Insightful27

The other day @Carl-Richard said something that stuck with me. This made me think of Leo's Burning Through Karma video, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and also David Deida's concept of Life Purpose. I'm at a stage in my life (graduating college) where I am making a lot of major decisions, and it is important to me to clearly understand how to walk on the spiritual path. The idea that I will eventually get to a place where there is "nothing else to do" strikes me as intuitive. Right now in my life the most compelling thing I want to work on is my dating/sex and social life. It seems like if I spend 3-5 years really working on this, then I will be able to move on to "more spiritual" things. My main concern is that this approach will lead to me deluding myself and chasing addictions in circles. Take a cocaine addict for example, will he be able to break out of his cocaine addiction by doing more and more cocaine? Maybe, but how long will it take before he reaches a breaking point? Modern psychology/neuroscience views addiction like a physical disease, on the biological level it can be essentially impossible to break away. I'm worried that this is what my pursuit of dating or even my career will turn into. Wouldn't it make more sense to take the path of renunciation, and free myself that way? I know that in that video Leo said this is an option, but that it maybe less practical. I really want to hear other people's experiences and perspectives. What has your experience been like with this approach to spirituality?

Yeah I am going to pursue Kriya, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Thank you for your responses!

I’ve spent a lot time doing Buddhist meditation practice and I have done multiple intense retreats. On my last retreat, I found myself (20yrs) wondering if there was a spiritual practice more aligned with where I am in my life (energy level, drive, ambition). I find it really tedious to sit in zen mind when I want to be doing something competitive like martial arts or pursuing my life purpose (psychology). I’m not sure if it was Leo or someone else who said that young men with lots of testosterone makes poor monks, but I’m finding that to be true. I wanted to see if anyone in this community has any ideas of spiritual practice that might be more effective for someone in my position, or if anyone has any thoughts on this topic in general. Thanks!

Also, I really like how you put this. This really resonates with where I am in my life right now. Always appreciate hearing your thoughts.

LOL, I should've said that I don't know if that is true. I haven't spent much time in the eastern yoga world...

@Leo Gura Thanks for the response! I bought a couple of the Kriya books that are on your book list. Is the best way to learn through reading those, or is there a more formal in-person course that I should take (like Goenka)? I have heard that Kriya can be dangerous without guidance, but I haven't confirmed that.

@cetus I started following Leo's content and meditating in 7th grade. I have found that as I have gotten older that there are some boxes lower on Maslow's Pyramid that I haven't checked off yet.

@aurum I've read a couple of his books, I really like him. Would love to go on a retreat with him in the future.

News Article “At least nine abbots and senior monks involved in the scandal have been disrobed and cast out of the monkhood” She blackmailed them for $11.9 million USD, which they then embezzled to pay her. I think this is such a great example of Maslow’s Heirary of Needs in action. It also makes me think of Leo’s video about burning karma. Trying to bypass egoic needs by acting like they don’t exist is never going to work in the long-term. It has to be an authentic transcendence from these needs, which a very small percentage of people have actually done.

Yeah and the fact that Abbots can move it around without anyone knowing is crazy.

What did you do to have fun alone?

I am in the process of applying to Psychology PhD programs, the entire aim of my career is to expand the scientific understanding and application of meditation and psychedelics. What areas do you think most deserve more research? The research proposal is for a grant from the National Science Foundation, so try to keep suggestions on the "sciency" side of things. I will take all recommendations seriously, I figure that there isn't a better place to ask for feedback than here. As a side note, I took Leo's life purpose course the year before I started college and it is surreal how all the insights/inspiration I got from that course have come to fruition. This summer I am getting paid thousands of dollars to travel to different monasteries and research meditation, something I would pay to do. I highly recommend the course, the money was a drop in the bucket compared to the value I have gotten from Leo over the years. I look forward to playing a small role in legitimizing meditation/psychedelics into the mainstream, so that others may benefit the same way we have benefitted. 🙂

Yeah actually there was research being done at Insight Meditation Society where they were micro dosing meditators on retreat and then measuring various signs of meditation progress. I would LOVE to do something like this. Thanks for your ideas!

@UnbornTao Well if I can get ahold of a general aspect of meditation that I could research then it is easy to break it down and make it specific/technical. For example, I want to do a comparison of Metta Meditation and Christian Prayer. This breaks down to technical concepts like mirror-neurons firing, oxytocin-dopamine-serotonin serum levels, etc.

@Raze Thanks for these suggestions! I just learned about the EPRC a couple weeks ago but SEMA is new and definitely something I will look into more.

@Carl-Richard Lmao maybe we can brainstorm together then. Are you also on the psychology side on things or more neuroscience? There are a lot of different options for neuroscience...

Recently I was in a philosophy class and an acquaintance of mine wrote his paper using AI, I didn't, yet we both ended up with my same grade. He admitted to me that he wouldn't be able to pass if it was an oral exam, and that he actually didn't know what he was really writing about. This caused me to realize that in the near future (10-15 years) AI will likely advance so far that my intellectual work will become purposeless, it will turn into merely a hobby. Obvious I am concerned about the practical aspect the job market narrowing (I want to research psychedelic medicine & do philosophy) but it also makes me apathetic to think that I won't be able to do anything that is really valuable or new if (most likely when) AI reaches a certain point in its development. Has anyone else ran into this with their life purpose? Any advice?

