Leo Gura

There are many good communes, ashrams, and monasteries all over the world. Where you can devote your life completely to spirituality, if that's your desire. It's all a matter of figuring out for yourself what the hell you want out of your life. Why are you alive? What do you care about? Get clear and then take action. Enormous courage will always be required to follow your truest path. If you are young, and you don't have a family to support or a big career or business to maintain, then you've got very little to lose. You can afford to be bold. Now is the best time. You can always return back to your old, crap lifestyle.

@Tony19 You eat an elephant one piece at a time. What's the rush? Get comfy and dig in. This is the whole point of your 70 or so years here in this life. There is nowhere to get to. So enjoy the process of research and discovery. Just balance your theory with practice. A combined, holistic understanding of all the concepts will take you at least 10 to 20 years. And that's assuming your doing it actively every day, and are wise enough to avoid most of the traps of this work.

@electroBeam All koans mean the same thing: Truth There is no point in "answering them". The answer is the Truth itself. You either experience it or you don't. There's nothing to puzzle out about koans. When you become so openminded that you cease making a distinction between reality/unreality, and life/death, you will experience physical death. That is enlightenment. You become so openminded that you literally kill yourself.

Of course it doesn't want to stick. That's the thing you gotta break through past, not avoid! You should be able to focus on one thing for 5000 hours. Boring is in your mind.

Do it your way. But the proof will be in the pudding. You've been warned. Look at all these Zen devils in the making... sigh...

@The White Belt Yes, that's tricky. Requires real vision, intuition, and contemplation to get clear about that. This is where reprogramming your subconscious mind comes in handy. Just as a thought-experiment, you could imagine all your fears and limiting beliefs disappear for a moment. Imagine you couldn't fail. What would you pursue in life? Go through and answer the list of life purpose questions from the course. There's like over 50 of them there. Set your fears aside for now. We don't care what you fear. We care what you WANT.

It's extra-bad for coders. I've coded quite a bit myself in the past, and I worked in an industry with professional coders. It's an obscenely unhealthy and unconscious lifestyle. Much more so than being a writer. Coding has a way of sucking you in. I don't spend 10 hours a day starting into a box. I could minimize my computer activity to maybe 5 hours per week. I'm pretty flexible. The core of my work is not dependent on computers. And I'm far from the best role-model as far as high-consciousness lifestyle.

Because it's setting a stupid expectation based on arrogance and delusion, promoting further arrogance and delusion. You can practice mindfulness 24/7 all you want, but don't tell yourself you're gonna master this field in 1 year, or even 10 years. You won't! Not even close. Don't get cute here. You master it by doing, not by bullshitting yourself with cute neo-Advaita phrases about cats and blooming flowers. When someone comes and rapes your mother, let's see what tune you sing then. Let's see how enlightened you are then. You have no idea yet how much work it will take. You are a human being, not a cat. Cats aren't doing mastery. If you want to be a slob and sleep for 75% of the day, follow the cat's example.

Just because one studies or models the mind in an academic setting does not mean they are doing anything to raise their own personal consciousness. It's like: just because you're a heart surgeon doesn't mean you have a healthy heart. Meany heart surgeons are fat and unhealthy. Also, consciousness != AI. This is big misconception. Consciousness is the very fabric of existence. AI is about mechanical algorithms which resemble the actions of mind. But mind != consciousness. Consciousness is actually almost the inverse of mind. All that said, I don't want to bum you out. If you really have a passion for AI and programming, that could be a valid life purpose. But just don't confuse it with raising your own consciousness, or other people's consciousnesses. Additionally, if you want to make your life purpose about using technology to help people actually raise their consciousness, that is a viable path. But note, very few people are doing that. There is a lot of self-delusion in the tech industry about how their technology affects consciousness of ordinary people. Most of the tech actually makes things much worse for people. And AI is not about helping people raise consciousness, it's about making computers more efficient or more capable. So you have to be very careful here, otherwise you could end up having the opposite impact of what you intended. Also, you should consider what affect sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day coding has on your consciousness and quality of life. Is that how you really want to live your life? Staring into a box while telling yourself you are living a high consciousness lifestyle? How are you different from a slug hooked up to a VR machine?

@The White Belt That's definitely a good clue. Your first clues will not be crystal clear because you suck, so you do have to mentally adjust for that fact. There will be unnecessary fear and doubt clogging up your clarity of vision. That said, also be careful about the praise/validation part. Egos love validation, so you cannot rely on that. It's also completely unsuitable for fueling the mastery process of anything. Instead of basking in the validation, ask yourself, "Do I really love this craft? Do I want to go deep in learning the craft of acting? Do I really enjoy it? Do I consider it beautiful in itself even without money or validation?" If YES! then that's a very strong positive clue.

Nice topic, lots of 'em out there if you search.

@electroBeam Purify that desire, get to the bottom of it, and it will turn into being a Bodhisattva. An evangelist is just a corrupt, ignorant Bodhisattva.

Try breath. It works great.

Not worth plugging if it takes 70mgs. Waste of rare product.

Sweet

Only totally.

No! No! No! Stop playing this shit. Seriously. Get a life. You're one step shy of: "Look Ma! I'm meditating!"

Lol, you ain't gonna master shit in 1 year. Least of all nonduality.

@Splion You're welcome to work in a factory. Let's see how egoic that turns out.

I would listen to the guy with the most Rolls Royces

@Snick Well of course. You play with pigs, you're bound to get dirty Use it as in-field mindfulness training. As you get more experienced with meditation, you'll start to carry it into your everyday life more, not just the cushion. And you don't have to be an arrogant ass about your spirituality. A Buddha can get drunk with the villagers. Read some Ryokan poetry.

Your family happenings got nothing to do with advancing your spirituality. Why would you expect them to? Do your consciousness work all alone, and don't expect any social support, unless you are specifically in an ashram or workshop where such support is promised. Yes, enlightenment is simply awakening to What you are. Nothing more. What you do with it is another matter. The issue isn't time, but that you are conflating the realization of Truth with changing the self, which are two very different things.

I swear, rationalism is a worse disease of the mind than fundamentalism. So many good minds wasted.

Generally yes. Although you could, for example, join the Santo Daime church and drink DMT legally through them.

In the early and middle phases, you ask questions to focus your mind. At the advanced phases, you become so focused on the questions, and you've asked them thousands of times already, so they can drop away and you are just left in a sort of meditative state plus you are deeply wondering. When you pose the questions, make sure you actually get traction. Wonder very deeply. Observe your experience very closely.