Vladimir

San Diego, California

@Jordan wang I was just thinking how lucky I was to get out of the "competitive sport" paradigm myself, only around 6 months ago. I now see it as a ego bolstering activity and a huge waste of time. Yes there is of course the fun aspect of mastering the sport and enjoying the process, in my case it was table tennis, but the competitive ego far outweighed the fun and exercise part. There is a rated table tennis tournament here in San Diego every Thursday. Looking back on it now, I have never seen so much ego getting together in the same place, myself being part of it. There is so much egoic pressure to win and show off your skills that it often makes people perform at a much lower level than they are really capable of it. Even just for fun, wasn't ever just for fun, I think it's ego's way of denying it's competing, so that's even worse. I remember feeling really negative, if I only just lost one game in the tournament, because I was always supposed to beat everyone, because my skills were much better than what I played every Thursday night. It would also start a downward spiral, leading to as far as "my life sucks, and I'm a loser, because I can't get good at anything". Competitive sport can really suck you into a very rigid paradigm, because you so strongly identify and measure your level of success based on your performance and feedback from other competitors, which can easily percolate into personal life, you will never feel satisfied because there will always be another level to reach and someone who is better than you. What I presented here is from my own experience of participating in a competitive sport and what kind of ego traps I experienced. I believe it can be a fun, enjoyable activity, though I think it's very difficult to approach it in this way if you're competing. PS: It was very difficult to drop this activity for me because I was so identified with, my whole life revolved around it and it became part of me, it was like breaking up from a relationship, but turned out to be one of the best decisions I made in my life.

Felt a lot of opening in the chest and warm feeling in the heart during acupuncture at Natalie's yesterday, the needles were placed on my head, center of chest and both hands, in the center of the palms area, creating a triangle which has powerful meaning in the sacred geometry and is symbol that represents masculine, fire, light and the holy Trinity. She guided me to first, expanding the heart beyond the body and cultivating love for myself and then going back to the past, sending this love to all the previous ages, all the way down to when I was still inside of my mother's womb, together with my brother. As I was going back to the past, looking where I was and how far I've come, I realized that I was still holding resentment, judgement and regrets for a lot of my past behavior, a lot of it was also guilt and shame. I could feel these psychological wounds being healed as I sent all these past versions of myself love, it especially got emotional when I got to around age 5, when I was that innocent, cute little boy, playing with toys and being so curious about life. Tears started rolling down as I sent love for the toddler self, here I was, before I learned anything about life, just completely being, how could I ever criticize myself and being so harsh towards oneself? When did I learn to be so cruel to that divine being of love? I don't think I've ever looked back on my life in this way, whenever I've thought about my past, it would occur randomly, automatically, unconsciously, and I would begin to judge and criticize self for all the mistakes I've done in the past which would of course re-enforce those memories and make my self criticism stronger. Sending unconditional love, going back all the ages has really started to change the way I look at myself, I don't see mistakes anymore, but rather countless experiences and lessons, and I'm starting to see other people as guides and teachers along the path. Had I not gone through a lot of the challenges and obstacles along the way, I may not have arrived to a place where I am now, which is the happiest I've ever been in my entire life. I'm so grateful for my life today and can only be thankful for the fate leading me to where I am today, with all of the sign posts and guides along the way. I now see social anxiety, depression and any other illness as body's signals of telling me that I'm off the right path, rather than seeing it as misfortune and illness. It's my body's way of telling me that I still need more healing and that I should make it a priority to seek out ways of healing any psychological wounds still remaining. This is what has lead me to Natalie, and Ashley, the Ayahuasca shaman with whom I'll be going to Peru for 10 days ceremony by the end of October. She told me, I will come back a different person, the experience changes you, for the good. Is it a coincidence that I got that gift for myself right on my birthday? I see it as a gift from the Divine, I feel like a lot of things that I have been doing in regards to healing myself was like a preparation for Peru's "big one".

