Nic

Nothing against psychedelics and stuff but hey, when you can have this kind of state for free, without anything someone could take away from you and have it anytime you want because you can set the DMT chemical by yourself... I know what I choose... Check Wim Hof!

Here is a 11 years old german documentary (Unterwegs in die nächste Dimension) about the powers of shamanism and other forms of so called magic healing. We can assist to various forms of shamanic traditions and healing powers. The only shamans using psychedelics that I know of, are in South America. This documentary is quiet mind boggling and will make you think twice about dismissing "crazy, naked drumming tree huggers" . The last part of the documentary starting at 1h00 & 10 sec, with the Korean Shamanic dancer called Hiah Park is someone I would like to meet one day. Very powerful lady, who lives in Austria. The whole documentary is very interesting but the last part I mentioned is quiet impressive, don't miss on that one! I wish you all a good time watching this: My personal favorite is the Mongolian drummers shamanism which is not represented here. I feel drawn to shamanism because a lot of magic, unexplainable first hand experiences happened to me lately. Watching this documentary again after having experiencing magic a few times gives me chills, I see this from another point of view... even though I can't identify with this community at all.

Thanx for highlighting the important part And thank you for sharing your good work that I really use all the time! Take care Juan!

Hi Leo, Please consider updating your playlists on Youtube again! Thank you very much for the good work and precious shared information that I'm watching "religiously" ! It's a blessing! Happy New Year to you! Nic

How to Stop Backsliding/ How to Stop Procrastinating Book Mastery by Robert Greene Homeostasis is a word that is used in the world of biology & cybernetics which is the study of systems, how they work. Systems are items interlinked together into a complex web of feedback loops. It can be a human cell, a body, a tree, a computer system, they have a center of gravity, and the center of gravity is its homeostasis., It’s the place where the system like to gravitate towards and stay at, it has set a track record of proven safety. Systems face threats and they have to get good at providing a space so that it can survive and reproduce. In your body there are many homeostasis models going on without you noticing it. Blood pressure, temperature must be at the right level and so on, it’s everywhere in your body. You have to have such balance in so many things it’s like walking on high wire. It’s like your unconscious mind and your body system is doing it all for you. It cares for your survival and what has always worked before for you in your life. You want to change when you wake up, when you go to sleep, what kind of food you eat, how much you exercise, how you behave in your relationship, how do you perform at your job, but our subconscious mind tends pulls us back to where we were. It just does what always worked. Your brain is biased towards keeping you in the same place. The unconscious mind doesn’t distinguish between what works king of well, really well or what is dysfunctional but still keeps you alive. But we do not only want to survive, we also want to thrive. The mind is like a thermostat that keeps the homeostasis of your life & habits. Emotions pull you back towards the center. Sleeping habits, drug addiction, clean diet… This is why you will never create a great magic pill to have a fulfilling life, because you have to exert emotional labor to make change happen in your life. Emotional labor happens when you resist the homeostasis. You have to exert will power to move off center and reset the center point. Big change is possible, it’s not impossible to clean your diet, sleep earlier etc. You can do it but it need a little extra work, a craftiness. There is also homeostasis in groups, family friends, colleagues, corporations, spiritual groups, communities, cities, governments. So what do we do about it, how do you navigate around that force?: Be aware that homeostasis exist, it keeps you alive, it’s a law like gravity. Just being aware of it is a good start. Expect it to happen, it will kick in. The mind will resit, the body will resist and the people around you will resit when you start to change. The mind will create all sorts of crazy thoughts and stories, millions of rationalisation and excuses for why you should go back to where you were. The body will feel psychosomatic stuff, like getting a little cold, your mind create those. Be prepared for serious negotiation, find the balance in your inner dialogue. You can’t bull your way to the problem, it will fail on the long run and go back to the center of gravity. This one of the most challenging aspect of personal development, is the emotional labor that goes it the serious negotiation. So when you have war inside your head, you have to go through it, you have to hold on, stay with that and perceiver through the challenge, get some resolution, come out the other end and not quit, this is emotional labor. People are not self actualized because they cannot cope with this emotional labor. They are support system if you want to change something, they will support emotionaly, get into a community. Put a meditation habit in place, it give you more awareness of all the emotional bullshit that happens in your brain and see the homeostasis coming. Meditate daily. Do visualization of what you want to create in your mind 10-20 min. Make sure you change the right thing Change one thing at a time If you dont’ feel 100% committed, there will not enough wiliness to change the habit you want to change. There must be no excuses & no wiggle room. If you make like a 5% wiggle room, that 5% can kill you. You have to see that what you do is important. Set a meditation habit! Failure this time will make it easier next time. We tend to over exaggerate the number of times we tried to change our habits. The mind makes the obstacle bigger than it is. Don’t underestimate how much difference only one change can make. If you could see what 20 years of 20 min meditation a day would make in your life, you would meditate religiously every single morning like your life depended on it. Become visionary of your own life, see how the little change can snowball into massive qualitative explosion of change. Give it the value that it deserves and tell yourself how important that is for you. Go and make some big changes in your life.

Sorry, thanks!

Is LOVE the only thing there is, a survival aid, a human made concept, a philosophy, a religion, a myth, a dream, a feeling, an emotion, a reaction, a natural state, something to seek, something to access, some state to achieve, enlightenment, an energy field, a life purpose ? What is true love is there such a thing? Is it possible to feel the love others send me or do I only feel my own expression of it? Why we try to find reasons to give or not give our love, that is to say rationalize something irrational? Thanx

@khalifa I didn't say that he was enlightened, but that he had an experience. In the video, towards the end, he describes the beauty of it and have tears in his eyes. But he didn't say he cried during his trip as far as I can remember... but I did! For my part, it wasn't what I would call a neutral state but pure loving state.

Hi Katiee, The location is important in a sens that it will motivate you to meditate there, but it can also be used afterwards as an excuse by the mind to not want to meditate unless you find a peaceful place to do it. You can meditate anywhere, anytime. The Swiss Alps are for sure a very good place to find inner peace. This is where I go to reload my batteries and to get centered again as I'm lucky enough to live close to them. As you are new to meditation, I encourage you to practice as much as you can until then, once or twice a day at least and to not expect anything about the place, about yourself and the outcome of the retreat. I hope you'll find peace.

Sorry I don't know which one that one was... I'm looking for one myself... the one where Leo nearly cries at the end of the video when tells about his enlightened experience...

Yes I do!

@Richard Alpert you are welcome! I'm glad you joined the course! I hope you'll do a review on it too! I've been doing his relationship course lately.... OMG absolutely fantastic! Totally worth it! I've been putting it on the side for years as it came out after the advance series... and Gary decided to put it between the 2 courses. Now that I've done it, I understand why. At first I thought it was for commercial reasons. But no it isn't. It's a smart course on how to avoid drama in any relationship. I'm going to do another review on the relationship course someday too! Still working on it! I still have a lot of progress to do... a lot to unlearn. The quality is definitely there and I feel it work doing the work every day. http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/self_mastery.htm If anybody is interested on doing the relationship course without the mastery program... I guess you could, but you'd be for sure better off doing the mastery program first.

Fear of What Others thinks of You http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod27-overcoming-fear.mp3 -You don't need to have fear to avoid harmful situations, what you need is awareness. -If we have awareness, we can be more creative then if we just live by the rules. Artists break the rules when they come up with new way to express themselves -An "If this, then that" assumption is an assumed fearful and painfull outcome. -Taking no action is still an action, it's a fearful action, it's a fearful inaction, but it's still an action, doing nothing is still a doing. -What is not as obvious is that if you continue to live by the rules, you are continuing to live with fear controlling your life, because those rules are made of fear. -Can you imagine being afraid of crossing the street because there is no traffic light or because someone is not holding your hand? This is the kind of fear we have about so many things, about our money, about relationships, about what other people think of us. We are so use to it, we don't even notice them anymore. -You might think that you are not being afraid of anything, (because of the amount of self importance you have), this is a big denial and the lies are underneath that denial. How many time do you try to look good in front of the people who mean something to you, the amount of money on your account, afraid of your career, afraid of not being good enough, ask yourself "what will they think of me?" Realize that these are fear based stories and questions. Realizing that this is fear, is not enough to let it go. The fear is pushing you through all the patterns of the logic. -That looks like a nice carrot, to have friends and people that respect you, it doesn't look like you are doing it out of fear until you say to yourself, "what happens if I don't do what is expected from me?" You loose friendships that requires you to be false that only worked if you are wearing a mask of pretend, you aren't yourself. If you don't face your fears on the other way, what the others will accept and respect, is this false pretends that you are projecting. In this case all the things that you thought are worth having are actually false. Fear is pushing the logic with artificial pressure. -Our minds are filled with rules, how we should be or shouldn't be, what the world should be or shouldn't be, and most of them are fabricated out of fear. It's the fear that is taking the decisions for you, your belief system choosing for you, blinding us from free will and free choices. -Living by those rules of how or what should or should not be, creates a lot of unhappiness. Living without all those fear creates a lot more room for love, not only for yourself, but for a lot of other people. When your fears dissipate, your internal dialogue dissipates. -Living without fear, when you begin to do it, feels scary. You'll feel fear and uncomfortable, because you are starting to break the agreements in your mind about what your belief system says you have to do and have to be, in order to feel safe. It's an uncomfortable path to happiness. Dealing with financial fears http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod25-financial-crisis-fear.mp3 -Take the time to evaluate what you are attached to, do an inventory of it to see why the emotions come up and what are the plans and assumptions you build. -You have to let go of the plans of the future that you have made in the past so that you can face today. -The awareness, the detaching makes it easier to let go all the mental structures. -The way that you reach the end of the road, is to do one step at a time. -The emotion of fear or any other emotion we feel is perfect, we are supposed to feel that way and we are supposed to create emotions. -The emotional body doesn't care what emotions you demand him to produce and doesn't care if it's real or not. If you are creating fear, it's creating fear. Your emotional system is working perfectly. -What we can have control over, are the things we project in the mind and watch how much faith we invest in them. -The emotions are the perfect response to what our mind is doing. You can be thankful, appreciate that everything is working properly. In that way you will be more focus on what is coming out of the mind if your fear is rational or irrational. -The goal here is to believe less the chatter of the mind, to be skeptical about our fears. The reactions we have, the emotion we feel is the tail end of the story. Facing Fear and Overcoming Fear http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod8-overcoming-fear.mp3 -When you really look what's behind the fears, they fall apart all by themselves. -What's hurting? The fear of failing or the fact that other people are judging us? No! That is the faith you invest in the belief of being a failure. If we knew we were going to laugh at ourselves, we would be totally free to express ourselves. -What we are really afraid of, is of judging ourself. We are afraid that we will believe those thoughts about ourselves, that we are a failure because only in believing those things will we feel emotional pain. We are afraid of what we believe about ourselves. -When you have the awareness not to believe what you think about yourself, there is a great deal of freedom opens, a whole world of opportunities shows up and what you do with your life is depending on that. Not because you are no longer afraid of what they think about you, but because you are not afraid any more of what you think about yourself. -The people don't challenge their fears because: A) They don't have a way to go around it. We aren't taught to question the stories in our minds that loop over and over again and generate fear. We aren't taught to challenge what we believe, so we end up recreating it over and over. B) It's uncomfortable to challenge fears. But not challenging our fears is actually just as uncomfortable if not more uncomfortable, we just don't realize it. -When you are afraid of something, you have to realize that you are experiencing all the emotions that you are trying to avoid and that you are doing this everyday by not taking action. Then you take the suffering of a single day, you multiply this by the numbers of days you suffered, you will find out after a while, that this is a whole lot less painful to go do this thing that you are afraid of. Stagnation is not a remedy for fear. -The key is to notice and to know that the minds assumptions aren't true. -The real way to overcome fear is to become a skeptic of the assumptions that your mind generates. Reasoning Your Way Out of Fear http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod28-reasoning-out-fear.mp3 -Is there a battle between the heart and the mind? There is no battle between them, it's all happening in the mind. The battle is more between truth and fiction we can call illusions or false beliefs. Fear arises from these false beliefs. The battle is more between the love in the heart and false logic in the mind. Having no more fears, opens the way to more love, and that means more happiness. This is where common sense is in alignment with love and being happy. -Reason is the part of the mind that is driven by logic. It is forming beliefs about how the world works. and is building an internal working model of understanding. -The funny thing about the reason is, itʼs looking for an answer, it gives you the feeling of confusion if it doesn't have an answer. The reason is looking for an answer, and when it has an answer, it feels relieved wether that answer is true or not. The reason doesn't care for the truth, what it wants is an answer that fits a logical pattern. When it has an answer, even when it is an illusion, provided it fits well enough with other beliefs, it gives us that feeling of being relief and our tendency is to stop the inquiry process. -Here is two motivators to accept that answer: A)They feel relieved of confusion, they found an answer B) There is a relief by not opening that door and go face to face with their fear. Accepting an answer doesn't give you the structure of the false beliefs, it's like looking a car from the outside saying "the car is broken". But it doesn't help much. To know what is broken helps, "The tank is empty". To ask then "Why is the tank, empty?", maybe will prevent from happening in the future. -Fear of the unknown don't exist but the reason loves that kind of simplicity, not really needing the truth, thatʼs why we accept such answer to be true. You are not afraid of the unknown, you are afraid of what you think will happen. Before we learned to be afraid we were thinking that any experience can be exited, this is our nature. -People use to think that the earth is flat, they had an answer, they stopped inquiry further into truth. -The other layer to this, is when we have an answer, we know, and within that knowing we develop a sense of superiority. The self importance expends, and we feel better and more powerful than if we didn't know. So we have the relief of feeling better from the confusion, we have the relief from fear of what might happen in the nightmare scenario, and this elevated self importance state, the sense superiority of knowing. -We find the same logic when get angry and we want to justify it: "Oh, if you hadn't done this! That was disrespectful! I wouldn't feel this way, if you didn't do that..." All are justification for our own behavior and our own emotional reactions. But so we so easily accept what our logic take as right, as it relieves us from the confusion. Particularly when we blame someone else. It is seductive because it feels better to comfort ourselves with certain type of fiction. -Notice the feeling of shifting from confusion to relief even when the answer is not true -It's a little disconcerting when you realize that we comfort ourselves in fiction. When you get over that, you can ask yourself the questions: "What can my life be like without fear? What happens if I leave these layers of false logic in my mind behind me? How much love, happiness and joy can I experience?" This is really going into the unknown and life becomes a much more exiting adventure. -Living with common sense is living with open heart. What we have to pass through is to identify the part of mind called reason and not letting dominate our choices and our decision making. Not letting it decides for you in its fiction based logic. Because that part of the mind is desperate for an answer, however it doesn't really care if it's the truth. When we discover the truth, we experience the emotional state of love. Love is the emotional vibration in the body when you are aligned with truth. In a much more profound way than only being relieved from confusion.

