Data On Spiritual Teachers "efficiency"

[Nahm]

@Real Eyes then yes. A guru is required. 

[Cudin]

6 hours ago, Nahm said:

@Cudin wondering if you drew that avatar pic. I like it a lot. I feel like it captured something not so obvious. Nice.   My two cents is it takes a very long time and a lot of practices, and paradoxically, if you were to commit to the most absolute honesty, you could enlighten yourself as a product of rejecting all else (beliefs). Your consciousness is already beyond any earthly enlightenment, but your body, brain, & personality have all this shit they prefer, want, "need", etc. They come up with some pretty convincing stories. Good luck! You're in the right place imo.

Thanks Nahm! I did it using two photo editing apps, actually. I am not a very good artist :P. 

I have an optimistic view on the general awereness of spiritual concepts and enlightenment itself. The Internet is an amazing tool for curious minds. Even taking into consideration spyral dynamics levels, more and more people seem to be aknowloging these concepts. 

In my view, there is going to be a spiritual revolution in the next century, maybe. People are worried about "the technological singularity" and things like VR, but it seems to me that this kind of technological mind fucking might actually hint people about what is going on in "real reality". 

Yeah... I have a problem with optimism, I guess haha

[Cudin]

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

A) Jeffery Martin's method/course doesn't promise 75% success rate at liberation. It promises 75% chance of at least one nondual experience within 6 months of practice. That is a FAR cry from liberation. Make sure you're reading the fine print. Yeah, if you do 2 hours of daily concentration and meditation practice very rigorously, you'll probably have a 75% of getting a glimpse. Don't expect it to be a deep glimpse.

Thanks Leo!

I'd like to know where did you get this information, because I am still very skeptic about Jeffery's claims. 

He seems to be in touch with Ken Wilber and other really respectable people, I just didn't try his course yet because I don't have the money for it.

In this interview, Jeffery talks about how most people that took his systematic approach did get to a "ongoing persistent non-symbolic experience".

http://skeptiko.com/267-jeffery-martin-can-enlightenment-be-taught/

(listen from 1:34:00)

I do understand the difference between an enlightenment experience and an actual non-dual persistent state (at least conceptually). Jeffery seems to be talking about taking people to a non-dual persistent state!

I hate to be the one doing this, because I am new to the forum, and I know how much you have read about non-duality and even talked to enlightened people, but aren't you conceptualizing enlightenment to be the hardest thing ever to "achieve", when it is actually said by countless teachers  to be a really simple realization?

We all have spiritual egos and limiting beliefs, but I think the main reason for a forum like this to exist is to put it all on the table and help each other to go higher in the beautiful game of life

love from Brazil!

[Leo Gura]

@Cudin I remember reading about his statistical claims on his Finder's Course website. There he explains what the 75% refers to. I'm not saying anything bad about Jeffery Martin. I'd bet his course is great. Just make sure you go in with your eyes open. People tend to get overly-optimistic about such things. The whole "come follow my spiritual practice and you'll get enlightened in 2 days" is the oldest marketing gimmick in book. If it was true, a lot more people would be enlightened in the world.

Of course, enlightenment is easy, and enlightenment is hard. All depends on how you look at it. Don't make a limiting belief out of "enlightenment is hard". What I mean when I say that is that most people must go through a lot of suffering to attain it. And 99.999% of people fail. If it was truly easy, this wouldn't be the case.

As you get deeper into this work, and discover the Devil within you, you'll suffer enormously, and then you'll be able to appreciate why so few people are enlightened, and why enlightenment cannot be mainstreamed. At least not in our current era. Maybe in another 1000 years.

If you want to test this, try doing 16 hours of straight self-inquiry. "Easy" is probably the last word you'll use to describe that experience.

[Cudin]

@Leo Gura Why don't you try it?

You've got the money and the knowledge.

Pursuing enlightenment seems to be your priority (it is currently mine too, thanks to you).

