Leo Gura

Faith has become somewhat of a dirty word. But let's put it in proper context. Does a scientist need to have faith in order to verify an existing peer-reviewed lab study? Is it proper for him to act like a fundamentalist cynic and refuse to allow the possibility that the study was accurate, to the point where he refuses to verify it for himself? Even to disprove something requires that you first take the possibility of it seriously. Otherwise why even bother disproving it? From a pragmatic point of view, you wouldn't even be able to take a piss without the faith that it won't miss the bowl and squirt in your eye. All action requires a baseline level of faith. Self-inquiry is no different.

Technically there is no way to tell because enlightenment is an inner realization. But in practice, you can easily tell enlightened people from non-enlightened people simply by the non-reactive way in which they carry themselves. I've never found this to be a problem. I can tell when someone is speaking the truth just from listening to them for 5 minutes. It's quite obvious if you study this stuff for some length of time. The other reason it never bothered me is because it doesn't really matter. What matters is my enlightenment. What matters is if the stuff they tell me is getting me closer or further away from my own truth. And that's quite easy to detect.

That's a lot of interests! Oh well... better to have too many than too few. One thing I could suggest is to buy and read books about each one of those fields. Then see which interests still stand strong and which ones fall away. A top interest should emerge over time with further study. If you haven't checked out my life purpose course, in the course I take you through a pretty deep process for how to drill down into your core values and eliminate dead-ends. That might save you a lot of time too. The whole point of the course is to show you how to develop a VERY strong, clear, singular direction in life.

I would wait until the forum gets more users and more established before trying to organize meet-ups. There aren't enough members yet to make that feasible. Once we have 10,000 or 20,000 members, THEN it could work and perhaps we'll even create a sub-forum specifically for that purpose.

I will shoot a video about psychedelics at some point. Not ready to share my full thoughts on them yet. It's a deep and nuanced topic.

There are many ways to market yourself as a coach. Videos and social media are NOT an easy form of marketing. They are very challenging and extremely labor intensive. I do it because I love to create videos, not because I want to attract clients. If you did what I do just to attract clients, you would probably hang yourself after a few years. Most life coaches struggle to get clients because they suck at marketing. Most life coaches never even begin to make money and quit because they cannot attract clients. Most successful life coaches attract clients in-person through word-of-mouth, speaking events, and networking functions. Successful coaches are usually very social and build a large social-circle of contacts. Running an online business like I do, is VERY different from coaching. Which is basically why I don't coach any more. They are two different fields. There are information products and seminars available that you can purchase which will teach you how to market yourself as a coach. Learning marketing is more important to be a coach than learning to how to coach. Coaching is EASY. Marketing is HARD. As a self-employed coach, you're a coach second and an entrepreneur first. Most coaches are terrible entrepreneurs so they fail. If you wanna be a successful coach, you have to make sure that you don't let your positivity and passion for coaching blind you to the realities of running a business. Business is cut-throat and demands very pragmatic thinking.

Never. All my clients were great and polite and very respectful. You would have to do something horribly wrong to get a negative coaching review. Where would they even post it?

I wanted to read another book of Sam's after Waking Up, but his other books are not really books. They are more like essays. Nothing wrong with that I guess, but I didn't feel like reading them. I could be wrong. If someone here knows better, then please correct me.

Yellow is not enlightenment. Yellow is systemic thinking. Being able to see the world as a set of complex interacting systems. And the ability to think up and down-spiral. It's a very intellectual kind of activity. Yellow is stuck in his head a lot. But he's finally seen the spiral and therefor has tolerance for and understanding of all the other stages to some degree. The transformational dilemma of Yellow is that systemic thinking is STILL not sufficient to solve the world's biggest challenges. Thinking can only get you so far. Turquoise is not necessarily enlightenment either, but it could involve enlightenment and its various spiritual insights which make one compassionate towards the entire planetary ecosystem. Turquoise is concerned with ecology and is willing to sacrifice self in order to uplift the world. There is an emphasis of peace and love and deep respect for life. Genuine spiritual leaders fit into this category. Think: Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Ekhart Tolle, Yogananda, etc. My guess is... you're probably not at all at yellow yet, or you're just scratching the surface of yellow. You'll know you're solidly in yellow when the majority of your day is spent trying to solve big problems with systemic thinking. How much time do you spend planning how to save the polar bears from extinction by using technology to address the root causes within politics and society that's leading to their demise? << that is what yellow thinking looks like.

