Edogowa Conan

I grew up in a blue/orange Muslim household. When I was 14, I finally asked my parents for the first time, how can we know that Islam is the truth? Luckily, my parents didn’t just ‘beg the question’, as I see a lot of religious people do. Since they had some stage orange mentality in them, they understood the question. They brought out a video that would convince me all the time that Islam must be the truth, because I just couldn’t falsify it. Every time I doubted Islam, they would bring out the video and I would become convinced. Years later, I left Islam because of watching ‘the masked arab’, who is a YouTuber that provides evidence against Islam. His reasoning made sense to me and I quit. But still, that video remains to be explained. It’s very puzzling. I don’t know how to falsify it. What do you guys think of this:

The power of now indeed. The now is the only thing that’s real. Everything else you’re thinking of, if it’s not happening right now, is not real. I’m learning to ground myself in the now as much as I can, because now is always good.

Thanks to @How to be wise recommendation, I have decided to use The Work as my method to enlightenment and sagehood. Leo always says that it takes decades to achieve mastery of your mind and emotions, but this technique might actually get me there in a year or two. I’ve been doing The Work for three days now, and I am amazed at how good I feel when I’m inquiring into my thoughts. The four questions of The Work are: 1. Is it true? 2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true? 3. How do I react when I believe that thought? 4. Who would I be without that thought? According to Byron Katie, the questions 3 and 4 are most important for beginners. As we ask ourselves how we react when we believe those thoughts, we become aware of the suffering that it causes. Then we ask, who would you be without this thought, and you feel the peace that comes from not believing it. Your mind becomes aware, over time, that believing untrue thoughts causes suffering, and it lets go of them by itself. But as we get more experience with The Work, Katie advises that we focus more on the first and second questions. Before we answer the questions, we need to fill in the ‘Judge your neighbour’ worksheet, which is something I take pleasure in doing. In the three days I’ve done The Work, I’ve done half hour meditation sessions. What I like about The Work is that we work directly with the issues that are troubling us. We directly question those thoughts and let them go. We always end up in a state of not-knowing, which feels very good. Reading Katie’s books about her experiences motivates me a lot to pursue The Work. Some of her stories are so shocking that I recognised what level of mastery she holds. I’ll be posting here if I get any breakthroughs or interesting experiences with The Work. What I’m really after is not experiences or mystical states. I want my permanent state to be transformed. I want permanent enlightenment and complete embodiment. Is it possible to do it in a few years rather than your whole life? That is the question I will answer.

A few days ago, I came to see that absolutely nothing is true. Nothing. I wasn’t really shocked, because that experience was gradually coming up for a few weeks. But how can nothing be true. Well, let me try to explain. Just in one instant, what can be true. Just in one moment. Is there anything that can be true for just one second. Really. Any thought that comes up, it took time to come up. So before that thought what was the truth? Nothing. Just emptiness. I also came to see that physical pain comes from the mind 100%. Leo was wrong in his video. Let me explain: Physical pain must take some time to occur. You can’t say that I felt pain for 0 seconds. That would be the same as if you hadn’t felt any pain. So you felt the pain for x amounts of microseconds. Let the point where the pain began be called ‘t’, and the moment the pain ended be t+x, since it took x microseconds. See, already you created two different points in time: t and t+x. But in reality both moments cannot exist at the same time! So one of them was mind created. You can try to shorten x as much as you like, and the same result follows. Therefore pain does not exist in reality, you imagine it. This proof seems mathematical because I study maths at uni. But this can only be understood from a high level of consciousness. So get to work!

Holy crap! How did I get it so wrong?! For the past 5 years, I have really believed that a group of people in my high school used to bully me. But today, I have realised that only they existed, not me! So how could they have bullied me, when there was no me! I created an idea of me that I thought was being attacked, but all of that is bullshit. I was them! And only they were real! Huge huge huge relief! But no more me! Epic! Epic! Epic!

Huge progression has been made the last couple of weeks. These days I feel blissful around half the day. My body is just oozing with excitement. I feel like I have taken a huge stab into my shadow, and finally it is showing itself. I intuit that it will only be a few more months till the end, till the shadow is brought to the light fully and I am fully purified spiritually. Can’t wait!