The worst thing that might happen is losing $2k

I bet you were skeptical about 5-MeO-DMT and the whole Martin Ball story at first, too. Maybe you could even interview Jeffery himself for some future Actualized.org episode!

cheers

[Real Eyes]

The fact that Jeffery Martin charges such a huge amount of money for the course is HIGHLY suspicious to me.  He has tons of incentive to oversell his program.  

[Cudin]

@Real Eyes it is! but I felt the same way the first time I bought a self-help book. We have no way to discover if the dude is legit, unless someone from the forum actually take his course. We could even try to raise some money through an internal crowd funding or whatever. I swear, if I had the money, I would already have done it and reported the results here.

cheers!

[Cudin]

A great interview for those who are interested in what Jeffery is talking about! 

At around 2:00:00 he talks about his own full non-dual persistent experience (that meaning that the man is fukin' enlightened).

He also talks about how people are actually able to get to a non-dual state a lot quicker than we previously thought it was possible

Edited September 19, 2017 by Cudin

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Cudin said:

@Leo Gura Why don't you try it?

You've got the money and the knowledge.

Pursuing enlightenment seems to be your priority (it is currently mine too, thanks to you).

The worst thing that might happen is losing $2k

It requires a very big commitment. You gotta be his guinea pig for over 6 months, doing his exercises every day, filing reports every week.

If not for all that, I would do it. I've already got a lot of commitments. And I've already got a dozen different techniques that I could use for enlightenment. I don't particularly need any more.

If one of you guys wants to take the course and report back to us, that would be great. I would be interested to know what techniques he's teaching.

[Real Eyes]

Has anybody come across any reports from individuals that completed Jeffrey's course?  

[Scholar]

Does anyone have an estimate on the number of enlightened people living today? And obviously there are degrees of enlightenment, so I guess there are far less Buddha-level enlightened people than there are regular level enlightened people.

[Nahm]

@Scholar 0

[LaucherJunge]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

Does anyone have an estimate on the number of enlightened people living today? And obviously there are degrees of enlightenment, so I guess there are far less Buddha-level enlightened people than there are regular level enlightened people.

It's totally speculative i have heard estimates of around a few hundred to tens of thousands. You can't exactly go around asking people or even gurus for that matter "are you enlightened?" and expect everyone telling the truth the ones that are actually enlightened may even have a big chance of saying that they are not. 

[Scholar]

3 hours ago, Nahm said:

@Scholar 0

If I hate one thing about the entire spiritual culture, it is that people always look to give the deepest answere they can instead of actually being helpful. Yes, "A person cannot be enlightened!", but you know exactly what I mean!

[Nahm]

@Scholar  I'm staying strong with my zero. ??  An enlightened person can't be found. I don't think it's deep though. In simple terms, if you knew you'd met one, you'd have to be one (to have a comprehending consciousness) and then there wouldn't be one. Just one. So zero. Or one. 

[Cudin]

4 hours ago, Scholar said:

Does anyone have an estimate on the number of enlightened people living today? And obviously there are degrees of enlightenment, so I guess there are far less Buddha-level enlightened people than there are regular level enlightened people.

In the podcast I posted previously, Jeffery talks about it, if I am not mistaken. He has interviewed around 1200 subjects for his initial research, including some very well known spiritual leaders. He also gives an estimate about a percentage of the population that experiences PNSE, but I don't remember the exact number (it's probably far from true, anyway). 

And yes brothers, we all should try to use relative language, and put our Devils aside to help each other, mainly in this forum. 

Love you all

[Cudin]

On 9/18/2017 at 6:36 AM, Leo Gura said:

Egos have been reinventing the spiritual process for thousands of years, trying to make it more mainstream and adapted to the historical era in which the ego resides. Nothing new about that. This is the history of all religions. Making enlightenment "scientific" is no different than what any other religion does. Because you cannot ever symbolize enlightenment. So every teaching cannot be better than a metaphor.

