Leo Gura

The most fundamental step -- as I happen to talk about in this week's video -- is to commit to a slow, steady life-long study of this field: self-mastery. Then you just make sure to stay calm, patient, and consistent with your studies. And eventually, EVERYTHING will transform. But it will take some struggle at first and it will be slow-going at first. Just stay calm and carry on. You probably should avoid my deeper videos for now (like the enlightenment videos). Stick to the more practical stuff that will improve your current daily existence until you get deeper into it.

People can lucid dream by accident, but you won't get very far with it unless you become committed to mastering it (just like anything else in life). Enlightenment is not at all necessary for lucid dreaming. It's much easier.

Lucid dreaming is a well-proven thing. There are many books written about how to develop it deliberately. You can start lucid dreaming with some simple techniques within 2-4 weeks. And then you can actually use it to do personal development in your sleep! I haven't had time to delve into it much yet. But it looks promising, not to mention fun: design the hot orgy of your dreams and control it like a film director!

@mkieblesz Awareness is prior to and independent of rationality. In fact rationality actively impede awareness because -- like I alluded to in the dream analogy above -- rationality is the content of the dream. Rational people get lost in the content of their thoughts. For example, to say that something is contradictory and therefore false is to be lost in the contents of thought. It assumes that we should take thoughts seriously in the first place. Which of course is the mother of all bad assumptions. I'm not saying rationality is bad per se. It's certainly better than irrationality. But there is something above rationality, which is a-rationality. Reality, as it turns out, is arational. I want to write a whole book on this topic because I've thought about it A LOT.

You're talking about lucid dreaming. I'm not lucid when I dream. That's a skill that can be developed with practice if one desires. Now what's even cooler than lucid dreaming is being conscious in deep sleep! Which highly enlightened folks have been able to accomplish. 24/7 consciousness!

What I mean is, if takes 6 years to research, then it should at least take a viewer 6 hours to decompress it. If someone could learn everything I learned in 6 years in 60 minutes, frankly, I would be pissed off! The topics we're generally learning here take YEARS to fully plumb. I always feel I do them injustice, even with a 60+ minute video.

I try to pack them full of juicy insights. The recent video about the human knowledge graph was like 6 years of intense research packed into 60 minutes, lol. There was a lot more than needed to be said in that one, but it just runs too long. It's hard to balance between depth vs brevity and depth vs practicality. A 60+ minute video is exhausting to shoot and much fewer people will click on it than a 30 minute video which is much easier to shoot. Not only that, but it starts to get so abstract that people don't understand how to act on it, and then it just becomes more beliefs in the knowledge graph. Which is why in the last video I asked people to make a long-term commitment to understanding.

What would you do with your life if you had $100 million dollars and no chance of failure? Do that!

The forum is mobile-friendly, so I don't see the need for an app at this point. Creating an app for something as complex as this forum is a huge technical project.

I want to create a small course in the future what shows you how I organize and manage my commonplace book, with video screen captures and lots of explanations. It's taken me a good 3 years to come up with a good system. And it's really powerful.

Another, less anti-social option, is to do a live-in consciousness apprenticeship program. PM me if you're serious and I'll give you a recommendation or two. (Note: this is only for very serious spiritual aspirants who have money and time to burn.)

@Kyle Sounds like you might be a great candidate for going off and doing your own thing. If you're highly independent, creative, ambitious, and self-driven, then don't let mainstream society hold you back. Watch this video, it was shot for people like you: http://www.actualized.org/articles/how-to-unleash-your-ambition Do be careful though, because going off on your own takes a lot of maturity and responsibility. It becomes all on you. Personally I LOVE going it rouge.

Your vision shouldn't be about making yourself successful, but more about your impact on other people, society, or the whole world.

Haha, you don't need to become anyone's assistant. All the tools for developing yourself are mostly free! That's the beautiful part. The bottleneck is not lack of money, it's lack of willingness to do the inner work. Want to develop yourself to crazy levels quickly? Use that money to buy a little shack in the woods, stock it with food, and live there for the next 2-3 years. Read books, meditate, contemplate, journal, etc. You will grow crazy fast and you don't need to be anyone's little bitch assistant.

It's not wrong, it just depends... How passionate are you about Plan B on a scale of 1 to 10? If you're not that passionate, then it's probably a waste of your time because you will not be able to do great work with Plan B. A career like acting requires lots of talent, skills, and commitment. There's no way you're gonna compete with other fully-committed actors if you're spending 40 hours per week doing Plan B. If you wanna be an actor you have 2 basic options: Go all-in right now and don't look back Find a well-paying Plan B job, do it for a few years to save up lots of money. Then quit and do option #1. Or... You can give up on your acting ambitions entirely and find something else that you might like even more.

If you're a good programmer, one option for you is freelancing or consulting work. Programmers get paid well, so it's much easier for you to support yourself than other people. Another option is to find a lucrative programming job, do it for a year or two, cut back on all your expenses, save up like $100,000 in cash, and then quit and start your own thing.

