Wrong State

By Leo Gura - May 7, 2025

The only reason you don’t see God right now is because you are in the wrong state of consciousness. If your state changed, you would see God all around you within 5 seconds. God would bathe you in its radiance like the sun on a bright summer day. You would be surrounded by God in every direction. You are already surrounded, you’re just in such a low state you cannot recognize it. It’s not your fault — there is nothing you can do because your state is simply inadequate. No amount of thinking or trying will help you from within your current state. Your state makes recognition of God impossible. It’s like you’re trying to do advanced mathematics while drunk. That won’t work. More effort will not make it work, it will just make you frustrated. This is why sitting and thinking about God does not reveal God. This is why no proof, argument, logic, or evidence is enough to reach God. Your state is wrong and no amount of thinking, reading, or proof is enough to change your state. Thinking does not change state enough no matter how hard you think. Proof does not change state. Reading books does not change state. To understand God requires radically changing your state. That’s the missing key.

Thinking is also not the problem. If you were in the right state, thinking would actually improve your understanding and recognition of God. Thinking is only a problem to the extent that it distracts you from changing your state. In the wrong state, thinking is incapable of reaching God. But in the right state, thinking is capable of reaching God. It is wrong when nondualists tell you that you cannot think your way to God or Truth. You certainly can and must think about God/Truth — but only from the right state. First reach the right state, then think. Then your thinking will be effective and illuminating. Thinking is also useful after the fact to help you integrate your higher state experiences.

It is impossible to understand the things I teach without radically changing your state. If something I say sounds crazy, that’s because you’re thinking about it from the wrong state so it does not compute. The #1 mistake of all human intellectual activity is to overlook the primacy of state in understanding. Reality simply cannot be understood from the default human state. It’s completely impossible. Yet no intellectual recognizes this. The only thing stopping you is your state. If you aren’t in the right state, none of your effort will matter. It’s not about effort, it’s about state! The dirty secret is: state > effort. If you were in the right state you would need zero effort. And if you are in the wrong state no amount of effort will work. This is why you cannot think your way into Awakening. This is the #1 most important thing nondualists and spiritual gurus do not tell you. They keep wasting your time trying to get you to understand things you will never understand because you are in the wrong state. In this way these teachers waste decades of your life, getting you to chase your own tail in endless frustration, confusion, and disappointment. It’s not your fault. You are just in the wrong state. You are wasting years trying to do the impossible. Stop listening to gurus and figure out how to change your state. Spiritual effort is important but that effort needs to primarily go towards changing your state, otherwise it will not be effective.

It took me a decade of frustration to understand this. No one was good enough to explain this properly to me, in fact, they gaslit me by telling me that state doesn’t matter.

This is the first thing that should be told to every spiritual aspirant.

The reason that long, hardcore meditation retreats work is because they are one of the few things that change your state. If you meditate all day long for two weeks straight, you will enter a new state. From this state God can easily dawn on you. But people are too distracted and unserious to do this.

The self-inquiry technique is virtually useless unless you are in the right state. If self-inquiry is not working for you, now you know why. Change your state first, then do self-inquiry. Self-inquiry should really only be done at the end of a 10 day meditation retreat. Then it’s effective because you are in a ripe state.

I think Zen koans are a stupid way of going about Awakening, but in the rare occasions where they work, it’s because the monk is in the right state from days and weeks of meditation. But a Zen koan in the default human state is completely useless.

All of spirituality can be boiled down to techniques for changing your state. Any spirituality that doesn’t place change of state as central will be ineffective and delusional.

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