Leo Gura

Quite neurotic. Try instead loving yourself like a 5-year-old child next time. Watch some Matt Kahn videos By fighting with yourself during meditation, you strengthen the illusion of the self. There is no one to fight with. All your struggles are illusion! There is no one is control!

I read Jed McKenna's first book and immediately recognized what he was talking about because it fit with my own musing from years of epistemology study. Lots of gains. It would take a long time to describe them all. Here's brief list: More peace of mind Purging of old neurotic emotions One incredible enlightenment experience Much greater self-awareness More focus More mindfulness An entire direction for my life Haven't listened to him too much. He seems great. A grunt who can manage everything I manage would cost $200,000/yr. I moved here because of the insane nightlife. But I haven't gone out to the clubs in like 2 years now. No other ideas. There were hundreds of names. I can't even remember any more. The problem is always finding the name available as a domain. All the good domains are taken. I got lucky in that the owner of Actualized.org let it expire the same month I came up with the name, and so I snatched it up!

If you can afford it, and you want some of the deepest consciousness training in the world, that fall retreat will blow your mind. BTW, you don't have to do the full 4 week retreat, you could just do 1 or 2 weeks. Actually, a 28 day retreat for $4000 is not a bad deal at all. It includes food too! Not the greatest food, but eh, you can't be too picky about such things. When you're cheap with your personal development, don't be surprised when you fail to get good results. I will be interviewing Peter for a documentary about enlightenment next week. I will interview a handful of masters who have 40+ years experience each!

They matter in the sense that if you can't discipline yourself to ace a government exam, how you gonna ace the much more emotionally challenging aspects of life? How you show up in life tend to be consistent. I find that people who slack off in school tend to have the exact same attitude towards life. And their lives are shit. That said, of course there is no direct causal link. You could technically flunk school and become a rockstar human being, but I wouldn't bet money on that. And none of this is to say there aren't serious problems with our education system. There are! Which is why I recommend taking your education into your own hands. Going WAY beyond the basic curriculum, but also including it. As far as grades themselves, and even entire diplomas, the truth is they virtually don't matter in real adult life. Nobody cares about your grades, diploma, or what school you went to. They care about what results you can generate. And if they DO care, then those are the kind of people and places I would avoid, because it's just a silly status game. Focus on mastering life and business, not on jumping through somebody's hoops like a well-trained poodle.

Eventually mainstream science will come around and recognize enlightenment. Because enlightenment is an empirical fact. It will just take a long time. Science cannot avoid the objective/subjective split forever. Once neuroscience gets deep enough, fundamental dogmas of science will have to seriously be called into question, and there will be a paradigm shift in mainstream science. How long that will take, who can say? All that being said, don't count on science as being a way towards enlightenment. All science will be able to do is to explain via better models how consciousness, brains, and matter/energy interact and interpenetrate. Then again, maybe some day science will be able to just surgically remove the ego structures from the brain. But it will still never be able to perfectly model enlightenment because the fact remains that the model is not the territory.

I'm grateful for how good life has been to me. Not eternally grateful though, because it's really easy to forget and take for granted. Gotta remind myself of it consciously.

You're asking me to promote all my competitors?! My sleep schedule can be erratic. Right now I go to sleep around 1am and wake up around 9am. Making faces in front of a camera is pretty easy Previously answered. Thanks for the sentiment, but I don't know if I'll ever be in Germany. It's pretty far from Vegas and I don't really have any reason to go. Not knowing about enlightenment in college. And not meditating since I was a kid.

@aze Do that process for another several thousand hours. It's like you're asking "What's next?" after you traveled 1 mile towards NY from LA.

That's not really necessary. If you want to get enlightened, you can do it without changing your environment at all. In fact, plans to make drastic environmental changes are often just a distraction of the ego. In the end, it will all boil down to you sitting in a quite room facing the agony of not knowing yourself. No guru can save you from that. Muster the self-discipline to sit and look now. You'll have to no matter what. The only question is how many years you'll waste with spiritual frippery before you throw all your gurus under the bus and sit.

That's our lot as humans. This big brain of ours turns out to be a double-edged sword.

You might as well ask why the squirrel has to gather acorns for winter. Wouldn't it be nice if the squirrel was just born and was handed an infinite pile of acorns to feast on? It would be even better if the acorns were liquefied and mixed with sugar and pumped directly into the squirrel's stomach via IV. Then he wouldn't have to exert effort to crack those acorns with his teeth and swallow.

Two of the most enlightened people I've met were both happily married. You don't even understand what a relationship is until a few enlightenments in. Sex != relationship In fact you can be in a relationship and celibate.

