Leo Gura

@How to be wise Very roughly, happiness should increase as one goes higher up the Spiral, but this won't be the case for every individual. It's a rough average and depends a lot on circumstances. A stage Yellow person could be diagnosed with cancer while a stage Green person might find a great job, etc. Scandinavian countries rank some of the highest on the world happiness index. There are no stage Yellow societies or governments so we don't have a ranking for countries above Green. The prediction is they will rank higher than Green when they do emerge.

@Brittany It's obvious to me that Peterson does not have a direct consciousness of God/Absolute. He speaks of God way too theoretically and indirectly. As if he read about it in a book. He is not a mystic, he is an academic with some Christian leanings.

This one's a real doozy:

@Emerald Getting quality backlinks is hard. That's the whole point. It's a full-time job and it's quite tedious to do. I would focus more on content and other forms of marketing. For example, getting on popular podcasts is good for getting your name out there. Or writing guest blog posts. Or giving public speeches. There is no easy solution to marketing. Marketing is hard, time-consuming, and expensive because it is so valuable. It's also very hard to market something which isn't Purple Cow. Make sure you're bringing something new to the table. Success in business requires extreme creativity. You cannot just copy what other people did. You must innovate. You are being paid to innovate, and if you cannot do that, then your business will not succeed. Your job, as CEO, is to come up with new original strategies. That's why they pay you the big bucks (or at least they will if you succeed). This is why only highly ambitious and extraordinary people can start businesses. Most people only know how to paint by numbers and follow others. Entrepreneurship is about leadership. You gotta find cutting-edge emerging opportunities in the marketplace and creatively exploit them. No one can tell you what these new original strategies are. Because if they knew, they'd have your job. You gotta do lots of research and connect dots.

It was my passion and purpose for many many years. Then when I actually started doing it, I saw that it didn't quite suit me. I had a thirst for something deeper. Game development is fun and very interesting (and I'm still passionate about it to some extent), but I needed something deeper. Which turned into my quest for metaphysical understanding, self-actualization, and enlightenment. Life purpose evolves. It never starts out clear and perfect. You start with your best guess, you pursue it, and then you adjust on the fly. Sometimes large adjustments are needed, like quitting your entire career. Which is what I did. Twice!

@CreamCat That's right, Orange will only care about price, not about gallons burned. Because he has not yet developed eco-consciousness so the health of the environment is beyond his circle of concern. Green's care for the environment goes beyond just saving money. Green actually cares about the environment for its own sake. Green has developed heart, which Orange cannot understand because Orange is too self-centered.

No point in asking us, contemplate it in your journal. You cannot become aware by talking about it.

Building artificial backlinks is not a good idea these days. Google is smart about catching you and penalizing you for it. You can actually get your website blacklisted forever if you build too many artificial backlinks. That era to do that kind of stuff was 10 years ago. Google has gotten a lot smarter. No-follow links don't count at all, and making links on blog comment sections is a no-no these days. Google knows what you're doing. Quality links must come from the body of the page, not the comment section. These days I would assume that almost all social media links are no-follow. Which means they don't count.

You are misunderstanding Green. Don't give Green a bad name. Green can be very healthy. In fact, mostly it is. Only in rare exceptions does it get toxic. These days people in the political sphere love to demonize Green and over-exaggerate Green's excesses. If you use the news or YT political commentary to judge Green, you will get a very distorted picture of Green. 80%+ of Green people are moderate and easy-going.

Green never really stops buying nice things. If anything, Green buys fewer but nicer things. Green people love expensive Apple products and expensive yoga pants, for example. Green just realizes that happiness is found more in relationships than in material objects. Don't over-simplify Green as being against material objects. Healthy Green is not against those things. In fact, Green should realize that life cannot work without material objects. It's just that Green understands that material objects are not what life is about. Green is also conscious of how buying up useless material objects affects the environment in unhealthy ways. So Green will be mindful of what they consume whereas Orange doesn't give a shit as long as it suits them. For example, Orange will drive a Hummer and doesn't care about how much gas he burns. Green will prefer to drive a Tesla. Tesla is a nice, expensive material object. But it is also eco-friendly. Green buys nice material objects, but for different reasons than Orange.

It's one thing to say that, it's a totally nother thing to actually realize that in your life. The real test is when the shit hits of fan. When someone tells you your child was run over by the bus. How conscious will you be of the fact that you create meaning?

Well, it's very simple. All that nihilism really boils down to is that being is meaningless. Which is what nonduality reveals. That's all. But the ego-mind don't want to accept that. To the ego-mind it seems negative or depressing or chaotic. You gotta be very careful though. Meaninglessness does not mean what you think it means! You don't need to dive deep into nihilism per se. You just need to become conscious that ego-mind constructs all meaning for the purpose of its survival. Once you become deeply conscious of this, life will cease to have meaning for you (at least for a while) and it will feel like a deep depressing nihilism as you realize that all your life motivations were predicated upon lies and illusions of the deepest sort. But keep pushing past that, surrender all your illusions, and you will eventually get to pure being, liberation, divinity. This is what they call the dark night of the soul. It's really more accurate to call it: the final death-throes of the ego.

