FindingPeace

Yes it's possible. His insights are raising your awareness, changing your perspectives on life and creating a sense of uncertainty about everything you thought you knew and where you thought you were going. But it's fine, as time goes on things will get clearer. Stick with it. In fact, notice the stress and anxiety. They are pointing to areas within you that are awakening and need working on.

Seeing the beauty of nature, always puts a smile on my face, no matter what else is happening in the world or in my life.

I liked that example. And it reinforces what I said earlier. Attachment is a natural process in many species including our own. For good reasons. To try and reject it as 'bad' or 'unnecessary' is to create a resistance to something that is inherently inevitable. Which will only create more pain in the long run. Like many things in human psychology, with personal development the key is to become aware of these mechanisms when they are operating. Not to use black-and-white thinking and to react against them. By becomming more aware of these mechanisms we can respond more healthily to them and be less controlled by them. The dangers come when we are not aware of dynamics like attachment. Attachment can create various problems for us. The greatest issue being that it can create fear and anxiety. Attachment is an automatic process. We don't really control it. It just happens. The problem is, it feels very 'nice'. It's comfortable, reassuring. That's the point of it. It is designed to keep up interested in something that apparently serves us. But as a necessary consequence to this, we now feel fear or anxiety whenever our relationship with the person/object is threatened. And this is where it creates the most issues. It can become a distraction from the original source of the attachment, so that rather than enjoying something or someone we become focussed on the 'neediness' of the attachment itself, trying to avoid the fear of losing it. It can become an obsession. Another issue is that the attachment can persist even when the original object or person is no longer of value to us. Like if a relationship turns dysfunctional or toxic. People are still compelled to maintain it because they feel fear or losing it. The issues here are obvious. In both of these example, if someone is not consciously aware of the mechanisms at play then they can't really make healthy decisions and take appropriate actions. I suppose this is the greatest threat from attachement - it distorts perception a little bit. This is highly noticeable in most relationships. So ultimately, we need to maintain awareness and mindfulness of the process and how and when it is affecting us. And yes, it takes a conscious effort to overcome the fears asscociated with attachment, the discomfort associated with it when the needs necessitate breaking it. But this is when the work needs doing. I think ultimately in response to the title of this thread "How to keep detached from others", you don't really get a choice. If it happens it happens. If it is uncomfortable for you then it takes conscious effort to fight it. Ultimately, don't. Just be aware of it and make healthy choices that are not influenced by it. It isn't the attachment you need to fight, it's the resistence, the fears, the discomfort that you feel about making healthy choices that you need to work on. You can't 'fight it'. To do so is simply trying to deny it's happening. You can't. You don't get to control it, if it's there it's there. Fighting it will only create more pain and may even perpetuate the issue. Denial is a neurotic and unhealthy approach to personal growth. Acceptance is the healthy approach. The only way that detachment becomes less of a problem and perhaps happens less intensely is when you are more grounded in yourself and less dependent on others. But ultimately, it isn't one of those things you see coming. It isn't a choice.

I always find this an interesting question to ponder. It has been quite a prominent question for me of late. Consider this: There are two elements to living life. There's the process of living, something that we are doing all the time without thinking about it. And there's the narrative, the story, the autobiography that we are trying to write. In essense, it is the former, rather than the latter that is important. Go and sit somewhere quiet, maybe in the park, in your room, or somewhere out in nature and just be still. Be present. Focus on your senses and on your awareness. And be aware that you are living in that very moment. In fact, you are living life in every present moment. That moment is life being lived. It's you living life. And hopefully, in that moment, you are safe, you have peace of mind, and there is nothing inherently 'wrong'. In that moment you are just being and there is nothing that you need to do to 'live'. And also realise that every moment in your life is exactly the same. It takes a bit to see this but but doing this excercise from time to time, becomming aware of moments in time, you can see it. My point here, is that if you can appreciate and be at peace with the present moment, then you are already living life successfully. Everything else that you do is a choice, and hopefully just a bonus. The 'story' you write about your life, and the antics that you get up to in the years to come are fundamentally of little importance. Because everything you ever do is only 'real' in the moment, before becomming a memory with everything else. And nothing from the past is ever as satisfying as what you are doing in this moment. So whatever you are doing in life, learn to appreciate the present moment, be still and present, and need nothing more in that moment. I'm not saying that you life live in a constant state of meditation and do nothing else, I'm merely illustrating that the 'story', the 'doing' is less important than the 'being'. Because whatever you 'do', the 'being' is always the same. I suppose the ultimate question is: how important is the story of your life to you?

