Leo Gura

Two great suggestions above. Changing family is like pulling teeth.

What would you do if you had $100 million dollars and didn't care about money at all any more? Take money out of the decision. Money clouds your vision.

1) I like to share deep insights with people. 2) At this point, very little. My life is mostly centered around my work and purpose. Fun for me is either doing my work, doing nothing, taking a long road trip, being out in nature, hanging out with a girl. As far as cheap low-grade entertainment goes: I'll play a video game once in a while I'll watch some funny political commentary from the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert I'll browse tech news websites like The Verge

People I admire from history include: Marcus Aurelius Various Greek philosophers David Hume Gandhi The Buddha Da Vinci People I admire from modern times: Various yogis and enlightened folks Responsible business leaders like the founders of Google Eben Pagan Barack Obama And hundreds of other people who I can't even recall because there are so many.

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you Yes, it was a lot of effort.

It varies, sometime morning, sometimes late at night. The only rule I have is that I never miss a day. I sit cross-legged on my couch with pillows and cushions. Not full-lotus or even half-lotus. Worst? The oldest ones.

1) Yes, I love to learn about science, history, philosophy, and other stuff. 2) All-out focused on learning, and planning my future career in video game design. 3) Zero experience with girls. I took a vow in early highschool not to distract myself with the opposite sex or with friends. They were a huge waste of time in my mind. 4) Supernatural? No. Aliens probably do, but not like UFOs and Martians. 5) I don't care about them at all. A big distraction. 6) The fact that reality exists at all and that I am alive inside it. 7) Every upset and negative emotion and dissatisfaction with life is a complete fiction. The mind creates problems out of thin air. External situations are truly irrelevant to happiness. 8) No, but my Mom has some photos that I will have to scan at some point.

From my research I think a mostly-vegetarian (as close to raw as possible) diet is most healthy. So that's why I'm moving in that direction. There are ethical and environment concerns as well, but my first concern is my own health. Don't know about food combining.

I don't have public playlists. There are hundreds of songs I like.

There is a whole domain within spirituality which we might call the "powers realm". It's all the occult stuff like astral projection, healing, extra-sensory perception, channeling other entities, etc. I don't have much experience with that domain other than to suspect that it's fun and interesting, but also infested with fantastical thinking and illusions. And that there is a deeper realm. As the Zen tradition or any seriously enlightened person will tell you: ignore all that shit and go straight for the Truth without any detours or power-trips. Then if you still want, you can come back and play wizard. I might be too closedminded about this though. I'd have to do more personal dabbling in wizardry to know for sure.

I like music that's either moody or has strong melody. So mostly: pop, some alternative rock, chillout, dance, club. I don't select music by genre or artist. I cherrypick individual songs that I happen to like and ignore the rest. I don't follow musicians or listen to their entire albums because most of the stuff in the album I will not like.

Yes, that's what I'd hope you'd be doing.

There's nothing irrational about saying that reality is arational. Rational people simply don't like to hear it. Rationality CAN'T cover everything. If it could, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The rational person has to come to a point where he sees the limits and self-defeating nature of rationality. Unfortunately this rarely happens because for the rationalist, rationality is God. The ultimate false assumption at the center of his knowledge graph. Rationality has no contact whatsoever with direct empirical data. It's a purely conceptual conclusion.

Something like that.

I define it as when you realize that you are not the body/mind. A more strict definition that I also like is: permanent non-dual awareness.

Most enlightened people are quite ordinary and you would not know from the outside that they are special in any way. Plus they are humble, so they don't go around shouting, "Look at me! I'm enlightened!!!!!" In today's age there are MANY enlightened people. Thousands of them. Maybe even tens of thousands. They just aren't flashy, rich, or powerful, so they have little influence on mainstream society.

As your awareness rises, lucid dreaming becomes more likely from what I understand. So consider it a byproduct of your heavy consciousness work.

The most fundamental step -- as I happen to talk about in this week's video -- is to commit to a slow, steady life-long study of this field: self-mastery. Then you just make sure to stay calm, patient, and consistent with your studies. And eventually, EVERYTHING will transform. But it will take some struggle at first and it will be slow-going at first. Just stay calm and carry on. You probably should avoid my deeper videos for now (like the enlightenment videos). Stick to the more practical stuff that will improve your current daily existence until you get deeper into it.

People can lucid dream by accident, but you won't get very far with it unless you become committed to mastering it (just like anything else in life). Enlightenment is not at all necessary for lucid dreaming. It's much easier.

Lucid dreaming is a well-proven thing. There are many books written about how to develop it deliberately. You can start lucid dreaming with some simple techniques within 2-4 weeks. And then you can actually use it to do personal development in your sleep! I haven't had time to delve into it much yet. But it looks promising, not to mention fun: design the hot orgy of your dreams and control it like a film director!

@mkieblesz Awareness is prior to and independent of rationality. In fact rationality actively impede awareness because -- like I alluded to in the dream analogy above -- rationality is the content of the dream. Rational people get lost in the content of their thoughts. For example, to say that something is contradictory and therefore false is to be lost in the contents of thought. It assumes that we should take thoughts seriously in the first place. Which of course is the mother of all bad assumptions. I'm not saying rationality is bad per se. It's certainly better than irrationality. But there is something above rationality, which is a-rationality. Reality, as it turns out, is arational. I want to write a whole book on this topic because I've thought about it A LOT.

You're talking about lucid dreaming. I'm not lucid when I dream. That's a skill that can be developed with practice if one desires. Now what's even cooler than lucid dreaming is being conscious in deep sleep! Which highly enlightened folks have been able to accomplish. 24/7 consciousness!

What I mean is, if takes 6 years to research, then it should at least take a viewer 6 hours to decompress it. If someone could learn everything I learned in 6 years in 60 minutes, frankly, I would be pissed off! The topics we're generally learning here take YEARS to fully plumb. I always feel I do them injustice, even with a 60+ minute video.

I try to pack them full of juicy insights. The recent video about the human knowledge graph was like 6 years of intense research packed into 60 minutes, lol. There was a lot more than needed to be said in that one, but it just runs too long. It's hard to balance between depth vs brevity and depth vs practicality. A 60+ minute video is exhausting to shoot and much fewer people will click on it than a 30 minute video which is much easier to shoot. Not only that, but it starts to get so abstract that people don't understand how to act on it, and then it just becomes more beliefs in the knowledge graph. Which is why in the last video I asked people to make a long-term commitment to understanding.

What would you do with your life if you had $100 million dollars and no chance of failure? Do that!