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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.

WEEK 13 DAY 85 20 minute morning yoga. 60 minute yoga class. 25 minute breathing meditation. Spent some time reading and watching Ken Wilber. Finally getting a basic understanding about what whole integral theory is about. Also watched new Leo's video. Very sceptical about it. I have done my share of experimentation with certain substances and it can be very insightful and also very delusional. Although all this is relative and depending on the context you are comparing it against conclusions can vary dramatically. Anyway, it is interesting to see where he goes from here. Meditation was tough today. Really really tough. I was not able to concentrate fully. Still very glad I did it. Fingers cracked 1 time. DAY 86 20 minute morning yoga. 25 minute breathing meditation. Lovely meditation today. I felt deeply thankful for the opportunities I have in my life and all the big and small things that are happening around me. I am experiencing so much daily it is crazy. I have a morning routine which stuck to me nicely. My nutrition has improved significantly. Without even having an intention to lose weight (because I was in a decent shape anyway) I lost 4 kilos in last 2 and half months. I have a job which is not easy but I like it and I see myself growing and becoming a master in what I do. I work on myself consistently and my awareness and emotional balance is evolving. I have a girlfriend with whom I am happy with and our relationship is growing and getting more grounded. I have other people that care about me and I am very grateful for that. I am learning to take life less seriously and enjoy present moment more. I am also becoming less dogmatic and more open minded. There is still so much to learn and discover and that does not mean that there is a lack of something or that there is some sort of underlying deficiency which does not allow me to be happy. It simply means that life can get even more colourful and meaningful. Love you all. Fingers cracked 4 times. Shit. I often notice myself before I crack fingers but sometimes it is too late. Shiet. DAY 87 15 minute morning yoga. 25 minute breathing meditation. I have overslept today for the first time in months. When I woke I just felt terribly and went back to bed for another 10 minutes. Had to cut my morning yoga a bit short because of that. Meditation was smooth today. Fingers cracked 6 times. There is no improvement in this area. Actually at the moment it is a bit worse than few weeks ago. Such a little insignificant habit can become a big problem when you try to get rid of it. DAY 88 20 minute morning yoga. 25 minute neti neti meditation. 25 minute contemplation. Meditation class continues. Two more weeks and it is over. First of all, I was introduced to neti neti and that these words basically mean "not this, not this". What a striking similarity to Lithuanian language - "not this: in Lithuanian = "ne tai". The way English speaking people pronounce "neti" sounds almost the same as "ne tai" in Lithuanian pronounciation. I knew my native language has very old roots and is one of the most archaic languages remaining but I did not expect such literal similarities to sanskrit. Today something special happened which I really want to share with you. Second meditation was called "contemplation". There was a question which we had to "activate" by thinking and analyzing it, then we meditated and relaxed and then asked the question once again. This method is supposed to help you get answers from subconscious mind. The question was: what does the real freedom mean? During activation phase I came up with 3 possible answers: Not having any attachments to internal or external environment; Totally giving up control and being pure observer; Dying. I thought that I probably will not get any answer because these are quite good and I had no more ideas at that time. Then I sat, relaxed and after 10-15 minutes I asked the question again: what does the real freedom mean? And after a second the answer came. I am one hundred percent sure that it was not something I thought. I simply did not even have a time to think, I just asked and the answer happened. The answer was simple: freedom = present moment. And then silence. I knew ideas sometimes just appear but I have never ever been this conscious when it actually happened. I was so excited and blown by such a direct experience of the contact with my subconscious mind that I was not able to follow remaining steps of this contemplation-meditation. I want to start practicing this meditation more often. I have shitload of questions to ask. Fingers cracked 1 time. DAY 89 20 minute morning yoga. 25 minute breathing meditation. Last day at work before holidays. I was so excited in the morning that I forgot to do affirmations and spent time daydreaming about the holidays. It is not that I do not like my job, I simply have never had a holidays which I can spent however I want. All the holidays I had before were dedicated to taking caring of my studies. 3 suddle finger cracks. DAY 90 20 minute morning yoga. 25 minute breathing meditation. Today and tomorrow I will do whatever I feel like I want to do. I will not limit myself in any way and since I am going home I will probably eat some "not very healthy" food. Now I writing in the evening and that is exactly what happened. I had some sugary craziness and I also noticed that at times when I go back to some old habits I do enjoy them less and less. As the result of changed environment and a lazy day meditation was really tough. Fingers cracked 1 time. DAY 91 10 minute morning exercise. 25 minute breathing meditation. Day 2 of no control. To understand how bad nutrition affects oneself you have to eat healthy for some time and then go back to old habits. It messes with my head big time. What I noticed is that I became less conscious, more passive, not really interested in taking initiative or challenging myself. This of course happened because of the change of environment but nutrition played an important role too. Today was the first time when I actually thought about skipping meditation. It was evening and I had thoughts that "I might be too tired and it will not be a quality meditation anyway. I do not want to do it just to have a plus next to my goal". What helped me to follow through is remembering that I had even more difficult circumstances for meditation and I meditated despite of them. I got my shit together and sat for 25 minutes and all I can say it was so worth it. Things have settled down, I relaxed and realized how tense I was getting. I felt a pressure because of my holidays. Funny, isn't it? Holidays are supposed to be used for recreation and resting but I wanted to make these 2 upcoming weeks to really count. Without noticing I created some subtle tension which was not in my field of awareness. After meditation I felt excited about all the opportunities that are awaiting me. Fingers cracked 2 times. (It was almost accidental and very weak cracks. It was tempting to not inculde them in the counter but since I am doing this for my own good I got to be ruthless) REVIEW OF WEEK 13 Goal review Quitting smoking - Same as last week - failure. Did not take any action this matter. Quitting any kind of contact with video games - Check. (did not play but watched other people play for a while) Limited social media time - Check. Eating healthy - Check. (with a pre-planned exception on weekend) Exercising daily - Check. Meditating for at least 25 mins everyday - Check. Setting at least one hour per week for review - Check. Finger cracking - Failure. No more porn - Failure. Well, not proud of this. Affirmation habit - Check. Thoughts There are 2 goals that look very shaky: smoking and finger cracking. Once again - GET READY FOR CHANGE OF ENVIRONMENT. Can't stress this enough. Every time I go to my old home old patterns reemerge. I think it would be a good idea to sit and meditate/contemplate on what is awaiting. Just believing that things will happen in the right way is naive and I do underestimated it again. I got really good in managing my workdays. I do enjoy them almost every day, there is a clear routine which is strict but not too constraining. What I mean is that there are certain stuff (like exercise, meditation, journaling) that I do everyday and there are periods of time that could be spent however I want. When it comes to weekends and especially weekends when I am not at home I always struggle. Another important note is that I need to get used to new ways to rest and new things to enjoy while resting. When I am at my old home I tend to act the way I used to. I look for satisfaction in my old pleasures. That does not really work well because I get less and less pleasure from food that makes me feel heavy or is very sweet. Also the time I spend watching some light entertainment does not last as long as it used to. I know I can always meditate, read, take a walk, have a meaningful conversation, practice my listening and empathy skills, study things that excite me and so on, but old patterns work in an old way. Next two weeks are HOLIDAYS! Oh there is so much stuff I want do! So here goes goal adjustment. Goal adjustment - Minimal meditation session increased to 30 minutes. - Learn another 20 minute morning yoga routine. - Practice mantra meditation. - Do a value workshop. I have never completely figured my core values. I had some notes, some thoughts but result never looked convincing. - There is also some literature to read and stuff to do that are related to my career. Will not go into detail here. - TIME TO STOP CRACKING FINGERS AMIGO! That is it for this week. I want to leave you with a song. A song which has a profound twist. If you will be patient enough and listen through it till the end it might become a special song for you as it is for me. Thank you for reading, TakeCare Next update planned on 2016.10.02

