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Turning fear into joy So this is the biggie, right? How do we turn water into wine, lead into gold. Realising fear is the same as joy. It's a feeling, a thought, a sense. We just conceptualise it differently based on our life situation and context. What you truly fear, is ultimately what you are. To live as the moment. We fear this because it dissolves meaning. And yet there is so much meaning in the moment (the ultimate paradox). We are desperate to gain meaning in our lives. We get stuck on the path searching and seeking. Turn back into yourself and face yourself. What are you afraid of? What is your heart telling you to do. Follow your Heart. Follow your Bliss Turn Fear into Joy.

Please watch these videos. Many people who have experienced what you have have realized something beyond it. When I was 17 11 years ago I had an experience where it felt like I went to a place that you describe from smoking weed. It was terrifying and I thought I was experiencing the separation of everything. I was cycling between absolute despair and orgasmic bliss but both states were painful. I have experienced going into a void and feeling what it was like to have no one to share myself with.

I experience zero depression as all sensations are seen to be in the continuum of sensation vs. cessation which is basically to say that bliss sensations are seen as almost equal to something like what I would’ve called emotional loss. I still have a human experience and my present moment is almost exactly as it was before. What has changed is my past self imagination and future self imagination and what I think is possible between those two poles. I’ve had roughly 500 awakenings at this point for my present moment to pull from memory. This makes my present moment feel so fresh and different even though the raw sensations of let’s say me being hungry might be almost indistinguishable from yours, I have 500 awakenings telling me what might come out of me feeling hungry which could be formless crystalline consciousness of a Luciferian Bhakti-fueled singularity which I would call in a relative sense still Brandon Rohe (my character’s legal name). So if you can hold all of that under your hat, imagine dropping that and picking it back up as a humble Buddhist monk who lives and dies by Jesus’ teachings in John chapter 15 where I abide in Christ and He abides by me as the Holy Spirit experienced within me. We can take this any which way you can imagine and I say that in full sincere care as something which could certainly be cognized as Brandon Rohe the Ultimate God of Madness. So imagine that as an ant getting picked up and analyzed as a sentient being ultimately as true as my human being within that moment and then placed carefully back down into its own reality to awaken when it pleases. I teach under the guise and illusion of being a Zen devil that you will be forewarned about the distasteful aspects of me which might come along with my present moment experience splaying itself out in fullness. Notice how you really aren’t ant closer to being my subjectively experienced reality after reading or not reading all of that? That’s what we’re dealing with. No one can teach enlightenment and no one can know enlightenment in truth as an unenlightened self can only come up as a relative marker the same as anything else. The finger pointing to the moon is never the full essence of the finger pointing to the moon. What you should be worried about in that analogy is the Gravity which brings us together here and now which might be pointed to in the Christian canon as the Heavenly Father. It is only by the Father’s will that I toil at all and it is only through the Holy Spirit within me that I write to you any answer, so do not give me praise for works that are not my own fruits to give you as the true karma yoga Krishna Consciousness which they I’m truth will hopefully present themselves to you to behold.

Quote from Adyashanti, from the book "The end of your world": "Most of what we are told about awakening sounds like a sales pitch for enlightenment. In a sales pitch, we are told only the most positive aspects; we may even be told things that are actually not true. In the sales pitch for awakening, we are told that enlightenment is all about love and ecstacy, compassion and union, and a host of other positive experiences. It is often shrouded in fantastic stories, so we come to believe that awakening has to do with miracles and mystical powers. One of the most common sales pitch includes describing enlightenment as an experience of bliss. As a result, people think, "When I spiritually awaken, when I have union with God, I will enter into a state of constant ecstacy". This is, of course, a deep misunderstanding of what awakening is. There may be bliss with awakening, because it is actually a by-product of awakening, but it is not awakening itself. As long as we are chasing the by-products of awakening, we will miss the real thing. This is a problem, because many spiritual practices attempt to reproduce the by-products of awakening without giving rise to the awakening itself. We can learn certain meditative techniques - chanting mantras or sing bhajans, for example - and certain positive experiences will be produced. The human consciousness is tremendously pliable, and by taking part in certain spiritual practices, techniques, and disciplines, you can indeed produce many of the by-products of awakening- states of bliss, openness, and so on. But what often happens is that you end up with only the by-products of awakening, without awakening itself. It is important that we know what awakening is not, so that we no longer chase the by-products of awakening. We must give up the pursuit of positive emotional states through spiritual practice. The path of awakening is not about positive emotions. On the contrary, enlightenment may not be easy or positive at all. It is not easy to have our illusions crushed. It is not easy to let go of long-held perceptions. We may experience great resistance to seeing through even those illusions that cause us a great amount of pain. This is something many people don't know they're signing up for when they start on a quest for spiritual awakening. As a teacher, one of the things that I find out about students relatively early on is whether they are interested in the real thing - do they really want the truth, or do they actually just want to feel better? The process of finding the truth may not be a process in which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process during which we need to look at things honestly, sincerely, and truthfully - and that may or may not be an easy thing to do. The sincere call from reality to reality, the sincere call to awaken, comes from a very deep place within us. It comes from a place that wants the truth more than it wants to feel good. If our orientation is simply to feel better in each moment, then we'll continue to delude ourselves, because trying to feel better in the moment is exactly how we delude ourselves. We think our delusions are making us feel better. In order to awaken, we must break out of the paradigm of always seeking to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better; it's part of the human experience. Everybody wants to feel good. We are hardwired to seek more pleasure and less pain. But there is an even deeper impulse within us, and that is what I describe as the impulse to awaken. It's this impulse to awaken that gives us the courage to look at all the ways in which we deceive ourselves."

I can intuit this. However, I don't think that replaces life long learning for me. I can realize I am God, this is imaginary, and I am in heaven and still learn more because... It's infinite and it's fun to learn. Spiritual books are more than just for seeking. They are for growing and fleshing out, plus there is simply an aesthetic element to reading something beautiful. Also, there is too many spiritual paths, spiritual flavours and potentials for the soul and human body. I can't see myself just sitting around lazily in bliss. I wanna explore and learn in bliss and create value. This is just my own spiritual take. It's all right. alllll right. Unbiased. I've experienced plenty of radical states, but I am still integrating and developing myself spiritually. There is not shoulds.

Yes these two things make me feel wayyyy better. I just stopped doing my early morning walk recently due to poor weather, but I realize now that I probably never should have stopped. When I turn the water on cold, I tell myself "get ready to feel some bliss". Viewing the cold water as 'bliss' lets my actually enjoy the thrill of having it on my skin. To time it, I just tell myself I have to wash my whole body with soap before I make it warm again.

While I’d be tempted to say nothing is useful, I’ll talk on a different level: It’s ridiculously effective, but it can take either luck or finding the right techniques. With meditation skill alone, you can manifest as much bliss as you want, any time you want it, maybe not instantaneously, but in short order.

