thedoorsareopen

I know what you mean, I've been down the rabbit hole, I've crossed the gateless gate, I've rested in my nondual state as I Am, and learned the intricacies of neuroscience and psychology, and I'm running out of information to explain why I'm still not perfectly executing the goals I say I want. I've gotten pretty good at following a routine for like a week, but eventually I just want some unstructured fuck-off time to read random Reddit and YouTube stuff, even though I've reached the point where there's no further information I really need to understand any of the following subjects: my childhood trauma, discipline, how my brain works, how to manage my emotions. It's just, I'm not a robot, that's the bottom line. But I have large goals and am not happy about the current amount of time I devote to them. The only thing I can say is I continue to try to get better at making the goals I have into tasks that I can make into habits and start doing more and more unconsciously. Exercising, writing, setting up websites and stuff like that. That's where I'm at now.

I've experienced this before, is this not the Non-Dual Experience? I thought it was, and if it's not, then I guess I've got more work to do... what is non dual experience then?

I'm not sure if I've hit my turning point yet. I might have, but maybe not yet. Turning points only look like turning points in retrospect, I expect. I empathize with your feelings of realization and regret. I've progressed mentally and spiritually, and find that once I unlock a certain limiting belief, I find it easy to regret the specific instances that led me to those limiting beliefs, or that I didn't internalize the information I needed sooner. These regrets come up in my awareness uncomfortably. But I would say, try not to attach to these thoughts too much. Before I was even on a spiritual or self-actualizational journey, I still regretted things when I moved past them, and while you may not be able to stop the thoughts from popping into your mind, you are able to choose to remove awareness from them. A lot of my problems stemmed from attaching too strongly to these regrets in the first place. I literally developed PTSD from it, which of course added to the pile of regrets and problems. But it also led me to pursuing mindfulness and investigating metaphysics and my psyche. Would it be nicer if we were zen masters at age 18? Yeah, maybe. But I think regret is felt based on something lacking from your life now. What you feel you are lacking in changes over time, along with your position and perspective in life. A couple weeks from now you'll learn another mindblowing thing that could lead you to regretting some different event or missed opportunity from your past. You could attach feeling to it, and sit in the self-discovery hangover, or you could drop it and do something else. Consider this, as well. I found that I had actually encountered a lot of this information in the past, many times in fact. But it went right over my head because of either a false limiting belief I hadn't smashed yet, or because I simply didn't understand enough about life or myself yet to understand the significance of the information. So for this stuff to work requires a little bit of the right kind of experience, which requires time, perhaps getting older or reaching a new life stage. Knowledge + experience = wisdom, and you're feeling that now. Your initial reaction may be regret, but what matters is what your ultimate reaction is. You can consciously choose to take action of some kind to self-actualize, whether it's career/business stuff or developing your meditation practice or whatever else. I've cleared up a lot of my mental problems, but it seems to me that my brain simply has a circuit that works like this: When it learns something new that's useful for my interests, my brain instantly tries to slot it into my past, usually age 18, and when it realizes that's impossible because time travel isn't an option, it generates negative feelings. Maybe I can engineer that out of my brain, but maybe not. What I can do though, is think something else, challenge the regret, choose to do something about it, or even feel gratitude that my brain cares about me. There was a time when I couldn't sleep and stayed up all night carving PTSD into my brain feeling endless regret about shit, so it's progress. I've found that the regret I felt way back in the day was based on believing in limiting beliefs that said my experiences were negative, when those beliefs were the highly distorted beliefs of a sheltered teenager, and ultimately were completely false in the face of my full potential as a human. So I felt all that regret over nothing, right? What you focus on, expands. Focus on making a plan, or on making tomorrow slightly better than today.