Internet time: In the last post which got deleted with the server crash I wrote that I want to stop wasting time on the Internet. I wanted to only use it on Sundays for the new video and for school work. That did not work out at all. I will allow myself to use my computer once a day for one hour straight. Then I will have to shut it down again. This way I will have to consciously decide on which sides I will spend my time. On my phone I will deactivate the Internet, and if I need it I will turn it on for like 10 minutes. The good think of the server crash was, that I didn't spend too much time on this forum. I think I will journal my time spend on my computer and my phone to keep myself responsible. Journaling: In the last week I wrote almost nothing in my journal, neither in this one nor in my private one. I used to write everyday in my private one since April 2015. But thats okay. What is going on in my life: reading "The Teachings Of Don Juan" by Carlos Castaneda - getting a new perspective on psycedelice learning for my chemistry exam, and three other exams coming up in the next two weeks working out a lot, stretching and researching about bodyweight movement frustration with meditation Leo's new videos: Every Sunday I am excited to get to know what the new video is about. I always want it to be about an Enlightenment or advanced personal development topic. If the video is about such a topic I am happy. But everytime I do almost nothing with it, I do not implement it into my life. Once Leo said that you should take massive action from each video. Well, I take almost none. I do not need more Enlightenment videos from him. I still have a lot of action to take from every other video. For example I hate the midfulness meditation and neti neti method because I always get distracted, or I hate strong determination sitting because it is so painful. Why don't I use these hints and work with these methods, rather than waiting for a new video to get published expecting a method that works instantly? Now I will shut my computer down, learn chemistry for like three hours, work on my body for like two hours, shower extremely cold, and then eat while watching the new psychedelic video.

