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Just did the Neti Neti Inquiry and I felt like I kept getting stuck because I believe I am the voice (thoughts) and the perceiver too -- so I perceive what I do. I didn't really think I thought I was the body. In fact I'm a little surprised some people think they are as it seemed obvious to me that I am the one perceiving the sensations (Spiritual Enlightenment part 3 helped come to this conclusion). Now I don't know where to go from here. I feel like some thoughts I have no control of and I don't know what the next thought will be but yet feel like I have control over these thoughts -- after all how can I do self-inquiry if I didn't have some control over thoughts? I also didn't fully get why fundamentally ''I'' have to be constant. Why can't ''I'' fundamentally change from moment to moment? We only have the present moment so why does it matter what I was in the past? Another thing I'm confused with is that ''I'' am nothing yet it seemed convincing that I am the sensations that happen in the present moment like in the short Guided Mediation video. So how can I be both nothing and the sensations?

What I've learned: Fructose can never be 100%-ly absorbed by the gut. Some fructose will stay inside the gut and cause some problems there. The human body is not designed for being a fruitarian. Bottom-Line Contemplation separating your reactions from your emotions questioning the root cause of your emotions deeply discovering your core assumptions my bottom-line is something like "I need the support of others to survive" Nature of Emotions: Fear: about the future, unwanted experience Anger: about the past, incapability, feeling hurt, demonstrating capacity through destruction Desire: about the future, desired experiences, suffering in the present Pain: primitive, eliminating it through being present and letting go of the distinction "pain" Breatharianism is possible There are life principles which are more inclusive - not just exclusive and centered around the ego e.g. honesty (-> serving the Truth), communication (-> listening closely, speaking about experiences truthfully without manipulation, self-agenda) What I fear will most likely not happen I like analyzing the psychology and structure of thinking of other people I need to make bold life changes. Otherwise I will stay in homeostasis I feel a drastic effect of less meditation (because of Christmas). It is very very important for my mood to meditate at least two hours. I really don't like doing strength training. I really like endurance training, stretching and other stuff like yoga and stretching or practicing a handstand It is very important to truly know ones values, strengths and big picture Proper standing posture: Feet: about shoulder width apart, external rotation Tension on gluts and abs -> no pelvic tilt moving chest up/out, shoulder back and locating the head above the spine looking straight forward You are so drastically influenced by your childhood vows. I am very limited through those vows How I am moving towards becoming a sage: Implementing a new morning routine meditation + drinking tee while practicing gratitude and visualization + yoga/strechting and doing exercises for dorsiflexion + cold shower and not using my phone or computer until I am ready Waking up directly, not lying down again, sitting upright Drinking lots of tea Having finished reading The Book of Not Knowing Noticing negative emotions, anger, fear, judgment Having some deep neti neti meditations in less than 1.5 hours Comforting my sister with unconditional love Watching desire and craving arise Noticing that I like Teal Swan although here is a lot of negative discussion about here going on Analyzing the psychology of my parents Questioning fears Trying out yoga videos Writing E-Mails to my best friend Trying mindfulness meditation and noticing that I am very bad at it Speaking honestly with my best friend Starting to read Zen Body-Being by Peter Ralston and directly taking notes to every chapter One day in school I had almost the whole time this feeling of unconditional love for everybody, smiled and was happy Assessing my values again Sometimes doing breathing exercises in the morning outside Making notes for a full review of 2016 What my intuition is telling me lately / how I will move towards sagehood: Creating many mind-maps about core concepts form The Book of Not Knowing Meditating for multiple hours per day Doing more mindfulness meditation Doing sports only intuitively Reviewing my older journal entries more closely Taking a gap year Finally attacking my eating habit 2017 and fixing the root cause Music: I noticed that I am often having a loop of music inside my head while meditating. This was really distracting and annoying. I wanted to know what happens if I stop listening to music. So I stopped listening to music for a few days. Initially I wanted to do it for one whole week. I started Wednesday but today I listened to a few songs. I don't really mind. Anyways I couldn't avoid all the Christmas music and the radio around the house. It is almost everywhere in the house as soon as I leave my room. I quickly noticed that the music loop stopped and my meditation was a little bit more concentrated. I also noticed that I am a bit addicted to music. It is a habit to listen to music while doing something else. It is like a constant drug, which prevents you from questioning and thinking deeply. From now on I will only listen to music when I want to enjoy it purely without any other activity going on. Just notice how this artist is enjoying and mastering his craft:

@Saarah Yes I totally agree with the raising of awareness. Been doing a lot of Neti Neti lately and it is working nicely. That along with all the other personal development stuff like working towards and becoming and embodying my goals and desires, radical action, learning about life purpose is doing me well and seems to be "attracting" more of what I want in life.

