vizual

I wouldn't say intense, that's the wrong word. But definitely more truthful, more pure. Romantic love always has egotistical delusions mixed in which always obscures the unconditional acceptance. And of course, there are all the hormones which give the body an drug-like high, but this high has nothing to do with truth. No doubt that romantic love can make you feel amazing though, that's why it can also be oh so dangerous when it all comes crashing down. Enlightenment has nothing to do with the possibly bodily effects and emotions. Even though enlightenment may change the body chemistry, that's not what it's about. It's beyond that even.

True forgiveness can only take place when you realize that person never really hurt you. Even if that person physically attacked you, or did something emotionally malicious, that action had absolutely nothing to do with you. It was simply them trying to defend themselves against an invisible demon. There has to be absolute peace with the situation. If a person stabbed me, it is impossible to truly forgive someone before I fully accept the fact that I have been stabbed. And when you fully accept the situation it's just as easy to forgive the person himself. It does not mean you still have the preference to be around this person, but there is absolutely no ill will towards the person in question any more. When you can't find it in your heart to forgive someone, it simply means that the pain of that experience is still living on in your reality. The consequences are somehow still manifesting itself in your reality. If that's the case, then that pain has to be addressed.

If the goal is to not think, or to not daydream. Guess what's going to happen, you are going to constantly think about not thinking. It's the dog chasing its own tail. By just trying to silence thought you are trying to treat a gunshot wound with a band aid, even it helps stops the bleeding for a moment, you are eventually still going to bleed out. You have to ask yourself critically, while at home. Why do these thoughts and daydreams get priority in my field of consciousness over my work? There's an underlying reason/belief you are not giving your full attention to your work. That's up to you to find out.

Law of Attraction repackaged in slightly different terminology to sell suckers the same crap promising them it will make them rich and successful. It's marketing 101. It's a real sad manifestation of modern society that people's insecurities are being exploited so much in the economy.

The information is only the hand pointing to the moon. And you can study every single inch of the hand to the tiniest detail, you still have to look where the hand actually is pointing to. The only way to do this is to observe your own reality very critically and carefully, you have to find out what is true. And it can be tricky, because you are looking at a certain lens since early childhood. You take things as truth without thinking twice about it. Yes, you do have to sit down and look again. It's kind of like reverse engineering your own reality to the point you get to the ultimate truth. And this is not purely a rational process since there comes a point you also have to question rationality itself.

I agree with you. Except for the thousands of hours requirement, that's just a limiting belief which may be true for you, but it's not necessarily true for others. It all depends on where the person is momentarily at, and also the guidance that person comes into contact with. A person who isn't filled to the brim with all kinds of hardwired bullshit beliefs, and has the proper guidance, can get to full realization rather quickly.

First fully acknowledge and accept that there is a situation in your life that you are not happy with. It's totally okay to not like a situation. The difference between an enlightened person and an unenlightened one is that the unenlightened people are always jumping through all kinds of hoops to not feel and change certain emotions. If a feeling is there, it's there, and it wants to be acknowledged. So relax, feel the feeling of your annoyance and let your actions take the natural path. Remember that your annoyance is a reflection of you, not the thing that is annoying you. I don't mean that you are not in the right about being annoyed by that thing, it's just that it is not necessarily 'true'. You may find that with a lot of these things, it's not even the object of annoyance that keeps annoying you. It's the bottling up of that feeling the keeps gaining momentum and keeps increasingly annoying you. All the feeling wants from you is some acknowledgment. And feelings are not rational, there's no way to dance around it and try to intellectualize it by asking questions like "what would an enlightened being do?". An enlightened being would be the first to say, it's not about what you do, it's about how you do it. And the only way to do things right is in the light of truth.

Stop spamming the site with these stupid video's

I disagree, if anything, being identified with ego is suffocating the human. Loosening the grip on the human will manifest the will of god. I guess the quote makes some sense from the perspective of ego...

It's not about that specific situation that makes or breaks you. If you are a bad ass, fearless dude, those kids would have never taken your ball just like that. You have to be willing to stand up for yourself, every single moment of the day. It's not something you do, it's something you are. And if you aren't it at the moment, you can become it very quickly. Fear hangs around you like a bad stench, and especially kids and females can smell it a mile away. How can you stop being scared? You simply stop fearing fear and embrace the fear. Let yourself feel the fear and love the fear if it comes. When you prove yourself that fear itself is not that scary as you thought, then over time fear will manifest less and less. And people will sense that you are not afraid anymore. This takes some commitment, but it isn't as bad as you think it might be. But again, you have to be willing to commit.

