SeaMonster

Those two sentences literally contradict each other, unless you think friendships and social skills are trivial aspects of life. Stories to tell to friends you have trouble making? Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, but you sound like you're a little bit in denial.

Sometimes "not acting" is in alignment with The Truth. I will use the phrase "behaving in accordance with" since it captures both action and inaction if it's clearer for you.

Yes - how you act is even more important than what you consciously believe. If you believe something that is true but don't act on that belief, knowing what's true is meaningless, pointless, useless.

I don't know what's happening right now, but before COVID there were a ton of them in all the big cities listed on meetup.com. Then they went all Zoom. I don't know how many of them are back to live meet-ups.

Couldn't tell you unless you are clear about what you goals are. It may just be an escape where you don't have to struggle with the uncomfortable realities back home. You have to know what you want out of yourself and then figure out the best way to get it (which is not always as enjoyable as going backpacking for year.) If your month-long trip didn't offer you any clarity, then I don't know whether a year would. A month-long trip should have been enough.

Give it a try. There's no need to feel bad about being aroused by beautiful women, and there's no need to paint women as victims of lecherous men (women are sexual beings who love to have sex and frequently get frustrated when men they are attracted to don't take initiative with them.) Those are both unhelpful beliefs. However -- there is no doubt that porn and fapping has negative effects on you -- because it makes you WEAK...HELPLESS...OUT OF CONTROL...NOT THE MAN YOU COULD BE. Try becoming the man you COULD be, then see how your attitude towards women changes. In the very least, try for a realistic goal such as eliminating porn and reducing fapping to once a week, or whatever it is you think you can manage with effort.

If everything is material, then how does one explain the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, body-mind medicine, etc.? Why should it matter what your state of consciousness is if it's all just material interactions?

There is only the transcendent God and the apparent multiplicity of its creation. Those aspects are coexistent and simultaneous. In other words, you cannot drop the limitations inherent in your manifest aspect. You can be fully enlightened, sacred, holy, etc., but you still have a human body. If we're talking about "God", the only practical meaning that makes sense is the transcendent aspect of God. Otherwise it's "you", "me", "everybody" (i.e. the manifest.)

Well, to be fair "becoming God" is a meaningless statement, so the whole sentence is incomprehensible. You cannot "become God." You can become aware that the only true reality is God, or something like that, but you're not "becoming" anything. If you're looking at it in terms of power (relative to other manifestations of God), you can be more or less powerful and become more powerful. The transcendent God is something "you" can't become. It is outside of the process of time, space, change.

Newsflash: Leo is human, with all the failings of being human. He uses defense mechanisms of denial and rationalization all the time because it is too painful to him to admit certain truths about himself. He prefers to live in a fantasy world where a certain idealized picture of himself is the truth. Now, given that, it's upto each and every person on the forum whether to buy into his illusions about himself or to see him as just another flawed human being. Of course in order to do the second, one has to drop certain false beliefs about oneself as well.

Not to sound repetitive, but one must understand the difference between enjoyment and attachment. Enjoyment = mastery Attachment = slavery Sense objects aren't bad in and of themselves. It's the attachment (i.e. being a slave to them) that is the problem. Once the attachment is gone, one can still enjoy.

Distortions can get healed and contracts can get rewritten. Maybe not everything, but many things we think aren't possible. It's just very advanced work that most people aren't even close to (as it takes a ridiculous amount of preliminary work.) The point is that if it's possible for anyone, it's hypothetically possible for everyone. It's not like magically regrowing a missing limb or something like that.

Right. There's a difference between desires and obsessions/compulsions/addictions, though. It's possible to control desires, to have a balanced life that puts them in proper perspective. It's possible to be a master of your desires. The other stuff...well, you're a slave to them.

God wouldn't be causing this to happen, though, in such a case. If it's possible for anyone to heal the kind of thyroid problems Leo has, then it's possible for Leo. If it is possible, then Leo simply hasn't done everything he could possibly do to heal it. He may believe he has, but he could be wrong, e.g. He is not omniscient. He may simply be unaware of how to do it, or unwilling to pay the price to do it. The only way to find out is to become fully enlightened and then make changes that would have been inconceivable/impossible for the ego to make. Only then can you know. (Power is something that can be reclaimed with integration work, e.g.)

1. No. Language in itself is grounded in duality. Even if you stopped using those words, you are still using language which is implicitly grounded in duality. Something is not something else. 2. No, it's not important. What's important is enlightenment and understanding the "virtual" nature of language.

