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Nothing can exist outside of consciousness because consciousness is infinite and all things can only exist as imagined by consciousness. The end. You guys make it too complicated, you get tangled up in your own minds. There is no such thing as non-existence. Only existence. Nothingness is existence, not non-existence.

What you’re talking about and Nothingness had a certain phenomenological difference. You already have oneness for what you’re saying

? agreed It's been said that a good clear understanding of Adviata or Nonduality firstly can lead to a better understanding of no creation, nothingness or Ajata in the latter. Robert Wolfe has some incredible essays in this area on his AjataSunyata Project website. ❤

You were on your way home, when you died. It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable. But fatal, nonetheless. It was a painless death. The medics tried their best to save you... but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered, you were better off. Trust me. And that's when you met me. What happened? Where am I? You died. I said, matter of factly. No point in mincing words. There was... there was a truck. And it was skidding. Yes. I... I died? Yes. But don't feel bad about it. Everyone dies. You looked around. There was.. nothingness. Just you, and me. What is this place? Is this, the afterlife? More or less. Are you.. God? Yes. I'm God. My kids.. My wife... What about them? Will they be alright? That's what I like to see," I said. You just died, and your main concern is for your family. That's good stuff right there. You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man, or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure maybe. Don't worry," I said. They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contemptuous of you. Your wife will cry on the outside. But will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it's any consolation, she'll feel very guilty for feeling relieved. Oh.. So what happens now? Do I go to Heaven? Or Hell or something? Neither. You'll be reincarnated. Ah.. So the Hindus were right! All religions are right in their own way. Walk with me. You followed along as we strolled through the void. Where are we going? No where in particular. It's just nice to talk while we walk. So, what's the point then? When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate right? A baby? So, all my experiences and everything... everything I did in this life... Won't matter... Not so. You have within you, all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now. I stopped walking, and took you by the shoulders. Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water. To see if it's hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had. You've been in a human for the last 48 years. So you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But there's not point to doing that between each life. How many times have I been reincarnated then? Oh, lots! Lots and lots! And into lots of different lives. This time around, you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 A.D Wait... What?! You're sending me back in time? Well I guess technically. Time as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from. Where... where you come from? Oh sure, I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what it's like there but honestly you wouldn't understand. Oh.. You said, a little let down. But wait.. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point. Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespans, you don't even know it's happening. or who will ever live, yes I'm Abraham Lincoln? and your john wilks booth too? (i didn't get what he said) I'm Hitler!!! You said uphold (again i din't get or catch what he said) And you're the millions he killed. I'm Jesus! and you're everyone who followed Him. You fell silent* Every time you victimizing someone you're victimizing myself every act of kindness you've done you've done to yourself every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was or will be experienced by YOU you thought for a long time why? why do all this? because someday you will become like me because that's what you are! you're one of my kind You're my child! Wow!! you said incredulous.. you mean i'm a God? No, not yet, you're a fetus you're still growing. once you've lived every human life throughout all time you will have grown enough to be born so the whole universe... it's just... an egg I answered.. now it's time for you to move on to your next life and I sent you on your way

LWAM Season 1, episode 12 I’m back to write my annual post. I had an itch to share some of the things I’ve been experiencing since last time so here I go again. I don’t even know why I would write anything because I would simply be repeating what’s been said a million times. But I also cannot NOT write because THE ITCH! Falling deeper into this never –ending funhouse of absolute nothingness tends to come in waves. After the initial shock of altered perception, it slowly becomes more and more natural and yet, there is always this element of surprise waiting around the corner. There are subtle ways in which I notice things changing. I guess I feel major shifts whenever there’s any change in the degree of identification with thoughts and feelings. And that’s the closest I can describe it because even saying that isn’t quite true. All that is happening is deeper falling and I don’t know what exactly is falling and where. Recently, there’s been a subtle way in which identification arises and drops almost instantly. The constant dissolving of this fake structure is so amusing. I see myself making stuff up and then convincing myself it’s the truth and maybe falling for it for a day or two before I see through the whole thing and then I’m back “at the right perception”. At this point I’m just fucking with myself for laughs. Like, how can I trick myself while also knowing I’m tricking myself? I do keep on dying on different levels and here’s what that looks like followed by random sentences I wrote in my journal about the thing: 1) BRAIN NOT WORKING WORDS WHAT I got somewhat used to not having memory, but then another disorienting thing happened with thoughts. As in, I would have intrusive thoughts about one particular thing and after a while it would exhaust itself completely and then I’d be left in this state of no thoughts. And from that state it would be very hard to articulate and formulate words. It feels as though my brain has been fried which is hilarious in and of itself because I can’t find the brain that I’m referring to. Everything is rising out of me and in me, I can’t believe it, I have no mind. I made it up!! There’s a mind that does what exactly?? 2) THE DICKHEAD I noticed that I no longer feel feelings of others which was an amazing relief because it meant that I no longer felt suffering hardly ever. And after that I noticed that - wait, I don’t feel any feelings period. And then oh, I do feel feelings, but it’s sort of like, they have nothing to with me so I don’t really pay that much attention to them. And when I do pay attention to a feeling and stay with it for a while, it fades away very quickly. Feelings are a nonissue because I don’t see a difference between “positive” and “negative” emotions. Like really! It doesn’t matter what I label the feeling, it’s gone before I try to get hold of it. I feel everything almost three feet away from me at all times. Things are not important - I don’t believe in them anymore. That’s why there a lot of things I feel like I can’t really relate to. One moment things matter to me, the next they don’t, it’s like they never happened. I’m having trouble with seeing people’s problems as problems because it all looks like imaginary nonsense. In any interaction my first reaction is: I’m not buying it. It almost like can’t relate to or understand personal issues. Or maybe I’m just a dickhead now. Practically, it might be said that I turned into a dickhead but strangely, I’m more compassionate than ever. The funny thing is that feeling people’s feelings and understanding them or believing in them doesn’t help them, it just puts suffering on top of suffering. Only when you don’t believe them can you feel real compassion. The paradoxes of this are insane. I can’t get sucked into human drama like before as in, I know it’s not real and because of that there’s so much compassion for anyone that does because I remember what it felt like. 3) FAMILY STANDS FOR??? The body that is here is certainly related to my family members, but my relationship with them is totally gone. I value them as people and continue to have relationships with them, but not as their daughter, sister or aunt. The person that they once knew is gone and they don’t even know it. I just do a hell of a job pretending. How can I be related to anything when I see myself being born and then dying each second that passes? What would that even mean? The person that I was is completely dead. I’m dying laughing. Dear god. The person that pretended to be here finally left, or honestly, was dragged out of the theater. 4) LOVE PERSONIFIED BLABLABLA I feel suffocated by love. The love is so intense I am scared of it. I am embodied love. And I love loving. I’m literally living in never ending love I am absolute love. What I am has never been hurt, never left, never rejected. It doesn’t know anything but pure love for itself. Read Meister Eckhart for much more clear insights about love if you’re in the mood. Everything is my body. I’ll never be able to express the gratitude I feel. I genuinely don’t need anything outside of what needs to keep the body mind alive. I want everyone to experience this, but I’m not sure they are ready or even want to. Every moment I am there, always there, never arriving, never going, always here, always full, always infinite, always at the place of life and death and neither. End credits: All creation is hollow, and a picture's a shadow. Just a symptom of love, with a lack of a cause. Directed by The Prime Minister of writing clichès on forums.

So here's a short intro to how you could go about this consciously and willingly; Let's say you discover through introspection and contemplation that one of your shadowy impulses is telling you to pursue meaningless sex and waste your money on whatever the heck you feel like spending it on in the moment. Let's say you truly wanted to have that experience and integrate it into who you are. But let's also say you are deeply passionate about your purpose and have a grand vision for your life and the world you live in. The conscious way to go about this (assuming that you can afford it) is to make a vow. A vow that will serve a purpose of waking you up when it's time. Once its purpose is served it simply dissolves back into nothingness. The vow should sound something like this; 'Ok... I obviously feel a strong resonance with having meaningless sex and not caring about money.. I will commit to that experience fully and dedicate *this much* of my time and invest *this amount* of money in it. If things get too out of hand or I realize I made a wrong choice; I will wake up.' Essentially; you're putting yourself under hypnosis. You're putting yourself to sleep. But also; setting your alarm. The vow is your tiny light guiding you through the experience. Ofcourse; this is just one example. The scenario can look like anything. Point is; you make a conscious decision to give yourself the experience your shadow wants to act out. You calculate and create the time and space for the experience to unfold. You make sure yours and everyone else's safety will not be jeopardized. And then... you dive in. As mentioned before; another great way to jump into and/or merge with the dark side of you is... music. Lovely, awesome, epic music. Intense music. Dark, loud and heavy music - even. But also; sad and depressing music. You name it... This is - in my opinion - a much safer and much more gratifying way to explore and express certain dark thoughts and feelings. You can really get deep and far with music. Here's a good example of the loud, heavy, dark and somewhat disturbing kind; https://youtu.be/VRPxao3e_jY And here's a wonderful example of the sad, depressing and hauntingly beautiful kind; https://youtu.be/zEmtfA8FETc Get creative!

@Leo Gura Do you think all worlds I can imagine exist? Like a world where Christianity is the correct religion and we all go to hell at the end of this. Or a world just like this one where we evaporate in ten seconds. It seems all these things exist because they are Nothingness the same way my reality is Nothingness. So they are all identical. So they all exist.

I was in a rather pleasant highly conscious state with focus directed toward a certain “chakra” I’ve been working on lately while I was driving today through the countryside with rather nice weather. Near one of the peak moments of this experience, I began to recall a distant childhood memory. It was of a specific instance where I looked at a specific toy at my aunt’s house on a sunny day much like today where my cousins and other kids were playing outside. This exact moment had a certain “existential aesthetic” and context which resonated with me so heavily that I started to experience intense nostalgia. At this moment when nostalgia was becoming intense, I thought about how we will never get those precious memories back. Upon having that realization, I started to filter through different “emotional/visual snapshots” of many different personally significant life events such as losing my virginity, and plenty of other more unique and seemingly inconsequential things that I experienced. This quickly transitioned into a flood of memory-like imaginations/daydreams about the past times in that exact location. I saw human death, prehistoric animals, dinosaurs, a lifeless planet, void space, and even more complete Nothingness than that. This was an experience of Infinite Intelligence or contacting Intelligent Infinity as Ra calls it in the Law of One books. This was clear. There’s so much to the moment which I cannot even grasp now. It may sound like a cool daydream, but this was a very intense “awakening.” I’m not as thrilled about this word as I used to be. I’ve had so many experiences in this tier that my life is becoming more or less a constant awakening or at least moderately awakened state. For example, I usually rest in no-mind which is essentially the prerequisite for No-Self experiences for many people. Being in no-mind so often is quite interesting. I was in no-mind during most of the writing of this post. But yeah, the point of this post is basically just to discuss an interesting experience I had in case people want more data on such things.

@dflores321 "The club of no one" hahaha @Leo Gura Being God/nothingness for a while has made me appreciate being human with all its suffering so much more. I'm not sure going all the way is right anymore if it means never coming back to this relative game, isn't that what death is for anyway? I guess everyone's path is different. @TheAvatarState Loving kindness is so important on this path, God is alone in its infinite love, and as humans we are united in that aloneness. There's a narcissistic aloneness that makes you feel alien and separated, and there's a selfless aloneness that is intimately connected with all. When you look at another human being you're looking at a literal manifestation of God, which is much more profound then just a fleshy robotic meat suit I think.

Haha. Well if it was complete, it would become obvious that it was unreal from the very beginning, dissolving itself into the nothingness it is. Once you recognize that a thing is causeless, you realize it was never caused. If it was never caused, it does not exist. Incompleteness it quite literally that which holds math together, aswell as everything else in existence. Being complete means to be no thing at all. If you could proof everything, you could proof that you don't exist! Sneaky, sneaky reality with it's tendencies to thrive for existence. So really, what the mathematicians were thriving for all along was the cessastion of math itself, aswell as all else in all of existence. They are lucky they stumbled upon incompleteness, this way they can avoid the inevitable for a few more moments. Also, they are making a mistake in describing infinities to be larger than others. This is not actually true, any infinity is endless, it has no size at all, it is undefinable. What they call different sizes of infinity actually show different densities of infinity. We in general seem to be approach the idea of infinities in a kind of naive way. People are kind of mind blown by the ideas of infinity, yet it is not limitlessness that is so extraordinary, but limitation. Limitation must be explained, limitlessness is the default. They are trying to explain limitlnessness through limitation, when instead they need to start to think about how limitation can be explained through limitlessness. The miracle is not that there are lines with no divisions. The miracle is the fact that division can exist at all. That is mindblowing, truly mystifying. The self-referential problem is actually a really fitting name. You cannot refer to your Self, because if you could, you would lose your self.

You are on the right path. Most, not all, people on this forum are still stuck in the limited belief of just Us and God, with nothing between. The Ego still controls their limited perception of Human form and Nothingness/God. They do not see the Forest with all it’s diversity and multidimensional patterns, realities and forms of Beingness, which are beyond the Human experience. They only see the Tree, and mistaken the Tree for God. They have not experienced the diverse multidimensional Forest within the One Tree of God, because of their limited beliefs. They are still stuck in their beliefs that we are the only “Beings” ever created by God, and beyond Us, there is only a Void of consciousness and nothingness! The Ego loves to be the center of attention, and what better way of being the center of attention and feeling special, by believe there is only Us and God! Most of us believe we are at the summit of Beingness, so we do not need to explore the rest of God’s infinite Ocean of multidimensional identities and acts of creativity. How dare anyone imply that we are not at the top of all creation! We are the masters of this planet, and we have the highest awareness and consciousness that ever existed! Especially "We" on this Forum, because We are more conscious and enlightened than anyone else on the planet! LOL... Just a little drama to get the point across.... Having said that, I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to studied and experience many indigenous and Shamanic spiritual teachings and ceremonies, and one of the most important teachings I received from them, was to become aware of the Ego’s need and illusion of “Self importance.” What the Ego needs most right now, is to be Humble and conscious of all forms of Beingness. "We are Not the only Form of Beingness" within an infinite Cosmos of multidimensional realities that exist in all directions of Us, and within God! The Ego hates being small, it needs to feel big and important! Yes, we are God, but we are also a limited microscopic fragment of God within an infinite ocean of other forms of beingness that are far more expanded/advance than we are, which no longer have a need to experience or enter physical matter. If you dig deep enough, or expand your awareness and consciousness beyond the Egos limited believes, you will soon realize that we are a form, or pattern of Psychic Energy materialized in matter. This Psychic Energy materialized is also an interconnected and interrelated psychic energy extension of some of these more expanded “Beings” of consciousness, awareness and energy, which have decided to explore this one particular physical reality. Me, We, They and Them, are all interconnected and interrelated within “All That Is.” Just sharing a few thoughts, ideas and beliefs.

We are just changing definitions around. I would say awareness is time. I would say nothingness is time as long as it continues to be nothing. But the moment it's something, that's also time. It's just word games. I don't find any significance in saying there is no time other than intellectual flexing tbh.