@Emerald Wilkins I like how Matt Kahn says it; being identified with ego is living in crazytown. Just because everyone's doing it doesn't mean it's perfectly normal and natural. When the whole world is insane is it then okay to be insane as well? I would have to answer that question with a negative. I can come up with all kinds of analogies, but in short, turning your cheek on the truth is never an honorable or even natural thing to do.

If your idealism prevents you from seeing reality and being in the now, it's pure ego, simple. It's funny because this reminds me. I only eat vegan and I sense that a lot of vegans I meet don't eat vegans out of love for the animals and the environment, but I have the sense they do it because they secretly hate and loathe humanity. There's a lot of anger in them, you can see these people in the internetz also, lol. All your ideals and ideas are worthless if they just live as delusions in your head. And, on the other side of the coin, it can be plain dangerous if you try to bend reality just to fit your own delusional ideas(see religious terrorists). The best thing you can do is to strife to live truthfully with love in your heart, reality has a tendency to figure out where to go on its own. You can start by looking where your ideals come from, ideals are always tainted by some subjective experience in the past. By trying to enforce these ideals in your life you are only trying to run away from pain you have experienced one day in your life. The same goes for perfectionism, people become perfectionists because they were hurt in the past because they did not live up to someone else's standards. If you want to fix these things you gotta embrace the pain. And it's not that hard really when you see through the illusion. Pain is perfectly neutral, it's all the thoughts and images that go with it that can make it sufferable.

Realizing that you have zero control over yourself and reality, so you can let go and be free of all neurosis.

@khalifa It's not about states or belief systems, it's about not resisting reality anymore. Full acceptance, and there is no one inside of us that can 'do' that. It's a matter of not doing. The patterns inside of your brain can do just fine without a 'you' inside there to micromanage everything. The 'you' is more like a fifth wheel on a car. Have you watched Leo's enlightenment video's? I think he explains quite well what enlightenment is, and what it isn't. I think you have the wrong impression. It's not about being in some unshakable zen-like trance all the time, it's more subtle than that.

@Salaam You accuse me of being ignorant, yet you state all kinds of ignorant claims about me and my understanding and experience with enlightenment. I don't mind, but surely you can find the irony in that. The thing I want to say about it is that all this stuff you talk about stil appears in one consciousness, it's not "keyboard jockey shit". You can study all the aspects that appear within this consciousness, but that doesn't make them necessarily true. Yes, even an enlightened one will experience inner resistance even when he is enlightened, but the fact that he doesn't mean words like "somatosensory system" doesn't mean he is ignorant.He just chooses to communicate his ideas about enlightenment from a different perspective than you do. If anything, you seem to be the one incapable of recognizing nuance, different things resonate with different people and no single one thing is ultimately true.

Good luck brother. Defeating your invisible ghosts is great fun if you are willing to commit to it. It can be a pain in the beginning since the ghosts have been there for so long but it's all worth it when you look them straight in the eye, guaranteed.

What do you mean by they have their own entity? Nothing is its own entity, there are no clear, defined lines in this reality. And enlightenment is not a belief, it's seeing reality for what it is beyond all the thoughts and beliefs. An ego can not be enlightened because what is an ego? Just a conglomeration of distorted beliefs. Of course these beliefs appear inside of the true reality, but the beliefs themselves don't reflect the truth. It's also not about thinking outside of the box, there only is the box, there is no way to think outside of it. All thoughts appear inside the box of awareness, that's why you can't take thoughts to be true because thoughts only reflect a distorted perspective on some of reality. An enlightened being will not claim he has all the answers, he only knows in his heart that there are no answers. At least, the answers people are looking for can not be accurately communicated through the limited lens of language and symbols. The only truth may or may not be being/consciousness/god, and the only way to find out is to experience that for yourself and not take it on as a belief system.

Can we please stop about this talk of 'high' consciousness. High consciousness is the most ordinary thing there is, the word high implies(at least to me) that it is some superhuman state which only a few elite yogi's can attain. Yes, most people are totally hypnotized by their own delusional thinking. But let's not make enlightenment in this godlike state. It's just what is, no judgments, nowhere to go to, nowhere to go from. No value judgments, everything is just as it is, and it is all perfect. It's only difficult if you make it difficult yourself. And having all these terms, judgements and values of what enlightenment may or may not be is not helping. To answer your question, it is the ego that is asking if it is making progress, and the ego is never going to be enlightened. The ego wants to think that it is making progress, so that it doesn't have to give itself up. There is no progress to be made, only ego thinks in terms of progress. Consciousness does not know progress, it just knows what is.

