just drop the degree altogether but I am already 2 years in and I am doing some things on the side in the city where I'm at for my real career. Although, I have already failed some classes I don't like such as: -Medieval Philosophy -The origins of european philosophy (because of the teachers there) -Modern logic (highly technical, failed only the last exam, which was the hardest) QUESTION: How do I keep doing this soul draining kinda need-to-play-dogmatic paper work till I finish college? Any way I can make it easier on myself? It's just one more year, and I'm gonna specialize in moral philosophy in this third year, after which I'm gonna continue with my music career.

Consciousness can create a triangle that also is a square. Consciousness can create conceptual and physical things that just seem to be impossible from our human level of imagination and perception. Consciousness is the level where existence and nonexistence become one, for it is itself in and for itself. It is the level of absolute nonduality where the objects, and also the concepts, of, say, dog and cat, are one. It includes itself in itself and knows the being that expresses itself in the human perception that it right now is, being the being, talking to. It is the level where, in a sense, all distances between perceptions become the self referance. And for it is the self referance, it knows, and not, itself.

@Hello from Russia Mostly the people who teach you nonduality are actually teaching you from within a dream where they think they are awake and being spiritual, but have actually replaced the materialist conceptual dream with a nondual conceptual dream. Nonduality becomes a worldview of its own, just like any other worldview. It's not the same as realizing that you are imagining everything, including nonduality. Although of course reality is One. So that much is true. But there is a lot more to awakening than realizing that everything is One.

When you speak of non-duality as bullshit, do you mean the human concept of nonduality is bullshit or the phenomenon of non-duality itself? Are you criticizing Buddhism and various spiritual teachers because they are pointing to the wrong thing or because their pointing method/process just sucks?

@Godishere yes you got it . Non duality teaches that consciousness is the only actual existence. This is obviously quite different from the understanding of the solipsist. Solipsism is a theory holding that I can know nothing but my own modifications and that I am the only existent thing. It is like saying, I exist but everyone else could just be my dream. There is a definite “me” and “other” duality in solipsism. Nonduality is that there is no other. In fact, the “I” is also a fiction of thought. “My own modifications” are part of the illusion of duality. There is no “me” or “my”. Duality is an illusion…there is only nonduality and no other.

All of the stuff attained and taught by teachers of nonduality is still within the dream. Same with Buddhism. You have been tricked into a spiritual nondual dream by people who have never realized what God is and who have fooled themselves and their students into thinking they awoke. People like Shinzen Young, Spira, Bernardo Kastrup, Tolle, Mooji, Ken Wilber, Daniel Ingram, Frank Yang, Nahm, Winter Knight, etc. It's all more dreaming. I have warned you guys repeated against this. You guys think I am being arrogant but I am just telling you how it is.

How many times do I have to tell you? Nonduality is not God-Realization.

DMT is awesome. You won't stop breathing. It can be scary at high doses, but the nice thing is you can dial in the dose by taking small puffs. No need to blast yourself. At low doses DMT is easy to handle. At high doses it's very challenging, but in a good way. It's just freaky powerful. You don't really understand what conscious is until you do a moderate to high dose of DMT. That's when you'll realize that nonduality and Buddhism are bullshit.

Hey! I was wondering. There are these more grounded guys like Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Peter Ralston, Paul Hedderman etc. who basically point to realizations that one can awaken to on his own. And then there are people like Abraham Hicks, Bashar, Teal Swan who claim to have metaphysical knowledge (like Law of Attraction, Reincarnation mechanisms, Aliens, Densities of reality, etc.) My question: Is it possible to also awaken to and realize for oneself those metaphysical mechanisms or laws? Or will it forever be something that we either belief or disbelief in? One possibility might be to try things like Law of Attraction and see if it works. But that wouldn't prove the Law itself would it? It could also be coincedence etc.

Then we can say that the sentences "a cat is an animal" and "it will probably rain tomorrow, say the experts" are actually the same sentence, on the level of absolute nonduality, or nothingness. This is holy frickin ...................................

Deep Simplicity (chaos theory) and Infinity and the Mind (infinity in many varieties) GEB is great for understanding fundamental pure math ideas about the limits of logic, and it's certainly a Yellow book, but it is rigidly materialistic and misses the very heart of nonduality despite bumping its head into over and over. He even has chapters on Zen and just can't grasp consciousness to save his life and tirelessly confuses it with mind. I wasn't as impressed by this book as Leo, it was mostly cute cleverness and a whole lot of work.