No they don't contradict and you don't need to do both simultaneously because there aren't two things. Through meditation you can realize the Self - and you can reach states of consciousnes that are omniscient. I don't like creating a duality between "classical awakening" as being where meditation can't get you to the Godhead. It most certainly can. It's not limited to no mind/void and nothingness/no self realizations. Through no mind meditation you can actually go full circle into God Consciousness and omniscience. Shutting down the mind into Pure Actuality is the portal to Infinite Mind. Now.....all of that said - I agree with Leo that reaching these states through meditation is rare. Hardly anyone does it..I meditated for two weeks - perhaps even less than that. So if you are two years into the work then I would look at leveraging all of the tools within your tool belt.. But even with powerful psychedelics I feel that you need to be at a baseline state where you are mature enough.

Oh boy. This is it. Everything. Imagination. Including Alan Watts. Including me as a person. Including you as a person. Including "being asleep" -- including "being awake". Death. Life. Two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, no difference. Only the difference YOU imagine there is (as God). Everything. Imagination. Nothing. Real. Unreal. Real. Everything. Nowhere to get to. Everywhere to get to. Sing. Dance. Play. Enjoy. Live. Let go. Love. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door ... It opens - I've been knocking from the inside!" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just like a meteor falling down from the sky and destroying your living room is: - not your doing, - nothing to do with you, - out of your control, - not your own free choice, likewise is "insert-your-name" (with your body and with all your 'problems', inclinations, thoughts, feelings etc.) that coincidentally was born out of your mother's stomach (and ruined 'your peace')...: - not your doing, - noting to do with you, - out of your control, - not your own free choice. ((( However, one could also turn the above completely on its head and say that the metor impact WAS/IS my doing, and that my birth into (= out of) this world likewise WAS/IS a free choice that *I* took ☯️ ☯️ ☯️ ))) But if the above is true what are 'you' then? 'What am I?' I/You are That/He/She which dreams , imagines: - that a meteor (perhaps) fell down and ruined your house ?? - that "insert-your-name" was born and is currently xx years old, has an ugly/nice/normal/abnormal body, study/work with yyy and has zzz problems, hhh thoughts & worries & regrets, fff inclinations, sss dreams. And what IS 'that' ??? I don't know. No one does. Because it cannot be known - as in "traditional knowledge" can be known. It can only be. You are IT - already! Always. One can never not be 'IT'; the only (imagined) difference is whether you're aware of 'IT' or not. Consciousness. You could call it God, Love, The Eternal Dreamer, The Dao, The Absolute, Infinity, Eternity, Nothingness, Everythingness, Consciousness, Spaghetthi-Monster... In some way, it really doesn't matter what we call/name 'Reality', since <words/thoughts/logic/concepts/rationality> naturally never can contain IT. Sometimes it may even be wise to not try to call it anything! What is Reality? THIS: ................ *smashing a gong* ... and we won't give it a name! Can you bite your own teeth? Can eyes looking out ever see from where they are looking? Can a fist grasp itself? What a caterpillar calls the end of the world -- we call a butterfly! Luckily we got music, dancing, embodiment/physical activites, sex (tantra), meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, art .... that can in a much better way can contain ("show us") 'IT' than words/thoughts/science/logic/conceptualizing can! THIS IS IT! THIS. HELLO! YES. THIS. NO - NOT THAT. THIS! HA HA HA <3 <3 <3 The finger pointing to the moon ..... is NOT the moon. You cannot eat the menu! The map is not the terrotity. It is a SILLY idea to try to live life in your head all the time! (It can be very good and fine to think and reflect and contemplate a lot -- but you have to be practical about life too!) Form, emptiness. Emptiness, form. Life, death. Death, life. Good, bad. Evil, Good. Implicit, explicit. Outer, inner. Internal, external. External, internal. Physical, mental. Mental, physical. Material world, Consciousness. Consciousness, the outside world. Being, Nothingness. Nothingness, Everything. Up, down. Down, up. Worse, better. Better, worse. Self, other. Other, self. Free will, determined/controlled. Determined, free. Illusion, real. Real, dream. The real unreal --- The unreal real. Form is Emptiness --- Emptiness is Form. Hell, Heaven. Both here. Now. What you see is solely determined by 'the inner game'; that is: how you look at the world; from where? From which point of view? Which perspective? Believe in the story that gives you most inner joy. Anything else is a form of silly autism. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The world -- existence, life -- will never be good unless you are willing to see its goodness. What you experience depends on how you look at things. When you look with judgement -- either upon yourself, the world or both -- life seems twisted and empty. When you begin to look with an open heart and mind, life becomes fascinating and full of both meaning and mystery. When you realize the perfection, intelligence and beauty of everything in existence precisely as it is (without the filters of ego; yes, drop them - let go!), you see that every outcome is a good one. You start to live life fully without fear and regret. You learn and move on. When you look with love instead of judgement, you see a whole different world. Life isn't easy all the time. You're not alone. For there to be joy, there has to be some pain. So instead of looking at the painful life-phases that you're undergoing as "bad", look at them as absolutely necessary and beneficial in the long run for your own growth and eventual happiness. Remember, nothing lasts forever, everything passes away at some point. 0. Knowledge is but a rumor until it lives in the body/bones. 1. Reality is non-dual. Non-duality means: Not one, not two. The question is: do you get it or not? For example, let's take the extreme duality: good - bad . Obviously complete opposites. Right? Well, not so fast. "Apply non-duality to it": Reality is not: bad Reality is not: good (either) Reality is not: "good AND bad" (paradox). Reality is: ________________ (Or you 'could' say: "bad-good"). 2. To let go of power is to gain power. 3. To let go of control is to gain control. Life is about all the contrasts! As a wise man said: - The heavenly highs, one is capable of reaching, are directly proportional with the unknown depths, one has the courage to dive down into. - The apparent seperation / division / fragmentation, paradoxes, opposites ... only exist in the divided mind, based on subject-object-relations ... ((( that is how the illusionary, separate self -- the ego -- survives; or we could say that 'opposites/duality creates the illusion of ego'; a kind of 'strange loop' that is almost impossible to 'get out of' (impossible because 1. it is imaginary, 2. you imagined it yourself and deep down want to stay in it, 3. in a sense there is nothing to get out of; you *trying* to get out (becoming awakened / enlightened) is what keeps you in 'it' (= asleep, ego) ... - It is "possible" though, just like it is possible for a larva through 'rebirth' to become a butterfly; the larva is in a beautiful away ALREADY the butterfluy, just like an acorn contains the whole tree ... ))) ... - but from the Level of Unity (The Heavenly Self's Consciousness; God's point-of-view) all these 'apparent' opposites/paradoxes -- all fragmentation, division, seperation -- are dissolved & melted 'back into' what they truly are & have always been: Your Imagination - Oneness. One. Zero. Unity. Harmony. Oneness. Lila. Divine play. Game. Theater play. An Eternal Dance. Musical Music. The Bottomless Bottom. The Gateless Gate. The Ground of Being. The Groundless Ground. God. Unconditional Love. Nothingness. The Eternal Dao That Cannot Be Spoken. Buddha Nature. Christ Consciousness. Pure Awareness. Infinity. Source. The Absolute. Goodness with a capital G. Just Love. ☯️?????❤️?? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: <<< There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black. In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place. God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world. >>> This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating." - Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center. You find the jewel, and it draws you off. In loving the spiritual, you cannot despise the earthly." - J. Campbell. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “This is IT! So you don’t need to do anything at all… It’s just the way it is. What’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation.. It’s not just letting go. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything.” ~ Alan Watts “When you look for your own mind, that is to say, your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you won’t be able to find it. But the only way you’ll know it isn’t there is if you look for it hard enough, to find out that it isn’t there. And so everybody says ‘All right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.’ Because the harder you look, you won’t be able to find it, and then you’ll realize it isn’t there at all. There isn’t a separate you. You’re mind is what there is. Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible…. So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat. Look out the window and see; it’s obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn’t is to say ‘Well let’s go and find the edge.’ And in order to find the edge, you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles, you’ll never find it that way. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the world is round. That’s the only way that will teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions. There is another possibility, however. But this is more difficult to describe. Let’s say we take as the basic supposition–which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it–that this now moment in which I’m talking and you’re listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we’re sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed. This is IT! So you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try and not do anything, because that’s doing something. It’s just the way it is. In other words, what’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it’s not ordinary relaxation. It’s not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you’re heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It’s not like that. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything. And how to explain that? Because there’s nothing to explain. It is the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up!” ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Life is not a problem to solve, but an experience to be had. However, sure - you can imagine all kinds of problems that "should" be solved (in order for you & the world ? to be at peace ?️), but that is just it: imagination, fantasy, a dramatic good movie, a theater play, a book, a game... play ???. Life is what you choose to experience. The ultimate meaning of life is very simple: it's life itself! Of course! But this is so obvious that almost no one seems to buy into it, and everyone runs around in great panic and try desperately to achieve something beyond themselves. There isn't anything wrong with trying to achieve something beyond oneself, as long as one remembers it's just a cute game. But of course: We should all strive to make it a good game, a good dream, a good book, a good play, a good film... with total redemption for all the dream-characters in the end ??❤️?. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o There’s aren’t enough words to describe how powerful this video is for me. It’s in my iPod and every single morning before I lift I listen to this speech. It’s absolutely stunning. Inspirational. Motivating. It’s everything to me. I would like for you to watch it and tell me what you think. We all should dream big. Without going after our dream, we cannot possibly live our best life. It is there for a reason. It’s necessary that we follow it…not just an option: "If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be." And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not." - Watts up, Alan? Love ya all <3

Yeah, you can do it. Zen no-mind paired with No-Self will obliterate thought. Your character could orate a filibuster on the Senate floor for 48 hours, and you still wouldn’t have done a single thing or thought a single thought. I’ve found that true no-mind and No-Self in myself loves to live through the ego. The thing is that the ego runs itself now. You are detached. You are the witness, but upon looking for yourself, you know that you can never be found. Everything is absolute Nothingness. Your thoughts come from the void of Nothingness whether you are in incessant thought or in pure no-mind and No-Self. I can’t even say that all of this hasn’t applied to “myself” as I’ve wrote this post.

@BipolarGrowth Intedimensional Portal. Continuous inner self reflective work to acommplish communicational skills. Clairaudience on one occasion. During a transmission I lie down after 1 hour of relaxation and another 25 minutes of meditation. The writing is reconstructed from memory, later. @Dodo Thanks! Gaia rarely ever speaks to me. I can count our sessions on one hand. @Frenk Yes, Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God Books, taught me how to develop intuitive conversations pretty much with any being in existence. @Seraphim I just discovered Leo's channel back then and so Gaia used my subconscious mind to bring it up to the conscious. You're right, of course. I am speaking to myself. to my own mind. When you realize Who You Are, for real. You see that everything is equal to Self. To God. and the mind is just my tool for communications. You DO have this ability. You simply not trained in it. It's like a muscle - when you use it often, it works. The opposite is true also, neglect it and you're just another regular bloke. No judgements, just telling you how it is. When i ask for new insights, I need to transcend every communication - To Go Meta of this intricate matrix of The Universal System and go WITHIN, even deeper. The Shinning Nexus awaits. It springs from The Ultimate Nothingness and IS Absolute Isness. @machiavelli Yes, exactly that. Gaia Mother Earth. It is real, as far as I know. and that is as far as you can get. I worked on Spirit Guide communucatiion since age 19 with the help of many mentors, teachers and masters. Some directly, some remotely. I cultivated techniques for Self Disciplined Spiritual Practice. Tai Chi, Yoga and Meditation are my main exercises. Read a lot of books. Lately I'm active on social media, high consciousness websites, enlightened chat rooms - yes, they exist. Not many but some are just like that. Supreme wisdom is shared. Greg

A while ago I had this profound realization that I do not view the world through my eyes. It was so obvious to me; this whole thing is conscious of itself. There is no need for eyes. God simply is. And one of the qualities of being is consciousness. The ability to see and (to various degrees) recognize oneself. And it's instantaneous. It's now. Seeing and that which is seen are indistinguishable. But as always; there is a trick. And the trick that makes you believe you're over here looking at the world with your eyes is, quite simply; blur. What is blur? Google says; it's when something is unclear or less distinct. Something that cannot be perceived clearly. Hmm. Rings any bells? It's all consciousness, baby. And that which is blurred; is simply the degree to which consciousness is asleep to itself. You had your dmt trips. You know what I'm talking about. There are no blurry corners in the Light of God... -Or so they report. I've been exploring this and playing around with it a bit. Simply by staring into the deep nothingness and breathing my way around. And it occurred to me in one moment that me not seeing my face, or Ivan's face - if you will - is not a coincidence. It is yet another trick of consciousness. I can recall memories... instances of being fully conscious of my head/face. As if I was looking into a mirror. But better. Much, much better. It was unlike anything... None of us has ever seen our own faces, actually. We only see a very limited, distorted reflection of it. Be it in a mirror, a picture or whatever... But to be conscious of it directly is beyond anyone's wildest imagination. So I'm wondering now; am I onto something here..? I think I am. Can anyone relate?

Suppose we investigate these words from a deeper perspective. Many see this and assume, well my image is human body so God must be human or human like etc. Others perhaps reach the assumption that they are the mind, their image self is mind and therefore then God must be mind. But us here have a deeper understanding of Self through enquiry and other practices. The image we "get" of our self is no self or clear now awareness. What if what we're being as our Self is still not God. It could still be just an image of it only, but those here who are "God realised" perhaps have an assumption that their image of nothingness/God is the true nothingness /God, when it is only an one of many images of infinity. Thoughts? If you believe this is just mental masturbation, skip. I am inviting experiential investigation and deeper contemplation of this. If you are made in the image of God and see your true Image, you see God. Sure! But maybe the God this image is of, would find it arrogant and disrespectful for one image to claim it is the All itself. As in, you may be infinity, but there is one Absolute out of which the image of many infinities come. There are infinity sets smaller than others which is provable through mathematics. There are more numbers between 1 and 10 than there are between 1 and 5, but they are both infinitely many. You might be infinity in actuality, but are you the Absolute? My take is no, but i am open to discussion

Here is a little quick representation of my understanding. in short, I believe the atman is something that both exists and doesn't exist ( a point) and can be viewed both as nothingness and as somethingness. Check out the pic. To me it is not about all those who discuss about it etc. I will never be able to trust with my eternal soul to someone else. What if they have bad intentions? For me to really know I have to find out myself. Especially if the subject is me!

I believe that what Leo is saying is that atman is imaginary and therefore not real (therefore no atman). That only Brahman/nothingness/Everythingness is real because it cannot be imagined. While the atman POV can be imagined. I guess! (we are imagining it right now )

So this is a new (or new old) way to try to conceptualize reality and make sense of it. The distinctions here are arbitrary and completely relative but nevertheless here we go. There is basically only two things in all of existence.. Forms and formlessness. That's it. There isn't and never was and never will be anything else. The forms ALWAYS are limited and impermanent. The formless ONLY is unlimited and permanent. The two Are actually identical but it's hard for the mind to make sense of that (how could these forms be formless?). Instead try to think of it this way.. The formless is the container of forms. You might ask "where are all these forms taking place"? "where does existence happening"? And the answer is really nowhere.. Reality is happening inside of nothingness. If we erase all forms from existence.. What's left? Only pure formlessness. Pure nothingness. So that's like what's underneath all forms. Or the container of all forms.. The original state that then comes different forms and appear inside of it. So this present moment that's happening right now is 50 % forms and 50 % formlessness. We usually don't think of it this way.. We think "it's just forms ".of course you can't see it because it's not a form. It has no qualities whatsoever and that's precisely why and how it is present everywhere and every when yet you can't see it.. Because you can only see forms. But how come forms are present without a container? There must be a container that contains all these forms and it can't be anything else but formlessness. Think about an empty glass that is necessary to have some water or any substance inside of it. But instead what we have here is not an empty "glass".. But rather pure emptiness. Now you might ask.."where did all these forms come from then"? Here there is really no answer. It's pure magic. But the trick is that ultimately all forms appear and disappear.. They are just like dreams or hallucinations.. Forever appearing and disappearing. There is no rational explanation whatsoever why forms are here (the answer is actually that form is formlessness but it's near impossible to make sense of it rationally without a mystical experience). But the only way to relate to it is by understanding that all forms are ultimately a temporary passing show that means absolutely nothing and was never ought to be anything substantial or to form a "reality".

