Someone Reviewed Leo's Views on Enlightenment

[Leo Gura]

@Enlightenment Jeffery Martin's work is good, but still very shallow. He has no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. He's still within the materialist paradigm.

The stuff I talk about is what the most advanced yogis realize and embody. Total God-realization. You are not going to acheive that with a bit of self-inquiry or meditation. It requires a rewiring of your entire brain and even body. Which is what yogic techniques are designed to do.

Someone like Sadhguru is a good example. He is living in a full state of God-realization.

[NoSelfSelf]

@Leo Gura how? Self inquiry can take you all the way...

[electroBeam]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Enlightenment  bit of self-inquiry or meditation. 

Are you saying that the purpose of yoga is different to the purpose of meditation and inquiry? Are you saying that meditation and self inquiry are not as powerful as yoga? When would someone use meditation instead of yoga or yoga instead of meditation? What is even the difference between yoga and meditation? Are you talking specifically about kriya? Because self inquiry = jnana yoga?

[Mu_]

18 hours ago, electroBeam said:

@Joseph Maynor YES!! My experience is much more similar to hers than Leo's

Having said that:

1. She says that everything and nothing is a stepping stone and she derives that reason from her experience as just 'nothing' and no 'everything'. My experience is the same as hers, I experience literally nothing and I have no idea what Leo means by 'everything' or I've never experienced 'everything' before. Yet I have a feeling that this is an interpretative difference rather than experiential difference, and not because Leo is less advanced than her. Leo might be trying to say everything as in form rather than formless, but I'm not sure.

2. Totally agree with her when she says awakening has nothing to do with changing facts. In my awakening experiences, facts do not change only your perspective of it. Yet at the same time, what DOES change facts(like the physical world being made up) is actually not consciousness work but philosophy work: reading philosophy, intellectual contemplation, etc.. I think Leo mixes consciousness work up with intellectual work, hence he thinks that awakening experiences cause you to loose sense of physical reality or any other relative facts. relative facts only change when you do a lot of intellectual contemplation work, or in other words, authentic western science. 

3. Totally agree with her with the lower self and higher self. She said Leo thinks there is a higher self, but in her experience she has only experienced nothingness. I experience the exact same. When I experience no ego, I don't get an experience of being god. I just get an experience that I do not exist. Like whether I'm god, or a self, or a lamp or an alien is totally irrelevant. The whole trying to identify yourself as something game drops away, and hence I do not experience myself as 'God' Reality is just existing the way it is, there is no identification at all. So yeah don't get at all what Leo means by we are 'God'

4. Again agree with her with the distinctions. But again, I think that's because she doesn't do much intellectual contemplation. 

When a everything revelation happens you will have no doubt what it’s pointing to. Hahaha. You can get very intellectual after but the embodied directness of that moment is such that all is oneself experientially. Not a belief. No confusion about it. Remember before your recognition of nothingness. Prior it may of seemed impossible unfathomable, or just a fantasy. Then boom void/nothing/undefinable yet happening. Same thing here boom, everything, historical laughter probably. 

 

Your point 2. Is interesting. I’d have to ponder that one some more. 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, NoSelfSelf said:

@Leo Gura how? Self inquiry can take you all the way...

The key word there is CAN.

Besides which, how would you know? Have you tried all the techniques? Have you gone all the way? How would you even know what "all the way" is? All you have are stories from gurus. And how do you know which guru is right and which is wrong? Because they certainly don't all say the same thing.

See how tricky this is? You don't know what you don't know.

1 hour ago, electroBeam said:

Are you saying that the purpose of yoga is different to the purpose of meditation and inquiry? Are you saying that meditation and self inquiry are not as powerful as yoga? When would someone use meditation instead of yoga or yoga instead of meditation? What is even the difference between yoga and meditation? Are you talking specifically about kriya? Because self inquiry = jnana yoga?

There are many valid techniques.

But to reach the highest levels will require that you use these techniques with such focus and intensity that it will physiologically change how your brain fires.

You have to consider: your brain physiology puts some hard limits on your degree of consciousness. Which is why psychedelics are so great. They change your brain physiology in such a way that you are able to access states of consciousness which most ordinary brains cannot access without incredible periods of practice, or even at all.

Consider the possibility that if your brain was twice bigger your awakening would be deeper in ways that a normal human brain cannot even fathom.

Yoga is specifically designed to change the physiology of your brain. Think of it like doubling the size of your brain. Of course you are not physically doubling its size, you're just changing how it's wired. Which is just as significant. And not just the brain but also the bodily nervous system.

