Leo Gura

Meditating outside is great. It's easier to get enlightened looking at nature than sitting look at a wall. The expansiveness of nature itself will reveal God to you. It's hard to see God in a white plaster wall. I attribute my first samadhi experience to the fact that I meditated outside in a very beautiful natural place. Of course it's not necessary, but a nice bonus. I recommend doing both indoor and outdoor for variety, and so you don't develop a one-sided preference.

@How to be wise The desire to use awareness to manipulate reality to become more successful just goes to show how unaware you are.

This!

What's so absurd about it? The self-actualized individual Maslow describes is simply an emotionally and cognitively mature human being who is growing himself. Usually not enlightened, but far beyond what most people do in life.

No, Maslow was not enlightened. He merely studied people who had peak mystical experiences. It's one thing to talk about the transcendence of self, it's another thing entirely to actually transcend one's self.

@30secs No, because the point of religion is to distract you from Truth. That's it's function. That's the function of all ideologies. All the major religions are already built upon enlightenment. They are the distractions unenlightened people created to avoid becoming enlightened. The only paradigm shift that can happen is you deciding to throw all ideologies away, sitting down, and discovering Truth. Everything else is a distraction.

If you study early Christian mysticism it's clear that many of them pursued enlightenment (AKA God) seriously and successfully. Monks and nuns are supposed to be pursuing enlightenment. That's their sole purpose in life. And some of them attain it. But this tradition is mired in a lot of ideology and politics which tends to get in the way, so many of them don't attain it as they get lost in dogma.

Yup, personality is innate. But also acquired. Every organism, whether human or not human, is unique and behaves in unique ways. It's partially genetic and partially environmental. A human being raised in an African village will have a different personality than one raised in New York city. The aim of the game is NOT to remove one's personality, but to see through the falsehood of the ego. Personality != ego.

No, that function has been disabled.

It's the exact same perspective. This perspective is called nonduality/enlightenment. What's really life-changing to actually experience enlightenment, not to believe in it or to think about it. Actual enlightenment will totally blow your socks off. So work towards it. You cannot do what Tolle talks about without actually experiencing enlightenment.

Go to bars & clubs, meetup.com, Toastmasters, and other groups/organizations. It's easiest to make friends when there is a common theme or interest, like if you get involved in golf, bowling, tennis, soccer, public speaking, meeting girls, church, meditation, yoga, chess, hiking, fishing, etc.

@Sky The spider is also just a sensation. It's a sensation first, and a spider only a distant second, after the mind has had a chance to interpret the sensation and give it value. In fact there is no spider there at all. All it ever is, is a sensation.

Different people resonant with different modes of inquiry or meditation. So you'll have to do some trial and error to find the technique you like the best. Mixing up various techniques can create lots of confusion in the mind. But also it can give you a broader, wider understanding of the enlightenment domain. If you only go with 1 technique, you might find it isn't effective for you. Although you might also use it to breakthrough and go all the way. You won't know until you try a lot. Yes, you should study the theory of enlightenment to some degree. You need to understand conceptually what enlightenment is and what enlightenment is not, so you don't get trapped. Watching the videos is helpful because it will reveal many traps to you and answer many questions you have about the path. Watch the videos. Watch them multiple times. But don't get lost in theory. Follow it up with lots of practice.

This is the correct answer. I notice a lot of the other responses are talking about thoughts as brain activity and whatnot. That's NOT what thoughts actually are. Those are just more thoughts about thoughts. The best way to think of a thought is simply as a sensation. What is an itch? It's exactly what an itch feels like, and nothing else. An itch is NOT nerve activity in the body << that's a thought! Likewise, what is a thought? It's that vague image or sound that arises in your awareness. That's it. Don't try to make more out of it than it is. Experience the thought literally, not figuratively. When experienced fully literally, a thought has no story, no content, no meaning. It's purely a sensation. Try listening to a thought in a foreign language. Does it have any meaning to you? No? In this case it's very easy for you to notice its literal being, because you cannot get lost in the content, because you have no idea what the content is. So a foreign thought, to you, is just a sensation. And that's all thoughts are.

Sounds like you got too little going on in your own life. Focus on building a better life for yourself (career, life purpose, health, wealth, friends, self-improvement, reading, etc), until all of it becomes more exciting and interesting than flirting with boys. Create a larger vision for your life, and get to work on it. Guys will come and go.

Women with abusive relationships? It always boils down to low self-esteem. Check out Nathaniel Branden's work. You will NEVER be able to have a healthy relationship until you solve the self-esteem issue. It would really be worth the effort for you.

That's not an interface. That's like stimulating a muscle by attaching an electrode to it. A far cry from understanding how the muscle actually works. There will need to be a full understanding of the brain's functions on a micro scale if you're gonna do anything meaningful with consciousness. And the complexity of it will be far far greater than the human genome, which, even though it has been decoded, tells scientists virtually nothing about how to construct a living organism from scratch. The complexity of these things is WAY underappreciated. It's likely that decoding every neuron in the brain will still not be enough, because the brain seems to have billions of sub-neural processes, perhaps even down to resonance on the quantum level. The reality is that by 2100 we'll still probably not have flying cars. So don't hold your breath.

Lol Guess I'll be seeing her in the Youtube comment section in 20 years

Personality is NOT a function of ego. Personality is the natural, authentic mannerisms and tendencies of the organism once all the SHOULDS, fears, neuroses, repressions, and affectations are removed. Without ego, personality gets STRONGER. In the same way that a diamond ring shines brighter once you clean off all the dust and gunk on it. You have a natural personality in the same way that a baby or a cat or a dog has a unique personality.

It fits in precisely as follows: Once it's realized that you are not the body/mind (enlightenment), the structures of the ego-mind will still largely remain intact. Your job then, for the rest of your life, is to become more and more conscious of the ego-mind structures and disassemble them one by one. That is the bulk of spiritual work, and that is the deepest form of personal development that exists. So for example, if you still have confidence issues after enlightenment, you would penetrate with your awareness the structures of the ego-mind that are fueling this dynamic, and thereby eliminate them. So personal development is the process of shedding every last vestige of self, until there is no longer anything that you are attached to as yourself, including your life, your body, your work, your possessions, your relationships, and your ideas. If you do all that, you will be unimaginably happy and your life will be complete.

You're not even in college yet!! So you got nothing to worry about.

It will take longer than anticipated to release because I've made some personal discoveries that are forcing me to re-evaluate my life and my work. But it's still planned.

It's best not to think of those experiences as enlightenment. If it was an experience, and you still don't know what you are, then it wasn't enlightenment, it was something else. In which case, you gotta drop it and start from scratch in the NOW. You're not going to find enlightenment in your memory banks. You gotta find it NOW in the present experience. And old memories of experiences tend to only get in the way, because a memory is not what you are. In this regard, psychedelics are problematic. This is the delusional aspect of psychedelics that I warned about. No psychedelic experience equals enlightenment, even though the experience might have been very profound and "spiritual".

There isn't really a path to enlightenment. All you are doing is asking, "What am I?" That's pretty much it. You sit and try to become aware of what you really are, assuming all phenomena (sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts) are not you. There's no need to wait to do this. Do it right now! Don't you wanna know what you are?

This is the answer: Sit down and do this, over and over again. Keep your enlightenment practices very simple and consistent. With as little thinking & theorizing as possible. The simplicity of it is what makes it so hard.