jjer94

Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself that you should do one thing over another, when you've probably have been doing that most of your life, and it hasn't worked. This quote explains the phenomenon well: "Anytime you’re practicing renunciation, you’re deluded. How about that! You’re deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce... The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands." -Tony de Mello Don't try to convince yourself that social media or any of the things you think are 'distractions' are bad just because some people say they are. Instead, understand why you feel so drawn towards these distractions. What do you get from them? Go on Facebook and ask yourself that question. Be honest with yourself. Let yourself indulge, and then figure out why you feel so inclined to indulge. When you understand the magic trick for what it is, it won't be so exciting for you anymore.

You can't want to be aware; you already are. Instead of striving to add stuff to your present experience, you may want to ask yourself what is the rubbish in the way that is preventing me from seeing that awareness is my natural state? The pathless path to enlightenment is not one of adding awareness, of 'trying' to be aware. It's one of subtracting out all the bull---- your mind says so that awareness becomes your natural state. And for that...sorry to say, but you're going to have to stop running away from your anxiety and instead face it. You will need to enter into the things you fear, the things that cause you emotional pain, in order to understand the stories you tell yourself that give you a reason to suffer. “It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” -Bruce Lee

This is very subtle, but humor me for a second. Could you consider that chasing enlightenment is just as much an ego game as anything else? Anything with a self-agenda is ego-based. Why do you want to know the Truth of your being in the first place (you can't know the Truth, by the way)? Because you want to be happy. You expect that some time in the future, you will be enlightened and boom, all problems solved, you will live happily ever after. As if salvation were in the future. Sounds pretty familiar to the ego's games, doesn't it? Yes, all external happiness is temporary, and yes, true 'eternal happiness' would only arise when one discovers who they are. But that very idea is creating a self-agenda for you. You said it yourself: you're chasing after enlightenment, as if it were some external thing you can acquire. What if happiness were right here, right now, and it was never a matter of chasing after anything externally, but a matter of looking inwards to see what ideas are preventing you from seeing that happiness is already here? What hidden beliefs and agendas (like this one) are causing your suffering? Examine your own personal beliefs enough, and you may just arrive at Truth. In the end, all games are pointless games, and the point of the game is playing it, not to win the prize at the end. Happiness is just a matter of being happy.

You need to re-examine your assumptions. You assume that there exists some ego that has control. What's actually there in your direct experience? From my point of view, it's like you're asking whether Santa Clause has 8 or 10 reindeer, or will he give me a lump of coal for christmas, or will his elves accompany him on the sleigh... Do you see? Santa Clause doesn't exist. Santa Clause and all the stories that come with him regarding reindeer, coal, and elves, are just stories. The same goes with ego. What's actually there are thought sensations that tell itself that there's an ego. It doesn't really matter that there are desires, or negative emotions, or boredom, that arises when you do your inquiry work. What does matter is that you're taking them so seriously, as if the stories they told you had any reality. Instead of trying to get rid of all of these apparently negative things, why don't you inquire about them? Why are they so negative? Why do I feel so moved to post on this forum about them? Am I expecting someone's words to solve my own problems so I don't have to do the work of examining these painful emotions myself? Stop running, my friend. Run towards. Let all of these emotions come up, look them in the eye, and learn to understand the illusory beliefs behind all of them. Then they won't bother you so much, you can let them be, and they will go away naturally on their own.

Hi! An enlightened being is not some transcendent superhuman. They still see the same exact things you do, and they still feel the same exact things you do. They may have transcended the ego, but that doesn't mean the body's survival mechanisms are completely destroyed. If they feel pleasure, they feel pleasure. If they feel pain, they feel pain, and they may wince and cry from it. That's life. Sometimes there are moments where we feel physical pleasure, and sometimes there are moments where we feel physical pain. The difference between you and them is that they suffer a lot less. Suffering can be defined as resistance to what is. If they feel pain, they may try to avoid whatever is causing the pain, but they don't say in their mind, "That shouldn't have happened." The average person that is punched in the face would come up with a million-and-one stories as to why that shouldn't have happened, thus making them angry and hurt, thus causing them suffering. An enlightened being enjoys music even more because they are (mostly) free from their own judgments about the music. An enlightened being still has preferences, but they don't see personal preference as an aspect of themselves and don't try to defend them. Enlightenment doesn't require anything other than seeing clearly. In order to see clearly, you don't switch world views: you destroy all world views. You can do that any way you want. Some meditate, some contemplate, others write. Do whatever feels right to you, and don't let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn't do. Enlightenment is a pathless path. You don't have to do anything. Cheers!

