Leo Gura

It was a bit rocky, the social game, because I'm not politically correct. I offended some people. But it was a small company so mostly it wasn't a problem. Game developers are a pretty laid-back folk. So they tolerated my rougery pretty well. I was desperate for a way out of the wage slavery I had unwitting submitted myself to. I didn't know any other way. Until I found online business. That's discussed in the life purpose course. I wouldn't even know how to start counting the hours. TV and internet were pretty hard. Bad food too. Meditation was very challenging to start. And self-inquiry for enlightenment. Yes, but in the distant future. It needs a total revamp and lots of content. I college is spent 2 years studying Aerospace engineering (which was basically just a bunch of math and science). Then I transferred to philosophy and graduated with that. I learned programming (or rather scripting) on my own, outside of college because I was developing websites and games as a hobby. Select one habit to install and spend a few months installing it. Then do it again with a new habit. And so on. The life purpose course could be game-changer for you. Consider taking it and working it hard. I feel it's very foundational. It gives you a roadmap for the rest of your life. I have more important things to do with my time. I just can't justify wasting 4 hours per night in a noisy nightclub, as fun as it is sometimes. It's also emotionally taxing on me because I'm a heavy introvert and I don't like socializing. I can do it, but it feels unnatural and goes against my values.

@LiberalPipe Let you higher intuition guide you. If you're reasonably emotionally stable and you take them in a good setting, then there's really nothing to fear. You just have to be developed enough to be okay with letting go the ego and surrendering to the experience. Many undeveloped people take psychedelics and the majority still have awesome experiences, so don't be paranoid about it. The only thing to fear is fear itself. That's what causes bad trips. If you follow the guidelines in my next video, you should have a great trip. But of course, there are no guarantees.

Obviously! That is told to you by every enlightened teacher (and myself) from day 1. The problem is you don't understand it until like 10 years later. The study is necessary UP TO A POINT. Then you have to let it go. Like scaffolding around a skyscraper. Don't get attached to the scaffolding. But denouncing the scaffolding is equally a newb mistake. Study is necessary and has its place. Otherwise you would be totally lost. A delicate balance must be struck, and newbs suck at that. They always go too far to one side or the other. Newbs want a formula for enlightenment, a black/white answer, and no such thing exists.

True, but the opposite is even more true: that they will be used by the ego as a convenient escape & distraction.

Well what do you think will happen when you're dead? You think love, gratitude, humor will exist? They will be gone forever. Just like when you go sleep each night, the entire world disappears. And it's not depressing at all. It's peaceful. Absolute peace. It's only depressing when seeing through the filter of ego. The problem is you've been avoiding contemplating death. You're distracting yourself. You're not facing it. And the truth is that it's coming. It will happen before you know it. So you might as well face up to it. But also, whatever genuine gratitude or love is currently in you, is not of the ego. It is of the Nothingness that you really are. Ego only limits it. Notice how you killed off the love and gratitude you were feeling at the breakfast table by activating ego. The ego got lost in thought stories and so the love was replaced with fear, confusion, and depression. When ego is seen-through, gratitude and love are the default states until the body dies. The real question is: How can unenlightened people laugh, love and be grateful? And the answer is: They can't! Not really. Because they have to spend every waking minute of their life worrying about protecting the ego from death.

Do not look for mainstream scientific backing for such methodologies. Science is lagging 100 years behind. It will take a while for them to catch up. Wikipedia is NOT a reliable resource for verifying the validity of self-help techniques. You're taking the scientific method totally for granted here. Scientific studies are expensive to do. They are rarely done unless there is commercial viability behind it or it's part of the mainstream academic agenda. A lack of studies does NOT mean you can conclude that the un-studied topic is bunk.

It works. I just wouldn't limit myself to NLP only. And learning it can be a bit technical. I've never resonated that much with NLP, which is why I don't talk about it much. But I think there's value there. You just gotta mine for it.

The illusion of ego is more than just thoughts. If it were only thoughts, it would be easy to stop. The ego is a mixture of verbal thoughts + visual thoughts + body sensations + emotions + deeply held and unconscious existential assumptions. Imagine all that stuff super-glued together, then covered in rubber cement, then coated with 10 layers of paint and 10 layers of glossy varnish and 5 kinds of glitter, then feathers, inside a gift box, inside plastic wrap, inside a shopping bag. That is a more realistic picture of ego. Your job is to sort that whole mess out into its separate components.

@MrPeak If awakening is what you want, you should be doing self-inquiry & questioning more than meditation. Meditation is not that effective for awakening. You have to systematically break down your conceptual framework of who and what you think you are. I have many videos explaining how to do that. See my video especially about the Neti Neti method.