Do not assume that all people or spiritual practitioners have access to the same brain hardware. Not at all. Every brain is unique, with unique pros and cons. Some people's brain hardware is so inadequate they cannot add two numbers together or recognize their mother or father.

People take all this for granted. The reality of how spirituality works is much more complex than most people are willing to admit.

And the paradox is, brains still don't exist

Tricky, tricky stuff.

[SoonHei]

@Leo Gura love it

[electroBeam]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yoga is specifically designed to change the physiology of your brain. Think of it like doubling the size of your brain.

Yes true, but what is the difference between yoga and meditation. Meditation, by definition, reshapes your brain aswell. Is yoga like an advanced technique while meditation is a kindergarten technique? If on the other hand yoga is more powerful than zazen, and at the same time its not an advanced version of meditation, then why do people still use zen? I also acknowledge that some brains get more effects from zen compared to kriya yoga because everyone is different, but as a general understanding, what is the difference between them?

9 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You have to consider: your brain physiology puts some hard limits on your degree of consciousness. Which is why psychedelics are so great. They change your brain physiology in such a way that you are able to access states of consciousness which most ordinary brains cannot access without incredible periods of practice.

Except for the fact that your brain only changes while under that drug. After the drug wears off you're back to normal. Hence why yoga and meditation are still essential, more essential than psychedelics.

 

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Consider the possibility that if your brain was twice bigger your awakening would be deeper in ways that a normal human brain cannot even fathom.

This is a very popular paradigm in the personal development sector: neuroplasticity and the like, I don't see how that paradigm makes sense in the case of increasing consciousness though. When in awakening experiences, its hard to take the existence of a brain seriously. This doesn't make much sense to me. 

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yoga is specifically designed to change the physiology of your brain. Think of it like doubling the size of your brain.

Like its also designed to get you in touch with different chakras so that you can utilize them effectively to understand the universe, but apart from that yes maybe it doubles your brain. 

How about we look at it this way: What flavour of insights do you get from self inquiry compared to kriya yoga? Do you get more understanding of NOTHINGNESS in self inquiry, but more awareness of LOVE when doing yoga? What do you feel when doing kriya compared to self inquiry? More energetic less energetic, what do your awakening experiences feel like on kriya vs self inquiry/buddhist meditation? 

This is valuable not just for me but for everyone here, because we all need different experiences depending on where we are in our spiritual journey. Some of us need more nothingness while others need more love. Different techniques render different facets. 

[Leo Gura]

Yoga has more of a physiological and bodily component to it than meditation or self-inquiry. This is not to say that self-inquiry or meditation are bad, but there is good reason why yogis do all those bodily practices. It really helps with embodying one's enlightenment. There is an energetic component to enlightenment which could easily be missed if all you do is self-inquire. Emotional blockages can reside in the body.

After the drug wears off you are not totally back to normal. Permanent shifts are made. You have to stop thinking of this process of awakening in a binary way of "awake/not awake". There's much more nuance to it.

Personally I think yoga is more powerful than meditation or self-inquiry. But that's my guess and it could vary for person to person. If meditation was as powerful as yoga, yogic techniques would be obsolete and they would not have been invented. That's my guess. It's hard to fairly compare all the techniques because they each require so much training that no one person has mastered them all. Also, no two people have identical capacities.

The point is: keep an open mind and experiment to see what works best for you. I am not trying to convince anyone that yoga is best. It's hard to argue that yoga is not powerful. So it's worth exploring.

[electroBeam]

@Leo Gura interesting thanks!

I also have the same experience. I tried self inquiry and meditation for about a year and it was a failed project. Went to bhakti yoga and kriya yoga and for the past 6 months has been much more effective because you have more stimulus: the whole body rather than just intellect or thoughts(6th sense). 

having said that, theoretically self inquiry could be as effective as yoga when you consider ramana maharshi advocates it above anything else. 

[Leo Gura]

49 minutes ago, electroBeam said:

having said that, theoretically self inquiry could be as effective as yoga when you consider ramana maharshi advocates it above anything else.

The problem with that is that Ramana Maharshi was clearly extremely spiritually gifted. Whether it was genetics or good karma doesn't really matter. He had unique capacities which ordinary people do not have. So comparing yourself to him can be problematic. It's like Arnold saying that benching 500 lbs is a piece of cake. Yeah, for him it is.

If your brain is already in a spiritual configuration, then obviously you don't need yogic techniques which are designed to rewire your brain into a spiritual configuration. If you are 7 feet tall you don't need high heels. Some folks are born 7 ft tall. Some are born spiritual midgets.