Fear Doctrine: The Creation of Anger and Aggression http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod22-fear-leads-to-anger.mp3 -Underneath all those dynamics of behavior around all the emotions of anger and jealousy, greed, ego and arrogance, there is some kind of fear, there is some kind of a threat. -We try to control our environment, we try to make it safe, we don't challenge what is going on in our imagination, but we feel better by doing these controlling or compensating strategies. -When a dog has been beaten, you pass that dog and it bites you. You think that's a mean and bad dog. But the dog has been conditioned to react this way, protecting itself. It appears evil. But what it is really, it's afraid, it is hurt, and it feels threatened. From the dog point of view of logic, it is just protecting itself. You always see humans that are mean or angry as evil. You might think of them as evil, but if you see underneath that, what you see is a human being that is emotionally wounded afraid of being hurt again. Some people imaging being hurt or have develop such self judgment and self abuse, that the feel abused all the time by their own mind. They might blame other people for it. But they create that emotion themselves and the way it is created is artificial. -It is easier to see this when other people or cultures are being aggressive, It is harder to look at ourselves and see this because it is more uncomfortable. We have been conditioned not to be comfortable with our own emotions, which are the very thing we create. -Those who stops the aggression aren't weak, in reality they are sane. The insanity is to continue. The aggression goes back and forward, waiting for the other one to stop. -Gandhi introduced us to a different way. He looked at these two options, he said "I can either fight this injustice, or I can flee". He sat with those two option for a while and said "I will do neither". There is more then two options! “There is no way to peace, peace is the way” Gandhi The real enemy in all this, generally is not the other person, it is not our anger or our aggression, that is just a reaction, but fear is the real enemy. Fear is based in the lies we believe. The real fear exist in a scenario in our imagination that we invest our faith in. -When you try to control someone else's behavior, they become afraid, and now there is more fear. You are planting the seed of more aggression. When you try to change someone's beliefs, you challenge there beliefs, their beliefs feel threatened. They go to fear and attack back. -If you fall into fear, your chance for sanity lies in not believing what your mind projects. This implies to be the observer of the mind and that there is what the mind projects and then there is another world that is not distorted by our fears, insecurities and aggressions. -When we say someone is evil, they just try to survive, they do the best that they know, very often protecting themselves. This is ignorance. -The base of evil is: fear and ignorance. Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity. But intelligence is not the same as consciousness and awareness. Your intelligence doesn't protect you from fear as awareness does. Intelligence doesn't protect you from ignorance. Only that larger consciousness that gives us the possibility to look at things from multiple points of view, that protects us from ignorance and allows us to see other choices. -The real problem of resolving conflicts on international scale, in a your relationships or even with yourself is that we try to beat ourselves up.The inner judge judges us for being angry, so you feel hurt again, the reaction to feeling that pain is: we fight back. We do the same in international conflicts than in the microcosm of our mind and then it plays out in the outer world on a mass scale. This is one aspect of the dynamic of human suffering. The enemy is not outside of us, it's within. The root of the disease is fear, and the seeds of that root are believing in lies that make us afraid. -When you try and change somebody else's fear, you try to change someone else's beliefs, and trying to change them generally ends with a poor reaction. That is why the only battleground is your own mind, and nobody else's. There is no point in trying to clean other people's mind from fears if you haven't cleaned up your own. Fear of Love and Happiness http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod9-fear-of-change.mp3 -When we look at our fears and try to change them, it may make a lot more to sense to see these habits, these behavior patterns as own living beings. They are aspects of our personality that have taken a life of their own. -The mechanism of the mind, that is making the decisions is in self-preservation mode, and is causing us fear of not succeeding. -You can be afraid of loosing a whole side of your personality. That's true, but it might be the side of yourself that you are not particularly happy with, frustration, anger, fear. -The judge in your mind is afraid of being uprooted, the victim in your mind is afraid of being uprooted. -The part in our mind that we'll be annihilated is very much afraid. That is not our fear! -Even though the voice speaks with I and me, it's not us! When you have that clarity, you have an opportunity for a gap, between the fear that cause us to resist the very medicine that will cure you from those emotional reactions and the real you. -Faith is like water and fertilizer in your mind that is going to make those belief stronger and those roots deeper. -You have to practice the skeptic "you know what? I don't know if they are true or not!" -You'll find that they often involve an initiation of death, but it's not a physical death, it has to do with the letting go of all those aspect of the personality. -We've got to kill all the conceptual ideas of what we think we are. The image that we're better than someone else, good enough or a not good enough are conceptual ideas, you can call it the false self. -Love requires to be vigilant in your mind to not believe those stories, it requires awareness. Love is the great force that can shatter all those false images.

Love Relationships Part 1 http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship_desire.mp3 -Because of what the society says about being in a relationship, our mind tells us that our aches of not being able to have our desires fulfilled, go away with the help of one single person, and that you will live happily ever after. It is not that way most of the time. -The mind creates the hurting by setting expectations of how the relationship is supposed to be. Having someone pushing those buttons in your head, pushing against those expectations, hurts. Does love hurt? Expressing or being in love isn't painful. It is the shattering of the illusions of how we expect people to be, expect them to act like and the amount of faith we invest in those illusions that are painful. Does truth hurts? No! It's like having a splinter in your hand, you want to take it out with a tweezers and to say: "the tweezers hurts". The illusions we have about our relationship that's the splinter, the truth, that's the tweezers! As it comes out, it can hurt more than when it was just in here. But if I let it in, it's going to be more painful overtime than pulling it out. -Because of the set up illusions we have in our head, the mind tells us that If you fall in love with someone, he/she must be the one for you, even though you don't know this person very well. -But the agreements in my mind aren't really as authentic like our physical or emotional desire. -This is how a lot of relationship get started: We have sex, we feel emotions, the mind thinks it fits the bill, you put on the person expectations without knowing the person. People assume that the emotion and the agreements they have in their mind are the same as the other person has. -When the sexual chemistry lines up and there is emotions, the mind says: "it's a fit!" and starts to take the image of our prefect soulmate, our expectations and paint it over this person. We then assume that this person is our soulmate, we assume this person will meet all the criteria we have in our head. -You can eliminate all the pain if you pay attention to the stories you paint in your mind and recognize our role in that half. As much as you pay attention to satisfying your desires, you have to watch the mind, so you don't believe in things that aren't true. Love Relationships part 2 http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship_desire2.mp3 -The mind expresses the ache of the non-fulfillment of our desires as pain. It is associated in our mind to being alone. The greater the ache, the greater is the fulfilment of that desire when you finally connect. -In a couple, your desire of having a good time and being happy together is the same. However, the agreements in the mind are in conflict. The agenda of both becomes to "how can I persuade my partner to do what I want him or her to do to actually feel good". One of the way is to disrespect the other person's agreement by making comments. In this process, the emotional quality is getting trampled on. The desire of the other person to express love is diminished as she feels no longer safe to open her heart. She represses her emotions and the relationship becomes unsatisfying. In that case you can say that each person's expectation to have their own agreements met became more important than expressing their love. -The solution is to set the priority on the emotional quality of the relationship by taking care of how you express yourself. Even when you express what you want or don't want. You have to set the priority to the quality of the communication, the manner of how you express your differences is affecting your relationship. -In a relationship, when you both practice communication in a way that is respectful and kind, you are satisfying the emotional quality of the relationship. If you do this, the criteria of the mind become less important, you become more flexible of how you are going to fulfill that emotion. You have to set the priority on the relationship and not on the desire of the mind and pictures of how it is supposed to be like. When you speak or ask something, what is the quality of the emotions that you express? If you choose anger, you'll satisfy the agreements of the mind to the detriment of the (emotional quality & communication) relationship. -The importance has to be set on the emotional quality as you get through this together. If I communicate with kindness, love and respect, maybe the solution is not that important anymore. -Whatever you do, wherever you go is not important, you just enjoy being together. This shift happens when the emotional quality is set over the agreements in the mind. What makes Relationships Work (Love Relationships Part 3) http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship-work-podcast-14.mp3 -A relationship that works is depending on the 3 points triangle: 1) The physical intimacy (holding hands, cuddling, sex...) 2)The emotional intimacy (if both are happy, jealous, calm...) 3)The structure of agreements, You have to ask your mate and yourself: -What are your core beliefs? -How do you handle with money, what are your savings program? -Do you want children? -Do you want to settle down or travel and live free? -Do you want to live in the country or in the city? As much as you love each other, those criteria can be deal breakers. Those differences in agreements are not insolvable if you have good tools of communication and if you both are flexible. There has to be compatible flexibility. -Communication requires that you both listen as being open enough to share how you see things and why. If one starts to judge and minimize the feeling of the other person, she will close down on what she communicates. -Trust means, it's easy to be yourself with them, you don't need a mask and no need to pretend, so you can enjoy life more, being completely honest and open. -As you eliminate your judgments, your appreciations, your gratitude and respect grows and make a lot of flexibility in the relationship. The listening comes down to respect, to honor the other person. -We should respect the lover to the extent of the admiration, it is a key factor to a sustained long term relationship! -Respect in the way that it is palpable means admiration. -Watch how your lover treats others, it may give you a better insight of what he is really like.

