Leo Gura

Notice how all those things are concepts... monkey mind really. Is there any problem with just being? If being is not enough for you, it's cause your mind is chattering away in the background without you noticing it. "I need motivation" << monkey mind "I need to feel love for other people" << monkey mind "I don't feel connected to people" << monkey mind "I need a reason to keep living" << monkey mind "I want a way to get fulfillment" << monkey mind "I..." << monkey mind Become mindful over all the above, and fulfillment will be the natural end result of simply being. Sit, be, enjoy. If being isn't enjoyable for you, that's something to work through. Spiritual purification is required there. It can take many hours of sitting before it becomes enjoyable. But start to notice that mere being is highly enjoyable. It doesn't require any adornments. Spend some number of hours just practicing enjoying the act of existing. If you want to catalyze that process, take some AL-LAD or mild psychedelic. It will show you the beauty of mere existence. You don't need anything at all. Not love, not fulfillment, not a reason to live, nor any such made up human nonsense. Just be and enjoy.

When has it ever not been that? All the direct teachings are out there. People just don't want them. Nothing more direct than 30mg of 5-meo up the nose. Literally enlightenment in 15 mins, for 30 mins. But who wants it? I find it hard to stomach myself.

That's why your Mom overlooks all your evil traits Happy Mother's day.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when you start. Pick one thing and focus on it for a few months to build up some momentum. Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's eating healthy. Or whatever will make the biggest difference for you.

@Ayla Not sure what the big deal is. That is the entire path. The mind struggles and through its failures it learns the way. How else could it be? You can't just jump from addicted, ideological monkey mind to enlightenment in one fell swoop. It's gonna be messy in between. With of course many traps and false starts. My approach is to just keep learning, practicing, and pushing through it a bit each day. If you want the most direct path, go rent a cabin in the woods and sit there questioning everything for weeks and months until the mind shuts up. But who is prepared to be that hardcore? Maybe 1 in a million. Most people need a more gradual process, or at least to build up to that. I think the best we can do to help people with enlightenment is explain it clearly, tell them all the traps, given them actionable techniques which they can use every day to become more aware, and finally just inspire them to do it.

Well... it's true that the world is not real and not significant. That's called awakening. You don't need professional counseling. Professional counselors need awakening. So what exactly is the problem?

@Jordan wang Eventually you'll find that such over-the-top stunts are unnecessary and don't grow you that much. You have plenty of real fears to tackle without resorting to childish ones like orgasming in public. You want to tackle some real fear? Do some self-inquiry. Or find your life purpose and try following it. That'll be much more growth-inducing. Don't chase fear for its own sake. Plenty of fear will naturally arise as you pursue Truth. Fear like you've never imagined. When you do stunts, people will clearly see it as such, and you'll probably look like a fool, cause you're being inauthentic. Ask yourself, "Why am I drawn to doing stunts?" If you were just being yourself, would you be orgasming in public? Being yourself is often scarier than pulling a stunt.

@Visionary You just need lots of preparation and rehearsal. Practice, practice, practice at home. Get a camera and record yourself. Toastmasters is great for beginners.

@oysterman A quality problem. Don't theorize too much about it. Pick a thing and start making your first small bet. That will yield feedback within a few months, allowing you to gain more clarity. There is only so much clarity one can get through sitting and thinking about these things. Your small bets don't need to be perfect. They just need to be within the right ballpark. If the best thing you can think of is working with plants. Roll with that for the next 6 months and see how it feels.

@Ritu Not only is it fine, vacations are mandatory!

@BeginnerActualizer If this is your first time thinking about your values, your current progress it great. You don't need to nail them 100% to move forward. It will take months or a few years before your values fully gel in your mind. You don't have to sit and wait. You just get started on executing on whatever you've currently got. That will spur on the gelling process. Try to do the course well, but also keep moving forward. If perfectionism is paralyzing you, drop it and keep moving forward.

@street19 Yes, it's frightening. But again, what have you got to lose? Where do you start? Google your nearest monastery. They take new people all the time. Easy-peasy. I'd do it myself if I had nothing going for me. A healthy environment can change a lot. It won't do the inner work for you, but it can put you on track so you can start doing the inner work. Your only real problem is that you've lost touch with yourself, nature, and with BEing. Mainstream society has discombobulated you. That can fixed faster than you'd think if you really put your heart into it and exit mainstream society for a while.

@OnceMore No words can describe it. It is the universal cure to all of mankind's problems.

@LetTheNewDayBegin Hehe... such a methodology is called life. Stick with it. Who says you're doing it wrong?

Great insights. Good, proper use of this substance.

@AlldayLoop Look what the world has come to. Where just being by yourself for a week is considered a life-threatening ordeal.

If it's all pointless, why are you making such a big point of it? Notice that your theories and your actions/emotions are totally out of wack. Spiritual theories will not help you. In fact, they'll only make the gap wider, creating more suffering. You have to actually start practicing spirituality. ACTUALLY. Not logically. ACTUALLY. The fundamental problem here is that you're out of touch with reality. You're living inside a conceptual cage. And of course you feel like a slave and want liberation. But you're confused into inaction and apathy. If you don't like your life, you can always start over. Go join an ashram, monastery, etc. What have you got to lose? Your life will be thousand times better in a good ashram.

@OnceMore Rent a motel room near the woods and just there for a week or two doing nothing.

Stop associating enlightenment with behavior. It has nothing to do with that. You can be an enlightened axe murder. EVERY behavior, without exception, is God. You could destroy the entire planet with a nuclear holocaust, and it would still be love. True story. Happened not too long ago with the dinosaurs.

Shrooms are so easy to grow it would be harder to fake them than to grow and selling the real thing. You might as well ask for a test kit for bananas.

No more discussing good vs evil in this thread. Start a new thread if you want that. Edit: I've moved all the Good vs Evil discussion to a new thread.

Great stuff! Keep 'em coming.

@AlldayLoop More like, there is no needle. Which is why it's so hard to find! How can you find something which is nothing? And who is the one doing the finding?!!

@Seeker_of_truth Notice that you cannot experience Nothingness. Because an experience, feeling, or perception, is Somethingness. What you have is a subtle conceptualization of Nothingness -- some kind of image of it in your mind, or a feeling, or an intuition, etc -- which is actually Somethingness, not Nothingness. Also, notice, how can Nothingness be inside you? It's nothing, so it cannot be limited to physical space. Why don't you assume it's everywhere? All that said, what you're doing (trying desperately to grasp at Nothingness using the mind) isn't wrong per se. It's the essence of self-inquiry. I just want you to know ahead of time that it will never work. Mind (somethingness) cannot grasp Nothingness, ever! Because somethingness is not nothingness. You cannot think Nothingness. You cannot feel Nothingness. You cannot conceptualize Nothingness. You cannot intuit Nothingness. Because it's not a thing. Now you might wonder, "So should I stop?" That's tricky. This is the process of self-inquiry. You're being asked to do the impossible. It takes hundreds of hours of wrestling with this problem until your mind starts to learn why it can't grasp Nothingness, and then eventually your mind starts to shut up, and actual Nothingness might dawn. Whatever you presently imagine Nothingness to be, it is surely NOT that! I suggest you keep looking into this matter. Keep wrestling with it. You need to grasp what I'm saying here at a bones-deep level. It's not enough to theoretically know it. You need to experience the futility of the mind for yourself. And the only way to do that is by spinning your wheels a lot in this process. Have patience.

I've closely re-read this whole thread several times and taken notes on your issues. Good stuff guys! Keep 'em coming.