The moment your ego looks at another ego and sees itself reflected back, like a mirror, the way you relate to another human and to yourself, will change profoundly. But until then, your ego will see every other ego as either a utility or as a threat. And it will see itself as the centre of its universe.

Many people want to feel 'special'. It is as though their identity is threatened if they don't have that exclusivity. But is this a 'need' and should anyone fulfill that need? The answer will probably hurt the ego.. The whole notion of wanting an exclusive feeling of being special is a losing game. If everyone were to be special then noone would be. Because they would all be on equal ground. And once at the top... there is only one place you can go.. and that's back down. It's a fragile state to live in. And it necessitates suffering. Why? Because in order to feel 'special' then there has to be a time of not feeling special in order for it to have any value. And once you have that value, and hold it for a while, you get used to it and it becomes 'normal'. Then what? You have to find bigger and better ways to get that feeling back. Ultimately, if you pursue this paradigm then you will spend your life chasing this feeling, balancing at the top, fearing falling down at any moment, at the slightest sign of dissapointment. Expecting another human to be able to consitently elevate you to this imaginary exclusivity is another losing game. It also becomes a selfish game on your behalf because if you enter a relationship with the intention of receiving this treatment then you are focussed primarily on yourself and what you are getting and not on the natural qualities of the other person. The realtionship become about you and the exclusivity of you, and the specialness of you. Which of course... everyone likes the idea of. It's the kind of concept conveyed in every fairy tale and romantic movie. Which is an important point to note.. that this is something that is conditioned by society. But what I'm saying here is that entering a relationship with any intention of using it as a utility to you (in this case to promote your own ego) is an inauthentic and ultimately dysfunctional way. Other people are not there to be a utility to you, they are there to appreciate for their own uniqueness. Not for how they can serve you. Entering a relationship with this kind of agenda will ultimately cause many problems and the ultimate failure of the relationship. You will have a never ending list of expectations of behaviours from the other person, of what it is in your mind that you need to get this exclusive feeling. And anytime they fail, you will feel hurt. And, as I said above, even if they succeed for while, once the feeling normalises you will be looking for bigger and better examples that will bring the feeling back. The relationship will, for you, become about this need for exclusivity and the feeling of being special. It will distract you from ever seeing the true value that the other person is bringing to you. So, to find someone that can meet this need.. that will be a life long, painful endevour. A game that you will never win. It will toxify any relationship. The real answer to all this is to love yourself. No other person will ever fulfull the emptiness that you are feeling. And you only feel this way because you perceive something lacking within you. Learn to love yourself and see yourself as special, then you will never need an external source of validation. And through this paradigm, you will have far more authentic and fulfilling relationships with people.

No. Emotions are an important part of life. Personal growth is not about learning not to have emotions, it's about learning how to respond to them. You don't really control emotions, you can only control how you respond to them and also understand what causes them. Attachment is not an emotion. It is a psychological dependency. And it is an inherent component of a social species, such as humans. It is there by design in most social creatures. It's purpose is to create cohesive societies for the purpose of survival. Except, in the case of humans, we have 'out-grown' this need within the context of survival, and in conjuction with ego it causes many problems for us. The problem is that it creates obsessive, compulsive and neurotic motivations that actually distract us from the true value of the object of our attachment. In the case of relationships, attachment can become so distracting that the purpose of the relationships becomes the maintaining of the relationship for attachement's sake. It blinds you to being able to authentically 'see' the other person in their own beauty. You are consumed by your own self-interested need - the attachment. And of course, if you now lose the object of your attachment it creates great pain and suffering for you. I am a believer that being more detached actually increases the quality of a relationship. Whether it be with an object or a person. Being less 'needy' with someone and less controlled by the attachement allows you to be more present and pay more attention to the natural qualities of that person. It allows your focus to be the relationship with the person itself and not your compulsion to maintain it. Rather than focussing on attachement, focus on the natural rewards of the relationship, whilst they last. When or if the realtionship ends, then be greatful and appreciative for the value that it gave you, and be accepting of the new situation, including any emotion that comes with it. I think the key is being more appreciative towards things or people that are of value to you, and less needy and dependent on them. Enjoy the natural rewards in the moment, whilst they are present, and accepting of when the nature of these interraction changes or dissipates.