I had a similar experience to this last Sunday, September 1st. I was on 100 ug of LSD. I had written on my whiteboard the words "Create positive self-fulfilling prophecies," and repeated that out loud. Then I was surprised to find I had various other things to say stemming from that. I was speaking in a more confident, masculine voice than usual, and didn't really know what was going to fall out of my mouth next. I also felt a lot of lightness in my body, and felt compelled to stand on the tips of my feet. Finally, "I" asked this voice, who are you? I was expecting myself to say, "Oh gee, it's me, God," or "it's me, the Holy Spirit," but instead I said, "I'm your intuition." I believe Leo was tapping into infinite intelligence in the sense that all our thoughts ultimately come from that source, but this is the problem I have with the word "God" in a consciousness, non-duality context. Leo says he talked to God, and you guys start asking him to ask God about P = NP, or ask God why bad things happen to good people. That's old stuff, that's the kind of ideas we have about God in a society shaped by dogma. Non-duality is interesting to me because it seems more fundamental than all that Abrahamic bullshit. I found that my "intuition" actually was able to express information to my awareness that my conscious ego did not previously know. My intuition guided me to feel tensions in my body associated with trauma I hadn't yet cleared. I didn't really have any but the vaguest understanding of the energies in my body up to that point. Like, I knew chakras were vaguely a thing, that's about it. I believe the reason I was able to gain seemingly unknown information from within myself is that this is the type of information relating to operating my human body. The body can know itself in an intuitive sense, and there is a godly aspect to this, much as non-dual Being can be known from within. The arrangement of the universe, as well as the shape of the human psyche, are intuitive to us. BTW, I believe my "intuition" was ultimately just an expression of an archetype in the Jungian sense; my brain was personifying certain parts of itself to me in a voice, while "I" the observer rested in awareness, except to ask questions from my Anima/feminine archetype personification. I grew up in a way that caused me to lose contact with any intuitive feeling of common sense, as well as any ability to "trust my gut," so I took this experience as an outgrowth of my past year of healing from narcissistic abuse. I mean, in a sense, I do feel like I "talked to God," but like, in a somewhat poetic sense. Ultimately, after months of immersing myself in different structures of belief, these are all language games! That's the point! You can have the pure experience of being, but it is *beyond* language and must be experienced directly! Leo can no less tell you God's exact words than can he have your non-dual experience for you. Honestly, Leo, I sincerely love you, and your videos have completely changed the course of my life in the past year, but like, I dunno how far off the deep end I would be at this point if I didn't have my coworkers at my day job to ground me a little. I've been in awe at your ability to direct your efforts thus far, so I can't really talk shit, but I agree with those that say it's a bit irresponsible to directly label this a communication with infinite intelligence. Would love to hear criticisms, or if anyone else has had a similar experience.

This is true. The way this works is that the narcissist's lies and dogma become a part of the narcissist's ego identity, as well as that of his supporters. To face the truth of the lies would require ego suicide at this point. They won't face that until they're forced to.

As an ex-Muslim who very much agrees with your number 8, I still recognize that doesn't change the fact that Islam, and a whopping 1.5 billion Muslims, are here. My question to myself often is, do I want to continue to seeth in the feeling that I'm totally right in like a hundred ways that yeah, Islam is very negative! Or do I want to fill my life with other things as much as possible? Love, color, vibrancy, these are all things I was missing while I was in the Muslim community. These are the things I revel in nowadays. Art, free expression, pure color and music. I don't know how enlightened it is to enjoy aesthetics, but I feel there's real spiritual meaning to enjoying the expanded palette of secular life. There's a lot of stark blacks and whites in the Islamic aesthetic scheme, my experiences with it were often pretty grim on a sensory level. So I feel like I wanna drape myself in velvet just because I can. If I remember right, some Muslims believe music in general is haram. Music is like the most pure art form in the world.

If anything, it makes me aware of the more awake aspects and nature of other people. I can see now that life was always going on around me, and there were and are many aspects of it I wasn't aware enough to be open to that are now revealing themselves to me. Other people are variously awake and asleep, just as I have been. They just maybe didn't need all this vocabulary to understand it like I did, they just were it. Still, I want to continue to shape my life to be less at the mercy of those who would play some egoic game with me against my will.