So, my battle to be more authentic has begun. But what does that mean for me practically? Well, firstly, I’m going to stop hiding my grey hair. So, I have pre-mature grey hair, which started when I was like 16 or 17. Ever since, I have tried to hide it, in fear of suffering. But today, I have finally made the choice to stop hiding it. Because if I hide it, then I am lying to myself. Secondly, I’m going to stop acting macho in front of the students. Usually if older students from other classes came over to my class, they would try to tease me, and make me look weak to my students. In normal cases, I would sit up straight and try to act like a teacher. But now, I have decided to allow myself to look weak and scared, because the ‘macho facade’ which I put up, drains a lot of energy from me. I’m lying through my body when I do that. Lastly, I will not hesitate to show my students how physically weak I am. I’m physically weak compared to even younger students, and of course I have tried to hide it. But I will hide it no longer. I become anxious and tensed up whenever an older student asks me to arm wrestle him in front of my own students, because that will reveal my appalling physical weakness. But I have also noticed that hiding my physical weakness is far more painful to me, because I am lying. So I will not hide it again. I’m sure that other ways that I lie will show up to me, but for now, I will take care of them three.

@Charlotte Leo has a whole ‘limiting beliefs’ video series in his website, you must have seen that right?

Although Islam is just another religion, it has some very important things that I can use in my self-inquiry practice. For example, in Islam you are required to pray five times a day. The moral of that is so that you don’t forget about your practices. In a similar way, I have constructed my practice so that I do 40 minutes in the morning, 40 minutes in the afternoon, and 40 minutes in the evening. A total of two hours. With that in place, my practice becomes the most important thing in my day, because it covers the whole day. Also, with this method, I will never ‘forget’ about my practice.

@alankrillin @SgtPepper @Shiva I’ve considered that as well. But look at how many reporters and people there are. Two thousand people! Surely they will know if it has been written on. The reporters would definitely wait until another verse appeared on its own. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

So I’ve finally let go of controlling the class. That was quite a big achievement. My time in the school has become a lot more peaceful and joyful. That peace has even spread through to other parts of my life. But now, my next milestone is to allow my students to see that I’m quite weak. There are many students in year 9 who are probably physically stronger than me. I’m not very strong physically after all. Those year 9s sometimes come to my class and try to test my strength in front of my students (year 4 and 5). That fills me with so much anxiety because I’m scared that my students will see that I’m physically weaker than other students. I fear that the news will spread to the whole school and that I will lose my students respect. But I must let go of that. In order for me to be happy around those year 9s, I need to allow everybody to see how weak I am. I realised that this is one way that I lie. I lie to people about my strength. I make them believe that I’m strong, but actually I’m quite weak. I must let go of any attachments that I have to my students, and any respect or admiration they have for me. I will be working on that over the next few weeks.

We have seen techniques to improve in different facets of personal development like enlightenment, emotional mastery, success, health, relationships and so on. But what I haven’t seen is a way to improve your creativity. The innate ability to ‘realise’ things, to ‘solve’ a challenging problem. How can we increase that ability to extremely high levels. I’m partially motivated by this because I watch a show ‘Detective Conan’ where the entire theme of the show is clever people. Not clever in the sense where they know a bunch of facts. That’s easy. Anyone could do that. I mean clever in the sense that they can ‘solve’ a difficult murder case easily by ‘realising’ the trick. It’s the same thing as when Einstein ‘saw through’ general relativity. But he only did it that once. How can we train ourselves to the level where we can have Einstein level genius insights every day rather than just once in our lifetimes. Do you guys know of any people who teach this? Or is it not possible.

@Prabhaker Oh Please! Meditation doesn’t do much for you. We have plenty of cases today were people have been meditating for decades. We see basically no benefit. @pluto A lot of people are doing that. And they are not very creative. @Solace I asked for advice to be more creative, not more happy. I have that part of my life figured out thankfully. Do you guys know anything about the akashic record. They say that all information about this universe can be accessed there. Do you guys know any authors that teach about how to access the akashic records. Any books?

@seeking_brilliance I teach age group 8-11. Although in our school most of the kids are between 12-16. Which is exactly the age group that I used to get bullied in. Will I Cop-out? No. For two reasons. 1) I don’t have a choice, my parents are forcing me to teach there. Otherwise they won’t pay for my uni fees. 2) Since I’ve found a way to deal with this permanently, it only adds to my benefit that they are around. After a few months of being around them, I will have dealt with it once and for all. After that, I’m good as immune to this problem.