"What would you like for your birthday?" Enlightened person: "To be present."

Pretty much. In most cases. And it's easy to prove although most people will probably not want to take this close a look at their motives and see the truth. Ultimately, every motive a person (or any lifeform) has is in some way self-serving. Othewise, what would be the reason to act? Every action benefits the 'self'. Whether it is breathing, eating, walking from a to b, earning money, buying material things, having sex or entering a realtionship. 'Relationship', incidentaly, is just a label. Take the label away and consider what it really is. And do the same with 'love'. We attribute a whole framework of beliefs and protocols around these labels. Most of which are self-serving. We attribute more to the frameworks of these concepts than we do to the reality of what is actually going on. What they really mean. People don't really pursue a 'relationship', they persue the conceptual framework that we attribute to the label. A framework that comes loaded with self-serving benefits. Why do you think that relationships cause so much pain and suffering throughout our species and are inherently unreliable? Because when people aren't getting what they want out of it, it starts to become an ego battle. Just ask yourself why you want a relationship, what you expect out of it. What is it you want from a partner? What you are looking for. These are the self-serving motives that drive people to do it. And for anyone who is already in a relationship, consider what you will lose if the realtionship ended. Right there are your self-serving motives. But self-agenda is an inevitable, inehrent, part of life. You can't escape it. But it isn't something to be condemned. It is something to be accepted. As once you accept that this is how everyone is living their lives you become instantly more loving and authentic towards them as you can no longer judge or criticise another being. From this paradigm, people can stop the ego battles and have more authentic relationships. We are conditioned to belief that selfish interests are a 'bad' thing. But this entire paradigm comes from a selfish self-interest. The concept of selfishness is supposed to be perceived this way as it is self-serving by its very nature. However it is unavoidable. Provided that noone is harming another, self-interest is a natural, inevitable and healthy motivation.

I can relate to this. I don't really meditate for a 'reason'. Because as soon as you expect something out of it the whole process starts to take on an agenda and becomes frustrating. This is counterproductive. Meditation has benefits. Many different benefits and I don't even know what they all are. In fact I'm not interested in 'knowing' what they are. I will find out in time as the benefits become apparent. And that's really my motive. Not because I am expecting anything specific from it, but because in time, I will see the value in it. And I'm starting to see the value. What more value I will get in the future remains to be seen. Only time will tell. My motivation is really just to go into it with an open mind and see where it will take me. That is why I started in the first place. Just to see what would happen, without expecting anything in particular. But once established in a meditation habit I find that it motivates itself. I am driven to do it. As though it is doing me.

@electroBeam Yep, I used to do the very same thing, just for fun. I still do. It's also a bit like holding your index fingers out horizontally in front of your face and trying to make a third, double-ended floating finger inbetween them by uncrossing your eyes and overlaying the two images. It was things like this that started to make me aware of the illusions of our perception and how clever our brains are at creating the perceieved experience.

I would say that being mature is akin to being authentic. And being less egoic and more grounded in reality.

If you are judging and evaluating someone by comparing them to you, then really you are never going to have an authentic and loving realtionship. Authentic love and authentic relationships comes from the absence of judgment. Not from whether or not someone is 'as good as' you or whatever. True, authentic and meaningful connections come from understanding and aceptance of one another. Not by judging a person's list of 'attributes'. And again, I see people using such simplistic 'judging' mechanisms for evaluating people's worth. Someone being 'kind and honest' doesn't necessarily make them compatible or meaningful to you. There are far deeper layers to someone than this. And far more relevent and important factors that will determine the quality of the resulting relationship.

