LastThursday

For the sake of balance: You even imagine that you are God. The caveat of course being that divine imagination is also Absolute Truth.

In my opinion you should not speed up the process, but go at a pace that you can maintain. You are more likely to actualize that way! The point is not to reach some lofty goal of Enlightenment or whatever. The point is to pay attention to the journey and expand your awareness, IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. Just keep watching the 5 year old videos if that is where you are, there is no shame in that. It is not a competition to keep up with Leo's output. In fact a lot of us on here could do with re/watching a lot of the older material - it really is gold. Me included.

Over thinking at bed time is something I really used to struggle with. It would easily take me 1-2 hours to get to sleep every night. I did two things which turned that around for me: 1. Gave up ALL caffeine. I eventually worked out that I'm highly intolerant to it, and it wasn't allowing me to sleep. 2. Every night. I religiously listened to a recording from Paul McKenna's Change Your Life In Seven Days. This was a kind of hypnotic style relaxation CD. I'd like to elaborate on those two points. Firstly, what you ingest during the day can greatly affect your state of mind and your ability to relax enough to get to sleep. It's very important that you experiment with your diet to see if any particular foods or drink is affecting your alertness at night. Of course this applies to other areas of your life and health in general. Second. It's important to train your mind/body that the bedroom is for one thing only: sleep (have sex somewhere else!). Your mind works by association and it does that very very well. If it associates lying in bed with thinking and ruminating, then you'll have trouble sleeping. You have to retrain the mind to associate bed with relaxation and sleep. The point with the hypnotic CD was that it was nearly impossible for me to think while I was listening to it. Apart from those two things, there are a million other things that can improve your sleep and ability to get to sleep. Here are some highlights: Block all blue light entering your eyes from about 8pm onwards (i.e. two hours at least before sleeping). This will shift your body clock. Ensure the bedroom is slightly cooler than other rooms. You will not sleep as easily if you're too warm. Take a shower if it helps you cool down before bed. Get bright sunlight or daylight as soon as you can after waking up. Talk a walk outside! Don't stay indoors in dark rooms. Again, this will shift your body clock. Do exercise (walking, running, gym whatever) very regularly several times a week. This will reduce your alertness in the evenings. Find time to do your 'thinking' during the day and not at night. Do your thinking at the same place and time each day. Good luck!

I was prescribed SSRI's at one point, but I just could not sleep on them, so stopped. However, my mood lifted slightly in the coming months, but I was not functioning at a 'normal' level a very long time. In the end I had enough and decided to self medicate and started with St John's Wort - after reading the literature that in some instances they were just as effective as SSRI's with less side effects. You don't need a prescription for it here in the UK. After about three weeks I noticed a marked improvement, especially in the mornings. I continued taking it with hardly any side effects - other than the morning after a bout of drinking the night before, where I would feel slightly euphoric or high, possibly due to a spike in serotonin levels. After nearly a year of continuous use, I decided to try stop to see what the effects were. I fairly rapidly noticed my mood drop, but nowhere near as bad as previous levels. Since then I've done a lot of work on myself and certain dark thoughts no longer bother me and I've improved my diet and exercise tremendously. I would say it helped me pull myself out of a dark hole.

There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Just stop grasping and don't panic.

That's how you know you're making progress. At first nothing makes any sense or it's not even on your radar, then BOOM! It all clicks into place. All this work feels like just treading water, and sometimes like you're drowning. But actually slowly the tide is pulling you towards the shore.

Depends on who socialise with. But generally? No. I'd say 99% of socialising is surface level and low consciousness. Chimpery, to use someone's words...

Move to a place half way between the two? Anyway, 9000 euros over three years for travel seems like a lot. But you could probably get 20,000 euros per year in your first job. If you lived with your parents then, you could easily pay them back in a year or two.