@Someone herewhat the fuck is nothingness

Sounds like you all have been reading up on Douglas Harding and Richard Lang's work on the Headless way. I am trying to understand the bible verse What I gather from this is that YOU CAN see MY FACE and LIVE because the No-Face is All-Face. The Face of No-Face is the same for all. Oh but I think I am getting another interpretation here in that No "man" meaning ego can see the God-self of No-face and continue to exist. The No-Face shatters the illusion of having a head or ego and thus when you see my face, meaning the no-face of nothingness in all of us, then your ego is gone and you no longer live, meaning living as a self in a world, but rather a world experiencing a self. Did I get it?

Here are all the quotes I've collected last year. Enjoy. "Do not make a distinction what is filthy and what is sacred. This is where the key is. Because involvement means unprejudiced inclusion." - Sadhguru "The juvenile idea of freedom is you want to do your own thing. A wrong idea, a wrong attitude, a wrong emotion can cause much, much more damage than poison." - Sadhguru "Once you get identified with something that you are not, your intelligence is no good. It just becomes repetitive. This repetitive intelligence is what we are referring to as karma. Your experience of life is 100% your doing." - Sadhguru "What you do in this world should be relevant to the situation in which you exist. Action is always about the situation, not about you. In a given situation, you simply do what's needed." - Sadhguru "Create wealth, because only after creating wealth, do many other dimensions open for you. Use everything as a step. Don’t deny anything. If you have money, you can meditate more easily than the poor person. You can have more time to yourself. You can have a small temple in your house; you can have a garden, rosebushes, where meditation will be easier. You can allow yourself a few holidays in the mountains; you can go into isolation and live without worry. If you have money, use it for something that money cannot purchase, but for which money can create a space. Wealth is as significant as beautiful music, as great literature, as masterpieces of art." - Osho "Success in any venture is simply the automatic consequence of being the best that one can be as a lifestyle, without looking for gain." - Doc "If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the maximum of what I mean by the term ‘a classic’, it is the word maturity. The qualities of the classic are maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style." - T.S. Eliot "The artist makes available for humanity knowledge that everyone knows but has forgotten. Great works of art are recognized universally. Although they may be clothed in the time and space in which they were created, they transcend that: they speak across generations; across borders, because they are putting into form something that is shared by everybody, and they give everybody access to what is in the depths of their own consciousness." - Spira “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” - Henry David Thoreau "Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung "A person who rejects things just out of the desire to be 'different' still conforms as their life, like that of the more typical conformist, is still shaped by an external source, that being the crowd. True nonconformity, in contrast, is displayed to the degree that one's life path, and thus character, are shaped by behaviors, beliefs, and values which are chosen for personal or authentic reasons." - Unknown "Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of nothing is the greatest; its essence dwells between the past and the future, and possesses nothing of the present. Nothingness has no center, and its boundaries are nothingness; this nothingness has the part equal to the whole and the whole to the part, the divisible to the indivisible, and it comes to the same amount whether we divide it, or multiply it, or add to it, or subtract from it. Everything is unfolded into everything. Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything." - Leonardo da Vinci "The hardest thing you'll ever do in life is to make that critical decision to say 'no' to yourself and to say 'yes' to truth at the cost of yourself. As soon as you do this, you will become an outcast. You will also be on your way to becoming a true hero." - Gura "Projection is when your needs, your fears, your cravings, and your agenda and ego color or distort how you see people." - Gura “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "If you are genuinely on the spiritual path, nothing will be clear. Everything will be a blur. The faster you travel the more of a blur it becomes." - Sadhguru "Suffering, in any form, is caused by a misperception, and a misperception is caused by a belief, an idea that's grabbed; a conclusion." - Adya "When we say pleasant, pleasantness happens in five different ways – if your body becomes pleasant, we call it health; if your body becomes very pleasant, we call it pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call it peace; if it becomes very pleasant, we call it joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call it love; if they become very pleasant, we call it compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call it bliss; if they become very pleasant, we call it ecstasy. If your surroundings become pleasant, you say, it is success." - Sadhguru "Transformation doesn't come through struggle. Transformation comes through awareness. The harder you struggle, the field of your awareness gets narrower and narrower." - Adya "You start to run up against archetypal patterns of holding. It's like a taboo against fully being what you really are." - Adya "To not struggle doesn't mean to not pay attention. To let go of struggle is a very engaged thing to do." - Adya "All you have is this moment of dreamstate being which can slam shut at any moment. The questions is: 'What are you going to do with it?'" - Jed "Only in silence do we have the stability to look very closely at our own experience — that's the usefulness of silence; in silence a question has great power." - Adya "There has to be the willingness to experience what is understood; what is seen. What is it like to not find a separate somebody there? What's the experience of it? What does it feel like? This starts to be the link between understanding and realization. Realization can only come spontaneously. This goes true for any and all spiritual inquiry: it has to be grounded in experience and a certain stillness of mind. Your thought processes don't have to come to a complete stop. Your attention has to be more on experience than it is on thinking." - Adya "We're dealing with a way of engaging what's the most important thing to you in such a way that you do not succumb to the ego pursuing its ideal and its image, and yet you also don't succumb to: 'It's grace there's nothing I can do, and it'll happen when it happens.'" - Adya "It's a willingness to be really honest with yourself: 'Okay, I'm resting in being. Is this what it's all about for me? Is this enough? Is this the ultimate truth?' That doesn't mean you leave being and start rushing, but from resting in being you keep your integrity. You always check in with your integrity of what it's about. Resting in being is the foundation, but then just because we feel good doesn't mean we have to throw out our integrity. 'Have I finished the job here? Is it over with?' Now you're resting in being, and you've got the energy of the question. It's very difficult to look at what's true when we're not in being. If we're all scattered, it's hard to ask the question in any useful way, but when we stop, and make room for the silence, we feel better, so we go to sleep. Can we not lose our integrity when we start to feel good? What am I really, even when I'm feeling good? That's the balance. It's like seeking without seeking." - Adya "Letting everything be is not an end unto itself, because if we see letting everything be as an end, then we actually end up in a certain state of total unintelligence." - Adya "If there is a belief pattern — that is totally allowed to be. If we're resisting the beliefs that we have or indulge in them, meaning 'I know my belief is true.' then nothing can happen. When you let it happen, you can see it. This feeling has a belief. This feeling is allowed to be, and it reveals the belief, and the belief is allowed to be, and the belief reveals itself even deeper. Never at any moment is one having the goal to remove it. The goal is what's true. What's it like to belief this thought? What has happened my whole life through believing this thought? What kind of life has this thought actually generated? No belief corresponds with what is, but you have to question them to find that out." - Adya "That's all that's happening: you have a thought, you believe it, you're living it out, you're manifesting the thought. The thought isn't true, but you can believe it and manifest it." - Adya "Inquiry must not be used with the intention of getting rid of something. There's a deeper intention which the love of truth, of what is. Just to do it to feel better will leave us continually still trapped in the confines of the ego." - Adya "There is this intelligence within us that arises when we're not manipulating our experience." - Adya "This isn't about removing negativity. This is sometimes removing thoughts that make you feel really, really good. Sometimes it's removing false comforts." - Adya "The illusion of personal will must be faced; it calls for the deepest surrender to truth itself. True realization comes through a complete relinquishing of personal will. There is no such thing as the personal, but until we see that there is really no such thing as the personal will, the experience of willfulness is something we must encounter. This is where we start to encounter the wisdom of being disillusioned. When we feel disillusioned with something, it means we're coming to the end of our willfulness, and it's only by coming to the end of our willfulness that this transformation happens." - Adya "It's not that one needs to destroy their opinions or their preferences. What does get destroyed, as we awaken, is believing them, is even the capacity to believe them. It becomes impossible to believe your own beliefs." - Adya "Start to meet them, face them, and see the truth of them: how is it that this body-mind unenlightens itself? What am I avoiding? What am I running from? What is it that I don't want to deal with? That can be internally and, or externally. The thing that we avoid will pull consciousness back to itself, because everything seeks truth, not only every being, but every situation. When we stop avoiding anything or any part of life in any way, it's often magical how staying in the presence of our being effortlessly happens. What do you really know about it that you really don't want to know? Act on what you know to be true. It takes courage, but moving from the truth and in the truth is always the safest way to go. Always. Moving in illusion pretends to be safe, but illusion always ends up hurting. None of us get away with denial. There's always a price to be paid." - Adya "What you judge yourself for is what you can damn near guarantee you're going to repeat." - Adya "It's not even bringing attention to consciousness. It's more like a recognition, an admission. It doesn't matter if you understand it. Just the admission, the recognition that it is present, and then stopping in that recognition. No speculation. No metaphysics. No ideas. It silences you all by itself. Right now consciousness is doing nothing. It's not a checked out doing nothing, it's not a dismissive doing nothing, it's not a lazy doing nothing. It's vital and alive and full of presence. It's the doing nothing where everything is being done. When it comes to you, you will see that everywhere. Realizing you can't make it happen really opens the doorway for the happening to happen. You can't make it happen, and what you can do is to simply come into a recognition and appreciation, an acknowledgement that consciousness is fully functional. Get the sense of it. Get the feel of it. Give your attention, your heart, and your soul to that. Just to the sense, the feel. The rest literally takes care of itself." - Adya "Our brain pays attention to what is changing. Our brain discounts what is not changing. Meditation is the art of paying attention to what your mind usually discounts. You might be amazed at how well life can figure things out through you. Life can clarify things for you, bring things to you. It does it for you, if you allow it to." - Adya "This is something you notice, it's not something you do. None of this outside of your experience. If you're thinking about it, and you're trying to impose it upon yourself, you're quite literally wasting your time." - Adya "When we're not in truth, no matter what our mind thinks, our bodies will tend to have some sort of contraction, some sort of discomfort. That is the underlying sense of spiritual guidance." - Adya "Self-improvement is just a dressed up form of self-conflict. When you discover the truth, bad habits can disappear." - Naval "You can save a lot of time by picking the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. Third comes how hard you work. They are like three legs of a stool. If you shortchange any one of them, the whole stool is going to fall. You can’t easily pick one over the other." - Naval "You can save a lot of time by picking the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. Third comes how hard you work. They are like three legs of a stool. If you shortchange any one of them, the whole stool is going to fall. You can’t easily pick one over the other." - Naval "Keep changing your objective until it arrives at your specific knowledge, skill sets, position, capabilities, location and interests. Your objective and skills should converge to make you number one. When you’re searching for what to do, you have two different foci to keep in mind. One is, 'I want to be the best at what I do.' The second is, 'What I do is flexible, so that I’m the best at it.' You want to arrive at a comfortable place where you feel, 'This is something I can be amazing at, while still being authentic to who I am.'" - Naval "Lean towards authenticity, towards getting away from competition. Competition leads to copy-catting and playing the completely wrong game. If the masses knew how to build great things and create great wealth, we’d all be rich by now. When you see a lot of competition, sometimes that indicates the masses have already arrived. It’s already competed over too much. Or it’s the wrong trend to begin with. On the other hand, if the whole market is empty, that can be a warning indicator. It can indicate you’ve gone too authentic and should focus more on the product-market part of founder-product-market fit. There’s a balance you have to find. Generally, people will make the mistake of paying too much attention to the competition. The great founders tend to be authentic iconoclasts." - Naval "Immediate doesn’t work. You have to put in the time. You have to put in the hours. You have to put yourself in that position with specific knowledge, accountability, leverage and an authentic skill-set in order to be the best in the world at what you do." - Naval "One thing that’s important in entrepreneurship: You just have to be right once. You get many, many shots on goal. You can take a shot on goal every three to five years, maybe every 10 at the slowest. Or once every year at the fastest, depending on how you’re iterating with startups. But you only have to be right once." - Naval "Your eventual outcome will be equal to something like the distinctiveness of your specific knowledge; times how much leverage you can apply to that knowledge; times how often your judgment is correct; times how singularly accountable you are for the outcome; times how much society values what you’re doing. Then you compound that with how long you can keep doing it and how long you can keep improving it through reading and learning." - Nivi "Adding more complexity to your decision-making process gets you a worse answer. You’re better off picking the single biggest thing or two. Ask yourself: What am I really good at, according to observation and people I trust, that the market values? Those two variables alone are probably good enough. If you’re good at it, you’ll keep it up. You’ll develop the judgment. If you’re good at it and you like to do it, eventually people will give you the resources and you won’t be afraid to take on accountability." - Naval "The first thing you realize when you’ve made a bunch of money is that you’re still the same person. If you’re happy, you’re happy. If you’re unhappy, you’re unhappy. If you’re calm and fulfilled and peaceful, you’re still that same person." - Naval "You want to figure out what you’re uniquely good at — or what you uniquely are — and apply as much leverage as possible. So making money isn’t even something you do. It’s not a skill. It’s who you are, stamped out a million times." - Nivi "People don’t understand what accountability entails. They think accountability means being successfully accountable. No—it means you have to stick your neck out and fail publicly. You have to be willing to let people criticize you." - Naval "Sometimes it takes suffering through the wrong thing to motivate you to find the right thing." - Naval "Judgment takes experience. It takes a lot of time to build up. You have to put yourself in positions where you can exercise judgment. That’ll come from taking on accountability. Leverage is something that society gives you after you’ve demonstrated judgment. You can get it faster by learning high-leverage skills like coding or working with the media. These are permissionless leverage. This is why I encourage people to learn to code or produce media, even if it’s just nights and weekends." - Naval "Early on, find things that interest you and allow you to take on accountability. Don’t worry about short-term compensation. Compensation comes when you’re tired of waiting for it and have given up on it. This is the way the whole system works." - Naval "There are two forms of specific knowledge: timely and timeless." - Naval "Technology is, by definition, the intellectual frontier. It’s taking things from science and culture that we have not figured out how to mass produce or create efficiently and figuring out how to commercialize it and make it available to everybody. Technology will always be a great field where you can pick up specific knowledge that is valuable to society." - Naval "Investing is one of those skills that can only be learned on the job. When you find a skill like that, you’re dealing with specific knowledge. Another good indicator of specific knowledge is when someone can’t give a straight answer to the question: 'What do you do every day?' Or you get an answer along the lines of, 'Every day is different based on what’s going on.' The thing is so complicated and dependent upon circumstances that it can’t be boiled down into a textbook form." - Naval "Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology. What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage." - Paul Graham "How to grow revenue fast? Make something people want. How to make something people want? Make something you want." - Graham "Creativity is the art of hiding your influence." - Unknown "When you feel a lack of something, or notice that you should have had this or that, you are thinking original thoughts. You see things differently and if you start researching the subject, you are probably very close to making the new big thing, or at least the newer and better version of something that already exists." - Unknown "If you do a business and your only plan is to make money, and you're gonna make a game like somebody else's game, and then you take two years and work hard, late hours, and you make that game, it comes out, nobody buys it, and then what? You wasted two years of your life maybe doing boring things. That's my biggest advice: don't do that. The human species has enough people just trying to pick low-hanging fruit and do the easy thing. We need people doing the hard jobs, and scouting unknown territory. 