This is why you cannot boil this work down to some stupid platitude like "be in the now".
This work is much more complex and subtle than newbies imagine it to be.
The ramifications of nondual awareness are enormous and they cannot be formalized.
This is why post-awakening a lot of integration work is required. Your mind has to do work to figure out how to adopt Truth/Absolute to everyday life. And it is VERY EASY for your mind to distort the Truth and embody it incorrectly.
Hitler could come to your house with a flamethrower and if you're naive, you might tell yourself something like, "Just be in the now" and that will be a huge mistake.
It takes great intelligence to apply high spiritual teachings and principles. Newbies and fools will make terrible mistakes.

Yes, very clear.
Sounds like you still haven't found the right sweet spot.
Some substances are better/easier than others. Mushrooms can be twisted and hard to understand. Ayahausca can be overwhemling and very uncomfortable for newbies.
What I recommend is tightening up your protocols and tripping in a very controlled manner.
You could try the following routes:
1g of mushrooms >> 2g of mushrooms >> 3g of mushrooms >> until you hit your sweet spot 75ug of LSD >> 125ug of LSD >> 200ug of LSD >> 250ug of LSD >> until you hit your sweet spot This must be done in a good comfortable quiet setting, free of distractions, free of people, and other nonsense. You must do it on an empty stomach and you must sit still and contemplate about the nature of reality with your eyes open. Your intention must be pure & serious.
If you did all that, I don't see how you wouldn't have some nice breakthroughs.

@nistake Every creature has a unique personality. Do not confuse this primordial personality with ego or with social conditioning. This primordial personality will remain even after total enlightenment.
Even cats and dogs have these primordial personalities. No two cats have an identical personality.
Because every brain is unique, just like every computer hard drive is unique.

That's good progress!
That's the trick! There isn't a "how". Formlessness cannot be reached through any method or process. Formlessness just is. You are it. You cannot reach it through any steps because it is the zero-th step. It is impossibly direct.
Although psychedelics can put you there in minutes.
The reaching of formlessness is a spontaneous occurrence, like a lightning strike. You cannot predict it or make it happen. But you can increase the odds by intensifying your inquiry & concentration.
Of course they are a part of you -- because everything is a part of you. But they are not essential to you. For example, a thought or feeling can arise and then disappear. It's disappearance does not change your essence. So what you are -- your essence -- is independent of all arising phenomena.
What you're missing is that you must distinguish yourself from all form. You have to separate the formlessness which right now is intermixed and confused with various forms. Then, later, you will realize that formlessness and form are in fact identical. But at the same time, they can be distinguished! It's a paradox.
Your first awakening experience is you realizing that formlessness is distinct from all form. It's you realizing that Consciousness/You is distinct from any content that arises.
It's sort of like a TV realizing that it is distinct from the images it displays. In the unenlightened state you are like a TV which is attached to the forms it displays, not realizing that in fact all forms could disappear without affecting the TV's existence.
What you are looking for with self-inquiry is PURE CONSCIOUSNESS. Consciousness without any forms.
But be careful, what I said above does not mean that any particular forms must be eliminated. So don't get some silly idea in your head that your sensory field will somehow turn off or go black. That's not what I mean. I mean you must realize that the sensory field is always occurring within formlessness. Like water is always occurring within some container. The True Self is the container. Find yourself as the empty container which holds the world. Right now you are so identified with the world that you cannot see the transparent container.
Form = the material world
Formlessness = the transparent container which holds it
And ultimately, Form = Formlessness
That's what "nonduality" means: not two.

