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Traditionally, the end-goal of human life is considered to be liberation. Where the word liberation essentially means end of suffering, unlimited freedom, unlimited choices, and eternal bliss. More specifically, it is end of the cycles of birth and death of "individuated consciousness" (Jeev). The latter means not much for me from an experiential point of view, but I can see how that can bring on eternal bliss. But I'm not very sure, not really convinced It seems to me that ignorance and suffering, bondage etc are just phenomenal (illusory), and its the Ego (lower mind) that wants to avoid it. Isn't the consciousness already free? Any thoughts?

Sage like Life Version 1 (hardcore version) Ramana Maharshi style... Or Jesus? Buddha... That kind of guys... Everyone calls you lazy, hates on you for years, you attain enlightenment and... Bliss out! Then you develop deep self mastery and become a teacher experiencing true worship from you drop out of nowhere disciples. + supermind or clear light whatchamacallit, perfection, edge of human experience and self mastery - (highened mortality) bad finances and health, you won´t reach a really broad audience (unless your disciples do the marketing for you and create a youtube channel or somethin´), no paper written qualifications therefore no status in the mainstream sense (might stop many people from taking you serious) Sage like life Version 2 making a living while nearby working on enlightenment, on deepening and making it constant. Doing research, gain insights and then write books (have you noticed how many sages are authors?!), maybe give seminars or do arts.... + you will have a social presence, reach and inluence many, you will be able to consider the multiple perspectives that out of ongoing discussion with others you will have access to, your studies will materially supported, there will be room for all kinds of relationships if wished - you will not have much time for really intense and close teaching (unless you get paid for it maybe), you will ahve to keep a sense or function of self and personality, you will be very surrounded by peoples suffering, your spiritual practises might suffer under your bussiness or family or whatever responsibilities, you will have to handle critics and competition Sage like life Version 3 the scientist sage, life devotion to a double life where you study similar or very related but seemigly never unifiable aspects or functions of consciouness in a spiritual and a scientific context/understanding. Your bread and butter is both meditation and testing hypothesis... On the one hand you embrace the state of not knowing and on the other you constantly expore and try to understand what does not seem to be understandable. You get enlightened sometime between earning diplomes, writing and reading papers... + gaining an audience won´t be that hard (unless your theories are crappy), perspectival exchange will be an everyday phenomenon, you might actually discover something that might spark great change in the world or at least be qualitative considerable knowledge and food for thought for others... - you will be surrounded by knowledgegraph phanatics, especially naive realists like no where else, you might get very stressed, you might understand the world but go crazy. Time will always be against you. You will be alone. The spiritual people will call you a materialist and the scientific people will call you a mystic... Well okay, who cares about that... Okay, I´m tired... YOU tell me where the heck balance is supposed to be found in this opportunity mess.

Why? Well, Ralph, from Infinite Waters, explains it. I posted this in another thread. What he said here makes sense to me. Leo also explains... When you experience Infinity, you might have noticed that you're left with a huge residue of bliss or "divine love" that came along with it. Well, what Ralph and Leo are trying to explain matches the meaning of love via infinity. "There is no you." "We are one." "We are everything / nothingness." "We are infinite awareness / peace. Our ego is fictional." Ok. We get it. So? The question is, what are you going to do now with this wisdom?

