Leo Gura

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.

@ZenDog At your age, I think it's a great move. If you really took 1 year off in solitude to focus on discovering yourself, that would save you years of misery and hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses over your lifetime. It would be a very wise strategic decision. The difficulty for you would be to actually carry it out and not piss that year away on distractions. Can you actually pull off such wisdom? That is the key question. 99% of people cannot.

You are! You are simultaneously everything phenomenal and not it either. You are self-aware! Awareness is aware of itself and also of the body and of the mind. The problem is that you're mis-identified with the mind, which occurs as a temporary flux within awareness. When the mind is gone, what then? You need to draw a sharp distinction between awareness and thoughts/mind. Right now you think you're the mind, but in fact the mind is only a tiny part of the larger you. The larger you is empty awareness that transcends even existence and non-existence. It's such an odd fact that it's impossible for the mind to grasp it. Because the mind cannot truly grasp facts, it only grasps images of facts. What needs to happen here is for you to let go of all the images, so that the facts can dawn on you. This is a totally foreign thing for you. You've never had a direct experience of the facts in your entire life yet. If and when you do, it will be like waking up from a dream. So be careful about trying to judge or analyze the outcome of Truth from inside the dream state.

You can make it work either way. The problem is that the ego doesn't want to make it work either way. The road to full enlightenment is not gonna be easy no matter how you slice and dice it. I personally think living in the woods for a few years is a great idea, especially if you have few obligations and are able. But that's just me. Living your whole life in the woods is not necessary. It's only helpful for a short while to unaddict yourself from society and to get the focus to have those first few critical enlightenment experiences.

You haven't seen true passion until you've seen a full enlightened person in action. Your particular passions may of course change as the ego mind crumbles. But fear not, new deeper passions will take their place. It's like you're upgrading to a Mercedes from an old Ford Pinto and worrying about whether you'll still have your favorite cup holder. The Mercedes has 10 cup holders!

@Samuel That is a great question. Very difficult for the ego to navigate it. It's the ultimate ego defense mechanism. A major part of the enlightenment journey is resolving this for yourself. You haven't truly grasped what enlightenment is about until you see the relative unimportance of all those lower-hierarchy pursuits. It's a real challenge. And it's the #1 reason almost nobody is enlightened. It might take you years of "burning through karma" before those lower egoic needs lose their grip for you.

Would you ask that of your child before deciding to send him to elementary school? Maybe he's just not capable of mastering arithmetic? Maybe we shouldn't get his hopes up?

@Socrates Hahaha I like the contrast of that to this depiction of stage Orange mentality

The key is not desire for money. The key is passion for the work. Money follows passion. You've got it backwards. The fact that you don't want material things is super-powerful. Now go use your passion to do non-material things and stop wasting your time in a dead-end material job. You're actually way ahead of the curve if you just make this one adjustment.

I got fired from my first job within 8 hours. Turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. But it sure felt miserable those first few weeks after the firing, before I found a much better job. Use the misery as fuel for doing even better in your career.

How cushy!

Hobbies serve an important function of their own. They don't necessarily all need to be turned into careers. Often turning a simple hobby into a career will destroy your love for it. Because sometimes you just want to engage in an activity casually. For example, if you enjoy fishing, it doesn't necessarily mean you should become a professional fisherman. Selecting a career is a lot more involved than simply converting a hobby. Although you could draw inspiration from your hobbies, and some people really do need to take their hobby and "go pro" with it. To sort all this out, it really helps to understand yourself on a much deeper level. Which is what the life purpose course help you do. Then it becomes very clear which direction to go and which hobbies should be kept recreational vs made professional.

You're not gonna be able to sustain more than 40 hours per week for long. Programmers burn out and destroy their health all the time. You should research why we have a 40 hour work-week. Where did it come from historically? Do you know that Henry Ford and other industrialists of the early 20th century actually commissioned studies to find out the optimal amount of the time their factory workers should be working to produce the highest output and thus earn them the most money? And you know what number they came back with? 40

If you can't find at least one thing in life to be really passionate about, something's deeply wrong. You should be asking, "How can I par down 100 different passions to just 1, when everything in life is so exciting and awesome? How can anyone only have one life purpose?!!!!"