Only in so far that an elightened person will be more in tune with their intuition and will follow more authentic desires.

"What Do Men Prefer: Nice Girls Vs. Bitches?" Isn't that another way of asking "Do men prefer needy/insecure Vs. egotistical women?" In which case.. neither. In any case, it's way too black-and-white for my liking. If you approach relationships with this sort of shallow thinking you're never going to have a fulfilling relationship.

It is my opinion that a healthy and functional, authentic relationship is self-sustaining. It doesn't need to 'proven' or labeled or in some way made binding. Those things are the very antithesis of a healthy authentic relationship. You don't need marriage to have a satisfying and fulfilling relationship with another human. But, if you feel you need it, then no, there is no right or wrong age for it. I would say, however, that there is an appropirate stage of personal growth and maturity for any relationship to be healthy and self-sustaining.

I can't help thinking that this is like asking "Why are people gay?" Reality doesn't care what you think is moral or immoral. All sorts of things happen in reality and there is much of it that doesn't suit the majority of the human population. But it happens nonetheless. Why are you the way you are? Because you are. Whether people like it or not.

Absolutely. I should have put that one on my list. This is the highest value for me. There are many people in this world who are not authentic, who instead project themselves using a pretentious facade. And often people are attracted to these facades only to discover the fallacy of it later on. Authenticity comes before any other trait.

It's grounded in this: Exactly. Reality is a subjective experience in the first place. It's an interpretation. It comes from our conscious experience. Otherwise... there is no reality and no cause-and-effect. No nothing. Everything about your experience of reality, of 'life', is subjective and an emergent phenomenon of conscious awareness. It is impossible for anyone to even conceive what reality really is because you can only experience it as a manifestation of your sensory input, cognition and consciousness. Time, space, empty space, matter, objects, life, light, sound, colour, thoughts, decisions... you name it... it's all created by our interpretation of sensory input. Free will, making choices etc, are experiences too. But they aren't real. If you look in to it hard enough you can see how every 'choice' in life is actually not a choice at all. That 'free will' is in fact not free, because it is completely influenced by pre-existing causal factors. Every 'choice' you make is actually an effect of a cause. If we really want to get deep, it's possible to see that there are never any 'choices' or 'decisions' at all. But, this is all my subjective interpretation of reality. It isn't real. It isn't the 'truth'. Just a perspective, like everyone else's.

I just want to clarify something in response to what Leo said above.. I'm not suggesting that values are not important or that they shouldn't be pursued. The problem is that we get too attached to these values as though they form part of our identity. There are some value in life that are inherently a part of us, that, as Leo said, transcend ego. But it's the other values that the ego latches on to that we need to learn to be less identified with. How do you practice detachement? It's hard to explain. In simple terms, we become attached to things because we believe that they are a part of our identity. And identity is basically a story, a narrative, about 'who' we think we are. And for some reason we become very attached to this. Like it is inerently necessary to have some consistent self-description of the self. As if we need to prove something to the world, to declare our unique independence from the rest of society. But the truth is, that this identity is arbitrary. It creates far more pain trying to maintin it than it does learning to accept the 'self' as it is without the long-term narrative. In short, your 'identity' is whoever you are at any moment in time. It isn't dependent on consistent criterea like successes and achievements, Or any particular belief or value. Those things can change in life. They can come and go. You can live up to them or not. It doesn't really matter. In any moment in time you are exactly 'who' you are. And learning to be ok with this, and embracing this, is the key to acceptance and detachment. If you don't achieve something in life that you value, then be ok with it. Accept it for what it is. See the truth of it. The truth is that you didn't fulfill something. So what? You can try again, you can do it again. Or not. The issue is that you feel you 'need' it to be a certain way to feel ok about yourself. But you don't. You can accept the fact that it isn't a certain way, and be ok with that. And acceptance doesn't mean that you don't ever try again, or that you have to change your values. No. You can still hold these values and keep on pursuing them. And the outcome will be whatever it is. It's just that you don't need to prove anything to yourself or to anyone else by trying to uphold any particular 'thing'. A personal experience: A few years ago I made a mistake with something. I was a huge error. A mistake I had never made before which was something I prided myself about. Something that was part of my identity. I had the belief that "I'm really good at this and I don't get it wrong". But then I did. Big time. And I remember being in disbelief about it. I just kept saying to myself "But I don't make this sort of mistake. This isn't right. How can this be?". I actually felt like my identity had been compromised. Like I wasn't who I thought I was. And then, a while later, when I made yet another similar mistake I came to a point of acceptance. "Ok.. I DO make these mistakes. Because I have. Here's the evidence." And from that point I was never again attached to my belief that 'I do not make this sort of error'. And I'm ok with it. Because that's reality for you. I no longer beat myself up over these things because it's pointless. And so I also don't have this thing as a part of my identity anymore. And I feel much better for it. It's easier said than done, but it really comes down to seeing reality for what it is and not for how you want it to be. Reality is what is real. The fantasy that is our life narrative and identity is not real. Also, discovering your authentic values from your inauthentic ones will help with detachment. And authentic values come from inner desire and intuition. Not from anything external.