Feeling Not Good Enough http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/not_good_enough.mp3 -If you try to replace an image of yourself by the another image of yourself that could somehow discount this other belief, but it doesn't make the other one go away. -To create this image of what you want to be, puts the bar in your head always higher. Trying to follow the voice in your head don't take you there where you want to be. You need to change the beliefs about yourself. -To accept not being good enough makes you feel a lot better. You realizes that those images of being good enough or not good enough donʼt exist. They are boxes made of duality you put yourself into, which consist of conceptual ideas of yourself. We can describe them in our imagination but they don't exist, we dream them up. Those dreams can run our lives, if we don't have the awareness to step out of them. To live in this "good enough box" is such a small place to get into, that youʼll find out you donʼt fit in the box. -Why would you want to trap yourself in a virtual reality in your imagination? Why would you want to put yourself in a conceptual box? -You have the power to shift your point of view, to step out of story you imagine and that you puts your beliefs in. you are not those low self images and not these high self images either. You might believe in these illusions but they are not you! -When you have awareness, you get a hold on your attention and step outside the illusions in your mind, no longer living in the duality of conceptional ideas, and instead enjoy live and be happy. -The only way to win the game of being good enough or not good enough is to not play the game. Problem Questions and Hidden Assumptions http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/hidden_assumptions.mp3 -There are questions that hook our minds into settle patterns of traps of impossibility, of pursuits where there is no answers. Some questions are tricky. They send you to see possibilities that don't exist, send you to a ghost chase in you mind. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That question comes from Zen practice. -"What is my life's purpose" is a great subject to get ourselves frustrated with. It is obviously something we have to know in order to be successful in our life, it applies also that in your life you have something you have to fulfill in order to be a success, if we don't fulfill it, we would be a failure. It may have a lot of applied meaning to it but it hasn't. We are tricking ourselves into making a much bigger deal than it is, or a very different deal that it is. -When people start putting their life's purpose in terms of what they have to accomplish, wether it is to save the world or feed the hungry, teach kids to read or serve their country etc... now life's purpose have a measurement of success and failure. The people feel like they have to succeed at it and the mind might trick them saying they are a success or a failure, depending on the results, that they cannot control. -Those questions seem logical but they don't have real value at all. This is because we haven't learned to analyze questions, to be a skeptic of them, and ask if this is a valid question or not. To see all the implied assumptions and the traps that they possibly can pull us into. Beware of the question, beware the assumptions of the questions, where they direct your mind and the traps that they can take you into. With "what is the meaning of life?" kind of questions, we end up doing intellectual somersaults for years. -The question "Am I a good dad/mom?" The roam of the possibility that the question allows to answer is "Yes or No". That question is a trap. It send our mind in only two different directions, but both answers are false, because it's an image of what we are, it's a picture in our imagination as being a good parent. -It puts us into two dream in our imagination one of those is, "Being a good parent" we build this imaginary world of being a good parent, and do the same thing with the image of "being a bad parent". As we create those world in our imagination, our consciousness shifts into the point of view of those characters that we imagine as ourselves. We step into these characters and than we imagine that whole world from that role or the other. -We believe the two images, we have two images of ourselves and they are in conflict. -This is how the mind structures duality: I'm good enough or not? With that question which one is me? It only has two possibilities. Which one of these two Am I? Now you start to see the problem with the question. Because maybe you are both, or maybe you are not, but we don't usually look at ourselves like this. As soon as we ask the question "Am I good enough?" (as a parent, as a boss, as a lover), we cast ourselves in two conflicting roles. Our consciousness put us into two different points of view about ourselves at the same time and gather evidence of both virtual realities, imagined realities which are in conflict. We are so busy battling in our mind that we never notice that the question was invalid. We end up chasing illusions of answers. -You will never get a description made of words that will accurately give you that answer. We get descriptions but they won't be the truth, we get picture images but they won't be the truth. -Should I have done that? Am I lovable? Am I good enough? Did I do the right thing? Did I do the wrong thing? Whenever we put a duality context into a question about ourselves or on an action, we are going to have illusions going. If we try to answer those questions, we will not find the truth, we'll be chasing conceptual ideas of what we are or of what other people are. -Did he do the right thing? Should they have done that? Those problem questions, duality questions has a lot to do with the suffering in our own mind, because of all the illusions we chase. So again: Beware of the question and beware the assumptions of the questions, where they direct your mind and the traps that they can take you into.

Don't take anything Personally http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod13-taking-things-personally.mp3 -To get hurt we have to: 1) Agree the statement about us or what we have done. 2) Think that this means something about us 3)Think we deserve some kind of an emotional punishment for being a failure -We have been conditioned as an automatic program to react emotionally to what people say. We have been conditioned to accept other people's opinion as being true. We agree with that opinion that if we create a failure, we are a failure, and when we fail to meet other people's expectation's we punish ourselves with emotions. -This is just a habit. You have to develop your awareness to the point that you can see those interpretation being made in the moment. In the beginning you start to see it after the fact. The more you practice, the closer you start to see it to when it's happening until you see that scenario happen in your mind while it's happening. -With that level of awareness, you change everything that happens in your mind, you change the thoughts, the interpretation, you change what you believe, and by changing that, you change the emotional experience of everything. -When someone criticizes what you do, it's only telling you that he is criticizing what he sees in his imagination. -What they see is something in their mind. This is one of the most challenging aspect of sharing what goes on in people's mind. -When someone criticizes you, it's really about the picture in their mind they have of you, it gives you total immunity to not believe what they say. It allows you to change that very first interpretation. Self judgment, stop beating myself up http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod43-beating-myself.mp3 -Self judgment is at the core or at least an element of just about every kind of unpleasant emotional reaction there is. And if it doesn't involve a self judgment it is probably a judgment of someone else or anything else outside you. -But when the mind is automatically putting ourselves or someone else down, there is generally not a healthy emotion with it. It is something that leads to unhappiness. -Talking about self judgement can have different aspects : I shouldn't be or do this, but it can be harsher like "I'm such an idiot, I'm so stupid", it might get projected on to someone else in the form of "they might think I'm an idiot, or stupid". You are still judging yourself but you are imagining that somebody else is joining you in that affair. -A lot of people try after the judgment to get some comfort with reevaluating themselves by saying "I'm not that stupid, I learn a lot from what I just did, I'm not a bad person of this and that, just adding positive thoughts. It's somewhere effective but the judgment in your head might come back -We can put those positive thinking on top of the bad ones, but there is a whole belief structure underneath that hasn't gone away. No matter how many positive stories we put on the top of it. -The part of the judgment that you hear and feel, is the visible part of the iceberg. 90% of the structure is below the surface, and you don't see it... until you learn how to look for it. -When we break it down in smaller pieces, we can move the pieces quiet easily Let's say that the comment "I shouldn't have done that" comes from one voice in the mind, the one particular comment we are talking about is called the "inner judge" , the judge is pushing all those negative opinions. There is another side of our personality that agrees, that part is called "the victim". -It's the side of the judge to do the condemnation and the side of the victim that is accepting the condemnation. If you don't have the awareness to take a gap from those condemnation and agreement, it feels like it's us. By practicing awareness, you realize more and more of a gap of time between when the judge says something and the victim accepts it, even to the point that before the victim accepts it, you say "hey wait a minute, I don't know that I agree, I don't know that I accept that". When you can do that you don't end up with fear, the embarrassment of shame...You don't have to agree with every opinion that goes thru your mind. When we accept those comments, we put our faith in them. -What happens before the judgment, is what's really buried in the ground. Because the judgment is a conclusion, the judge has already some idea of what you should do instead, what would have been the successful thing to do. We have put our faith in what the judge says, in what the victim says and all the images of how we are supposed to be, those images of perfection the judge can compare us to. -We have build a huge structure of beliefs, it's a belief system. We can see a small percentage of it, we feel all the emotions of it but we don't know about the chain of events that precedes it. -Achieving all your goals is not a way to get out of self judgment! -Some people would like to keep the judge in their head active because they think as the judge would be the only motivation they have. If this statement is true, then the most successful people on earth would be the ones that are the most harsh on themselves. Success means also happy and confident. A confident person isn't beating himself up on the inside. A successful person is not measured on what he has but more on what he feels. -When there is no comparison there is no self judgment, when there is no judgment there is no self rejection, no shame, no embarrassment, no guilt, no insecurity, no fear of what other people will think of you because you will accept yourself just the way you are, without conditions.