Grow up and make the effort to give your dad a hug everyday. He's your dad, you only get one in this lifetime. Sure he may be a dick, just as you are probably a snotty brat just as much but you are still related. Make the best out of it. Even if you don't like him, you can still respect him, even if his actions are misguided. No one is perfect, everyone struggles in their lives. If you should have one persons back in this world, it's your family members backs. A better world begins with you, and judging your dad as toxic is not helping. I'm pretty sure underneath all that resentment there is still some love there. Even if you have to go years back to find it. Once, there was love for your father, and your father loved you. Find your way back to that love man, life is too short to stay hung up on this petty bullshit.

Yes the world should only speak one language, what's the use of multiple languages when we can just avoid all the hassle of translators, studying languages and such. Let's also ban art, art is just as useless as having multiple languages. What about history? Useless. Literature? Pretty useless. Philosophy? Yup, useless. Y'know, if we cut out all the things in the world a lot of people find 'useless', there isn't much use to go on living. Character is the thing that makes this world worth living in. The diversity of all the personal expressions give color and meaning to our lives. Seriously, Irish is fucking cool. When you grow up you'll learn that pure pragmatism has its place in the world, but it doesn't provide that true intrinsic value. Feel free to disagree

Very true, those few days I couldn't log in into this forum I almost had an existential crisis which led to a near dissolvement of my ego. Thank goodness the forum started working again or else my ego surely would have been a goner.

The need for lists is also a big trap of the ego

I personally believe that it is the intent if the things you say, not if the content of those things are factually correct. For instance, when flirting with someone you like you can tell all kinds of teasing little lies, that does not make you a bad person. Or let's say, that you lie because you are honestly trying to protect someone from possible harm. In both instances, these lies can actually come from a place of truth. I believe that you can tell a lie from a place of truth but these instances are not going to arise very frequently. If I have to interpret the OP. He says that he has to lie to get along with people. Let me say this, when you in some way present yourself differently than you really are people are probably not going to like you for who you really are. Even if you can keep up the charade for a long time, people are going to find out eventually and think you a fraud. And even if you do manage to keep it up, people are always going to have that slight little feeling that something is off with you which prevents you from building authentic relationships with people. This does not make them happy, and this definitely does not make you happy.

Forget about the girl for a moment, exactly like you said, you need to overcome your shyness. It's not about 'defeating' shyness because shyness is not really a real thing, it's a learned and irrational habit cooked in the brain. I know it can feel very painful and awkward when you can't express yourself around people you really like. The solution is that you need to give mindfulness to that blocking feeling. The automatic response of the ego is to run away from that uncomfortable feeling, but if you keep running away it will persist. You have to 'shine light' on that feeling as to say. A good exercise is to visualize social situations where you feel anxiousness and blockages and stay with that feeling, watch it and let the feeling be. Don't resist the feeling because the feeling is not bad per se, it's your interpretation that makes it bad. Your lizard brain thinks it's protecting you, but that part of the brain can only look at things at a very short term. It does not always look at for your best interests on the long run. So there aren't any shortcuts one way or another. You have to look the uncomfortable feelings straight in the eye, and realize that blockages in your brain are just smokescreens if you truly let them be for what they are without trying to warp them in some way or run away from them.

Stephen Covey calls it 'sharpening the saw' in his books. Basically, if you do focus too much on a thing you are going to get burned out on it. It's important to have a passion and a goal to work toward, but if you can't let it go for a while you are actually holding yourself back. Because, in the long run you are going to resent doing those activities, you are going to resent the activities related to personal development. Just like in a relationship, if you are 24 hours a day around your partner you are probably going to end up resenting each other, or at least the passionate love is going to die down. There always needs to be a bit of breathing space to keep that sense of wonder going. If you want to reach your goals, yes, there is always going to be the gritty work with maybe some grinding labour involved. But on the other hand, to truly reach its potential there also has to be this love and passion involved if you truly want to transcend averageness. If you want to get the most out of your personal development there also has to come a time where you can let go and disengage, because you know you will get back to it later. Only if you don't trust yourself you have to force yourself, because you might think that you will be too lazy or whatever to later go back to it. If you indeed feel a certain laziness in your mental space that's actually a good time to put some mindfulness to these feelings.