This whole thing screams lack of construct-awareness and lopsided bias for self-made fictions. I'm about to use a lot of words here but believe me that none of this is meant to be a counter-construct. Rather, my aim here is to burn all constructs to the ground, including my own. "Space and time have to exist just as much as Consciousness does" - you literally just made that up. Your statement has the same philosophical weight as the flying spaghetti monster. I don't say this to try to dunk on you: from my POV I seem to see something that you seem to be missing, and I wish to make this clear. Before I say anything else, you make the mistake of treating space and Consciousness as two distinct bedrock substances, both somehow equally fundamental. This is apparent in the way that you attempt to bound (your concept of) Consciousness by (your concept of) space: And yet you also seem to be on-board that Consciousness circumscribes All. If you acknowledge that your pursuit is to mutually bound Consciousness and space, please see that you are cognitively operating in duality while backwards-rationalizing your duality by paying lip-service to so-called "Oneness." Let's cut the crap: if reality is ONE BEDROCK SUBSTANCE, it can't be both "space" and "consciousness." Either Space eclipses consciousness or Consciousness eclipses space. And whichever one we decree is greater makes the lesser NONEXISTENT through OSMOSIS. Leo's recent video on not-knowing is really crucial for you. If you've already seen it, I urge you work on integrating the lessons immediately. Nearly 100% of everything you claim to know (including concepts of what does or does not exist) is spawned nigh-arbitrarily on the spot by your own hyperactive mind - that is to say, there is nothing fundamental or true about any of your knowledge. This is abundantly, inarguably the case when you introspect from the vantage point of supremely elevated consciousness. The only reason you fight tooth-and-nail for the "existence" and "reality" of "space" and "time" (or any other "thing") is because you're closed off to the possibility of their Absolute absence. It is in fact YOU who is maintaining a rigid duality in thrusting forth the assertation that "space (qua space) exists." When Leo or I say that space does not exist, this is not a dualistic assertion. Nor is it a knowledge claim. Rather, we are choosing to not confine our minds to a narrow, arbitrary insistence. We honor the blank canvas of not-knowing wherein our constructs fall apart like sand castles, for this is the only way to gaze upon the truth with clarity. A passage from Plato's Timaeus - clearly a nonduality analogy: "Now imagine that a man were to model all possible figures out of gold, and were then to proceed without cessation to remodel each of these into every other,- then, if someone were to point to one of the figures and ask what it is, by far the safest reply, in point of truth, would be that it is gold; but as for the triangle and all the other figures which were formed in it, one should never describe them as "being" seeing that they change even while one is mentioning them; rather one should be content if the figure admits of even the title "suchlike" being applied to it with any safety." In this hypothetical, Plato gives us the example of someone who models "all possible figures" out of gold. If I were to point at one of the figures and ask you, "what is that?" the only real answer here is "gold!" even if this gold took the shape of a triangle. To say that the figure itself is a "triangle" is untrue, for it is in fact "gold." Likewise with the square-shape. We are so tempted to say "Look! it's a square!" but the moment we say that, the square is remolded into a circle. So now we must amend our statement: "Oh wait, no, its a circle now! But it used to be a square!" If this is the level at which you are identifying + knowing these figures, Plato would say that you risk being unsafe, for truth is not on your side. Your cognition is at the whims of flux, and at every turn what you once thought was right becomes wrong. By declaring that these shapes exist, you are getting bewitched by a façade, while being totally ignorant of the underlying being and substance at play. It matters not in what way the gold is configured. All that is true and Absolute is this: IT IS GOLD. Likewise now with space and Consciousness. Consciousness is free to appear to you in the shape of a concept which you call "space." So is this apparition real? does it exist? What is the true being here? If you answer "that thing right there is real, and it is space," then you are getting bewitched by a façade. All that is true and Absolute is this: IT IS [ Consciousness ]. When it comes to BEING, there is only ever ONE answer. Consciousness, God, Infinity, Love - whatever you want to call it is fine. The labels are interchangeable. But it is singular. This singularity leaves no room for "space" or "time" to be bandaged on top as something distinctly recognizable. Insofar as space/time ever existed in any capacity - on the level of BEING it is fully absorbed and vaporized by INFINITY as though it never were. This is the necessary fate of all finitudes. "You cannot sidestep the terminological issues, so you have to create a system of language to understand them. This is why intellectual rigor and philosophical technicality are important. Substantial for the Actualized book, the imprint of which upon reality could be extraordinary. No issue, no aspect, can be left unturned." I hope you can respect the "intellectual rigor" of this word cascade even if you feel somehow compelled to disagree. This one was for one philosopher to another That being said, respectfully, your entire methodology is limited and frankly untrue. I'm surprised that an Actualized fan is this wedded to language and finite sense-making. If you really care about TRUTH, you would be well-served to just NUKE your entire paradigm of meaning, and to re-learn life as a nobody. When you really get it, you will be unable to utter such statements as the one I highlighted above in red. I enjoy this kind of intellectual questing, but really only as entertainment. I'm painfully aware that it all means nothing. ----- Tl;dr Just go bask in a state of no-space and you'll see how myopic it is to claim that space is in any way Absolute/on the level of Consciousness. Your relative map that attempts to combine the relative with the Absolute through language is holding you back.