Looking for shortcuts tends not to work. Because if it did, most people would be enlightened. But they aren't. Because the ego will corrupt the process, no matter how short it is. The problem of enlightenment isn't with lack of a straight-forward process. It's with lack of willingness. Which is something no process can fix for you. If you really wanted it, you could go become enlightened in a few months. But you don't want that. It's too much for the ego to swallow.

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not replying on this to make you waste your time or to bug you in any sort of way. It's just that I think I have the opportunity to repay all the knowledge and aha moments your content have allowed me to get.

The spiritual process is, like any other process, in constant evolution. I see spiritual practices as a sort of transcendental technology. Like any technology, it developed through history. Siddhartha gave us Vipassana. Later Buddhist Masters  invented Transcendental Meditation, Metta, Goenka Body Scanning, Zen Koans, Strong Determination Sitting and so on. Advaitins tend to focus on Self Inquiry / Neti-Neti methods. Some types of Yoga work through God devotion (Bakthi Yoga), which is very similar to the Christian Mysticism way. There is Kryia Yoga, Kundalini practices, Pranayamas, Asanas, so on and so forth. Shamans discovered a long time ago the "plants technologies", as Terence McKenna liked to say: Marijuana, Ayahuasca, Psilocybe Cubensis, Peyote, LSD, the Toad, Salvia, Holotropic Breathwork - the list is never ending.

Of course you know all of this - I am just trying to build up my argument, which is - spiritual practices are no different from material technology, they evolve through time. Some methods being more suitable for some people than others. The problem is that most of these methods are embedded in very dogmatic traditions (blue mythic-literal), which doesn't really allow their practitioners to see the big picture from a yellow integral perspective. For some reason (ego, I know, I know), the spiritual technologies didn't really evolve as much as material technology throughout history. My opinion being that we never reached a point where we could observe the big picture of it. We have internet, we have a lot of people transitioning from green to yellow!

IMHO Jeffery's body of work is the perfect missing link between science and spirituality. This is mothafuckin' huge, folks. It's the first time someone is trying (and getting outstanding results) to have a systematic, non dogmatic, integral approach to reaching non-dual states, using modern material technology and "gold standard" spiritual technologies. He even managed to avoid the dark night of the soul in the process, by using positive psychology.

To make things clear, I am not being paid to make any kind of propaganda here.  Since you are curious to know the methods Jeffery is using, there is a Reddit thread about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/62ev8b/community_the_finders_course_techniques_and/

From my research, it seems that Jeffery already tried to make the course available for free, but in that case, people would not apply enough discipline and could not effectively transition to any PNSE "location", as he classifies. Since that's the case, I felt it was ok to post this information here.

Of course there is a chance for it to be just plain BS and Jeffery's course could be a total scam, but following my intuition and research about it, I tend to say this is 100% legit. 

It's a wonderful time to be alive, my friends. We should be celebrating! 

[Leo Gura]

I have read reports of people taking Jeffery's course and benefiting a lot from it.

If you seek the most efficient spiritual technology in existence, you need look no further than 5-MeO-DMT. It's a veritable spiritual nuclear weapon.

But be careful what you wish for Truth is not for the faint of heart.

[Joseph Maynor]

At some point you gotta surrender, and no teacher can do that for you.    It seems to be happening automatically for me now.  Like a process that's now gonna play itself out.  Instruction is just first base.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[cirkussmile]

The problem is not waking up! That is already the case! The most difficult part is how to continue life. There are no techniques except practicing love in everything we do and get used to life as it is. Love get you there. Go outside and meet people is the way to go. Acceptans and so on. This is a way of life and not a point in time that will make the rest of time blissful.

Don't stress to much about it, instead ask yourself how you can act out of love in every new moment. But please.. don't decide before how you should act because there are no rules and you always KNOW what's right to do.