@Leo Gura The great traditions always had very good feedback systems. Because they realized that someone could be truly enlightened and also be an asshole. So going full-circle and developing your dreamy character could also be a nice thing to do. Because I resonated a lot with another comment about the way you write at the blog, you don't seem at all at peace, much less in ecstasi or bliss. Yes, they are all dreamt, so what? The problem when people wake up is that sometimes they have still lots of traumas or problems locked in the body, however as their consciousness (or even beyond) is absolute they do not care at all. Be aware of this because it is very common, much more than you think. They just wake up and stop identifying with the character and they don't give a fuck at all, because they are awake; yet I still insist Leo, be aware of this trap. @Leo Gura

@Mason Riggle I'm curious, have you had spiritual experiences of bliss that surpass heroin in terms of wonderfulness ?

Or, you use all the practices at your disposal and stop making false lines between practices. You can do these substances which will skyrocket your growth and still have these other spiritual practices. I think they are all necessary to being conscious. It doesn't need to be state chasing. Which, by the sounds of it you are doing with your meditation anyway. Because if you are suffering... of course you are trying to change your state so its just foolish to condemn that. The peace, bliss and insights from 5meo have only bolstered and advanced my Qigong, journaling/contemplation and sitting practice. Both are still. young and as I progress I am very excited.

I can relate to a lot of this. My heart is also numb and I don't really feel any sensation in my chest like I can in other parts of my body. I feel tremendous pressure in my nose too. I've only managed to unblock my nose a handful of times with psychs, but when the blockage gets erased it feels like someone is literally breaking and cracking my nose from the inside. But the end result is incredible. When my nose gets fully cleared I get entire perceptual shifts in how I view reality, and it's like a huge weight is getting released from your head. When my nose was cleared I also had full breaths of bliss. I think there are certain trauma points in the body and these result in blockages. I know I have certain energetic points in my stomach and center of head, that when I feel into them i get an entire liberation of energy. I think spending as much time in meditation and feeling into these sensations throughout the body is the way forward. But i'm not sure I haven't solved this yet

Suffering is the precursor for bliss and beyond bliss. it is God's foundation. The whole point of suffering is to stop suffering. God (you) is figuring out how to stop suffering.

Hi everyone! I've started to ponder how an accomplished 70-year-old zen master can do a 10 hour SDS sit in perfect posture. Without suffering. With a smile on the face. What exact ingredients wouid he concoct in his mind body system where this torturous sounding practice could be liberating with a smile on the face. Of course, these people being massively awake with lots of integrated insight do help a lot. But as a beginner on the path, can I get a sense of how he might generate these sensations which he spends 10 hours in? After all, once you get the insight that pain is mentally generated, you realize that it is the same with pleasure. In the previous SDS sit where everything was dominated by pain, I had the interesting insight afterwards: 'Why did I experience so much pain?...Oh right. Because that is exactly what I intended to investigate and generated my attitude coming off the practice' There was this 'I need to see how I react to pain' mentality prior to the sit. And that is exactly what my mind provided me with. As a samatha practitioner, my mind is extremely susceptible to suggestions and intentions it generates. It is not an exact fool proof science but as long as it is within my conditioning, through mindfulness, it is more likely that the results will be in favour of these intentions. So, it is only natural that I try the same SDS sit with pleasure. Why wouldn't an SDS be filled with amplified pleasure? Why do we assume that it will be full of pain? Of course, I'm not going to assume absolute bliss to arise just because I've formed strong intentions for it to arise. But I can observe to what degree I can do this with my existing understanding and skills. The most pain arose in my legs the earlier sit. With that in mind, this was going to be my overall strategy. 1- Generate any sensation of pleasure in my body with my mind. 2- Ampilify it enough with attention and then spread it to my legs prior to any pain settling in. I can also spread it everwhere else but the legs are a priority. 3- If any pain already set in, attempt to transmute it to pleasurable sensations as best the mind can. 4- Hold a whole body metacognitive awareness of other body parts of pleasure even when pain arises at any location. 5- Whenever an opportunity is found, experience the entire mind body system from no-self perception as the generation of pleasure ensues. 6- Observe the tranquility and equanimity this provides and reinforce this perception as much as possible. ----- As a rule, I also couldn't generate any perceptible pleasure before I start the sit. Everything would be done starting from the cross-legged posture from a neutral emotional state. And in a 1 hour SDS sit, I BARELY experienced any pain. Especially not the 'leg pain' I perceived as so ingrained and had to do with pressure between nerves. None of that registered any overt pain sensations in my mind. I downregulated most of the pain receptors in my brain with a strong intention. In fact, there was this perceptible pleasure in my legs and head area momentarily with each inhale and exhale the entire sit once the momentum set in. There was no pleasure in my torso area with very little tint of pleasantness in my arms and hands. I'll definitely work on spreading it deeply to my torso in the future. I assume there is some unconscious tension and blockage there. I did feel some agitation and sweating at some points but due to the attitude of my mind, it transmuted into excitement and energy somewhat coagulated into perceptible pleasure in my legs and head area. Which made those sensations pleasurable to experience. I only felt this neutral feel to my entire back and torso as a whole. I feel like there are some physical and mental knots there. But there was no significant pain at all. I'd regard all 60 min of this sit to be 99% pleasant and pain free. Not orgasmically pleasant but pleasant nonetheless. And it was all because I did go through that 6 step process outlined above with a strong intention to do it. ---- After I got this, I assume that this is second nature to a 70 year old zen master doing 10 hour SDS sits with ease. Not only do they have the insights, but they have trained their minds to generate either pleasure or pain depending on what they want to investigate. This is all mental work I've done with this sit. It wasn't 'physical pain' and paraesthesia spreading my legs. I had a completely different experience sinking into pleasure. The zen master don't suffer as a self anyways but this idea that the entire sit is working through pain sensations is not accurate in my opinion. Just as one can train to maintain perfect equanimity in a lot of pain, the same can be done with pleasure. Both are liberating in different taste palates. A zen master must definitely has complete access to all 3 flavours of experience and can see through them with equal clarity and skill: neutral, painful and pleasurable sensations. ---- Hope this helps. It was an eye-opening sit in regards to the forming of intentions of my mind and how they shape up my experience so directly at this phase of my practice. Let me know your thoughts. Much love,

Hard to follow up on that. Lately I feel confuddled and I know there isn't really a reason I feel confuddled but there seems to be a reason. And that's confuddling. I feel like I've spent my life avoiding feelings, avoiding depression. And you sit in meditation and wonder of wonder, there's feeling and there aren't anything like that. The avoidance was the creation of it. But when I'm thinking, or not thinking rather, but thinking, it seems like that's happening. The motivation of not wanting to feel like shit doesn't cut it anymore. I mean, in the SUMMER I can BELIEVE I'm really infinite bliss or some shit like that. Every year watching the conditions you think made you happy get stripped away can be disconcerting. I don't want to admit that I'm kinda panicky about it, like I feel like I need to take my last gasp of air. That air is mine! It's limited, and it's going away. Run, run, run from the depression. Alright, whatever, come here. What do you want? I am what you cannot see. I want to be seen. I'm afraid I won't be able to handle it in the future. And what of now? I must prepare, stock the shelves, harvest, prepare. I must get it over with now, so I won't have to suffer in the future. You can't bottle up summer. You can't bottle up happiness. You cannot suffer now to prevent suffering later. You are not made happy by a circumstance. You are. But I'm trying to do that. How are you supposed to look around and feel the chill in the air, and not DO anything? Trans- formation. Thank you nutrition facts telling me there is no trans fat in my sparkling water. Eyes went right to you. Trans- formations is trans (through) formation. Ok, so that's been a huge belief of mine. If I enough suffer now, I won't have to suffer later. suffer (v.) mid-13c., "allow to occur or continue, permit, tolerate," Magic. Magic everywhere.

