Leo Gura

I will share a technique soon for how to work on that in a very powerful way. Stay tuned. Duality defines happiness in relation to unhappiness. So they are two sides of one coin. And yes, conventional happiness ends. That's a big freaking deal! The way you're holding it doesn't acknowledge the massive significance of this simple fact. All experiences end. So you must stop identifying with all experiences and instead identify with the only one constant, empty awareness.

@Snick-The ThinkTank The YOU is the most irreducible element of this whole thing. All there is, is YOU. And YOU is not an absence of anything, it's the presence of everything. Whatever ideas you have of Nothingness or Void, it's not that, it's more like the opposite. The Void is bright and full.

@Sri McDonald Trump Maharaj Good work. That was just a tiny preview of the things possible with this work.

@ashashlov Just a limiting belief. I find it's actually easier to do all this work when you're between the ages of 6 to 25. After 25, your mind becomes rigid and set in its ways. Young people's mind still fresh, still open, still free of pet ideologies, and full of energy and curiosity of about life. Many great sages have become enlightened in their early 20s, before 25. Buddhist monks are trained from age 8 upwards very successfully. I wish I had all this information back when I was 6 to 12. Changing 20 years of bad habits is really hard.

It's a phase. It will pass as you go deeper in this work. You haven't really hit the belly of the whale yet, where you will suffer so deeply from your own unconsciousness and arrogance that it will humble that spiritual ego into submission and compassion. And experiencing the divine love of God helps. Truth is an acquired taste. But once acquired, there's nothing as sweet. Knowing that reality is an illusion makes it all the more amazing. Why would you want to live in a 2-dimensional reality when it's actually infinite-dimensional? With time and more awareness your tastes will change. Just a phase. Keep going deeper. Consciousness work will not make you less capable. It will not rob you of your thoughts. Any such fears are just fears. Part of the ego's defense mechanisms. Become more mindful of this mechanic. Again, just a phase. There's nothing to really fear, because nothing is really changing. It's not like you're losing control. You never had control in the first place. It's much more scary to have control, because that would mean you have to bear a big burden. No control, no problems. Sit back and enjoy the show. The core issue here is that the ego HATES giving up control. That's its sole justification for existence: that sense of control. But it's just a hoax! Yes, that's how it unfolds. The mind/ego will conjure up all sorts of doubts and fears about this process. Notice that it's just being a whiny little child. Don't take the fears too seriously. They are part of the monkey mind. A still, conscious mind has no fears, even in great danger. Because danger itself is part of the illusion of life. When you're really conscious, even your physical death will not be scary. You can actually look forward to it.

Just requires much more practice. There are subtle but important distinctions to be made here between what your mind consciously knows and awareness itself. Awareness is still happening in sensory overload, you're just caught up in the illusion more. Like when watching a movie, it sucks you in. Might help to start to think of awareness as being. Or awareness as the physical substance of reality, instead of atoms. Rather than something your mind is doing. Mind itself is being awared.

Thanks all for your caring. Back from 9 days of meditation. Puts a smile on my face after spending my birthday alone in the woods for a week straight.

@WaterfallMachine You realize, right, that death does not exist, life is a hallucination, and you are not you? It's like you've been fishing in a pond for minnows and all the sudden you discover you've hooked, not just a whale, but the entire fabric of reality. What is the purpose of waking up from a dream?

@Socrates If you find your life purpose, that will serve as the backbone for much of your education guidance. But also nonduality, etc is sure to come in handy no matter where you go. Just following your curiosity and bliss is also a good way to go. Study what you LOVE. Yes, more great books coming.

@Beyond Words Sure, but be careful not to confuse a hang-up or neurotic compulsion with Zone of Genius. Just because you like sticking your dick into things, doesn't make it your Zone of Genius. Your mind is just like your dick. It has no off switch. So watch out with all that logic and endless thinking.

@Parki By framing it that way, you're actually describing idealism or phenomenalism. The naive realist believes that what he sees corresponds to an external world behind the scenes, which he thinks looks and works very much the way he sees it.

@Socrates Yes, which is why I said this approach is only gonna work if you're very driven and entrepreneurial. The whole point is that you're going off-roading. If you desire a paved road when you go off-roading, then you shouldn't really be off-roading, you should stick to the highway. Also, to be clear, going autodidact shouldn't be thought of as rejecting formal schooling. Many autodidacts had formal schooling. Obviously you need a way to feed yourself, whether that's your parents or your savings or a job. It might be worth going to college just for the scholarship money, if you can get it. That's way better than working at McDonalds for 4 years.

@Shane Roberts I've found that doing one-off projects rarely works, because one lacks the requisite experience to create anything that will stand up against the polish work of masters. So your best bet is to decide upon what is the ONE thing you want to become a master in, and then bet all your chips on that. That's basically how I came to the lessons described the life purpose course. I tried a lot of individual projects myself and they kept disappointing me because I wasn't committing to mastery enough.

@Frank B Have you heard of this thing called the Do-Nothing technique? It's one hell of a thing

@Saba I cannot tell you that. Therein lies your work. The universe gave you a brain and consciousness so you could puzzle it out. Contemplate, Why am I creating this suffering? Don't just think about it once or twice casually. Sit down and seriously contemplate it for an hour straight, with focus.