Thanks for the questions and response. Well I am 17 so I don't know how young you think I look in the picture to be fair a lot of people think I am like 14 or younger although I did start personal development at 15 but only really got serious into this non dual field when I was 16. Before that I was focused on other areas of life. I got started into a number of insights I learnt through my highschool years that shaped my life forever. I had an exstistencial crisis as a teenager which was strange but a sudden occurance of the impermanence of life led me to a lot of different questions I felt driven to answer. I think my love for cinema as a child actually helped too start this search also since I was always seeing different worlds and perceptions and characters each day which made it apparent to me a lot of things I wouldn't due to the beauty of been able to see different perspectives on the world. If I'm honest I'm not 100% sure what led me to go towards this path I just think I've always had an intuition that there is something more & I've just been curious about discovering why we are here. I think just the way events panned out that were out of my control led me to where I am. I had a first long term relationship during highschool that ended which affected me a lot in those years. I started to read self help and do fitness from there and although I know it was the pretty shallow form of self help it did introduce me to a lot of different information. I was watching actualized.org but when Leo wasn't talking about the stuff he was now. His shift happened about a similar time as mine. As Aroung the age of 15 I became homeless due to family issues such as divorce, abuse etc. That was when an even major shift happened that I decided I really have to take ownership of my one life now and matured a lot through that difficult period. With young kids I recommend you just keep being an example for them and spend time doing fun stuff with them that is related to personal development might help. It's like if you were or are a Dad that loves football if you keep playing it with them and watching it around them most of the time the child will too in my experience since they really do take a lot in from there parents idea of what is a worthwhile interest. Try meditate and do yoga around them and as they get older (if they refuse to do it now) ask them if they want to join in and teach them. Take them to interesting retreats, events and country's to expand there minds. Read children books to them based around the personal development or spiritual or scentific topics you love. The famous book "the little prince" is one of them that can teach them interesting philosophy's to grow up with. Of course there are many many more though you just have to look into it deeply but I believe this is a useful way. You can do the same with all forms of entertainment they love. Just introduce them to a variety of diffekinds even the more socially "weird" ones. Being introduced to many different perspectives on life, relationship, suffering, death, morality, religion, science etc greatly influenced me so I'm only speaking from personal experience. I think the environment your kids live in is important too though so the school, neighbourhood, friends, teachers, media all shape the type of things they will be interested in growing up and some of them can be out of your control if you don't want to be a controlling father. Overall I'm not a father so I'm not the only person you should be asking so maybe someone else on this forum can help you out. I hope this has benefitted you though Also by when I mean pleasurable sensations are ego percieved I don't mean they are wrong or should be denied but mean that they aren't any sort of awakening as it will pass. If you have a genuine enlightenment experience you can feel the mostly divine bliss and peace you can ever feel but it's not dependent on the body's emotions. You become the stillness infinite timeless space that is within everything. I'm talking about emotions like anger, sadness, pleasure such as sexual relief or the feeling when you have a good meal since all those pass and are not a constant. These are not wrong in any way and I'm not saying don't try feel pleasure but what we are looking for is what has always been there throughout our lives at all times. Becoming fully aware of that is enlightenment although the best term would be awakening since it isn't as flashy.

@aryberry I think the subject at hand is knowing one's self. Which leads to knowing one's Self. There's a deep discovery of self honesty that I think you are going through. Like "what do I want, really?" And "How much do I want to work for things or opportunities for purchasing or traveling or whatever?" "How much time do I want to spend working for something vs just living and chilling?". My two cents is keep going deeper but make a conscious change to approach everything with ease and positive emotion. Use meditation as a reset anytime you feel less than awesome. There is no rush. You have forever. You are perfect where you are. It is perfect to question anything. Everything will always work out. You are as worthy watching a rerun of Friends as you are in solving world hunger. YOU are worthy, not your actions. You are expanding the experience of the universe no matter what you are doing. If you sit and stare at the wall, you are adding an exceptional experience to the universe. You are the only you that has ever existed. No one has ever experienced being you staring at a wall before. It is all appreciated. You ARE worthy of everything. Perhaps, you have categorized and assigned emotions to things. Like "work" is not fun for example. Like doing your favorite leisure activity is more enjoyable than running an errand. Maybe you want to consider a different line of work. Maybe you want to find the bliss that lies in doing any type of work. But what is for sure, is that this is your reality. This whole thing is you. When you say it is all ok, then it is all ok. Allowance. Creation. Acceptance. Let go of resistance. Allow.

I don't It slips often, but its ok. We are here to have this "forgetting", this human experience. So let it flow. I can go there whenever I want, that's all. Don't have any techniques. Some people use reminders, like a ring on the finger with some sacred text, or an image of some deity. Some people wear clothes of a special color, with mantras written on them. Some people hang posters/pictures on walls that remind them. So on and so forth. I do not use anything external at all. Why depend on stuff? It promotes ignorance, it becomes a mindless ritual. Some people mechanically do that, the religious people, they do not know what they are doing. The "spiritual" types, meditate. They sit for long hours and focus on nothing but being aware. It works, its the real training. However, if you don't carry that state into everyday activities, it becomes yet another magical ritual. One hour of bliss, and 23 hours of Ego worship. The important thing is, when I see in the mirror, or eat or talk to people, I do not automatically assume that I'm a body with a bunch of thoughts/likes/dislikes etc. I was like that long ago. Now "I am that" !

