Ideally speaking, bordem is a reaction of the ego-mind.
In practice though, until you deeply awaken and purify the mind through 1000s of hours of meditation, you will suffer lots of bordem. It's a survival function.
There is no way around bordem, you must go through it.
Extreme mindfulness is required for things not to lose their magic. Survival necessarily makes things lose their magic because magic is not important to survival. Magic is a quality of pure Being.

@aklacor727 It took many years for my intellectual and metaphysical curiosity to develop into a serious pursuit of awakening. You don't just start serious spiritual practice overnight. You gotta mature into it through learning, study, and basic self-help. So your desire to learn is all good. It's just the early stages of this process.
Start by making your life the way you want it to be, before you go chasing enlightenment. Learn how to survive well.

@Spiral Wizard The answers will depend on where you're at now (what your sticking points are) and what your goals are.
Learning dating is about as challenging as learning biz. It will take some years to sort through the BS. And just like learning biz, it's worth it. So jump right in. Don't worry about having it all figured out now. That's not possible. It is an epic journey.

There is so much depth in the last 2 years of videos you will have to watch them 5+ times over the next 10-20 years to understand everything that's there to understand.
You can only understand up to the level of development that you're at. As you grow, you will understand more and more nuances that you had previously missed.
The bottleneck is you
 

@assx95 Don't adopt truths which you did not realize as beliefs.
You have no idea if things are imaginary or not. You are just parroting some words you heard someone else say. These words are not true for you.
For you, if we cut off your finger, you are gonna think it's a real problem. So that's what is true for you.

And what did the Buddha do? What did Christ do? What did Muhammad do? What did Moses do? What did Joseph Smith do? What did Yogananda do? What did Sun Myung Moon do?
Bodhisattvas build large movements which later become dogmatic religions and perpetuate ignorance through collective ego.
This story has been played out since the dawn of human civilization.
No one is to blame for this. It's inevitable given how consciousness works. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

Capable is one thing, actually seeing it is another.
99% of people are capable.
Just the fact that you're watching my videos means that you are more capable than most.
Now... what you gonna do about it? Shit has more substance to it than capability.

This thread is meant to be a concise list of exercises pointing to the truth of enlightenment -- the truth of no-self.
All of the exercises listed herein are PRACTICAL! They are NOT philosophical or theoretical. They are not to be debated or pondered intellectually. They are to be actually done! Do each exercise carefully and notice what direct experience reveals. Often times direct experience will reveal something counter-intuitive, something that goes totally against all common-sense and any models you have of how reality works.
Feel free to contribute your own exercises to this thread. But do so in a concise and practical manner, so whoever is reading this thread can focus on LOOKING or CONTEMPLATION versus debating or asking theoretical questions.
This document is a work-in-progress. I'll keep adding more exercises to the list.
Here are some of my favorites so far:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exercise #1: Drawing An Imaginary Line
 
Exercise #2: Noticing Space As Unitive
 
Exercise #3: Noticing That All Phenomena Is Democratic
 
Exercise #4: Noticing Objects Exist Only Where They Are
 
Exercise #5: Sensory Field Connection
 
Exercise #6: Noticing There Are No Objects
 
Exercise #7: Noticing The Self-Image Isn't You
 
Exercise #8: Noticing You Are Not A Point-Camera
 
Exercise #9: Noticing The Gap Between Thoughts
 
Exercise #10: Noticing The Source Of Thoughts
 
Exercise: #11: Noticing That Sound Occurs Exactly Where It Is
 
Exercise #12: Noticing The External World Doesn't Exist
 
Exercise #13: Noticing Other People Do Not Exist
 
Exercise #14: Noticing That Nothing Is Hidden
 
The above exercises are true enlightenment work. This is where the rubber meets the road.
Keep practicing all of these exercises diligently, for months, until all your imaginary paradigms of reality break down and you are left only with direct experience. When you start to feel like this silly creature below, you're on the right track:

Enjoy

No, the whole point is that it is NOT miserable. Your mind constructs pain, suffering, and misery.
You are not understanding how deep this work goes.
Imagine being so conscious that someone could break your finger and it would not be miserable to you.
That is the depth of this work.
Now, how to actualize that is the trick. It ain't easy. But we can work towards it.

