mandyjw

I looked in the back of the book and we win. "Happily Ever After" even. Then it's just nothing, no words, no more paper even. So I say we better make up some real dramatic shit and make it up fast.

Seems like it's messing with you but it's just you becoming aware of just how infinite joy and freedom to express it is. You're seeing limitations you put on yourself unconsciously for the first time. Who wants to be the King? The King just sits back and lets everyone else take risks and be part of the action. I mean, maybe that's what you want, if you're King. Maybe it's a pretty sweet deal, if that's your thing. Maybe it's not. To me, the pawn is the most interesting character in the game of chess. It's the only one that has the opportunity of going from the lowest value piece on the board to becoming a Queen. To do that though, it would have to die to its pawn self.

Pretty much, you can get stuck and hold on to any parts of it you like. You'll take on new beliefs and you can keep them or transcend them. It's like getting a new pair of shoes when you're a kid. They feel amazing because they fit much better than the old pair, but your feet are still growing so you knew they won't fit for ever and that's ok. Intuition and guidance exists within duality, within the story. The belief in intuition can either feel amazing to know you have a guidance system and don't have to think so much about everything to get it "right". It can feel like a huge relief to know this. OR it can feel terrible because you are concerned that you aren't following it or using it right. You cannot get it wrong. Character "gets it wrong" in the story, character discovers something new, story is richer because of it. You can get it wrong, but "you" don't get it wrong. The problem here is identification with you. No "you" haven't, silly. Other people don't know that at all. Don't tell yourself that story.

Water is always running out of something, sink taps, pitchers, etc. "My cup runneth over!" "Water is running out!" Glass is half full, glass is half empty.

Well you don't exist, just like the fitness guru is a character in some crazy lady soap opera writer's head. Knowledge and choice are attributes that imaginary characters can only appear to have in the story, they can't actually have them of course. Of course crazy lady soap opera writer has this whole plan, the lady who caused your car accident is also 50 pounds over weight and your soul mate, who you'd never have recognized before this whole "unfortunate" charade. Bahahaha. Fat middle aged women sitting on their couches will LOVE this story. The writer wants it to sell, she has a reason and purpose for writing the story, because the soap opera writer exists as a character within the story that I'm now writing for the purpose of pointing you to something. In life, "God" has no purpose. There is no purpose, no one to sell the story to. Purpose appears within the purposeless. There's no agenda whatsoever, no one to sell or market it to, no one's opinion to change, no one's emotions to manipulate. Unconditional love. God appears as man, the son of God manifest, to break the third wall within the story. That's you. Ta DA!

Of course! You could say that peeling the layers off is your true purpose and desire. The storyline of life is something like, "Fitness guru with the body of a god purposefully gains 50 pounds to document his weight loss journey and write a book about it." Except he gains the weight, gets in a car accident, gets a head injury and gets amnesia, forgets he decided to do it on purpose, forgot that he wanted to a write a book, feels bad that he is fat and has to recover his true desire and purpose for his self imposed challenge. Only NOW the book is WAY more interesting. Terrible example, but that's life as far as I can tell. God is a terrible writer sometimes, it's like we're living some kind of awfully written soap opera. But the good thing is, it's SO badly written, that all you can do is laugh about it.

Maybe you want to see through your own fear more than a trip to Barbados? Maybe the desire to go to Barbados was a clever and inspired smoke screen?

You already did, JRR Tolkien. What do you think happens when you read a book? It's a story you're telling yourself right now that JRR Tolkien wrote The Lord of The Rings. That's the real imaginary story behind the imaginary story. Middle Earth is infinite imagination miraculously masquerading as a belief in your head that it's a common idea shared and communicated by multiple people.

In your regular experience darkness is the only close to nondual state of seeing you experience, there are no borders, there's nothing to distinguish. In your regular state you only visually experience light as duality, it allows your eyes to see and distinguish, shapes, colors, distances. Darkness is supposedly the absence of light, it's an illusion. If you look closely, your visual field still fires billions of little "lights" in darkness. There's always colors and lights flashing in your vision. Beyond duality, just light, no noticed absence of.

Creative expression/creative work and sex/romance are closely related in terms of life energy. The way to solve problems in one area is often to focus our thoughts on the other. That's why creative artist sometimes have or talk about muses when they get artist's block. We often make the mistake of focusing on our lack of success in one area, rather than the inspiration and fulfillment that we want in life. The key is to think more generally about it. The easiest way to stop the negative train of thoughts about a specific subject is to change the subject for a time, or get way more general. How's your creative/work life? Don't think you have to become a famous musician or something, it's the feeling of inspiration that matters, NOT how it looks to other people. Set aside some time to write down a list of things that inspire you and make you happy. Make time for them, focus on them, expand them. You may have somehow accidentally and mistakenly outsourced all your inspiration and joy in life to women. Later you can more easily reexamine your thoughts and beliefs about women. Women don't have any power over you but your thoughts about them do... until you realize those are YOUR thoughts and you have the power to change them.

Yes, and, reading some novels can be incredibly helpful to your spiritual growth. They are much more implicit and sneakily subtle about it though, they don't pretend to be talking to a "you" nor do they pretend to try to change you, but they do anyway.

Open-mindedness was the major one for me. I've continuously become more aware of the ways I've judged myself and others for it in the past as being flawed, stupid or dangerous. At the start I really loved and watched his "How to Stop being a Workaholic" video a few times because that was a huge challenge for me. It took a lot more growth in other areas to really move beyond that. Later I resonated a lot more with teachings like Eckhart Tolle's and stopped considering Leo's advice of much spiritual value. Over time it became evident to me that Leo's more explicitly stated knowledge about spirituality had been of enormous benefit to me during that time when I was reacting quite badly to it, but followed other spiritual teachers around like a puppy.

