Educate Yourself About Enlightenment

By Leo Gura - May 21, 2017

Please! For fuck’s sake, if you are pursuing enlightenment, take the time to thoroughly educate yourself about it. Do the necessary reading! I see too many people cluelessly stumbling into this path, clearly not having done any serious reading or research. This is extremely foolish and dangerous. This path is WAY too tricky. It has way too many traps.

There’s no excuse for incorrect theory nowadays with Amazon and the internet.

Read at least 20 books about enlightenment. Make sure you include a broad cross-section of teachings, including: Buddhism, Yoga, Tantra, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Dzogchen, and modern secular teachings. With most emphasis and priority given to modern secular teachings.

This is a very practical matter. You buy 20 books, take them in your hands, and read the shit out of them, with pen in hand for plenty of underlining. And No… watching videos on YouTube does NOT count as reading a book! You sneaky weasel.

Don’t let people — like the annoying Neo-Advaitan’s — mislead you into thinking that enlightenment is simple, and therefore you have nothing to study. Enlightenment is both simple and extremely complex and nuanced. There is TONS of practical stuff to study about it. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have so many spiritual books, texts, and traditions. There is more to study than you will have years in your life.

If you are too lazy or too stubborn to read at least 20 diverse books on this subject, you have no business pursuing enlightenment. You will likely be more harmed than helped by it. You need to understand enough to be able to diagnose your own sticking points.

I exclude Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam because these teachings tend to be overly ideological, indirect, and misleading. Don’t be hurt by this. My concern here is practicality, not equality. The fact is, these 4 traditions have become very diluted and distorted, to dangerous levels. Although I encourage you to study them at some point just so you have a full appreciation of the world’s mystical traditions.

If you need book ideas, my book list has close to 40 great selections. And I’ll be adding more in the future.

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