JP is serving a valuable function for young college-aged males. He is giving them a sense of stage Blue discipline and direction which their culture never gave them. Basically, at his best, what JP is proposes is having a sense of Life Purpose. Which is basically what my LP course is all about. The only thing I would stress about that is that it's very important to realize that Life Purpose is a conceptual construction. It is not objectively true in any way. It's something one creates for oneself to live a good life and have a sense of focus. And to develop mastery in some field. And that there is a higher level beyond life purpose, which is awakening. One of the excesses of stage Green relativism is that it can leave people feeling lost, directionless, nihilistic, unwilling to engage in building a passionate life. JP seized on this Green excess and is building a public identity around it. But reacting against excess tends to produce more excess of another kind.

@Recursoinominado Visualize for 10 minutes every day for the next 30 days yourself being hardworking and successful. Visualize it hardcore, like your life depends on it. Put full confidence and feeling into each of those 10 minutes. Forcing all negative thoughts and doubt out of your time for those 10 minutes. That will fix it. But only if you actually do it every day. Don't make the excuse: "But I can't visualize it because I've never seen it." That's nonsense. You have an imagination which can visualize all sorts of things you haven't seen, like a flying rainbow mammoth. Your imagination is how you bootstrap success.

It just requires surrender, and dropping all sorts of old ego expectations and desires. The ego-mind is transitioning from living for survival to living from Being. This is a radical shift and the ego-mind has a hard time coping with it. The freedom that comes from meaninglessness is very radical, but also beautiful. It is an acquired taste after decades of living in a conceptual fantasy land under all the artificial meanings that society programmed you with. Just give it time. The depression will pass and give way to emptiness, joy, freedom, and being-love. To truly awaken you are going to have to change your entire attitude towards life. Basically, life as you knew it will end, and a new life will begin. You have to have courage to surrender your old life. If you cling to it, that will produce suffering and depression. With awakening, you must go ALL-IN. Half-measures will produce lots of suffering. To try to awaken but keep your old life intact will produce lots of suffering. Just remember this: depression is ALWAYS temporary. It's something the mind is ACTIVELY doing, and the mind can't keep it up forever. Use this little bit of truth to weather the storm. Keep reminding yourself that this is just temporary. The ego is just acting up like a child.

It does. One vs two is a distinction, a duality. Nonduality is both one and two. All distinctions are embraced at once, creating one unified field containing an infinite number of distinctions. Oneness and many-ness are in fact identical. Notice that a carton of eggs is both one and many at the same time. There is no contradiction because number is a relative projection of your mind. You're the one deciding whether you see the carton as 1 carton or a dozen eggs.

@Cody_Atzori What if the mind is deceiving itself that it is the body, in the same way that a religious fanatic deceives himself? How do you know what you are supposed to be? Where is it written that you are supposed to be a body? Why can't you be omnipresent consciousness, and the body is just another object like all other objects? Does the body really have any special boundary around it? Is it really any different than a coffee table? If the body is really you, how is it possible that you can perceive the coffee table? After all, the coffee table ceases to exist if you close your eyes. So clear the coffee table is a creation of your mind. As is your body. Why are you trusting those bodily sensations as evidence of your identification with the body? After all, you have sensation of the coffee table (you see it), but you do not identify with it. Who says that bodily feeling is more real or determinative of your identity than colors? Why are feeling superior to colors? Who said so? Why are you blindly trusting your feelings? Who said feelings have any meaning whatsoever? Who said the feeling of a body = you? How arbitrary is that?

@Nevon Good work.

You can split hairs over all sorts of nuances of JP's work, but in the end, it's still thoroughly grounded in the classic dualistic Christian paradigm of meaning, morality, order, right vs wrong, good vs evil, etc. Which is, ironically, the opposite of what Christ realized. You are not going to realize Christ through studying myth. You will realize it through hardcore spiritual practice and deconstruction of all belief systems, morality, value, and meaning. The paradox is, you will find Christ at the very bottom end of nihilism. And the distinction JP draws between the individual self and collectivism is a duality which did not exist for Christ. The individual self and the collective self are in fact one and the same.

A Bodhisattva is someone who has awakened. That ain't JP.

Kirya yoga Psychedelics Solo retreats That is the killer combo right there. Getting magically enlightened at the hands of some guru is extremely rare and it's a super disempowering attitude to have. You might as well be hoping to win the lottery. Take your awakening into your own hands. No one will do it for you. If you are feeling stuck, go do a Bufo 5-MeO retreat with Octavio. You'll experience infinity in 5 minutes. It's worth the travel.

I expect better of you guys.

Do your research.

He'd have to do at least a dozen trips, yes. Otherwise what would we be talking about? Just because a person is enlightened does not mean he knows psychedelics. It would be pointless discussing pizza with Sadhguru unless he ate some pizza first. This is really just common sense. People who talk of things which they have zero experience with end up saying stupid things. I know cause I've done it. I am now much more careful about what I choose to speak about so that I don't over-step my experience too much. It's a constant problem. The mind loves to speak of things which it has not experienced as though it has.

@Key Elements That's right, you must explore and discover the truth for yourself. All else is hearsay. Which is why I do BOTH: psychedelics and lots of non-psychedelic methods. I was only arguing against those who oppose psychedelics on dogmatic grounds. This anti-psychedelic dogma is almost always rooted in lack of experience with psychedelics. People do not fully appreciate just how badly our culture stigmatizes psychedelics. They take on this stigma and argue from this stigma unwittingly. Psychedelics have not become mainstream yet, so you will often find people criticizing them simply based on that.