'I'm gonna out there and look for the fruit that nobody even knows what it is yet.'" - Blow "Don't take surface knowledge too seriously, because it won't matter in two years, but there is deep knowledge that will matter always." - Blow "Insights do not bring cure." “It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” - Marie-Louise von Franz "The four basic premises of writing are clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity." - William Zinsser "Let us have an end to such phrases as these: 'it is also important to bear in mind the following considerations' .... 'or consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect'. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word." - Churchill "The deeper question is to ask what’s worthy of orienting your entire life around. I’d also add to that, what is worth suffering for?" - Adya "God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear." "Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do." - Rowling "Take your time and enjoy it; that's what should be number one." - McMillen "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things. And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches." - Hill "Let fear be your guide and always go into the darkness are good mottos for spiritual autolysis." - Jed "Your authentic narrative — your unique pattern, your spiritual DNA — is not being hidden or withheld from you, but you won’t find it in any classroom or textbook, or get it from any so-called spiritual teacher, and you certainly won’t find it in the herd." - Jed “You can only discover your unique path by traveling it. Awakening within the dreamstate is not a one-and-done deal, it’s an on-going journey. Every step is the revelation of a new vista. It’s a process of continuous unfolding, but to discover your unique pattern you must first break out of the herd’s pattern and find your own way. That’s the death/rebirth transition no one likes to hear about, but there can be no adulthood without first dying out of childhood.” - Jed "If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future." - Paul Graham "It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting." - Graham "I think we just have to face the fact that elegance and curtness are two names for the same thing." - Graham "I studiously avoided all so-called holy men. I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own…I must shape my life out of myself, out of what my inner being tells me or what nature brings to me." - Jung "One’s absolute reality is beyond consciousness itself. It is the substrate of consciousness; it is beyond Allness or Voidness. It is prior to Creation, beyond the manifest and the unmanifest. It is prior to existence, beingness, or is-ness. It is beyond identity, yet out of it arises the Self. It is neither transcendent nor imminent, yet both. It is the infinite potentiality out of which the All and the One arise. The Self is the Presence expressed as existence, and out of that consciousness arises the sense of Existence." - Doc "Once you've set your intention, then you don't resist, because the intention will carry the rest of the way." - Doc "People will rise to be that which you see them as; people will rise to the expectation." - Doc "Intention increases the likelihood of what is held in mind. A person who calibrates quite high, if they hold something in mind, its likelihood of manifesting is sometimes close to hundred percent. People with a low negative calibration probably tend to manifest what they don't want. It's the power of who one has become and is." - Doc "One who can change his breathing, could then change his thoughts and feelings, which sets the breath on the foreground of any change you desire in your life." "Life is the energy of God." - Doc "Everything is much more powerful on the unmanifest. Whatever is on the unmanifest must, sooner or later, manifest. That's how it works. It must manifest." - Adya "Many people have many resentments about many things in their life, and, if you check back on them, you see that they were earned." - Doc "There is nothing stopping you from using your creative mind to invent some new gadget, product, service, or art which will generate $1 million in value. If you'd put as much energy into being creative as most people do in playing victim, you'd solve all your money problems." - Gura "Naivete is different than ignorance, and that's different from innocence, and they're all different than denial. What passes as spirituality is often denial." - Doc "Life is nothing but a fight against your own disbelief. Whatever you don't believe you can do is what you're fighting against." "Each and everyone completely and totally themselves determines their ultimate faith via their own choice and by no other. There is no arbitrary God that has to see to it that you go to bad places." - Doc "We're only going to experience that which we already are, because there isn't anything else." - Doc "The 'ancient craft of communicating events and experiences, using words, images, sounds and gestures' by telling a story is not only the means by which people passed on their cultural values and traditions and history from one generation to another, it has been an important part of most forms of entertainment ever since the earliest times." "Do work you’re proud of." - Neil Druckmann "Worry about fighting your way out of your embryonic pod first, then you can worry about what you’ll do when you’re out. Think in terms of the expansion, exploration and expression of your own unique pattern, and discover the one thing you can create that no one else can." - Jed "Don't grasp onto anything. Don't grasp onto the hells and don't grasp onto the heavens. They're all projections of mind." - Adya "Awakening has to have to do with a fundamental shift of identity. It leaves its rigid confinement to the psychological structures, to the physical structures, so we no longer have a rigid self-definition in our mind. Identity lets go. What it goes to varies from person to person. Someone can realize total unity or absolute pure awareness. There is various degrees. The similarity is the shift of identity." - Adya "It's one thing to have that understanding when you're in a room by yourself. It's quite another to not only sustain it but be able to bring it forth and live from it, not only exteriorly but how we relate to our own psychology, our humanity, our fallibility. That unfolding is the real journey. That requires a fierce amount of humility and determination." - Adya "We all hold vastly paradoxical experiences that combine totally opposing points of view at the same time." - Adya "It's easy for the ego to hide in clarity, to hide from our humanness, our fallibility. To be honest with oneself, it's not how to deal with all the issues, it's the vital thing that begins to open the door. Honesty is to no longer lie to yourself. Am I clear here? In that conversation, was I clear? How about my reaction to that? When I contracted, or got angry, or got jealous. Honesty is to say: 'Oh, I got angry. I got jealous. I really did.' Everyone is walking around trying to be so untouched by everything, it can be hard to admit everything." - Adya "Spirit leaps up and out. There's another movement: spirit moving down and in. It is endeavoring to embody, and, as it does that, it begins to put pressure on the dark places. The unresolved, psychological material, anything that you don't want to look at, you'll feel increasing pressure put on it. It will become harder and harder to sustain not being honest." - Adya "Life itself is the crucible that brings these to the fore and develops the avenues through which spirt can operate." - Adya "Compassion is a quality of love, but there is a quality of love that really deeply opens us and really makes us available. It's hard to be honest with yourself, if you don't have a deep access to love. A love for your own humanity. The hardest thing you'll ever accept fully is your own humanity. Once you've got that, you will have accepted everybody else's in the world. To be able to not just see what's happening for them but to have a real deep tenderness for what's happening for all of us, for the whole human experience. I'm not talking about creating an emotion but the opening of the heart." - Adya "There's the intellectual hiding with beliefs and opinions and misunderstanding, there is the emotional shutting down, and then there is the ultimate fear of non-existence." "The experiences are important, but after those what's important is how easily do we get triggered? How much are we grabbing hold of identity? How much we grasp onto ideas that aren't really true?" - Adya "Silence isn't just a lack of sound. It seems like that at first, but it's a door opener." - Adya "Spiritual experiences do not confer human perfection upon you. Yo can still not have your emotional human ego act together at all, even if you have really big powerful spiritual experiences." - Adya "We don't actually get to successfully repress anything. It just comes out in a different form." - Adya "Who you become begins to have an effect beyond causality. You're getting out of the ego, and you're seeing who you are is now determining a field, and the experiences of the field are different than what they were. What you need begins to appear of its own." - Doc "The clue to success is to just be exactly what you are, be completely and totally, a hundred percent, what you are, and the world will provide all that you need." - Doc "When the prefrontal cortex was added, the animal brain was not removed. There you got the whole human experience explained; the source of all suffering." "The downside of blame is guilt. Every time you lie, even though you intellectually believe it, on the unconscious level, you realize you've lied." - Doc "Own that you are the source of all the phenomena that happens in your life." - Doc "The way to transcend the mind is to just watch it, because it dawns on you, after doing this for a while, that you are the witness of the mind." - Doc "Each thing is what it is by virtue of its karmic inheritance and not by anything else. You are not at the effect of anything else than except your own spiritual intention. There is no cause out there. You are it. By virtue of what you are, and by virtue of what you are, is what you've said 'yes' to." - Doc "When something throws you out of easygoingness, that's something in yourself. It's like a light going on: look here. When you're not thoughtful, when you're not tolerant, when you're not calm, then that is pulling up something that you gotta clear. You clear it by looking within yourself, and finding it there, owning it, forgiving yourself for it. The kindness that you show to yourself, the willingness to forgive yourself then transfers in the willingness to forgive others." - Doc "A thing is only true by definition within a stated field, which is called proximate field. The proximate field can be political positions at the time, it can be the weather, it can be glamor. One of the most powerful proximate fields is the media in which you can take anything and glamorize it. The infinite context is not the proximate field but it's the field which has the power to transform the unmanifest into the manifest. The power of creation comes out of an infinite field of the unmanifest becoming manifest, and the mechanism is intention. Truth, then, can only be defined within a certain context. The content of the field is the ego. The proximate field is the spiritualized ego. The infinite context is the spirt. The content is linear and specific. The proximate field is semi-linear. The infinite context is beyond time." - Doc "You're encompassed by the infinite divinity, and the presence is within, but something precludes that awareness." - Doc "This world is becoming that which we hold in mind." - Doc "Whatever we do, do it in a beautiful way, because that's what communicates to people. That's more important than simply focusing on what we're doing. We're conveying something through 'how'. All the time. What part of myself I really throw into this is the most important element of anything. Do what you do with great commitment, but it's all a temporary thing. You might as well enjoy the doing of things. Because it's all a sand mandala, including our lives. Something's going to come by and do the old cosmic sweep right through the middle of our life." - Adya "Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence." - Watts "I haven't tried my hardest. I'm going to really try my hardest, and see where that gets me. I made a deal with myself that I wasn't going to pussyfoot around and sit on my hands all day, that I was going to work as hard as I possibly could, and be as honest as I possibly could with what I was working on, and only work on the stuff that I loved and felt passionate about, and see where it would take me." - McMillen "Trying to get rid of yourself is a very self-centered activity." - Adya "Your relationship with yourself is projected upon the world." - Adya "It's important to take responsibility for the shit you're dreaming up. If you don't like hell, then stop creating it." - Gura "The web of life is about the opening of our senses to the marvelous system of intercommunications between the individual organism and the cosmos, which gives us the feeling of being literally one body within the external world." "When we bring children into the world, we play awful games with them. Instead of saying, 'Welcome to the human race. Now, my dear, we're playing some very complicated games, and these are the rules of the game we're playing. I want you to understand them, and then you learn them, and then when you get a little bit older, you may be able to think up some better rules.' Instead of being quite direct with our children, we say, 'Maybe when you grow up a bit, you'll be acceptable. But until then, you should be seen, and not heard. You're a mess. You gotta be educated, schooled, and whipped until you're human." - Watts "The strategist takes responsibility for their interpretation, evaluation, and sense-making, and life stories. You become responsible for everything. There's nobody to blame, other than your own mind. You take responsibility for how your mind is interpreting, evaluating, and making sense and meaning of reality." - Gura "The strategist is infused with a grand purpose and vision of what mankind could become, of what the world needs to move forward in the evolutionary process. The strategist is a midwife to the birthing of a new humanity through this evolutionary process by understanding it, and working with the various systems that are involved, and by transforming oneself through self-actualization to become a better midwife for mankind." - Gura "The strategist worries most about failing to observe universal principles. They will tend to want to walk their talk; hold themselves to that high standard." - Gura "There is a deep appreciation of how challenging it is to be a mature, responsible adult, and how rare one's capacities are. Unlike pluralists, strategists have a more realistic sense of what it takes to actually change old patterns, habits, and systems." - Gura "The strategist has a very deep understanding of human nature, but it comes with the trap of self-inflation." - Gura "Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun." "We labor over the stories. Four years on Toy Story, the first year and a half was story development alone." - Lasseter "For me, two principles are truth and love. My orienting value is, 'I'm going to be as truthful and honest as I can possibly be. No matter what. I'm going to commit to speaking and articulating what's most truthful as far as I experience it, and also what's most helpful.' If I don't live this out, I'll be violating my soul." - Adya "It's the perennial appeal of magic; hiding in plain sight, there is a world within a world that we could all access." - Rowling "With the twin powers of focus and intent, look harder and see better. Behold the quotidian miracle. The implications of that single observation can change everything, if you let it. If you want to pierce through the segregated cosmetic layer into the integrated structural layer of the dreamstate, you can do it the same way you do anything else. Shine the light of your mind upon it with focused intent. Begin with little miracles, and progress to actively watching for pattern. See how things unfold along certain lines, watch the relationship between your thoughts and feelings and your surroundings; between the inner and outer; between hopes and outcomes; between all the ways something didn't go, and the one way it did. Feel your own energy within the larger energetic environment. The barrier between you and the integrated state is of your own making and fueled by your own emotional energy. Make a pronounced declaration of intent by journaling about it." - Jed "Self-honesty needs to be cultivated in a radical way. Every single day you open yourself up a little bit more to the truth, to painful, bitter, stinging truths. They sting your ego, which is that which is inauthentic within you. Let it sting you, and slowly kill that ego every single day. Every single day, every single hour of your life, you're being presented with little opportunities for either killing off your ego, suffocating it, or aggrandizing it, expanding it. Go head-on into legitimate suffering. Legitimate suffering is the suffering you encounter when you face the truth in whatever way. Just face the truth with your relationship, face the truth with how you feel about your physical body, face the truth about your financial situation, face the truth about all the stuff you've been procrastinating on." - Gura "Rebirth is the basis of all life. The one rule, the first concept, that got into their head was the idea of life and death." - Coppola "All of your desire is a perversion of the desire for God. When you desire pussy, what you really desire is God. And you get God. You get God in that limited form. If you desire pussy, you get God in the form of pussy. And you see God in that thing you desire. You see God in that pussy, and that's what makes you fall in love with it." - Gura "When you have a lot of ideas about how reality is, or should be, you stop being open to direct experience. A belief is an idea, a thought, of something that you either think is true or false. Every belief held, feels true. You build up your web of beliefs, and then you use that foundation to judge all new beliefs. Beliefs generate strong emotions. Beliefs are self-fulfilling. Beliefs are circular: the only thing that justifies a belief is another belief. Beliefs determine what's possible or impossible. There exist meta-beliefs: beliefs about beliefs. For example, 'I don't hold any beliefs. Most of my beliefs are accurate. It's good to believe certain things. Some beliefs are safe. If I stop believing something, I'm doing something wrong. There are no alternatives to holding beliefs.' Beliefs are not looking out for you. Beliefs create paradigm lock. A paradigm is an entire perspective on reality. The danger is not that you're gonna hold wrong beliefs; it's that you hold beliefs at all. When you stop the game, you're going to open yourself up to true growth." - Gura "Our thoughts, without realizing it, tend to be in tune with a prevailing energy field, which we have brought in out of our own agreement. One has agreed by propinquity, and the energy field now dominates one's consciousness. " - Doc "I like to take themes that I feel strongly about, and then put them in different kinds of situations, and explore them in different contexts." - Lucas "Deep issues don't get resolved by surface level external solutions. When you experience real growth, the issue simply becomes a non-issue. You won't need defensiveness anymore. There's no longer a need to exert willpower over the situation. Here's a litmus test for real growth: you look at your emotional responses to challenging situations in that specific area of your life that you're trying to develop in. Have my emotional responses improved? Am I less reactive? Do people no longer push my buttons? Do I have less emotional need in this area of my life? Do I not think obsessively about this area