Christian

I think it is wise to compare yourself to yourself exclusively. You cannot control how successful other people are within a particular field and comparing yourself to others will lead to you seeing the world through an inferior/superior paradigm. Since there is always going to be someone better than you, you will always end up feeling inferior to some extend. It is more beneficial, and emotionally diffucult, to just focus on improving yourself. If you have not already, I suggest that you watch the video titled “How to stop comparing yourself to others” by Leo to get a better understanding of why comparing yourself to others is unfair, biased and adds minimal value to your life.

All your speculations about death are not death itself. You can never know what it feels like to die so long you have not died. How do you find out what death is? Become enlightened.

As the title may suggest, I am on the autism spectrum. I got diagnosed at the age of six and I’m now 19 years old. I feel like autism has had a major impact throughout my life, but especially recently. I used to go to a special needs school from 2006-2015 and that was easy for me. Everything was a lot more predictable and stable than things are now. Fast forward til now, I am currently in highschool and I have a hard time understanding social cues and making friendships that last longer than six months. Every day, I feel intense anxiety and pressure to do well academically and socially. I feel incredibly self-conscious and I believe it always gets in the way. My mind always over-analyzes every little detail and I can’t make high quality decisions that way. I feel like a victim because I understand that the reason why I am self conscious is because I have autism and I care how others percieve me. That is a very bad combination. It’s like hitting a brick wall 100 times that is impossible to overcome. I just want to be normal; to have faith in myself, but how can I trust myself at all when I know how many fucked up decisions I make? How tricky and weird my mind is? I wish I could just control my life a little easier, but I have come to understand that change is hard. When you have autism, it is very difficult to make changes in your life. Even very basic ones. Because I have autism, I feel like a victim I feel doomed and like things will never get better EVER. The videos Leo made about how we have no free will and no self has made me question my ability to make any changes to my life. How can I meditate daily if I am not in control? How can I expect anything at all from myself if I am not the person who is doing the thing I’m expecting? The fact I have zero free will also means that I am not in control of my autism, which is great, but it means that I can’t make changes to my life when I want to. That frustrates me a lot. There are so many things I want to do, but they seem impossible at this point..

@Caterpillar I have a belief it might be bad to believe that because the belief does not reflect reality. Reality tells a completely different story, hope you agree. But, Hey, if delusion is needed, then that’s what’s up...

@Caterpillar How can I stop believing that I am autistic when people always treat me different and I was diagnosed at the age of 6? I went through special education so autism is so engrained into my psyche... I never felt normal. A lot of my actions reflect that I have autism as well so why should I believe I do not have autism when reality always points at the fact that I behave like someone who is autistic? You see the problem?

@Nahm There are many things; I want to understand how to behave in social contexts, I want to be confident in my ability to make wise choices, I want to develop a meditation habit (daily), I want to stop being extremely self-conscious, I want to stop feeling like a victim, I want to become more extroverted, I want to not let my autism be a limiting belief, I want other people to stop treating me like I'm different.. But all this seems like a fantasy at this point

@Samuel Garcia The fact that you feel unloved suggests that you've lacked good role models in your life. If you had loving parents, then you would learn that you are the source of your own happiness. However, if you have been neglected before, that can traumatize you to the point where you believe you are unworthy of love. The problem with feeling unloved is that you will act needy and desperate in order to fill that void. That will make people more distant towards you since no one enjoys being around a needy person. You need to face your feelings head on despite how emotionally difficult it may seem. This is an internal issue. That means nothing external can help you overcome it. You state that you cry a lot and that is great. Crying is a sign of emotional purification and growth.Keep feeling your emotions until they change. Always remember that emotions are temporary sensations and if you just keep at it, you will start to see progress.

@Marinus Sounds great! You seem very motivated to study, but do not over-study to the point where you burn out. 41 hours/week seems like a lot unless you are in university. Make sure that you take care of your mental and physical health as well. This means socializing, working out, getting involved with your hobbies, etc. I regret studying too much when I was in high school. Spent so much time studying that I neglected other aspects of my life such as relationships...

You cannot stop your judgements because you do not exist. Surrender to the fact that you have zero control and it might get better. Maybe this will not change your tendency to judge, but at least you will stop percieving yourself as bad for judging others. Do not moralize yourself for judging others. That is not the way to go. Become mindful of the judgement as it happens and love yourself when you judge.

The reason why your family dislike Leo is because his teachings are threatening their paradigm. They say he advocates falsehood and he is the reason why the world has suffering because they are afraid of adopting his perspective because it lies outside their comfort zone. It triggers fear. If this is their reaction to personal development, that means they are probably not ready to hear about it. I know you want moral support from your parents and it is scary to go against their authority, but sometimes you need to do the most emotionally difficult thing. Just avoid mentioning personal development in conversations with them, but still keep doing it. Keep doing consciousness work, keep reading PD material, etc. Not everyone will support you, that is the hard truth, but I remember Leo talked about how he never got any encouragement from his parents to start doing personal development. But look where he is at. That just proves that even if your family are not supporting you, you can still keep doing it and succeed

Since you have not spoken to her in years, it seems to me that you and the family member do not have a close relationship. Therefore, it would be socially acceptable imo to decline her suggestion if you have other plans. So I agree with @Truth

@WaterfallMachine This is a self-help forum with 6000 users where people seek advice and share knowledge, experiences etc. Some users on this forum are better at offering advice than others. That's to be expected. But forums, blogs, etc. are often not a reliable source for high-quality information. Books written by experts are much more ressourceful so look for that if you want to be taught properly. The people who give advice on this forum don't get paid for it, they don't know you well enough to help you, that is why they don't teach you properly. You can't expect much of strangers on the internet is my point.

