Contemplation

A faithful description of the practice Gura teaches:

1. Pick one question that matters and that you cannot immediately answer. Gura favours “basic questions” you’ve never genuinely investigated — e.g. “What is happiness?”, “What is love?”, “What am I?”, “What is truth?” Choose a question whose honest answer would actually change how you live.
2. Sit down with it, undistracted. Set aside dedicated time. Many practitioners pair it with a journal (Gura has a specific “contemplate using a journal” teaching) so the reasoning is written out and can be examined.
3. Start from “ground zero.” Provisionally drop your inherited answers and second-hand beliefs about the question. The point is to think it through yourself, not to recite what you’ve read.
4. Reason and observe honestly. Turn the question over: define your terms, test your assumptions, look at your own direct experience for evidence, follow the logic even when it’s uncomfortable. Gura: “Even just sit and idly thinking can be a good start” — the work is sustained, focused, sincere attention on the one question.
5. Refuse to lie to yourself. The core discipline is radical honesty: notice when you’re reaching for a convenient or flattering answer and keep digging instead. Gura frames asking “the mind the right question” as already “a successful beginning.”
6. Stay with it past the easy answers. The first answers are usually shallow. Keep returning to the same question across many sittings; understanding deepens by repetition, not by a single insight.
7. Verify in experience, not just in thought. Gura treats genuine contemplation as moving toward direct understanding — checking conclusions against what you can actually observe in your own awareness, not only against argument. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases are short renderings from Actualized.org’s contemplation materials, attributed to Gura/forum context. The protocol is a faithful description, not a reproduction.)

The method is articulated by Leo Gura on Actualized.org through long-form video and written articles (“Contemplation — The Most Important Tool For Sages”; “How To Contemplate Using A Journal”). Gura’s framing draws on the Advaita / Ramana Maharshi self-inquiry lineage (he explicitly uses “Who am I?”) and on Western philosophy’s tradition of first-person reasoning, but he packages it as a general-purpose investigative tool for any question, delivered natively to an online audience.

Ramana Maharshi — self-inquiry (“Who am I?”) — Gura’s question-driven inquiry is directly downstream of this; Ramana, however, treats the question as a pointer that ends in wordless abidance, not as reasoning to a conclusion.

• Socratic method / philosophical contemplation — sustained questioning of definitions and assumptions to reach understanding.
• Reflective journaling & “the Work” (Byron Katie) — writing a belief down and interrogating it.,
• Zen koan — sitting with an unanswerable question; but koan aims to exhaust discursive thought, whereas Gura’s contemplation engages it.
• Rudd’s “contemplation” — sitting receptively with a theme.

Reciting received answers. Quoting a book or guru is the opposite of contemplation; the whole point is to think from ground zero.

• Drifting into daydream. Contemplation is focused thinking on one question, not free association; if you’ve wandered, return to the question.
• Stopping at the first answer. Early answers are shallow; the value comes from staying with the question across many sittings.
• Self-flattery / motivated reasoning. The discipline is catching yourself reaching for the comfortable answer and digging anyway.
• Refinement: writing it out (journal contemplation) makes the reasoning visible and harder to fudge.