Leo Gura

The key is not desire for money. The key is passion for the work. Money follows passion. You've got it backwards. The fact that you don't want material things is super-powerful. Now go use your passion to do non-material things and stop wasting your time in a dead-end material job. You're actually way ahead of the curve if you just make this one adjustment.

I got fired from my first job within 8 hours. Turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. But it sure felt miserable those first few weeks after the firing, before I found a much better job. Use the misery as fuel for doing even better in your career.

How cushy!

Hobbies serve an important function of their own. They don't necessarily all need to be turned into careers. Often turning a simple hobby into a career will destroy your love for it. Because sometimes you just want to engage in an activity casually. For example, if you enjoy fishing, it doesn't necessarily mean you should become a professional fisherman. Selecting a career is a lot more involved than simply converting a hobby. Although you could draw inspiration from your hobbies, and some people really do need to take their hobby and "go pro" with it. To sort all this out, it really helps to understand yourself on a much deeper level. Which is what the life purpose course help you do. Then it becomes very clear which direction to go and which hobbies should be kept recreational vs made professional.

You're not gonna be able to sustain more than 40 hours per week for long. Programmers burn out and destroy their health all the time. You should research why we have a 40 hour work-week. Where did it come from historically? Do you know that Henry Ford and other industrialists of the early 20th century actually commissioned studies to find out the optimal amount of the time their factory workers should be working to produce the highest output and thus earn them the most money? And you know what number they came back with? 40

If you can't find at least one thing in life to be really passionate about, something's deeply wrong. You should be asking, "How can I par down 100 different passions to just 1, when everything in life is so exciting and awesome? How can anyone only have one life purpose?!!!!"

Both. I find myself needing more and more solitude. It's fine if you have a good reason for it. It's a problem if you're using it as an excuse to run away from judgments you make and the like. If people annoy or emotionally upset you, that's grist for the self-actualization mill. But I find myself spending lots of time in solitude simply because I need time to contemplate and meditate and I get little value out of regular social interactions. This is fine. You should have no problem spending 100s of hours in solitude. If anything, people are under-doing solitude rather than overdoing it. Just make sure you're not using that solitude time to steep in your own egoic malaise, but actually doing inner work. If you're on a path to become just another depressive loner, you're doing it wrong. That's not what enlightenment work is about at all. Being a hermit is a great thing when done for the right reasons. It's a terrible thing when done for egoic reasons or shadow reasons.

You shouldn't even be eating stimulating or exciting foods if you really want to optimize your meditation. The aim of meditation is to silence the mind to get at reality directly. How you gonna do that while filling your body with poisons and stimulants that have the same effect on your mind as sticking a chili pepper up your butthole? I've radically changed my diet for the sake of optimizing my meditation practice. It's too important not to.

It takes lot of time. I've been meditating for over an hour every day for the last 1000 days and it's still hard to maintain mindfulness over thoughts. Thoughts are very very very very tricky. You're so identified with thoughts that they literally feel like "YOU", so you have no distance from them, so you cannot be aware of them too well. Keep practicing. A helpful exercise is to specifically focus on determining what thoughts actually are. Try meditating while holding the question: "What is a thought?" Don't think the answer. Use awareness only.

Enlightenment work is only for the purpose of having a direct experience of your true nature. There's more beyond that in the sense that aspects of the old ego mind will still probably remain after you discover who/what you are. So that's where shadow work comes into play, and in general, self-actualization continues after enlightenment. What happens then is that you spend the rest of your life aligning your mind to embody the realization of no-self. The bulk of the spiritual work comes AFTER enlightenment, not before. People commonly get this wrong because they have a cartoon image of what enlightenment is. And they want to use it as magic pill to cure all of life's problems. Which is not how it works. All that said, it's still really really helpful get enlightened. Because trying to purify the ego via the ego is like pulling teeth. Seeing through the ego speeds up the shadow work a lot. Huge chunks of the ego structure will simply fall away after enlightenment, making your job a lot easier.

You gotta strike a delicate balance. Most times, let people be how they are and focus on growing yourself. But sometimes you need to give people a poke too. And if that ruffles some feathers, oh well. Part of your growth should include not being so sensitive about how other people react when you talk about personal development topics with them. Most people will react defensively or negatively. And that's their issue to deal with, so long as you don't provoke them in an egotistical sort of way, or as a distraction from doing your own inner work. Changing people who aren't ready to change is a tough business.