86th day: Enlightenment work What a freakin day. From 10-11AM I did SDS then right after lunch I did Neti-Neti for 56 minutes and then I just waited for the full hour to go by. After other stuff I did 1 horu of self inquiry in the evening and I just finished another 30 minutes of SDS, I planned whole hour but it did not clap with dinner and such. Cool, all of it was sitting crosslegged basically not moving especially during oficial SDS. Towards the second half of self-inquiry something interesting happened. I was wondering who the hell recognizes thought when it comes up. It is recognized by someone right? Well there is somebody otherwise the thought would as well not exist at all.... and then something happened. I had this insight about this "field" that reflects these things, it did not have any form. I was like: all right then, I better remember this! I tried to recreate the complete experience but was not succesful. I feel great now anyways and it was something remarkable.. I also understand more this concept of not clinging to experience. Physics Alright, I did some Khan Academy. Mindfulness Quite good and it is not even school! No computer games (30 streak) Stuff I went running today. I ran over 8 kilometers with tempo something like 6 minutes and 10 seconds for kilometer.. that is definitely weak for me but I do not mind, I enjoyed the run a lot. Knees are completely ok just the bone under it hurts a bit. Two days ago I actually was doing parkour and I finally had the courage to jump one of the more difficult jumps! I also did some exercises for knees again. I joined the no music for one week unofficial challenge! Leo's practical guide to enlightenment is great. The Grand Project Have you been wondering how is my work here going? Well I have finished first course on HTML and CSS in CodeAcademy and now today I started PHP. Otherwise I am getting some better idea what will be my way of approach to this thing but it is kind of abstract to write here. I need to study a lot a lot, thats why I have to go to University because I could not learn the stuff by myself so easily. Of course I can start before I finish my school. That needs some studying too but if I start to prepare the most of the surface stuff it will be easier to work with it later on. I realised that blogging (that is around 250 posts on my blog each roughly 400 words) really improved my writing skills. Just the other day I received 11/12 points on english writing and the only problem is that I never learned to use "articles". This is nice indeed. Dragallur

Karma yoga - action without expectation. Bhakti yoga - surrender to reality as it is - exercise for every second especially for bad moments and mindfullness. Raja yoga - meditation and asans and nidra and neti neti and inquiry. Jnana yoga - knowledge and concepts from enlightened people / advaita vedanta.

83rd day: Enlightenment work Well lot of monkey mind. I am going throung Neti-Neti too fast. Since winter break is coming I am planning to do long distance walking again. Two times I walked already in summer 65 kilometers and 50 kilometers once in a day. SInce I am not so fit at the moment I will probably start with 40 or so and if it goes alright I will walk more. Really looking forward to it, just realized that this plan was made up by intuition probably!!! Physics Wow today... I spent most of the day doing physics and math. I need to work so freakin much. I tend to look towards the people that have around 100% on one of the hard-core physics seminars and then I take look on the problems and its like another language.. The problem is that I have learn to expect that I will solve problem fastly or that I will see the solution immediately. At the same time I persuaded myself to do some research before giving up and I found the stuff I needed for one of the problems and basically understood everything in it which was great! Lesson: I need to learn more patience and really dive into the topics. I have really fun sometimes with derivatives, its really cool to do them. Mindfulness No comment. (no comp. games) I watched the new video of course. This one was pretty good indeed. No time to loose, there is really lot to do and physics and enlightenment need to be mastered. I forgot to say, about week ago I had spontaneous lucid dream, cool but it was short as hell. I spend a lot of time on the computer and on internet.. I think it is alright since I do not procrastinate these days and I need to learn physics on computer since I do not have here any books anyway. Also I realized that I did another intuition thing. I decided that I will stop heating my room completely. It safes water which is good for environment (I was just re-learning something with calorimetry and hell, water takes so much energy to heat!!!). It is right now pretty chilli and my feet are freezing a bit but I can adjust! After today I feel this strong urge to really learn physics cool. One of the best threads ever on this forum was created when Leo shared the book of Ra. Interesting was that the part I read I took pretty ok, but no I do not believe in UFO. It is not actually very important to take ANY position here, you can just let it be and let evidence show up, which I really like. Leo mentioned that there is some part about meditation and it is pretty well described to what he experiences which sounds cool. Its all alright I know that my emotional reaction when I hear about somebody being religious is going pretty close to zero! I see how the yellow stage is amazing. I am not there, I have been thinking about it a long time but I am not there, definitely, long way to go.. but hell yeah it is great to feel peace and not disgust when somebody talks about these things. Dragallur

