Electron

I recently watched Leo's episode on how to get laid and while I get the gist of what he is saying, I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of pursuing sex like that. Ultimately, leo was highlighting the importance of inner work and becoming more self-aware as a result of which, one will naturally become attractive. And I agree with that. People in general are naturally drawn to me when I am genuinely happy. But one other thing that happens whenever I am that conscious is that I do not want to pursue sex, or go to a party and talk to a girl just because she looks hot. I'd rather write a poem when I am like that or shower unconditional love on anyone that is around. Edit: My point is that if, ultimately, "truth" is what is making you attractive and if at the end, self-awareness is going to give you the kind of relationship filled with deep love and intimacy, why not prioritize truth directly (if you can), rather than spending 5-10 years jumping from one 5/10 relationship to another? Makes sense?

@Knowledge Hoarder I said what I felt like personally. I wasn't stating a fact. Notice the word "feels" in the title. If you seek truth, manipulating, and playing the game of the world can certainly "feel" like a backward step. Maybe leo can do both at his level of understanding but its certainly conflicting for me at this stage of my life. Its like having each leg on a different boat,

@Leo Gura You are very likely misinterpreting my words. It's not creepy at all. Its creepy infact, when I am seeking pleasure from a sense of lack. It only escalates my pain and I only want to use the other person to fill the void. That's what's creepy!

Some stuff about me ? I am a seriously introverted guy. I don't go out much and even when I do, I go alone. Right now I am focused on my career and spend some of my day doing consciousness work. I am not engaged in any socialization whatsoever and I am 21. I have never been in any relationships or ever had sex. A lot of people have advised me to try going out with girls, because, as they told me, its important to learn about these things at my age and to really understand the mechanisms of girl/boy bonds and I am at the appropriate age according to them. But I don't buy that. I don't really feel the need for any human being. I already feel like I am satisfied alone. It just doesn't occur to me.

@Armik That's Me right there..!! ☺ Boy I often wonder how similar we all are from inside.

What, according to you, are some characteristics of a Well-Lived life? @Leo Gura

@Zane Thanks Zane. It really helped. I've read some of your other comments on different posts and they really resonated with me.

This question has intrigued me often. Let's say that you hate football. But that hate usually comes from a negative judgment you have made about it. So even the anticipation of playing football feels repulsive to you. But what if you choose to play football regardless and confront the bad feelings. Soon by repeating the activity, your past beliefs about it will start to change and you might begin to enjoy it. Now you judge it in a positive way. This makes you incline towards it and makes you practice it even more and this further improves your skill which gains you appreciation. This turns into a positive feedback loop which makes you feel really passionate about football. Now you think it is your calling. But is it? Using the principles of Mastery, I think we can certainly be passionate about anything. I think what most people fail to see is that passion comes afterward. First, we have to build a certain momentum through discipline because at the start it feels like shit. After enduring these things, the forces in us begin to align towards that particular aim and we feel more and more motivated. If this is right, then how can we use our present inclinations to decide our calling? What if, currently, we are negatively biased against a certain activity but could end up very passionate about it if we go that road.

@Leo Gura But don't you think as one grows as a person, the things that he care about also changes. So what if someone values to be the best swimmer in the world and has been practicing for years but somewhere along the way, as he matures, he starts valuing living a life of service and his dreams start appearing rather selfish to him. Now in his mature psyche, the idea to be the best and win gold medals feels childish. So he is not motivated to work that hard anymore. So would it not be a better strategy to find a new source of motivation (regarding swimming ) which is aligned with the new mature psyche rather than quit swimming altogether and find other career more suitable to the new values?

@Scholar I think math is just our linguistic projection on the raw reality. Its designed in a way to avoid any ambiguities in quantitatively describing the world we live in. We only follow a very narrow rational path which ensures least possibility of any discrepancies so that we don't fool ourselves along the way in trying to tell our story about the reality. We keep our facts aligned with reality. This is why our descriptions seem accurate. We are not revealing the truth, we are merely describing it. Its like if I say the sun rises in the east is accurate and start wondering how we became so accurate in our understanding of that truth. But if you look closer sun rising in the east is just a description of the way things already are. No wonder its accurate. We see reality then try to make a story about it using our language. We label every aspect of reality then connect those labels. Then we use reality again to confirm our story, if it works we say we understand the reality, if it doesn't we change our story.

