Extreme Z7

@ULFBERHT I don't want to speak of enlightenment too much but I will say that all doubts and skepticism is normal on the enlightenment journey. The reason why I don't let them get to me though is because my higher intuition and direct experience tell me that there is something to spiritual enlightenment and I recognize just how much my own thoughts about reality is irrelevant.

@Hardik jain Then accept your lack of acceptance. Counter intuitively, removing your neurotic desire to improve your reality improves your reality.

What long term plan, indeed. . . if you don't have one, it's simple. Just be patient and study educational material and most importantly, yourself. Gain mindfulness over your actions, thoughts, and behaviors and how they affect how you feel. You're treating meditation as if it's some shortcut to bliss. Just keep focusing on learning new things on this path that may help you. Embrace your own ignorance/incompetence. Once you get a deep understanding of how little you actually know about life, then it will make perfect sense why you still have big problems in your life even after a year of personal development.

@Hardik jain Don't fight any emotion that crops up. Fully accept your emotional state no matter what. Also, maybe create a long term plan for developing emotional mastery because it seems to me like you're trying to look for a shortcut.

<10-26-2016> Enjoying My Own Self-Created Suffering Stumbling around the forums again and this time I kept bumping around some advice involving being kind to yourself on your self-actualization journey. Hating your own flaws and ego is, ironically, itself ego. My intuition is telling me that's all I need to enjoy life but it's also telling me that it's still critical to strategize my way to a different lifestyle. Currently, my environment, my social relationships, my duties, and even my own psyche are far too toxic to live a truly amazing and creative lifestyle. I'm beginning to real gain a grip on my life purpose too, but I feel like I've made good progress only on the foundations. Doing all this is extremely tough, extremely emotionally tasking, and I have to love it. I have no choice really, not fully accepting my suffering means that I'm going to avoid it, and I can't beat it as long as I do so.

<10-24-2016> Following My Intuition I'm not in the mood to write a very lengthy entry today. I'm just feeling lazy that's all. Anyway, Leo's last episode "How to Harness Your Intuition" is still burned into my subconscious and I've been reflecting a lot on how it's helped me and how it's going to help me in the future. That's all I want to talk about really. I'm very tired, I made a drawing that took me 6 hours today which is more time than I usually spend. Here it is below:

LOL. He's even got the shirt down. Amazing content, though.

Are you foreshadowing the future episode "Why Philosophy is Wrong - A Critique of Philosophy"? I'm just kidding around.

<10-23-2016> Suffering The Consequences of Overconfidence (and Leo's Intuition Video) Perhaps yesterday's experience (see post above) made me overconfident. I wasn't even able to last 10 minutes in SDS today without moving. Even when I didn't fully expect that I would be able to it again, I didn't think I'd barely even get close. Oh well, lesson learned. I'll still try to do 1 hour SDS per day until Friday, though. I don't need to, or even want to. But I'm curious to how it will be like. Leo's newest video was quite profound and it gave me a lot of reflection as to my past actions in personal development and a more broad perspective on my future life decisions. There's too much detail for me to talk about so I'll not talk too much about it. All I'll say is, many months ago, I was struggling on figuring out what my life purpose is. After so much trial and error, I find my intuition attracting me to the realm of cartoons and perhaps even animation. My drawing habit has become my most cherished creative hobby which is surprising to me because when I first started personal development, I thought I would either pursue game development or music production as a main creative field and everything else, including drawing, would just be side-hobbies. I've experienced far more passion for drawing than I have any other hobby recently. Here are some recent comic strips I drew for mine and other people's enjoyment. On a final note, I downloaded and printed out Leo's worksheet and even the worksheet of last week's episode. I'm not sure yet as to how it will help me but it's worth trying out.