Ah, my bad. Yes, the only difference between you and me is that I see through illusion, or I see "Everything as it is" . "What is" can't be explained or even known, only pointed to. It's not like I don't have a sense of self, or I had an ego death or any of that. A sense of self is still there, but I see it more as a perfume rather than an actual thing. That perfume can stink sometimes The 'state' of enlightenment, if you can even call it that, is always there. It's incredibly subtle because you wouldn't even guess to look there. I have a kundalini experience? It's still there in the backdrop. I get shitfaced? It's still there. I get high on DMT? It's still there. But, paradoxically, as Gertrude Stein once said, "Once you get there, there's no there there." The Truth is not something you abide in. You can't know it; you're too busy being it! I don't abide in Truth, but I'm learning to abide in the "I Am", which is that sentient emptiness that permeates all sense perceptions. Sorry, it's so hard to explain, but I reckon that gave you a basic idea of the 'state' of enlightenment?

I'm not sure what you mean by "real being". If you're asking whether there's a difference between what I'm experiencing right now and what you're experiencing right now, I would say, of course not. I'm no transcendent superhuman. The only difference is that you may still see some illusions as real, and I don't. What is the reality of an illusion? There is none. How do you destroy Santa Clause? Imagine that somehow, we were both in a dream. This dream looks exactly the same as what we call waking reality, with all the same 'laws' of physics and such. Now imagine that you believe it's waking reality, and I know it's just a dream. We have a conversation, and I ask you what the table is made of. You say, space and atoms arranged as molecules of cellulose. I say, no, it's just consciousness, all of this is consciousness; you're in a dream. You would think I was crazy, even if what I was saying was pointing to the truth of the matter. You believe that the 'space and atoms' in the analogy are actually real, when they have no reality at all outside of your believing in their reality. What's left when you stop believing in anything? "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick

With all this talk of kundalini and sensations of emptiness, I just want to clear the air for a sec. Experiences are fleeting. The Truth is eternal. Upon having an awakening or discovering the Truth, you may experience joy or bliss or kundalini or whatever, but that's just a side effect. Enlightenment is not an experience. It's not a sense perception. It's not anything you perceive in the world of phenomena. A lot of people like to confuse sensations of emptiness with enlightenment, when what they have likely found is the "I Am" or "the witness" or "beingness" as Nisargadatta puts it. The I Am is a very alive, sentient emptiness that is the backdrop of all sense perceptions; it's not just limited to your body. It's incredibly liberating when you first find the I Am, because that's your first realization that you are not the ego. The I Am is where the sense of Oneness comes from, because you see that the emptiness of the I Am is not separate at all from sense perceptions. After discovering I Am, you will spontaneously begin to abide in it. However, the I Am is a gateway into Truth and not Truth itself. Why is it not Truth? Well, where does the I Am go during sleep? Where was it before you were born? Who is witnessing the I Am? Do enough contemplation, and you see that the I Am is just another part of the dream world of perceptions due to its ephemeral nature. Just wanted to clear that up for anyone who's confused about the term "enlightenment experience."

There are so many great ones out there, but then again, great is a matter of perspective. Some teachers like to point to the moon with their middle fingers; some like to raise both their hands and point; some like to stick their fingers up their butts and point. What you consider 'great' really just depends on your personality type. Here are some that I've found useful for certain personality types: If you're the philosophical/analytical type, check out Peter Ralston, Ken Wilber and Goran Backlund. If you're the skeptical/monomaniacal/dark/Tyler Durden type, check out Jed McKenna and Steven Norquist. If you're the flowery/spiritual/all-is-one type, check out Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, and Mooji. If you're into the deep esoteric stuff, check out Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi. If you're the practical/straight-talk type, check out Tony de Mello and Leo's videos on enlightenment. There's no one best teacher. They all pretty much point to the same thing. It just depends on your tastes. However, if you're wondering whether a spiritual teacher not on this list can help you, here's a checklist of red flags to watch out for: [ ]Do they ask you to believe what they're saying? [ ]Do they talk about themselves a lot? [ ]Do they say that they can give you enlightenment? [ ]Do they say that you will slowly become enlightened in their presence? [ ]Do they sell crystals/buddha statues/trinkets and say you need them for enlightenment? [ ]Do they claim to be superhuman? If they check off any of these points on the list, you may want to approach with caution. On a side note, I've found my best teacher to be life itself. Learn to treat everyone and everything as your guru. Your interpretations/feelings towards a particular guru can tell you a lot about your hang-ups on the journey. And of course, if you're an animal lover, dogs and cats are your personal Zen masters. Safe travels!