Faith and Personal Power http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod17-faith.mp3 -When you put your faith in something, you are putting your personal power in a conceptual idea or in something that is real. -The other option of putting your faith in something, is to doubt. To doubt in something is to put your faith in an opposing conceptual idea. -To be in a state of I don't know is to be a skeptic. This isn't the same as being a doubter. To be a skeptic requires a higher degree of awareness, a discerning way that isn't negative and sarcastic to oneself or to another. This doesn't suspend our openness to possibilities. That's an art-form, a very high mastery in life. -Yes, plan financially, take care of your health, but worry is not preparation! -When you worry about anything, the return on your investment of faith is fear. -Your emotional body responds with its natural answer to that particular imaginary. Emotion is what you get back from the combination of having a thought and putting your faith in that imaginary world called conceptual ideas. -Thoughts aren't generating emotions by themselves. -Changing your thought is chasing the tail of the problem, the real power is where do you put your faith. -You are going to find the beliefs or what you invest your faith in, by looking at the emotions. The faith is between the emotions, the internal dialogue and the words that are coming out of your mouth. -Do you have to believe in something? No! It's a reaction the mind has. As you don't need to believe in something as the truth. The sun is going to come up tomorrow. Those things that aren't the truth, ideas we have, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, not good enough, I'm beautiful, better than someone else, all those ego self- importance conceptual ideas, need your undying faith in order to perpetuate themselves. -How much effort does it take to not put your faith in something, that's a "not doing"! It's just easy as this, you just don't put your faith in it. -We basically act on what we believe. -When we have the conflict between the reality and the virtual reality in our minds. It can create a lot of unhappiness and misery. -When you pull your faith back from those virtual outcomes that you imagined, which is to stop believing in that outcome, those images in your mind and your pain can dissolve. That is detachment. -First, find where your faiths are by watching your emotions. After it's about investing your faith where you choose to invest it, so you are inspired to take action. At last it is about learning to detach when it is time to detach, and to go create something else, take new and different actions. Free Will http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod15-free-will.mp3 -Do you really have free will? -We are taking about free will in the context of the decisions we make during the day. -The question has a lot to do with how much of social programming we had in our lives, and if we can break it? -A lot of people think they have free will, but maybe they just don't really know what free will is. -If you didn't have a choice because you didinʼt see the choice or didnʼt know there was a choice, then you didn't really have free will. -Sometimes, you had the awareness of another choice, the intellectual idea of another choice but not the will power to change the momentum of your direction. -In another case you could see and you had awareness of what was coming. And you had the will power to direct your actions in a way of choice. That is what we can call free will. You have a free choice and you can make it. -There was always the potential for the choice in all the 3 examples. -Most people think they have free-will, but they end up going so fast to an emotion like anger or frustration that they never looked at other options on the menu. They didn't even see other options. They didn't even know there was a menu. -How many time do we actually see that road, the possibility for that interpretation before we end up to a dead end called anger and frustration? -As you gather awareness, you gather to see all the different roads, before you pass by and you are able to see them further and further away before you get there. That is awareness! -You can make another interpretation and feel much more happy about this situation and use for example forgiveness, joy, gratitude... It can change your life, and a large amount of emotion you feel. The mind works on habits, it's what drive the mind forward, it's his resistance to change in its state of motion, its inertia. The habits are not going to change unless an outside force is being applied to it. In this case, the force is your will power. How you are able to turn habit around is depending on your will power. The more will power you have, the faster you can change direction. But you can have all the will power in the world, if you don't have awareness, you won't see another road. With practice, you'll drive by the same intersections again and again, that one day you'll know the dead end is coming up, you'll take the foot off the gas soon enough -Everybody has the opportunity to make a different choice. But very few people see any other choices than their pattern and habits of emotional reactions that they are programed with. Free will is when you have any kind of situation and you can see numerous options and when they aren't any emotional reactions anymore. -You never have to get down the road of anger or an interpretation to feel victimized. You never have to go down the road of judgment and feel righteous or do anything else that sabotages your relationship and your well-being, because you can see there are some other choices, and you have enough will power to be able to make the choice. -To resist the only possibility that you seem having means acknowledging something about your current state. It means realizing that you've been living with a socialized program of the past agreements in your mind instead of making the choices. -To realize that you don't have free will over your emotions is an uncomfortable truth. Some people don't admit that. They prefer living in a comfortable illusion. They have the potential to see the turn off but they refuse to see it, in that way they don't have a choice. Emotional Reactions http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/emotional_reactions.mp3 -When we are battling to change our emotions, what we are looking for to change is our energy field. The emotional field comes with words, an attitude, feelings and sensations that have a dialogue. In times of stress, that dialogue runs in our mind. -We have to wake up from our day dreams. Don't believe anyone ourselves, meaning donʼt believe the dreams in their or our own mind. -This field of energy has a life on its own. -That expression of I don't like this, rejecting this field of energy leads to wanting to fix it or push it away with anger. That judgment attitude is predicated by another attitude which make you feel like as you are the victim -We have 3 different aspects: we have a victimization, we have a judgment about this experience, and that leads to a hero or a destroyer expression/ attitude. This is a typical response to experiencing emotions that are unpleasant. -This desire to fix the original emotion gets distorted and corrupted into these four different characters that then get agitated and build our emotional field even further -What we are creating and expressing with our words of wanting to fix the situation is rejection and judgment. -By wanting to fix the situation, we are actually creating more bad feeling. The desire is authentic, the expression of it through these distorted channels, creates more of this very thing we are trying to free ourselves from. It is the way we have been conditioned to approach changing the society but it doesn't mean it works. -One of the most important aspect is to refrain from those stories of "I want to change or fix something, this is wrong or bad, I wish this would go away", so that we don't feed that field of energy anymore with that poison of distorted stories. -If you try to fix you are agitating the field, you are in a paradigm of rejection. -Our habit is to jump into an opinion about... or think about.... If you do this you, are into another character. In order to stay into that witness observer mode you have to take action and think about for example being present, putting your attention in the "Here and Now", That shift you out of all those character stories. -If you practice shifting that emotional state, your point of view on your day to day basis, then you have lot better chance to shift out when you are in a reaction. -By generating the emotion of gratitude, you are infusing it with a whole different dream, a whole different emotional field. You are modifying the emotional field of anger or frustration. You are replacing that old dream with a new one.

Happiness as a Choice http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/happiness_choice.mp3 -There is this whole world of emotions that we don't have an awareness about. Once we satisfy our physical needs, food, shelter and comfort, all our needs turn to emotional fulfillments, the satisfaction of passions. -There are two kinds of emotions: Emotions that are based in love and emotions that are based in fear. Emotions that are pleasurable, love, joy, gratitude, excitement laughter, ( there can be thousands of those specific ones) are based in love. On the other hand jealousy, anger, envy, fear, shame, guilt, etc... are based in fear and are generally unpleasant. If you want to be happy in your life, then you need to create more love, which is more pleasure, and get rid of all the emotions of fear. If you eliminate the fear, there will be a lot more room for love. The thing about feeling emotions that is not easy to understand, is that emotions is something we create. We are not use to think of emotions in this way. -Most of the time, when we speak about emotions we say: "He makes me sad", "I'm so happy to see you", "she really frustrates me", "that driver gets on my nerves". All these interpretations kind of effect how we perceive emotions, because we don't really see them as something we create, we are missing the in between part: They called you stupid, you created an image in your mind of a stupid person, you believed that's what you were, you believed that is a bad thing to be, you judged yourself as that character, agreed with the judgment saying "yes that's what I am, I'm stupid" and then you felt this emotional reaction because you invested your faith in this false self image. So now you are hurt and you are angry at this other person for causing you to feel hurt, because you are not aware of what is happening in that intermediate step in your imagination. By expressing yourself in that image, you create this whole emotional reaction to that picture you have in your imagination. That's creating the pain, the hurt, the emotion, but we don't see that part, we only see what this person said. That's because we are focusing on a physical reality and we are unaware of what is happening in our imagination in our mind, that is causing us to create the emotion. -When you don't create that image of you being stupid, and especially when you don't believe in that image, it doesn't hurt, no matter what someone calls you, because you don't do that intermediate part. -When you become aware of your responsibility in the emotions we feel, we have a whole different game to play. The emotions that we experience are the emotions that we create. If you aren't aware of that intermediate step and believe that the external things and other people make us feel this way, you can say: "Now I have to control other people and what they say, I have to control the traffic, the weather, the economy in order to feel good, because I'm reacting to all those things, those determine my emotional state. We end up trying to control all those outsides circumstances and people, which are things we can't control. We ignore what's going on in our mind which is the one thing we can control with some practice and training. -We can still be happy, but that happiness is depending on having our criteria met. That criteria says: "I will be happy if..."(I lose 5 Kg, redecorate the kitchen, get a promotion...). What it really means is "I will express love when my body looks a certain way", "I will allow myself to feel good when my boss recognize my work", "I express happiness when my partner does this and that for me". -We have criteria to every emotion we express. "If this happens I express this emotion, if that doesn't happen I express this emotion". The criteria of a belief system determines what we transmit emotionally. That expression of emotion is that what we actually feel. -Happiness is the expression of love, if you want to be happy express love. The criteria for expressing love keep on changing, then even when you meet them, you don't express love and appreciate your successes, you can get tired of chasing them. -If we see beautiful landscape, we see some pollution on it and we have a big story about the pollution, our emotional reaction is relative to our interpretation about the pollution, relative to that's what is going on in our head. The experience that we create can be stimulated from something natural, direct perception or by perceiving something that we imagine or we tell ourselves as a story, our interpretation. But either way, the emotional body is just responding naturally to whatever we perceive. -We are responsible for the material that we project in our mind. At a certain point of mastery in awareness, you can have no material on your mind, empty all the internal dialogue, you end up just perceiving life as it is, wether it'd be your breath and your heartbeat on the inside or the world on the outside which is perfect as it is. -To have a work that your passionate about doesn't make you happy directly. It is the expression of your love that makes you happy, your joy, your passion, your gratitude that you have in doing that work. Your love for this work is the way that you create joy in your life. It's not having friends and family around you that make you happy, it is your love for them, your emotions, your joy and your happiness that you feel. It doesn't come from them, it is the expression of your love that you feel when you cook with them, play and talk with them. A lot of people have a lot of good friends and family and they may be in depression because they are expressing completely different emotions to what their friends and family do. -How do you make yourself happy? You have to express love. It's not a big secret because if you watch kids, they are doing it all the time naturally. However over the years, we have build up many reasons not to express love: "I'm not smart enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, the world is a problem, the traffic is a problem, my boss is a problem, my employes are a problem...". We create all these judgments we believe, we create all this sense of victimization we believe, we invest faith in those beliefs based in fear and we express negative emotions instead of positive ones. There is a natural expression of happiness once you eliminate all those belief structures, criteria, judgments and opinions that fills the mind. -A lot of people try to feel happiness by creating more financial wealth, having bigger and better vacations, finding the right partner... They try to meet the criteria they have in their imagination. They will withhold the expression of their love and express those emotions based in fear until those criteria are met. When those criteria are met they have such a habit of expressing those emotions based in fear that they don't have practice in expressing love, gratitude and joy. -We can look at the world and find a lot of things that are injustices, lots of abuses, and we can defend our rationalizations. Withholding our love in that situation isn't helping any situation. Expressing anger isn't helping any situation to improve. Did you ever see a judgment make something better as much as the expression of love does? -The easy way to start with, is observing all the stories and ways we create our unhappiness with. To look at those statements pull the stories out from behind them and start not believing them, not believing the stories and justifications for why you create sadness, why you make yourself angry. -Has the world change, have you change? Not really, the world is in the same state of chaos, you still have your haircut and your weight but the way you look at it is different, the dialogues in your mind is different, the interpretation is different, what you believe is different, what you invest in emotionally is different. Therefore the emotions you express are very different and that expression coming out of you is what will make you happy. -When you understand all that, and you take responsibility for that, then the choice becomes: "Will I express love and be happy or will I invest and defend a story that creates unhappiness" You only have a choice if you have that degree of awareness. -What it takes is a commitment to be happy and create love in your live or in your relationship. That commitment is critical, it is the most important step. -Making that commitment to be happy is planting a seed. The water you give this plant, is paying attention, it's looking around, starting to notice, reading this again... .Step one, make the commitment to be happy in your life , then keep your eyes open for step two as you create your own pathway to happiness.