For a dose of realism, having worked in various online businesses for almost the last 10 years, I can tell you that earning a full-time salary from a website is VERY VERY challenging. Not impossible, but most people are not willing to do what it takes to make it happen. However much work you think it will take, multiply that estimate by 10 or 100! I don't want to discourage you, but this path should only be considered if you want to be a serious online entrepreneur. And even then, you're likely looking at working 60+ hour weeks for 2-5 years before you see any money. There are other paths which may be more appropriate for you, involving less risk and less time investment. Some jobs can be highly-lucrative without requiring much skills or training. For example, I know a guy who works as a merchant sailor. Zero experience required to start. He travels on a big commercial freight ship around the world, mostly between the US and China. He works for 60-90 days, then he gets 30 days rest. He earns really good money for this basic job: $60,000-$80,000 per year. That's enough to allow him to live whatever lifestyle he wants. Most of his sailor friends blow their money on booze, gambling, and hookers in Asia. But this guy is smart. He saves up his money and during his 30-day rest periods he goes to meditation retreats, does personal development, and enjoys himself. When he's traveling aboard the ship -- there are no distractions, no cell phones, no TV, no friends -- so he has time to meditate and read books. That's just one example. There are many others you could research and discover.

Be more mindful that you're using mindfulness mindlessly I think you've defined mindfulness too narrowly, as something associated with focusing on your breath. When in fact it's much broader than that. You gotta be careful not to become a mindless meditation machine. Try practicing mindfulness without focusing on your breath, and while doing activities such as light chores, house work, cleaning, showering, driving, watching TV, and even talking to people. This will push your mindfulness abilities outside of their currently constricted pigeon-hole. And when in comes to doing practical thinking/planning, allow yourself to get into it and to flow. In pursuing mindfulness we tend to swing our pendulum too much to one side and demonize all thinking as evil. Thinking is not evil. This needs to better integrated in you. Thinking is useful in proper proportions and situations. The only thinking that's really problematic is the I-thinking. That is, thinking about the me, me, me, me! all the time.

The ego's favorite defense is to stall out the clock. So of course there's never enough time to do the important stuff when all the unimportant stuff is prioritized higher. But I can also empathize with the lack of time problem. In a sense, it's a lack of energy problem. I remember working a frustrating 9 to 5 job. It's grueling. By the end of the day, after work, dinner, gym, and some daily chores, all I wanna do is crash and veg out in front of the TV. I want to watch something fun and easy-going, not a bald dude yelling at me for 60 minutes, telling me everything I'm doing is wrong. Lol Pushing past that is really tough. I had to do it though personally to start my first business and create the free time I needed to do personal development work and pursue my passions.

If I had ADHD, I would invest a lot of time and energy researching the root cause and finding a natural cure. It's very likely related to improper diet or toxins/chemicals in your body that need to be detoxed. Or some psychosomatic thing. Or simply lack of discipline. What you're doing now is like trying to race your car while the parking break is on. Go research people who have cured their ADHD naturally and read what steps they took. You'll likely find the solution.

Sit and do self-inquiry or meditation, especially when you feel eager to distract yourself with titillating entertainment or important business.

Most people with regard to ethics and morality have it backwards, they put the cart before the horse. If the boundary between self and other is eliminated (enlightenment) then what naturally springs up from that void is: universal compassion and expressions of unconditional love for all of reality. << This is where all the best and oldest ethical and moral precepts come from. It's analogous to when Pythagoras discovers the Pythagorean theorem through direct investigation and then codifies it into a formula which is then applied mechanically by millions of school children to crunch numbers. A deep understand of the theorem from first-hand investigation is rare. Most people just crunch numbers blindly when it comes to ethics. They don't understand WHY it works or where it's sourced from, they just know the rules to follow. And ironically this turns them into little egotical devils, judging everything under the sun as good/evil. Why does Buddhism teach ethics? Probably because most people won't get very far on the path and some rules are better than nothing. Probably because reducing hedonistic or narcissistic action helps keep moving along the path. Probably because of social and political reasons too. Probably because from the Buddha's position it's the natural way to act. Probably simply due to cultural conventions and even the Buddha's own dogmas. And probably because the Buddha could not foresee the evils and abuses that would come when people turned his rules into religious doctrines. It's important to remember that the ancient sages like Jesus or The Buddha did not have the wisdom of history like we do today. If Jesus or Buddha saw the last 2000 years of human history and all the evils that have been done in the name of religion and morality, they would probably have re-thought how they taught their disciplines and what rules they laid out. My guess is, they just sort of assumed that if you give the people some nice rules to live by, that will be helpful and no wrong will come of it. But they couldn't foresee how societies and religions would rise to power and use these rules as weapons to wage war on the ego's behalf.

I don't know about sensing calm, but my old cat used to certainly sense when people around her were frantic, disturbed, or angry from the tone of the conversations in the family household.

Two questions to ask yourself when this happens: What is the depression hiding? What is it a smokescreen for? What am I ultimately distracting myself from? The Void is scary thing to face. Few people are wise enough to face it head on.

I do talk a lot of about the hero's journey in the life purpose course. But I probably should make a free video that touches on it too. There are many things to be said about the hero's journey.