I had a profound experience with this video, and I feel like I woke up to something during/before/after viewing it, after months and months of doing nothing but thinking about the trauma I grew up in. The thing Leo was saying about how families are always here, they're like different locations on a swinging pendulum on down the generations, based on the strength of the story they tell about why they're here -- that snapped a lot of things in place for me. I was raised Muslim, but am half white, my mom from a Catholic family. These big Muslim and Catholic families that themselves came from big families that have been going down the generations like that, presumably. Certainly within memory of my recent ancestors. Very status conscious, very worried about being seen at the mosque/church every week, but low spirituality. Team Islam, that sort of thing. I was decidedly not Muslim, and even though I was dragged through it so much, it never sparked in me even a little bit. As an adult, I was deemed the scapegoat and cut off contact. At first, I felt liberated, but soon it seemed like built in defense mechanisms swung into place and swung me into this enormous gender confusion. I spent about a year thinking maybe I was transgender, maybe that was my problem. I had enormous black depression based on this trauma for over a decade, so I was searching for anything. All I knew was being cast out of my family meant I was deemed unworthy to do the following: be considered respectable, be confident, be able to project my actions into reality (the kind of "fucking the world" that I heard Leo describe as what masculinity is, once). Instead, I experimented with gender fluidity for a while and found it really interesting, but very... inert, ambiguous, impotent, distasteful and uncomfortable. Recently I got a new job that has allowed me to start fresh, and develop a normal masculine demeanor for the first time in my life, after starting to heal from some of the feelings of complete impotent unacceptability. Still, I remained interested in the whole masculine/feminine thing, I wanted to learn more about it, I couldn't stop thinking about what masculinity and femininity meant for me, while also digesting ideas of non-duality from here and other sources. It felt like there was some kind of puzzle piece I couldn't quite wrap my cognition around, and then... A couple days ago I heard the song "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey. Stay with me, here. Leo talks in the Survival pt2 video about how form is important. The lyrics are simple, but at first they seemed to me like this strange juxtaposition of Catholic schoolgirl energy, like she's talking about being horny for Jesus or something. But in the context of thinking about Catholicism in terms of its ability to inspire its followers to continue it on, this makes PERFECT fucking sense. I listened to the song like 25 times, then later watched this video, and it's like alllll this non-duality stuff snapped into place all at once, along with a final certainty that I can let any further sway Islam has over me drop, and a sudden swinging back into place of my masculinity. Going back to form being important: "Fantasy" starts with this really heavy serious intro, then almost winks at itself and plunges into a light, breezy Tupac-esque beat with modern synth sounds. It has an unmistakably exuberant bounce of the groove that corresponds to the complete inability I felt to fit in with either Catholic or Muslim paradigms. Just a sense of absurdity to my existence, a sense of sticking my tongue out at the 20 centuries or more of dominance that the Abrahamic religions held over my world. I grew up in so much trauma because in many ways, my parents fucked up by getting knocked up with me. A person like me, this perfect blend of two competing belief systems' shame defense mechanisms. That was a large part of the personality that made up the conscious experience of being me. Like Leo talking about staring at actuality in his hand, and becoming the freefloating hand that is simply itself, just for a moment... That is like my trauma. I was a living personification of the failure of my creators to essentially sow their field with the right blend of reccesive and dominant genes. Whereas a slightly different mix of traits and genes could have resulted in a strong, fecund man that somehow integrated the sensibilities of both Muslim and Christian virilities, instead I was cast and then raised in a neglectful way that led to my feminine side overtaking my masculine one as a child, as I subconsciously sensed the lack of control or masculinity that my dad set as an example. My masculinity became muted as I reached puberty, and then later in adult life when I was discarded by my family, it swung shut and I had my gender confusion. ***** "Images of Rapture/creep into me slowly/as you go into my head And my heart beats faster/when you take me over/time and time and time again." That was me feeling my spirit coming to attend to my human animal, or relate with it in a more noticeable way. I've had this urge, for the last couple months, to just... apologize. To no one in particular. And not about any particular incident or action. I simply wanted to describe in as detailed a way as is possible without it being about a specific thing that happened. Just expressing every possible variation of the feeling of remorse, sorrow, regret, desire to change, desire to rectify, change and understanding. To just fully and utterly enunciate that feeling to the furthest fullest extent I can, in writing. In carefully, consciously chosen words. I want to do this with certain other feelings I endlessly feel inside of myself filtered through the physical mechanisms of my brain, which themselves are based on the experiences I have gone through. Eventually I realized this idea is essentially trying to scrape up against a Platonic ideal of certain emotions, or certain... spirits. Hmm. Spirits. The spirit of apology exists, independently of whether I ever received the apologies I wanted in my life, or if I was ever able to give the ones I deserved to give, let alone thinking about how I wouldn't have had much vocabulary with which to honestly, genuinely and constructively