What I've learned: I will be less effected by my circumstances though honesty, letting go of value, detachment from this social person and taking things less personally. I need to be careful to distinguish what my intuition is telling me and what social conditioning wants me to do. Beliefs = consciously adopted beliefs + programming + assumptions Through eliminating beliefs one will become radical open. Life will become magical again. I need to master one domain. Otherwise I will not be able to create something valuable. I am absolutely free. Only my mind/social survival is limiting me. I just need to get free of social survival. Many philosophers have discovered aspects of nonduality. They knew that language is an illusion and cannot display absolute truth. Many people today are not aware of this. Physics is fascinating. When matter and antimatter come together a huge amount of energy gets set free. Or all those thousands tiny particles that make up our matter (quarks, leptons, neutrinos...) I only work out to stay healthy and to feel good in my body. I don't want to reach some ideal. Just working out for one hour, a combination of endurance, strength and mobility is totally enough if I stay relatively active throughout the rest of the day. I am annoyed when the day does not work out how I imagined and others occupy my free time. I am easily influenced by my father and other persons with authority. There is a huge gap between poor and rich. The poor people become more and more. They make the government responsible for their circumstances and therefore search for other types of government (Trump or the AfD in Germany). We need to care about these people, otherwise conflicts will arise like we are seeing at the moment. Be the change that you want to see. Raise the consciousness of humanity. I am still very very closed-minded. While I read a few pages of "The Law Of One" I noticed how much resistance I have. But it clearly could be possible. Contemplation Pre-Contemplation: Presence, Clarity, Possibility Contemplating: Intent, Openness, Focus, Questioning I don't take Enlightenment seriously enough. I need to study other traditions more. Enlightenment is just the beginning. How I am moving towards becoming a sage: Eating less raisins and exchanging it through tea and raw fruits. It starts to work out. Reading a lot in the Book of Not Knowing. I am getting to the really interesting parts now. It is getting easier to take really cold showers. Feeling and observing my emotions. Not repressing them. Dealing with them. Creating an intuition incubator - simply a little journal/note book with things my intuition told me. I review it every day and look what I can do, so that I really act upon it and don't forget it. Surrendering to this confusion whether I should just listen to my intuition or to be more realistically. Visualization and assessing my values. I found a technique to stay awake in the morning. Just sitting upright in bed, and not lying down again. A big difference! Working out intuitively without any plan. Self Love. Feeling strong emotions of love with become almost painful. Having quite a few "successful moments" with neti neti and contemplation. I feel like I am growing a lot at the moment. What my intuition is telling me lately / how I will become a sage: Taking more and longer cold showers My life purpose could be AI and programming. I could develop apps which analyze how people think, their beliefs and how they should move towards Enlightenment. But I also could become a coach because I recognized how much I like analyzing the psyches and shadows of other people. I could combine AI and coaching! Writing a big review about 2016 Meditating and Contemplating throughout the day for short periods of time Doing more mindfulness meditations Creating a strong morning routine Not spending much time on the Internet in the morning