<10-22-2016> Best (or Worst) Strong Determination Sit I've Ever Had The highlight for my day today was that I decided to do another Strong Determination Sitting session. I've been hanging around this forum for a while and I came across people talking about strong determination sits. After the stuff I read, I decided to give it a try again. I've been doing really comfortable meditation sessions for the past few weeks and I really think it was time for something different. I set my timer for one hour. The sit started and I decided to let my mind loose and suddenly, a wave of random thoughts emerged. It was a rapid stream of noise and it felt like madness. After a few minutes it dies down and I spaced out for a while before things actually started to feel peaceful. It felt weird because I don't expect any pleasant feeling from SDS but surely enough, it eventually vanished and things started getting uncomfortable. At first it was bearable and my thoughts came back to its original monkey-mind state. The more time passed, the more uncomfortable the sit became and the more I wished my timer to go off at any moment. I had a bunch of salive stored up in my mouth because I didn't want to spit or swallow it. Eventually, I felt so uncomfortable in my current position that it was all I could think about and I just let my spit drool down onto my lap. Things started to feel like hell, the most difficult part was trying to deal with the urges and temptations to give up. As I sat, my most effective weapon against the pain was to constantly remind myself that I am not my body. ("I am not my body", "I am empty awareness", "I am not my body", "I am empty awareness"). I definitely think it helped. As a matter of fact, I gained a new perspective on SDS and that it can be seen as a practice to get closer to a state of consciousness where you are not your body. I needed to constantly remind myself of this, though. When I wasn't, it felt like hell. A couple of strong urges came up, telling me to give up. Each one I ignored by doing the previously mentioned technique. In the end, I won. I couldn't believe how great I felt when I heard my timer ring which meant I had successfully pulled off a 60 min. SDS. 60 minutes of sitting down without re-positioning myself. This was by far the most intense and difficult meditation session I've ever had so far. The session felt so powerful that all I could think of doing afterwards was to lay down on a comfy couch for another 5 minutes. I started to think about the worries I've been having for the past months and I felt like some of them became far too petty for me to worry about. In other words, I quickly solved some problems that have been plaguing me for months by doing a practice that lasted only one hour. I'm absolutely curious to how my life would change if I do this for an entire week. I'm up for that challenge. I hope that I'll make it through. If you're still reading up to this point. Please wish me luck!

@Grant6 Question everything you've gathered you're entire life. All neurosis stems from delusion of existence. The more you get closer to what's actually true, the more free and happier you become.

<10-20-2016> Fear, Frustration, and Fun I absolutely pushed my schedule and energy today past my normal daily average today. It's not something that makes me feel good. It's emotionally grueling and I'm still asking myself if it's worth it. I still want to hold on to hope that all this work is going to lead to a far more fulfilling future but right now, it's still work 'til I can work no more, then ponder how I'm going to do much of the same tomorrow. Part of the reason why I work so hard is because of fear. I have not so much a fear of failure as I do a fear of losing (things). I keep imagining in my head all the negative stuff that's going to happen if I don't work hard and that I may even lose a lot of the cherished things I have today. On the flipside, I do have some degree of positive motivation but it's something I have not spent a good amount of time cultivating. I'm still ultimately frustrated day-by-day given the amount of emotional labor I put in. Part of the problem is that I have too many duties and obligations right now that my efforts are basically spread thin among the different workloads. I can't just drop them, though. I need to strategically complete each of them while simultaneously making sure that I don't blindly accept any new duties or ideas without first assessing how this will affect my work. (This is something my 2015 self did not know) And of course, I find myself slowly moving away from "fun" activities because of this. I actually find this to be very beneficial to my level of productivity but detrimental to my level of happiness. I find that I'm going too far in the former so I better stop and relax to re-balance the scales. I'll be doing "fun" activities after finishing this journal entry. I don't know. . . play a video game. . watch a show. . . anything. It's the easiest thing in the world for me anyway. That's all for today. 'Til next time.