Self Importance or The Ego -Self importance has 2 sides, positive and negative. We can be playing out those stories at the same time. Self importance is the structure in our mind that determines how we take things personally. How does these images of ourselves work? -We view the world, ourselves, other people from the point of view of the images we build about ourselves, the world or other people. -We are not the one thinking our thoughts. -The spiritual masters that have been studying the mind since thousands of years, have a completely different point of you than psychologists that have been studying the mind for decades. You are not your mind and you are not the one generating those thoughts. -From the point of view of the judge and the victim that statement looks true. We identify with the point of view of those characters, and we assume that it is us thinking about ourselves. And there in lies the lie. But the characters are not you and are not even talking about you, they are talking about each other. We get our identity lost in the mix. -We can use those tools of characters to understand what we are not. We are not the judge or victim, we can separates ourselves from these aspects of our personality and use them to dissect those layers of self importance as oppose to accept and carry them further. -When you think there is something wrong with you, think of it as "it needs to fix, it needs modification and change" not "you need to be fixed", and you are the instrument to fix it. In that way you can stop judging yourself. -Our problem is the responsibility of what to do with those thoughts, it is different from us being the problem. If we bring our car to the mechanic and tell him, it's not working, we haven't helped him at all. He is going to ask you a few questions to do systematic analysis to narrow down and see what is the specific problem. Apply the same technic in your mind, identify, cut out and dissolve. -It is the faculty to change your point of view that make it possible to change your reaction. -Without a systematic approach it is very difficult to break free of that false identity, because we have this old habit of identifying ourselves with those thoughts. You have to practice being not you. You might think twice a day that you are not your mind, but it doesn't really have an impact compare to a disciplined practice, because meanwhile you will identify with the "I" and the "me". Changing Habits and Overcoming Addictions http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod19-change-habits.mp3 -Quit one day at a time, You break these huge habit doing small steps at a time, you set the bar where you choose to set it. -Old habits are like elastic bands around you. To cut a small one allows you to have more room to move, so that you can cut a bigger one after that. Donʼt try to cut them all at once, donʼt set too high expectations. -The way you recover your personal power by not believing the judge, the victim in your mind can also become a habit, it becomes automatic. -Your point of view will determine your interpretation, what you believe, what will you invest your faith in and then the emotion you create. -The way to happiness develops in a lot of little steps. All those steps forming an entire path, a path to happiness, compassion and enlightenment. -The way you stay free of doubt and opinon, once you are completely clear, is that you practice that until you get there. So then when you get there, you know how to keep your mind clean, free of doubts and false beliefs. -Staying aware, free in your mind of fear, doubt, misery, judgment and victimization is a habit. After you do it for a while, it becomes an addiction, a habit, starting at the smallest little thing.

Can You Change Your Life? (is a customer interview) http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod11-holly-interview.mp3 The real transformation that you create for yourself, is in actual practice. Those exercises can be found in the self mastery course. Before you start changing your life, you start with mastering yourself. You are the instrument with which you create your life. And without first tuning that instrument, you are likely to miss the mark of what you are aiming for in your life. Do You Need Guidance? http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod21-teacher.mp3 -Enlightenment is when you see things as they are. -All that one has to do to make that journey is to shift his point of perception -Choose to put your point of perception to a different view point at anytime, to take you out of victimhood and out of judgment. -To a certain point, you have to get free of the path, but to even get to a point where you can depart, you have to develop the skills to develop your attention and therefore follow a path. -Book learning is quiet different from developing consciousness. What do we do with that knowledge? We have to pratice. -Don't be under the belief that if you really care about someone, you have to point all what he's doing wrong to him. It's a different kind of caring, not as accepting or as respectful. In the structure of belief system, of how to become more spiritual by having expectations in being more perfect, doesn't fit. You have to adapt a point of view where you accept yourself (and others) completely the way you (they) are. -Wanting to become perfect on the spiritual path is counterintuitive. Finding Your Self http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod16-finding-self.mp3 -The quest starts the day you're not happy with the global situation you're in. -To make possible to express more love, you have to get rid of your fears. That means getting rid of fears made of beliefs, beliefs that are connected to fear. -We bounce between our good self-esteem and our bad self-esteem. Those self-images create an identity. -Within that matrix of who we are, having to find ourselves over the years, we' ve made hundreds of agreements "oh I'm this way, I'm not that way","I'm good at maths, lousy at english, I cant sing or paint". All those images exist in our mind. We've been defining ourselves by agreements and by imaginary characters, conceptual ideas of who we are, many of them based in fear. Some kind of self-rejection, some kind of "I wonder what they think about me" story. The thing the people mistakingly go do in finding out who they are, they go looking among those imaginary characters they have among themselves, that they've had created. And all these imaginary characters of themselves not one is really them. -That path to happiness or that path to love in your life is about uprooting all those false images based in fear even the positive ones based in illusions, because you aren't that imaginary character either. Your own mind becomes a big trap, it becomes a matrix of illusions and many of those are based in fear. You might ask :"well if I'm I'm not any of those character, who Am I, what am I?" The who Am I question isn't a so good question to ask, because it leads us to believe in an imaginary character! -At that point, it can be very frustrating to get more lost instead of finding yourself. But that is the nature of the journey. In the journey you have to dissolve all the illusions, and it can be pretty uncomfortable. As you honestly dissolve all these false images and illusions you have about yourself, you will find that you'll be happier, because there is more room in your life. -As your consciousness expends, and you dissolve the fears, you dissolve the false beliefs -From that divine point of view of truth, love or consciousness , only perfection exists. -The mind has an idea of what the body is supposed to do and look like, it judges the body as wrong in some fashion. It's kind of ridiculous. The world of the body is separate from the mind, and the mind very often tries to control the body, and therefore creates a conflict. When we are not aware, we create a judgement of our body, it can end up in feeling guilty, ashamed, being angry at our body. The body by itself is a beautiful being, the divine world by itself is only perfection. It's in the middle world of the mind that there is all those comparisons, judgments, victimization out of emotional reactions. -You have to let go all the egos versions of self in order to embrace the authentic self, witch is a divine self. It's a big and beautiful leap in consciousness. It allows a world without conflict, in yourself and in the world, and see everything as beautiful. Unconditional love and acceptance for life. -Why do get people angrier over the years? We learn to accumulate stories, opinions, beliefs and agreements in our mind and we collect all these ideas in the mind, but we never clean up our mind. We collect them and a lot of them are in contradiction. We are not taught to evaluate thoughts, we are not taught to let them go. -In that quest of finding oneself, you have to dissolve the world of illusions of the mind, to find who but more importantly what you are... which is life, conscious life expressing itself through that body. -It take consciousness, awareness and mastering control over your own attention, this is not an intellectual paradigm.

A quote by Gary: -"Life is not a problem to solve. There is no answer. It is an opportunity for mastery of expression. Your life is your work of art." So here is a mix of summaries and transcriptions of some of Gary's free audio series, sorry for the long wait but I had a lot of shadow work to do on my ego before coming to talk about the subject again. I've realized that some of the podcast have changed title since the day I started with the transcription, so I'm not sure about the link to the podcast for some audio. Here is the link to Gary's free audio series: http://pathwaytohappiness.com/insights.htm What is Awareness? (sorry I'm not sure about the link to the podcast on that one) Awareness is the ability to see with clarity the whole world, the invisible world of faith and to perceive the power of faith. Faith is not here concedered as a religious matter. Your emotions are the feedbacks of your beliefs and the faith you invest in your beliefs. Awareness is the capacity to open your eyes to the world of what is going on in your mind, your belief system, what you are doing with your personal power, what you are doing in your relationships and how you create your own happiness or unhappiness. You become independant to what you know, think and perceive. Understanding The Spiritual Journey http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod20-spiritual.mp3 -We tend to think that this spiritual journey is having a lot to do about God, but in fact, itʼs about us. -The spiritual journey is about life and more specially about being happy in life. -The feeling of being home is a personal experience. These things that are spiritual fall more into these personal experiences that we feel and therefore, just by their nature, are very difficult to describe. Those descriptions in all religions and traditions can become very confusing and can become a myth. When you add fear, judgments, self importance to a myth, there is a lot room for superstition and tyranny. -Being happy means being kind to yourself and others, compassionate, generous, showing understanding, enjoying life. Being happy means simply making sure you have more and more love within yourself and less and less fear. -What makes sense is to take all the things that you fear and get rid of them. In doing so, there will be a lot more room for love. Some other things have to change as-well, that included beliefs, internal dialogue and most importantly change the point of view, the point of perception. Everything begins from that point of perception. -Very often, the emotional state we create, begins with a certain point of view that leads to an interpretation and beliefs, that result in an emotional state. What often fixates a person's point of view in a state of victim, judgment or righteousness, pride, arrogance are a set of beliefs. Those might be in the self- image and beliefs about oneself. Those beliefs fixate a persons point of view. That point of view dictates then how you make interpretations about everything. If someone put its faith in the interpretation, the corresponding emotion comes out. Due to that emotion we put more faith and belief in that emotion that fixates our point of view. That point of view make all those beliefs appear true and so we create more and more emotions that fixate the point of view. -A large part of breaking our fears is about breaking apart those core beliefs that fixate our point of view. By shifting the point of view we are able to take apart those beliefs. The result of which is a change in our emotional state. -The challenge in our traditions around the world is that we are describing things that can't be seen with words. -You have to have a quiet mind to create that euphoric state of love. By describing it with words, we fixate the mind on knowledge and informations. The mechanism of language that we have, is a part of the barrier of progress. -This is why there is so much benefit in taking action and in doing something different, that creates experience. This also why a lot of people can read a lot of different books of self-help, spiritual teachings, and not being really happier in their lives. They have taking the process of opening up to an emotional experience and a clearer perception of life and substitute it with gathering knowledge, filling the mind. -Language creates a structure of conceptual ideas and creates massive amounts of knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom. -What actions can you take? Meditation, sitting still. On the outside it looks like you are doing nothing, but on the inside it can be very active, you are breaking up your every day routine and create a different experience. You realize how much chatter there really is in the mind and how uncomfortable it is for the mind for you just to seat still and do nothing. That emotional state is done through actions, not through the intellect, not through feeding the mind more information. -You measure that spiritual journey very simply by your emotional state. To keep it simple, Are you happy or unhappy? Are you on a path to happiness or on the path to misery? The quieter your mind, then the fewer illusions, temptations, distortions, contradictory beliefs you will have and the more peaceful you will be. -The immunity against self importance comes with awareness by knowing where your happiness is coming from, by knowing that there are more points of view available. -To have a common reference for a state of being where the mind is quiet and the emotional state is euphoric, you might have that experience, if you see something beautiful, like a sunset. Some people say it takes their breath away. What it actually takes is all the internal dialogue. That experience of perceiving beauty transcends description, and that direct perception of beauty opens you up to a euphoric state of love. That experience of emotional bless may come in meditation or may just hit you one day down the street, your eyes open up and you see the incredible beauty in front of you, in a way that you have never seen it before. We call that the spiritual experience. It transcends all the internal dialogue. We can also call that feeling being free of the limitations of the beliefs and thoughts in our minds that fixate our point of view in a fixed limited range of possibilities. -It is this desire to escape this limited state of consciousness, this feeling of being trapped by things we can't see that makes us seek the freedom of the spiritual experience, and see beauty in life, that we can only see when we shift our point of view. All of this happens behind the eyes. -Besides meditating, one other method is to challenge that structure of beliefs in the mind that fixate the point of view. Dismantle the structure and start freeing up the way we perceive things that allow ourselves to have different interpretations, and therefore create different emotional state about the same experience. -Another way is to control your dreams. Our mind is dreaming all the time, day or night. Memories of the past are dreams. When we imagine anything, it's a dream. We often experience the emotions that comes with them. When you are aware that you are having a day dream, you are able to change it. In that way you change the interpretation your mind is making, you don't believe the old stories, you can change your point of view from victim or judgment, see it from a new perspective. You still have the memory, that haven't change, but you changed the way you see things and that's now under your control. The spiritual journey is about common sense, respect and love that transcends those limiting points of view, and limited beliefs.