Both. I find myself needing more and more solitude. It's fine if you have a good reason for it. It's a problem if you're using it as an excuse to run away from judgments you make and the like. If people annoy or emotionally upset you, that's grist for the self-actualization mill. But I find myself spending lots of time in solitude simply because I need time to contemplate and meditate and I get little value out of regular social interactions. This is fine. You should have no problem spending 100s of hours in solitude. If anything, people are under-doing solitude rather than overdoing it. Just make sure you're not using that solitude time to steep in your own egoic malaise, but actually doing inner work. If you're on a path to become just another depressive loner, you're doing it wrong. That's not what enlightenment work is about at all. Being a hermit is a great thing when done for the right reasons. It's a terrible thing when done for egoic reasons or shadow reasons.

You shouldn't even be eating stimulating or exciting foods if you really want to optimize your meditation. The aim of meditation is to silence the mind to get at reality directly. How you gonna do that while filling your body with poisons and stimulants that have the same effect on your mind as sticking a chili pepper up your butthole? I've radically changed my diet for the sake of optimizing my meditation practice. It's too important not to.

It takes lot of time. I've been meditating for over an hour every day for the last 1000 days and it's still hard to maintain mindfulness over thoughts. Thoughts are very very very very tricky. You're so identified with thoughts that they literally feel like "YOU", so you have no distance from them, so you cannot be aware of them too well. Keep practicing. A helpful exercise is to specifically focus on determining what thoughts actually are. Try meditating while holding the question: "What is a thought?" Don't think the answer. Use awareness only.

Enlightenment work is only for the purpose of having a direct experience of your true nature. There's more beyond that in the sense that aspects of the old ego mind will still probably remain after you discover who/what you are. So that's where shadow work comes into play, and in general, self-actualization continues after enlightenment. What happens then is that you spend the rest of your life aligning your mind to embody the realization of no-self. The bulk of the spiritual work comes AFTER enlightenment, not before. People commonly get this wrong because they have a cartoon image of what enlightenment is. And they want to use it as magic pill to cure all of life's problems. Which is not how it works. All that said, it's still really really helpful get enlightened. Because trying to purify the ego via the ego is like pulling teeth. Seeing through the ego speeds up the shadow work a lot. Huge chunks of the ego structure will simply fall away after enlightenment, making your job a lot easier.

You gotta strike a delicate balance. Most times, let people be how they are and focus on growing yourself. But sometimes you need to give people a poke too. And if that ruffles some feathers, oh well. Part of your growth should include not being so sensitive about how other people react when you talk about personal development topics with them. Most people will react defensively or negatively. And that's their issue to deal with, so long as you don't provoke them in an egotistical sort of way, or as a distraction from doing your own inner work. Changing people who aren't ready to change is a tough business.

I agree with Trump. (That sounds so wrong.) But I do have a few other vids explaining other techniques. Here's a powerful one to play around with: http://www.actualized.org/articles/mindfulness-meditation

http://screencast.com/t/kjTsJl4sGsVm

@cle103 You're doing good. Keep at it. The first thing you should notice when doing self-inquiry is that you ALREADY do believe you know who you are. So don't kid yourself about that. Start by first getting clear about what your existing beliefs are, even if you suspect they are wrong. It's important to get clear that one is wrong and why one is wrong. A good way to get clear about this is with the following thought exercise: if I point a gun to your head and you sense I'm about to pull the trigger. What is it that you believe is going to die? Answer truthfully. Whatever is true for you is whatever you hold as your deepest identity. Then clarify that identity. What exact is going die? The body? The brain? The mind? The entity called "cle103"? The voice inside your skull? What? Spend several weeks at least getting clear about all this stuff. Then start asking yourself, "Why do I believe I am _________?" And fill in the blank with whatever you most believe you are. If you're the body, why do you believe you are a body and not a coffee table? And who exactly is perceiving the body? Is the body perceiving itself? Then who is perceiving the coffee table? Is the coffee table perceiving itself? And so forth. Spend some time investigating all this intellectually in order to generate some doubt in your mind about who you might be. Then you can sit and meditate and focus on "Who am I?" more productively. You're not seeking an intellectual answer. You're seeking a direct conscious awareness of your "True Self". All intellectual answers are not it.

Cold turkey is good. Or gradually reduce dose if you can't handle cold turkey.

Shoot for 40-50 hours per week. And take a 10 minutes break every 90 minutes at least.

Yes, the world is in need of improvement. See my sig for the answer