<10-18-2016> Distinguishing Success From Happiness I've gotten very good at maintaining habits to pursue success but I'm still pretty clueless to actually feeling fulfilled. I don't think it's because I'm doing anything wrong, It's just that some things take a very long time and being able to distinguish success from happiness is a very recent thing for me. When I started doing personal development, I didn't make the distinction and so I have a lot of things that I wanted last year but they still haven't made me happy. I still have some distracting worries in my life which I'm still trying to be mindful with so I don't get lost in them but I hope I'm able to get big progress in my level of fulfillment and satisfaction as soon as next year, perhaps.

<10-17-2016> Short Entry I did everything I wanted to do today. Procrastinated and wasted time a bit but it's all normal. Nothing more to say.

@Seyed Ditto

<10-16-2016> My Problem With Academics I just finished reading Robert Greene's book 'The 33 Strategies of War' yesterday (I forgot to mention that) and with the book finished, I had more time to allocate to something else and the most obvious choice was to replace it with a study habit in relation to my college course. Much to my dismay, though, I found that it was very difficult for me to do because I generally don't like doing academic work. I don't actually enjoy being college or anything academics-related. I don't know why but the things the academic system teaches and the way they teach them bores me a lot. Ever since I've developed a habit of learning through books and the internet, it has stopped making sense to me how academic activities could possible be beneficial to my life. I keep being told that that's what I need in order to get a job and earn a living but I've learned that that's complete hogwash. People care about the results your skills can produce, not about what system of education that you grew up in. There are things to learn from academic life, of course, but it's always going to be far more effective if you take your education into your own hands and what with all the information that is available nowadays through books, seminars, and the internet, you can practically learn anything. So what's still the point of having the traditional system of education we have now? It may have made sense a few hundred years ago but it certainly doesn't make sense today. Heck, I've learned more about life meditating in a quiet room than I have in a campus where they supposedly teach you everything there is to know about life but that's another story. And don't get me started about grades. Too ranty? Here's some pixel art I drew today. Triple Simley Face! ()

<10-15-2016> Overworking Myself Out of all the problems I've encountered through personal development, I've come to realize that the one I'm struggling with the most is overworking myself to the point where I'm almost constantly agitated and stressed out. It sometimes gets to the point where I deny myself fun or even relaxation just to get some work done. I'm not even getting paid for anything at the moment. It's just hobbies that I want to do and coursework that I need to do to convince my parents that I can continue to stay in their house until I graduate and get a job. I think that's one of the reasons why I've continued to do this to myself for months. It's because I have this idea that I'll be able to finish a lot of the work and THEN I can slow down and take a rest and be mindful of the situation. My meditation and mindfulness habit has given me the power to have moments of calmness and being in the present moment despite my hectic situation. But they're not perfect strategies. I gotta remain mindful, keep calm, and keep going. I've learned to say NO to a lot of unnecessary activities that I used to just take in only to realize that they're a waste of time. I think that if I can keep that up and keep being strategic then the future is going to have a lot more space and time just to be peaceful in existing.

@AlwaysBeNice Hmm. . .I'm not quite sure if you're lost or if you're on the right path. In any case, you spelled 'ecstatic' wrong.

I would say otherwise, Rali (the guy making the response) has a bit too much of an ideological bent which is ironic considering that he talks about getting rid of all ideas and what not. Basically, I say he's ideological because his attitude seems to be FOLLOW THIS ONE PATH AND ONLY THIS ONE PATH OR ELSE YOU WONT REACH ENLIGHTENMENT! Whereas Leo's attitude is to look at enlightenment through multiple perspectives and "leave no stone un-turned". I'm not saying that it's a superior strategy that will guarantee enlightenment but it's just my own personal preference. Obviously, I'm making a massive oversimplification here so don't take my opinion at face value.