We get into trouble when we (can't help but) anthropomorphize God. Leo is substantially right but God isn't powerful or powerless because applying that concept to God is a category error. We cannot compare the "power status" of the transcendent aspect of God to some perceived aspect of its manifestation. Power as we can't help but understand it involves the Relative -- "something" has more or less power than "something" else. Otherwise the concept makes no sense.

You solve it by eliminating bad habits and practicing good habits. The changes to your internal state will follow. Identifying what all those are is a huge conversation in itself. It's not some mystical thing you psych yourself into. It's just real, practical change work (like cutting down on porn or masturbation, e.g.)

That's fine. That's what it's all about. One of those assumptions (a cardinal one arguably), however, is an unconscious frame of what "I" currently means to you. Unless you are (fully) enlightened, there is still a sense of personal "I" to some degree. There is still an "I" thought of some kind. As long as there is an "I" thought, you are still clinging to a lot of other assumptions about yourself, such as identifying with certain personality aspects. This is limiting. One is at war with parts of oneself until one is enlightened and goes through integration.

This isn't quite right, though. You are still grappling with reality at the level of mind and conceptual understanding. The way to deal with reality is not to try to understand it AT ALL (which is really an ego defense mechanism - that which I understand is no longer so scary.) The way to deal with it is to SURRENDER to it (by letting go of false beliefs about self.) Any kind of mental nonsense is easy; it's a COPE as you kids say. Realizing that you don't NEED THE COPE is the goal of spiritual practice.

Leo is roughly at 580. Haha. That's why he claims to have transcended the model. It's called "taking your ball and going home" when life doesn't play by your rules. It's also not very original. Leo is basically emulating Ken Wilber, who decided to do a similar fork from his level in the 700s. The spiritual search humbles the biggest egos. You can accept the humility or you can create your own mini-cult by twisting reality.

There is always an experience or feeling. Suffering is an interpretation, i.e. in the mind. It's the sense that this is "bad" and I want "the good stuff." So it's failure to be present. But in being present, all kinds of experiences are possible. You have to let go of Leo's teachings, because all that stuff is just not true. No, you don't "need" psychedelics to awaken. You can get shaktipat, e.g. You can do self-enquiry. Leo is universalizing his own particular journey (which is very problematic.) His attitude is "it didn't work for me, or it didn't work fast enough, therefore it DOESN'T WORK." Takes quite an ego to make such assumptions.

Yes. The ego just gets trickier until it is fully extinguished. The point is that there is still an "I" thought. "I" may think it is the entire universe or one with God or whatever, but...there is still an "I." If a fully enlightened person tries to do self-enquiry (ask "who am I?") the feeling that comes back is that the word "I" is a fiction and that there is only The Absolute, The Self, the Nondual Consciousness, etc. So there is a simple test for the state one currently experiences.

There isn't one central authority governing the use of language pertaining to spirituality, so the words are used quite loosely and interchangeably by some, and for others enlightenment is ultimate while awakening may be an initial experience of spirituality. I tend to modify either term with "partially" or "fully" for clarity's sake. Then some people call a psychedelic experience as awakening. It may be an awakening, loosely speaking, but it doesn't mean it is a nondual awakening where you have permanently shifted into a state where you no longer experience "the center" (i.e. "I" is identified as the body or some bodily location, like point between your eyes.) After that state where you experience "the center" there are a bunch of intermediate states, where you progressively identify with local emptiness, universal emptiness, God/bliss, and ultimately all identification ceases and the subject-object duality is gone. You can call this full awakening or full enlightenment or whatever else you want. There are different names for this. Moksha, self-realization, sahaja samadhi, etc. (Of course, past that there is a period of years of integration, because personality habits have to unwind. A lot of shadow work takes place here.) So if you want a definition, enlightenment is the attainment of the "natural state" where conditioned notions of separateness are seen through and realization of The Absolute as the true reality is complete.

Either you're fully awakened or not. There is no "most awakened person" award. Anyone who thinks he is...is not awakened. Anyone who thinks this is some kind of contest or competition is an egomaniac. (This goes for Leo, Ken Wilber and other unawakened or partially awakened people.) They don't get it...the ego takes interesting detours while seeking. There are probably thousands of fully awakened people who...get it. They're not out there competing in the public eye to earn themselves a Most Awakened Being award...because they...just get it. They also know what will help others awaken and what won't. Forget about Leo for a second, though: if you think you're special BECAUSE you follow Leo and think you are PRIVY to something unique...you have a much bigger problem than Leo does. You need to question yourself and ask what it is you're really after: to bolster your ego or to awaken.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one: grandiosity. Narcissists live in a fantasy world and think they are special and unique in some way. Occam's Razor.