You know I think that this is also true at the psychological level as well. Our minds love to play into our negativity bias and hyper-fixate on the possibility of a negative future. This feels very grounding, thank you.

@seriousman24 That's a good point. There will likely be a period where AI can help augment human intelligence so we can keep up for at least a little while longer.

@Leo Gura Do you have any ideas about how to deal with the psychological distress of not having a meaningful impact on the world? While I enjoy working on my life purpose for its own sake, one of the things I got most inspired by from your life purpose course was this idea that I have a unique gift that I can offer to the world that will help people. Even if that is true today, it is becoming easier and easier to imagine a future where that isn't true. Even if we implement a high universal basic income, it will still feel empty to live a life without purpose, especially as a masculine young man.

This reading was assigned to me in class, I can't believe that this got published in NIH. It is a near death experience of a neuroscientist of 20 years. Must read. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6170087/ "Communication there goes light years beyond our simplistic linear thinking, beyond the bottleneck of linguistically constrained awareness we experience in these physical bodies in the earthly realm." "I came to see that unconditional love has the potential to bring infinite healing."

I emailed this to my philosophy professor and asked if this was evidence against materialism, here is his reply (he is a materialist) I was tempted a few years ago to write something about this very question, but I never did, though I was satisfied that the reports of people with NDE’s could be explained consistently with materialism. For there to be a problem for materialism, there needs to be conscious experience at the same time as there is no brain activity of a kind sufficient (given materialism) for conscious experience. So it’s not enough to show that at some time the patient’s brain exhibited no activity, and at some time the patient had a conscious experience; the two times must be the same. But it’s very hard to pinpoint the times of the two things. It is not true that brain activity simply ceases entirely when the heart stops, but as far as I can tell it’s very hard to determine how far relevant brain activity has entirely stopped after someone’s heart has stopped, in part because we don’t really know which brain activity is relevant to sustaining conscious experience, and in part because we can’t easily tell what, if anything, is going on deep in the brain of someone in the ER. Apparently, though, some brain activity continues for a surprisingly long time—several minutes—after the heart stops. And it’s hard to say when the conscious experience reported by a patient actually took place. There seem to be two ways in which we might tell. First, we might take the patient’s word for it. But if someone is revived and reports having had certain experiences five minutes ago (or whatever), we can’t just assume that their sense of when they had the experiences is correct. After all, when you remember your dreams, you typically can’t say when you did the dreaming, and even if you had a sense that it was some time ago, rather than just now, that might sense well be inaccurate. Second, we might find a match between the content of the conscious experience reported (for example, what the patient seemed to hear) and sounds (e.g., of human speech) actually made while the patient was unresponsive. If the match is surprising enough that we take the experience to have been veridical (e.g., the nurse spoke of her dog, Felix), then we have a time for when the experience occurred. However, we’ve all seen TV shows of people in the ER “dying” and being revived, so we can easily imagine what might be said in such circumstances; that’s why the match has to be surprising. I’m skeptical that the match is ever that surprising. There is a skeptical literature on NDE’s and their significance for materialism. An activist scholar named Keith Augustine has written on the topic, but I’m sure there are others. For some psychologists, NDE’s are just an interesting psychological phenomenon to investigate; they’re not gunning for materialism. For all I know, there’s experimental work too. Let me add one more thing. If conscious experience occurs in the absence of any brain activity at all, then not only is materialism false, but so too are those forms of dualism that take certain kinds of brain activity to be (merely) causally necessary (and sufficient) for conscious experience. The snag is that these are the most plausible forms of dualism, since they accommodate the fact that ordinarily, as far as we can tell, we enjoy conscious experience of different kinds only when our brains are undergoing certain kinds of activity. Dualists would need to explain why, ordinarily, my auditory cortex has to be active for be to have auditory experiences , but not in the case of NDE’s. There is already a problem for dualists to explain what the brain does for the mind if the mind is immaterial; but the problem is aggravated if NDE’s are experiences in the absence of all brain activity.

I found this post from JP taking about Jung's concept of circumambulation of the self and immediately made the connection to the way Deida talked about purpose in Way of The Superior Man. Basically the concept is that you have a series of mini-purpose's that you need to work through, like the layers on an onion. As you work through them you get closer to your true self and what you really desire. Any thoughts about this or about how this ties in with Leo's idea about life purpose?

I recently bought the Claude Opus 3 after seeing it on Leo's blog and found something really creative that you can do find your life purpose and ideas for task/projects to get you there. I generated a PDF from OneNote with all my notes from the Life Purpose course, uploaded it to Claude, and asked it questions to help get me on track. Some of the best questions I asked were: -Given what you know about me, what are some different ways I could formulate my Life Purpose statement to make it sound more authentic? -Give me a vision of what my life could look like if I was living my Life Purpose, be specific -Give me a list of tasks and projects that I can do in order to get on track with my Life Purpose -Brainstorm a list of people who have a life purpose similar to mine and a brief summary of how they did it It's not a substitute for doing the real inner work but I think that it is a great tool to use especially if you took the Life Purpose course and want help brainstorming an working on your Life Purpose

@OBEler You make good points. I think I will take an extended break from Actualized. However, I do still see spirituality as a core part of my life and Life Purpose.