Emotions: I the last couple of days I am spending relatively little time on the Internet and rather sit there in "silence & solitude". Most of the evenings I just sit there. This gets me really in touch with my emotions. I want to understand them more and really feel into them. What do they mean? What are they like? What do I want to do know with this emotion? One day I had a relatively negative emotion inside me. I had time and planed to read or meditate. But I felt that I wanted to do neither of them. I just wanted to do exactly nothing. So I sat there for about an hour and did nothing (but not the meditation technique). Sometimes I sit there, listen to some music and feel into my body. Sometimes I do shadow work and feel the emotions arising in relations to my father or some childhood events. Sometimes I sit there and feel this deep love. Love for myself and others. Accepting myself and others. Sometimes I read The Book of Not Knowing and feel this love and gratitude. But today these emotions became somehow too strong. I meditated for two hours in the morning (neti neti) and got some sense that I am beyond perception. I felt this deep love again. This feeling came up again and again throughout the day. And now in the evening I wanted to meditate again for two hours. But this love became somehow too strong that it is almost painful. So I stopped after one hour. Now I am kind of distracting myself to ground myself again. I can understand why infinity might be threatening. What I am experiencing is probably just a tiny tiny aspect of infinity. Maybe its like 10⁻¹⁰⁰ times of the love of infinity. But wait, infinity is infinite, so my love is already infinite. Some music which brings me in touch with my emotions:

73rd day: Oh it has been a while since i posted, well few days. Anyway interesting stuff is definitely going on: Enlightenment work I bought the book Neti Neti meditation. It has only 50 pages but enough material for decades I guess So since I deleted my excel charts I kind of changed my meditation, not really though right now I do everyday 1 hour SDS and then 1 hour of Neti-Neti or Self-inquiry, today for example it was Neti-Neti. Pretty neat, I often feel during these two things as though I am standing in front of huge beautiful dragon (those are my favorite animals) and not even that I can not comprehend its appearence and majesty but I do not even know that it is dragon and there are 3 feet of wall of smoky glass between us (and I do not wear my glasses ). Btw I hate the imperial units but this time it seemed nice ot use feet since in the song While We Sleep by Insomnium, they say "wall of glass thick and deep"... oh wait there is no "feet" there, ouch.. Physics I am working on problems from one seminar. The one that I need to solve right now goes like this: you are on a beach with your girlfriend/boyfriend and you watch sunset. Since you want the romantic moment to last, you brought an elevator.. find out what speed does the elevator need to drive in order for you two to be able to watch the sunset. Mindfulness Last week was better. No computer games (17 streak) Wow, I would not expect this to be so easy. I almost played one really old game yesterday, I completely forgot about this. It did not work though because of WIndows 10 so.. I will not try to wake up at 5:00AM for some time now. I feel like I have a bit of sleep deprivation and I need to catch that up so I stop falling asleep during SDS. Pick Up Well this is where things go as much personal as they have been ever in this journal, I guess. Well. Girls. Yup. I was in a friendzone at least 3 times (I am 16 and one of them was for like 6 months at least). This never made me angry at this kind of stuff and rather learned me quite important things about myself. So no, I never had girlfriend, I have some good female friends, I had one about 2 years ago who was for some time probably the closest person to me ever but thats about it. While I called it pick up it was not much of a pick up. Today during lunch I had a great opportunity to talk with one very sympatic girl since she was sitting alone. It was completely catastrophic, but hey, I almost laughed out loud during my Neti-Neti about it. In the afternoon I summarised the conversation, highlighted important parts and commented on my mistakes, yeah they were really dumb. Thats my first experience with walking to person of another gender without even knowing their name and starting conversation out of nothing with no idea where it will go. Random stuff I started to watch Game of Thrones again but only in German. Wow, it is pretty hard, otherwise my german has improved a lot, I quite like it these days. In physics test I got 13/21 points. Well, I had EVERYTHING right except one minus and then the teacher did not like that I do not write units often and my way of working through some problem. She does not have much of physics-problem-thinking. She always inserts value into equation and after that she evaluates it instead of manipulating it so that you have something you want to find out equals to stuff and then inserting the values. Dragallur