I think we should start bringing together all systems thinkers (stage yellow) and start brainstorming how we can help out Leo on his noble goal to awaken humanity to the next level of consciousness. We are in the middle of the Great World War of Information where the current system of survival and dominance paradigm is keeping itself alive by creating all sorts of mechanisms for it's own survival and benefit, but creating much suffering for humans, planet and other beings in the process, it's up to us as conscious individuals to redesign this malignant system. The days of individual survival are over, it's time to survive as a whole human race, this is where the stage turquoise of human psyche development is pointing to and we need to design new systems and sub systems to re-awaken as many individuals as possible, help them switch from the paradigm of survival, so they see the light of non-egoic consciousness and start working with us. Leo is doing the most important work, he has been my teacher and guide and the reason why I'm on this journey. How can we get more like-minded people together and help with this most noble goal of helping humanity awaken. We need to combine our creativity, talents, all sorts of art forms, technical, marketing, story telling and other unique skills to create the most powerful messages possible. For this to happen we need to think outside the rational boundaries of current system, we need to design a way to work together so that our efforts work in synergy and our messages reach as many people as possible. I will be starting my own channel called ONE, (we are one) where I'll be talking about these ideas in a similar style as Leo. We need an army of Leo's! YouTube is a great platform for dispersing this information, but it won't be easy working on our own, we need each other's help. I envision this "CIA style" command center where systems thinkers will come together some day to work towards this noble goal of helping the world awaken. We will have the latest gadgets and tech, videographers, artists, actors, marketers, charismatic leaders, technicians, programmers, engineers, architects etc...And we will all work on designing new systems for delivering the most powerful messages, infiltrating entertainment industry and other sources of global information. Selecting the right 'targets' of influence like celebrities and actors to somehow 'show them the light' and switch them over to our cause (not in a forceful way of course, but by designing a system and nudging them towards discovering higher levels of consciousness and seeing the light). It will be like the school of magic where we will be experimenting with psychedelics, psychic abilities, alternative healing, gathering insights and intelligence, growing our consciousness and spreading this new enlightened information everywhere. We will also be working on 'tangible' system structures like - 'zeitgeist (Peter Joseph) style projects like resource based economy', regenerative farming, the Tesla of eco-villages, music festival style gatherings for sharing love and knowledge. Is there anybody out there who wants to join this cause? I think this forum is a great way for starting to connect with other systems thinkers.

@Sean Johnson More vagueness, "I must", "I have to", "I have to". If there is no way to communicate it to me, then why are you even attempting to communicate this to me? When you throw words around like "must" and "have to", you don't inspire much credibility and reeking of dogma. Anyway, we're off topic now.

@Sean Johnson That's very vague, could you elaborate? What type of communication are you referring to and what is "true" communication? You have learned to write your words from books and other people, is what you're communicating to me false? What do you mean surrender? Do I just surrender myself to my laziness and gain all the wisdom in the world?

@RichardY Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza

@Kimasxi If people knew the value and true meaning of the word "solitude", everyone would be cultivating it instead of chasing friendships, relationships, love and support from other people. Coming from a place of egoic neediness, all these pursuits become addictions and cause great suffering. Imagine getting to a place where you're truly feeling content on your own, not needing anybody to make you feel better or support you, I know this may sound impossible now and you may have thoughts like: "so should I just accept my misery and loneliness?", that's where the difference between loneliness and solitude comes in which are the opposites of each other. And when you have truly cultivated solitude, making authentic friendships will come naturally, and this time they will be true friendships, not surface level fake friends feeding their neediness off each other.

@Sean Johnson Yes! Seeing religions as metaphors from Joseph Campbell's perspective, I love the "Second Coming": "The armies of heaven, dressed in fine linen, white and pure, follow Him on white horses. And from His mouth proceeds a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations." The sharp sword being the most powerful weapon that we have as humans - language. Armies of heaven and Him are the enlightened people - us who will communicate messages to enlighten others. Of course language does have it's limits, it's very inefficient when it comes to learning and especially memorizing things. We think in pictures which is why I'm currently studying symbols, metaphors and concepts from a books called Unlimited Memory and Systems Thinking. I think re-building the system for our own learning, understanding and thinking is the most important work one can do on this journey when starting out. We haven't really been taught to learn how to learn and think efficiently, and with so much to learn and understand about reality and ourselves, building that foundation for optimized learning is going to help us tremendously. I'll describe what I've been working on in more detail in another post, this is fascinating stuff.

But @Leo Gura What if I get together with someone to talk about self development and we both come out of the meeting with insights that we haven't been able to come to on our own? This is a very small example of how we can work together, are you saying we shouldn't be interacting with other like-minded people to get a better understanding of reality and how to navigate it, why should we be pursuing consciousness on our own? I do understand, the real inner-work is done on our own by meditating and gaining the understanding of reality, nobody will do this for us, but connecting with others to gain insights, seeing people as teachers and experiences as lessons would greatly amplify our growth and test if we are really embodying all the good things that we're trying to cultivate within ourselves. I guess my original post was misleading. I think a misunderstanding comes from not making a distinction between "let's get together and spread the messages of consciousness" vs "let's share information with each other and elevate our own consciousness" so that we can then make better decisions on whichever way can help the world. Did I get that right? @Truth Thanks brother, I think I understand now. I agree that we need to work on ourselves first, so that we can then make better decisions on how we can help the world and that jumping into this by trying to organize people from a place of ego is going to lead to another disaster.