@Dlenger1 The intellectual questions are a good beginning point, but ultimately you have to graduate from that to basically just sitting in silence with a calm mind and focusing intensely on "the seer" or consciousness itself. Just sit and kinda stare at consciousness itself.
The problem with asking too many questions is that the mind then gets in the mood of giving verbal answers, which is never going to be enough.
The Neti Neti method is helpful here. Anything you identify as yourself, you must negate by realizing that that thing or property cannot be the True Self.
What you're really looking for is formlessness. "The seer" is formlessness. So any from you think you are cannot be it. And you have to be very careful about not thinking "I am formlessness" because that is still form!
This is supposed to be frustrating process and it takes intense concentration to break through. You will not break through if you do this process without intensity and consistency. 20 minutes of inquiry is just not going to produce enough intensity for a breakthrough. It's very important to schedule some long periods of time for nothing but inquiry. Like a solid week of full-time 12-hours-per-day inquiry. That is how people break through in practice. You must concentrate on it like an obsessive psychopath.

You and 99% of humans. That's normal. That's just a consequence of being disconnected from your True Self and enmeshed in the Matrix of culture.
Your survival almost entirely hinges on surviving within the Matrix of culture. Misalignment here can easily get you killed, so ego struggles and suffers a lot to navigate this domain successfully.
In practice you should do both:
1) Try to fit in within reason. Don't bend over backwards but also don't rock the boat too much. You don't want to be locked in jail, or punched in the face, or sued, or fired by your boss. So in this sense you must fit in within reason. But most people go way beyond this, trying to fit in far too much to the point of becoming a slave to impressing others.
2) Work towards awakening and transcending your biographical and social identity. With this a great relief will come and you'll find yourself able to fit in without struggling to fit in. You will just flow with life and you won't worry to much about playing social roles. Yet at the same time you will still be able to play them, but consciously rather than reactively. So you won't suffer from not fitting in the way you do now. You will find your unique personality and place in life and you will stop caring how others judge you. It will not affect your happiness because you'll be totally grounded in your authentic personality and in your heart.
What people don't realize is that an enormous part of their identity is social. We'll discuss that in future videos. Very few spiritual teachings discuss this aspect of waking up.

Yes, this can happen, especially with a bad upbringing.
But even so, if a person is truly spiritually gifted they should have some sense of it, however faint and obscured it may be by bad social conditioning. These people should feel like "I am just different from other people." They may not know why yet or how, but they can intuit that they don't quite fit in with dumb society."

If you're asking that question, then you probably aren't, unless maybe you had a really dysfunctional childhood.
Generally speaking, spiritually gifted people will have one or more of the following:
Find it very easy to meditate or concentrate Are extremely interested in metaphysical and spiritual topics (more so than other topics) Are naturally very loving Really interested in Truth for its own sake Have paranormal abilities: they see auras, angels, and others weird stuff, they have telepathic abilities, etc. Exceptionally intuitive They have spontaneous kundalini activation/awakenings Are wise beyond their years, wiser than all their peers Not all of those need to be present. Just one or two of those is already great.

Well, in that case, just realize that this entire work of developing oneself is all about transcending culture, realizing how toxic, deluded, and dysfunctional culture can be.
"Culture is not your friend." -- Terence McKenna
At the same time, don't hate culture either. Just become aware of how limited, partial, and artificial it is.
There is no liberation or freedom without transcending one's culture.