Hello from Scotland! I've been on the enlightenment path for 2/3 weeks or so, doing Neti-Neti once or twice a week, self-inquiry daily, meditation daily. In the self-inquiry process I've started to notice that despite trying to "zoom in" and find who I am, who is perceiving etc, I realise after a few minutes I'm not really doing anything at all. I'm still sitting in the same position and my awareness hasn't changed that much, just that the focus is on a certain part of it or is trying to reach a certain part of it. This happens especially when my consciousness dilates - the sensations seem to move from their usual location and I'm left calm, peaceful and detached from thought. It feels like the state occurs without any control and disappears in the same way, but somehow my awareness has changed. When it shifts back I realise that nothing in the surroundings has really changed and I've done nothing to achieve the awareness shift. In this state I can find it difficult to keep looking for who I am. Anybody else experience this? Should I accept this realisation as part of the process or am I doing something wrong? Are we really doing anything at all in self-inquiry?

@RossE Firstly, it takes time and consistency. Doing neti-neti once a week, it will take you 50 years. Try doing 100 hours of neti-neti straight in a row. That's more like what you need to break through. And even then, that's just newbie work. Secondly, you're never going to find yourself. Even after 50 years of neti-neti. All you'll realize is that you ARE the thing you're failing to find: namely, NOTHING! There's nothing to find cause you don't exist. That's what's to be found! You have no attributes. You cannot be seen, hear, smelled, tasted, felt, or thought. What you are is the absence of all attributes. AKA, infinite nothingness, AKA God. It's right there! Look! There is nothing to find.

Dear Leo First please accept my deepest gratitude for all your work... there is a gap , massive gap, there is theory, that can be interpreted in milloins of ways and the applications are not straight forward, and then there are the enlightened masters who speak in symbols (if they do speak) so what happens in between it seems that nobody wants to talk about... Nobody that i came across with , nobody but you, so far that i am grateful and certainly many people who folow your videos and have signed up for your book list (for which also i am so grateful, it would have been taken me ages to stumble upon all these books individually) share the same gratitude i think... I have been pracitcing meditation but not on regular basis, for several years now, and only in the last few months started dedicating more time and doing it daily, following your self-enquiry and strong determination seating... i am also in process of doing 3-4 times a day one hour seating.... Something happened to me when i did the neti neti with you ,,, i dont find many words to describe but there was silence the kind i have never known before, deep, veyr silent silence, silence that felt like i needed and wanted so much, perhaps my mind stopped thinking for fraction of a second, in any case, it rendered everything else i have experienced so far a bit pointless, so that now i am less and less focused on what i would pursue in the past... ?.. My mind keeps going over your words, and yes i know you may say that the mind cant comprehend this things, but for now thats the only tool i have and thinking is the only thing i know... You say i am nothingness.... that contains space and time.. . this means me and you and everyone else is the same nothingness so there is no distinction between me Lily and pretty much everything else around me ... and that the nothingness which is constant was there before the body as i know it and identify with started its existence,,, so why is the nothingness linked/attached to this particual self/body/entity? why is it that the nothingness that i am is perceiving things through this particular Lily the person ? if i am to my body the same as to a coffee table, then why is it that an assigning/identifying to this particular body took place? ... i am trying to keep my mind open for this possibility and just contemplate or go in silence with it... what helps is that i go back to moments from childhood, something very vividly stuck with me, in kindergarten when i wasnt allowed to go out of the balcony there was this overwhelming sense of ability to hover/fly/disperse in space but frustration that i was somehow contained in this body, the first time i looked at my own legs, as i was putting on a colourful leggings i was given, i have realised that ohh so these are my legs, this is me? it felt scary and alien and ver often as a child i would look in the mirror and not buy into that this is me.. perhaps these are just childish nonsense, but it helps to present to my mind an alternative scenario that i did have some 32 years ago of what i was, and the no identification of the body.... Apologies for the long post, please , pleasee kindly make a video of where you share your thoughts on the WHYs which nobody addresses, i know that the masters generic answer is somethign along the lines of - the WHY isnt important or that the WHY is created by the ego, or that knowing the WHY will not give me anything, but these sound more like people avoding to share their thoughts, afterall theres no harm in contemplating and trying to understand why ... and yes sure understand is the wrong word again... PLease tell us why do you think the nothingness that is our true nature, gets assigned/identified into the little individual small letter selves where each one is different but in reality everything is one and the same? Thank you so much for your time and for everything