Leo Gura

There are MANY fantastic business courses and products available. Highly worth it if you select the right ones. They can save you years of trial and error. But avoid the get-rich-quick-type products. Focus on learning the basics of business & marketing, not specific exploitative techniques. Stuff that promises you $700/day, etc I would avoid. But quality biz advice is priceless. I highly recommend Eben Pagan's biz products. Brendan Burchard also has some good ones. Dan Kennedy is excellent.

I'll talk more about overcoming cravings and base desires in the future. That'll make a good video topic. A lot of people get stuck here.

@Shab-e Ma_araj Doesn't sound like you're emotionally or consciously capable of maintaining a healthy relationship with ANY girl. It's not the girl that's the issue. It's you. Always you. You are trying to escape into a monastic lifestyle but you haven't yet purified yourself of your base needs like sex, love, approval, stimulation, security, etc. So it probably won't be sustainable. Neither will your relationships be sustainable, because you are relating to people for the wrong, egotistical reasons. Do the inner work necessary to not have so many cravings. Cause right now you're a slave to them. And to understand what relationships are and how to authentically relate to another human being.

What do you mean you can't do it? Tip: If you want useful help, be clear and specific with your issues. State what your block is and what your goals are.

That's your problem right there. Your expectations are totally off-kilter. If you watched some of my earlier meditation videos, I clearly tell you to make a life-long commitment and to not expect any results for 1 year. I said that for a reason. Because you would psych yourself out otherwise with silly expectations. When you undertake a serious life change, you CANNOT do it for the purposes of the result. That almost always leads to failure. You have to do it for a higher purpose -- as a matter of principle. Then you are almost guaranteed to succeed. The only thing stopping you from experiencing the life-altering benefits of meditation is your improper expectations. That is all. That's the only obstacle.

@Baul Sorry, that was a typo. It takes you OUT of empiricism when you think of somethings has empirical or rational. That's rationalism. True empiricism is so empirical it has no name or category or opposite. You can also call it phenomenological. No, most modern everyday knowledge is HIGHLY empirical. Which is why it's useful. Science is effective because it is highly empirical and sticks close to the facts. Well... within the confines of the limited scientific paradigm. When it comes to nonduality, we are talking about ABSOLUTE TRUTH, not scientific everyday knowledge. ABSOLUTE means that you get to realize the very structure of existence. Which is infinite and impossible to grasp in any intellectual way whatsoever. You will NEVER grasp it with mind alone. This is a TOTALLY different endeavor than you've ever encountered. So throw all your ideas and beliefs out the window. You need to kill all notions of understanding or intellectualizing. They are all false (despite being useful for everyday life). Start questioning the foundations of everything you believe, including science, space, time, self, world, others, dreams, and life. All of it is NOT what you think. We are talking about RADICAL stuff here. Things like: there is no time, there is no space, there is no death, there is no big bang, there is no evolution, there is no Earth, you are not a human being, and existence and non-existence is an illusion. This is totally mind-breaking stuff. You cannot think it.

Don't forget to be skeptical of your own skepticism. Leave nothing undoubted.

@Telepresent Exactly right. It would help you to draw a sharper distinction between awareness & thought/belief. Ask yourself this, What exists outside of awareness? Anything? How could it be known? If it is known, awareness is employed. All thoughts only come AFTER awareness. For there to be a thought, there must first be awareness of it. So it is impossible to think your way out of this problem, because you're trying to use thought to reach under awareness when in fact awareness is all there is, and it's the bottom-most thing! A thought is actually just awareness that not aware of itself! THERE IS NOTHING BUT AWARENESS! Everything single fucking thing is awareness! Test this in your direct experience. Attempt to find something -- anything -- which is not awared first. It's not possible. It's not even conceivable. Because anything you conceive will first presume awareness that renders it knowable. And then you just gotta realize that there is nothing behind awareness. There is no YOU or I looking at awareness or being aware. Awareness is the end of the road. There is nothing outside of it. (Well, except for The Void.) If you're stuck intellectualizing these things, try a heavy dose of do-nothing meditation or mindfulness meditation with labeling. It really helps cure intellectualizing. It's very hard to create awareness with thinking. Much easier to do it through long do-nothing sits. That's probably what you're missing.

