Emerald

Well, the attraction would still likely be there. But you wouldn't be able to lie to yourself about not wanting to be in the situation. I was in a relationship with this guy, Jeff, for four years. I was with him from age 16 to age 20. I had this idea in my mind that I wanted to marry him, have kids with him, stay together for life, and that I loved him more than anything. But life with him was difficult. He was manipulative and had anger issues and smoked weed all the time. He was always getting arrested and I was constantly stressed out. But the degree to which I was capable of convincing myself that I was happier with him than I had ever been, was profound. I wasn't able to see how much he took advantage of my loyalty to him. I couldn't bare the thought of letting him go. Then I tried an entheogen, which catalyzed my first experience of ego transcendence. I was musing about how beautiful everything was, and he came up and held me and told me he loved me. I sensed a disingenuous air to his "I love you" that was suddenly super clear to me and I realized that my response of "I love you" was just as disingenuous. And I realized in that moment that I had been sacrificing all of my happiness for the relationship and that I was lying to myself and enslaving myself to the idea of 'forever.' I was just afraid of breaking up. I didn't want to be near him. There was a part of me that hated him. I never knew any of this before. It took an enlightenment experience, to see through my own bullshit. So, you might (or might not) still be attracted, but you won't be able to bullshit yourself into staying in a bad situation.

Unfortunately, surgery is the only thing that really works. You can't tone the breasts through exercise like you can do for other parts of the body as muscle isn't the thing that holds breast tissue up in the first place. However, while she's lactating, if she needs to wear something that might make it more obvious that her breasts are not as perky, she can pump earlier in the day so that the baby can drink the milk from the bottle. Then, she will become slightly engorged on the milk later on, which will make the breasts really full until the next time the baby nurses.

Well, I think it's good that you're asking yourself these questions. But my thought is that, because you're considering this, it's more likely that you're just passionate about the things that Leo talks about. When I really resonate with someone, I tend to dream of them and think of them often. I tend to develop what I call "platonic crushes" on them. So, I feel attracted to them in a non-romantic kind of way in the same intensity that I would have a romantic crush. When I feel this way about someone, I know that I'm listening to something helpful to myself in some way. It's like my emotions and mind are telling me "Yes! This is exactly what you need right now!" So, it's okay to have very strong positive emotions about a teacher. But on the flip-side, you must also recognize that teachers are just a mouthpiece and that you may go out of resonance with them eventually at different points in your journey. So, it's okay to feel a sense of love and admiration toward a teacher but it's very harmful to be attached. So, if you have a platonic crush on Leo, it's probably because you see reflected in him a part of yourself that wants to grow. Follow your intuition and emotions, and you won't go wrong. But do so in a detached way, and know that it's never been about Leo but only about yourself.

I just finished up with "The Science of Enlightenment" by Shinzen Young. It was really good, and I enjoy his writing style. His personality comes through well in the text.

I believe the problem becomes that enlightened teachers forget exactly what it was like to be unenlightened. So, they teach from the enlightened perspective and take for granted little details of difference between the enlightened and unenlightened paradigms. So, they may miss how the average person may interpret their meanings.

Given the nature of my experiences of ego-transcendence, I would say that it definitely made me more compassionate not less as I was aware of my emotions on a much deeper level. My joys and sorrows and lusts and angers were recognized as being so many shades more complex, and they carried a deep intuitive wisdom to them as the sensations swept freely through my body. The overwhelming amount of love that I had for everyone and everything was absolutely riveting. Though I could clearly recognize my murderously destructive drives and their consistent profound impact on my view of the world, there was also an out-pouring of compassion toward all life and a deep respect for the fragility of this human experience and the sentient experience in general. I would be careful not to sneeze at compassion, as somehow unrelated to enlightenment or as some sort of soft coddling that degrades the fabric of society through indoctrination. This view has likely come about through indoctrination into a society steeped in emotional resistance and ignorance. We tend to get ridiculed and ostracized for being emotional because we have a great many unwritten social rules around emotions, causing us to ignore that entire facet of our reality. Experience ego-transcendence first. You will likely see that compassion is key, and that emotions play as big a role as they've always played. But in transcending the ego, we no longer have need to ignore or repress them.