Went to ELG meeting at Linda's house yesterday, it was around here in La Mesa where I live and I was invited there by another woman I met at Enlightened Living meetup named Sarah. I had judgmental thoughts and made a lot of assumptions of what the meeting was going to look like. I knew, most likely, that all people there would be much older than I am, and I was watching my mind as it created thoughts like: "why are you going there to hang out with these old people? you're going there to do chanting and energy work? those are just some old desperate, lonely people who have nothing better to do but imagine things and believe in anything just to fill their time with something....why am I going there to waste time on this non-sense with these people? people my age should be hanging out with other beautiful people my age, talking about some real self development things, not some fairy tale energies." I had to push through all these barriers of criticism while making my way over there and I could see how I would easily change my mind about going there in the past, had I not been as mindful and aware as I am now. As I contemplate this further, I realize a lot of these thoughts come from my family, social and cultural conditioning and personal arrogance, ignorance and judgement of other people. When I got there, my assumptions about all people being much older than I am, turned out to be correct. It took me a while to warm up to the meeting, after some chants and meditations, I realized how much of an asshole I was prejudging all those people based on age and the activity. I can see how my own aging will cause a lot of suffering in the future if I continue with this type of thinking of putting myself on the pedestal, above others, just because I'm younger. I tried putting myself in those people's shoes and imagining myself being 60 years old, and how I would have liked to be treated by younger people. Being mindful and aware of these negative thoughts allowed me to transcend them and move into a place of cultivating unconditional love for all the people in the group. The actual theme of the meeting turned out to be right in line with what I'm doing with my own personal development, which was about Chakra clearing, chanting to re-connect with the divine self, concluding with sharing personal stories about our lives and supporting each other. All the women there turned out to be very kind, loving and supportive and I further felt embarrassed for my pre-judgements of these lovely women who gave me great insights and support when I shared that I'm going through a difficult time with my family. This is showing how transformative and powerful meditation and awareness really is, the experience of reality has completely shifted from "they are just a bunch of old people who don't have anything better to do, why should I waste time with them?" - which would lead to frustration, anger and a lot of discomfort sitting through the meeting to - "these are lovely human beings, sharing their life stories, on noble spiritual quest to reconnect with their true selfs, we are all here to practice self development and support each other." This allowed me to experience the group and getting into states of consciousness during meditations that we did together like I've never been able to before. By the end, I felt love and compassion for all the women, I felt connection with all of them, as if they had all become my friends. Huge lessons and insights from this experience, I think I'm starting to see real inner growth.

I'm going to Peru for 10 days for a deep Ayahuasca ceremony on October 22 - November 1st. Met Ashley yesterday and it turned out to be the best birthday gift I could've gotten. She beautifully summarized exactly what I was looking for in my life - a loving, supportive community of intelligent friends, a sense of worthiness, a connection with other human beings, a connection with life and the planet and most importantly deep healing of all the psychosomatic wounds I have been accumulating in my life, living with severe social anxiety and depression. She told me I'm carrying tons of shit, so heavy, that she wasn't able to lift it with her usual technique of uplifting people while the drumming and chanting shamanic ritual. There is a point during these rituals - EFT Energy meetup chanting, meditation mountain at LIB, Erica Gagnon talking at the sacred fire at LIB, Natalie's acupuncture, and yesterday's Ashley's shamanic rituals with drums, smoke and chanting -- which all get me to a point where my heart starts opening up and I feel this warm loving energy permeating my chest, throat, head and other parts of the body. It's as if I'm being reminded of how loving and beautiful life really is, a sense of a mother's love for her child, true happiness and joy, that all of that is within me, covered by the layers of social conditioning and self criticism which created all these blocks in the energy body. I woke up this morning, barely feeling the usual heaviness and pain in the chest, so the shamanic ritual yesterday really changed something in me. I will be visiting Ashley more starting mid August so we can start preparing my body for the Peru ceremony. She told me she will be identifying which ally plants I will be working with and what I should eliminate or include in my diet. The decision of me going to Peru happened yesterday, which was my birthday, I was actually contemplating my own death most of the day (fun thing to do on your birthday), and was thinking what I would do differently, had I died on that day. Well, the only thing I would do differently is to visit my family and tell them I love them, I'm not seeing them at this time, because I need to go through this healing journey alone and I'm just not ready to deal with their negativity at this time. But for the most part, I thought I wouldn't do anything differently and would continue on this journey of healing, self discovery and life purpose. I ended up at Ashley's place around 6:30pm which was supposed to be a meetup group, though nobody else showed up, so she gave me a preview of her work which turned out to be a lot more powerful than I expected. She was very knowledgeable in her practice, she has been doing healing rituals and working with Ayahuasca for five years through drumming, chanting, smoke and communicating with the spirits. There was a lot of hesitation and lack of trust on my part in the beginning, it took me a while to warm up to her and begin trusting her. I don't trust people easily, especially when it comes to these types of experiences and rituals. However, her loving energy, knowledge, kindness, understanding, warmth and the skills she demonstrated during the ritual itself, told me she is legit and that I should follow her advice on continuing the healing process and going to Peru for a full ceremony where people really know what they're doing.