Day 01 - 16/01/2021 - 30 mins - Morning - Done - Amazing It was really really deep. 30 mins of breathing passed as 5 mins. I was an infinite void of nothingness. It was really peaceful & Blissful. I have no feelings of Body. I detached from my body. And the body was just like a few sensations in that void. My awareness was really sharp. I felt like there were a lot of points opening up in me and at the opening of each point, It was releasing bliss & joy. By discovering my true depth, it was so profound that it made me cry. I felt like a lot of negativity was releasing. I felt very close to God. Day 02 - 17/01/2021 - 20 mins - Morning - Done - Very Good Day 03 - 18/01/2021 - 15 mins - Morning - Done - Good Day 04 - 19/01/2021 - 30 mins - Morning - Done - Good Day 04 - 19/01/2021 - 15 mins - Night (Before Sleep) - Done - Very Good It was amazing. I went into a really deep state of consciousness. I was in a void with no feeling of the body. My Visualisation and imagination power multiplied by 10. Whatever I was trying to visualize or imagine that was manifesting into that void more clearly than the normal state. I was receiving a lot of insights. I was able to experience different states of consciousness. I was able to remain aware while sleeping into Sleeping states. Hypnagogia was a lot more powerful visually. I enjoyed these experiences in that deep state a lot. I was hyperactive psychologically as well. My body was able to sleep but I was still aware of everything. Psychologically it was really hard for me to become unconscious and sleep. After 1 or 2 hours in that state, after all, I slept. Now I have feelings of very different kinds of sleep I experienced last night. I can't explain it. And my dreams were also a lot vivid than my normal routine. Day 05 - 20/01/2021 - 30 mins - Morning - Done - Very Good It was really deep & profound full of infinite bliss. I was void. It was so profound that it made me cry. I felt the closeness of God. I was talking to him. Objects in my visual field were in motion. Breath is optional. I can not die. We are afraid to kill our ego due to our own fears, desires & attachments. Day 05 - 20/01/2021 - 15 mins - Night (Before Sleep) - Done - Good (Vivid Dreams) Day 06 - 21/01/2021 - 35 mins - Morning - Done - Very Good Breathing became automatic after 25 mins. Today I was able to see colorful infinite patterns as well. I was an infinite void. Detached from the body. Flashing lights. I was in pure joy & bliss. At one point I was feeling like my heart was opening and I could feel a really peaceful void in my heart. Currents were running around in my whole body. My body was nothing but a few random sensations inside that void which was me. Day 06 - 21/01/2021 - 10 mins - Night (Before Sleep) - Done - Good The mind becomes hyperactive after the breathing exercise so after this exercise, It's hard to sleep. It takes time to go unconscious. Your awareness becomes Lazer sharp for a few minutes. After 10 mins of Breathing, I detached from the body for a few minutes. And this practice before sleep resulted in Vivid Dreams. But in the morning I forgot most of the dreams but still could recall one dream. Click here if you are interested to read that dream. Day 07 - 22/01/2021 - 15 mins - Morning - Done - Very Good (With Post Breathing Music) I Started Shamanic Breathing while listening following Tribal Drumming: https://youtu.be/BkzA_u9smXU After a few minutes while breathing I started to feel really cold. There was a lot of Tingling in my whole body. My arms & hands are totally numb, Tight, and hard. My whole body started to become so hard that it felt like it’s made of stone. As soon as I stopped doing shamanic Breathing, I held the breath inside. And suddenly it felt like I had detached from my body and had become an infinite void. The feeling of the body transformed into just a few sensations, flowing energy and currents. My Mind & Body was filled with Bliss, Joy & Peace. I could feel that all the blockages and knots in my body are opening and I am becoming more lightweight. I had earphones in my ears from the beginning and then after 5 mins of stopping the shamanic breathing following music started playing automatically in my ears. (I didn't need to come out of the trance to play the music myself using my hands): https://youtu.be/ZdElzvGlZbo I achieved the automatic Music phenomena through the following android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.muzical And it was an amazing experience to listen to music in that state of consciousness. I was feeling like I am the invisible being without any physical body floating into this infinite void and that music is the part of that void and echoing in that void. At a stage, I could feel that I am the universe, and then at a stage, I became Music. I was Music. Due to that music different kinds of vibrations were occurring in my body. When the music stopped playing there was amazing peaceful silence & void and I was in the presence of that void. I started to experience flashes of lights, hypnagogia, visualization in the blackness of my eyes. I was able to see silhouettes of some beings in human form, Faces, Eyes looking at me, and then the effects faded away and I was back to the normal state.

It's still doable. You need a job, get a job at McDonalds, get any job, you need to earn a living so you can buy certain essential things. Good clothes, good perfume, good food. You can't expect a women to get close to you without these things. Get books that you're passionate about, it could be self help, it could be about virgins like you. Start digging your head into reading material, it's good for you. enjoy it. Find a career path. Pay a professional counselor(see why you need money?) to help you figure what kind of a career you can make yourself. You need to get your head straight. Pay for therapy. Find a gym so you can get those feel good hormones, so you can get testosterone, this will boost your performance and drive for life. It will make you also want to get better food to get higher and better nutrition. Good luck. If all else fails, go to a monestary instead of suicide. Monks have been recorded to be able to instantly create bliss, to off record levels of bliss, such rapture and love on command is not something science understand. So if it comes down to it, just go and do that, what've you got to lose. Better than suicide imo.

Many of my own profound meditation-induced experiences were determination sitting too. For some reason the experience is profoundly deepened by simply letting go of your normal responses and suffering through it until your ego naturally dissolves. At some point all the pain is gone and only profound bliss remains. It's a powerful meditation method, at least in my experience. I think the longest one I did was about two hours.