The bias of a mystic is Truth, Goodness, Love, Consciousness, and Harmony.
This does not square well with right-wing or conservative politics because the primary appeal of conservativism is ego and closedmindedness.
You never heard of Jesus flipping over the money-lender's table? That was a very political act against the corrupt status quo. For this he was eventually crucified.
Truth and Love upsets the political establishment very much, because it is always run by devils. Devils seek power and money. Mystics seek Truth and Love.
See, the devil hates it when a mystic points him out as a devil. Because a devil can only stay a devil when he has other people and himself confused. But a mystic sees right through a devil because he is the Truth. So the mystic is the highest threat to devils. So the devil's #1 priority is to silence, demonize, and kill the highest mystics. The devil does all this without knowing he is doing it. Because if he knew, he could not do it.
All I'm doing is pointing out devilry to devils. To a devil this might look like a "left-wing bias".
More broadly-speaking, do I have opinions and biases? Of course. Every mind does. That's not the issue. The issue is, how conscious are you of your mind's biases? Are you aware of how selfish your mind is? Are you aware that your entire reasoning faculty has been hijacked by ego?
See, what I'm talking about is not a matter of left or right, it is a meta matter. It is a matter of one's altitude of perspective. You should not be so much concerned with left vs right as high vs low.
Very practically speaking, as you move into Spiral stages Green, Yellow, Turquoise and beyond you will appear to others as much more liberal/left-wing. This is a relative matter. It appears this way simply because high stages of development are very rare and society/culture/politics is dominated by the much lower stages of Red/Blue/Orange. These low stages are extremely mypoic, selfish, reactive, and closeminded. Almost at animal like levels.
Visionary, cutting-edge perspectives appear radical to ordinary folks. This has always been the case. Amongst a horde of slave-owners, someone questioning slavery looks very "left-wing." The slave-owners will have no choice but to demonize the person questioning slavery because it is a direct threat to their survival.

This issue is far deeper than you yet realize.
Your identity as a human is a false one, but you need it to survive in the social domain. So you play various manipulation games, trying to suit your identity to what has social survival value. This makes it impossible to ever be happy about yourself because all these social identities are pure fiction.
The ultimate solution is to awaken out of that false identity to your true identity -- as Nothing/God. For this enlightenment is required.
You can make your current identity more authentic and less pathological and less reactive. This will make your life better. But you will never be fully satisfied with that until you finally awaken to the fact that your true identity is Emptiness and formlessness.
You are literally not anything. Or pure consciousness without any properties or forms. You are also litterally the entire universe. So how could any human identity make you satisfied?

What you guys are overlooking is that my natural body shape is very tall and lean. Don't compare me to guys like Joe Rogan who are short, squat, and beefy-looking.
To look buff, I would have to add 60 pounds of muscle onto a 6'2" frame. This is not sustainable or healthy for me.
Remember that people have fundamentally different body types (regardless of fat or muscle). There are endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs. (And also xenomorphs ) I was always an ectomorph. An ectomorph who happened to be fat due to poor diet.
Muscles do not scale proportionally if your body goes from 5'8" to 6'2". You will become leaner and it will be much harder for you to look buff at 6'2" than at 5'8". Of course there are some tall endomorphs like The Rock. But that ain't me. If you go to the gym and just observe people there, you'll clearly see who is an ectomorph, mesomoroph, endomorph.
Our culture -- especially bro culture which tries to be macho -- devalues ectomorphs while idolizing mesomorphs and endomorphss. But all of these assignments of value is ego.

What must be deeply understood is that reason serves ego. Reason is NOT a function of truth or facts. Reason is designed to justify whatever serves the ego.
In the case of the alt-right and these genetic IQ debates, a stage Blue/Orange ego is working backwards from its conclusion that European civilization must be superior. (Notice how convenient is it that these egos happen to be European! What a shocker ) So they turn to "science" and "genetics" to solidify that fantasy in their own minds.
That's what all this is really about. It has nothing to do with truth, facts, actual intelligence, or reality.
What all of the alt-right boils down to is identity politics. They are trying to preserve their white male European identity in the face of a culture, society, era which is forcing us to adopt more global and inclusive identities. Their egos are scared of adopting a wider, more inclusive sense of self. That's all. The rest is just their justification games. "Science" and "reason" is used in these games because it lends an air of authority and truthfulness. After all, "How can one be wrong with science on one's side? Science is just objective facts, man! Facts don't care about your feelings. The data doesn't lie." LOL
In reality there is no such thing as "data". There's ego cherry-picking & interpreting data to boost its survival.
See, the devil always cloaks himself in a veneer of "truth".

Indeed
There is good reason for unhappiness and delusion though. It keeps you alive.
If all delusion was removed tomorrow, society would collapse into anarchy and cannibalism.
You can remove delusion within yourself, but doing it across all of society is unworkable at this point in human evolution. Society is like a house of cards held together with snot (delusion). If you insist too much on cleaning up all the snot, it will all fall apart. So the snot must be cleaned up very carefully and gradually to prevent catastrophic collapse.