You're basically doing it right. You just sit and genuinely wonder, "Who am I if I'm not the body/mind?" Actually, you don't just wonder, you ask this question directly of your present experience. What does direct experience say about this matter? Any logical answer to this question is wrong. The question is not meant to be answered verbally or intellectually. It is meant to get you to a direct conscious "taste" of the True Self. But in practice, before you ever get that true taste, your mind will have to slog through thousands of false verbal and conceptual answers. Your mind will come up with all sorts of wrong answers like: I am me! This is a stupid question I am confused I'm not doing this right I am nothing I am everything I am God I don't exist I am the no-self I am invisible I am awareness I am this body I am a brain I am the perceiver I am the one who's aware I am behind my eyes I am empty space I am infinite I am unknowable I don't know who I am I am Markus I am a man Etc. All these answers are wrong because they are intellectual. You have to exhaust all of that until your mind finally gives up the search in total frustration. Then what might happen is that the mind finally goes silent, and the answer is revealed to you experientialy in a very shocking and powerful way. The best place from which to do self-inquiry is a true position of not-knowing. You need to generate massive doubt in your mind about this idea you have that you are a human being sitting there with a human body and a human mind. << This belief is so strong that it prevents any deep self-inquiry from happening. So you have to bust it with whatever means make sense to you. Are you seriously open to the possibility that you are NOT a human being? If not, then self-inquiry cannot occur.

I actually have a video planned about this topic. While doing enlightenment work I got a surprise insight into what prayer is. Prayer is contemplation. It's the attempt to directly merge with "God" or your True Self by cessation of mind activity and total surrender. It's identical to the aim of yoga (union) and meditation. That's what old-school prayer used to be before modern-day religions corrupted it and turned it into a tool for appeasing the ego. Old-school Christian and Jewish prayer was designed to stop your mind from thinking, merging the ego with reality. It had nothing to do with asking God for good stuff, lol.

Submit it as a feature request with the exact type of emoticons you want to see and maybe we can do it.

Hehe, you guys just LOVE asking me about porn. It's definitely on the to-do list.

Yeah, this boils down to tradition and cultural norms basically. You can become enlightened in so many ways. You could probably become enlightened while skinning people alive. So it doesn't say much. Can sex be used to expand one's consciousness? << Definitely Can celibacy be effective for focusing the mind on meditative practices? << Definitely Can you do both at different times in your life? << Definitely Can you stick to only one path your whole life and still be enlightened << Definitely So you have a lot of options. A lot of the reasons that Eastern monastic school abstain from sex has to do with tradition and culture of the area. Of course sex and relationships are very messy and distracting, so it's nice to not have to deal with that stuff at all when doing enlightenment work. Imagine you're trying to meditate while you're girlfriend cheats on you. It will screw up your progress big time.

This guy on Youtube looks like a monk; https://www.youtube.com/user/yuttadhammo Maybe he can give you a taste of monk life. Although there are MANY different kinds of monks and monastic traditions out there, even just within Japan, not to speak of China, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Thailand, Burma, and Europe and the USA.

Because the Bible is a story for your entertainment. It wasn't written by Jesus. It was written by people after him to sell the story of Jesus and their brand of ideology. The Bible attempts to communicate extremely advanced truths that most people cannot even begin to fathom. To do that, it has to dumb everything down into an almost unrecognizable form. It's like trying to teach calculus to first-graders using Sesame Street characters, glitter, and crayons. God had to be turned into a man because egos cannot fathom or stomach the notion that God is Absolute Nothingness.