@Loving Radiance I say that because it's the least distinct one apart from sahasrara. You have always felt comfort, pleasure, joy and love which are expressions of the first 4 chakras. They are more tangable. @itachi uchiha ksf is alsmoast too intence for me. It has me shaking and losing control. How I understand it, it's not about pleasure but rather to increase your prana to then use in more gentle practices to create bliss, comfort, pleasure, joy, love and/or awareness. How long it lasts depends on a lot of factors, a day maybe? The amount of wellbeing you get from a chakra can be calculated by prana amount*chakra openness. If you have a lot of prana but a closed chakra it can actually create intense suffering. If you have an open chakra but little prana then it will feel nice but not overwhelmingly so. But also prana helps you open your chakras, and allows you to go into depths that are normally unavailable. Open chakra + lots of prana = bliss bomb Nothing that I've experienced through energy work compares to 5-meo, but if you have a full-blown kundalini awakening then maybe you could get to that level. Energetic practices has changed how psychedelics work on me, it's more energetic now.

feel deeper. Push yourself out of your social comfort zone it forces you to feel deeper. Let yourself get upset, angry, sad, happy, and everything in between. Allow yourself to feel like total shit or total bliss. Yes you can read books to arm you with tools to employ feeling deeper into emotions. But also keep in mind that understanding emotions can only happen on a feeling level. And until you feel them you don't really understand them. Emotional intelligence is just this: how aware are you of your own emotions and the emotions of others. The most accurate understanding happens at the level of being. You don't need to will being in touch with the emotions of others. If you become fully involved with your own being emotionally you will naturally feel deeper into all other beings.

once i've had a dream/vision first it was hell that i went trough, i came out slowly on the other side and then there was only me and bliss i realised that i've created everything for "fun" for the lack of a better term then i was horny and wanted to fuuu* and then i realised that i'm always only f'n myself, which was funny

God is eternal. It can only destroy itself via illusion. But it's only horrifying to the ego mind. Because pure Infinity is Infinite Bliss and Infinite Love and Infinite Intelligence....I'm not glorifying it as some special state because your current state of consciousness is also Love and Bliss if you can realize that the ego mind causes its own suffering via its own selflessness. So as your consciousness increases you will find that you are perfectly happy in your current state of consciousness so there is no need for thoughts of death as if it was "some better place". This is an illusion spun by your ego.

Lightly assign a time to that entertainment for letting go of everything. Maybe 30 minutes. And in that 30 mins, let go as deep as can be. Even if you’re watching something, or playing a video game… let the body go completely. Deeper & deeper into the muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc. I find this to be almost equivalent to having just slept eight hours or not worked all day. The ‘five inner bodies’ model of Vippassana are very on point here. When the ‘inner bodies’ are let go, it is very much felt, and it is very deep relaxation / great feeling, and ultimately bliss such that working and not working and any entwinement with creative or not creative actually fall away. That might sound woo woo or out there, but sharing from direct experience and much inspection of this as of late. To create what I prefer to create on the project I’m on means physical labor (painting, drywalling, sanding walls, etc, etc) to the tune of twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day. Two or three times a day I sit and allow an ‘ultimate let go’ of all the ‘bodies’ and am rejuvenated. Without this, I don’t think I’d last even eight hours, and I don’t think I’d be enjoying it all nearly as much. There are some singular insights which come to bat in regard to ‘the changeover’… the going from working a job to whatever else, and the overlap ‘in between’… Use a dreamboard. No “thinker thinking”, simply, thoughts arising. Receiving thoughts & insights specific to what you desire and the way from Source, rather than ‘figuring anything out’ / ‘voluntary thinking’. Fist thing every morning, before any engagement with anything - connect / bring to mindfulness - that experience is one whole. This one whole experience, or, What Is… is morphing, becoming, the one whole experience you desire. Much like the trying to see if the light in the refrigerator is still on when you’ve closed the door, this morphing is unseen, but can be deduced, and thus it can be realized that you are steering it, you are at the helm, always. Thinking this what is is becoming what is desired is like, an ok feeling. Believing it is feels a bit more interesting. But knowing it is and can not possibly be any other way is ineffable.

It sounds like you are going after states, not for the Truth. There is no such a thing as "God state", because God doesn't exist, it is existence. In other words, God is not distinct from any thing. So sorry, I have no idea what you talk about when you say by living in some god head state. As a human being you can have a very different variety of states, for sure. But those are all functions of self and mind. Self and mind are not God, but they are manifestations of "it" so fundamentally there is no separation. So, it doesn't matter whether your self is in a state of suffering or flow, or some love state. Self is not separated from God. If "God" was a function of state or experience, then it wouldn't be the Truth. It would be just another thing in existence, relative to some other things which are not god. I don't mean that going after states isn't good or beneficial. On the contrary: improving your state of being is important for us all. I love being in the flow state. But a state of being is not the nature of being, and many many fall prey to the delusion that God is hiding in some mystical state. God is every state of being. I think this is especially common among Psychonauts. The substance nukes self or mind so deeply that you are temporarily freed from being inside a conceptual self that drains your being and lower your state. And boom, you go from emotional deficiency into some blissful state of peace/flow/love, and mistake the state for the Truth. Classic trap. If you want to permanently change your state, than lose, loosen or change the self you created. Self transformation is no easy task at all, especially if you want the "high" states of being. You will have to sacrifice a lot of what you built as your self for this. And shedding deep beliefs and assumptions about you or reality is not easy at all. And you don't remember that you crafted your self from scratch, because your were to busy in creating it, so how could you? Consider that if you want constant emotional abundance and being in flow or bliss, you would actually have to give a up all the things that bind you into your current self and state of being. And this could be everything that you hold dear as a self.