It has been updated 10 times already. Be happy with what's there. If you ever read and fathom all those books you will be a God among men.

A delicious book. A work of art.

It can still be difficult for them. Plenty of spiritually gifted people have harrowing journeys to awakening (like the many classic shaman stories). So don't get the idea that being spiritually gifted makes this process a walk in the park. You can be spiritually gifted and still have a lot of shadow material to work through.
But the biggest thing is, most people will never even attempt to awaken or know about awakening otherwise, unless they are lucky enough to stumble upon it.
A big secret to successful awakening is have the right motivation, curiosity, and desire for it. That in itself is a very rare thing which already requires a certain degree of spiritual attunement. If you motivation is strong, the rest is just a matter of time. If you motivation is weak, almost nothing can help you. So getting your motivation straight is crucial. Which is where psychedelics can be especially helpful. People would be a lot more motivated to awaken if they had a direct experience of God or Infinite Consciousness. It's very hard to build motivation off hearsay and fairytales. It's crucial to experience God for yourself so you know that it is more real than a brick wall. It's very hard to be motivated to pursue a thing for years which you doubt is real.

Not so hard really. If you ask most masters about their childhoods and how they got into spirituality, many of them will tell the same story of having spontaneous (psychedelic-like) mystical experiences, kundalini activations, astral projection, lucid dreaming, etc. when they were in their teens. Not to mention that basically all of them were deeply interested in metaphysical and spiritual questions from their youth. It is not at all an accident that they got involved in spiritual work.
I notice this in myself. I was born a philosopher. I would estimate I have double the baseline level of consciousness of the average human and my sensitivity to psychedelics is at least double or triple that of a typical human. But even so, I never had spontaneous mystical experiences as many masters do. So I am nowhere near the top of the bell-curve of spiritual giftedness. But it is no accident that I ended up in this line of work.

No, they just skirt the issue and teach to a very mainstream audience -- whoever will listen and pay. Besides, what do you expect them to do about it? They can't recommend psychedelics because 1) they have no serious experience with them, and 2) most of their followers can't access them, and 3) they would get into trouble.
The more mainstream the teacher, the more mainstream and mild his techniques need to be.
Do you really expect Sadhguru to stand up in front of 10,000 people and tell them point blank: 99% of you will not awaken? Why would he do this? Of what benefit is this to his followers or his organization?
Also, when you are highly spiritually gifted from birth you have no idea what life is like for people who are not spiritually gifted. It is like living in a different reality. So easily many teachers can be dismissive of the struggles of newbies and normies.
You have to ask yourself, what is it you want and how badly do you want it? Do you really care to know what reality is? How important is it to you that you discover the answers in this lifetime?
See, Sadhguru's agenda is not that. He will not resolve this for you. He is busy building his organization. If you die without reaching the ultimate answers, it won't bother him one bit. But if it would bother you, then you need some sort of reliable plan for how you're going to get those answers.

Yes, it's worth it.
It certianly won't get you awakening, but at least it will be a gateway to more serious spiritual pursuits in years to come.
If you want a chance at awakening via meditation you will have to do at least week-long retreats where you meditate nonstop all day long, every day. Month-long retreats would be more realistically necessary.

The mistake you're making is confusing psychedelics with makyo. Psychedelics are precisely NOT phenomenal distortions but pure insight, deeper than the insight of Zen meditation. The visual distortions that some psychedelics cause are to be completely ignored. The visual distortions arise with psychedelics precisely for the same reason they arise in meditation. They arise even more with psychedelics because they are like meditation x100. So you get 100 times stronger visual distortions but also 100 times deeper insight. Ignore the distortions and keep the insight, just as the Zen masters advise.
There is no mistake in the Zen advice, but the way you are applying it to psychedelics is precisely backwards.
You should dismiss makyo whether you're meditating or tripping balls. And don't forget, all of physical reality is makyo. So don't forget to dismiss that while you're at it
This can vary for different people.
In my view yoga is signficantly more powerful because it is a bio-chemical-mechanical change of the body-mind organism. Much moreso than meditation. Yoga leads to effortless meditation by a mechanical silencing of the mind.