This morning I overcame resistance and went swimming. After a just a few swim-lanes, I entirely loved it. Then I had a moderate, delicious breakfast. I meditated and successfully completed the negative values release visualization on excellence. During this I remembered getting caught while cheating a test at about 10 yrs old. I articulated the lesson learned as "Preparation is important." I was pumped that it had worked! At that point I had gotten really hungry and prepared a healthy lunch. I listened to my stomach and stopped eating at the right moment - but then all of a sudden I got all jittery about my plan to use the visualization technique again on my negative motivation towards eating healthy and looking a certain way. This was when I suddenly trippled my portion size and stole dessert from my flatmate which I even stretched with even more fat and carbs ... interesting. Then I did the visualization. It turned out to be quite interesting again - and different than I had thought. It had nothing at all to do with my bulimic father actually. I vividly remembered a situation during the celebration of my fourth birthday: I had stolen a friend's chocolate bar just because I wanted to eat the flavor of hers, too. Classic, I guess. This, I did in silence and solitude - I think no one even knew it was me who stole it and that was of no relevance anyway. But it mattered that I knew. I remembered how eating my friend's piece of chocolate gave me zero pleasure. It was harder to catch the lesson here and the one I caught doesn't sound as catchy as the "preparation is important" one. But it's the lesson I caught, so here it is: "Conscious abnegation of immediate gratification is real bliss." This kind of surprised me. Even though I'm more than twenty years older now than I was in the memory, this lesson still seems so much wiser than me. Although I consciously know about immediate gratification vs. true satisfaction now ... I don't think this concept has penetrated my whole being yet. It must have been one of my earliest memories. Next to one of crazy laughter and one of me in the bathroom wondering what/who the hell I am (possibly god? I must be, because I feel and experience! but why can't I experience through other bodies then? I can't be god... WHAT AM I??? Why am I limited to myself?). It almost drove me mad. Kids are so fucking smart. Back today, this afternoon, on my way to a rehearsal I was wondering if it even mattered to me to be skinny after these insights. To lose weight. I thought "no" and that relaxed me. Resistance used the visualization against me. I lost the battle a second time today: My colleague brought crackers. I ate the whole bag. Later I ate a chocolate-covered waffle. Then I got a whole meal from an Indian take out and ate it. I had forgotten how thirsty overeating makes you. Well, at this point I could analyze the hell out of this situation or just ... do it better tomorrow. I'll be updating. The rehearsal was great. I have officially decided: My first full-on passionate project is going to be the duo with this dude. We inspire me. The music we picked inspires me. The unusual combo of our instruments inspires me. Sounds beautiful. I'm going all in. Made the first preparations to make the project real today, taking the next step tomorrow.

@kuwaynej I think exactly this happened to me after doing one of Peter Ralston's exercises in the book of not knowing. I was driving a bus from Prague to my home city laughing at the paradox that I have the arrogance to think of myself that I exist. And I felt such a bliss throughout the whole thing. And then it vanished. Damn that was fun!

There is no need to use drugs. Realizations, Truth, enlightenment and the state of bliss can all be attained the drug free way by working hard on yourself and staying on the spiritual path, being aware and meditating, sharing love with others and loving yourself. Don't let anyone pressure you into stuff that you geniunly do not want to do. There may be a good reason for your feelings.

@Marinus As you must be already knowing, an animal (or human) when faced with danger (any threat to survival) has two choices - fight with whatever is threatening it or run away. It puts heavy demand on the body, it prepares for the danger, all system go on red. Its not a pleasant state for the body obviously. When the danger is over, it returns back to a more relaxed and happy state. Something similar happens to the mind. People in so called "modern societies" are constantly under this mode, because of survival pressures. Race to earn more money, competition, crime, negative people, abusive relatives, wars......the list is long. Their mind and bodies rarely relax. Eventually it becomes a habit, and the negative impressions become permanent in the mind. Mental chatter is mostly negative, it is trying to cope. Bodies are under stress. All you need to do is relax and heal, and it returns to natural state producing the blissful feelings. Initially its a big contrast, so feels ecstatic, but more you meditate, more habitual it gets and bliss becomes just peace.