Last week, I made another huge commitment. I decided to let go of trying to control the class. The school that I teach is a place where students don’t want to be. The students are (by the looks of it) forced to come there and the teachers intimidate the children and scare them into behaving properly. Part of the job is to talk in a loud angry voice, to scare the children using any means possible. Anything less of this would produce a chaotic class where nobody would listen to you. For the past year, I’ve been playing into that game. It caused me A LOT of fear, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue and tiredness. I was extremely fed up of that school and yet I had to go there, because my parents forced me. For some background context I’m a 19 year old university student who is teaching this class in the weekend. So saying that it’s a school is a little misleading. But anyway, I was so bogged down by this school that I felt trapped. I had no way out, until I found The Work. Now I have a way out. I’ve decided to stop fighting the kids altogether, and to let them do what they want to do. I will tell them kindly to sit down and behave, but that will be as far as I go. I understand that with this attitude, my career as this teacher won’t go on for too long, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the best thing that I can do. One huge obstacle that I have against this attempt is the loyalty that I feel towards the main teachers who were the ones to give me this job. I understand that I will be letting them down, but I don’t care anymore. My happiness comes before anything. I won’t spend the rest of my life trying to kiss their feet. I have my own life to live. My own happiness to pursue. So tough titty to those teachers. Another huge commitment that I made is to ‘level the rank’ between myself and the rest of the students. For the past year, I’ve been acting like I was superior to all of the children, so they don’t treat me like one. I’ve realised slowly that this attitude is causing me more trouble. I’m constantly scared that the students might think of me as another student instead of as a teacher. That’s also something that I must work on. My goal is to one day do the job whilst enjoying it at the same time. I feel like it’s time is coming much and much closer.

@Leo Gura Is this a stage green religion? What do you think about this faith?

@How to be wise Sounds too good to be true. No wonder it found a difficult time spreading through the Middle East. The idea of ‘accepting all religions’ and ‘accepting all of humanity’ doesn’t sit well with stage blue Muslims. He should’ve just focused on a religion that gets people out of blue and into orange. But still, thumbs up to Bahá’u’lláh for such a kind religion.

Today, when I went to teach the class, I noticed that I spent a significant amount of the time in ecstasy. My body was oozing with energy and excitement in a job that made me anxious, angry and very tired for the last year. The thing that I did differently today was to let go of the anger I had for the kids. I knew from my previous inquiry session that this anger was merely covering up a far deeper and more painful issue. When I let go of the anger, in its place came fear, offensiveness and embarrassment. This was very familiar ground. I was bullied throughout middle school and the first half of high school. Those emotions where the ones I felt when this gang in my class would constantly pick on me. My anger in class as I teach today came because I didn’t want the students I teach to bully me the same way I was bullied in high school. The best way to avoid this scenario was to establish my status as a teacher. But today I finally let go of this anger so that I could deal with the real issue, which is the fear I felt from getting bullied. I’m super exited to finally deal with this problem that has been plaguing me for close to ten years.

In today’s session, I became aware of the nature of ‘wants’. You don’t ‘want’ anything, until the thought comes into your mind that you do. When that thought comes into your mind, you mistake the thought of wanting, for wanting itself. So whenever I say I want something, it actually means that the thought of wanting something has appeared in my mind, and I believe it. So the work of being detached includes ‘unbelieving’ all of your current ‘wants’, because in reality, you don’t want anything. Before the thought appeared in your mind, you were in perfect contentment. After the thought appears, you believe it and then you react physically or emotionally. Who would you be without that thought? Perfect peace. Nothing is true. Reality happens.

As I was watching Leo’s video today, it became clear to me that my practice of The Work for the last six months has really paid off. When Leo was talking about the pyramid of how the top people where using all the bottom people, I immediately saw through it as untrue and just “mind stuff”. When you go outside in the day you will never see such a pyramid. It’s not physical. It’s funny how when I realised that the pyramid only exists when you think about it, I became aware that enlightenment and no-mind really are the most worthwhile goals possible. With no-mind, there is no pyramid, no rich people and no unfairness, and definitely no slavery. I can be just as happy working for a gun company that kills people as I am living through my life purpose, because there is no gun company or life purpose until you think about those things, so clearly they are not real. I am not parroting what some other enlightened person said, this is all my direct experience when I was watching this video. I will definitely not kill myself if I became a ‘wage-slave’, because there is no wage slavery. That shit doesn’t exist. Anyway, I understand that what Leo was talking about, although fundamentally untrue, is still a useful model for those that are un enlightened, or those who want to live through a life purpose as a tool for having financial freedom. But definitely don’t use it to depress yourselves, because it’s not true ?. Good day.