[AlwaysBeNice]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Personally I think yoga is more powerful than meditation or self-inquiry. But that's my guess and it could vary for person to person. If meditation was as powerful as yoga, yogic techniques would be obsolete and they would not have been invented.

Powerful for what? Experiences?

[Leo Gura]

@AlwaysBeNice God-realization and consciousness.

[SriBhagwanYogi]

@Leo Gura Do you still do self inquiry? 

[Leo Gura]

@SriBhagwanYogi Not really. Since there is nothing but myself, I just sit and look around at myself. There is nothing to find since I exist anywhere I look.

At a certain point you just sit in silence and enjoy yourself. This is the essence of meditation.

[Scholar]

What if one day there will be an enlightened master who will claim that all aspects of spiritual work are describing aspects of mind? What if they, despite having experienced all Leo has experienced and more, will claim that it is all just mind?

Can there not be a perspective which simply assumes that the mind can be infinite, yet that it is not everything in existence? To me it seems like people have a misconception about how the brain and the mind function. We seem to view experience in the same way we view the physical word, as something that has boundaries, that is limited. For example, we cannot imagine there to exist infinite atoms in one single brain, and thus we assume there cannot be an infinite experience. Yet, experience might function more like a spectrum, a vector, in other words, it might not require any more brain cells to experience "1000% intensity of love" than let's say, "10% intensity of love". It might be that instead the experience, the aspect of reality that mind is "pulling" from, is rather limited upon than "generated" by the mind-structure.

Thus, instead of needing more "power", more "energy" to create an experience of infinity, it might more be like it requires more cells, more structure to limit in more nuanced ways the dimension of existence which is accessed. So, for example a structure less complex would only be able to either not experience pain or experience infinite pain. A more complex structure would be able to get more steps inbetween, like dividing infinite intensity into 1/4s, or 1/8s, 1/10000000s etc.

Might we not be victims to our cultural misconceptions of the capacity of mind? Again, if I assume that everything I experience is equal to the wave-function which makes up whatever brain-activity that is correlated to consciousness, then of course all aspects of experience will be revealed to have aspects of intelligence, of divine love, of oneness. Though these aspects will be rather the aspects of that particular wave-function, they will be very much real, very much as real as anything could be, but yet they would not be the whole, the entirety of the wave-function of this universe.

To "access" the entirety of the wave-function, or the universal-wave-function, would require to go deeper, more fundamental, where we find no-thing, no-mind. The wave-function of the individual mind is indeed part of the whole, but it should not be confused with the whole. Leo might be discovering truths between the mind-wave-function and the universal-wave-function and be confusing these aspects as something inherent to the universal-wave-function.

How could he possibly tell what aspects he is experiencing? It seems to me that Leo assumes that just because these aspects are grand, beyond regular imagination, beyond regular consciousness, that they are beyond mind, when all this could be is Leo's fundamental misconception of what the mind is and that it has access to infinities, yet that it is not Absolute Infinity.

 

I am saying this because whenever I listen to Leo talk about these different facets, it just seems like he is describing the infinities of mind, instead of the infinity of Totality.

I think we have to let go of the notions that Infinity, whether it is infinite color, infinite love, infinite meaningfulness, infinite space, infinite sense of self, whatever infinity it is, that it is something special. Instead we could start embrace the idea that infinities are simply regular functions of reality, that they are just as special as a limits. In fact, it might be that limitation is far more special than unlimitedness, because it requires structure that limit those infinities. Yet, when the regular mind is uncapped from it's limitations, it cannot fathom that these infinities are part of it, that in fact every single aspect of the mind is an infinity. It cannot comprehend, because comprehension requires limitations, and that is why we might fall into delusion, into false assumptions about the Totality of reality when we are merely experiencing infinite aspects of mind.

It would also explain why some people have an experience of God before they die, it simply is the different aspects of their minds shutting down, and as they do so, the limitations are "uncapped", revealing the infinities for what they are. This would explain the difference in experience from person to person, and it would explain why, in the future, when we will be capable of changing certain structures of the brain at will, why they will reveal those aspects to us. The structures are there to limit, not to generate consciousness. Once we change our paradigm, so will the interpretations of our experiences. Maybe Leo is paradigm locked...

 

In other words, Leo might be describing Soul, rather than Spirit.

[bobbyward]

@Leo Gura which yoga techniques do you think are best?

[SriBhagwanYogi]

@Leo Gura Nice i get that from self inquiry but i notice self inquiry and do nothing lead to same place. 

You are right about Yoga even if i do Kriya for month and basic practices i feel Energy boost more clarity, Concetration etc

[Joseph Maynor]

33 minutes ago, Scholar said:

What if one day there will be an enlightened master who will claim that all aspects of spiritual work are describing aspects of mind? What if they, despite having experienced all Leo has experienced and more, will claim that it is all just mind?