What I have learned: Through visualization, gratitude, meditation, movement, cold exposure and healthy food everyday might become absolutely beautiful Confusion is good, it is not knowing It is much more effective to learn something new firstly by getting an overview, a big picture about the topic. Only later detailed knowledge is useful. You should be able to summarize a book on a normal A4 page and to explain it in 5 minutes. Otherwise you have not understand it properly. Through summarizing you have to deal with all the topic intensively, so that at the end you will know all the details too. The intuition is so powerful. I have to learn to listen to it throughout the whole day to take the right decisions. Even for stuff like what I should eat for lunch. Our perception is distorted by our beliefs so much. My life is a story. Everything is a story! Society appreciates you only if you fit into the societal norms. Otherwise you are apparently worthless. It doesn't matter at all what I will do with my life! In a few thousands of years the sun will collapse and "I" will be just matter/energy. All of humanity will just be matter/energy. Everytime my family is holding me back from pursuing my dreams, they just care for me out of love. They just want to understand me. Every negative consequence will most likely never happen. I will still be alive. There is a possibility to combine physics with consciousness (look at John Hagelin, Ph.D.) Lower stages (red,blue,orange) will bring up problems (war->refugees->migration->racism etc.) that will catalyse the development of higher stages (green,yellow). People will recognize that ones culture isn't superior to others. People will spread messages of tolerance, peace, love, open-mindedness. So much is happening already. It feels like Peter Ralston is just talking about stuff that I have already came up with by self-inquiry/spiritual autolysis in the last months. He is putting it into nice language and concepts, what was for me just vague ideas. What my intuition is telling me lately: more Neti Neti meditation making a list of possible plans for the future less internet this forum is just an ego game (mostly for me), but also a source of great information doing shadow work regarding my father letting go of my identifications (health, sports, school) "self coaching" - imagining speaking to a life coach, telling him stuff about me and coming up with answers he would give me How I acted upon my intuition lately: only taking cold showers going outside every morning in light clothes (-5 degrees Celsius), running around, stretching and doing breathing exercises for about 10 minutes "getting out of bed" (off the floor) almost immediately puzzling doing Neti Neti meditation almost every day visualizing almost every day Life Purpose: My intuition came up with this: I want to make people more open-minded and skeptic. So many people just take the beliefs of our culture, the story of our lives (the song title "Story of my life" now has a very different meaning ), everything for granted. They never question anything about his. But they are not responsible for this, they never get the opportunity to take a look outside of the social matrix. I want to show people what different possibilities life has and how limited their view is. I want to inform them about Enlightenment, beliefs, the mind, religions, spirituality, ancient times, philosophy, psychedelics, history, consciousness, science, controversial theories, quantum mechanics etc. I'd like to do this through building a huge website with a lot of sources of information. The only problem is that I dislike writing stuff like informative blog posts. I thought of rather making mind maps, audiofiles, some texts, pictures and links for other resources. The whole website will just be a HUGE mind map where are thousands of connections between all the topics. Baby-steps I will take to improve my life: doing Neti Neti occasionally throughout the day and becoming aware that life is just a story 5 minute meditation before every food intake getting into a better, loving, visionary mood before going to school to transcend the negative mood of everybody in school researching a little bit about quantum mechanics.

Well, I sit down on my couch and close my eyes I firstly think of what my life will look like if I had a really good eating habit and would use the internet almost never. I try to imagine how good this will feel. Then I visualize what I want my life in general to be like (location, people, environment, activities, life purpose). Mostly then I am in nature meditating with people around me doing the same. I do the Neti-Neti meditation as described in the book "Neti Neti Meditation" by Andre Doshim Halaw.

One of your best journal entries, good job, I can see that you are really moving forward! How does the visualization of yours look like? Do you do neti-neti form Leo's video or do you have some other source?