An asshole is just someone who lacks empathy. But bear in mind psychopaths, narcissists and those on the autistic spectrum have the same problem. Speaking truth has nothing to do with empathy (on an everyday level). But you have to be careful that you're speaking the truth and not just your truth. In fact you're the worst person to judge if you're speaking truth (you could be very deluded). Obviously you can just not be an asshole by showing some empathy. Maybe your target is not ready for the truth?

@Giulio Bevilacqua pay your parents back AFTER university if necessary. Three or four years is not a long time. Make university a joy not a burden.

But there is a point. You just have to find it first. Once you do, life will 'come alive'. It does beg the question though. So what if life is a dream? What does that change exactly, why is it useful to know this?

@perlita emotions are like breathing. Most of the time breathing just happens without effort or thought, but sometimes you consciously control your breathing (say for meditation). Emotional mastery is being able to control your emotions when it's necessary, and letting them just happen when it's not. It's a fine line. It's working with your emotions and not against them. So I would say that suppressing all your emotions is not mastery, because we are emotional beings. But I would also say that unconsciously letting every emotion wash over you with abandon (as your kids might) is also not mastery. The mastery is somewhere in-between. But I would also say that beating yourself up about emotions which have passed (i.e. attaching a story to them), is also not mastery. Emotions come and emotions go. Letting the emotions go once they've played their part is also part of the mastery.

Hence my comment about mirrors. Perhaps the physical signature in the brain is just a reflection of consciousness rather than the cause of it. Correlation is not causation.

@Nivsch is the reflection in a mirror conscious? Is the electrical and chemical activity of the brain just a mirror of what is happening outside of it?

@Bill W naturally you'll have to be arbiter of what is and isn't nonsense for yourself. The Swedish straw-man guy is easy set up and to blow over. But only because he lacked the wit to produce original ideas of his own (parody or not). And without doing the work yourself, that is indeed all Leo's and Swedish guy's ramblings are: ideas.

Have you cut open a brain? It's grey gooey mess. Is your conscious life a grey gooey mess? How do you go from one to the other? Hmm? (I'd like to add, I'm not a serial killer).

I have the same response when I talk about programming computers to my loved ones. My advice is to talk to people who care about it, not to those that don't. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my passion about computers is not strong enough to get through to people?

It is liberating to be free from the prison of your past and your future. If you can really embody it you are completely free to be what you want to be. I'm still trying.

@Harikrishnan your life is not a solid block extending in both directions into the (imaginary) past and the future. It is YOU, NOW.

Is a parody any less valid? Even with a pencil thin moustache?

Of course the Swedish guy is confused on what Leo means by imagination. Imagination IS reality. It is not your ego producing reality, but the Godhead's imagination producing reality. The ego has no control over the Godhead's imagination. Also, there is a conflation between grammatical tense in English (denoting time), which Leo has no choice but to use and the existential absence of Time itself, to which Leo is pointing to. The two are linked. If Time does not exist and yet we have experiences of past events, then there is only one conclusion: we (the Godhead) are imagining a past (in the present moment). From there it is a simple step to say that the past did not happen in any sense whatsoever: we (the entirety of existence) have just been created de novo with all our imaginary memories - and we continue being so.

@perlita why do you think your loss of control is a negative thing? Do your kids ever lose control?

Is mastering emotions really about dropping the stories attached to them? Is mastering emotions about fully embodying their dynamic without prejudice? Is mastering emotions about knowing that they are an illusion to be seen through?

A lot of ego driven behaviour (often detrimental to self development) seems to come from needing the love of others. It's interesting to contemplate where this perceived 'lack of love' comes from. My pet theory is that most kids when they become independent of their parents, are so used to getting love and support from their parents, that they go into a sort of 'love shock' when they don't automatically receive it as adults. This sets up neurotic behaviour as an adult. One way out is to become a parent to yourself. Speak to your inner child (as an adult) and give them love and support, it sounds ridiculous but it can work.

Ask a farmer about philosophy and s/he will talk about sheep.