I think we need to define what 'happiness' even is as I feel that these is a misconception amongst people in relation to the way Leo (and others) use the term and what we are all working towards. We tend to think of 'happiness' as some form of elevated mood. But that would describe things such as pleasure, excitement, stimulation, bliss or euphoria etc. In fact I think the more appropriate definition of 'happiness' is peace of mind. A stillness of the mind, a neutrality of mood and emotion. That is what we are all ultimately seeking. Enlightenment will probably not bring you eternal bliss, but it will almost certainly bring you peace of mind. I feel this subject of 'happiness' needs better defining as it makes a huge difference to people's expectations and concepts of what we are all trying to achieve through personal development and spirituality. Happiness is the absence of pain, not the presence of joy.

Yes it's all predetermined. You can prove this quite easily. It's already been proven by your current history to date. We may not be able to see how our futures will turn out, but they will turn out exactly as they will. Then you can look back and see what happened. Ultimately, everything that has happened in you life up until this very moment, every thought, decision, action etc was always going to happen the way it did. There was never an alternative. That's why you are here right now the way that you are. And your future will continue in the way that it will. Whatever happens is the only way it can happen. You just can't see it until it does. You don't create your thoughts and make decisions. They occur and your conscious awareness witnesses them. There is no 'control'. Reality is just an inevitable chain reaction of cause-and-effect events. It will do exactly what it does and there will be no 'alternative'. How can there be? We only see the illusion of free will because we don't have the resource to construct an accurate enough simulation and projection to see what will happen. So we live with the belief that things are uncertain until other things occur and actions are taken. The thing is.. all those occurances and actions will happen anyway, exactly the way that they do. But this isn't a sad or scary thing. Why should it be? You're 'life' is only an observation of a process. Life is an emergent phenomenon of consciousness. Just go for the ride and see where it will take 'you'. Appreciate the fact that there is even a ride to go on!

This. Intuition is that quiet, subtle driving force that you notice when you quieten everything else down. It is absolute, undisputable. It isn't stimulation or excitement. It is almost a 'knowing'. It comes from stillness. Leo did a good video on this recently.

Laziness is just another label for 'lack of motivation'. And motivation comes from the promise of reward. But neurosis is more fear-orientated. If your lack of motivation was the result of some fear then I would consider that neurotic. If you think you are being lazy, then dig down and see which mechanism is at work. Are you lacking potential reward for taking action, or are you afraid of something by taking action?

Are values egos driven? Yes. It's the ego that 'evaluates' reality in the first place. And decides what serves its self-interests, which become things you value, and what doesn't serve it, which are things you don't value. If it wasn't for ego the concept of 'value' wouldn't even be an issue for you. Learn acceptance. Learn to be ok with whatever happens, irrespective of the outcomes in life. What you are doing is identifying to strongly with these values, such that when you 'fail' to live up to them you feel that your identity is threatened. You need to let go of this need to identify with any particular value and accept things as they are. That's not to say that you can't pursue any particular value in life, but remain detached from 'needing' it in order to feel 'complete'.