I didn't feel like writing much here in the last week. I started journaling daily in my private journal again. I wrote down some positive aspects of each day, something that I could improve, what I have learned, what my intuition is telling me and stuff that I am grateful for. Each morning (except for today) I reviewed the last journal entries and visualized stuff. Now I will sumarise what I find important: What I have learned: Visualization is powerful! Through visualizing and meditating for a few minutes multiple times a day I will become more consciousness about my actions. My actions and habits will automatically change to the better. Visualization is one of the most important habits. Building this habit is more important than just changing my eating of internet habit. Visualization is a keystone habit. Not-knowing is the natural state of being. My intuition is the voice of my subconscious mind. My intuition knows more than I do. I should listen to my intuition more than to myself. I am able to understand, write and read English well. I often even think in English. But I have to little practice of speaking English actively. Having a fluent conversation in English seems harder to me than I thought. I need more practice. I am scared of moving away from home but it would bring me much more growth and new opportunities. It is a risk but it has a lot of potential. Change is important. I do not have to spread non duality and become a spiritual guru to have a positive impact on humanity and to make humanity at least a little bit more conscious. The impact statement "raising the consciousness of humanity" is to general. There are so many ways in which I can do that. I have to look which way I am most passionate about. I could work at McDonald's as an enlightened guy and still be happy. At the end nothing is important at all. It isn't a good idea to look at WhatsApp and this forum right before I am about to meditate. This is just fuel for the monkey mind. Don't tell the devil that you are killing it. We live in a time full of risks. I cannot be sure about that I will still live in a few years. Money is an illusion of security. An economic crisis could always happen. Money could lose its value. Authentic deep relationships are more important. I do not want to have to persuade people by argumentation. I want my actions and achievements to speak for themselves. I want them to be inspiriting and making people act upon this inspiration. I want to live in peace with nature. Not just in near future. I can now begin to realize this and help the environment. Neti-Neti meditation is soo powerful. What my intuition is telling me lately: moving out or traveling after finishing school wwoofing after school, getting out of my comfort zone I want to try doing different things before deciding what I will do with my life. I don't want to start studying directly. doing more and longer Neti-Neti sessions writing my German and social science teacher an e-mail on how she could improve the classes studying maths when I want to How I acted upon my intuition lately: playing my guitar after a few years of not practicing it painting having 'done' two long (90-110min) Neti-Neti sessions rearranging my room a bit studying maths not writing here so often Baby-steps I will take to improve my life: waking up and standing up every morning immediately without spending time on my phone reading my last journal entries each morning and visualizing fore 15 minutes visualizing my internet usage for 5 minutes before using the internet visualizing my eating pattern for 3 minutes before eating or preparing food

Hello everyone! I've been on the spiritual path for nearly 2 years now and after a rough start I've achieved significant progress over the last few months. My awakening experience happened in July and its forever changed my life, since then I've watched my ego like a hawk. Every single movement, thought, feeling, belief, etc was carefully observed and dis-identified with until there was nothing left. During this time I had many dark night of the soul experiences but loved every minute of it Having been severely depressed and suicidal before I stumbled upon this path I feel has given me the intense desire to keep pushing along to find Truth no matter what cost it takes. Well I've finally made that breakthrough, I decided to seriously sit down and meditate for the first time along my journey and made the decision to not get up until I found my True Self. I used the Neti Neti method and after about an hour the space between my eyes began to vibrate very rapidly and I just felt everything disappear. For the first time in my life I finally felt free from the illusion, it was like I was back at home. There's still further to go on this path but liberation awaits! I had no one to tell in real life but I just wanted to share this accomplishment with someone

In his older content, Leo talks about self inquiry in a different way to now. It comes across as if it were simply a process of asking a few questions: Who is aware? Who is perceiving? Who am I? I would say that style of 'thinking' inquiry is also found in his Neti Neti guided video. In a more recent guided video (Guided Meditation), I notice an entirely different style of inquiry. In this episode, Leo slowly builds up your awareness by getting you to be mindful of your senses. After your awareness has increased, he encourages you to become your senses, accepting absolutely everything. When I practise the questioning-type method, I end up with no answers, and easily lose focus. With the other, awareness-type method, after just a few sessions of practice I can consistently 'push my awareness' out of my head, into all of my senses. This results in very strange experiences - I would definitely not call them enlightenment experiences, but my awareness shifts and my sense of self feels like it is being twisted and pulled. My question is this: are the older methods less effective than the new ones? Leo's content seems to have evolved greatly in the past few months, and I am wondering whether his attitude to self inquiry has evolved at the same time. I am lead to conclude that his older 'thinking' methods are now obsolete in comparison to this new, 'being' style inquiry. What do you think?