The Top Ten Things You Want But Don't Know You Want I'm watching Leo's Top Ten Things You Want and I realized that I'm achieving a few of these things on the list but I realize that I could go farther 1. Reality feeling magical This happens to me whenever I'm walking outside on a beautiful sunny day and thoughts aren't disrupting me or disturbing me. It feels like my mind is clear and deeply relaxed and I'm focusing on the sunshine and I'm just enjoying it. It feels like all the mental fog and monkey chatter has lifted. It's like a baby blue sky that's sunny and all the fluffy white clouds are out. Reality also feels magical when i recapture that childhood feeling of being so deeply immersed in a movie or story that time flows by. Reality feels magical when i'm watching an AMAZING theater production and i'm speechless with awe. I also feel it when i feel deeply relaxed while meditating and it recaptures that feeling of sleeping like a baby. I've also been focusing on mindfully savoring tea and coffee and re-connecting with how delicious it is. 2. Things to be completely effortless I'm focusing on making my creativity, happiness, and bliss feel completely effortless where it just flows by and I don't feel blocked or exhausted at all. I'm focusing on achieving that peak experience state and flow state but i want to know how to achieve it where i get so immersed and hyperfocused that time just flows by and it doesn't feel like i'm rushing to beat the clock. 3. Authenticity At the theater and on the mic where I recite my poetry, this is where my authenticity SHINES!!! I'm starting to cut through the bullshit of the inner critic and the fear of humiliation by just getting up on stage and creating what I want when i want. I deeply desire having a devil may care attitude where I have the freedom and the power to do what i want and be intoxicated with life's joys and cut loose and be spontaneous. 4. Dispassionate Mind I realize that my mind tends to fall deeply in love with ideas, stories, and academic fields but what I'm focusing on is relaxing my mind and detaching from thoughts through meditation. My meditation is just sitting in a chair deeply relaxed and just focusing on the moment without the mind going into monkey mind. There's nothing wrong with the mind or ego or thoughts. The mind, ego, and thoughts can be beneficial but also deceptive. I want to focus on training my ego and mind and using it to my advantage rather than an enemy. 5. Full soberness/lucidity I want to wake up in the morning feeling completely motivated and ready for an awesome day rather than waking up feeling exhausted and dreading Monday. I want to wake up feeling like it's Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I want to feel completely awake and with no mental fog or feeling exhausted. 6. The desire to be nobody An alternative to that want is having a fluid sense of identity and self-image where identity is in a state of flux and that you can create and customize identity however you want to. You can program yourself with beliefs and mindsets and emotions and passions and skills and you can focus on experimenting with a wide variety of identities rather than settling on an identity or clinging to an identity. You can even choose to be a blank slate but it's one option out of many. Identity is the canvas and you are the painter who is free to do whatever you want to with the canvas. 7. Samahdi Samadi is a potential state that I can achieve during meditation but I'm just getting started on meditation as a daily habit and as a tool for self-actualization. Altered states of consciousness is a possibility that I'm far away from but in the coming months or a year, I could have a profound experience!!! 8. Truth I'm fascinated by discovering my authentic self and what my true passions are and what's my best life path. I'm focusing on balancing discovery with raw experience with researching rather than solely relying on rationality. For my self-actualization, i'm willing to use a wide variety of resources. 9. Benevolence For benevolence, I'm focusing on becoming a teacher for lower income students and struggling students in Las Vegas. However, my authentic benevolence would probably come from a place of comedy and desire to make people laugh, to fascinate and intrigue people, and to make them think. 10. Simple and natural lifestyle In Las Vegas, when i move, i will focus on living a rich and fulfilling life but by carving out large areas of free time and using the free time to take nature trips to Lake Meade, Red Rock, Grand Canyon or Zion National Park. I want to deeply immerse my life in passions and rich experiences but also focusing on relaxing so I have time to create, meditate, and contemplate. I want to focus on making my life feeling like those childhood vacations and 100% freedom and flexibility over my life. I strongly value freedom and flexibility over life! Here are my deepest desires 1. Being authentic and having a fluid and detached sense of identity and beliefs where my ego is completely flexible and open to new ideas. My vision for my authentic self is the lovable comedian with an aura of charisma that comes deeply from his passion and being uninhibited and free from all the internal and external restraints. I create and act based on intuition and merging my heart and my mind into one! My authentic self is effortlessly creativity! 2. Being free to create my life and my identity and my mind however I want to! My mind is detached from absolutes and shoulds and embraces new experiences and adventures, paradox, uncertainty, expanding consciousness but who also sees the benefit of comfort as a tool rather than rejecting the comfort zone. 3. Having the personal power of a billionaire and an artist who does what he wants whenever he wants and who has abundance and is anti-scarcity mindset. He is free to live life his own way with nobody controlling him. He has the impunity and the confidence to act on any vision like a Tim Burton or Quentin Tarnatino. 4. To live a richly fulfilling life where i was able to be truly limitless.