of my life anymore? Fake growth is success and achievement. Real growth is not about getting what you want externally but about releasing your need for it internally. The way you presently are is reinforcing all the stuff that you don't like about yourself. You can't stay loyal to that, and at the same time remove all the crap in your life. The two are one. All the crap in your life comes from the way that you are, not from your external surroundings. It will be tempting to go for the stuff people can praise you for. No one praises you for internal work." - Gura "Becoming great requires doing a lot of challenging things that will force you to grow. The ego would much rather play video games than face all that crap." - Gura "Do it. Just do it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Yesterday you said tomorrow. So just do it. Make your dreams come true. Just do it. Some people dream of success while you're gonna wake up and work hard at it. Nothing is impossible. You should get to the point where anyone else would quit, and you're not gonna stop there. No. What are you waiting for? Do it. Just do it. Yes, you can. Just do it. If you're tired of starting over, stop giving up." "The people who have the intention to live an awakened life and put their lives behind it, not just practices on the cushion but their whole life, after five or ten years their life starts to look more and more like a real awakened life. Somebody else that could've had the most mind-bending experience on earth but did nothing to follow it up, it is like a dream that once happened, it has not transformed their life." - Adya "Happiness is not something that you acquire. It's your capacity to surrender yourself to this very moment right now." - Gura "You're constantly interpreting, making meaning, filtering things, coloring things with your own biases, and putting your goals on certain things. This is all the work of your mind." - Gura "Do you how you develop passion for life? By taking control of yourself." - Gura "The prize of life is living beyond survival, connecting with life itself on an emotional, intuitive, spiritual level; that's what makes life satisfying." - Gura "You need to take responsibility, and you need to realize that actually it is you who is responsible for perpetuating your stuck situation, and that the only one who can turn it around is you." - Gura "Stop living according to the standards and norms of everybody around you. Take control of your life, of your own mind. Your mind is keeping you stuck in patterns of thought, emotions, and behaviors which are perpetuating the mediocre results that you've been getting, that have made you demotivated, lazy, depressed, and frustrated with life." - Gura "Logic is a handmaiden to emotion." - Gura "Your mind wants all the fruits and benefits of the change, without actually changing itself." - Gura "Oftentimes, you have to make a change for the worse, before you can make a change for the better." - Gura "Total understanding of reality is possible." - Gura "Self-deception is inescapable. Mistakes are inescapable. Do not beat yourself up for making mistakes. Make more mistakes. Fail faster." - Gura "We don't get beyond our narrative by disparaging it." - Adya "The people that we least want to see in ourselves, that's usually our blind spot. There's a bigger part of that person in you than you want to recognize." - Adya "The quality of our connection before we open our mouth and engage is so important." - Adya "Slow, incremental, voluntary encounters with our fears; it can really transform a life." - Adya "Awareness alone is curative. For this to work, it requires constant awareness. Awareness is not the same thing as logical knowing. Awareness is an in-the-moment observation of what's happening. If you want to eliminate the deep, underlying neurotic needs that you have, which are the sources of unwanted behaviors, the only way to do that is by shining and penetrating those with the light of your awareness: overeating, porn, internet, procrastination, shyness, guilt, perfectionism, workaholism, depression, anger, anxiety, fear. Believe that the deepest change will come from awareness of the damage that you cause to yourself, and from a natural desire for reality and truth." - Gura "The solution to dealing with strong negative emotions is very, very simple: it's to allow yourself to fully feel the emotion." - Gura "Early on in your childhood, you received wounds. You opened yourself up and you were vulnerable. You got hurt. You started erecting defenses to protect yourself. You adopted vows. You spend a lot of your mental energy maintaining these defenses. These defenses are all a sham. Part of becoming a mature, emotional adult is to dismantle all the defenses that you erected in your childhood and in your teenage years. They prevent you from being aligned with the truth." - Gura "Your automatic ego reaction, when you get a stab of negative emotion: you want to act stoic and cool, you want to deny that this is even happening, you want to distract with entertainment, suppress, control and manipulate." - Gura "Give yourself permission to fully feel. A strong emotion usually comes in waves. Every time you get hit by a new wave, open yourself up, allow it, feel it, do nothing." - Gura "A neurotic individual holds back and resists reality. To resist reality, you have to deny the present moment, which includes all the emotions in your body. The only way you can deny the present moment is to disassociate from your body by going into your mind, into fairytale land." " - Gura "The feeling of being hurt does not actually hurt you. What causes psychological damage is resistance." - Gura "The definition of magical pill is avoiding of emotional labor." - Gura "Thoughts create emotions. If you are not conscious of this filter, and you don't take control of it, then your life is going to be very miserable, and you're going to struggle, and you're not going to create the kind of results that you want, because you're leaving the interpretation up to chance. You have the power to assign meaning and interpretations to external circumstances with your mind. If you abdicate that control to somebody else, or you just leave it in the hands of fate or God, then you've got a lot of randomness in this system." - Gura "You think negative thoughts, you create negative emotions, you take negative actions, which create negative results. And this cycle continues. That's one option you have." - Gura "Lazy interpretations lead to suffering." - Gura "Many people are not able to identify emotions. We don't understand what the messages of our emotions are." "Relative means that it's relative to other things and that it's a conceptual construction. Absolute means that it's inherent to reality." - Gura "Significance is relative to your life, to a life. If you didn't have a life, nothing would be significant to you. Things are significant to you because they can either help or harm your life." - Gura "Significance is relative to survival. The most meaningful and the most significant things in the world are those which threaten your life." - Gura "Your mind uses meanings to manipulate you. You need to notice that you are a puppet of your mind's meaning-making apparatus." - Gura "You've been creating meaning in your life way beyond what you need to survive to the point where it has become toxic and neurotic." - Gura "You are creating meanings unconsciously to get yourself into action. Whenever you're not getting the thing that you labeled as good and you're getting the thing that you labeled as bad or harmful, all your negative emotions come up, and you suffer." - Gura "You're not satisfied with life because you've assigned all these meanings to things and you've disconnected yourself from being. You're wrapped up in illusions, and illusions are hollow, and therefore your life feels hollow, because you keep chasing phantoms." - Gura "People get addicted to reasons. You construct reasons in order to get yourself to do stuff that you probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place. You need all sorts of reasons to motivate yourself. But when you really want to just do something, when you have a natural spontaneous desire to do something, you're just gonna do it; you don't need a reason to do it." - Gura "You can grind through life, which is obligating yourself with all these meanings and reasons. Or you can free yourself of those and then you can play." - Gura "Being will give you unconditional satisfaction. You will no longer need to chase circumstances in life. You will be free to play life however you want without moralization, without obligations, without feeling pressured." - Gura "Build your emotional vocabulary. Apathy: depression, defeated, bored, lazy. Grief: sad, hurt, betrayed, disappointed, guilty. Fear: terror, nervousness, worry, insecurity. Lust: craving, possessiveness, greed, frustration. Anger: disgusted, pissed off, vengeful, annoyed. Pride: gloating, icy, judgement, arrogance. Courage: confident, creative, happy, secure. Acceptance: compassion, glowing, loving, playful. Peace: awareness, calm, tranquility, complete, freedom, centered." - Gura "Looking at an emotion is the best way of managing it." - Gura "It's not going to stop, 'til you wise up. So just, give up." - Aimee Mann "Do the important things that are non-urgent." - Gura "Slow down your pace, but still work. Explore fresh mediums and sources." - Gura "Masterful word-class creators, they know how to mix and match otherwise weird mediums and weird sources." - Gura "Focus on the technique instead of the output." "Create a sandbox for yourself: a creative sandbox where you can mess around and experiment." - Gura "Create a catalog of inspiring ideas." - Gura "Beige is basic organism survival: babies, mentally ill people, senile people, bum on the street. Each stage has a transformational dilemma. For beige the dilemma is that he has to learn how to interact with other organisms. Purple: magic and tribal. Purple needs to let go of the tribe. Red is egocentric power: this is pure unadulterated use of power for self-gratification. Red starts to backfire. There is an alternating pattern of the psyche fighting for itself and then the psyche sacrificing itself for the sake of the community. Blue is called absolutist conformist rule or civilization: tradition, rule of law, heritage, family, obedience. There is a strong believe in good and evil. There is a strong believe in a god and a devil. Orange is individualistic: success and science. Orange believes that the point of life is material abundance and comfort and scientific progress. With orange comes the rise of business. Green is relativistic, caring, and communal. The problem with green is that it's overly idealistic. Yellow is systemic thinking and integration. Yellow is the first stage that understands and is aware of the prior stages. Turquoise is holistic global actualization. The ego likes to think that it's two steps above where it actually is." - Gura "There is a boundary between the lower and the higher self. When you are threatened, you go into your lower self. Are you aware of what triggers you to cross this boundary? Make a commitment to never make decisions when you're in your lower self. Make a commitment to disengage from people when you're in your lower self." - Gura "We're not very good at seeing the true value of things." - Gura "Successful people are passionate people; they're inspired by life. They're very, very hardworking. Abnormally hardworking. Successful people are extremely persistent. Successful people are rule breakers. Successful people are clever; they're good at manipulating situations and people to get what they want past through. Successful people are highly creative; they generate massive value. Successful people have a training in technical skills. Successful people value excellence. Successful people are visionaries; they're leaders. Successful people are intuitive; they're guided by their heart and by their gut. Successful people are decisive. Successful people are motivated because they want to impact the world, they want to have a positive contribution to society. Successful people are highly focused; they're able to select one field and invest years of time and build up a lot of experience in that one field. Successful people are ambitious. Successful people have a rapid speed of implementation. Successful people have a spine; they stand up for themselves. Successful people are optimistic and hopeful. Successful people are courageous; they're willing to act in the face of fear. Successful people value knowledge and learning. Successful people are willing to endure the cost, and they're willing to make sacrifices to get success. Successful people are highly self-motivated. Successful people are long-term thinkers; they think ten years down the road. Successful people are pragmatic; they're practical. Successful people work for themselves." - Gura "Self-actualization is the realization of one's potentials, capacities, and talents: the fulfilment of one's mission in life, a fuller knowledge of one's intrinsic nature, getting really in touch with your authentic self, and becoming a whole human being. It's an unceasing trend towards unity and integration within yourself." - Gura "There are two types of pleasure: scarcity pleasure and abundance pleasure. Scarcity pleasure is the relief that one gets from the loss of tension and anxiety. Abundance pleasure is the ecstasy of functioning at one's prime." - Gura "Self-actualization is the pursuit of humanity, creativity, knowledge, fairness, rationality, playfulness, authentic love, virtue, truth, beauty, and a feeling of joy, and real deep gratitude, and fulfilment with life." - Gura "Self-actualization is living to the peak of human capability." - Gura "It's possible to free yourself of your neuroses and your fears and any kind of other limitations that hold you back and sap your aliveness feeling." - Gura "Create a life where you never have to worry about money again, where your work is your greatest joy. Develop full emotional control. Become a really grounded, emotionally imperturbable human being. Have a deep understanding of how the world works. Cultivate deep self-love. Physical vitality and energy. Become a leader. Be creative to the ultimate degree. Live a life with integrity, a life based on principles. Realize the true existential nature of yourself, other people, and reality. Contemplate and reflect on life." - Gura "Step number one is knowledge: you're lacking accurate, high-quality information. Start making small changes in your life right now: eliminate toxic habits, start building good habits. Focus your attention on mastering your emotions. Become financially independent. Think wiser, and hold this vision in your mind every single day." - Gura "The root cause of all addictions is fear of emptiness. The degree to which you're emotionally mature is the degree to which you can sit alone in an empty room without any external stimulation. Your life is empty, but you're running away from that reality. Sit with emptiness, and do nothing. Don't go into fantasy. All addiction is basically emotional immaturity." - Gura "Self-actualization is not about fixing problems. It's about living life to its fullest." - Gura "Instead of hating your sins, which only makes them stronger, you want to love your sins to death." - Gura "What's the best life possible for a human being?" - Gura "The greatest human beings who ever lived were sages and mystics. They are true masters of being human, of understanding reality and life. They're comitted to truth, consciousness, goodness, and love, and a deep mastery of these things to the point where it's embodied effortlessly. They radically turn inward to completely transform themselves." - Gura "There's a big difference between being enlightened and being a sage proper, a masterful sage." - Gura "A sage is not a cold, smart-aleck intellectual who just lives in theory land but has no knowledge of himself, his emotions, no mastery of relationships, no mastery of his body, his energy." - Gura "If you have a strong vision, and you're comitted to it, the 'how' will solve itself." - Gura "Set your top value as truth. Purify your body, your mind, your emotions, and your habits." - Gura "The purpose is something you construct. Just because it's a construction it doesn't mean it shouldn't be constructed. If it floats your boat, if you enjoy it, then do it. It doesn't need to be true in some sort of existential sense for you to do it." - Gura "You need to take this enterprise very fucking seriously. You're very serious about self-mastery even though you realize that it actually in a sense is part of the illusion. You need a temporary objective. Your objectives will change on this path a lot." - Gura "The prime directive is to increase the quality of your consciousness. Everything else is a distraction. Everything that happens to you in your life, including the most mundane things, are tests of the quality of your consciousness. Every single action that you take in your life, every single domain of life that you interact with people in, family relationships, business relationships, these are all tests and opportunities for you to either show up in low consciousness or in high consciousness. High consciousness means a degree of accurate perception. Accurate perception is the key to living a good life. Every single problem you have in your life ultimately comes from inaccurate perceptions of reality and nothing else." - Gura "Low-quality consciousness is permeated with fear, dogma, ideologies, rigid belief systems, clinging to ideas and pet theories, little picture thinking, short-term gain thinking, blindness to backfiring mechanisms, mechanical behavior. The way you treat people is highly unequal. It's also characterized by moralization, projection, materialism, arrogance." - Gura "High-quality consciousness is selfless and giving. It's fearless and courageous. Focused on direct experience over belief. Committed to truth and accuracy. Values learning and growing very highly. It's an intelligent machine imbued with wisdom, foresight, intuition, and vision. It's creative, spontaneous, and organic. Takes one hundred percent responsibility for its actions, behaviors, results, and how it feels. It's humble. It's big picture understanding. Tends to think in terms of long-term gains. Becomes aware of backfiring. It's characterized by indiscriminate love." - Gura "Your feelings, motivations, always reflect the real you with perfect accuracy. If you feel anger, negativity, inadequacy, anxiety, that is a reflection of how you are and what you are on the inside, and not how other people make you feel." - Thomas Campbell "Two very important factors for gauging where your consciousness level is: the quality of your feelings and motivations." - Gura "Emotions tell you exactly how you are." - Gura "Motivations tell you exactly how you are. What are you pulled towards in life?" - Gura "How do I feel in an hourly basis? How loving am I? How fearful am I? How intellectually open am I? How well do I govern myself? How noble are my motivations?" - Gura "If the prime directive of your life is success, sex, money, that's going to be a wasted life." - Gura "Increase your capacity to love. Increase your capacity to feel happy independent of circumstances. Increase your capacity to be intellectually open. Increase your capacity for self-governance. How effectively can you control your behaviors and actions when you decide to pull the trigger? Increase your capacity to face fear. Transcend selfish and protective motives." - Gura "A goal has to be specific, compelling, written down, reviewed every single day, aligned with your highest values." - Gura "Man assumes that he knows himself. But man doesn't realize that he's a machine. You really need to appreciate how deeply asleep you are, before you will take up the quest for raising your awareness." - Gura "There are four main features of your mechanicalness: lying, imagination, talking, negative emotions. And distraction, criticism, and judgment." - Gura "In order to become a different being, man must want it very much, and for a very long time. A passing desire, or a vague desire, based on dissatisfaction with