That's exactly right. For those who are serious, it can happen much sooner. But for most people, it will take a LONG time. Who the hell is going to concentrate for 60 minutes a daily for a year? 0.0000001% of people. There are various kinds of Samadhi possible. You can even have a Samadhi without any object. A Samadhi of awareness or nothingness.

@Bruno The best way for you to grasp what ego is, is to say, "Hey Bruno!" So who heard that? Who registered that? That's ego. It's simply YOU. This thing you think is reading this sentence right now. And it doesn't exist. There is no thing reading this sentence right now.

The dirty secret is that you can't help but be aware 100% of the time. Notice that you are always aware! It's impossible not to be aware unless you're dead. Past and future cannot exist without awareness. Nothing can exist without awareness. So you are already 100% aware all the time. You just need to sit down and be quiet and you'll notice it. That's why do-nothing works. And why distractions and addictions make up your lifestyle. If you remove every single distraction and addiction in your life, you are pretty much guaranteed to become enlightened automatically. But you're not gonna do that, are you?

Yes, you can think of it that way, although that's takes you out of empiricism and right back into rationality. It's so empirical you can't even call it empirical. It's so empirical it goes full-circle, beyond all the 5 senses and the mind to pure Truth. And this fact cannot be understood by the rational mind. The rational mind hates it! It's like poison to philosophy.

I try to update the book list very quarter with the best stuff I come across.

@DizIzMikey Notice that belief is not required for shitting and eating. Every important life function happens without beliefs. The body would not be so stupid as to entrust life-support functions to arbitrary egotism.

Most of Maslow's subjects (if not all of them) were not enlightened. They were just more aware than the average person. More awareness means you're closer to what an enlightened sage or an ideally self-actualized person would generally look like. But enlightenment is such a rare thing, that self-actualization is much more realistic as a goal for most folk.

Truth is definitely not a belief. It's not even something you can access with your 5 senses or the mind. You literally have no way of accessing it. But there is one possibility: remove the "you".

Concentrate on any object for 30 minutes straight without wavering your focus even once. And you'll have Samadhi with it, more or less. The trick is, you can't do that, because your mind is too distracted. So it takes 5 years of daily practice, or something like that.

You guys are totally underestimating enlightenment! You should be more interested in becoming of aware of the fact that "right side of the brain" is a thought inside nothingness. When you say "brain", you say it as thought it really exists. Might want to question that assumption. Where was the brain before you were born? Did it exist? No? Then what possible significance could it have to you or to truth? All this brain-talk is shallow, shallow, shallow. You need to look 1000 miles under the surface.

Study Spiral Dynamics. Lots and lots of spiral dynamics, until you see all the unawareness inside you as you judge & get emotional about these vast social structures.

Umm... THERE IS NO YOU! Like really! Why the fuck do you assume you exist? It's a totally groundless assumption. Check it and see. "I" is just a sound + an image + a feeling arising in an empty vacuum. There has NEVER EVER been a YOU! You are a total fantasy. There is no you reading this sentence right now. There is just a sentence floating in a vacuum with a bunch of other colors, sounds, and feelings.

Studying a lot of diverse high-quality information, contemplating it, and being in a very relaxed state tends to produce the most insights for me.

A good couch is my favorite cushion.

I will talk more about curing introversion in the future. It's a more important topic than it seems.

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It's all just one giant distraction from doing serious inner growth & living life. If you were conscious, you'd feel so good you wouldn't need it. But since you're not conscious, you use it because that's the best shortcut you can find. And of course because you're not conscious, you're not conscious of the rationalizations your mind concocts, which keep this whole thing in place.