I can't speak to Byron Katie's perspective because I have not heard or read very much from her. But I have heard these types of criticisms of her work before. I think there is a fine line (on the intellectual level) between transcending a negative situation through a realization of oneness/ accepting 100% responsibility for your life and blaming yourself for things you did not deserve or cause and engaging in self-flagellation. For someone who speaks to large groups of people, who are likely not enlightened, this doesn't seem like it would be the appropriate advice to give. Many people will mistake the meaning, and will end up making unwise decisions from it. For the average person, they need to hear "You did not cause your abuse. Get out of the situation now. Don't blame yourself. There are options." To say, "you are the cause of your abuse" may be true from the perspective of oneness (as if there is only one, who else could cause or create anything?), but most people have not experienced this... so this just becomes intellectual fodder that fogs instead of clarifies. An enlightened person knows the Truth... but a true master knows what to teach to whom from exactly where that person is.

That's true. It certainly is a concept, and for a seeker of Truth it's very important to realize this and to be able to separate belief from first-hand moment to moment experience. I just think it is a bit dangerous and potentially inaccurate for anyone to conclude that there is factually no existence beyond a person's firsthand experience, and to make a sweeping statement like (paraphrased) 'there are no hungry children out there'. Actually, it's more than likely inaccurate due to the fact that this is a human understanding of the phenomenon of reality. My view is that if it makes sense to a person, then it should automatically be regarded with suspicion. I just think a lot of people won't understand Byron Katie's perspective, and become callous to the suffering of others.

This can be quite a harmful assumption to make about the nature of reality. You don't really know one way or another whether there is a hungry child if he is not there before you right now. It is not actually knowable by anyone, no matter how enlightened a person becomes. We all conceptually know exactly nothing about the nature of reality. So, it is probably best, in these instances where there are actions we can take to improve the lives of others, to pretend that we know there are people separate from our experience. It's better to err on the side of caution for the welfare of other sentient beings, and to treat the situation practically as though there are people separate from our immediate first-hand experience. But it's also important to detach yourself from the notion that you know without a doubt that there is or is not a world going on separate from your first-hand experience of now. Don't fall on the other side of the horse of naive materialism, because that would be just naive non-materialism.

I don't think I've ever heard any truer words uttered before.