external circumstances will not create sufficient impulse. The evolution of man depends on his understanding of what he may get and what he must give for it. If man does not want it, or if he does not want it strongly enough, and doesn't make the necessary efforts, then he will never develop. Man must acquire qualities which he thinks he possesses but which he actually deceives himself about." - Gura "What does it mean that man is a machine? It means that he has no independent movements, inside or outside of himself. He is a machine which is brought into motion by external influences and external impacts." - Gura "Life runs you. It triggers you. When you have higher states of awareness it's because someone or something triggered you into them." - Gura "All the absurdities and all the contradictions of people and life in general become explained when we realize that people live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and yet do not know that they're asleep. The first obstacle in the way of development of self-consciousness in man is his conviction that he already possesses self-consciousness, or, at any rate, that he can have it at any time he likes. It's very difficult to persuade a man that he's not conscious, and he cannot be conscious at will." - Gura "All the logical understanding of the world will not get you awareness." - Gura "If you're listening to advanced advice, and you're not taking action on it, it will actually retard your growth." - Gura "We're in the era of modern capitalism. Business is shaping society, culture, government, science, religion, and everything else. There is no facet of society which is not touched very heavily by business. Marketing people are architecting systems to trap your lower self. You get trapped into low consciousness patterns." - Gura "Eyeballs directly equate to power. Power directly equates to money." - Gura "The chimp part of your mind: salt, sugar, fat. Sex. Power and status. Fun, play, and entertainment. Validation. Security and comfort. Desperate love. Vanity. Gossip." - Gura "Ways in which businesses and society exploit your lower self: food, education, celebrities, books, video games, shows, popular culture, fashion, tech, romance. Society is an amusement park for the ego. You're being distracted from being conscious of your own death, the shortness of your own life, and you're being distracted from the lies you tell yourself." - Gura "You're aim in life should be to find your true self. Not achievement and progress and power and efficiency." - Gura "The culture you grew up in has imprinted your mind with norms and values and beliefs of which you are unconscious." - Gura "The biggest likelihood for self-deception occurs when you ignore the possibility of self-deception occurring." - Gura "When you don't know something, you don't know that you don't know it." - Gura "The Zen master and the yogi have realized through self-observation that there is no such thing as a self. That allows them to flow with life. From the outside, it looks like they have complete self-discipline. In fact, they have gotten rid of the idea of a self. And now everything they do, there is no resistance in it. There is no internal suffering or struggle anymore. They are flowing with life, and that looks effortless, and that looks very rigorous and disciplined." - Gura "There is a very huge difference between being a victim and no free-will." - Gura "Your biggest problem in life is internal struggle, self-interference. Your biggest problems are not external problems; it's how you interpret these things and how you react unconsciously to these things." - Gura "Faith is the surrender to nature. Faith is not believing blind ideas. Faith is the recognition that you actually were never in control in the first place." - Gura "When you live in falsehood, you create your own hell." - Gura "There is nothing to lose. The only thing you lose is the illusion of control." - Gura "Consciousness is only raised on an individual level." - Gura "Learn the big picture. You need a vision and goals. Unhook from distractions. Build positive habits. Purpose. Journaling. Meditation. Reprogram your subconscious mind." - Gura "You're suffering from the problem of having sloppy vocabulary. You talk about things without knowing what you are really saying." - Gura "There is a big difference between knowing something implicitly and explicitly. Implicit means you haven't bothered to articulate it, to explicate it, to make it clear." - Gura "The most conscious teachers, how do they communicate? Extremely clearly, extremely simply." - Gura "Reality, existence, being, hallucination, magic, time, energy, matter, mass, reason, perspective, truth, God, emotion, concept, psyche, science, religion, delusion, illusion, consciousness, absolute, relative, wisdom, spirit, ecology, insight, creativity, paranormal, philosophy, psychology, mind, integrity, profound, basic, evil, virtue, excellence, confusion, logic, theory, knowledge, awareness, experience, belief, universe, epiphany, enlightenment, depression, love, self, meditation, contemplation, thought, perception, essence, skepticism, substance, intelligence, evolution, suffering, karma, mysticism, occult, am, is, I, be, sex, love, relationship, happiness, sadness, money." "There is no contradiction between enlightenment and becoming a clear thinker. There is no benefit you get from remaining a sloppy thinker." - Gura "The quality of people's life and the psychological maturity and the degree of self-actualization that they experience in life is directly proportional to the quality of the questions they think about." - Gura "Projection is when your needs, your fears, your cravings, and your agenda and ego, color and distort how you see people. It's when you superimpose your emotional baggage, your own stuff that's happening with you, all your own shit, onto others. You make a lot of assumptions about the other person based on your own needs. You try to think what the other person is thinking. You see others as they are for you which gets you into a lot of trouble in the end. When you're relating to other people, you're relating to yourself. It's about how you're reacting to yourself, your own expectations, your own assumptions, and your own story you created about that person. When you start to take responsibility for that, that's when your relationships start to turn around. That's when you can start to learn from people. Until then, you're only listening for what will serve you. The closer the person is to you, the more projections you make on them, which is why it's so difficult for you to relate successfully with them." - Gura "Signs of when you're projecting with teachers: when you have imaginary arguments with the teacher, when you get into the teacher's life story, when you start to criticize based on little nitpicky things." - Gura "Your true authentic self would be: -Confident. Completely confident. -Assertive -Disciplined -Internally grounded in his own values -Emotionally stable -On purpose in life -Deeply passionate. About all he does in life. -Having zero limiting beliefs, of any kind. Believing in a pragmatic way that you can accomplish whatever you want. -Having a sense of strength and power. -High self esteem, knowing that you deserve. -Having the desire to explore all life. -Being completely self expressive. -Zero fears. -100% positive. -Social and extroverted. -Generous. With yourself, your time and the work you're doing. Doing work that's promoting the well-being of other people. -Selfless. Idealistic, driven by values. -Having high consciousness. -Healthy. Completely clean, sober and fit. Vital. -Sexual. Comfortable and open about his or her sexuality. -Comfortable with his or her masculinity/femininity (or, if it's the case, with something in between). -Accepting of the opposite polar (masculine/feminine, opposite sex). Comprehensive and understanding. -Completely open-minded. Willing to consider that you're wrong and to readjust. -Having a sense of nobility about the way you approach life." - Gura "All ideas and all perceptions that you have are not the thing you're looking for. You have to come back to obvious things over and over again. Anything that you can imagine is not it. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is elsewhere. The best approach is to become very present. You have to be very honest: what is your present identification? Don't try to pretend that you're nothing. Observe existence itself. With a lot of focus, patience, and time, you need to trust that pure observation will produce huge for you. Long stretches of focus are required to make serious traction with this work." - Gura "Neither blame nor excuses preclude consequences." - Doc "You feel like you are going backwards, but you are not. You have earned the right to see how awful you have been." - Doc "As soon as you start underestimating your ability to be fallible, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. Anywhere that you're feeling certain about something, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. Any assumption that you take for granted, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Anything you think is self-evident or obvious, you're setting yourself up. Anything you think you know based on belief or hearsay, that always sets you up for a mindfuck. Anytime that you're relying on authority that you just blindly trust, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. You set yourself up for a mindfuck, any place that you don't have direct experience of a thing. Anywhere where you have a vested interest, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Anywhere where context is ignored or underappreciated, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Life is much more perspective dependent than you have ever thought possible." - Gura "Mindfucks you will encounter in your life: you think you're the body, you think reality is real, you think truth is logical, you think materialism is correct, you think religion is just superstition and myth, you think your favorite ideology is correct, you think your thoughts are trustworthy, you think that society and culture is healthy, you think success is equivalent to happiness, you think evolution is random, you think science has no blind spots, you think the twenty-first century is advanced, you think what school taught you is correct, you think history is objective, you think that death is real, you think evil exists, you think you're the good guy, the hero of your story, you think that other people hold you back from getting the success you want in life, you think your problems are material, you think your fears are real." - Gura "Always investigate deeper." - Gura "The biggest mindfuck comes when you think there can be no more mindfucks." - Gura "When a person is in denial, they may feel happy because nobody is pointing out to them how they’re ruining the lives of everyone around them. So you come out of denial, go through the pain of facing what you’re facing, work out the guilt about it and forgive yourself–then life gets beautiful again…until the next thing comes up. This is characteristic of the whole spiritual pathway." - Doc "The higher the level of consciousness, the more powerfully you affect the collective unconscious. An unconditionally loving individual has a profound impact overall, you see. You look at this person and he’s not doing anything, but what you don’t know is that without him, the world would probably collapse." - Doc "Balance cannot be taught. You have to find the right balance for you. Complacency versus neurotically disciplined. To know when too much is too much and too little is too little, and when it's hurting you in either direction. Being gentle versus being harsh. You'd be wrong if you weren't context-sensitive. Left brain versus right brain. Theory versus practice. There's problems with every extreme, even with always being in the middle. It's a dynamic equilibrium that you're going for. Life purpose versus enlightenment. Pragmatic versus idealistic. Rejecting culture versus studying culture. Brutally honest versus compassionate." - Gura "I recently discovered that configuration in the collective: only by suffering and pain can you save your soul. This looks to pain and suffering as the savior." - Doc "Writing a resume is all about understanding what the employer wants, who you're appealing to, and what their needs are. Be very clear about what you're offering specifically. The best resume is a simple bulleted list of exactly what you do, what you specialize in, what you're going to provide for this employer, what your skillsets are, how much experience you have in them, and some of your personal characteristics: on time, good working with other people, friendly, sociable, diligent and hardworking. reliable. Lead with the portfolio. The resume should be sparse, an outline of exactly what you're providing to the employer. They don't have time to read through your garbage, flowery language, and philosophy. All they care about is what are you providing? Are you a good match for exactly what they need? Put yourself into your employer's shoes." - Gura "Marketing is all about how to sell something or convince someone of the value of what you have to offer." - Gura "Judgement is a rejection of reality." - Gura "What leads to improvement is not criticism but self-reflection." - Gura "The core of why you care about what other people think about you is because somewhere deep down inside of you, you feel like what they offer you can have true and lasting value. You're after approval. There are real costs to being you. There's a cost for standing up to truth." - Gura "Success will come to you, if you hit all these points: you're working hard, you know yourself, you're aligned with your life purpose, you've chosen a path of mastery; that means you're going to be very committed to it for years and decades." - Gura "You acknowledge all the uncertainty and mystery of life and you let reconciliation happen organically." - Gura "Awareness of homeostasis will increase your odds of successfully changing your center of gravity. The mind will resist, the body will resist, people around you will resist, when you try to make a change. Negotiation means that you know when to ease off the gas pedal a bit, and you also know how to press on the gas pedal when you know that there's a little bit more room to grow. It's knowing when to push yourself and when not to." - Gura "The cure for procrastination is action. Act in spite of the resistance. Break the cycle." - Gura "Self-Love is the only teaching." - Gura "I would rather be right in the end rather than insist that I was right from the beginning." - Gura "Your life is the actualization and realization of what Self-Love means and why it's important and why it all boils down to this and not something else." - Gura "We're lacking Self-Love the most, and that is the ultimate lesson of the universe, not just for humans; it's much more profound than some feel-good emotion for humans. It's an existential force that drives all of evolution." - Gura "Make a list of all the ways in which you don't love yourself." - Gura "Learning Self-Love is the point of human life. If you loved yourself completely, you would have no more problems in your life." - Gura "The difference between knowing what a thought is and not knowing what a thought is, is the difference between living in a self-constructed mental prison, a hellscape, in which you suffer all the negative emotions that you suffer: all your anger, sadness, all your frustration, all the difficulties you have in relationships, with money, and health — all those problems are largely conceptually created — and living in freedom." - Gura "There is a key distinction we have to make to meditate effectively: the distinction between thinking and awareness. Your best days are your worst days." - Gura "Stage one: just watch. Don't try to control anything. Stage two: active detachment. Release every thought that comes into your mind. Stage three: awareness focus. Put your awareness on awareness itself." - Gura "Purification equals pain multiplied by mindfulness." - Gura "Mythology was designed to give a society the tools they need to be a society: they have to have a common belief system, they have to believe in the same gods, they have to believe who their leaders are, they have to believe what their history is, they have to believe who their heroes are. Those are the things that combine to make a society. If you don't have those things, then you don't have a society." - Lucas "Art tells a narrative of society. That's how people come together and have a common belief system. You can give speeches, but it doesn't resonate that much. In ancient times, they had statues of their heroes, they had mosaics of their religion; those were all things that told people in a very emotional way — it's done emotionally, not intellectually — that this who we are." - Lucas "The only thing that is real is what exists right now in the present moment." - Gura "You're not aware of how judgments backfire on you. Judgments that you make about others always apply to you. Judging is like creating a law or a rule, which then your mind stores, and then that law or rule gets applied to all future situations, because your mind tries to stay consistent. That makes you inflexible in life. You're not able to flow with the circumstances of life. You're not able to be spontaneous in life." - Gura "The love that you've ever felt in your life, that's a little sliver of infinite love. The very being of consciousness is love." - Gura "Love is absolute acceptance of everything. Love is to be conscious of the beauty of creation. Love is tolerance of the intolerable. Love is surrender of the self. Love is selflessness. Love is the dissolution of all boundaries. The purpose of life is to love. Your job here is to learn how to navigate all these obstacles and still love despite all of that, and that's the most difficult thing. That means you have to get over yourself." - Gura "You don't want to be waiting for love to come looking for you, knocking on your door. Love is something you need to create. You are meant to be a fountain of love: a walking, talking, breathing, fountain of love. That’s what you're trying to become. This is done proactively, deliberately, consciously, not accidentally and randomly when good stuff happens to you. You put the love into everything. The biggest problem with people is that they expect love from external sources." - Gura "A true test of your love is non-judgment. How non-judgmental can you be?" - Gura "What prevents love? It's the ego's fear of dissolution." - Gura "What is the opposite of love? It's egotism, narcissism, fear, hate, judgment, unconsciousness, violence, intolerance, manipulation, tribalism, exploitation, power-games, ignorance, closed-mindedness, and division. You cannot love so long as you're preoccupied with food, sex, survival, status, success, money, addiction, drugs, ideology, politics, religion, or logic." - Gura "Every fear you have is one roadblock to you being infinitely loving. And, ultimately, the fear you have to give up is your fear of death. If you're afraid of death, you will always choose your own life over truth and love." - Gura "Practicing acceptance, non-judgment, and surrender is a great technique. Being more kind, more giving, more caring, and more vulnerable is a really good practice. Allow yourself to cry. Practice unconditional self-love. Love your body. Feel love during difficult and bad times." - Gura "It's going to be impossible for you to love fully until you accept the ignorance of mankind. There needs to be a very deep acceptance of ignorance." - Gura "To create a great life you need to summon the courage to tap into love. Cowards do not have great lives. Love requires the greatest courage." - Gura "Love is something you have to work for. It's not just an emotion that comes and goes. Being strategic, being pragmatic. It's not just about being airy fairy and always believing that everything will just happen for you. Love is having a vision for your life, a vision of what you can offer to mankind, and then waking up every morning on time, and working ten, twelve hours a day, figuring out how do I train myself? That's