Leo Gura

I met a guy who was employed as a merchant sailor in the Northwest, Seattle area. Requires zero experience to start. Their union trains you. Pays very well for a manual labor job, good promotion opportunities, you get to travel the world, and you get 90 days off the ship several times per year. A great gig for those who are solitary. It's also nice in that is gives you an escape from the numerous distractions and enticements of modern American society. Make the ship your monastery as you save up dough. $50,000 - $70,000 per year salary is possible within just a few years of work. Most sailors blow it on booze and hookers in Thailand, but you can be smarter than that (I hope )

You're not gonna get enlightened through psychedelics. That desire itself is neurotic and escapist and immature.

Tell him that this guy gets laid: Check of some of his talks, they will give you hope:

Of course duration helps a lot. Most people aren't willing to invest 3hrs a day though, so I rarely speak of it. 20 minutes is hard enough to get out of people. I myself am doing at least 2 hrs daily nowadays with the intention to ramp it up even more. I find 4 hrs per day is the minimum I need to get a palpable feeling of growth towards enlightenment.

You should be good to go. All your really need is an open mind and get yourself off of any substance addictions like coffee, tobacco, soda, etc. Disconnect your mobile phone and laptop so you don't use them during the 10 days.

Select 1 lifestyle change that would make the biggest impact on your life or mood, and plan out a habit to enact it. Focus on that habit every day until it becomes like on auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat. You're so young, you don't need to rush. Focus on baby steps done consistently. Trust that the results will be exponential over a time frame of months and years.

It's definitely a POTENTIAL trap. But not one you necessarily need to fall into.

Why is future development bleak??? That's the issue right there. If you believe the future is bleak, you've screwed yourself into a corner.

Yes, definitely. The art of being a great teacher is being able to meet the student where he's at. I find that many of the most spiritually advanced sages are NOT able to do this. Because they cannot identify with what it's like to be stuck in low-consciousness, because they are like virtuosos. Or they have been enlightened so long they forget what it's like to be "normal". Which is why most average people cannot get any practical value out of sages. Their advice just goes in one ear and out the others. The sage appears untouchable. The sage appears to be an idealistic dreamer who's out of touch with "reality". A lot of my advice is frankly dumbed-down so that people find it relatable. If I just flat out stated things as they appear to me in my mind, most people would be like, "WTF are you smoking?" And this problem only gets worse as one develops. It doesn't get easier because the gap between you and your average student grows wider every year.

I've addressed this question in various videos: 1) http://www.actualized.org/articles/the-secret-curse-of-being-human 2) http://www.actualized.org/articles/the-happiness-spectrum And all the meditation/enlightenment-related videos are pointing the way to satisfaction with life.

Some good suggestions above. I would suggest that as a baseline, you sit down and ask yourself, "Are those statements actually TRUE?" Is it literally true that you are not good enough? Is it literally true that you can't do anything right? How can you be sure? What do those beliefs even mean in practice? What is reality and what is mental abstraction? What you'll discover if you just sit down and rationally examine those beliefs, is that they are gross over-generalizations and technically false. The reality is much less grandiose: there are some aspects of your life that you want to improve and have struggled with up to this point. Notice how much better and more realistic that sounds. That won't be enough to completely unwire your beliefs, because clearly your mind has supplied you with lots of evidence to back up them up. But at the very least you've stopped letting your mind get away with ridiculously sweeping statements unchallenged.

I didn't add 48 Laws Of Power to my book list for a good reason. It's NOT an emotionally mature attitude towards life, disregarding the power of higher consciousness values. Robert Greene is a good writer and thinker, but I wouldn't use that book as a manual for self-actualization. If anything, we have an over-abundance of that type of thinking in modern stage Orange Western society. Seek a higher standard.

He's a legit yogi. Great sense of humor.

It takes discipline to rewire your motivation from negative to positive. Society has rotted our brains and made us into lazy twats by default. When life is so easy, every bit of self-discipline becomes intolerable.

How can anyone decide for you what's right for you? The optimum strategy depends on what your heart calls you to do in this life.

Hawaii's a pretty expensive place to do it. You could make your dollar go much further somewhere less touristy.

@Enizeo I recommend you make your own decision based on your own intimate knowledge of your self, your abilities, and your maturity level. This is not a decision you can outsource to any guru or teacher or coach. You're gonna have to suffer through the agony of the decision-making process. Let's hope you are a wise general, wise beyond your years

Because they are too ignorant to foresee that their existing strategies for happiness will not work. Everything anyone ever does is motivated by the seeking of happiness. Think about it. Hitler started WWII to increase happiness. The only problem is, some strategies for happiness do not work as well as we originally think. In fact, ALL strategies for happiness outside of BEING will never work. There really is only one path to happiness. The problem is, it's too counter-intuitive and unorthodox for people to swallow. So their choices of path ultimately are limited to the lesser of the paths of suffering. And thus we see why so few people are truly happy.

@ZenDog At your age, I think it's a great move. If you really took 1 year off in solitude to focus on discovering yourself, that would save you years of misery and hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses over your lifetime. It would be a very wise strategic decision. The difficulty for you would be to actually carry it out and not piss that year away on distractions. Can you actually pull off such wisdom? That is the key question. 99% of people cannot.

You are! You are simultaneously everything phenomenal and not it either. You are self-aware! Awareness is aware of itself and also of the body and of the mind. The problem is that you're mis-identified with the mind, which occurs as a temporary flux within awareness. When the mind is gone, what then? You need to draw a sharp distinction between awareness and thoughts/mind. Right now you think you're the mind, but in fact the mind is only a tiny part of the larger you. The larger you is empty awareness that transcends even existence and non-existence. It's such an odd fact that it's impossible for the mind to grasp it. Because the mind cannot truly grasp facts, it only grasps images of facts. What needs to happen here is for you to let go of all the images, so that the facts can dawn on you. This is a totally foreign thing for you. You've never had a direct experience of the facts in your entire life yet. If and when you do, it will be like waking up from a dream. So be careful about trying to judge or analyze the outcome of Truth from inside the dream state.

You can make it work either way. The problem is that the ego doesn't want to make it work either way. The road to full enlightenment is not gonna be easy no matter how you slice and dice it. I personally think living in the woods for a few years is a great idea, especially if you have few obligations and are able. But that's just me. Living your whole life in the woods is not necessary. It's only helpful for a short while to unaddict yourself from society and to get the focus to have those first few critical enlightenment experiences.

You haven't seen true passion until you've seen a full enlightened person in action. Your particular passions may of course change as the ego mind crumbles. But fear not, new deeper passions will take their place. It's like you're upgrading to a Mercedes from an old Ford Pinto and worrying about whether you'll still have your favorite cup holder. The Mercedes has 10 cup holders!

@Samuel That is a great question. Very difficult for the ego to navigate it. It's the ultimate ego defense mechanism. A major part of the enlightenment journey is resolving this for yourself. You haven't truly grasped what enlightenment is about until you see the relative unimportance of all those lower-hierarchy pursuits. It's a real challenge. And it's the #1 reason almost nobody is enlightened. It might take you years of "burning through karma" before those lower egoic needs lose their grip for you.

Would you ask that of your child before deciding to send him to elementary school? Maybe he's just not capable of mastering arithmetic? Maybe we shouldn't get his hopes up?

@Socrates Hahaha I like the contrast of that to this depiction of stage Orange mentality