I'm working on the Life Purpose course and have just finished watching the video about Finding my Bliss. This then got me watching videos from Joseph Campbell. In one video on Youtube, called "Becoming an adult", he talked about the different rites of passage and initiations in different cultures around the world (specifically simple cultures and societies). He talked about how these initiations were designed to kill the infantile ego (characterized by submissiveness and dependence on the society). Therefore bringing into consciousness the mature ego (characterized by authority, responsibility, and courage over one's own life). He goes on to express how many people in our culture live to be 30 or 40 still dependent and submissive in the infantile ego. An example he used for an initiation was of a tribe in Papua New Guinea. The initiation started by covering the boys eyes so they couldn't see. Then a man would come in waving a bullroarer around in the air. This would make a sound which would made the boy think it was a deity, while the man would say he was intent on eating the boy. Then the boy would think he was dead. This would then create the effect of breaking through death. Therefore, killing the infantile ego and making way for the mature ego. I'm wondering if you have any personal experiences with rites of passage, any knowledge or wisdom about how one could create these for themselves in a culture without them. Also, do you think we can create them ourselves, or does the knowledge of knowing what is happening make these initiations not work? I believe that our culture is deficient in initiations and that it is having a negative effect on many people's development. Causing men and women to grow older physically, but stay immature mentally. I believe that by creating a video on rites of passage and initiations would help many people, and that it's important for a healthy society. Thank, in advance, for you consideration. Here's the video

@PureExp I'm only just beginning to grasp the reality that becoming fully lucid during THIS dream, and learning (re-learning?) that with full awareness and realization of my true nature, this shared dream is a play that exists to be not only experienced from a place of pure peace, love and bliss of existence, but is also fully shape-able. I never knew I had the power (I, ha ha). Everything gets slowly better and better. The world slowly becomes more alive & 3D & high def. Each interaction with another human, each one becomes an opportunity to love and appreciate and share. I think I'm actually growing a fair bit in the last year, it's pretty crazy for this guy who thought he was something else! @cetus56 Mini marshmallows! How many beautiful women!? Oh ...it's up to me? There's a music video in there somewhere... and something else for the bucket list!

To most of us, ignorance is bliss.

Some people report only being transported in heaven and becoming one with God. WITHOUT FEAR! WITHOUT SUFFERING! Without anything but pure bliss. Are they just really experienced with 5-MeO and spirituality that they trust the experience that much? Could you tell us more about this?

I think we need to define what 'happiness' even is as I feel that these is a misconception amongst people in relation to the way Leo (and others) use the term and what we are all working towards. We tend to think of 'happiness' as some form of elevated mood. But that would describe things such as pleasure, excitement, stimulation, bliss or euphoria etc. In fact I think the more appropriate definition of 'happiness' is peace of mind. A stillness of the mind, a neutrality of mood and emotion. That is what we are all ultimately seeking. Enlightenment will probably not bring you eternal bliss, but it will almost certainly bring you peace of mind. I feel this subject of 'happiness' needs better defining as it makes a huge difference to people's expectations and concepts of what we are all trying to achieve through personal development and spirituality. Happiness is the absence of pain, not the presence of joy.