@Elton

To become good at understanding your emotions, you need to develop awareness of your body. For this, I highly recommend that you meditate daily, socialize regularly and go outside your comfort zone every day. To raise your EQ, you must first change your lifestyle and set up the proper habits first before the improvements in your EQ start to show. Sidenote: You don't need to read an entire book about EQ -- that is usually a distraction -- just learn the basic theory and take ACTION.

I think the point of systems thinking is to become conscious of how reality is interconnected. That sounds very abstract, I know, but let me explain. Many people try to fragment reality and look at problems only from the surface. But as a systems thinker, you are not interested in the superficial vanilla layer. You want to get to the true cause of global and personal issues and understand them from big picture point of view. If you apply systems thinking to society, you will begin to see how it is connected to spirituality and consciousness. Have you ever wondered why a society even exists? The people who are only interested in the superficial answers will say to get a job, survive and reproduce. But what function do these things serve? If you really introspect, you can clearly see they are a distraction from enlightenment and tools the ego can use to remain the tyrant in power. But why are most people not able to see this? There are two main reasons 1) Because of our society -- and all the cultural beliefs that come along with it. 2) 99.999% of people care about self-survival at the cost of Truth.

That was awesome man!

I think the important transition for me will be to change my perspective on taking action. I literally thought in the past that listening to videos and reading books were ways of taking action and from that standpoint, actually changing my habits was difficult because I did not see the value in just getting started. I made rationalizations and oversimplified things to the point where I said when I have enough theory, only then will I begin. But that point never came. There is always more material to learn. But now I know better and I think raising the bar for what it means to learn is great for adoptiong this new paradigm that learning=repetition. It creates a clear distinction between real learning and fake learning aka mental masturbation or theory collecting. The paradigm will make me more aware when I am engaging in fake learning. I will use this paradigm in all areas of my life and ask myself the question: "how will this change my behavior?" I'll use this questionwhile I watch Leo's videos on meditation to set up a regular meditation practice.

@Fredrik Andersson How do you know what to prioritize? Get a good understanding of your values as a human being. Before you can prioritize, you want to be sure that the things you are making time for is connected to fulfilling some of your higher values. How do I focus on one thing at a time? You sit with 1 task, don't have any distractions nearby, just focus on that one thing until you build momentum and enter a flow-state. Usually it takes 30-45 minutes for me to enter the flow state, but once I've achieved it, working becomes easy and fun and at that point, I don't want to distract myself because I've built up that positive momentum.

Why do we need a thread on this forum for people to let their monkey minds freely Express themselves? Have you seen Facebook, Twitter, instagram? Go on there if you want some ?

Training your subconscious is like training a dog implying that repetition is more important than variety. My advice for you is that you do one affirmation for 5-10 minutes a day and do that for 60-90 days straight. So if you want to be a millionaire for instance, you can say: "I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire for 5 minutes per day 60-90 days straight to really cement the idea in your subconscious. Notice that the important part is consistency. You gotta discipline yourself here.

Firstly, most people simply do not know that personal development exists. So how can they discuss a topic they've never heard about? Secondly, personal development is a personal and private topic for many people including myself. I don't personally enjoy discussing PD topics with people in real life as I feel that it is a waste of time and energy. I would rather keep things light and friendly. Talk is cheap anyways. I just take action and let my actions speak for themselves. They are the true indicator of personal growth, not how well you can talk.

I don't think there is a simple black/white answer. Whether you should spend much time with others depends on many factors. 1) Whether you authentically like to be social 2) Your values 3) The current stage you are at in life Most importantly is be true to yourself; don't play any games or manipulate yourself to be someone other than who you are. Just because a study says relationships are beneficial for your health and longevity does not mean you now have to put pressure on yourself to meet people and be social. If you find that you need to always "should" your way into doing something, that thing is probably not right for you. I recently quit going to the gym because I did not enjoy it and thus I had to manipulate myself to go. At that point, it was clear that it just was not right for me.

@Milos Uzelac Glad I could help I feel like having a journal on a forum keeps me more accountable because if I backslide, it feels like I've let the viewers of my journal down (along with myself). So it keeps me more motivated to stay consistent. Hopefully, it will have the same effect on you!

I figured that since it has been a challenge for me to start a regular meditation practice, I would start this 30 day challenge just to push myself outside my comfort zone. For the next 30 days, I am committing to meditate for 20 minutes every day - no exception. I will post here every day for the next 30 days just to update you guys on where I am at and what I'm going through so it should be fun. Let's gooooo!

Day 7: Meditated 20 minutes from 8am-8:20am Glad I decided to meditate in the morning today especially since it had an amazing impact on my day. Felt a lot less stressed out, but was still pretty stressed/nervous since it was the first day of school after summer break. Right now, I just want to continue this meditation streak and install the habit permanently so I can focus on other important habits. But I know I have to be patient and dedicate myself to this project, otherwise I will just backslide like I have in the past...