Leo Gura

Submit it as a feature request with the exact type of emoticons you want to see and maybe we can do it.

Hehe, you guys just LOVE asking me about porn. It's definitely on the to-do list.

Yeah, this boils down to tradition and cultural norms basically. You can become enlightened in so many ways. You could probably become enlightened while skinning people alive. So it doesn't say much. Can sex be used to expand one's consciousness? << Definitely Can celibacy be effective for focusing the mind on meditative practices? << Definitely Can you do both at different times in your life? << Definitely Can you stick to only one path your whole life and still be enlightened << Definitely So you have a lot of options. A lot of the reasons that Eastern monastic school abstain from sex has to do with tradition and culture of the area. Of course sex and relationships are very messy and distracting, so it's nice to not have to deal with that stuff at all when doing enlightenment work. Imagine you're trying to meditate while you're girlfriend cheats on you. It will screw up your progress big time.

This guy on Youtube looks like a monk; https://www.youtube.com/user/yuttadhammo Maybe he can give you a taste of monk life. Although there are MANY different kinds of monks and monastic traditions out there, even just within Japan, not to speak of China, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Thailand, Burma, and Europe and the USA.

Because the Bible is a story for your entertainment. It wasn't written by Jesus. It was written by people after him to sell the story of Jesus and their brand of ideology. The Bible attempts to communicate extremely advanced truths that most people cannot even begin to fathom. To do that, it has to dumb everything down into an almost unrecognizable form. It's like trying to teach calculus to first-graders using Sesame Street characters, glitter, and crayons. God had to be turned into a man because egos cannot fathom or stomach the notion that God is Absolute Nothingness.

Good question. If you go through a coach training program (which you should) then they will train you in the basics and you will have partners that you practice on. Every new coach of course still feels self-doubtful and inexperienced. What I did was I committed to getting massive 1-on-1 coaching experience. I found extra partners and coached every week as much as I could for months. Then I contacted all of my friends and acquaintances and offered to coach them for free. I do so for months. All this coaching was free. After doing that for 6 to 12 months, I had over 100 coaching hours under my belt and started to feel moderately confident, although I still had anxiety before each call. I just kept pushing through the anxiety and doing the best I could. Sure, sometimes I would be on the call and I got stumped or didn't know what you say. But clients are quite forgiving and hardly even notice. Remember that coaching is NOT about giving people advice. Coaching is about asking the right questions that make people think. If you're coaching properly, you should be able to coach a person through a challenge that you have zero experience with. Realizing this helps a lot to build up your confidence. Coaching is a form of facilitation, not advice-giving. You don't tell the person how to solve their problem. You help them to find their own solutions. Just like with starting any business, you gotta fake it till you make it a bit. Realize that most people you are coaching have NEVER heard about life coaching before and they have zero expectations. They are often pleased just to vent their frustrations with you. You don't need to do very much. You just listen real close, and then asking a question or two that makes the person really wonder about their thought-process, or their goals, or their actions.

Diet is the most important factor. If you can't afford a healthy diet, that means you gotta put all your energy into raising your income until you can. Only then will you really be able to address the energy issue. Until then, you'll have to tough it out and do some crunching while you focus on improving your career. If you have abnormally low energy, get blood tests to check your thyroid hormones. That is one of the #1 causes of chronic low energy. Also cut out all wheat and dairy products. Rice and potatoes are not really as bad as wheat and dairy. Buddhist monks live just fine on small portions of rice so it's doable. Wouldn't recommend it for too long though.

Yeah... that's a lot of stuff to cover! I'll have to think about how that might be talked about in a single video. To develop all those skills requires years of study and practice. Thanks for the suggestion.

Cause if God didn't talk, there's be no Bible. The mind is obsessed with language and doesn't realize that language is the only thing separating you from "God". A REAL Bible would be a book filled with 1,000 empty white pages. Can you imagine buying a book like that? I've actually thought about publishing one. That is a more direct pointer to God than the actual Bible.

I recommend both meditation and self-inquiry. I do both. Lately I've been doing 1 to 3 hours per day. My meditation techniques right now include: Do nothing Labeling (formal mindfulness practice) Strong determination sitting I use the Do Nothing technique the most. Although I want to start doing more Labeling because it's so powerful. Try experimenting around with all of them. Try doing 1 month straight of Do Nothing, then 1 month straight of Labeling, then 1 month straight of Strong Determination Sitting. Then compare your results. You'll make huge gains no matter what and you'll discover your favorites.