486. Summary: Satisfaction Meditation - How To Make Meditation Enjoyable! This episode gives you a practice you can use to apply the insights from The Root Solution To People Pleasing & Loneliness. (Summary is here.) It’s a very simple, but effective meditation technique that’s somewhat counter-intuitive. It helps answer… “But Leo, how do I practice becoming satisfied by myself? How do I embody not needing any kind of external validation? How do I apply the wisdom that chasing dopamine hits is a bad strategy for happiness?” The point of the Satisfaction Meditation is to take back control of your reward mechanism. Currently, your happiness usually depends on rewards from someone else (love, praise, attention, etc) or some external event (a promotion, lots of money, a hot date, no lineups at the DMV.) With the Satisfaction Meditation, we want to develop a practice of just sitting, being and not doing anything. Just basking in satisfaction. It’s the idea of just basking in the present moment and being deeply satisfied with it. That’s it. It’s literally that simple. There are two potential traps. First, you have to practice it. Second, your mind doesn't like feeling satisfied with “just existing and being, duuuude.” Your mind wants to do things and fantasize about stuff. It has ambitions, fears, problems that it wants to fixate on endlessly. All of that robs you of your natural joy. The Satisfaction Meditation Meditation starts at 3:22. It will take 10 minutes. Set aside all distractions and take a comfy seat. Sit with your eyes open. Relax your muscles. Now, you’re just going to sit there. Don’t try to manipulate or control anything in your experience. Don’t try to stop your thoughts or achieve a mystical experience. Just sit there and be fully satisfied. Allow yourself to be satisfied with the present. Keep gently nudging yourself to be satisfied with the Now, with just this moment. Notice if there's a positive, joyful feeling in your body. Maybe it’s a feeling of comfort. Enjoy the feeling, but don’t hinge your satisfaction on it. If you sit long enough you might start feeling uncomfortable and you still want to be fundamentally satisfied. That’s It! Think you can you do that? Normally your mind wants to fixate on the future or the past because that’s where your problems exist. You then lose touch with the beauty, calm and peace that’s present, in the moment, because it's not relevant to your survival plans. We usually take the present moment for granted. So, you might notice a subtle shift as you bring your awareness into the now. Proactively start to appreciate and enjoy your direct experience. Keep nudging yourself to feel satisfied with it. (The present is a gift, that’s why it’s called the present ??) Enjoyable Meditation?? The enjoyment from the Satisfaction Meditation doesn’t feel like ecstatic, dopamine-fuelled pleasure. It feels like relaxing into the moment. “Ahhh ?, it’s nice to just sit here and be peaceful. It’s nice not needing to chase an outcome or solve some problem. Ahhhhhh ⛱️.” So basically, you’re going to find satisfaction with being and existing. During this period of 10, 20 (or 60, 90 ?) minutes you’re just going to focus on being satisfied. If you practice this frequently you’ll notice a subtle shift. Before when you meditated you didn't really enjoy it, but now when you meditate you actually enjoy it! It’s not a chore, or a grind! The Satisfaction Meditation can create a positive feedback loop, because the satisfaction will start to build on itself. ⁍ Focusing on feeling satisfied in the present moment…helps you… ⁍ Realize you actually are satisfied…which creates a… ⁍ Feeling of satisfaction about being satisfied and your ability to recognize it. (“Wow! Leo’s weird meditation actually works!!”)…which causes an… ⁍ Increase in satisfaction that builds up that feeling even more…which helps with… ⁍ Focusing on feeling satisfied in the present moment… …So just continue to sit there, and become ever more deeply satisfied… -After that, it’s a matter of staying in the sweet spot of satisfaction for as long as you can. Try to keep your awareness there. -The Satisfaction Meditation shows you that being satisfied and happy is something you get to do right now. Happiness is not something you have to chase after! If you really practice it intensely, it can turn into deep joy, bliss and love. You can become so satisfied with just sitting in the present moment, not needing anything, that it brings tears to your eyes. -You can make this a formal sit down practice that you do everyday or a few times a week. Or, you can turn this into an entire week-long meditation retreat, where you’re just sitting, being satisfied and not doing anything else. The Sneaky Ego-Mind -Warning: your ego-mind will start to get sneaky… “Psssst…hey you…sitting there doing nothing…your to-do list ain’t getting any shorter…" “Wouldn't this moment be better if you had some drugs, or sex, or chocolate? Or friends? Or a mystical experience? Or a mystical, drug fuelled, sexperience with friends? Or at least a yummmy nummmy cookie…?” -You have to let go of those fantasies and just savour what’s right here in the present moment. Stop trying to chase for a better experience. Your mind is going to imagine all sorts of “better” scenarios. For now, focus on the present. You can spend the rest of your non-meditation time chasing goals and doing stuff. “But Leo, what if I can't be satisfied in the moment? That hottie ghosted me! I got a parking ticket! I have a project due tomorrow! I’ve got bills to pay, kids to feed, a hottie to resent and stalk on instagram. I needs me some enlightenment, pronto!” -Well, the challenge is to try. Your mind might resist and come up with excuses, at first. You have to notice that those are tricks of your mind. You have to just let those go. (ep: The Power of Letting Go) Let go of needing things to be different. Allow yourself to be satisfied with what's here right now. Focus on that satisfaction. Enjoy it. -This meditation is powerful because the whole point is to be happy right now. Other meditations are such a chore that they become difficult to practice consistently. They’re a frustrating means to some future happiness or enlightenment, which becomes counterproductive. Instead of dreading meditation, you’ll look forward to it because you get to just sit and be happy for 30-60 mins! It’s the same reason you sit down to play ?Ghost of Tsushima? isn’t it? Spirituality Is Not Supposed To Be A Grind -If you're just grinding through meditation, that's a signal you're doing it wrong. It’s hard to reach mystical states through meditation when you don't enjoy the process. It takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours of just sitting and being present in order to reach that. How do you plan on keeping that up if you don’t enjoy it? Reframe how you think about your meditation practice so that you can bask in the enjoyment. Whether it’s the Do Nothing technique or Neti Neti or just counting your breaths, enjoy the process. That’s crucial. -Making spirituality all about productivity and attaining some idealized future to avoid the present is a corruption of what spirituality is truly about. If your spiritual practice isn't aligned with joy and a satisfaction with existence, then there's something deeply askew. You could also broaden that lesson out to the entire process of self-actualization and personal development and even your career or life purpose as well. People Pleasing and Loneliness “But Leo, how does being satisfied with nothing connect to people pleasing and loneliness?” -People pleasing happens because you need others to fill you with love. You're not satisfied with things the way they are, so you do a lot of work to get praise and approval from others. It becomes an addiction. On top of that, you’re never fully satisfied even when you do get their validation. The afterglow of praise doesn’t last very long and it doesn't deeply fulfill you. If you're not fundamentally happy, you'll probably doubt or criticize their praise. “She didn’t really have a good time. She was just being polite.” “Okay, he complimented my hair, but what about my outfit? He probably just wants to get laid.” And so forth. -Loneliness happens when you imagine that the present moment could be improved by having more people around you, or people to talk to, be intimate with, share experiences with and so forth. It’s similar to people pleasing in that way. The solution is to ground yourself in being satisfied with existence, by strengthening your Satisfaction Muscle. That why you do the Satisfaction Meditation! You'll notice that you don’t feel lonely while you're doing the Satisfaction Meditation, because you're satisfied with existence itself. You don't need anyone else or anything more. You’re alone, but you're not lonely. Developing the deep capacity for satisfaction helps you to be non-needy and detached. It will augment the joy you do get from relationships. -This isn’t a license to become a recluse. This doesn’t mean you never socialize or be intimate with other people. That would be a mistake. You should cultivate relationships, just not while you’re meditating. Your Satisfaction Muscle -The Satisfaction Meditation will help you build your Satisfaction Muscle, which is your ability to appreciate and be happy with the moment just as it is. The effect of building your Satisfaction Muscle will spillover into other areas of your life. You will become happier, because you’ll be the source of happiness itself. It’s the kind of joy that most people overlook, because it's not a sharp peak in pleasure. It's not like a drug high or an orgasm. It's a very steady, even keeled contentment. It’s mild at first, but you can train it to levels of deep pleasure. The satisfaction can even turn into ecstatic levels of joy and bliss. Ultimately it can even turn into love. Why love? Because, you’ll start to fall in love with existence itself. That’s the rock bottom of this practice. Just a love of being conscious of being conscious of the eternal Now. With enough practice, you’ll start experiencing mystical states and even some satoris. Awakenings will happen as you sit there. You’ve stopped chasing them, but they’ll start happening because you've fully surrendered to the present moment. -As you build up your Satisfaction Muscle , you can go out into the world and apply the Satisfaction Meditation to everyday situations, like filing paperwork, grocery shopping, waiting in line at the DMV, etc. Usually you’d be irritated while sitting in traffic, but instead you can let go of your impatience and turn that into a Satisfaction Meditation. Also, when you go for a walk in the park, you can really be there and enjoy the beauty that’s all around you instead of being stuck in your head. Spirituality & Embracing The Now -Spirituality is the ability to cultivate your love for existence itself and be satisfied with whatever IS. It’s about developing an appreciation