Thank you so much it is as always very appreciated @Juan Cruz Giusto

Enlightenment FAQ1 Resume No Self-No Ego There are a lot of these questions because this is a very nuanced subject. You have to be very careful about your mind jumping to conclusions about what the truth of no-self means. Your mind will want to jump to extreme conclusions and turn this Enlightenment thing into this black and white thing. But it’s not black and white ̶ it’s a very big gray area. So we have to tread carefully with subtlety and nuance and intelligent thinking and reasoning to think about this stuff. Embracing the Experience You’ve got to understand that can live from this place where you actually live and realizing that you are not a real physical entity in reality. You are merged with everyone and everything else in reality. Until you get that shift don’t assume that you’ve got it. If the truth of no-self is so simple, if the truth is that there’s literally no self, and all there is are these perceptions and reality, than how come I can’t see it? Shouldn’t it be just obvious like you say? If it is that obvious how come I don’t see it instantly? Why do I have to spend a thousand hours looking and searching? This is a really interesting question. It turns out that your entire psyche has been constructed from the point where you’ve born and enculturated and raised by your family and grew up in this culture. Your entire environment has shaped your personality in such a way that your psychology is prevented from seeing it even though you can logically understand it. And there is a very big difference between logically understanding it and actually seeing it. This is a very counterintuitive, unorthodox way to look at life. You’ve never looked at your life this way before. What is required is a drastic paradigm shift. It is a bit like looking at an optical illusion and seeing it flip and in a sense it almost happens automatically. You can’t force it. And a part of a problem here is that you psyche doesn’t want to see this. -What was fed to you when you were young is this idea that you exist and you are this personal entity who is experiencing life. To undo that takes quite a lot of work. The Matrix the self doesn’t exist. Does this mean that we live in a sort of a matrix? Like the movie The Matrix? The answer is no Imagine that what happened in the movie was that the matrix itself was real but that the person who is supposedly stuck in it is actually a part of the fiction. What you do to break of the matrix is to realize you do not exist at all. The matrix itself exists, the external world exists, but you, as a personal entity, do not exist. It is much more counterintuitive and freaky, much more interesting, much more intellectually fascinating, much more paradoxical than just breaking out of the matrix. It is not like we are saying that your physical body doesn’t exist, because it does. It’s part of a phenomenal world. The thing is that the thing that you think is controlling and looking at the physical body and sensing the physical body, that that entity that you call you doesn’t exist. It is a very subtle pint, so you have to go from the black and white to this gray subtlety. Reality is just an illusion. Is that what you are saying? And the answer to this is no. we are not saying that reality is an illusion. Reality is in fact real. It exists. What you are seeing exists. All the physical objects that are in your awareness do exist. We are saying that there is not a you who is looking at those objects and perceiving those objects. Philosophy or Religion How is this different then religion or philosophy? Isn’t it the same? The answer is that it is very, very different. What religion and philosophy are is a system of thinking about reality. They make certain factual claims about what reality is and how it works. They give you certain explanations and justifications. It is basically a model of reality. That’s what religion is. That’s what philosophy is. Some of them seem better than the others. Some of them seem truer than the others. Some of them seem somewhat reasonable and others very ludicrous and far out there and crazy. And it’s easy to confuse Enlightenment with some other crazy, wacky philosophy or religion. But, it is not. It is really the antithesis of religion and philosophy. If you think that the science is the antithesis of philosophy and religion then I’ve got news for you ̶ it is actually not. Science is actually much closer to philosophy and religion than Enlightenment is. Enlightenment is not a model. It’s not thinking about reality. It’s not theorizing or putting justifications out there. It’s not trying to make sense of reality. It is simply being reality. It is being one with reality itself. Without mental chatter, the common thread between religion and philosophy and science is that there is a lot of theory building and mental chatter all the time. You’ll notice it that whenever you’re thinking about philosophy or religion or science you have to be thinking, and thinking is an active process. So, what is the opposite of thinking? It is not thinking. Thinking is the way we progress. Thinking is the way we find truth. That is exactly the paradigm we are questioning here. What if thinking wasn’t the proper way of finding truth and thinking is, in fact, separating you from truth? Could that be possible? The mind wants to theorize. The mind wants to build theories. The mind wants to claim certain facts about reality. It is very difficult to stop the mind. When you do stop the mind something very powerful happens. Basically, you become enlightened. It is a very different thing from just another religion or philosophy. The trick is that you can very easily take Enlightenment and turn it into a religion or a philosophy. Even within science, the mind theorizes. It can’t just look at something objectively. The process of Enlightenment is the process of removing all these preconceived notions, all these theories that you have about reality, so that you can actually melt into reality. When you finally melt into it, then you become reality itself. That is something that neither religion, nor philosophy, nor science can offer you. It is a very powerful, life-altering experience. Isn’t this nihilism? Isn’t really what you are talking about nihilism? The answer is no. It is not nihilism at all. Nihilism is a philosophical system, and what nihilism says in the nutshell is somewhere along the lines of: life is pointless. There is no importance attached to one thing over another thing. Everything is basically neutral. Everything is pointless so you might as well just not do anything in life. There is nothing to believe about life. That’s what nihilism says. Nihilism is not Enlightenment because nihilism is a philosophy. It is a way of thinking about reality. Enlightenment is a way of not thinking about reality at all. There are certain superficial parallels between the two, but one of the key differences is that nihilism leads to this bleak, dark outlook on reality, as though reality is meaningless and purposeless. Therefore, you should be sad and depressed because there is no point to living. That is the dark nihilism. Enlightenment is in fact this very light, positive realization because what you realize is that, yes, there is no point and there is no meaning in life. But, this is actually a very positive and great thing because the fact that the life has no meaning itself has no meaning. The enlightened person is not doing any mental masturbation. It does not matter in his mind that the there is no meaning because you are just reality. Reality just exists for its own sake, and this is a very beautiful realization. you keep saying that philosophies and religions are offering stories about reality, but aren’t you in this video, and all the other Enlightenment videos, also giving us your story? So how come your story is true while all the others are false? It’s like you are taking some sort of authority, some sort of precedence over your story. This is actually a very tricky aspect of the Enlightenment work. It is like everything I am communicating to you is just another story, just another belief. But you have to see that what I am trying to communicate to you is not that you should accept my story. It is that you should go off yourself and try to find what I am trying to hint at with the story. We are using language and thought to communicate to you. Why? Because the only thing that you understand and know how to work with is thought. You’re stuck in the mental prison of the thought. Then, how can I do this for you? I can only do this through going inside and using the flawed mental models that you are under. I have to get inside your cage. Imagine it like this. Imagine that you are stuck in a matrix, as in the movie The Matrix, and now I have to come and rescue you. And I am outside of the matrix. How do I rescue you if I am outside and you are inside? I have to get inside the matrix and use the falseness of the matrix to tell you that the matrix is false so that you can break out. But the danger is that if I get into the matrix and tell you: Hey, everything here is false, you have to recognize: Yes, everything here is false, and also he is false, and everything that he says is false. He is not real because he is just a part of the matrix. If I get outside of the matrix then I can see what’s actually is real. It is analogous to what I am doing here. I use language and communication because the story is what you understand. The danger is that you will take what I am saying as another belief system and you are going to turn it into a philosophy or religion. You are going to stay stuck in the matrix. To get out you need to think: OK, what is he trying to point to? All these words are just words. There is no truth in the words. What is he actually pointing to? What is he trying to communicate between the lines? Let me see between the lines and then go out there and actually experience what he is trying to hint at. It takes intelligence and subtlety on your part to understand this communication. If you want to be black and white and simplistic you are going to say: Leo, everything you’re telling me is just another story. Every story is just a story. Every story is false. Therefore your story is false so I’m just going to stay in my current paradigm. What happens is that you are lost in your mental prison. It is like you are in prison and I come and give you the key to break out, and you look at the key and say: This key cannot possibly work. This is a bullshit key. And you throw it away, when in fact it was the real key. Because you didn’t have belief and wisdom enough to see that it was the real key you don’t try and use it, and because of that you don’t break out. Be very careful about this common trap. The Power of the Enlightenment if I get enlightened, will I become strong and powerful? I am doing personal development to become very strong and powerful in my life. Will Enlightenment help me become the strongest self? The answer to this question is interesting. The answer is yes and the answer is no. It is yes in the sense that you are going to be free of your mental prison. You are going to be free of thoughts that limit you and you are going to be free from the crippling emotions that sabotage you. This is the number one problem that people face in their life, no matter in what area, weather in relationships or at work or with health, these emotional and mental blocks that they have. why would you want to become strong and powerful? You have to realize that this you is just an illusion. It does not exist. This is the matrix we are talking about. There is no you to become strong and powerful. You are not going to gain magical superpowers. Why? Because there is no you to control anything. You have to realize that there is no possibility in reality for you to have any strength or power at all. So in a sense what we are going to do is strip you of all the power you are presuming to have. This is going to be very emotionally difficult for you, because you don’t want to relinquish your strength and your power. You want more of it, not less of it. Counter-intuitively, what happens is that if we successfully strip you of all your notions of power and strength, and you realize that those are not real, that becomes the greatest strength of all. What you will get is peace, tranquility and inner power. Not an outer power with which you will dominate other people but an inner power with which you get to relinquish your sense of self, so that in a