That's what I used to think too.

Or like driving a really nice, really fast car, looking ahead at where you're going, excited for the destination ahead, but also completely exhilarated and fulfilled in the moment. Yes. Please.

Lots of random synchronicity led me here, and... it has 66.6 million views. You're imagining reality on the fly. “Trust your wound to a teacher’s (God) surgery. Flies collect on a wound. They cover it, those flies of your self-protecting feelings, your love for what you think is yours. Let a Teacher wave away the flies and put a plaster on the wound. Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the Light enters you. And don’t believe for a moment that you’re healing yourself.” - Rumi

Your mind is imagining reality on the flies.

"The key to "deadpan" is the use of "pan" as theatrical slang for "the face" (reflecting the use of "pan" to mean "skull," found as early as 1330). ... So the old word for skull gave pan, which was adopted to mean face. From there, pan entered American slang in the early 1920s" Today I saw a dead fox. I was marveling over how some idiot put these black wooden silhouettes out that freak you out that someone is walking out into the road in front of you. The right after that an actual black bear went across the road in front of me.

@Serotoninluv The personality types are a scale or measurement of dualities and distinctions so I think the more deeply we get into this work, the less sense our personality types make to some degree. We find we're more able to open up and show up more as needed per situation, in the moment. It is really helpful to know what your set points and strengths are though. I test INFP now, was INFJ years ago before discovering Leo's videos. Most of my life has been guided more about how I felt about things than how I thought about them. It was a strength because I ended up doing counter-intuitive things that were logically pretty stupid but felt right and ended up being very rewarding and successful. On the flip side, my emotions were so strong that I suffered. A lot. By learning to think things through more, I was able to see through the suffering. Sometimes I think of sensations as feeling and emotions as some arbitrary space between feeling and thinking. We can't really, actually separate thought, emotion and feelings at all. It all happens together as one.

Sometimes us truth seekers hold out for profundity. At some point we have to ask ourselves if we actually wanted the truth or if we assumed that the truth would also have to be profound. I don't know why we put that qualification on truth but we often do. I think it's because profound also implies importance. The truth must be profound and important. But this is a belief, an unconscious assumption. What is important? What is it that wants things to be important? Of course it's the thing that thinks of itself as important. Important implies that something can be gained or lost, something is at stake. It implies that there are things that are important and things that are unimportant. It implies duality. So it may not be that positivity, love, unicorns and rainbows are fake or false. It may be that they just don't seem important enough to what we think of as us. Profound stories like Moby Dick, etc, have lots of drama, there is a lot at stake. Profundity is something we deeply long to experience in life. But it only exists within the story, the profundity of Moby Dick only is there for the drama and enjoyment of the story. You as the reader were never in danger. The story was so well written you forgot that you weren't in danger. Nothing is lost when it's realized that it's a story again, the story is still profound. See how you can have your cake and eat it too? Have you ever laughed so hard at something that you started crying and this sort of profound hilarity took you over? Sometimes the duality between what is profound and what is funny, dies within us. It's no joke, but it is still funny.

That's amazing. I've sometimes felt as if that could happen to me but it hasn't. I can totally see it if you were marathon training though. I've never run more that 9 miles. I find that 30-40 minutes in on some runs, I start to really zone. I like to be headed back towards home by then.

The lyrics to this song never cease to amaze me. Younger Seinabo Sey There's a conclusion to my illusion I assure you this There's no end to this confusion If you let it wish you well Soul to sell Highest bidders, can't you tell what you're getting? There is a light to all this darkness I will tell you this There's redemption in you asking them just why it is Some answers are better left unspoken When you know you ain't getting any Younger, younger, younger, are you? Younger, younger, younger, are you? You ain't getting any Younger, younger, younger, are you? Younger, younger, younger, are you? Why we fight to get on loving I've been wondering How your mind will leave you hanging your heart lingering Stay lost Then found by whoever stays around, forgetting There is a way to be yourself, I assure you this There's a way to catch your dreams without falling asleep You might as well get it while you can, babe 'Cause you know you ain't getting any Younger, younger, younger, are you?

I get what he is saying there. There seem to be two kinds of non-doership, (absence of ego). There channeling/ deep flow states, which appear to be active, but so absorbing there's no one doing them, no suffering, no effort. Then there is literal (from the outward looking in) not doing anything, like sitting in meditation. Flow states might be the path of least resistance for active minds, at least for a time. I've had a lot of growth by running for most of my life. My mind goes into a creative flow state really easily while running and new ideas and insights flow in. There are also gaps in between these that I don't notice. The gaps allow space for the new/creative. Active and passive is a duality, of course, so that difference is essentially false. Sitting mediation is an INTENSE badass practice under the guise of... sitting and doing nothing. It's so easy to do nothing, it's effortless so we make it hard. It's not what it looks like.

Went for a run and saw a post it note throw out. Turned it over to see if anything was written on it. There wasn't. I remember that I forgot something. Laughed about that possibility. In the past week or two I've really contemplated how attraction, beauty, likes and dislikes are all imaginary. Hubby could care less about my yoga shorts cause I wear them all the time but if I throw a dress over them it's another story. Nude beaches are the least sexy thing ever. We conceal to feel.

Mind be so stupid. It's like "Get off the forum you bitch loser! Go fake (MAKE, typoed the word "fake", what's going on here?) some fucking money!" When my biggest dream is to write. a book, REALLY, your biggest dream in life is to WRITE a BOOK, no one has ever WRITTEN A BOOK. WRITE A BOOK IS A MISNOMER! They have just written. Books are. Ok. Duh. Never "saw" that before. Yet, I'm telling myself I shouldn't be writing.