@Epiphany_Inspired Depends on your goals. If you shoot straight for enlightenment, expect it to derail many of your materialistic success goals. But then again, it's not like getting success will do anything for your happiness level.

@username When comparing spiritual teachings, you have to be extremely careful about terminology and language use. Terms like "logic", "free will", "God", "consciousness", "mind", "the self", "you/me/I", could have 180 degree difference in meanings. You have to look at the context they are being used in. Yes, you could say there is a certain "logic" to God and reality. But that's just a manner of speech. Like I could say there's a certain logic to operating a Windows PC, or a certain logic to playing beer pong, or a certain logic to psychedelic trips, or a certain logic to meditation, or a certain logic to suicide bombers. But that's a very loose use of that word. Yes, there is a certain logic to the Neti Neti method, where you realize that if you're having an experience, it cannot be you. To your other point, I noticed that his understanding of Buddhism is very limited. And his criticism of the Neo's saying they don't exist also fails to address their true meaning. When the Neo's say you don't exist, they mean the personal human self, not the Absolute self. The Neo's are teaching from the point of view of the ego, whereas Vedanta teaches from the point of view of the Absolute. It actually makes a lot of sense to teach from the ego's point of view, because the student is identified with ego. If you tell the student he exists, he's likely assume, "Yeah, of course I exist. I'm this body/mind right here. I got it! Duh!" But when you tell the student, "You don't exist!!!" he immediately gets scared and put on the spot. Now he has to come up with evidence for his body/mind identification, which he starts to see is impossible. And that creates an opening. James is a great teacher, but he suffers a bit from being a Vedanta hardliner. He feels old-school Vedanta is the ultimate teaching. Well, that's a relative judgment. And it certainly won't be true for all his students. For example, I was frustrated by his lack of giving actual self-inquiry technique. All that talking turns into mental masturbation very quickly without a clear, explicit practice method.

Ahem... Life purpose!

Of course, which is why I release a lot of videos about epistemology, paradigms, skepticism, naive realism, psychedelics, etc. Because the mind is blocked up by mainstream social thinking. Most people cannot even begin to hear true personal development teachings, let alone act to embody them. But you CAN do regular, dualistic self-help. It will be helpful to you, it just won't fix most of the deep root problems you have. So if you can stomach the nondual teachings and are willing to work harder with less immediate payoff, then that's your bet strategy. Like people who aren't yet ready to eat true health food, at least they can order the salad at McDonalds instead of the Big Mac. Most traditional self-help is geared to help people become more successful, not to actually become conscious of the truth. But without learning the truth, you're just running off of delusion, so your efforts at success will be delusional in the end. Because you got your priorities backwards. Truth must be priority #1 if you want the best results. But truth is a very acquired taste.

Working on understanding authentic relating would be an important aspect of going Green. Green is all about relationships.

No, evil is not still evil without a label. You're not appreciating how much you create reality with your concepts. Concepts and distinctions are not "just labels", they are the building blocks reality. For example, you were not born out of a vagina. "You" were created when the concept of self/other arose. Which makes you a concept. Not only is evil a concept. You are a concept. Your body is a concept. Reality is a concept. None of these things are a given. They had to be created. They are the paradigms which you created to exist in the reality you presently inhabit. Until you become aware of this, you will be a slave to them.

@PetarKa They don't really exist. Nothing really exists. The question of "existence" is very tricky. Existence itself is a projection! To create existence, you made a distinction between existence and non-existence. Without this distinction, there is no existence per se. Try to grasp that existence only appears to exist from your biased point of you. Because you occupy the realm of form, you are biased to seeing everything only in terms of forms. But right behind all the forms is the formless. When we speak of values for purposes of personal development, it should be clear that we're just using this notion of "people have values" as a conceptual framework to explain why people tend to behave in certain ways. It's a scientific model. And like all scientific models, it's just a metaphor. It's not true in any deep metaphysical sense.

Nothing is hidden, of course. The thing you're looking for isn't a thing at all, and it sits nowhere else but right under your nose, in plain sight. Nothing is "located" exactly in the same place as everything you see. That's why it's hard to discriminate it. BUT! Unless you're disidentified from that body/mind, you ain't got it. So yes, it's simple, but don't mistake that for you already grasping it. Chances are you haven't grasped it yet. And there are many depths of grasping it. When you finally do grasp it, there will be significant shift in your perspective. But don't take that to mean that you will start seeing Jesus, auras, and flying unicorns. Your perceptions will not change at all. The reason you're struggling here is because your entire reality right now consists of perceptions. And you're being asked to discriminate awareness out from perception. Which is not something we generally hold as possible, and we don't know how to do it. Awareness is not perception. But you are aware of perceptions. You're trying to become aware of awareness itself, which is tricky, because awareness has zero properties. So you cannot latch onto it with the mind. So yes, nothing is hidden. It's all right there in front of you. You're it! You're just not a perception or "a thing".

If your therapist is not working with you, hearing your agenda, then they're not a good therapist. A good therapist/coach should have no agenda of their own.

Just do it. Fear must ultimately be faced, not circumvented. Start by singing in your car.