Mathematics is totally imaginary. There is no limit to what consciousness can imagine.

What some of you guys aren't fathoming yet is that awakening is God-realization. Nothing else. You still hold God as one thing and awakening as something else.
When people speak of awakening or enlightenment what they really mean is:
1) Realizing you are God.
And...
2) Realizing what God is.
Of course some people haven't awoken deeply enough to understand this. There is much depth to understanding what God is.
Do not be so naive and literal that you need a teacher to tell you the words, "You are God." They rarely state it so bluntly. Often because they know the ego will reject such a direct statement or misunderstand it.
Be very careful with being overly literal in your reading of mystical teachings. It is a serious mistake to search the Bible for the phrase "You are God", and failing to find it, conclude that the Bible doesn't teach that you are God. Mystical teachings are not written for literal-minded rational buffoons. They are written for highly intuitive intellects which know how to connect dots.
Intelligence and wisdom is being able to read between the lines. To understand what which cannot be made explicit.

@Jin Kyu Park Nice! Happy for ya. Welcome to God.
Look, psychedelics are not gonna do all the work for ya. Start doing Kriya yoga every day and you should build up a natural psychedelic in your body.
Spirituality is best practiced alone. You don't really need anyone else doing it with you. Just get serious about yoga and do occassional trips out of country for psychedelics.
Also, you aren't far from the most spiritual country in the world: India. Lots of gurus and ashrams there. You could travel there and get shaktipat from a guru.
China also has many unbanned research chemicals for sale which are even better than classic psychedelics. Do your research. It only seems like China cracks down on drugs when actually they make so many research chems.

The ego's delusion is to believe that one outcome is better than another. The ego is a biased perception of reality. This bias is what creates suffering. So if you want to manipulate reality your whole life, go ahead. The cost of that will be living in a self-created hell. If you want an easy and effortless life, surrender to the will of the universe and stop manipulating.
The point of surrender is heaven and joy.
By trying to get everything your way, you end up creating your own hell. That's the tragedy of the ego's game.

Subject/object is a duality. The ultimate nature of reality cannot be understood via that distinction, or any other distinction.
See my video: What Is Perception?
"Experience" is already a dualistic, biased notion. Strictly speaking experience does not occur because there is no experiencer.
There is no reality or world outside of one's imagination. You imagined your birth and you imagine your death.

Of course it works.
Don't ask women if they want to be approached. No woman will ever admit that she would sleep with a guy from a cold approach because that would make her look like a slut. But she will if you attract her. Just do a quality approach.
Attraction is not a logical choice. Never ask women if they would logically date you. The answer will always be No.
Day game is the best. The only trick is that you need a location with lots of beautiful women. That's hard to find in most cities. You need a big city. Cities like LA, NYC, and London are amazing for day game. You need a place with cafes, malls, boardwalks, beaches, busy sidewalks, college campuses, etc.
I like day game because the approaches can be a lot more genuine and natural. And there's zero competition.

No only are days, weeks, months, and years relative, time itself is an invented notion. At one point in your life you had to invent the notion of "time". Before that, time did not exist for you.
Of course as Einstein's relativity shows, even at the physical level, there is no such thing as time. In fact, physics cannot define what time is other than in terms of velocity, which is a circular definition (as all physics definitions are).
Which is why time seems to fly when you're not thinking about it, and seems to crawl when you're wishing it would go faster. You are imagining time.

Yes, I have worldly obligations. Mostly with my biz (Actualized.org) and you guys. Also a bit of family obligations, but not much.
I am not a social person because I find it too shallow and I like my freedom.
I don't need to talk much about these topics with people/family because I get it out via my videos. The videos are my outlet.
To me social balance looks like living in a cabin in the woods with maybe a girlfriend. And interacting with students via teachings or writing. I don't care for having a social life in the conventional sense.
Don't try to emulate this unless it feels natural to you. People have different social preferences. Mystics tend to have an abnormally high tolerance for solitude.
Figure out what you want. What I want is irrelevant to you.

Tease her and flirt with her. Be playful in your conversations. Share some stories about yourself with her so she gets a feel for who you are.
THEN you can ask for her number. Don't mention the word "date". You can tell her, "Let's grab a coffee sometime" as you get her number.