necessary to be able to actualize it." - Gura "Practical structures are necessary to live the kind of life you want to live, the life that is aligned with your highest values; that's not something that happens by accident: that's something you have to create, construct, architect, and you have to be very deliberate about it. Construct your environment, an environment that's suitable for living your values, which makes living your values easy and automatic." - Gura "Don't get so spiritual, or so idealistic, that you forget about the pragmatic, utilitarian requirements of life. And don't forget that your spirituality and your ability to stay in a high-consciousness state is going to be highly dependent upon the environment that you're in." - Gura "When you get the small stuff down, the big stuff becomes easy." - Gura "To become that which people talk about, to be kindly, to be forgiving, see and witness the sacredness of all things." - Doc "Liberation is when you don't have to work towards anything. You work from it." - Adya "Divine relativity: how to be awake in the world." - Adya "Just holding things as possible can be quite profound. It's possible that the whole battle with life can cease. No prerequisite has to occur. You can just stop." - Adya "To surrender into a radical letting go is a death which allows us to wake up. But to surrender back into life and your humanness is also a death." - Adya "Find the divinity not jut outside of humanity in the great unborn space of emptiness but find the divinity right in the world of form through a complete embrace of life as it actually is. Embrace everything that it is to exist. It is not a movement of seeking to avoid it. When you completely and absolutely embrace it with an immense cosmic 'yes', you experience life with a buoyancy and joy and peacefulness. It's a way of finding freedom and liberation both beyond life and also in life." - Adya "Everything seems to be complete. Not complete because you've left it behind but because you've discovered the completeness within it. You've discovered the grace within the chaos." - Adya "Step outside of your own imagination and open to something larger than anything you know, something larger than your own personal resource. That's what faith is." - Adya "It's useful not to just know but to feel that that part of your being that's unconditioned has no problem with your humanity. It's important for the humanity to feel that, because that's what it's looking for: something in the universe that's not judging it, condemning it, or even praising it." - Adya "In every conversation you have, even conversation that you have with yourself, endeavor to speak only from what is true, really honest. What is the deepest truth in this conversation? Just become aware of what you're doing and why you're doing it." - Adya "All human forms have an endless capacity, potentiality, to more and more clearly reflect the ground of our being; that place of profound wisdom and love and joy." - Adya "Meaning orients our lives, it gives us our direction." - Adya "Each thing and each being is of infinite value." - Adya "Turning points are little moments of choice when you can choose to pivot an interaction towards understanding and peace." - Adya "Enlightened action is action that's not distorted by the self, and so it tends to feel clean, instantaneous, unpremeditated, and unselfconscious." - Adya "The negative side of self-consciousness, the kind that leads to hesitation, doubt, and criticism, all forms of unnecessary suffering happen right in that gap." - Adya "Little things in yourself can end up to be immense things." - Adya "As soon as you see how something's working, you see that something could be engaged or resisted or neither one of those. You start to realize that each moment actually becomes a choice. These are moments of what you want. And life doesn't care what you want. If you want to desire, there's no entity up there that will punish you. It's just unsatisfying." - Adya "We see what happens when someone's not truthful. Chaos ensues. Internal chaos, internal division, and external chaos, external division. Be truthful, honest, and sincere. Not only with others but with yourself: do not be deceitful to yourself, do not lie to yourself, do not hide from things, from yourself. Tell the truth about things. The cost of not being truthful is very high; they're higher than people imagine that they are. You can be afraid and still tell the truth. Just because you have a hesitating emotion doesn't mean that you have to be dishonest. You can tell the truth anyway. As you do it, it feels like a deep quiet. Because you're no longer running from anything. Truth and love are the two most powerful embodiment tools to lead an undivided, good, beneficial, benevolent, useful, beautiful life." - Adya "We need to drop our head into the heart." - Adya "Spiritual inquiry is a way of questioning every idea, every belief, every assumption you've ever had about yourself. It's taking that light of awareness and intellect and focusing it down and starting to dismantle what's untrue." - Adya "What is worthwhile orienting my entire existence around? If you don't decide, your conditioning will decide for you." - Adya “It is all about paying attention, about being extraordinarily conscious of what is happening inside you and all around you.” - Adyashanti “Embrace and love the part in you that you want to get rid of.” - Adyashanti “Real awakening leads to a deep and profound sense of compassion and courage—without your compassion becoming a burden.” - Adyashanti “It’s not about getting out of the challenges of life, but it’s about pouring oneself into life, as an act of redemptive love.” - Adyashanti “Harmony doesn’t always look pretty—it has reality to it.” - Adyashanti “The more undivided we feel, the more we have to offer the world.” - Adyashanti “Be with all parts of your experience, or you’re a prisoner of ‘shoulds.’” - Adyashanti “No matter what’s bothering you, keep trying to find the you that is having the problem.” - Adyashanti "Whenever you have a choice to see things through the eyes of fear or love, choose love." - Adyashanti "When you were distressed, when you were angry, when you were confused by any incident, no exceptions, that is your refusal, at that moment, to give up your false riches." - Vernon Howard "Everything's okay, and then you simply see how the heart responds." - Adya "The past doesn't create the present. The present creates the past." - Adya "If you're more open, more available, more trusting, the antenna, the way of perceiving life, starts to reach out beyond the boundaries of your skin." - Adya "Encounter another human being heart first instead of head first. Encounter everything and everybody that you meet heart first." - Adya "The magnetic field draws to you that which is of your own level of consciousness. You become an energy field as you let go of negativity. You draw to yourself that which is the consequence of that field." - Doc "Just by holding awareness on something, you come to understand it with great clarity without even trying to understanding it. Awareness is highly intelligent." - Adya "When a conversation gets challenging, that's an opportunity to see what set of unconscious ideas you have. What is your underlying philosophy that you were operating by? They're not just abstract ideas that float around in your mind. They're ideas that you perceive through. They dictate the way that you experience life." - Adya "The freedom to take the form that the moment demands or calls forth: our orientation to life becomes what our true nature really is which is an infinite field of potentiality." - Adya "Do we know how it translates into activity, conversation, and disagreement?" - Adya "The price of staying awake is every reason you have to stop loving. Who are you so resentful and bitter towards that you would never ever want to let them into your love?" - Adya "To be awakened is to have no more argument with yourself, no more argument with the world, no more argument with others, and no more argument with God." - Adya "What would it be if I was in this moment from my depth?" - Adya "To look within means to attempt not to distract yourself." - Adya "Divinity is existence beyond self. As soon as the verb, the activity, of self emerges, it distorts and disregards divinity, it takes the place of divinity. It takes the place of that freedom, clarity, and love, and it lives in obsession with itself." - Adya "If the bodhisattva thinks there are sentient beings who need to be saved by a bodhisattva that bodhisattva is not a bodhisattva at all." - Adya "We're always in a state of becoming. The becoming isn't a search for completeness if you've already found the completeness that's always there. The becoming is the capacity to always embody that completeness more clearly, more compassionately, more wisely, more fully without end." - Adya "The attempt will be made to crucify you if only with a thought, an idea, a judgment coming from the outside, but usually the greatest crucifixions happen from the inside; we crucify ourselves." - Adya "The belief gets turned into emotion and very deep and profound feeling. If what you think and what you feel tells you the same thing, you feel really stuck. Whatever you belief, your body duplicates and turns into feeling. You're not experiencing reality, life. You're experiencing a thought in your head that you believed. Everything you feel is just because you believe this belief; that's all that's happening. This has no connection to anything other than belief. It's not connected to reality. It's all made up. What keeps it alive in your system is you really believe that it's real. " - Adya "One can bypass one's conditioning, one's karma, completely, and, every once in a while, you'll bypass it, and the revelation will be so deep that it will wipe it out of your system. Even though you've transcended it, the mere fact you've transcended it, and realized the ultimate, doesn't necessarily mean that it's all got flushed out of your system. Anytime you go to the absolute, it is like a washing machine for karma. You never come back from an immersion in the absolute the same as before you went. It is the most powerful purifying element there is. It's very rare that someone will transcend everything and then all their unconscious belief structures will just fall out of their system. There usually will be some there. And you know they're there, and you know you have to look at them, if they keep repeating and repeating. You have to bring consciousness to them." - Adya "Nobody has the power to make you happy or miserable. You do that to yourself for yourself. If somebody comes up and says something and you feel miserable, you feel miserable, because you've told yourself something about yourself based on what they said. That button gets pushed and you take responsibility: your mind is doing it to you. It's not them, it's not the situation, it's not the world. The body goes into contraction, into upset, into hurt; these are the ways that truth has been biologically hardwired into your system: when it goes into conflict, the system is saying, 'Take a look. You're veering from what's real.' There's always a hidden belief that you're believing." - Adya "When you have a negative emotion, the only thing you're experiencing is a negative belief." - Adya "Clarity knows how to meet anything that happens. Your mind doesn't need to know how. You don't need beliefs." - Adya "If something is recurring, you have to go in there — not analyze it, figure it out — just notice what you're experiencing is a belief. What is the belief? And then sit there and feel. Don't try to get rid of it. This is the feeling that your belief produces. You can willfully take on the belief, and then see what it feels like." - Adya "The core belief holds all the others intact. The ultimate belief is, "I am separate. I am separate from God.'" - Adya "True compassion isn't something that I feel for another. True compassion is when I know in every fiber of my being that you are me. This is life meeting life, it's not me meeting you. That perception breeds compassion. Even if you have to say, 'No, you can't do that.' in your heart, you haven't separated from them at all. There's a natural spontaneous flow of love, of compassion. Your actions naturally reflect that. You don't have to try to be compassionate or loving. When you go up to somebody, anybody, you can feel there's an energetic connection. You can spot the exact word that you speak that severs the connection, if you speak anything that's untrue. You'll start to get the hang of how to be even in challenging situations with very challenging people, how to be with them in such a way that you don't sever it. You can say 'no' without severing it. As we realize our true non-separateness, we also discover our true human autonomy. Life gets to live itself through you in the way it chooses, and then you're not a carbon copy of anything or anybody." - Adya "You love but it can't change something. Don't expect any result." - Adya "There's into and out of infatuation. There's not into and out of love." - Adya "Sometimes life moves on even though there is love." - Adya "Why am I born? This is it. To have this experience right here. The meaning of your existence is to take that next step. This is not a philosophy, it's the feeling that starts to come alive in you. And then one moment isn't sacrificed for a better moment. There's something sweet about each moment, even if it's not what you expect. You can't fake that. It's who you are. It comes from the lived experience of your true nature." - Adya "Any part of yourself that you've pushed aside is that part which will keep pulling you back from whatever place of revelation you're in. Nothing gets left behind. Nobody gets the option of leaving any piece of themselves behind. Whether you deem it illusory or real, it doesn't matter." - Adya "The whole manufacturing of a false self needs one of two things: it gets its energy from resistance or indulgence. Even indulgence is resistance. Because anytime you're moving away from something, you're moving towards something else." - Adya "Deep in human consciousness, there is the idea, 'I can't stop resisting. Because, if I stop resisting, nothing will change.' If you judge a thought, which is a form of resistance, it sustains. It can sustain for a whole lifetime." - Adya "As long as we're horrified with ourselves, we're stuck with ourselves. We can't start, much less sustain, anything, as long as we don't get over the beliefs that are creating blame and shame, and taking everything personally. Shame is arrogance inverted." - Adya "The central misunderstanding is 'I am aware.' That there is someone, something, who is aware." - Adya "Reality is playing hardball. It's not playing spirituality, it's not playing incense and candles." - Adya "Your life isn't falling apart. It might look like it's falling apart at certain times, but it's actually falling together; it falls into place." - Adya "That which continues to recycle that's worthy of looking at, because that's catching consciousness and dragging it back into a dreamstate. Those catches, it's not necessarily good enough just to watch them. They are formed by patterns of belief and assumption. What you're experiencing is an unconscious belief. If it wasn't believed, it wouldn't be happening. Look at those areas, and see what's being believed. What's the worldview here? How does this piece of conditioning see things? What's the structure that's holding it together? It's something very immediate, very in the moment. In this instant, there is a belief pattern, and that's what's recycling. Something is believed that's out of harmony with what is. Your system is showing you that. You can ultimately condense any piece of conditioning down to a single, short one sentence statement of belief. The belief has to see through itself. It's one thing to see the belief, but just because you see it doesn't mean that you're going to see that it has no truth. If you get conscious enough, there's a part of consciousness that knows that it's not true. But that's not the part that counts. The belief has to realize that it's not true. Then it lets go of itself. It will pop like a bubble. This isn't difficult. The difficulty is maintaining the focus and the simplicity." - Adya "Looking for something is a mistaken idea of what looking within means. Looking within can easily become narcissistic, totally self-absorbed. If you stop at the boundary between outside and inside, it's totally still." - Adya "What happens when this thought is believed? What's experienced? What's the impact?" - Adya "His consciousness no longer lived in that world, and, since it no longer lived in that world, it didn't have to solve that world." - Adya "We tend to attract what we're caught in." - Adya "When the recognition of you as the eternal presence gets strong enough and bright enough, then the dense energy field of pain can't live in your system anymore." - Adya "When you wake up from that generational transmission, you do a favor to everybody in that family lineage throughout time. It frees the energy field." - Adya "We're committed to things we don't even know we're committed to." - Adya "So much of human difficulty comes from what we imagine we know." - Adya "The more conscious we become of our essence, the less we know about it." - Adya "Words have great power to reveal and they have equal power to conceal." - Adya "If we're not listening, then spirituality is just the pursuit of one idea after another." - Adya "Spiritual inquiry is a way of directing your listening." - Adya "What would it be like to not be moving around in life with this endless narrative? What if the narrative was just to cease? No conclusion. No good or bad ending. Just stop." - Adya "Real awakening leads to a deep and profound sense of caring. It's caring without anxiety, caring without your compassion becoming a burden." - Adya "While the ego is often using spirituality as a way to escape from life, spirit is seeking its awakening as a means of a deeper, more conscious embodiment into life." - Adya "Own and accentuate your feminine qualities." - Gura "Caring about what other people think of you, trying to get approval from other people, worrying that you're going to make a fool of yourself, or going to get rejected, or going to get embarrassed, believing that what you have to say is not as valuable as what other people have to say; these beliefs get into your system, because, as you're growing up, you have different conditions that you're put into. One or two traumatic events in the past have suppressed your natural extraversion." - Gura "The six pillars of effective communication are: assertiveness, authenticity, open-mindedness, empathy, clarity and listening. If you have something to say, say it assertively, so you will be taken seriously. Identify your values, boundaries, and own agenda, so that you can communicate them authentically. Smiling and being afraid to contradict someone may be interpreted as being inauthentic. Be open-minded to the positions of others, which helps you grow as a person. Be empathetic to your listener, which builds common ground. The more clarity you use in communicating, the less likely it will be misconstrued. And don't just hear; demonstrate active listening." - Gura "If we're going to love well, we have to stop seeing people as problems or their situation as problems." - Adya "The only way to be happy in any relationship is to discover absolute truth and love. Otherwise, it's what we get on the movies: sticky, gooey, ridiculous nonsense." - Adya "'Something's wrong.' and 'I don't want to feel this way.' What do you experience when those thoughts are believed? Your body is experiencing your thought." - Adya "The resistance to what is, is always much harder to manage than what is." - Adya "We are constantly having to respond to existence. Even if you've realized that you are all of existence, it doesn't mean that you know how to flow with existence." - Adya "Simply returning to the state of clarity is not necessarily going to solve the apparent dilemma of the world of relationship." - Adya "You can be very, very clear but also be holding on to a lot of nonsense. Your clarity