Wrong, this is the opposite of control. I've realized this thread and responses are an obvious example of "spiral dynamics", where different stages of development aren't able to grasp the stages above them.

Visited a placed called "Cloud Temple" yesterday and met with a spiritual teacher named Rob and his much younger wife named Lisa. The place took place in a multi million dollar mansion on top of the mountain with gorgeous views and castle-like interior boasting enormous windows to behold the mountains and nature sight-seeing everywhere from the inside. Rob turned out to be an entrepreneur, a very rich guy. I'm a full blown empath and have the ability to immediately tell if the person I'm meeting has embodied what they're preaching, as the discussion proceeded, my intuition and first impression about what Rob is like, turned out to be correct. The guy is obese, unhealthy, boring to listen to, goes off on a tangent, dogmatic, arrogant, and feels privileged because of his "social status". I don't see any reason why his wife, who is in her 30's would be with him for any reason other than his wealth. He seemed knowledgeable, claimed to have achieved enlightenment multiple times, claimed he is able to "help others wake up" by verbally communicating something to them. When I asked the question if a person who doesn't meditate could become enlightened with his guidance he evaded the question for about 10 minutes, going off on a tangent and trying to explain some other ideas that weren't relevant to my question. Finally, after I persisted for a while, gave in and said that "it could be possible". At this point I was further confused because my idea of enlightenment was "thousands of hours of meditation" according to Leo, and here was a spiritual, enlightened teacher, claiming he could "wake anybody up" even if the person hasn't meditate in their entire life! At this point I started being more skeptical about him and further conversation and his claims deepened my skepticism. He proceed talking about his stories and just ranting on and on about where he's been, his experiences, traveling, which was all very boring to listen to and I felt like it wasn't a productive use of time. He also claimed to have psychic powers and told a story of how he predicted in precise detail of what exactly was going to happen to a woman that was going to travel to Thailand. To my question of "how were you able to predict what was going to happen to her in such intricate detail?" he quickly replied: "I can't explain it." His mansion was also a further indicator of how he is willing to splurge his wealth on luxury, instead of investing in projects that can greatly benefit humanity. Am I being too judgmental and critical about Rob? As the discussion approached a 3 hour mark, it was getting late and I was having an acute stomach ache from holding back my farts throughout this whole discussion. I remembered what Leo said in one of the videos: "If you're sitting on a bench and your ass hurts, and the person is late, this is an opportunity for growth". So I pushed myself to sit through it and as I was having my judgmental thoughts throughout this whole ordeal, I was aware of these thoughts and tried my best to develop compassion and loving kindness towards Rob and his wife. I think this shows I'm really growing, because I would be out of that house much faster, feeling angry like my time has been wasted and further criticize the host. However, I left the house feeling like I've grown from that discussion, seeing these people as teachers and the experience as a lesson. Meditation efforts and loving kindness are starting to pay their dividends!

I'm already doing many things in real life, including my own meetup group. All I'm trying to do here is expand the horizons and try to connect with more like-minded people because I thought this forum would be the most suitable place for it. I guess I was wrong to assume I would be able to start connecting with the kinds of people I'm looking for online without establishing any "cred" first. What I want is a master mind group for problem solving, not a bunch of egos trying to defend their positions and argue what's right and what's wrong. Here are some notes I took from Leo's video on spiral dynamics which explains what stage Yellow is, for people that have missed it:

You're missing what I'm trying to communicate to you brother. You're making assumptions, I'm not desiring any power, the only thing I'm desiring is fulfillment of my life purpose, which is directly inline with helping humanity, this is what Leo is doing and he is my role model. It's shocking to see a forum like this getting defensive about a proposal to work together, shows how divided we really all are, even at what should be higher levels of awareness. "If you don't use your skills to contribute to humanity, you're a useless human being." (paraphrasing) ~Leo

Still waiting for other systems thinkers to respond.

