Leo Gura

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.

@Elektrisko Even in the most morally-despicable example your imagination can come up with, it's still NOT evil. The thing you're missing is that evil is a judgment made by an ego. And the ego is illusory to begin with, so all it's judgments are irrelevant. The bottom line is, whatever your mind doesn't like about reality doesn't matter, because it's just a projection inside the mind. This is not a "logical" point of view. This is how reality is if you're just conscious enough. Believe it or not, there are people who live from this place of non-judgment. All it really requires is raising your awareness to the point where you see that no thought is true. And every judgment of "evil" is just another thought. In fact, not only will there be no evil seen, love will be felt for the morally-despicable character in your worst-imaginable examples. Because the fact is, reality has murders and rapists in it. And if you don't like it, that's your problem. That's you resisting what is. But all this takes lots of personal development to see. Because your ego LOVES to judge. That's how it acquires a feeling of fake realness. Egos hate giving up their right to judge others. But that's exactly what's necessary if you want to reach psychological maturity. The little child in you has to realize that judging is a delusional game.

Sleep is you returning to You (or Source). With lots of enlightenment work, one can become aware even in deep sleep. Awareness is always present. The only thing that changes is that stuff within awareness fluctuates. And what you call "the real world" is just a semi-persistent dream. This is such a radical paradigm shift most people can't fathom it.

I find boredom disappears after a good 50 to 100 hours straight of doing nothing. Boredom is like a chemical addition to stimulus. It's like taking heroin. When you first get off, you have terrible withdrawals, but after you get off, it feels great and you can't understand why you had withdrawal symptoms at all. The problem is that we live in a totally over-stimulated society. 10,000 years ago, life was a lot more "boring" and people didn't notice boredom the way we do today. That's why enlightenment was a lot easier 10,000 years ago. People could just sit around in nature and automatically get enlightened. Nowadays that's impossible because everyone is busy doing stupid shit that their ego has convinced them is important.

Now actually begin the work to attain true enlightenment.

Mindfulness is your ability to objectively observe phenomena in the present moment, as they arise, without mental distortion. Awareness/consciousness you will not really understand without an enlightenment experience. What they are cannot be described in words. But if one was to try, the best description I've heard is that awareness/conscious is pure empty knowing, and ultimately absolute nothingness. It's the eternal "space" or dimension within which everything phenomenal becomes known.

The ego is like a suicide bomber. As soon as it's threatened it wants to drag everyone else down with it by flailing around and creating all sorts of problems that really aren't problems. It is possible to get enlightened while still keeping your family, if you want that.

It's a good idea to do a few guided retreats before doing one yourself. Solo is much harder because you will likely not have enough discipline or know-how to pull it off. Even just knowing how to handle logistics like food/sleep is important.