Leo Gura

@JevinR Why waste time? Lack of wisdom. Those who have wisdom go straight for the jugular. Everyone else piddles around in concept-land.

@Jay S You are BOTH a non-localized awareness and a localized center of perception. Awareness and perception are distinct things. You are BOTH a human being and NOT a human being. This shit is paradoxical. You're not going to resolve the foundation of existence with the rational mind. You've run up against the hard limits of language and thought. The distinction between existence and non-existence is itself illusory. To truly answer your question requires an enlightenment experience into the nature of your being and existence itself.

Be careful about imposing your own biases on who qualifies as being enlightened or not.

I don't think you guys give him enough credit. Does he have neurotic tendencies? Sure. Is he fully enlightened? Probably not. But if you listen to him closely he's clearly speaking from experience and has had some direct experiences of non-duality. Everything I heard him say is accurate. It may just come off as New-Agey at times, but that's actually because he's not dumbing it down. I was pleasantly shocked by his level of accuracy and ability to describe spirituality in a non-dogmatic way. All spiritual truths sound New-Agey when spoken of quickly, the way he does in those short public interview sound bites. If I had to describe enlightenment in a 3-minute CNN interview, I would sound like a New-Age kook. Considering that he was a heroin junkie sex addict, he's doing pretty good. I'm happy to see him popularizing yoga meditation.

You gotta keep in mind that any guru's words are just words. They are never meant to be taken for reality. If you keep that in mind, you won't have this kind of reaction. The map is not the territory. Especially in spiritual pursuits.

If enlightenment does anything, it makes you MUCH MORE attuned to emotions. It's a common misconception that enlightenment makes you emotionless. Just the opposite. You become so sensitive to emotions that they flow through you without resistance. The capacity for creativity also skyrockets. The thing you should really be asking yourself is: How is staying unenlightened affecting my songwriting ability?

@stephanie The problem is that you're stuck looking at this from the level of beliefs, which is a pretty limit and fallacious level. Ask yourself why your mind is unwilling to be open to radical possibilities about reality? Do you really feel that mainstream society has the nature of reality itself figured out?

I met a guy who was employed as a merchant sailor in the Northwest, Seattle area. Requires zero experience to start. Their union trains you. Pays very well for a manual labor job, good promotion opportunities, you get to travel the world, and you get 90 days off the ship several times per year. A great gig for those who are solitary. It's also nice in that is gives you an escape from the numerous distractions and enticements of modern American society. Make the ship your monastery as you save up dough. $50,000 - $70,000 per year salary is possible within just a few years of work. Most sailors blow it on booze and hookers in Thailand, but you can be smarter than that (I hope )

You're not gonna get enlightened through psychedelics. That desire itself is neurotic and escapist and immature.

Tell him that this guy gets laid: Check of some of his talks, they will give you hope:

Of course duration helps a lot. Most people aren't willing to invest 3hrs a day though, so I rarely speak of it. 20 minutes is hard enough to get out of people. I myself am doing at least 2 hrs daily nowadays with the intention to ramp it up even more. I find 4 hrs per day is the minimum I need to get a palpable feeling of growth towards enlightenment.

You should be good to go. All your really need is an open mind and get yourself off of any substance addictions like coffee, tobacco, soda, etc. Disconnect your mobile phone and laptop so you don't use them during the 10 days.

Select 1 lifestyle change that would make the biggest impact on your life or mood, and plan out a habit to enact it. Focus on that habit every day until it becomes like on auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat. You're so young, you don't need to rush. Focus on baby steps done consistently. Trust that the results will be exponential over a time frame of months and years.

It's definitely a POTENTIAL trap. But not one you necessarily need to fall into.

Why is future development bleak??? That's the issue right there. If you believe the future is bleak, you've screwed yourself into a corner.

Yes, definitely. The art of being a great teacher is being able to meet the student where he's at. I find that many of the most spiritually advanced sages are NOT able to do this. Because they cannot identify with what it's like to be stuck in low-consciousness, because they are like virtuosos. Or they have been enlightened so long they forget what it's like to be "normal". Which is why most average people cannot get any practical value out of sages. Their advice just goes in one ear and out the others. The sage appears untouchable. The sage appears to be an idealistic dreamer who's out of touch with "reality". A lot of my advice is frankly dumbed-down so that people find it relatable. If I just flat out stated things as they appear to me in my mind, most people would be like, "WTF are you smoking?" And this problem only gets worse as one develops. It doesn't get easier because the gap between you and your average student grows wider every year.

I've addressed this question in various videos: 1) http://www.actualized.org/articles/the-secret-curse-of-being-human 2) http://www.actualized.org/articles/the-happiness-spectrum And all the meditation/enlightenment-related videos are pointing the way to satisfaction with life.

Some good suggestions above. I would suggest that as a baseline, you sit down and ask yourself, "Are those statements actually TRUE?" Is it literally true that you are not good enough? Is it literally true that you can't do anything right? How can you be sure? What do those beliefs even mean in practice? What is reality and what is mental abstraction? What you'll discover if you just sit down and rationally examine those beliefs, is that they are gross over-generalizations and technically false. The reality is much less grandiose: there are some aspects of your life that you want to improve and have struggled with up to this point. Notice how much better and more realistic that sounds. That won't be enough to completely unwire your beliefs, because clearly your mind has supplied you with lots of evidence to back up them up. But at the very least you've stopped letting your mind get away with ridiculously sweeping statements unchallenged.

I didn't add 48 Laws Of Power to my book list for a good reason. It's NOT an emotionally mature attitude towards life, disregarding the power of higher consciousness values. Robert Greene is a good writer and thinker, but I wouldn't use that book as a manual for self-actualization. If anything, we have an over-abundance of that type of thinking in modern stage Orange Western society. Seek a higher standard.

He's a legit yogi. Great sense of humor.

It takes discipline to rewire your motivation from negative to positive. Society has rotted our brains and made us into lazy twats by default. When life is so easy, every bit of self-discipline becomes intolerable.

How can anyone decide for you what's right for you? The optimum strategy depends on what your heart calls you to do in this life.

Hawaii's a pretty expensive place to do it. You could make your dollar go much further somewhere less touristy.

@Enizeo I recommend you make your own decision based on your own intimate knowledge of your self, your abilities, and your maturity level. This is not a decision you can outsource to any guru or teacher or coach. You're gonna have to suffer through the agony of the decision-making process. Let's hope you are a wise general, wise beyond your years

Because they are too ignorant to foresee that their existing strategies for happiness will not work. Everything anyone ever does is motivated by the seeking of happiness. Think about it. Hitler started WWII to increase happiness. The only problem is, some strategies for happiness do not work as well as we originally think. In fact, ALL strategies for happiness outside of BEING will never work. There really is only one path to happiness. The problem is, it's too counter-intuitive and unorthodox for people to swallow. So their choices of path ultimately are limited to the lesser of the paths of suffering. And thus we see why so few people are truly happy.