@Megan Alecia The whole point of consciousness work is that you become no-one's fool, most of all, your own.
An enlightened master is not some soft hippie that blows soap bubbles. He's more clever than a pack of foxes and more sharp than a slap to the face.
Don't get so spiritual you disconnect from pragmatism and strategy.

Easy. Shadow is sorta just the inverse of ego. Anything you think that isn't you and should not exist.
For example, if you think rapists should not exist, that's your shadow. You fail to accept that you are all the rapists in the world. This denial of rape is ego. It comes from fear, not Love.
If you were infinitely conscious you would realize and accept that you are a rapist, thereby healing the division between you and the rapey part of reality. The rapey part of reality is your shadow. It's that part of yourself which you have disowned in order to maintain an ego.

Yes! Good quoting.
Fighting with the ego is just more ego. Analogous to how judging yourself for being judgmental is just a doubling of the mistake.
Which is why I said that Self-Love is the highest teaching. Hating the ego doesn't work. Loving the ego works better. If the ego is acting out it's only because it seeks Love which it has been denied. So give it some Love to pacify it.
The best way to get the ego onboard with killing itself is by showing the ego that "killing itself" just means Infinite Love.

The reality is much more brutal than merely that.
The reality is that the reason rich people are rich is mostly because the whole society is rigged like a pyramid scheme to funnel money upward toward the very top 1% to 10% of society, thus basically enslaving the bottom 90% to be the servants of the top 10%. And then those top 10% are so happy and so powerful that they have zero interest in change the system because it serves them perfectly, and the bottom 90% are too poor and too busy working for the top 10% to do anything about it.
This is how all human civilizations have functioned for some 10,000 years since ancient Egypt. And it continues to this day.

All you have to do to see that your romance is completely self-biased and survival based is to contemplate why you don't get romantic with a gorilla. There is absolutely no reason why you should relate with humans more than gorillas other than survival.
Absolutely everything involving sex is pure self-bias. Why do you not hump a light-post? Sex is COMPLETELY arbitrary and relative. And the only reason you do it is because it has survival value for the species.
But don't get me wrong. This doesn't mean you can't have deep intimate relationships. You can! Just stop fooling yourself about what it is you're doing. You are using those relationships to enhance your survival. You are doing that without admitting you are doing it. Self-deception 101.
Except that's your projection, not anything I said.
Relationships are survival. But saying so does not devalue the relationship in any way. It's just being honest about what you're doing. People get the very wrong idea here that I am anti deep relationships. Not at all. You can do deep intimate relationships with consciousness and spiritual aspects. But it's still a survival game.
People love the illusion of it not being a game. It makes the ego feel justified in its raw survival. The ego needs to paint a pretty story about how all of its purely arbitrary survival needs and manipulations are in fact legit, pure, good, honest, truthful, and selfless. Women especially fall into this illusion and they really upset when it is pointed out them.
Both men and women are selfish as devils when it comes to sex. The selfishness is asymmetrical, with each side denying their own particular brand of selfishness while being outraged by the selfishness of the opposite side. And all of this is, of course, just more selfishness! And all of this is, of course, denied with great passion and fury.
It would be much simpler if you just came out and said: "I am a selfish devil and I want sex under conditions X, Y, Z because that's what serves me best." But of course you cannot do that because it harms your survival. Your community will judge you for it and you can't stomach admitting to yourself just how selfish you are. So you must keep all your true motivations and conditions secret, even from yourself.

It should be your goal and dream to die alone.
Enjoy people while you are here, but when it comes to death, this is too profound to do other than alone. Don't allow idiots to interfere with your facing of death.

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:
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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

If there was a reason for being good, then it wouldn't be good. Contemplate it.
For good to be good, it must be done for its own sake. Selflessly. Which is why Good = selflessness. If you are trying to do good for a reason, that is selfishness, and that is evil.

Note: What people call "good" is actually evil. And what people call "evil" is actually Good.
Oldest trick in the book

@Franco as long as you are looking for "who is ware of X Y Z ?" you still not getting it.   There is no distinction between the "I" thought and the awareness of the "I" thought.   There is no "one" aware of thoughts.. The one who is aware is a thought made of awareness.. And awareness is not aware of thoughts.. Awareness is the thought taking the form of it.. So ultimately all this battle inside your head to catch "who you really are" is pointless. It is for you to recognize that it's pointless because all these dualities must collapse ultimately. Observer =observed =observing ="I" =thoughts =awareness=being. 

By definition, Infinite Love Forever cannot have any form or person there. It feels a lot like if you were physically merged with every living being in the universe to the point where all of you became an undifferentiated soup of Love. It's like entering a black hole of Love from which there is no desire to return. You give up the desire to have any concrete personhood or form so that you could merge for fully with every part of the universe.
It's like having an infinitely long, infinite intensely orgasm that is so intense that it kills the body and just keeps going forever beyond the body because the body cannot contain so much Love. It is literally an Endless Ocean of Love in which all memory of having been a human or a person is lost. That is God in its purest form. But this degree of Love is not possible for humans because they choose to be finite and separate from things.
Imagine becoming ONE with a chainsaw. That's real Love

A Zen student asked his master, "Is it OK to use email?"
"Yes," replied the master, "But no attachments." 

You can't ever win that game because that kind of good vs bad is dualistic and relative. So no matter how much "good" you create and how much "bad" you avoid, you will always fail.
True Goodness is Absolute, which means it includes the "bad".
The ultimate solution to "bad" stuff is not to avoid it, but to stop seeing it as "bad".
"Bad" is a projection of the ego-mind thanks to its endless desire to survive. So this problem cannot be solved at the level of consciousness you're trying to solve it at.
Absolute Good does not mean that your ego will get everything it wants.

There is relative love, the opposite of which is fear.
And then there is Absolute Love, which has no opposite because it encompasses everything, including relative fear.
The duality is only present when you are stuck in relative, dualistic consciousness. When you are fully awake, you only see Absolute Love with no duality.