Name: Emerald Wilkins Age: 27 Gender: Female Location: Florida Occupation: Substitute Teacher Marital Status: Married Kids: Two Hobbies: contemplation, personal development, reading, health, and (previously) painting, playing the guitar, and writing. I got into personal development when I was 16 in high school. I was always very interested in growing myself as a person. I thought of my life as an art piece, and I had a huge grand-master plan for how I would bring that to fruition. I developed my skills in painting and other creative endeavors and was constantly seeking to add more value to myself by developing new skill-sets, learning more, and refining my personality and habits. I got into a good college completely paid for through scholarship after graduating Summa Cum Laude from high school. Then, when I was 20, I decided to try Ayahuasca and experienced ego transcendence. I realized that the masterpiece identity that I had been creating through various types of personal development was just a huge bandaid to cover over the deep wounds of my childhood. In fact, my refined identity and all the unwritten rules that I had for myself were causing me great suffering. So, I began repressing my drives for personal development, because I thought they were wrong. They were the thing keeping me from the liberation that I only ever felt through letting go of my identity. I started specifically trying to undermine my identity by ruining my self-image. I did a lot of crazy, destructive things during that time. My grades dropped, I became promiscuous, I repressed my logic, I repressed my drives for social acceptance, I repressed my drives for having boundaries, and I let go of all my moral values that I cherished so much. For a few months, my life situation became very unstable. I had no home so I was couch surfing and making money through playing my guitar on the street. I would wonder around in the middle of the night by myself, just contemplating. I had some traumas occur during this time. But then I met my now-husband, and I settled with him. I said 'never again' to the crazy, unsafe lifestyle that I was in the middle of. I sought to vanillify myself through adorning a very restrictive form of traditional femininity in combination with a solid career as a teacher. No major aspirations. No striving for higher values. Just existing in the most forgettable way possible. And it was hell. Then a couple years ago, I found Leo's videos just by chance. I was looking for a way to spice up my bedroom life. But then I saw that he had videos on enlightenment. I did not actually know what enlightenment was, at the time. I had always just been trying to undermine my identity to get "back" to what I had experienced when I was 20. So, I watched his first video on enlightenment and I was like "Holy ^!%@^%^!!!! That's what I'm looking for!!!!" And I was like "Ya know what. If this dude can pursue enlightenment and personal development in tandem with one another, maybe they aren't as mutually exclusive as I had assumed. I'm going to do it to." So, I just started personal development back up 2 years ago, though I still have many negative voices about how I shouldn't be doing it. But I'm working through it. Personal challenges I've overcome: Extremely sheltered as a child, I always felt I was behind everyone else in terms of social development and practical competence. I was also made fun of a lot because of this, which gave me a lot of issues with self esteem. So, this gave me the desire in the first place to be competent. As a teenager, I realized that I was capable of becoming competent and even excellent at most undertakings if I really put in the effort. This was incredibly liberating. My older sister is mentally challenged, so I realized when I was about 8 years old or so that I would one day have to care for her when my mother passes away. So I had a lot of fear and mental blocks about not being able to have time to go to college, get married, have a social life, or do things that I wanted to do as an adult. Thoughts like "What's the point in pursuing these things anyway if I'm just going to be my sister's care-taker for the vast majority of the rest of my life?" So, this awareness added a sense of urgency to my desires for personal success. I come from a working class background, and I've been under the poverty line many times in my life. There were times when I was in art school that I had to choose between art supplies and food. I lost 30 lbs when I was in college, just because I had little access to food during that period. Finances have been a pretty constant stumbling block to all of my aspirations, though it's much better now than it ever has been. I haven't lived with either of my parents since I was 16. I lived with my dad until I was 16, but only lived with my mom until I was 12. She and I have always had a distance. She has spent a total of 5 years of my life not speaking to me. Then, I moved in with my boyfriend who was 18, so I really had to learn many things on my own without a safety net. This contributed to my ability to be independent and self-motivated. Due to issues with my mother and general social attitudes regarding femininity, as a child I developed a deep sense of misogyny and identification with masculinity. This caused a lot of self-esteem issues, and always felt like I was trapped by being female. Not in a trans-gendered kind of way, but in a self-loathing kind of way. So, even after I became a teenager and no longer hated women as a whole group, I was still never content with being a woman. Because through personal development I wanted power and to be on top the whole world... I was very megalomaniacal in many way ways prior to my awakenings. But there was always this feeling that even if I had the whole world in the palm of my hand, I'm still a woman and no one would take it seriously. Then when I age, I would lose my attractiveness, and all of my power that I had earned through work ethic and personal development would just be ripped away from me. None of it would matter, I would still be powerless and worthless. But now I recognize that power and worth as illusory concepts, so this isn't as much of a stumbling block anymore. I'm more okay with being born as a woman than I have ever been before. I was in an unhealthy relationship from age 16 to age 20. So, this was a big drain on my personal development efforts, as I would often feel obligated use the money that I saved to pay for college related expenses on bailing him out of jail. He was also very impulsive and angry, and used these tendencies to intimidate me and manipulate me. It was a difficult relationship to leave, but doing so has made my life exponentially better. I used personal development as a means to escape from a great many issues, and accomplishment for me was the best emotion that I was capable of back then. Then, I had my ego-transcendence experiences, and suddenly that emotion became wrong to feel. So, I slipped away into my own inner hell completely for a few months, experiencing the dark night of the soul. I had really fallen down a rabbit hole. But over the years, I was slowly able to pick myself up out of it and rebuild my inner world in such a way that it is conducive to psychological health and wisdom. It all had to be torn down, then it took years to build back up again the right way. I finally have stable footing in my own psychology and I can relate to a lot of people's issues, which allows me to help others. What I'm working on now: - The ability to just be without some struggle to overcome or some end-state to get to but also -healthy diet -exercise -being a good mom -enlightenment -growing my YouTube channel -being able to enjoy life -breaking bad habits (internet, too much thinking) -shifting my focus more toward others instead to self

Great observation. I'm curious, were the hallucinations interwoven with reality seamlessly or was it a part thought/part visual phenomenon kind of experience?

This may be too personal so you don't have to answer it. But I've always been curious. Did your family move from Russia to escape the social ails (poverty, social decay, mafia, political upheaval, etc.) that resulted after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I've heard that the early 90s was pretty rocky.

Thank you. As I move further away from having a career in the arts, I start to get little cravings to paint, here and there. I really do enjoy the task of resolving a painting. I think I got disenchanted with it because I was so involved in the idea of being a successful artist as opposed to just enjoying the process of creating. And I also had a lot of unwritten rules for how I had to create and how much I should create.

I too have similar ideas like this that I like to believe, and I hope to contribute to this through my work. But it's also important to realize that this belief, while it's uplifting, may not be true and reveals a potential attachment to the anthropocentric view of the universe. It also sets happiness and fulfillment in the future, when the future never actually comes. Reality is always perfect and complete, regardless of what happens to humans. Humanity is an individual human's everything, but is not anymore significant or less significant that any other thing in existence. So, if humans evolve and self-actualize and develop toward a better world, it's perfect. If we kill ourselves and all living organisms on the planet through nuclear warfare, this is also perfect. But I certainly prefer your way. So, it's important to follow these preferences and advocate for them.