Shorten one's life? Lol. Zen masters who meditate for hours every day for 40 to 60 years often live to very old ages. Stress is what shorts your life, not sitting. You got much bigger things to worry about. Sure, you could do it standing up. You can even do it while walking or talking.

Already answered. When I was considering quitting my game design career in Boston. Hated that city, hated that situation. Almost became a criminal to break free. Almost.

God is Nothing. You gotta learn how to read between the lines of religious teachings and sayings. It's all metaphor for reality. Don't get lost in the details and images. A wise person can read the Quran and use it to get enlightened. A fool will read the Quran and entrench himself only deeper in foolishness.

@Salaam You can vibe all you want. Nothing wrong with that. Just realize it's a phenomena which is distracting you from grasping truth. Don't get seduced by pretty emotions.

@SaynotoKlaus You misunderstand the life purpose course if you think that way. It's totally open. You can & should use the course to develop whatever purpose and values you want. If you want to use it to become a professional baby killer, you can!

Imagine for a minute the depth of what you're really asking. Imagine you have no ideology what so ever. That means you have no beliefs what so ever. Here are just a few things this means: The past doesn't exist and never happened The future doesn't exist and will never happen You have zero justification for anything you do You cannot speak and make any definitive claims or rationalizations Nothing has meaning whatsoever You are not a human being or even on object Others do not exist You have no personal history or life story You were never born You cannot be motivated towards or away from anything You do not know who or what you are You have no idea what life is and what you're doing here You have no idea what will happen next Science, history, metaphysics, medicine, technology do not exist You have no laws, no morality, no governments The universe does not exist Your entire notion of life & self is completely crippled to the point where you are unable to physically function. So now you can start to appreciate why people kill over ideology. On the plus side, you'd have truth Who's down for truth? No? No takers?

@Heart of Space There is a much deeper problem with the endeavor of logical reasoning and proof. The notion of "validity" is a construct of the mind. It has no absolute nature. It's relative to an ego. Moreover, it can ONLY occur within the context of language, which is all relative and arbitrary. The mind had to construct the possibility of language before there could be the concept of "validity" or "reason". There is no such thing as validity, reason, proof, or justification. All of that is taken-for-granted arbitrary assumptions. Try to eliminate the notion of language whilst at the same time holding something as valid or invalid. It won't be possible. Those are all projections of mind.

Pneumatic Tubes? Lol What do Pneumatic Tubes have to do with personal development?

Yes! Brain = mind. No brain, no ego, no mind. But enlightenment is outside all of that! Your distinction between neurobiological and phenomenological is bogus. There is no such thing. There is only one substance: awareness. Everything else is illusions within awareness. The problem is that enlightenment might not be an idea or anything you can experiment on. It sits outside of any experiment you could possibly run or any idea you could possibly have. You can screw around with ideas and experiments for a million years, and you still will never come one step closer to enlightenment. When you say "enlightenment", what you're actually talking about is all possible existence & non-existence of reality and non-reality. P.S. Hopefully I won't have to leave

Read the Quran. And read or listen to the historical story of Muhammad. It's good stuff to the enlightened mind. The core of Islam is enlightenment. You are the infinite Allah.

You cannot recognize awareness with thought. But only with awareness. There is NOTHING more primary than awareness! You cannot reduce it to anything else. It is the rock bottom. So don't try to redefine awareness in terms of something else. Instead, redefine everything else you know in terms of awareness. Because there exists nothing else but it. Everything else you think exists is an illusion.

My pleasure. Stay with it and enjoy the work. There is nothing more meaningful you could be doing. If you've been asking the question: Who am I? You might now want to move onto the question: What am I? If you now know Who you are, what is that who? Look deeply into the matter. Nothing you see, hear, feel, or think is What you are. Become the Nothingness & infinity that you are.

Know your purpose, know your values. Trust them and stay authentic to yourself every day. That's pretty much the recipe for an awesome life. The opposite is a recipe for a disastrous life.

A few hairs on the ox's tail Good! But don't fool yourself. That ain't enlightenment yet. It goes WAY fucking deeper than that. Things you can't even imagine. There's still 1000s of hours of contemplation to do!

It seems to be a spontaneous phenomena that may arise from a mystical or religious experience. It occurs for psychedelic users sometimes, so it's not an exclusively Christian thing. There's really nothing important about it. Just a distraction from the really deep insights you should be after.

Cool. No problem as long as you're not selling them to people. Depressed, no. Anxious, a bit sometimes. Yeah, negative emotions are getting their ass kicked every day. It's like becoming Teflon-coated. Nothing sticks for very long. Many of the authors in my book list. Deep video coming about psychedelics soon.