and satisfaction with the present that will carry over into every moment of your life. -Ordinarily we ignore the present moment as we go about surviving in the world. We get distracted trying to solve some problem or chase some goal, just to improve how existence feels. That can lead to anxiety and worry. Instead, practice being happy right now, for no good reason. Isn't that how you imagine you’d be if you were awakened? Think of it like this: If you can just sit and allow yourself to be content, do you even need enlightenment? Do you really need mystical experiences? What more do you want, but satisfaction? Why not short circuit all of that and go straight to the satisfaction? -You’re chasing these experiences because you believe they will satisfy you. What if you don't need to jump through all these hoops? The present moment is Absolute Truth. It’s God. Love. Spirit. Consciousness. Nirvana. Shunyata. Teotl. Fana. Shiva. The Groundless Ground. Mu. The Tao. The Force. It’s right here, right now. It’s just a matter of developing the ability to become conscious of it. The Trap of Chasing Enlightenment "But Leo, if I'm just sitting here satisfied and that’s the bulk of my meditation, will I ever reach enlightenment? Where's my awakening? I wanna be wise goddamn it!!” -No meditation can guarantee you will become enlightened. If you’ve been doing a lot of pushing during meditation for months and years, and you’re still not enlightened, maybe you need to try something new? Don’t fixate on achieving some mystical state or becoming enlightened while you meditate. If you have that attitude, even at the back of your mind, you're not doing it right. It’s important you let that attachment go. Just be satisfied with the present moment. You’re chasing some future fantasy, which is not what awakening is about. The anxiety of pushing for a result is sabotaging your ability to be present. -You might do this especially if you’ve attained crazy high peaks of consciousness through psychedelics. You can override that impatience by focusing on being satisfied with what is. Meditation is its own end, and in this case, meditation is about savouring satisfaction. ⦿ What you really want is to be more present. If you’re constantly trying to achieve a mystical experience, you’re distracted by anticipating some future result. That takes you out of the present moment. Worrying and anticipating are future oriented fantasies. It distracts you from your practice and becomes counter-productive. ⦿ Chasing becomes frustrating. With a chasing mindset, meditation can feel like a waste if you don’t “achieve enlightenment in 30 minutes.” You might even shame yourself, which creates a negative association to your meditation practice. The meditation becomes another means to an end, when it should be the end itself. If you're chasing some fantasy state with meditation, that ensures you're never going to be satisfied with most of your meditations. ⦿ Chasing happiness makes you unhappy. Unhappiness is imagining there’s something you should have, but don’t have, and that having it is the only way to become happy. This ensures you'll be unhappy until you get that thing, and even if you do get it you’ll only be happy for a moment. -True happiness is nothing more than being satisfied with exactly what is happening right here, right now, whatever that might be. That's the root of happiness. So, the counter-intuitive move here is to short circuit that whole process. To say, “why can't I be satisfied right now?” and then actually practice that. -Turn this into a quasi-challenge for yourself. How satisfied can I be with nothing special? How satisfied can I be with raw existence as it is, without needing to change anything? Satisfaction and Productivity The Satisfaction Meditation is harder than it sounds, because we often don't allow ourselves to be “happy for no reason.” “But Leo, being happy is going to rob me of my motivation! If I can be happy doing nothing, then why would I keep working on Wall Street or on my business or chasing millions of babes and dollars…?” One could argue that being satisfied is counterproductive to survival. Counterintuitively, that’s a good thing that you actually want. First, being happy makes you smarter, more resilient, more observant and more capable in a multitude of ways, which makes it easier to achieve goals. Happiness actually fuels success. It’s not the other way around. (Shawn Achor has a lot of good books and lectures about this subject. ) Second, if you’re honest, has any of that activity ever made you truly satisfied? No. It's just put you on an endless treadmill of chasing chasing chasing. If you keep that up you’re going to waste your whole life chasing stuff and never being satisfied. Dopamine tricks your mind into the fantasy that attaining some goal will complete you. It’s common to fixate on the chase and overestimate how fulfilling money, sex, and approval will be. It happens to everyone, even the most logical among us ?. -Focusing on satisfaction doesn’t mean you’re going to sit on your ass and do nothing for the rest of your life. You should develop a strong work ethic, a life purpose and meaningful relationships. You most likely need them to feel deeply satisfied with life. So don't be a slouch. You can do all those things, but that needs to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. The cake is the Satisfaction Meditation and other practices that develop that muscle. A stronger Satisfaction Muscle will improve all those other domains of life. -Something fundamentally different needs to happen. So when are you going to wise up and realize that's not going to work? When you truly “get it” you’ll actually start practicing the Satisfaction Meditation consistently. Instant Gratification Culture -For most people, their Satisfaction Muscle is feeble because we live in a culture of instant gratification. It’s filled with social media, viral content, video games, loot boxes, tv & movies, fast food, porn and engineers in Silicon Valley using the most seductive bait to trigger those dopamine hits as fast and as frequently as possible. It’s a trick of your mind to think that chasing instant gratification and excitement is a wise and sustainable lifestyle. That’s what you realize after wasting years partying, drinking, masturbating, sexing people, taking drugs, having caviar in fancy cars. You end up crashing into dissatisfaction. -Those dopamine peaks never last no matter how enjoyable. That’s why you can finish one video game and still go searching for the next one, because no single video game has ever satisfied you. There's not enough money you can get on Wall Street or the casino to make those dopamine peaks sustainable. That’s why you need a root solution to the problem of unhappiness, otherwise you're always going to be unhappy. Two Different Reward Systems (Harvard trained physician Dr. K has an excellent explanation of dopamine at Healthy Gamer. Some of the following details about dopamine come from him.) -Dopamine chasing is ultimately unfulfilling because it has to do with wanting pleasure, not experiencing pleasure. When you do something rewarding the brain releases dopamine to reinforce that behavior by motivating you to want more of it. Dopamine does not cause the feeling or receiving of pleasure. Basically, wanting and enjoying happen in different parts of the brain. -Also, Dopamine isn’t “bad.” If you have too little dopamine you’ll be totally unmotivated. It just has to be properly balanced and not constantly chased as a lifestyle. -Your brain has two different reward circuits: the Dopamine Circuit and the Satisfaction Circuit. The Dopamine Circuit rewards you for sharp, positive changes in your survival situation, like stumbling on a hundred dollar bill, eating candy or playing a video game. It’s a very short lasting reward. When you get a dopamine spike you feel very happy for a few minutes, an hour, maybe even a day, then you drop back down to your default state. High Dopamine Activities: People pleasing. Partying. Winning the lottery. Watching TV. Eating a greasy cheeseburger. A promotion at work. Finding a new romantic partner. Taking drugs. Chris Evans musical tribute videos, etc. Because it triggers wanting instead of pleasure, you can get hit after hit and still feel compelled to chase more dopamine delivery systems (food, Netflix, video games, etc.) After all, if dopamine caused pleasure directly, you wouldn’t need to keep chasing more pleasure because you’d already be experiencing pleasure. The Satisfaction Circuit is rooted in the prefrontal cortex instead of dopamine spikes. The Prefrontal Cortex is the part of the brain that’s in charge of discipline, wisdom and all the qualities of the higher self. When you practice the Satisfaction Meditation, you’re strengthening the reward circuit of your Higher Self. (ep: Low vs High Quality Consciousness). It raises your baseline for happiness and consciousness. The Prefrontal Cortex also contains the pineal gland and/or third eye and receives dopamine through the mesocortical pathway. People with a strong Mesocortical Pathway have excellent willpower, vision, motivation and long term planning (among other positive qualities). One of the ways to develop that is through meditation. -No wonder most people are dissatisfied with life! Nobody taught them the difference between the dopamine circuit and satisfaction circuit. If you're not convinced of the benefits of strengthening the Satisfaction circuit, try spending the next 5 or 10 years desperately chasing those dopamine peaks. You'll realize it doesn't work. Some More Info on Dopamine • Dopamine release is about reinforcing a behavior through wanting. It’s a carrot on a stick. Trainers will hold up a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey and the donkey will keep chasing it forever and ever, never reaching the carrot. • Dopamine problems hurt your ability to delay gratification because it inhibits the part of the brain that’s involved in cost-benefit analysis. It makes instant gratification much more tempting, so you end up constantly making choices that are low reward for low effort. • Dopamine Exhaustion makes activities that promote your health and well-being a lot less enjoyable ?. Dopamine Tolerance eventually leads to Dopamine Exhaustion, where you have a vastly diminished ability to enjoy simple things. Reading a book or going for a walk becomes boring, because your body’s used to much higher amounts of dopamine than a book or walk provide. • If you do it long enough, you’ll end up creating a war between what you should do versus what you’re tempted to do to get that quick, easy dopamine hit. Thing is, you don’t actually want the donut or video game. It’s not as pleasurable as you imagine. Your dopamine is just throwing up false flares. • Dopamine chasing reinforces behaviors that aren’t even fun! You keep indulging in something even though it’s more numbing than enjoyable. (That’s