Autism: In the last two days I watched three reportages about Autism / Asperger syndrome. Quite interesting. I admire their honesty and authenticity. I recognized how much I am criticizing and judging people. I don't like the social norms but I judge people who don't fit into the social norms. Why? Because I also don't fit in and want to feel better by making other people down in my mind? There is this one girl in school who is really strange. She behaves very different, she is kind of annoying and nobody likes her. But she somehow does not recognize this and tries to make friends. Some of us assume that she has kind of "disorder" or a weak form of Asperger syndrome. I have a few classes with her. I am not as mean as everybody else to her but also not very friendly. Because of that she often came up to me when we had to form groups or had to play volleyball in a team. But I dislike working with her because she is so annoying and really really really bad at sports. Everytime that I am a little bit mean to her I feel bad. I can emphasize with her a lot. I can imagine being in her situation. Maybe I should treat her a little bit better now. The Truman Show: I just watched this movie because of recommendations on this forum. Actually I wanted to continue reading the book of not knowing but I had this intuitive urge to watch a film. It is mind blowing and so relatable to Enlightenment. Society is telling me like all these actors that I should pursue normal things and behave well. Everything is fine in this world of delusions, why should anybody question it? People give so many excuses for not pursuing higher things and not questioning. I will have to keep this in mind and rewatch the movie. At the moment I have many inspiring intuitive things in mind to do but I am resisting it so much. I am resisting it so much that I don't even want to write it down because I could be hold reliable on doing it here. My higher self knows that every earthly pursue is unimportant. But all the time the ego is in the background of my mind saying that I will still pursue those things. "I will finish school, I will go to university, I will get a job. Pursuing my life purpose is not possible for me." The ego is so influenced by society. How can I know that these things are even true, that reality exists??? Neti Neti Meditation: I received this book about two weeks ago, read it and have not really acted upon it yet. I remembered this and tried it out today. I did 87 minutes of meditation and after about 40 minutes I started negating. I explored my body and saw that I am not it. Still I have to investigate in each of these body parts much further because there still was this sense of self there. This meditation session was also nice because it was a proper session after quite a few days of no proper sessions. Sometimes I just ended the meditation after 30 minutes and continued reading the book of not knowing because this is more comfortable. But through reading and contemplating I don't get the same sense of relaxation, detachment, stillness.

That's a rather good explanation of it. Karma Yoga would be like selfless action. It would be similar to what I call life purpose. I doubt that Karma Yoga is too effective at making people enlightened. But it could be highly effective for spiritual purification -- which in a way is even more important than enlightenment. But if you're gunning for enlightenment proper, I would focus on a more direct method like self-inquiry, or mindfulness meditation, or neti neti, etc. Ideally, of course, do both! In general, seek to make your actions and your work as selfless as possible.

Self-Inquiry has nothing to do with thinking. Yes, there are the questions, but they're just there to direct your attention. The point is becoming conscious of what's true. Yes, it's easy to lose track. It's a highly focused activity. When you do lose track, just bring your attention back. It's not obsolete at all, that's just a conclusion you've drawn in your mind, based on ungrounded assumptions. Self-inquiry is the most direct method and Leo has frequently commented in support of it, as well as Neti-Neti even recently. Pushing your awareness out of your head is just that - pushing your awareness out of your head. That gives less CPU for thinking, so you're more focused. Yes, it gives you a high of a sort. That has nothing to do with enlightenment though. It's a feel-good trap. The guided meditation is not inquiry, it's basically the same as "be still", "do nothing", "choiceless awareness" etc. Many names.

Books: Like I said earlier I have received the book "Neti Neti Meditation". I have already read through it (just 50 pages). It is a pretty precise explaination of the Neti-Neti technique. I will have to work with this book so much and there is so much to learn from it. Neti-Neti is very powerful. But simply studying it will not be enough. I will have to apply it. This is hard. It always has been kind of hard for me to do self inquiry because of the monkey mind. I question something and almost immediately the monkey mind is coming up and is distracting me. Patience will be the key here. The next two books I received are "The Book of Not-Knowing" and "Zen Body-Being" by Peter Ralston. I began reading the book of not-knowing. Very very very very powerful and good, full with wisdom. This will be a life changer.

Habit-Transformation - Day 16: visualization internet usage - Streak 3 Mindfulness: I had only 6 hours of sleep. I tried to meditate in the morning but quited after half an hour because I was so tired. I almost fell back to sleep. My maths teacher borrowed me an old book of her for first semester maths. I could try to understand the book sometimes in the normal classes because its too easy for me. I just tried to understand the first pages. I did it for about 1 hour and got to the third page... I am doing this to look if I really want to study maths. My tics are coming back again... One of my book orders will arrive tomorrow (Neti Neti Meditation by Andre Doshim Halaw).