I agree with Trump. (That sounds so wrong.) But I do have a few other vids explaining other techniques. Here's a powerful one to play around with: http://www.actualized.org/articles/mindfulness-meditation

http://screencast.com/t/kjTsJl4sGsVm

@cle103 You're doing good. Keep at it. The first thing you should notice when doing self-inquiry is that you ALREADY do believe you know who you are. So don't kid yourself about that. Start by first getting clear about what your existing beliefs are, even if you suspect they are wrong. It's important to get clear that one is wrong and why one is wrong. A good way to get clear about this is with the following thought exercise: if I point a gun to your head and you sense I'm about to pull the trigger. What is it that you believe is going to die? Answer truthfully. Whatever is true for you is whatever you hold as your deepest identity. Then clarify that identity. What exact is going die? The body? The brain? The mind? The entity called "cle103"? The voice inside your skull? What? Spend several weeks at least getting clear about all this stuff. Then start asking yourself, "Why do I believe I am _________?" And fill in the blank with whatever you most believe you are. If you're the body, why do you believe you are a body and not a coffee table? And who exactly is perceiving the body? Is the body perceiving itself? Then who is perceiving the coffee table? Is the coffee table perceiving itself? And so forth. Spend some time investigating all this intellectually in order to generate some doubt in your mind about who you might be. Then you can sit and meditate and focus on "Who am I?" more productively. You're not seeking an intellectual answer. You're seeking a direct conscious awareness of your "True Self". All intellectual answers are not it.

Cold turkey is good. Or gradually reduce dose if you can't handle cold turkey.

Shoot for 40-50 hours per week. And take a 10 minutes break every 90 minutes at least.

Yes, the world is in need of improvement. See my sig for the answer

Certainly 1st world countries exploit 3rd world countries, just like the Romans exploits the outskirts of their empire. But also, it's not as bad as it used to be. At least it's not slavery anymore. There is lots of mobility in 3rd world countries for those that want it. The problem is that lack of infrastructure, government corruption, and poor education means that most citizens won't ever even discover self-actualization.

Unfortunately not. Saving up is the solution to that problem.

That may be true, but her teenage son is not one of them

The course doesn't focus at all on enlightenment or spirituality. It's 100% career/business.

@Psychonaut What good would enlightenment be if it wasn't eternal? It works even when "you" are dead. The only question is, can you sculpt the mind enough to see it.

You should eliminate caffeine (and all stimulants) from your diet. Especially if you're doing serious meditation. Even tea isn't recommended. Your mind has to be running pure.

The entire marketing field is unethical, shameful, and harmful to humanity. So many questions. I'll only answer a few. 1) I like him 2) Haven't watched him 6) I don't have time for that 7) Yes, but it will take years to complete Quite a few, but I only use 1 for filming. Yes Maybe Mildly supportive. But they generally don't see why it's important. No, I don't discuss much with my family about self-actualization. My brother and girlfriend took the life purpose course though. Because they addict your mind to simulation and excitement to the point where you cannot simply sit and be. It's just another way of describing enlightenment, with perhaps various energy activation in the body attached. I'm not ready to discuss that yet. No Yes No, that was just a random example. Not sure what qualifies as a "detour" in your mind. I've been pretty consistently working on it for the last 3 years. There haven't been any detours besides a few vacations. I still procrastinate and resist the work sometimes though. And I have some lazy periods. Then Actualized.org would die. You underestimate the logistical work that goes into running a business. Of course that's not just for sitting. That's a full-blown meditation technique. It's popular in Zen. You sit for hours without moving while meditating. Yes, a blue Actualized.org logo on my arm Yes. No. 1) Death is an illusion, once you discover what you actually are. 2) Yes, loosely. But you haven't actually known him. He is a figment of your imagination technically speaking. Notice how you turn him into an idol, which is exactly the opposite of what he was trying to teach you. He's got a lot of ego, which could have disastrous consequences for the world. It's extremely deep. 10-20 years at least, if you're doing it full time. Otherwise, your whole life. I've tried to eliminate the distinction in my life between "fun" and "work". So it all blends together. Most of what I do would look terribly boring to you.

@Lorcan You should make a distinction between your true self as a persona versus your existential True Self. The persona isn't really true. It's just true relative to a dysfunctional and misguided persona. Which is an improvement, but far from where you can ultimately develop to. The "true" persona will include things like discovering your authentic character traits, strengths, and weaknesses. This is useful, but not the end of ultimate achievement. The existential True Self is what @werlight is talking about above. It's the ultimate achievement. It's what you ACTUALLY metaphysically are.