Choosing science over Truth, a grave mistake I hope none of you make. I'm very fond of Schmachtenberger. He's more developed than me in many ways. However, his mind has been thoroughly influenced by the Ken Wilber Integral school and that entire community to the point where he cannot even say that idealism is true over materialism. He is still on the fence about that due to Wilber's 4 quadrant model, which is NOT awakening. You cannot be awake and still believe in 4 quadrants. You have to be extremely careful with all of these Tier 2 people. Their development is so impressive it lulls you into a false sense of what the goal of this work is. The goal is not Tier 2. The goal is God. And God is not Tier 2, not Tier 3, not Turquoise, not Coral, not Integral, not New Age, not nonduality, not Zen, not Buddhism, not any of that. And that doesn't mean there isn't lots of cool stuff to learn from the above. I just have to make sure you guys don't get stuck in that.

Well, that's where my new awakening course will come into play. It will be a deconstruction of absolutely everything, including science, Buddhism, Advaita, and nonduality. Working on that.

Yes, that's a good way to put it. Although technically it's about MORE CONSCIOUSNESS. There is such a thing as MORE consciousness than you currently have. Way more. You are describing classic nonduality, neo-advaita, or Buddhism, which is not God-Realization. Spirituality is badly corrupted by people who don't know what the highest consciousness is because they've never accessed it. The highest and purest spirituality is about becoming so conscious that you are fully conscious that your mind constructs all of reality around you and all sense of other. This is God-Realization. Once you reach God-Realization you've solved the entire riddle of existence. The common element is that you are God dreaming up everything and everyone, including all spiritual teachings and teachers.

Samadhi is basicly not leaking any energy out. Desire is the source of leaking energy outwards. What u desire there u exert energy to or attention to. Exerting energy to and attention to is synonymous. If u don't exert any energy u're in nonduality. Or in other words, try not to give your attention to anything at all. It will take u to the same place of nondual Self. (Can also make u realize what attention is.)

It's not about hierarchy, it's about ensuring you don't fool yourself into thinking you're awake when you're not. Unfortunately standard nonduality teachings have fooled many people into thinking they are awake or understand what awakening/consciousness is. When people are fooled into thinking they've reached the top, they cannot reach the actual top. This is not about being superior, it is about fully waking up to yourself as God. That is not possible if some Buddhist convinces you that you got it. It would be like convincing a child that there is no more mathematics to learn after 5th grade, and anyone who claims there is, is just being egotistical and trying to create a new game of hierarchy.

I've been quietly following the discourse taking place here for a while, and I'll now speak up to say that it's quite funny/sad/absurd to see Leo defer to a "stage blue" rhetorical tactic when he cited the recently leaked Floyd footage to mitigate the culpability of the murderous officers. Within 10 seconds of Floyd opening his car door the officer points his gun at Floyd merely for being confused and unsettled. At this time Floyd has presented no physical threat to the officers whatsoever. To save my own life I could not conjure what mental gymnastics must be taking place in order to interpret this video as anything other than additional evidence that Chauvin deserves no sympathy. Yes, Leo, you pompous enlightened simpleton, the police SHOULD absolutely be coddling a discombobulated subject for 10 minutes when the alternative is a potentially fatal altercation. Leo should be beyond embarrassed to have allowed these ignorant words to escape his private thoughts. It appears he's been duped into giving credence to some feeble alt-right narrative that seeks to conflate the likes of a disconcerted black man with a dangerous criminal. It's rather disgusting and quite disappointing that Leo would use his platform to rhetorically lessen the culpability of a murderer by claiming Floyd brought this on himself. Make no mistake, that is in fact what Leo is doing here. Despite presenting no threat to any officer Floyd was at gun-point within 10 seconds of opening his car door. The fact that he could have avoided this fate had he not been discombobulated is completely irrelevant. This next quote is where things get really problematic. We're really treading dangerous waters now. We've only seen Floyd's behavior while his mental state was compromised to a foreign substance, so exactly what substantive basis could Leo possibly have for callously casting him into an unflattering "stage red" category? I would ordinarily deem it an uncharitable interpretation to ascribe outright racism to this faulty perspective, however, when I consider this rhetorical folly alongside Leo's ignorant defense of disgraced/banned YouTuber Stefan Molyneux, a blatant white supremacist (evident from his wikipedia page) seen below, I can only wonder whether these foolish perspectives are facilitated through an underlying racial prejudice. When you've resorted to defending an obvious white nationalist with the phrase "his heart is in the right place." There is definitely something wrong. I want to strongly advice all of you to avoid lending credence to Leo's political takes. It is true that Leo has amassed one of the most useful compendiums of knowledge pertaining to nonduality, and this is great, but don't allow his role as a credible voice in this field to lure you into his political ignorance.