Firstly, even siblings are genetically diverse.
Secondly, the genetic factor is still only one factor. Hard training is also required. Sadhguru did yoga from a very early age. Genetics alone is not enough in most cases. All that genetics do is make it easier, not easy.
Thirdly, witchcraft seems to have some heritable aspects. Children of witches are more likely to have paranormal abilities from my understanding.
I don't see any contradiction here. The cases you're describing are extremely rare and they could be explained by the mind web going through a catastrophic collapse and then reconfiguring itself.
In a sense, all deep awakening is sudden. But also gradual.
Virtually no one becomes a enlightened master in a couple of minutes. This is pure fantasy. Eckhart Tolle, after his egoic collapse, spent 2 years sitting on a park bench. That was 2 solid years of his brain integrating his breakthrough.
The opposite of what you say is true: all enlightened masters that I know spent 10,000+ hours to become a master. And that was on top of their spiritual giftedness!
On top of all this there could additional factors like karma, soul, past-lives, etc. It's way more complex than people think.

What I've noticed is that watching Leo's videos makes me frustrated and angry at the world. Although incredibly powerful for inner growth, it has a tendency to make me overly intellectual and stuck in my head when relating to others. I've always thought of Leo as lacking 'that special something' when compared to the charisma of a mystic such as Alan Watts, Rupert Spira, etc...That is until he came back from his 30-day retreat.
There's this little glint in his eyes that sparks that same feeling of presence now. Obviously nowhere near the same degree as those I mentioned above but Fucken christ, the man's moving into turquoise!!I Leo if you're reading this, I'm genuinely happy for you. You're a lot more authentic than you were before and it really shows. I cant speak for anyone else but I would be a lost puppy had I never found actualized.org. You are a beam of light in this dark age, thanks for everything. 

Absolutely. In fact, I'd bet that the majority of enlightened people got there mostly due to their giftedness. It's just SO much easier that way. It's like being naturally high on psychedelics all the time.
Similar to how the best weightlifters will be naturally selected for high testosterone. Those with naturally low testosterone simply won't be able to compete against them.
Which is why many of the best gurus make the path sound easier than it actually is. It was easy for them. Yet it will be virtually impossible for ordinary folk.
This is the kind of stuff gurus rarely admit. Because you cannot know this stuff from sitting on a meditation cushion. To know this requires broad psychological research which most gurus dismiss because it is not 1st person experience.
Different brains have very different capabilities. It's not merely a matter of degree, it's also a different in kind. Some brains can access states and phenomena which other brains just cannot.

This is not true, but at your level of consciousness and development it is true for you.
Nothing about enlightenment work suggests you should not have relationships. If anything, your relationships will deepen. But at the same time you will not need them to be happy. So you'll get the best of both.
What you're not realizing yet is that you ARE always alone, existentially speaking. Self/other is a conceptual distinction you are creating. All those "others" you think you're relating to are actually projections of your Self. No amount of relating will resolve your existential aloneness. That's something you must face head-on.
Don't worry, aloneness is not a problem. But if you feel like you need to connect with people, do so. What I'm talking about is more advanced than that. Many people here first just need to learn how to create relationships.

@Gadasaa That's not unusual.
1) Keep in mind that most people look happy from the outside when in fact they suffer deeply inside and their lives are going down hill. Many celebrities fit this description.
2) It takes time to build up a great thing. Investment is required. For example, starting a business might put you into debt more so than someone working at Starbucks. But in the long-run you will be much wealthier as a business owner.
3) Learning theory takes time and energy away from practice. Some guy totally focused on practice will achieve more results in the short term but less in the long term.
4) You cannot compare yourself to anyone else. Other people are not in your shoes. They have different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Some people are "naturals" in certain areas of life which you will have to work your ass off to attain.
5) Progress is highly non-linear. It has ups and downs. Sometimes you must take 1 step back to go 2 steps forward.
You need to have a vision and long time horizon and be patient.
See my video: Be Fucking Patient!