I got the neti-neti mediation book and this just takes my self inquiry to a whole level. I didnt realise how in depth and disturbing the process can get!!

Cool! I have been putting off watching that video for months! I will try it! I wonder what it is... Kind of like a strange name "Neti Neti". My guess: questioning our identity over and over again. I will see the video, but I don't think I'll focus on that for now. I'm concentrating my energy on Shikatanza. If I get the desire of doing this method, I will. Anyway... just some rumination here

I recently have been doing a lot of self-inquiry with writing my questions and answers down. But almost every session I come to the same conclusion from which I cannot go any further. The self-inquiry process becomes useless in a sense because I already know the conclusion. In every session I realize that everything is just a concept, belief, perception... And I am non of these things. I get the sense of being this constant thing behind all of this, like Leo describes in the neti-neti meditation. So I am this thing beyond perception but also within perception. I am everything, nothing, infinity. At the end of a session I feel this connection with the constant thing I am. And I have the feeling that I cannot go any further. It seems like Enlightenment is just being connected with the constant me and letting go of all beliefs. Therefore the key to Enlightenment is mindfulness and I don't need to do any self-inquiry anymore. The only thing I would have to work on is being mindful and connected with the constant me. Is this the right approach? Or am I doing something wrong? Am I deluding myself? (here are some of my self-inquiry sessions)

Hi guys I wanted to write about an experience I had while listening to Leo's video 'Neti Neti method', since I'm not quite sure to understand what happened, and readers of what I'm about to describe might I've been meditating for a little more than a year now, testing with the do nothing technique, mindfulness and finally STS. For the past few weeks I've been watching some videos about enlightenment and it made me somehow more focused on the matter. Even though I had been practicing the Neti Neti method a some months ago (When Leo released the video), I stopped because I was living a life transition, entering college and thought that I wouldn't have time to keep doing meditation + enlightenment inquiry. I kept up with my daily meditation routine though, while increasing the time of the sessions. Then, a few days ago I had an insight about identity: while I was sitting and thinking of my own life story, I thought it literally was just a succession of images that were being 'scrolled' in my head. Then one idea just hit me: Is there any difference, if I tend to identify with anything in the first place, to identify with that succession of images or a simple feeling in my back for example? I came to the conclusion that no, there isn't. And I felt that realization kind of opened my mind somehow. This evening, I felt like going back to the Neti Neti video of Leo, and as the first words were spoken about 'you not being an experience at all' I got shivers all over my body. So I immediately focused on the video and started following the guided meditation. At the end of the video when the 'kicker' got in, I felt like having a micro glimpse of 'nothingness', I then had a feeling of spreading through space a little and all of my body tensed up like crazy: I was crying and breathing at a very fast pace at the same time. The tension in my hands is the thing that shocked me the most: They were all curled up, and I could hardly move my fingers. Then the tension melt down a few minutes later, and I feel quite relaxed right now, as I'm writing. That's it for the story, I hope I didn't wrought too much and that someone out there might have had a similar experience or knows about what I'm talking about Leo if you read this thank you for your video man It actually produced something in me, now is the time to know what exactly... haha cheers Damien

Hi people, Do any of you have any tips on techniques to where to take my meditation next? As some background, I started out meditation to get a handle on anxiety issues I was having. After a few years of slight interest and six months of serious practice I am now able to calm my mind down really well, and when anxiety attacks happen I can now get myself back to a relaxed state pretty quickly and reliably. When I am meditating without the anxiety I can get very calm and content. All of this has left me interested in doing more self-inquiry... most days I can get pretty calm after 20 minutes or so and it would be nice to have techniques that let me dig a little deeper after that point. I am currently using the following in order of "depth" of meditation: Simple breath awareness Normal mindfulness Do nothing Strong determination sitting Neti-neti style negation "Who am I" style questioning I kind of see how I feel before I start and then do 5 mins of breath awareness, 20 mins of do nothing, then 20 mins of 'who am i' questioning. ie. I kind of ramp things up slowly. Could anyone suggest other techniques that have worked well for them? Or is it more a case of working with what I have for longer periods perhaps? Or, do any of you have any nice combinations? For example, I find that 20 mins of neti neti followed by 20 mins of 'who am i' questioning can work really well. The neti neti kind of gets my head primed for the 'who am i' in a way that really opens things up.