<10-14-2016> Loving Life Despite The Hardship Entering this personal development journey has since given me the biggest struggle I've ever had in my life. No other time have I ever felt this challenged and pressured and at the same time been given stakes so high that everything else just feels like distraction. There so much to love and value and life and so far, being in this path seems to be the best way I know to nurture and value them. Today I took a Math test that I've been studying about a week for and to my dismay, I still was not prepared for the majority of the questions that came up. I felt really shitty afterward and I still feel a little bit of it as I write this because I was really looking forward to acing this test yet I feel it's likely that I failed. But then I remembered Leo's "You're Not Happy Because You Don't Want To Be" video and it's main lesson, you keep giving yourself arbitrary rules for happiness and it makes you miserable. Remembering that instantly made me more conscious of my situation and removed a huge chunk of my negative emotions but some feelings of disappointment still remain. It doesn't matter, though, this will just be another temporary passing in experience and if there's anything I should be keeping permanent, it's my vision and intuition for what's possible in life and also what's already to love in the present moment regardless of all the suffering. I want to keep going, I have no choice. Like I said, the stakes are too high. _________ On an additional note, Leo Gura temporarily changed his forum signature for a while and it's seems I got lucky enough to notice it! He basically posted a pdf to an enlightenment book he was reading. Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/file/8ido49ms5k0j3b5/Empty-Cloud_The_Autobiography_of_Xu_Yun.pdf I wonder why it was only temporarily up? Maybe because he posted a link to a pdf format of a hardcopy book. LOL I hope he doesn't notice.

@Hardik jain You're bored either because you want to do something but can't or you're in a state of not knowing what you want to do.

<10-13-2016> Sadhguru I re-listened to Leo's "Lifestyle Minimalism" episode on mp3 today. I haven't listened to the episode in a long time and I thought it was appropriate considering that my schedule is getting pretty cramped up again. It's middle of the school semester and I'm going to need all the peace of mind I can get. On the flipside, I've been into watching and listening to various Sadhguru videos for the past 3 days. They have a lot of really profound wisdom some of which I think even topped some of Leo's advice especially when it comes to peace of mind. I remember months ago I was thinking about peace of mind and just great my life would be if I had it. Now I seem to be developing one and I've found that it's not an end in itself. Peace of mind only makes it easier to handle the challenges of life but it does not mean one has reached the highest point in life at all. It was pretty much explained clearly in one of Sadhguru's very profound videos. I would recommend to anyone who follows spirituality to spend time listening to Sadhguru's teachings because he's so direct in his approach in regards to living life. He also talks about a wide variety of significant issues in modern society like the education system and the scientific enterprise in very deep and insightful ways. It's a joy listening to him whether directly or as I'm doing some work. There is a ton of content on YouTube involving him so he shouldn't be hard to look for.

<10-12-2016> College Getting Tense, I've Been Here Before. . . I've just realized that it's already the middle of my current college semester. I'm experiencing stress and a workload that's all too familiar with me. I've been here before, I can handle it and it's not going to last forever. I have a much clearer mind than I used to and I've also learned to reject a lot of ideas that pop into my head to do this and do that to make sure I don't compromise whatever tasks I've accepted now. Every habit I have is going pretty smoothly. The more I do them, the more they feel smoother and more effortless. I don't expend as much brainpower as I used to in drawing, I just kind of do it now especially with simple wacky cartoons. My meditation habit is less about struggle and more about. . well. . . just doing it. My game work feels pretty much the same but I've learned to control work in my indie game project so I don't obsess over the tiniest things too much. If there's any habit at all that I'm still working to remain consistent, it's a reading habit. I'm still stuck reading Robert Greene's "33 Strategies of War" but I'm also done with it. If I can persist and remain good consistency on what I'm doing, I'll be fine. I still need to broaden my horizons, though, and keep looking for stuff outside what I presently know that could help me. It's by doing that that I discovered Actualized.org, and I haven't stopped doing it since. (That's actually only partially true, I actually feel too lazy to seek out new material most of the time. But hey, it's better than remaining perfectly rigid and self-protective.)

Take it slow, though. Be patient and be okay with learning being very gradual.

@100rockets Obsessive thinking is a hallmark of neurosis but completely normal in the personal development path. My advice would be to get interested in learning and contemplation. Broaden you horizons on life and increase your ability to entertain a variety of perspectives. It's hard to get stuck obsessing over certain thoughts when there are other ways of looking at things that are equally entertaining to your mind.