You may want to be careful with setting a time schedule for enlightenment, Leo. Because what starts to happen, especially with self-inquiry, is that you begin to build illusory expectations. After enough consistent daily inquiry, you begin to build the expectation that you're going somewhere with it, that eventually (in 1000+ hours...) there will be some explosive flash of an experience and clarity will come shining down on you and you will be enlightened, boom, happily ever after. I'm not saying that's what you're doing; I'm just pointing it out to you and others as a warning. Hope that the self-inquiry will get you somewhere in the future is just another illusory trap you need to work through, because fundamentally, it's literally impossible to go somewhere when you're already there. I disagree that you can't short-cut self-inquiry. You can, but it likely requires some monomania, a stark raving madness for the Truth. That's the state I was in this past summer after watching your How to Become Enlightened video. From there, it took a couple months of self-inquiry alongside digesting masses of reading material to see through the veil of self. When I saw through it, it didn't come as a flash of realization or a change in sense perceptions whatsoever. It was incredibly subtle and incredibly beautiful. Afterwards was plenty of laughing and crying. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it; non-dual awareness just began to stick naturally. And now, a few days ago, the search just plain ended after a final realization. I hadn't done any formally scheduled self-inquiry since that first realization in the summer. My point is not to brag about how enlightened I am (or how stupidly contradictory that statement is) or how little time it took me or how superior I am to everyone else. My point is that there are no rules to becoming enlightened, no expectations, no requirements. Enlightenment is a pathless path, literally the most personal journey you can ever take. Sure, self-inquiry is a natural part of the process, but that can be done in many different ways, and it sure as heck doesn't have to take 1000 hours. After your first realization, you'll probably reconsider that statistic, because you'll be wondering how you didn't see it this whole time because of how dang simple Truth is. Now, the psychological clean-up/deprogramming process? That may take a while. All the best, Leo.

Yes...but not immediately. Just a heads-up: when you have a full-blown awakening, don't expect that it will solve all of your problems immediately. The fan of self may be unplugged, but its blades will still be turning for a long while afterwards as it loses momentum.

Yes, well said. Surely a body goes through birth and death, but the Truth of you does not. It's not that you came from Truth, it's that you are Truth. You never came from anywhere. You were always here. Truth was never born, and hence can never die. An eternity before you were born, Truth was there. Don't take what I say too seriously. They're just words. Since the Truth of you can never die, what Leo is probably referring to is your ego. When you expose the ego and start to see through it, it feels as though part of you is dying. In a sense, it is, because you identify so strongly with ego. To willingly continue to see through ego while it feels as though you are slowly dying is my guess as to what 'conscious dying' means. Another possible interpretation is death-awareness regarding the body: to realize that your time here in this body is limited and to consciously make the most of it.

Great question, because awakening is a poorly defined word indeed. I would define an awakening as an event in which you see through an illusion. The illusion is akin to a dream we believe is real, and it is from that illusion that we awaken. We can have several fleeting awakenings that recede into the background of our experience until we become what is referred to as 'awake.' To be awake is to no longer identify with the grand illusion that is ego and instead abide in the backdrop surrounding the thoughts that create ego.

Story of my life! I originally wanted to be a researcher because I thought you could arrive at Truth through science...but I was sadly mistaken. That didn't stop me from taking my analytics and skepticism into spirituality. It was Peter Ralston's "Book of Not Knowing" that opened me up to enlightenment work because of how wordy and analytical his writing is. While intellect is not required at all to seek Truth, it can actually be quite useful at times. You can be more surgical with dissecting your own beliefs and spotting hidden assumptions. If you're the analytical type, this may help you with some of your ideas regarding an external world. I had an awakening after reading his book and examining my own experience. Of course, there's a downside to intellect too, as you stated. Sometimes we get into mental masturbation mode as a way to spin our wheels. Truth itself is incredibly paradoxical and not logical at all. Bottom line is, you can use intellect to help destroy your own illusions and beliefs which in turn leads you to Truth, but then you have to leave intellect at the doorstep. Once you acquire a grounded consciousness of Truth, your mind will stop spinning its wheels.

Yes. You are the only authority there could ever be. It's 'your' Consciousness. Who could possibly have the authority to tell you what you can and cannot experience?

Several, actually, leading up to a final non-experience a couple days ago, which I think will end the seeking for good. But it's not like the oneness ever leaves. It's always been there. It's just a matter of seeing through illusions. Just take a look-see.