The key word there is CAN.
Besides which, how would you know? Have you tried all the techniques? Have you gone all the way? How would you even know what "all the way" is? All you have are stories from gurus. And how do you know which guru is right and which is wrong? Because they certainly don't all say the same thing.
See how tricky this is? You don't know what you don't know.
There are many valid techniques.
But to reach the highest levels will require that you use these techniques with such focus and intensity that it will physiologically change how your brain fires.
You have to consider: your brain physiology puts some hard limits on your degree of consciousness. Which is why psychedelics are so great. They change your brain physiology in such a way that you are able to access states of consciousness which most ordinary brains cannot access without incredible periods of practice, or even at all.
Consider the possibility that if your brain was twice bigger your awakening would be deeper in ways that a normal human brain cannot even fathom.
Yoga is specifically designed to change the physiology of your brain. Think of it like doubling the size of your brain. Of course you are not physically doubling its size, you're just changing how it's wired. Which is just as significant. And not just the brain but also the bodily nervous system.
Do not assume that all people or spiritual practitioners have access to the same brain hardware. Not at all. Every brain is unique, with unique pros and cons. Some people's brain hardware is so inadequate they cannot add two numbers together or recognize their mother or father.
People take all this for granted. The reality of how spirituality works is much more complex than most people are willing to admit.
And the paradox is, brains still don't exist
Tricky, tricky stuff.

No, you must contemplate and observe it very deeply. Only be becoming very familiar with how survival works can you begin to liberate yourself of it.
If you are not conscious of survival in detail, it is controlling your entire life and it is making you an unwitting devil.
The whole problem is that life is NOT a game for you. You take life all too seriously because you're not conscious of what survival is. Life only becomes a game once you are fully conscious of survival. Right now you are a slave of survival. You are a survival robot and you don't even know it yet.
Just because you don't have a concept of it doesn't mean you aren't doing it. A squirrel has no concept of survival either, but it's doing it 24/7.
You are not appreciating the depth of this issue of survival. It's worth you contemplating further, rather than dismissing it.
To attain the deepest liberation, survival must be deeply contemplated and observed. Emotional mastery requires consciousness of one's survival mechanisms. 99% of emotions are survival.

@Freyah I use those shallow examples basically to mock many stage Orange relationships/marriages. It's said tongue-in-cheek. I like to amuse myself with silly examples. Silly, but still true. It shows the absurdity of the typical human life.
Of course it does not have to be that way. Relationships are great and I'm all for deep intimate spiritual relationships. If you manage to actually pull that off, you'll be a hero in my eyes. That's challenging stuff.

This is a very tough line to draw. It cannot be drawn conceptually. You must find it through lots of trial and error and failure.
You know when you are breaking integrity, violating your own high values.
But what makes this so tricky is that blaming and berating yourself only compounds the original problem.
Still, as a newbie, you almost can't help but do it.
This is all part of the problem of self-control. I have an old video called The Problem Of Self-Control which is pretty profound.
You must be both hard-working and disciplined, but also gentle and loving with yourself. Not any easy balance to strike.
I also have a video called: The Paradox Of Development Self-Trust, and one called Freedom vs Discipline. They all touch on this topic to some extent.

@Matt23 How old are you? What is your financial situation like?
Are you running away from anything in doing this?
How mentally stable are you? Are you depressed or suffering from any kind of mental disorders?
How good are you at tolerating being alone?

It is an idea but it is also a state of consciousness. Which is why it's so difficult to drop. It doesn't really go away even if you stop thinking for a few minutes. Because there is an entire egoic state of consciousness which makes it feel as though you are real.
It takes a lot of deconstructing and focused concentration to break down that egoic state of consciousness.