@Sofiasspecial If a girl ever has sex with me, the chances that she will ever again experience that quality of sex with another man in her life is minimal. Most girls don't even understand how amazing sex can be when the guy knows what he's doing. I've made girls have deeper orgasms via text messages than their boyfriends or husbands could give them in person. It's not that I'm great. It's that most guys suck. And most girls suck too, and are defensive about it.

If you measure "advantage" only by your lay count, then definitely your lay count will drop by being less manipulative and less egotistical. But that's a pretty limited metric. There are much more important things to focus on in life than lay count. What a hardcore player gains in lay count a decent human being can gain elsewhere several times over.

That's a very tough situation. Realistically it will take her years of serious personal development work and therapy to just to start turning that kind of thing around. And the worst part about it is that she has to initiate it herself. You can't force her or even nudge her much. Techniques are not going to help her much until she decides to take her personal development seriously. The best you can do is love her more, compliment her more, verbalize your appreciation more, and encourage her without pushing her. Realistically she has to hit rockbottom before she decides to wake up. Until then, most personal development and therapy efforts will be ineffective. I had a similar type of girlfriend once. And it was pretty hopeless. You can't help someone who isn't serious about self-mastery. Eventually we broke up. What I learned is that I can't be around people who aren't into self-mastery for long. But that's just me.

@joegarland Nope, that's all I know about it.

Yap, yap, yap... As your monkey mind yaps away, enlightenment remains never to be found. I suggest you cut the crap and sit down and focus on the questions: "What am I?" "Who is aware?" "What is the evidence that I am a body or a mind?" All the myths, stories, personal problems, fears, doubts, etc -- just set those aside. They are largely irrelevant. What are you?! << That is the primary thing you should be concerned with if you're after enlightenment. And notice how you distract yourself from this with all sorts of stories and information-gathering expeditions. That's not an accident. The whole challenge in this journey is cutting through all the clever distractions your ego concocts, and going straight to the root.

You don't have to look too far back into your past when it comes to lying. You've already lied 20 times today and you'll lie 20 times tomorrow. Focus on fixing the source of that.

Make sure you don't get sucked back into the day-to-day grind. Use this time to change course in your life, or you will regret it latter. The life purpose course will serve you well. It was designed such for these kinds of situations. And I quit mechanical engineering myself in college. It's terribly dry. Muster the courage to follow your passion.

Well... the first thing to question is your assumption that you should have done anything differently. This is counter-intuitive, but the fact is you should have done exactly as you did, because that's exactly what happened. Going back and apply hindsight can be useful, but it's not strictly speaking true. Whatever happened, happened for a reason and couldn't have happened otherwise given your level of life experience. So first, you gotta accept what happened without telling yourself, "It should have been different." Then you can analyze the situation for possible lessons for the FUTURE. After acceptance, this can done objectively and impassionately. Personally, my rule for stock tips is simple: no one has good stock tips. The stock market has been proven to be unpredictable, and at best what you can get out of it long-term is a 10% return. If you expect anything more than a 10% annual return, you're kidding yourself and using stocks as a form of gambling. Now you learned this lesson the hard way. Sometimes that's how the deepest lessons are learned. Another general rule I have in life is that no one will give me free money. If anyone even mentions free money to me, I immediately dismiss him. It's a waste of my time to even hear him out. No one is out there working to make you rich. They are working to make themselves rich. Think about it from the stockbroker's perspective: Why the hell would he be interested in making you rich? He's interested in making himself rich. You're a stranger he's cold-calling. He has no emotional attachment to you whatsoever. You're completely disposable to him. Another general rule I follow: Don't listen to sales pitches. Cut the person off and hang up the phone immediately as soon as you know you're talking to a salesman. I don't take anything a salesman tells me seriously at all. It's all tainted by self-agenda.

@Brian Greendahl Wow! Awesome!

Consider that the Ah-ha moments aren't being made by me, but by your mind. So direct your hope at your subconscious mind

Reminds me of the Island of Doctor Moreau The challenges of reforming society in the workable way are extremely complex and nuanced. I very rarely see people -- even very intelligent and enlightened people -- who have enough understanding of systems-thinking to know how to change society in a practical way. If you're designing a stand-alone Utopia, that's not going to cut it. No one man can engineer something as complex as a society from the top down. You have to be much more clever and pragmatic about it. You have to understand how to work with egos on a mass-scale. Understanding the shit out of spiral dynamics is a good place to start. Without that psychological foundation, you will create a total disaster, like most people before you.

There's what's called a lower death drive and an upper death drive. The lower death drive is when the ego hates itself so much it wants to put itself out of its suffering through suicide. (Not so good) The upper death drive is when the ego is wise enough to realize that it's an illusion, and wants to end it's suffering through surrender to truth. (Very good).

That's certainly an option. An option that I'm currently executing.