I haven't seen that to be a problem is practice. I've seen many women meditate like champs. There ultimate reason it's not a problem is because the True Self -- the thing you actually are, not that body/mind -- has no gender! You are not really a man or a woman. You are an infinite field of empty awareness. And this field does not have a gender. It's equally accessible to men and women because that's what men and women ARE at their root. How the enlightenment gets expressed will be colored by gender, but that's not a problem either. Whatever gender you genuinely are, you will express it without having to try. I've met plenty of enlightened women.

I'm excited to see what you guys create. This is your sandbox.

Post-rational starts to dawn when you start having hits of direct consciousness of your true nature. This starts to happen after a few years of consistent meditation practice or lots of self-inquiry. Your mind has to actually experience something outside its own conceptual cage. Then you go, "Ahhhh!!! Now I understand what all those Buddhists are talking about!" Until then, it's all just theory and more rationality. Psychedelics are another gateway to glimpse the post-rational world, Although they are much more limited than doing it through meditation or self-inquiry.

If you're THAT behind the curve and you suck with women, then I would recommend pick up or some other form of dating material. Just do it responsibly and understand the limitations. There is no way to get better at dating without actually dating people. And it helps to learn the basics of how women think and what they are attracted to in a guy, because it's very counter-intuitive at first. If you've never been around women, then you will have a lot of wrong ideas about what they want. My rant video against pickup was mostly aimed at HARDCORE players and pickup fanatics, not newbies who just want a girlfriend. Like I said in the video, I personally got A LOT out of pickup and I did it fairly responsibly.

I did a 30 day all-raw challenge at the suggestion of Steve Pavlina. I noticed lots more energy and vitality and clearer thinking. I found it hard to sustain though. You're basically eating salads all the time and it can get boring without some cleverly planned out recipes.

Not necessarily. All 3 of them are pretty damned enlightened. They have different personalities so it shines through differently.

Pretty much. Although holding that as an idea or a belief isn't it. You have to directly experience it. Do you honestly, currently feel you're God? No? Then you aren't directly experiencing it and have much work to do.

What are all your interests and values? Write them out. Be genuine.

Stuff like that shows us that we don't have as much control over ourselves as we like to pretend we have.

I've experienced this kind of thing too. It's a cool phenomenon. In one word: awareness. With sufficient awareness things just fall away. One day you really SEE that what you're doing is shooting yourself in the foot and so you stop doing it. Little effort is required. But this usually comes only after a long period of struggle. I like to think of the body/brain as a complex self-regulating system, and when it decides its had enough of something, it stops desiring it neurotically for good.

Yup, slow and stead wins the race. Be the grounded tortoise, not the neurotic rabbit

If you had to decide between: A great exclusive relationship A great polyamorous relationship Which would you choose?

There is such a thing as a core personality that you have. It's what makes you feel most at ease and comes most naturally to you, without struggle. It's was remains after you remove all the ego blocks, limiting beliefs, childhood traumas, external moral standards, social norms, etc. But this is NOT what most personality tests test. And the most important thing that these tests don't tell you is that you are NOT your personality!!! WTF? You'd think that would be an important little caveat to mention! Here's how I see it: Entry-level personal development: trying to improve your personality or change it entirely because you wish it were different and better. Ironically, this gives you a weak and shallow personality. Advanced level personal development: fully accepting your personality and dis-identifying from it. Ironically, this gives you the strongest, most attractive, and satisfying personalty. What I find deliciously paradoxical about this whole thing is that you have a strong personality that cannot be changed, and yet almost everything about how you think and live can be changed to such an extent that people close to you will not even be able to recognize you any more. Humans are both rigid and malleable at the same time. I guess sorta like a car whose chassis you cannot change.

Best gains at the gym come from heavy-weight compound exercises which include: Squats Deadlifts Benchpress Rows Overhead Shoulder Lifts Start with very low weights (even an empty 45 pound bar) and then every week add a little bit more and a little bit more. I got a lot of value out of the 5x5 Strong Lifts routine. You can find it online. It's quite popular. I don't do this nowadays though because my passion for weightlifting has passed.

I think polyamory is not for most people, even if you take away all the cultural brainwashing about traditional marriage. Most people just want to find that one right person and make it work. But, if that's not you, then that's cool too. You're just in the minority.