It is interesting, I just watched him. Pretty inspiring to hear that the very experienced meditators rated their constant state of stillness & non-dual joy as an experience that trumps orgasms & 'shroom trips. Holy crap. That's very motivating. Anyone who's enjoyed a few grams of good, dried magic mushrooms and sat in their space-chair having multicoloured horizontal mushroom-cloud orgasms out of the back of their head for a few hours might consider working pretty long & hard to attain a similar state of euphoric bliss permanently. Wow.

For me, intuition comes when my mind is still, and when it appear, it's like crystal clear, with no doubt. It's difficult to know what's authentic in us, because what we think as "authentic" may just be a layer, which resonate with inner motivations, which are unknown to the conscious mind. "Follow your bliss" it's a very personal thing, only you can know, and requires years of research/evolving. I hope to drill into the superficial levels, and find the true reasons for my passions. Leo said once "everything you do in life, is a quest for awareness" maybe it means that we need to experience things first, to step back and growth from that. Ra (in Ra's material) call it "polarization" which I think is interesting). Then, it would be possible to reach awareness without experiencing Samsara at it's peaks, and take the shortcut thought meditation, or experiencing stuff in full awareness, so that the pain dissolve as it is occurring... Back to topic : you have to try it, to know if that's authentic, and you'll figure out on the path (+meditation practice). Personally, I see 2 kinds of intuition, the psychological one (subconscious, neurons...) and the esoteric one (synchronicity, deep meaning, dreams...) I think it's 2 aspects of the same thing, but I don't understand yet the connection between neurons and "infinite" consciousness.

@Leo Gura You may have just described Absolute Truth to a T. There is none. No right, no wrong, no this, no that. The perfection of absolute emptiness makes the search for any truth seem like being lost in a self imposed wilderness. @username You see, this so called search for truth is named that for a very good reason. It gives the ego something to do until enlightenment happens. Can you find bliss in maybe never knowing what is Absolute Truth? That there may be none outside of mind? Not so easy is it.

Bliss is not happiness. Happiness is worthless; it depends on unhappiness. Bliss is transcendence: one moves beyond the duality of being happy and unhappy. One watches both; happiness comes, one watches and does not become identified with it. One does not say, ‘I am happy. Peace, it is wonderful.’ One simply watches, one says, ‘Yes, a white cloud passing. And then comes unhappiness, and one does not become unhappy either. One says, ‘A black cloud passing. I am the witness, the watcher. And that third dimension brings bliss. Bliss is without any opposite to it. It is serene, tranquil, cool. It is ecstasy without any excitement.

I have already left my college. And started online business for earning and moved towards enlightenment with my own choice. Experiencing bliss.

This is completely normal. As you go on with the practice you'll encounter times in which you cannot concentrate more then 5 seconds on your breath. But always remember: If you take an stimulation-addicted being and sit it in an empty room, it'll take years of decades to fully come off the addiction and be in total bliss. It's all just the process.

Scrambling on my LP Habit Streak (3): 5 o'clock dayz Morning routine: (( Meditation (30 min) Programming Subconscious deep-work session (60min) )) Am I still doing my business?: YES?/NO? - I'm really fucking doubting this. Just watched a video from leo, he said if your not 100% you will fail. The thing is I'm not 100% convinced this is my path. I think it is making video's but those are showing no promise. I'm scrambling well atleast I have my morning routine but now I can't fill it in with activity's. Shit I know I should make video's because that is my bliss but it's so hard to fully tell everyone like fuck it I'm putting myself on your screen. If you don't like it well too bad my friend. SDFlkjSDhij hmmmmm. I think I will dedicate tomorrow on deep thinking. Also how can I make video's if I myself don't even have a lot of tangable results in my life. I experienced inner change because I meditated I think but I don't have anything to show off and convince people like HEY LOOK YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME! - Consciousness is the key

Learning to swim through life has enough terror for me to turn into bliss

@Dodoster Did you ever consider skydiving ? I hear the fist time you jump is terror that turns to bliss.