a sign you really need a dopamine detox to reset your levels.) • It can take anywhere between three weeks to three months to go through a full dopamine detox. • Having said that, dopamine is necessary. You just need to regulate it properly. If you have too little you’ll be totally unmotivated, but you also shouldn't turn dopamine chasing into a lifestyle. • Most of us have gotten addicted to dopamine hits, even if we're not doing drugs. What’s worse, your brain builds a tolerance to dopamine, so the more hits you chase the bigger amount you need to get the same effect. Double Unhappiness If you don't cultivate your Satisfaction Muscle your mindset can get so bad that you’ll still be unhappy in beautiful, extraordinary situations. Maybe you’ve experienced that first hand. You’re sitting on a mountaintop with the love of your life, watching the sunset, admiring the scatter of twilight across the horizon. You’ve spent all day hiking up the mountain just to arrive at the perfect time and it's only going to last a few minutes. The weather is perfect, the location is perfect, the sunset is perfect, the person you’re with is perfect, but you're still not happy ?. You know the situation is perfect and that you should be happy, but you're not. That’s a double dose of unhappiness, because you’re unhappy, and you’re unhappy that you're unhappy. You may even start wondering, “If I can't be happy when the stars are aligned, what chance do I have of being happy at all, ever, period? What if nothing makes me happy? What if I’m doomed to be sad forever?” That’s when a lot of people get depressed or even suicidal. That’s because nothing can make you truly happy other than yourself. The only long term solution is to train your Satisfaction Muscle to the point where you're satisfied with existence itself. Stop Living Life By the Numbers Stop living your life for some arbitrary numerical metric, like dollars in your bank account, or cars in your garage, or the number on your bathroom scale, or even number of books you've read. That can get very dysfunctional. Numbers on a spreadsheet won't satisfy you in the ultimate scheme of things (even if you’re a mathematician!) Leo used to have a demanding, results obsessed mindset where he quantified everything. His attitude was to just grind through work, suck up any suffering and achieve the result. It was a very left-brained, unhealthy, dysfunctional, stage orange approach to life. It was toxic, unsustainable, and it didn’t lead to satisfaction. The Problems with Grinding 1) It’s based in being “not good enough.” “But Leo, I’ve got so many things to do and I’m already behind in life. I’ve got to become spiritual, confident, fearless, more loving, nicer to people who secretly irritate me, or just better all around. Do you know how hard it is to navigate reality when you’re not perfect, like those people on Instagram…” You have an idealized image that you feel you must live up to in order to be “good enough.” Problem is, if you feel bad about failing to live up to that, you’ll be too demoralized to take consistent, long-term action. 2) It’s unsustainable. You might be below your ideal target for years because it takes time to build skill. It’s unsustainable to spend all that time feeling demoralized and not enough. 3) It makes you cut corners in practice. When you don’t enjoy practicing, you can get sloppy. If you’re just grinding through, you’ll cut corners so you can get it over with and do something that you truly enjoy. 4) It stops you from entering a flow state. A flow state happens when you lose all sense of yourself in an activity. It becomes effortless, like you have the creative force of the universe backing up your actions. The thing is, flow comes from freeing yourself up, not from trying to finish things quickly. 5) Grinding changes “I want to” into “I have to.” If your practice is demoralizing, unsustainable, toxic and unenjoyable, it’ll feel like such a drag that you have to force yourself to do it. You might forget why you wanted to accomplish the goal in the first place. (Teal Swan has an excellent episode about this: “Have to…The Philosophy that Will Ruin Your Life”) 6) The most effective motivation “moves towards” something inspiring, not just “away from” something negative. Leo has an excellent episode about this: Positive vs Negative Motivation. It’s one of his best about life purpose and motivation. It’s based on the excellent book “The Path of Least Resistance” by Robert Fritz. Leo’s Reading Example When Leo first got into personal development 10 years ago, he wanted to develop himself as quickly as possible: “Let me achieve as much as I can, as fast as I can, to hell with how it feels!” Leo had a mountain of books to read. He figured if he could master speed reading he could read ten times as many books. So he got a speed reading book and started going through the exercises everyday. After a month of tedious grinding, his practice became so unpleasant it was actually counterproductive. He realized he would rather read at a normal, enjoyable pace than speed read through books, worrying about whether he understood or remembered the material correctly. His boredom, worry and attachment to the outcome of speed-reading was stopping him from entering a good flow of absorbing the book’s information. Nowadays, Leo reads pretty slowly but enjoys himself and focuses on absorbing the contents of the book. (Considering how long and dense his book list is he can’t be that slow at reading.) So, it doesn't matter how fast you read, because the point is not to read X number of books. The point is to enjoy yourself. If you end up reading half as many books, but enjoy them twice as much, it’s even more of a win. So, you can read a book in an enjoyable way, or in a grinding, unpleasant way. The better way is to enjoy the process so that you keep doing it without burning out. Enjoy your career or business. Enjoy your relationships and enjoy watching yourself grow mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Watching Actualized.org Episodes Another example of slowing down to be more effective is watching Actualized.org episodes. There’s at least two different ways to watch them: 1) You can binge a ton of episodes. “But Leo, I’ve stumbled upon this gold mine of information! I need to get through these big, meaty, complicated episodes as fast as possible. I’ll just binge watch 500 episodes with a pot of coffee, some modafinil, a stack of legal pads for notes, an even bigger stack of armodafinil, and that eyeball machine from A Clockwork Orange…then I’ll be wise!!” 2) Or you can slow down and enjoy the process. When you watch Leo’s videos, find a sustainable pace that you can enjoy, instead of binging so many they become a blur. Maybe you only watch one video a week instead of one a day. In the long run you’ll watch a lot more episodes if you enjoy the process. Also, if you take time to pause and contemplate what’s being said, you'll get more benefit by concentrating on fewer episodes in a deeper way. When you slow down and get into the rhythm of an activity, you enter a flow state and lose all sense of yourself. Whatever you're doing becomes effortless when you're in flow, because you’re not putting stressful demands and distracting expectations on yourself. Flow comes from trying to do things freely, instead of trying to do things well. Deeply Contemplate Happiness -You need to deeply contemplate happiness. If you can't clearly articulate what happiness is, how can you ever be happy? Happiness is not a belief or an ideology. It's not enough for you to just believe what Leo says about happiness. You have to actually derive, for yourself, what happiness is. -You figure it out through contemplation and direct experience. This will help you to distinguish between authentic happiness and dopamine peaks of pleasure. When you’re happy, notice what’s causing it. When you’re unhappy, also notice what’s causing it. Another way to frame the question is: What if there's a form of happiness that doesn’t create a downward shift into dissatisfaction after it ends? -If you do the Satisfaction Meditation enough, maybe you'll discover it’s pointing you towards authentic happiness, to a type of pleasure that doesn’t create suffering. Don’t mistake dopamine peaks for authentic happiness. They're not. Those dopamine peaks actually create suffering. This distinction is crucial. Life Purpose and Happiness -The happiness you get from your Life Purpose is different than the dopamine spikes of a video game. When you find your life purpose and align with it, it triggers a different reward mechanism, similar to the Satisfaction Meditation. Instead of dopamine swings, it leads to a deep contentment with life. Bliss and joy can be reached this way. “But Leo, the contentment from LP won’t be permanent either!” Of course it won't. But there’s a difference between getting attached to satisfaction and enjoying satisfaction while it’s here. This does not mean you cannot meditate on the feeling of satisfaction itself. In fact, doing so is how you escape suffering. eg: People misunderstand Buddhism’s non-attachment and impermanence as “life is suffering, nihilistic and empty” or “this is why Buddhists can’t have nice things.” However, the Buddhist notion of suffering and impermanence basically means that chasing material conditions and positive states is dissatisfying because it never lasts. So you’re guaranteed to suffer. clip: Lose Attachments to Gain Infinite Love (9 mins) -Appreciating bliss and satisfaction in the here and now is a far better way to live than chasing dopamine hits, which is what most people are doing. Think of it this way: In every moment you can either be satisfied or dissatisfied. Which will you be? Applying Insights: From Abstract to Concrete -You need to develop practical techniques for implementing all the high level, big picture, abstract ideas that Leo talks about. In this episode you got a very tangible practice. A lot of episodes don’t and won’t provide that. -You need to take ownership of your own personal development. You won’t build muscle by trying to get Leo to lift the weights for you. That goes for all self-help teachers, books, courses and insights. -To get the most value out of Actualized.org watch out for two traps: listening idly and not taking action. You can’t just listen distractedly as you cook or do laundry, unless you’re totally new to this content and have trouble focusing. You could start there, but to get results you need to focus. -No matter what level you’re at in your spiritual journey, you must take effective action to get results. You need to develop the ability to take any insight and ask: “How do I turn this abstract idea into something I can implement in my life?” “How can I practice this wisdom and embody it?” -For every profound insight you get, brainstorm different methods to apply it. See which ones work and which ones don’t. That’s where your results will come from!