All I propose is that we work together, "один в поле не воин" - one person is not an army (Russian parable). I'm not even saying the CIA style vision is the way to do it, just an idea. A rather harsh response to a loving proposal to better humanity. I'm already doing most of the things you mentioned brother. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." ~Margaret Mead I understand it all starts with self actualizing myself, but that doesn't mean we should be alone on this journey. Working together will help ourselves first, and the world second. What really won't work is if we become self actualized and do nothing about it.

That's where systems thinking comes in. Enlightennati Not sure what your point is?

Smoked weed last night while meditating and put on music for opening up the chakras. I'm feeling different this morning, I think my mental faculties aren't working at 100%, though I feel more peaceful than usual. The trip itself while meditating was difficult to sit through, felt very intense sensations in certain areas of the body so I couldn't focus on any other areas but those. At one point, while feeling intensely warm, gross and vibrating sensation in the heart chakra, I started focusing on it, and thought "what if this is marijuana's way of trying to heal my heart?" So I focusd on the sensation more and more, until it started to feel like very warm feeling of love and light in my heart chakra and it kept expanding. Then the feeling connected through the heart to my dick and I felt intense sexual arousal from that, though the feeling didn't last very long. At one point I felt too tired and the body too exhausted to continue sitting through the meditation, so I just laid down on the floor and felt very relaxed and peaceful and continued in this half sleeping half meditating state for another 40 minutes or so. What makes it really difficult to sit through while high is the reduction of mental faculties, the mind seems to lose it's intellectual capacities and move over to the feeling of sensations. It also makes it difficult to concentrate on specific areas of the body, because some areas of the body intensify in feeling so much, is this marijuana's way of showing which areas of the body need to be focused on the most and healed? What's if it really activates nadis (energy points) of the subtle body and by focusing on those points I'll be able to make some new discoveries, instead of trying to control the situation, just go with the flow? Another thing that came up, was negative self talk, there were random crazy thoughts flashing, and they were pretty loud and annoying, like "people outside, by the jacuzzi can hear your music and think it's really weird", "people are going to smell marijuana and come knocking on your door, or they're going to call the police", and other paranoid thoughts like that. I just let them pass without being attached or assining any meaning to them and they seem to have dissipated after a while. I tried focusing on other areas of the body which felt intense, but it didn't seem to change like the heart chakra. Overall, I'm not sure if marijuana can be of any benefit if used in this way, I guess I could try again in about a month or so. The one thing that I really don't like is the reduction in mental capacities, because that makes it really difficult to be mindful of the present moment experience.

Thanks for the warning brother, I know I won't be panicking because I've done it before while meditating, though I half assed it in the past and ended up going to sleep.

I've had this angry feeling in my throat area for a very long time and I didn't even know where it was coming from, though I knew I held a lot of resentment for my parents. Well, during my recent meditations I started really contemplating this and I had a huge insight that I'm blaming and criticizing my parents a lot and I realized this anger might be the result of my constant subconscious judgement of my parents and it turned out to be true! So I think the best way of approaching this problem is to become mindful and think of all the past situations that triggered you, really see those memories and start feeling the anger rising in your body. Then just mindfully observe the sensations and be with them. Remember, you are your worst enemy and the most evil, ignorant person who creates suffering in their life and other people is YOU. You have nobody to be angry about by yourself. When you really embody this insight, you will finally have the freedom to choose what thoughts and emotions you're going to allow to manifest in yourself.

Bath with Epsom salt, meditation.

I'm going to try this tonight, the strain I'll be using is Passion Fruit because it's been sitting in the fridge for months and it's the only weed I have, this is from allbud.com: I'm really curious what it will do to my meditation because I'm already at a point where get into states where all I can feel is energy flowing through the body and lose all sense of physical body and environment, without using any substances. I'm a full blown empath so I'm very sensitive to energy in my body and I've been working with opening up chakras for the past couple of weeks during meditations. I'm also getting acupuncture weekly and doing yoga 3 times a week. I will set the intention for opening up chakras and healing because I still feel blockages in certain areas of the body, especially the chest and throat area and healing is what I need most right now in my life. I'll be listening to this music for opening up chakras, they have a pause between different chakras so I will know when to set my intention for opening up next one: I will let you guys know how it went tomorrow.