Can there not be a perspective which simply assumes that the mind can be infinite, yet that it is not everything in existence? To me it seems like people have a misconception about how the brain and the mind function. We seem to view experience in the same way we view the physical word, as something that has boundaries, that is limited. For example, we cannot imagine there to exist infinite atoms in one single brain, and thus we assume there cannot be an infinite experience. Yet, experience might function more like a spectrum, a vector, in other words, it might not require any more brain cells to experience "1000% intensity of love" than let's say, "10% intensity of love". It might be that instead the experience, the aspect of reality that mind is "pulling" from, is rather limited upon than "generated" by the mind-structure.

Thus, instead of needing more "power", more "energy" to create an experience of infinity, it might more be like it requires more cells, more structure to limit in more nuanced ways the dimension of existence which is accessed. So, for example a structure less complex would only be able to either not experience pain or experience infinite pain. A more complex structure would be able to get more steps inbetween, like dividing infinite intensity into 1/4s, or 1/8s, 1/10000000s etc.

Might we not be victims to our cultural misconceptions of the capacity of mind? Again, if I assume that everything I experience is equal to the wave-function which makes up whatever brain-activity that is correlated to consciousness, then of course all aspects of experience will be revealed to have aspects of intelligence, of divine love, of oneness. Though these aspects will be rather the aspects of that particular wave-function, they will be very much real, very much as real as anything could be, but yet they would not be the whole, the entirety of the wave-function of this universe.

To "access" the entirety of the wave-function, or the universal-wave-function, would require to go deeper, more fundamental, where we find no-thing, no-mind. The wave-function of the individual mind is indeed part of the whole, but it should not be confused with the whole. Leo might be discovering truths between the mind-wave-function and the universal-wave-function and be confusing these aspects as something inherent to the universal-wave-function.

How could he possibly tell what aspects he is experiencing? It seems to me that Leo assumes that just because these aspects are grand, beyond regular imagination, beyond regular consciousness, that they are beyond mind, when all this could be is Leo's fundamental misconception of what the mind is and that it has access to infinities, yet that it is not Absolute Infinity.

 

I am saying this because whenever I listen to Leo talk about these different facets, it just seems like he is describing the infinities of mind, instead of the infinity of Totality.

I think we have to let go of the notions that Infinity, whether it is infinite color, infinite love, infinite meaningfulness, infinite space, infinite sense of self, whatever infinity it is, that it is something special. Instead we could start embrace the idea that infinities are simply regular functions of reality, that they are just as special as a limits. In fact, it might be that limitation is far more special than unlimitedness, because it requires structure that limit those infinities. Yet, when the regular mind is uncapped from it's limitations, it cannot fathom that these infinities are part of it, that in fact every single aspect of the mind is an infinity. It cannot comprehend, because comprehension requires limitations, and that is why we might fall into delusion, into false assumptions about the Totality of reality when we are merely experiencing infinite aspects of mind.

It would also explain why some people have an experience of God before they die, it simply is the different aspects of their minds shutting down, and as they do so, the limitations are "uncapped", revealing the infinities for what they are. This would explain the difference in experience from person to person, and it would explain why, in the future, when we will be capable of changing certain structures of the brain at will, why they will reveal those aspects to us. The structures are there to limit, not to generate consciousness. Once we change our paradigm, so will the interpretations of our experiences. Maybe Leo is paradigm locked...

In other words, Leo might be describing Soul, rather than Spirit.

One day we're gonna get a simple answer from you haha.  A one-liner answer from Scholar.  

Edited April 18, 2019 by Joseph Maynor

[thesmileyone]

She got wierd energy...

Interesting idea in one of her other videos...dehumanizing people, the problem is it can lead to nihilism very easily. She is obviously smart... not sure I like the energy she radiates though.
 

 

Edited April 18, 2019 by thesmileyone

[Dumb Enlightened]

On 17/04/2019 at 11:11 AM, Enlightenment said:

@Adam M Awakened/enlightened people have ego's (otherwise they couldn't even communicate), so it's not that ego reforms back. What I mean is that Leo's 5-MeO trips which he takes as "Ultimate Reality" have almost nothing to do with how it is to be enlightened. Leo makes assumptions about enlightenment from his trips, that are incorrect. Enlightened people don't feel infinite love or infinite goodness/intelligence. It's more like a state of disidentification from ego with no sense of agency.

You are saying this by experience or you read it in a book ?

Because we can read lots of shit in books