sense you’ve conquered yourself. And that’s the greatest power of all, the power to conquer yourself. The Truth about the Free Will Are you saying that I don’t have free will? If so, it is obvious that I do have free will. In fact what we are saying is that you do not have free will. What exists is the illusion of free will so the big part of this enquiry is breaking down this illusion of free will that you have because one of the most common ways in which you prevent yourself from seeing the truth of no self is telling yourself constantly that you are in control of your life, that you have control over your hands, and your feet, and your mouth, and your thoughts, and everything else in your life. But the fact is that you don’t. How can this be the case that you don’t, but you think that you do? It is what ego does and is a master of. It is because ego claims control and responsibility for the things that do not belong to it. That’s the whole game that the ego plays. This is the whole deception. It is that your entire life you’ve been telling yourself this giant story that you are this entity that gets to control everything and look at everything and experience everything. It turns out that this is all false. The question is who is controlling your thoughts. Is it you, or is it something else? Am I controlling thoughts? Wait a minute, what am I? Aren’t I also a thought? Where did I come from if I am a thought? Did the thought I create the thought I, or is it something else? It turns out through the first-hand experience you can learn where thoughts come from. And it turns out that they do not come from you because you do not exist. The Meaning what is the point of living? You’re telling me that there is no point to living, no purpose. The fact is that there is no point to living. The desire to have a point or a purpose for living is an egoist desire. This is something that creates a lot of stress and turmoil in your private life. There is no even a who to have a perspective as to having a point of life. The fact is that reality exists, life is flowing. Life is one continuous river, and you are a part of that river. So, what is the point? Well, it just exists. Existence doesn’t need a point. What’s the point of empty space? There is no point. It is just there. It just exists. The ego needs a sense of purpose because it makes it feel significant. This is a problem because whenever you feel insignificant you have this egoic emotional reaction. This creates a lot of distress and turmoil in your life. The fact that life is meaningless and pointless does not turn that into an additional meaning of negativity like a nihilist does. With true enlightenment you discover that life is meaningless, and also that the fact that life is meaningless is also meaningless. It is really deep, profound meaninglessness. It is so profound that meaningless isn’t negative anymore. It becomes like a positive. then why don’t I just kill myself right now? This is a funny question. First of all you have to recognize that this question is a part of egoic reaction. This is your reaction to some truth that you’ve heard. Secondly, you should recognize that there is no you to kill. There is no you to do the killing. So, when you say that you are going to kill yourself, we say that there is no you to control the process of killing you. That is a kind of double fallacy. There is no you to kill yourself. There is no self to be killed. The self is an illusion. It does not exist. So, if you say that you want to kill yourself, you don’t really want to kill yourself. What you’re saying is that what I’m telling you is nonsense, because, if what I told you was true everyone will kill themselves. In fact, it turns out not to be the case. That is just an emotional overreaction on your part. is doing a business or having a family life meaningless too if there is no point to reality? The technical answer is yes, it is pointless. What do you think is the point of a business or a family in the long run? Under your models of reality what’s your point of a business or a family? You may come up with some point, but if you really track it into a very long term then you see that there really isn’t a point, because in the long run you are going to die. Your business is going to go bankrupt, even if you think it is going to fail five hundred years later it is going to fail. Your family is going to die eventually, too. Eventually the human species is going to die. Eventually the whole planet will be incinerated by the Sun. Eventually the whole solar system will be destroyed. Eventually the entire galaxy will burn out or will be sucked into a black hole. Eventually, perhaps, the whole universe will meet the heat death and it will go back to a singularity which was the initial seed for the Big Bang. The point only makes sense as a little trick that you play on yourself. You say: I want to build a nice business, I want to go and create a great family and I want to leave a great legacy. The fact is that no one in your family is going to remember you five hundred years from now, just like you don’t remember anyone from the past of your family who lived five hundred years ago. And, what is your business going to matter once you are dead? It is not going to matter at all. The fact is that life has no point, but it does not mean that you should become depressed and not do anything in life. This frees you up to do whatever you want. It’s like a playground. In reality, with enlightenment you can still go out and work on a business. You can still go out and have a family. And you do all these things because you enjoy them. Once you realize that life has no point and you are not depressed about it, it would mean that you can now do whatever you want and you are going to do the things that you really want to do and not do things that you don’t want to do. You are not going to feel obligated and you are only going to do the things that are pleasurable for you, that are most meaningful for you, even though you recognize that this meaning is a made up one. Emotions Are you saying that I should get enlightened and realize the truth about no-self and become some kind of an emotionless robot who has no feelings for anybody? This is actually the opposite of what is going to happen. If anything, the emotionless robot is who you are right now. You are not able to presently fully appreciate these emotions because you are like a puppet controlled by your emotions. Your emotions tug and pull at you. With Enlightenment you are going to have emotions. You can’t stop emotions. Emotions are a real phenomenon. They are not going away. Emotions are not an illusion. You are not going to become an emotionless zombie-robot. In fact, you are going to feel and experience emotions more richly, because you are going to be in the present moment. Now your monkey chatter is not going to be driving you crazy. It is not going to have you living in the future or the past or your imagination. You are going to experience your emotions for real. Do you want me, then, to become a monk who goes off to meditate in a cave or somewhere? Is this the kind of life you want me to have? The answer is no. Becoming a monk is a caricature of Enlightenment. Not every enlightened person is a monk. There is no reason why you should become a monk if you do not want to become a monk. Enlightenment is an inner realization. It is not a lifestyle. It is not any external behavior. if you want me to learn mathematics does that mean that you want me to become some nerdy college professor? I don’t want to become like my college calculus professor. You can learn mathematics and still lead whatever kind of lifestyle you want. Survival of the Ego Aren’t the ego and the self important for my survival? You’re telling me to get rid of my ego, but I need my ego to survive in this world. Aren’t you threatening me and my survival here? The answer is that the ego and the self do not exist. A part of the illusion here is that you’ve spent your whole life believing that you are responsible for creating these great results and earning wealth and achieving all these goals and getting into relationships and surviving, fighting for yourself. The bitter pill you have to swallow is that there wasn’t a you there the whole time doing all this. So, the ego is absolutely not a part of survival because the ego is not real. So, it is not important for your survival at all. This is a very counter-intuitive notion to accept. You don’t want to accept this. Why not? Because when we accept it we automatically undermine the entire ego structure and it does not like this. The way ego maintains its power is by saying that it is necessary. How does it say this? It says: “I am necessary for your survival.” What if this was just a story in your mind? What if it wasn’t true? It turns out to be the case that it is not true, but it is going to take some time for you to see it. You are not going to see it immediately. In fact, what you are going to realize later if you go far enough is that the ego and the self actually threaten survival. How can this be? Well, because you do a lot of stupid things in your life because of ego. Bar fights start because of ego. Wars start because of ego. Violent crimes and thefts and criminal activity are all ego based. Those do not exist when you are enlightened. You don’t have a reason to do those things. All those things are a mechanism to protect yourself. When you realize that there’s nothing to protect, you don’t have to do those things anymore. So, your survival will be improved. It is a very counter-intuitive and paradoxical notion. It turns out that if you want to get to higher levels of living and thriving in life you need to abandon your clinginess to the need of survival. If you observe the most admirable persons in history, who were they? Were they clinging to their survival or were they people who were selfless and did not care whether they would survive or not? It was the people who didn’t care. Counter-intuitively they thrived. Now, surely, some of them died. Gandhi was shot and Jesus was crucified. Martin Luther King was assassinated. There are a lot of bad examples, but there were also a lot of people with positive examples. Ego: Good or Bad The ego surely is not entirely bad. Surely there are good aspects to the ego, right? Again, this is an interesting question because ego does not exist. When you ask this question you assume that the self exists and you assume that if we remove the self, with the bad parts, we remove the good parts as well. It is like you are throwing the baby out together with the bathwater. But, there is no baby and there is no bathwater. That is what we are trying to say here. There are no good qualities because it is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. Motivation What will happen to my motivation levels if I become enlightened? Won’t I become this listless, useless slacker who just lies on the couch an does nothing all day? First of all, there are many such people in society who are unmotivated and they are very egotistical. Your motivation levels and Enlightenment itself are connected in a very subtle and complex way. The fact is that you might become enlightened and that you might lose certain motivations in your life, but generally it does not make you this lazy slob. Enlightenment only clears away your neurotic sense of obligation to things in your life. Self-help Doesn’t Enlightenment contradict self-actualization and self-help? It will definitely seem that way when you first start learning about this, You have to understand that personal development is like a staircase. With many steps and stages, so that you’re moving up as you are growing and developing. We are talking here about some of the most advanced stages that you can get to. To get to these higher stages you need to work your way through the intermediate and lower stages. It is not that Enlightenment makes everything else that I’ve been talking about pointless. For example, if I give you some relationship advice or if I give you some advice on how to earn more money you will say: Leo, isn’t it a sort of a fake advice? Well, yes, but what you are living is a fake life. False advice in a false world works in a sick kind of way. If you are at the lower stages of your personal development and you’re having problems in your relationship or with money or your career you actually need self-help. Now you’re telling me to throw it all away. No, we are telling you to transcend it. Ascend to the higher stages. Practice more meditation.