Good question. If you go through a coach training program (which you should) then they will train you in the basics and you will have partners that you practice on. Every new coach of course still feels self-doubtful and inexperienced. What I did was I committed to getting massive 1-on-1 coaching experience. I found extra partners and coached every week as much as I could for months. Then I contacted all of my friends and acquaintances and offered to coach them for free. I do so for months. All this coaching was free. After doing that for 6 to 12 months, I had over 100 coaching hours under my belt and started to feel moderately confident, although I still had anxiety before each call. I just kept pushing through the anxiety and doing the best I could. Sure, sometimes I would be on the call and I got stumped or didn't know what you say. But clients are quite forgiving and hardly even notice. Remember that coaching is NOT about giving people advice. Coaching is about asking the right questions that make people think. If you're coaching properly, you should be able to coach a person through a challenge that you have zero experience with. Realizing this helps a lot to build up your confidence. Coaching is a form of facilitation, not advice-giving. You don't tell the person how to solve their problem. You help them to find their own solutions. Just like with starting any business, you gotta fake it till you make it a bit. Realize that most people you are coaching have NEVER heard about life coaching before and they have zero expectations. They are often pleased just to vent their frustrations with you. You don't need to do very much. You just listen real close, and then asking a question or two that makes the person really wonder about their thought-process, or their goals, or their actions.

Diet is the most important factor. If you can't afford a healthy diet, that means you gotta put all your energy into raising your income until you can. Only then will you really be able to address the energy issue. Until then, you'll have to tough it out and do some crunching while you focus on improving your career. If you have abnormally low energy, get blood tests to check your thyroid hormones. That is one of the #1 causes of chronic low energy. Also cut out all wheat and dairy products. Rice and potatoes are not really as bad as wheat and dairy. Buddhist monks live just fine on small portions of rice so it's doable. Wouldn't recommend it for too long though.

Yeah... that's a lot of stuff to cover! I'll have to think about how that might be talked about in a single video. To develop all those skills requires years of study and practice. Thanks for the suggestion.

Cause if God didn't talk, there's be no Bible. The mind is obsessed with language and doesn't realize that language is the only thing separating you from "God". A REAL Bible would be a book filled with 1,000 empty white pages. Can you imagine buying a book like that? I've actually thought about publishing one. That is a more direct pointer to God than the actual Bible.

I recommend both meditation and self-inquiry. I do both. Lately I've been doing 1 to 3 hours per day. My meditation techniques right now include: Do nothing Labeling (formal mindfulness practice) Strong determination sitting I use the Do Nothing technique the most. Although I want to start doing more Labeling because it's so powerful. Try experimenting around with all of them. Try doing 1 month straight of Do Nothing, then 1 month straight of Labeling, then 1 month straight of Strong Determination Sitting. Then compare your results. You'll make huge gains no matter what and you'll discover your favorites.

I haven't seen that to be a problem is practice. I've seen many women meditate like champs. There ultimate reason it's not a problem is because the True Self -- the thing you actually are, not that body/mind -- has no gender! You are not really a man or a woman. You are an infinite field of empty awareness. And this field does not have a gender. It's equally accessible to men and women because that's what men and women ARE at their root. How the enlightenment gets expressed will be colored by gender, but that's not a problem either. Whatever gender you genuinely are, you will express it without having to try. I've met plenty of enlightened women.

I'm excited to see what you guys create. This is your sandbox.

Post-rational starts to dawn when you start having hits of direct consciousness of your true nature. This starts to happen after a few years of consistent meditation practice or lots of self-inquiry. Your mind has to actually experience something outside its own conceptual cage. Then you go, "Ahhhh!!! Now I understand what all those Buddhists are talking about!" Until then, it's all just theory and more rationality. Psychedelics are another gateway to glimpse the post-rational world, Although they are much more limited than doing it through meditation or self-inquiry.

If you're THAT behind the curve and you suck with women, then I would recommend pick up or some other form of dating material. Just do it responsibly and understand the limitations. There is no way to get better at dating without actually dating people. And it helps to learn the basics of how women think and what they are attracted to in a guy, because it's very counter-intuitive at first. If you've never been around women, then you will have a lot of wrong ideas about what they want. My rant video against pickup was mostly aimed at HARDCORE players and pickup fanatics, not newbies who just want a girlfriend. Like I said in the video, I personally got A LOT out of pickup and I did it fairly responsibly.