@Leo Gura @Nahm As I said, it’s a useful model to use. But I will always regard it as just that: a model, never a relative ‘truth’, cause there’s no such thing. I will carry on using such models to live my life, but the problem comes when you do get in a situation where you are stuck with a ‘wage slavery’ job. Leo said that he will kill himself. Clearly that shows the limits of actually believing that model, even as a relative ‘truth’. In my case, with a no-mind state, I will still do everything I can to get out of a situation of ‘wage slavery’, but I will never bog myself down with actually believing that it’s true. This is the advantage of enlightenment. You can enjoy life to the fullest as it is, and still work through your options and see what I can change. I’ve found that this is a far more useful and efficient approach. Byron Katie never understood why people struggle so much with money. ‘Money is everywhere, it’s so easy to get’, she would say. Of course, if you actually believe that rich people have all the money and all that pyramid stuff, you will be the one to dum yourself down with your own mind. You need to realise the limits of those stuff.

In today’s session, it became clear to me that my social anxiety was due to me holding an identity. I constructed a story about who I am, and about who I wanted other people to see me as. In secondary school, I was bullied very badly by the rest of the class. But today, I realised that my suffering didn’t actually come from them. They never harmed me physically. The way they made me suffer was by laughing at me, calling me names and making fun of me. I realised that I suffered those insults because of my self-image. I had an image of my self as an honourable student who was worthy of respect. And every time the class bullied me, I suffered a blow to that self image. Today, as a teacher, I was very strict to the class for that exact reason: I had a strong self image. I wanted all of the students to see me as the strongest and the most popular. That’s why I suffer so much when a student shows disrespect. I realised that if I want to be happy in school, I need to completely destroy that self image, so that I can do whatever I want to do. I can let whatever happens in class happen, and still be joyful about it. I have to get to work doing exactly that.

In this session, I realised that, as a teacher at a school, I need to give up the idea that I’m a teacher. That’s because when I latch on to the idea that I’m a teacher, I have expectations of how students should treat me, since I believed that teachers are superior to students. I had expectations that they should respect me, that they shouldn’t judge me and they shouldn’t try to start fights with me. But the problem was, those expectations caused me a lot of pain when a student did do one of those things. I woke up to the fact that none of those expectations are true, because students have free will and will do what they want to do. For my sake, I needed to give up all those expectations I had of students, and to also give up any notions that I as a teacher am any different from any of the students, and that I should get any preferential treatment, because that sometimes wouldn’t happen. To my amazement, I noticed that I feel a lot better when I don’t have any of those expectations. That idea seemed scary at first, but as I did The Work more, I became more and more accepting to this new reality. It’s a new start to something that I’ve been doing for a long time.

Yesterday, during my 90 min session, I had an extraordinary experience. As I was doing The Work on an issue which really made me nervous, I had an awakening where it felt like a straitjacket that I have been wearing my whole life had finally come off, and that I was finally dealing with that problem. I felt four of the chakras activating at the same time (and no, I was not doing yoga). For the past 5-8 years, I have been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and very little energy. I would get tired if I went out for even ten minutes. During those years, I spent most of my time on my bed using my iPad. I had no idea that my lack of energy was due to me being bogged down by so many of those beliefs, to the point where they would drain me of all energy. But in this experience, I felt that a significant chunck of this weight has been lifted off me, and a huge wave of energy just streamed through my body. Definitely a life changing experience. I am feeling this energy that I haven’t had for close to a decade right now. What I’m hoping is that as I carry on with The Work, I can increase my energy levels radically, and my body can become a lot lighter so that I can spend more time outdoors.

For the last two weeks, I bumped up the time of my practice from 60 mins to 90 mins. And the results of this practice have been pouring in ever since. I am unraveling my shadow aspects like I have never done before in my life. Many things that just 1 month ago would scare me and make me anxious, today I am laughing about them. Many of my long-held concepts that I’ve had about life have fallen away. It’s like the tight knot of my life is opening itself. The level of peace and bliss that I enjoy in my life is simply unbelievable. At this rate, I think that I can purify my mind in just the coming year. Then my journey to become a sage will be over. The Work is working!