I don't have much of it photographed by I can show you a few things. But I haven't created much art since I graduated from college. It sort of lost meaning to me. Here are some animations that I made. I wanted to see how far apart I could push each frame in the series apart from one another visually and still have it read as a coherent animation. Below are some of my paintings and drawings that I happen to still have images of. In the image on top, mine is the portrait that's second from the right. It's a self portrait of me back when I was 18 and used to be a bit chubbier.

I'm glad to hear that my video and comment has been of help. So, I think the main thing, now that you're aware of your underlying beliefs around being deserving of or allowed to have attention, is to start unwiring those beliefs and exchanging them with new beliefs. And at various times throughout the day, you can question your beliefs as they come up relative to this repression. Sometimes repressions can impact other seemingly unrelated things as the aspects of the psyche are highly interconnected. So, becoming mindful of this throughout your day should be very helpful in consciously letting go of these limiting beliefs.

Haha! I just realized that the site that the post you're talking about was from was the forum I used to follow.

I'm glad to hear that you can relate. Your question on codependency and neediness reminds of an insight that I had as a result of my experiences of ego transcendence back when I was 20. I always harshly judged people who were "attention whores". Like if a person openly cried in front of people or over-dramatized to get attention or just did things to seek attention in general, I would secretly judge them very harshly. What I realized during those experiences, was that I had the same attention-seeking bone in me, only I was in resistance to it. So, if I needed attention, I would have to do other more subtle and occasionally manipulative things that fit within the range of the rules I had set for my behavior. So, I sought attention through academic success, unique style of dress, creativity, novelty, and making myself attractive where I could actually tell myself that it was okay to get a little attention. But these never satisfied that need. I was always feeling like I needed more, but was too proud. So, I starved myself of it. So, when that came flooding back to me after those experiences, I was like 'ya know what... I'm going to be an attention whore on purpose. So what if it gets on other people's nerves.' So, I did a lot of crazy, sometimes destructive, but incredibly liberating things that I had never allowed myself to do. Luckily I was in art school at the time, and I had a lot of open-minded professors. But this was only the first phase in the reintegration process for me relative to this emotion. I had to find out why I felt the need to seek attention in the first place, and become aware of everything underneath that desire. So, it may be the case that you have a general tendency toward neediness that you're repressing. Like (this is a hypothetical scenario) maybe your parents didn't give you the attention you needed as kid. As a result you were needy as a kid and got made fun of by other kids for being too clingy. Then, you decided to not be like that. But your emotions that caused you to be that way in the first place weren't resolved. You just changed the outward behavior, to save yourself from the emotional pain of rejection from your peers. But inwardly and unconsciously, there would still remain a child, dealing with the emotional needs that never got met that the now-unconscious feeling of neediness was there to help with. So, I would say that it's important to first become aware of the neediness and accept and reintegrate that. Then you can assess why the neediness is there in the first place, then you can work on reintegrating and becoming aware of that emotional need. So, in this way, you can kind of follow your emotions deeper and deeper. Thank you for checking out my channel!

I made a video about Shadow Work fairly recently. I'll post it below. But to sum it up, repression is a very active process where you have an unconscious habit of ignoring or suppressing certain traits, emotions, and aspects of reality from your awareness. These traits get relegated to the shadow which is part of the unconscious mind. This is what creates distortion, delusion, disconnection from wisdom, and a lack of clarity. So, you find the traits that you are most resistant to in others, and you find your hidden beliefs that make those traits "wrong" or bad for you to have or express. Then, you let those beliefs go. Here is the video:

I would say that it's a big problem with many men who get into pick-up. If you read a lot of comments by PUA's it has a very misogynistic sort of vibe. That's because the men who tend to get way into the ideology come from a place of lack and have come to see women as holders of their personal value. Society teaches men in many subtle and overt ways that their worth comes from whether or not women are attracted to them. And when a woman rejects them, they don't often realize that women are choosy (they assume women work like men generally do and have similar dating standards), and that a rejection doesn't mean anything about their worth. So, these types of guys, feel powerless in relation to women. And even when they become successful with women through PUA, there is still a feeling of proving their worth and maybe even feelings of revenge. Like "Haha! I conquered you now!" But these are the men that get way into the ideology, who are the most wounded of men. However, some of the techniques and mindsets are helpful. So, I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What I find is that most men that I know personally who have studied into pick-up a little bit, do so because they want to know how to approach women and be successful. They're normally kind of nerdy/shy/nice guys who want to find some techniques. Trickery is not their plan. Nor is it necessarily to have tons of partners. They just want some form of success. Approaching is uncomfortable and there is no clear, socially acceptable mating ritual that is widely adopted due to living in the post-modern era. You either approach and risk looking like a creeper and being rejected or you don't approach and stay lonely. It can be an emotional experience, I'm sure. So, having a guide-map is helpful. A few years prior to meeting me, my husband actually read a few books on pick-up artistry as he always had approach anxiety and didn't really know what women were generally attracted to. The things that men are attracted to are posted everywhere, but women's desires much less so. So, he always felt that he was riding blind when it came to dating. But because he studied into pick-up a little bit and understood things about what women generally like, he was amazing on our first date. Just head and shoulders above other guys. Not because he was being disingenuous... in fact I think that he told me that night that he studied pick up artistry. He was just using the techniques to make himself better at approaching, dating, and being attractive.

Unfortunately, people are going to be how they're going to be. So, in one sense you just have to let go. A family member of mine, who used to not be racist until two months ago, since the U.S. presidential election, is reading a lot of propaganda on the right like Infowars and Breitbart News and other far right sites. So, in the past two months (and never before) she's all about "Islam is a front for terrorism", Muslims are bad distorted people, Barrack Obama is a radical Muslim from Kenya named Barry Sorento, we need for our police officers to be able to interrogate people who are Muslim on the basis of them being Muslim, black people have privilege over white people, we need to build a wall, illegal immigrants are criminals, etc. It's been a real shock for me, and when I point out fallacies in her thinking, she criticizes me for being politically uninformed and closed minded. It's really scary because it makes me wonder how many others have been hemmed into this type of thinking, who weren't that way before. Brainwashing is scary. But if you want to try to push your dad in a better direction, you have to meet him where he is and accept him how he is. Don't disapprove of him in a blunt way, as this will make him cling tighter to his beliefs. So, you have to find sources that are slight improvements on his way of thinking. He's not going to be able to jump paradigms that quickly, barring some huge awakening. Leo's videos and others in the rational/scientific and the post rational/spiritual paradigms aren't going to resonate with him. They're a complete mismatch to him right now. But you know the general direction that the Graves model moves in, so you'll want to maybe find more positive Absolutist-minded people for him to listen to. This may soften him up a bit more, or it may not. If this softens him a bit, you can start finding people who are mostly Absolutist but maybe have a dash of scientific/rationalism to their ideology. But Absolutists are very difficult to get them to grow, because they tend to like the status quo and their beliefs in right and wrong. Absolutist ideas and beliefs hide a lot of pain, so they need to keep believing them so they can keep targeting the hatred outward and away from themselves.

Oh... and also (I forgot to put this in my last message) when it comes to letting go of this mission to keep your mom happy, you'll want to try to let go of those beliefs. So, if that thought comes into your mind, you should actively question its validity from all angles. Then allow it to be there, but don't pay it much attention. It too, is another paper tiger. But I wouldn't get into this right now. If I were you, I would take a break for at least a week or two before doing any mental or spiritual contemplations. But when you feel sufficiently grounded, you can come back to this issues and systematically become aware of, question, observes, and let go of unhelpful beliefs.

You could give meditation a break for a few days. But if you want to continue with meditation to remain consistent, I recommend doing body scan meditations. This will help you ground your awareness more in your physical experience. It seems to me that you've gotten to a place where your mental experience is becoming difficult to control, so you want to starve that of attention and energy for a while. There is a saying (very clumsily paraphrased) "Thoughts are like paper tigers, they seem real and scary. But they can't harm you and if you don't feed them, they die a natural death." Give yourself some rest and allow yourself to heal from your fever. And get out in nature a bit. There is a process called Earthing where you walk barefoot on the ground to balance your charge out. The idea is that daily life and getting caught up with the mental life (and being around technology, radio signals, etc.) produces a lot of positive ions in a person's electrical field. So, because the ground has negative ions, this helps ground you and balance out the charge by pairing off the positive ions with negative ions. So, you're essentially grounding yourself in the same way that you may ground any other conductor of electricity. This is helpful in modern societies because most people never go outside with their shoes off, when in the past it was more common to walk barefoot from time to time.

I plan to do some videos about this coming up on grounding, spiritual bypassing, and Kundalini Syndrome. It's been a really strong theme in my life recently.