may be very situational." - Adya "Throw yourself into your life, even though you don't have all the answers, because only then do you come upon that reservoir of wisdom that we only come upon when we have to, when there are no other options left." - Adya "You have to want to be clear more than you want to hold on to what's making you not clear." - Adya "What does God want? This right now. How do I know? Because this is what's happening right now." - Adya "When we consciously allow it to be what it is, allow it all to be unknown, there's magic that happens there." - Adya "You don't know what's right and what's wrong, because so much in your life that you would say was wrong, and you didn't want it to happen, are the very things that led to a deeper state of consciousness. Often it's pain and suffering and hardship that's an intimate part of the progress of our lives." - Adya "Suffering is optional. We're insisting on our position. We're holding on desperately as life's trying to do everything it can to help us. If you can see that you're holding on and let go, it doesn't need to be more than that." - Adya "Don't wait. If you're going to sit, sit, but don't wait. No expectancy." - Adya "Your unconscious views the lack of doing as death." - Adya "If you're going to do, do something worthwhile. The doing energy, if used wisely, will take you back to being." - Adya "The deeper it goes, you get a much more grounded experience of what oneness is. Oneness isn't just a suffused experience of being grabbed by the beloved into oneness." - Adya "Can you feel inside you, the very deepest place within you, that you would want people to be as they actually are more than as you'd want them to be?" - Adya "The more conscious you become, the more painful untruth becomes." - Adya "Whatever we're doing, we're doing simply because that's just what it's doing through us. And we don't have any ulterior motive, or some holy motive, or some noble motive, because it's not true. It's just the way life's flowering. It's entertaining itself. If someone gets helped, fine. If they don't, fine. I'm not here to help anybody, anyway." - Adya "Every activity or desire will reveal that the basic goal is to achieve a certain feeling. There are no other goals than to overcome fear and achieve happiness. Emotions are connected with what we believe will ensure our survival, not with what actually will." - Doc "Self-awareness is increased much more rapidly by observing feelings rather than thoughts." - Doc "Every life experience, no matter how tragic, contains a hidden lesson. When we discover and acknowledge the hidden gift that is there, a healing takes place." - Doc "The mind projects onto the future with the expectation that the past will be repeated." - Doc "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as You, not I, would have it. If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, Your will be done!" - Christ "Resign yourself to writing lots and lots of rubbish, you just got to write that out of your system, and, sooner or later, you'll hit what you should be doing, and what is your genre." - Rowling "Harry is our eyes onto the world. That's his function. Ron and Hermione are colorful, interesting characters. Harry is a blank slate. Different cultures are able to project onto him what they want him to be. It's the archetype of the hero: the guy without the quirks; he's the vessel." - Rowling "'I don't want to do this unless I can change the world.' Geez, how big of an ego is that?" - Adya "The impulse for enlightenment is the first arising of enlightenment in your consciousness. The interest itself is a sign that there is a spiritual maturity that's already arising into consciousness." - Adya "Part of the journey is to go from a walking contradiction to a walking paradox." - Adya "A fairy tale takes place out of time. It's a timeless story. It takes place in an entirely imaginary kingdom. We pleasurably leave reality. We all understand 'once upon a time': you're going to a different space. The themes are timeless." - Rowling "Dive into the well of being so that you can reemerge with something deeper and more beautiful to offer." - Adya "People are hoping to have an experience that's big enough and complete enough and total enough so all of this will happen without any intention forever. That's not a very reasonable thing to shoot at. That's not a very good ultimate aim. You don't have to wait for the experience. You can step up right now." - Adya "It's almost like a willing suspension of higher truth so you can get down into where it hasn't penetrated." - Adya "Anything that's happened to us that was too big for us to remain conscious while we experienced it, it gets trapped in our system. Those things are waiting for you: can you experience this now? If you can, then it can go through you, and you can start to find some release. If you can't, then you tend to go in circles again." - Adya "I would love everyone who came to see me have had two or three years of arduous meditation under their belt and two or three years in courses that taught them how to think well for themselves. Inquiry is a way of using your thoughts and your perception in a really clear and in a really precise way." - Adya "We have to be open to seeing how extraordinarily wrong we are." - Adya "Say what's true for a day. Before you open your mouth and say anything, internally, while you're looking at this person, just say, 'I love you.'" - Adya "Be aware of your human limitations. Don't make them wrong." - Adya "When your life becomes the continues unfolding of miracles, there's too many stories to tell." - Doc "In a freer state, that which is chosen manifests in our life effortlessly." - Doc "The way to become that exciting person whom people want to know is very easy. We simply picture the kind of person we want to be, and surrender all the negative feelings and blocks that prevent us from being that. What happens then is that all we need to have and to do will automatically fall into place." - Doc "Everyone in our life is acting as a mirror. They are really reflecting back to us what we have failed to acknowledge within ourselves. They are forcing us to look at what needs to be addressed. What aspect of our smaller self needs to be relinquished?" - Doc "A conscious breath has the power to turn around automatic, conditioned responses within us. It's the way we relate to our conditioning, to our experience, that is the difference between freedom and bondage." - Adya "There's very few things that you could choose in life to do that's trickier than to be a spiritual teacher. You need to have your human growing up part pretty well established. To be a good, mature, adult, functioning human being is the second consideration after the awakening itself. Because they do not come together." - Adya "When we remove the blinders of ignorance, wrong-knowing, we'll see where we can be and that's where we'll want to be." - Jed "The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity." - Rowling "It's connected and it comes out of the whole fabric of English history and folkloric mythology; that's why it works. Things don't work if they are a result of feeble-minded fantasy." - Fry "Magic is perennially fascinating. The appeal of the idea that one can do something that will influence this large scary environment in which one has to exist is still enormous." - Rowling "Children's books have dealt with ultimate questions: where do we come from? What's the nature of being a human being? What must I do to be good?" "The only reason anyone has ever, in the history of mankind, committed a single evil action, a single selfish action, it's because there was something they were going to gain from it: money, sex, power, prestige." - Gura "You face every fear and conquer it with love, which is the ultimate rule for living life." - Gura "When we say that someone is good, we mean that he has God-like qualities. God's qualities: truth, honesty, integrity, concern for all rather than just oneself, doing what is necessary for the benefit of all, working for the benefit of others, selflessness, self-sacrifice, love, non-judgment, humility, acceptance, non-attachment, consciousness, the recognition of beauty in everything, giving rather than taking, benevolence, fearlessness, wisdom, intelligence, creativity, flexibility, holism, the ability to see the whole and not just the parts, forgiveness of anyone for anything, balance, not selling out. Such people offer the world hope, and a glimpse of what they could become. This process requires conscious participation. Devote your whole life to actualizing goodness, and then take the actions that goodness demands." - Gura "Non-attachment allows me to participate in life, and be totally at one with it. I have nothing to gain from it, and nothing to lose from it. Consequently, I can one hundred percent participate without getting caught by it." - Doc "Our comfort zone is our conditioned zone." - Adya "The spiritual instinct is aiming at becoming deeply conscious of itself. It will put us through nice life experiences and very difficult experiences in order to accomplish its task." - Adya "If you don't have your own center, the world is going to define it for you. Your psyche is unconsciously going to go out there and it's going to attach at whatever gives it meaning, because that's what we're hooked up to do." - Adya "The gaze of eternity is that which is never caught and defined by what's happening in the world of time and space." - Adya "What might deeper alignment look like?" - Adya "A museum is a way of improving the educational experience of children in a city without having to go and trying to solve all the problems of every single school." - Lucas "Use well-chosen words to engage sound, sight, taste, touch, smell, and movement. Then create unexpected connotations among your story elements, and set your readers' brushfire imagination alight." "Vocabulary, grammar, style." "Imagine if your founding myth was, 'I poured myself into the world, as an act of loving sacrifice, in order to redeem everything that was hurt, in pain, confused, about my own human incarnation, which will allow me, then, to broaden out and touch others." - Adya "Stories were the means that you conveyed massive truths. You don't convey massive truths through facts." - Adya "Peoples', individuals' lives will contain a lot of archetypal elements. Those are the kind of lives that tend to live over the centuries. People refer back to them, because there was something about their life that embodied a huge amount of archetypal material." - Adya "I'm in no way capable of having a personal relationship with God. It's gone. Hasn't been here for a long, long time. Something better took its place." - Adya "Just imagine if nothing you did was based on a feeling of fear or insecurity." - Adya "The paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing — the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-levee and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like — whole mansions, if you have the energy." - King "Book-buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on a plane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages. This happens when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviours, their surroundings, and their talk. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story." - King "Stories consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from A to B and finally to point Z, description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader, dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech." - King "Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translation what you see in your mind into words on the page. If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it in a way that will cause your reader to prickly with recognition. Locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story that any physical description of the players. Nor do I think physical description should be a shortcut to character. Good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else. In most cases, these details will the first ones that come to mind." - King "What people do tells us more about what they’re like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they — the speakers — are completely unaware." - King "Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him out." - King "Somebody did something, the environment did something, and your mind interpreted in a way that makes you feel small, or contracted, or angry, or jealous, or fearful. And those are really valuable moments. The body will go into discord as soon as we're not in harmony with truth. It gets nervous, it gets upset. You can get very specific: 'Exactly what am I telling myself that's shrinking me?' Get very precise. Sometimes you can't just wait till it all goes away. When you start to take seriously that nothing can cause you to suffer except yourself and your own mind, you're really onto something. You're experiencing your inner virtual reality. And a well-placed question can turn it upside down." - Adya "Turn that light of awareness in: what is this thing called 'me'? Really? Have you spent much time with the not-thereness? You're asked to do much less than you ever imagined. The only part you have to play is to get yourself to the frontier, the boundary, of your mind. When you can't find anybody there, at that instant, you're actually at the boundary. There's nobody there, but there's something noticing that there's nobody there. There may be a sense of self, but even the sense of self doesn't define who you are. Just stay at the frontier, just sense it. What does it feel like, that state of not-knowing? Of not finding? If you found nothing, why don't you experience that? There is no next. The next thing has to come from the other side. That's grace. But what you can do is to get your consciousness to the frontier, realize that you're there, and experience that amazing, that lovely, unknown of it, that mystery: feeling the mystery of what you are. That's the doing, and that's a very powerful doing. Trying to do more than that is a way of making horizontal movement along the gateless gate. It's extraordinarily simple, and it's very arduous for a human being to do something very simple with any consistency. Stark, raving existential terror that you will die, and the void will suck you up into infinity, and you'll never know anything ever; that's the doorway into heaven. All it needs is a good 'yes'. Yes to whatever the fear threatens you with: 'I'll die.' 'Yes.'" - Adya "We can't give our gift, if we're always looking around us, going, 'Do you like it?'" - Adya "The most beautiful ones, the flowers of humanity, are the ones that are willing to be alone, and what arises from that aloneness, something unique, creative. Unique means alone. Some people lean on ideas, they lean on their intellect, some people lean on people, some people lean on substances." - Adya "There are times when you simply cannot manage your experience. At those moments, self is being dissolved, crushed, annihilated. That is self's constant effort to not be where it is, to constantly be in control. If you boil down all of spirituality to one simple principle, it would be having all sense of control yanked out of your little hands. There are certain things you go through that you're just going to go through, and just the going through them is sometimes exactly what's called for. And sometimes it's absolutely unavoidable. We play games pretending like it is avoidable. Sometimes we're trying to mitigate the very force that is trying to awaken us. You stop thinking that when things feel good that means that you're at a higher place. And when they feel rotten that means you're at a lower place." - Adya "The ego's agenda has a simplicity to it: I want things to go the way I want them to go." - Adya "When you're trying to be aware, it's actually a denial of awareness." - Adya "Sometimes what we desperately need is what we desperately don't want. Sit there and suffer with it until you stop trying to control it." - Adya "The fact that you are and that you are in all states of consciousness; that's the intriguing thing, that always you are." - Adya "To know and not to feel is not yet to really know." - Adya "When you're right on the edge of seeing something very deep, all the fear, all the shadow side within you, will rally to the forefront of consciousness quickly and powerfully." - Adya "Find the inspiration itself. It will take a form. Start with the small things." - Adya "The exterior adventures, they're nothing like what's really inside. They're nothing like adventuring into the infinite, into your infinite nature." - Adya "Techniques are not useful unless the attitude behind it is there. Wanting what's real, once that catches fire, that's the path. Without that, the rest is empty technique." - Adya "We're dealing with a way of engaging what's the most important thing to you, in such a way that you do not succumb to the ego pursuing its ideal and its image, and yet you also don't succumb to 'It's grace, there is nothing I can do, and it will happen when it happens.'." - Adya "What's part of a dark night is a closing down of your affective system, your emotional energy. The first dark night is the dark night of the will. You're experiencing the limitation of will, of wanting, of seeking, of grasping, of a will to try to break through, of a will to give yourself. It depends on how much resistance there is, how much you mistake the truth of being for some of those fancy spiritual experiences. The more you realize that you are this conscious loving presence in which delusion and that which is not true can unfold, the easier this goes. You hurt yourself when you run from any part of yourself. You're not weaned away from those experiences, because they may come and go, but you're being weaned away from your attachments. And you're dying into a profound simplicity, a deep ease and a depth that's very hard to describe. Go into that quiet desert. You gotta dance your dance out. You can't pretend that you're somewhere that you're not. Be true to what you're experiencing. Feel what you're being called to let go of, and feel what you're being called to let go into." - Adya "Get clear on what you want to do in life, start to look at from where you are doing it first, and then what you do will carry forth the transmission of your own value." - Adya "Taking responsibility for your orientation, your state of consciousness, is absolutely essential in the spiritual life." - Adya "The very things we often are drawn to, to help ourselves, make it worse." - Adya "You have to teach them how to use the grammar of language: it's a communication class; it should be taught as a very practical tool that you use to sell and influence people and get your point across and communicate to other people." - Lucas "George doesn't make things up; he creates new things out of what exists: old stories. And he's taken those old stories and put them in the most modern idiom we have, which is film." - Moyers "It doesn't have anything to do with special effects, it doesn't have anything to do with spaceships; it has to do with the same thing that made people sit around and listen to a storyteller go on about Helen of Troy." - Lucas "If you have an artist who is pigheaded and stubborn and determined to get his vision the way he wants it, he's going to have to learn how to manipulate the situation to get what he wants. Mozart didn't have that ability; he was a genius, but he didn't quite figure out how the system worked." - Lucas "Yoga is not bringing trouble; it is just hastening up the troubles so that your quota of troubles will be over as soon as possible. The very process of life is put on fast-forward. When situations keep changing more dramatically than ever before, one needs a certain amount of balance and skill to handle the external situations; if you don't handle them properly and they collapse around you, then most probably you may give up your spiritual process." - Sadhguru

Yeah, I have the same situation with mine. He usually gets annoyed because I have this habit of talking about absolute nothingness and death before we go to sleep. He told me I give him nightmares so I had to stop