Quotes: Reality is a mirror reflecting your inner world. "Be the change you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi Jaguaralen - SPIEGEL (Lyrics) [English translation] If you stop fighting, it is the victory over war. Never aggressive again, filter the negative energies and shape them on the beat into this positive symphony. Peaceful and loving this G like E.T., just wanted to let you know that good melodies still exist. Rest in peace to sugar, nicotine and caffeine, unfold the energy. Life is the best game, the soul of a rap MC, forgive my enemies for everyone in the Galaxy and the joy shines through the vicious circle, anger, remorse, suffering, it begins a new time and it shines white, completely free, no expensive price. Yeah, so so deep, born MC, make rap back again to poetry. And the mirror breaks in the love of light. (2x) And the hero left his village and climbed up to the love choir. Embarked on a journey to the answer of life and therefore entered the greatest martial art. On this path he always carries in his conscience this life is a maze with obstacles. They will come and try to deceive the hero, but he knows he will find himself forever. So he drinks from the tree of knowledge, makes the dream disappear, including the thousand voices extinguished in the smoke. Oneness, wisdom, freedom, it begins and flows through his spirit. Birth and death, limited lifetime, but his bliss radiates from eternity. From infinity to zero... YOU ARE THIS HERO! And the mirror breaks in the love of light. (2x) The wars in the world are a mirror of ourselves, because man is blind, but in the heart a child. Yes, change is possible, from the twilight like a phoenix. It took me so long to realize... this is not about me, this is about the WE! And the mirror breaks in the love of light. (2x) ♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪ Have a nice day!