describe WHY I was apologetic, how I planned to change, what I learned, why it won't happen again, etc etc. I probably would not have been able to be mindful enough to tease those things apart before. Kept me thinking, though. Sometimes I feel something illuminating itself through the physical structure of my brain, and the experiences it fixed upon, traumatic or not. It was like some consistent force was trying to project itself through this flawed brain structure. Whether or not it was ever able to attain its self image in physical reality, it was there, much like the spirit of sorrow example above. But what was this the spirit of? Was it the spirit that inspired me to dress in drag in public sometimes? Was it the spirit that told me to go to art school anyway knowing I was completely flying in the face of my dad's pressure for me to be a standard second generation immigrant doctor or whatever. Was it the spirit that would become more present with my human body at the end of a work day, and start to attend to my body's needs almost as a person playing the Sims gets its sim some dinner. So what is that spirit? Duh. It's ME. That snapped into place somewhere in the first 20 minutes of Survival pt. 2. Something *clicked*, the understanding that this is a story that literally justifies itself but can kick start you into a human being to awaken from if you're so able. All of a sudden it made me realize, as you were talking about it, that if my personal story has justified itself into existence, then there must be significant work to be done in the later half of my lifetime to neutralize this inter generational trauma and make sure it ends with me, at least this little tendril of it. I feel uncommonly confident and able to undertake this task, and I have a clearer image of how to do it, over years, in many different steps, than I have EVER had about any life direction I have ever had, when I was still running off the old Abrahamic-trauma-software. This is just evident to me now, the path I must take. It seems to have arisen directly from my spirit blowing through my subconscious neural networks and illuminating the right energy, the right vibe, the right confidence. I have been feeling more present in the moment, day to day, in the last couple months. I've never been able to hold that kind of presence before, especially for so long. Now it seems I have crossed some sort of threshold of self-awareness. I feel vastly more self-aware than I did last night, last month, last year for sure. The parts where Leo directly addressed those of us who were born, like helium atoms being fused out of hydrogen ones, out of the sheer starstuff of main-line Muslims, that was very helpful for my understanding. My dad had a mosque. I briefly turned it into an art gallery, once. I was quite proud of that, it felt like a significant internal cultural achievement for me. His dad had a mosque, quite a large one in fact. I prayed there a couple times as a kid. All those centuries... "I'm in Heaven/With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend/There's no beginning and there is no end/Feels like I'm dreaming but I'm not sleeping" I feel conscious in a way I didn't last night, before watching this video, listening to "Fantasy" several more times, and writing out this post. This is a consciousness of more self definition, instead of simply being refracted through the prism of neural structures in my brain that were designed to only be able to bring a conscious experience of trauma or shame. I guess I just kinda figure, if it's possible for a human individual to experience and live that pain for as long as I did, then what is possible with love and guided awareness? I now have the ability to work on my own little piece of the tapestry of the big bang and physical reality, such as it is. My own little corner of creation, here, in my city, in this body, in this brain, in the next three to five decades probably. I will be the "sinner" that proves the lie of the saint. I feel strongly that I want to engage with this trauma electrical impulse that shuddered down from my ancestors, through my grandparents, my parents, and into me, fully acknowledge and accept the pain, transform it into something that no longer is associated with the hot nerve of rumination and trauma thinking, like a sore tooth you can't stop tonguing. And thus contain my mess and try my best to coexist with my fellow humans in a positive, adding value way, of abundance (and holy shit do I feel the abundance now), rather than my previous ways of unending self-pity, lack, shame, seeming inability to do anything about it. Leo you're a good egg, man. Thank you.

Yeah, this is it. I misremembered it a lot, but the phrase he used was humanity is the time-binding class of life. Thanks, Leo!

Hi, I unfortunately lost my bookmark to this book, and can't remember the title or author for the life of me. I think I found it in these forums, or maybe in a link from these forums, so I will describe it, and hopefully someone here knows it? It was a pdf of one of those books from the 1920s or 30s where a guru lays out his detailed scheme of life, of mankind, and how best to live your life. Seemed like the author was American. I only read the first chapter, which said that the author's main point was that humans have the ability to create memories and recall them. He called recording memories "fixing time into your mind," or something like that. Man stands out from nature because of our ability to fix memories into mind and act on them, thus leapfrogging us out of nature's normal patterns of time. From there he started going into the ego, and what happens when these excreted memories come together to form an identity, and it seemed like he was saying something pretty similar to how Leo puts it, which is that ultimately, our identities are simply a collection of memories witnessed by nothing, which the nothing takes to mean that it is something. It seemed really interesting, but I just don't remember enough info to track it down again. I could have sworn the title was "The Time-Fixing Animal" but that hasn't turned up anything. I worry I'll never come across it again. So what say you? Does anyone remember this book or know what I'm talking about?