Here an excellent one: All Of Religion Explained In One Video Summary Surpassing The Dogma So, the core problem here, between this religion vs. science debate, is that human beings are extremely, extremely dogmatic. Dogmatic, that’s the key word here — dogmatic. What does dogmatic mean? Dogmatic doesn’t pertain to religions, or to science, or to any particular thing. Dogmatic means that you cling to a particular world-view or belief. When you do this, you don’t tell yourself that you’re clinging to a world-view or to a belief. What you tell yourself is that you have the facts and that this is just a fact and it’s true. It doesn’t feel like you’re clinging to anything. But, in fact, what you’re doing is you’re clinging. And this closes your mind down and doesn’t permit you to do a very exhaustive, open-minded search, right? So, the trick here is not only — are we dogmatic? — but we lie to ourselves about being dogmatic. We don’t honestly tell ourselves that we’re dogmatic. We just behave dogmatically and we do this unconsciously. And we will defend, often to the death, our dogmatism. Deny that it’s dogmatism. So, this is not a problem of religion. This is a problem of the human psyche. Because, when the human psyche takes on a core assumption or a belief, no matter what it is, whether it’s a religious one or something totally different, it doesn’t really matter — you cling to it, you make it a part of your self-identity. You make it a part of your self image. And when you do that, you identify with it and you feel like you need to defend it This is a very common mistake that I see atheists making. They think that, just because they are an atheist, they are not dogmatic. Well, what I find in practice is that most atheists are actually very, very, very dogmatic. And this upsets them to hear because they like to use it as a separation between themselves and religious people. But, actually, you’re on the same side on that point. The difference you have with religious people is that you have a different kind of dogmatism. Ideas Behind Religions: Why does religion exist? Not just one, but many, many religions? They seem to have a lot of common elements and threads between them. Even though superficially they might look very different, also, from a big-picture point of view, they all sound, and start to converge, and look very similar. one explanation, you might think, well, religion is just primitive stupidity. Primitive cultures, thousands of years ago, they really didn’t understand life, they didn’t understand themselves, they didn’t understand how the mind works, or science. Nor do I think that tradition is a good explanation for what religion is and why it originated. Nor do I think that this explanation of religion as a social, political, controlling mechanism is a satisfactory explanation. while I think that that’s definitely been done in the past, that political leaders and religious leaders have used religion as a controlling mechanism for social engineering, and to profit themselves and other such things — to gain power, to maintain power over people — that certainly happened. But it doesn’t make sense that that was the origin of religion. there is an absolute truth and this absolute truth is accessible to human beings. And here’s the really nasty bit that you’re not going to like: it’s not accessible to the rational mind. It is not accessible to the rational mind. The scientific, rational mind, hates this. It hates this idea. This idea is not something it wants to accept. So, what I submit to you is that, if your mind is rejecting this idea and it’s not even open to this possibility, than what you’re being is dogmatic The Sense Of Self You’ve got a sense of self, of personal self. You believe that you are a body, and you believe that [you're] this mind and the brain inside the body. And you’ve got this personal story: you can remember the time that you were born and the way that you grew up, and where you are now. And you believe that you’re going to die, and yada, yada, yada, right? And that all makes pretty good sense. Except there’s one problem. And that problem is that, if you look really carefully and really deeply, what you’re going to realize is that this sense of self that you have is an illusion. And that there is no such thing as a sense of self. Thing that you call you, the thing that you think you are most certainly, when we say your name — the thing that points to — well, that thing is actually a big confusion and a big mistake in your mind. So, what’s possible then is that it’s possible to, basically, jail-break your brain. the self that you believe that you are, everything you believe that you perceive, is actually not being perceived by a “you” the true self is nothing. And this nothing is a very special thing. This is not something to be dismissed lightly. Nothing, here, I mean literally. You are literally nothingness. This cannot be believed or logically understood. It has to be directly experienced. You are the nothingness, so you are it. Once you realize it, you can actually be it. And that is, answering existentially: what is existence? Have you ever wondered about that? What the hell is existence? How can existence even exist? Ever wondered about that? What turns out is that you can have an enlightenment experience that will reveal to you the absolute nature of existence. And what that absolute nature is — is nothingness. Existence and nothingness are the same. They arise out of each other. Or, more accurately, existence arises out of nothingness. And that nothingness doesn’t go away, it’s always there. This is referred to as the Void in certain Buddhist traditions or, maybe, Zen traditions. They call it the Void. And the absolute truth is, basically, that existence arises out of nothing. This nothingness, this ultimate void, is God. The word “god” refers to this nothingness. Because it’s the source of everything, right? It’s not a personal god. It’s not a god with a beard. It’s not a god as “him” or “her”, but it’s god in the sense that it’s the source of all reality. And this nothingness is a unity, it’s a One. And it has no space, it has no location, it has no distance, it has no size, because nothingness doesn’t have any of those qualities. What we’re talking about here is not an idea of nothingness, which is something. But we’re talking about, literally, nothingness. And what you discover is that you are nothing, and God is nothing, and so, because of this — you are God. That right there is the core of every major religion. All major religions are grounded in the truth of no-self. Christianity is founded on this, as is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, even Sufism and yogic practices in India and in the East. All of these different religions are, really, different ways, very roundabout ways often, to explain what I just explained to you. Now, there’s an additional, really big wrinkle in this whole thing: what I explained to you is just like a vague, vague, vague, story. Still a story, not reality, about what reality is. Different Approaches when you think about nothingness, it’s already something. What is the one thing that you cannot intellectualize about? It’s nothingness. You can’t intellectualize nothingness, because when you’re intellectualizing, that’s something. So, the problem here becomes that, if you want to get at the nothingness, you can’t do it through your conventional, practical, every-day logical thinking. You can’t do it through scientific thinking. You can’t do it through language. And, by the way, science is language. You can create a model of how reality works, and that’s what science loves to do, and that’s what we do with even non-scientific pursuits. We create models. Religion creates models, too. We create models in our everyday life. We create maps of reality and all this kind of stuff. It helps, creating these models. So, you can create models and concepts, and you can think about reality. That’s one way to understand reality. A second way, arguably even better and more direct, is to actually experience it with your own senses. First-person experience. Who can doubt what they actually see? any model that you want to create — otherwise, that would be a fairy tale — it’s actually a model that’s pinned down by experience, right? So, it’s limited, it’s constrained. There’s a verifiability built into it. So that’s really cool. And then what we do is we say, well, that’s pretty much all we’ve got, right? You’ve got experience and you got your conceptualizing of experience. That’s how we know stuff and that’s the end of the story, right? Well, what if it wasn’t? The Third Way Well, what if you could actually be the thing itself? Because, the problem is that, when you’re identified with yourself, and you believe that you are this right here, this body, this mind, and these thoughts, then you’re stuck. And you can only be this, you can’t be anything else. Now, though, if you jail-break your brain, if you really dis-identify from everything in your experience, including your body, and your thoughts, and everything else, this gives you the freedom to be everything and anything. I’m not saying this figuratively, I’m saying it quite literally. So, this sounds pretty crazy, and it sounds like, well, some sort of myth or something like that. But what I’m saying here’s that you can actually do this in your own experience. It’s not a myth, you don’t need to go read a Bible, or whatever, to do this. It can be done. Now, the trick, though, is that it’s difficult to do this. It’s not quite easy. And why is that? Well, because you’re extremely attached to your self, to your self-hood, to your self-image. And so, this process of jail-breaking your mind from the brain, this is a very serious physiological undertaking. This does not happen easily, because everything in your psyche resists. – so the only way to get and use this third alternative of being is to actually do the being yourself. See, the problem is that it’s so difficult to actually jail-break your own mind. When you talk about these things to other people, what they do is they construct stories, and they turn this stuff into belief systems, right? And then, those beliefs, they turn into myths. And a lot of times, the way that people talk about these things is true analogy, because that’s the only way you can talk about it. You can’t talk about it directly. To talk about it directly would be to be the damn thing yourself. For example, if you want to write about mathematics, you can write some formulas in a book, and you can explain everything, and then you can print a million copies of this book, and send it around the world, and create classrooms full of calculus books, or whatever, that will teach calculus . And problem solved. Now, how do you communicate the truth of no-self? Well, you can write it in a book. But the problem is that the person reading that book, just by reading that, that doesn’t jail-break his mind. So, he still believes he’s the self. And he’s so dogmatic he doesn’t understand he’s dogmatic. So, what he does is: he conflates reality with a belief system. And he thinks that just believing it is enough. And so, the only way that you can mass-spread the truth of no-self is by turning it into a belief system — which makes it necessarily false. You can turn it into a myth. If you want to stay true to the truth of no-self, the only way to do that is through silence. You can’t say anything. So, this presents a really big problem because it turns out, then, that you can’t mass-distribute the truth of no-self. This is one of the few truths that cannot be mass-distributed, unlike most of science and all the other stuff we know. Historical Perspective therefore, people resorted to mythology, and story-telling, to talk about this truth of no-self. Now, how did this work in practice? Well, you have some extremely, really fucking hard-core guys, maybe one in a million, or out of ten million, that will breakthrough and see the truth of no-self by jail-breaking their mind. These were the mystics, these were the yogis. These were the Jesus Christs and the Buddhas. These were the sages, these were the swamis. There are so many different names for these kinds of people, right? These were the Zen masters, before there even were the Zen masters. some of them remain silent and say nothing. But some of them want to share with others, because it’s like: “Oh, my god, you’re living in a fucking dream. You’re living in a fucking dream, you’re mistaken about how your whole life works and you don’t even know it. I’ve broken out of the matrix. I want to help some other people break out of the matrix.” And so, what I do, is I try to explain it to you in the way that I can. But again, I can’t explain it directly. I need you to experience it. But the problem is that it’s pretty difficult for you to jail-break your own mind. And if we tell it in Europe, it has to be told in a European way, and if we tell it in the Middle East, it has to be told in a Middle-eastern way, and if we tell it in India, it will be told in an Indian way, and in Africa it will be told in an African way, and so on. The Sugar Coating So, if you want to explain this stuff to them, you have to really tailor it in such a way that their mind, their limited mind will find it palatable. Palatable, right? It’s like giving someone a pill that tastes bitter, but to make them swallow, you have to coat it in sugar. Sugar-coating the pill. So, in a sense, that’s what religion tries to do. And also, in a sense, no matter what explanation you give of no self, it doesn’t really matter because every explanation is wrong. It’s not like there’s one right explanation. The only right explanation is to actually have the person become the truth themselves and get it for themselves. Everything else is already wrong. the truth of no-self is very radical and it’s very mainstream. You can’t mainstream it by definition. It’s completely individual. It makes the spread of religion impossible, it really does. That nothingness can’t be somethingness. That you can’t perceive nothingness because the perception of nothingness would be something and not nothing. When you start to learn about the problems with conceptualization and the fact that, to think about something, you have to use a language system to think about it, and that language systems inherent biases and problems and challenges. When you start to look at this stuff, you start to se from a very, very clear perspective: “Oooh, of course! Of course there are these religions! Of course they work the way they work! Of course people buy into them!” Of course. And the reason you say “of course” is because you recognize in yourself that dogmatism, that dogmatism that a fanatical, religious person has. That dogmatism is in you, it’s in you, you just deny it. Maybe you hide it a little bit better than that person. Maybe you don’t take it to some really far-fetched extreme. Maybe you don’t act on it as much, but it’s still there in you. And the way you can recognize it is just by actually feeling it, right? You can feel that dogmatism when someone starts disturbing your world-view or your beliefs, maybe with a video like this one. What starts to happen is that you actually experience emotions, strong emotions. Distaste, fear, anger, bitterness, feelings of discomfort, demonizing of the other person, burning the person at the stake, or whatever. Creating a straw man argument out of what they are saying. Closing your ears. Clicking the “off” button. Telling your friends how stupid the idea was that you heard. Or writing a nasty comment. Or whatever means you use to protect your world-view. You notice inside, though, that this is a like a dirty feeling. Sometimes, it’s hard to pinpoint it, but if you’re very self-honest, you can say: “yup, there it is, there’s that dirty feeling inside me.” It’s inside you. Atheism if you take that atheist and you actually give him an enlightenment experience for real, and you get him to feel directly, to be the nothingness, he is going to have a real difference of opinion. A real difference of attitude. A real difference of perspective. Things are really going to change for him. And it’s not going to be a typical kind of atheism that you see people talking about. there’s a really big problem at he core of science. Yes, science is very practical, but there’s a real big, core problem. And that’s the matter-qualia problem. And this is a problem that science has never addressed, it’s a problem that, really, science skirts all the time. And my current understanding is that science will never ever — ever be able to rectify this problem. science has nothing about our perceptions. So, the things that you are considering most real in your life: your feelings, your emotions, the colors that you see, the smells that you smell, the tastes and the sounds, and the qualitative aspects of all that — those things are not atoms, or energy, or strings, or quarks, or molecules, or anything else like that. If we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the color orange in there. If we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the feeling of love or happiness in there. And if we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the sound of a guitar in there. And yet, these entities, these experiential entities are very, very real to us. The thing that science does with this problem is that is really skirts it under the rug, doesn’t like to look at it. Sometimes, it will deny the existence of qualia altogether. Or sometimes, it will come up with some ham-fisted way of taking matter and qualia, and somehow combining them together and explaining something away. But in the end, it doesn’t really resolve this issue. The Key Concepts Hell is where you presently live, hell refers to your current existence of being stuck and identified with your body. Heaven is the dis-identification of your self and your body, and becoming absolute nothingness. what faith is, is your ability to open your mind up to the third possibility. So, we have concepts, and we have experience, the third possibility is being. you can have the faith to take that leap of faith and try to go for the direct experience. And actually get the direct experience. Actually be the thing and then see what I’m talking about for real, for you. Evil is selfishness, evil is that identification with your body and all the actions that you do to live and perpetuate you ego. The devil refers to you. The way that you’re presently living your egoic life. So, you are the devil, right? Because you’re tricking yourself. The devil is deception. Good is everything you do from a selfless state. Good is when you become God, when you see that you’re nothingness. And therefore, you also see that you’re everything. And you start behaving in a good way. Why? Because, when you see that everything is you, you want to treat it well. afterlife means understanding the absolute truth of nothingness, because when you understand the absolute truth of nothingness, then you are in the afterlife already. Why? Because you can’t be destroyed, you’re untouchable. Nothingness lasts forever. Salvation means being saved from your wicked state. So, metaphorically speaking, if we say that you’re the devil right now. The people who are the most religious are the furthest away from God. That’s the whole irony of this thing. But, of course, that means that, if you just become atheistic, like the typical dogmatic atheist. That also puts you far away from God. So, if you really want to understand this stuff, and you want to be one with God, and you are God, then what you can do — because you’re nothingness — is that you can attempt to attain an enlightenment experience or two. And then, in that process, you will become religious, but in a non-religious way. In a very non-dogmatic way. You are not going to hold a single belief. You’re not going to need to have any theory. You’re not going to need to partake in any ritual. You’re not going to need to pray, or to meditate or to do anything at all. Because your absolute nature is nothingness. And that absolute nature is the same forever. And always. And it has no place, it has no space, it has no time boundaries, it has no problems whatsoever. And it’s the most beautiful truth that you can discover in this life.