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned The Truman Show.... "Mike Michaelson: Christof, let me ask you, why do you think that Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now? Christof: We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that." Or how about American Beauty? "That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in." But I think my favorite has to be Joe Vs. The Volcano: "My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."

"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?" -Waking Life

Who says there is a 'you' that can do whatever it wants, that is capable of anything? You may want to re-examine that assumption. If you're wondering though, the Truth of you has no limits; it's Infinity itself. But the body and phenomenal experience are very much limited to the confines of phenomenal reality (the realm of sense perceptions).

So you discovered the underlying consciousness, and it's amazing and mind-blowing and all that for a while. That's the honeymoon period. Then, what starts to happen is that you begin to get groggy and fall back asleep; your old egoic conditioning rises to the surface. You may feel inclined to resist all of this conditioning, to bury it again, to try to control the situation by attempting to detach, to try to 'stay awake'. But instead of asking, "How do I stay awake?" You may want to ask yourself, "What is it that makes me fall back asleep?" My advice: let all of the conditioning rise to the surface. Let the ego go on a crazy selfish rampage. Don't fight it. To fight it is to continue to operate in the egoic paradigm. Let it all come up, and instead of trying to control the ego, learn to understand it. Learn to see why it does the thing it does. Understand all of the agendas it puts itself through and all of the struggles it makes itself go through in order to fulfill those agendas. Once you see the struggling for what it is, you will find less utility in doing it, and letting go will start to happen spontaneously. Also, I hope you notice that the ego doesn't actually exist.

It's been about a year since I watched Leo's enlightenment video and took the plunge, and it was six months later that I first saw through the veil of self. Then, a string of awakenings led me to a final one a couple days ago. I've been deprogramming in between. You're probably looking for some sense of certainty, some projected estimate to give you hope for the future... but for this journey, you need to destroy your hope. Sure, you can get a sense of the task at hand from other's hearsay, but it's really about taking the plunge and not giving a damn how long it takes or how long it took others. As Walt Whitman wrote, "Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair."

Yes, very much so. Imagine that your whole life, you've had your foot on the accelerator of a car. Then, you realize that somehow having your foot there made you suffer immensely, and from seeing that, you put your foot off the accelerator. Even after you do that, the car will still have some momentum. That's kind of what post-awakening is like. You destroy your worldview in the blink of an eye, but your body still has boatloads of psychological conditioning from that worldview. There are still psychological hang-ups, but they're much easier to deal with now that you see that your worldview is illusory.

That's the trap with reading Eckhart Tolle right off the bat. He tells you to "Be Present", but you only know how to do that in your current egoic paradigm, which is totally bogus! I fell into that trap too, where I thought that I had to stop my thinking completely and meditate for hours on end. I even got the 'pain in the brain' that you described. The key assumption you have to examine here is whether you can even try to be present. To try is to attempt to exert control over a situation. If there's no ego, who can control anything? If you're gung-ho about enlightenment work, you need to realize that you have no control over anything. Don't believe that statement; you have to see it for yourself in your direct experience. Leo's video on free will has some good exercises for acquiring a direct experience of this. It's not a matter of trying to be present, or be aware. It's a matter of un-trying to un-be present, and for that, you simply need to see through your own illusions. Seeing through the illusion of control is your first step.

I think you may be referring to the Clare Graves Spiral Dynamics thing, which you can look up in Leo's video library. If not, then I think you may be referring to the natural progression we take towards enlightenment. Yes, there can be certain stages, certain milestones, you hit on the pathless path, but I wouldn't take them too seriously if I were you. If you're interested in learning more about that, check out the book No Boundary by Ken Wilber. He goes into depth about all of the arbitrary stages.

As Jed said in his books, once you use the sword of intellect to cut through everything that needs cutting, you don't feel the need to do SA anymore; you're just Done. Done, as in, all of your assumptions about what reality is are destroyed, and what's left is something you can discover in something like sitting contemplation. Yes, the process of seeing through your own worldview can be emotionally disturbing at times, but it's not like that worldview ever had any existence to begin with. And of course it's okay to still have that worldview when operating in everyday life. It's just that you see it as illusory. What I've found is that, yes, you can be absolutely Done with figuring out Truth, but you're hardly ever Done with seeing through the character you play. I've found that SA in the form of uncovering my own psychological hang-ups has been very useful alongside contemplation. That form of SA operates more like journal entries. Just examine any emotions that cause you suffering during the day, and try to get to the bottom-line assumption(s) that fuels it. You can do that before and after becoming conscious of your True nature. I've actually found it to be more useful after the fact.