I have seen many examples of people now that are following this pattern. Heres how it goes:: Someone is confused about his life and things are not going the way he intends. So he starts doing personal development, reading self help books and watching videos like Leo's. Soon he is well informed on topics like these and start giving life advices to his friends & peers. This gains him some sort of appreciation which he enjoys. Now since he lacked any form of purpose previously and was not good at much, he plans to do something with the knowledge he has gained in the self help field. Perhaps become a self help coach or a consciousness teacher. His intention is backed by a belief that enlightenment is the most important thing and any career that doesn't revolve around it or neglect it in some way is not good for him.

I am a 21-year-old guy and I don't know much of science and math but I am willing to go this road and sacrifice my next 10 years honing these skills. and become a physicist. I have not known to be good at these subjects in the past as I never really studied them seriously. I used to suck at math at school and I have had a very poor education. I never read a book in school. Studying repelled me and I still face past fears when I try to study a topic I was afraid of back then. I am trying to master the basics of these subjects currently. Things that they taught way back in early school years. What I often wonder though that is it a bad strategy? Should I rather spend my time mastering something that I am already a bit good at? Because I really don't know much of science and math and given the age factor, it sometimes makes me doubt my path. I had to overcome a lot of emotional blocks because I never really saw myself as a book person. The age factor makes stuff unmanageable. I just started and I don't even remember the math they taught at school and I am currently in college where they teach advanced calculus. You can imagine the dilemma I face. Every time I see those calculus books I am reminded of how bad I am at this. It makes things harder for me. I like solving problems and the kick one gets from it but the constant reminder of my inferiority makes me wonder whether I have come the right way.

@Dan Arnautu But How Can I predict right now whether I can be among the best? Right now I am even less than average. There is nothing in me right now that I can point towards as an indicator of this much success in this field. I don't know whether I can be among the best. But I am willing to try. And my willingness is all I got. I don't have any past accolades to tell me that. @JKG Thank You Mate. It helped. @Ritu Thanks. I appreciate that.

Here is mine : One day while I was running in my college campus early in the morning I heard some strange noises. I suddenly became very alert because it sounded like some strange animal. My heart started beating faster but I kept running. I meditated just before that so I was very calm. Suddenly from nowhere a wild dog came rushing towards me grunting and barking. I was afraid but I wasn't able to identify with my fear completely because of the after effects of meditation. I didn't feel like freaking out and I didn't really want to. In my minds eye I could see that just in few moments I am gonna feel a lot of pain and I surrendered to that future completely. I was ready to get bitten by that dog. I closed my eyes and allowed things to manifest as they wanted. I could hear the dog approaching near but then suddenly he stopped, stayed there a bit and went away. It was as if he just wanted me to surrender. What's the bravest thing you have ever done?

Hotness is an opinion, a filter which most people today tend to see through. Animals don't even have mirrors to see what they look like. Sexiness, hotness are just deep beliefs rooted at the heart of the pop culture. In animal kingdom if you are healthy and of high status then you are hot.

@eskwire It was interesting to know that you are willing to take the road of celibacy. I don't really know but vowing to celibacy seems to me like imposing a law on yourself, an obligation. I prefer conditional celibacy for example If in an attempt to reach my goals I have to stop acting out my sexual tendencies then surely I will do that and it feels authentic too as i am doing that for a cause. But it might feel inauthentic to do that for no reason whatsoever; unconditional abstinence. On the other hand of the spectrum I am skeptical of the idea that you can't really transcend sex. The reason for my skepticism is that I have come to realize through my own experiences that limits of this body and this mind only exist as a belief in the mind and not literally in the physical universe. So what if there is actually a way to transcend sexual inclination? What if sexual desires can actually be extenuated with time by acting a certain way? Well if there is such a way then certainly its worth exploring and researching, especially for the people who are cool with that kind of lifestyle. Yes we don't get to choose a lot of things but shouldn't we have a choice in how we want to behave. Are we really bounded by our sexual desires? One can only know the answers to these questions after serious experiential investigation. Good luck for your journey.

Since being conscious makes us feel aligned with love, and the experience of love makes us conscious. Is it the absence of love that causes unconsciousness? That causes us to rush through life, get compulsive, impulsive and small minded ?

Life wasn't given to you because there is no "YOU". Life is just a phenomenon not isolated from any other phenomenon in any way. To study it, it needs to be seen in isolation from other things and a separate entity but it actually exists in oneness with everything else. There is this one giant process of cause and effect which you can call the universe and everything that appears in it by virtue of cause and effect isn't the end result, nor it has any special meaning, the universe isn't going anywhere, it's just doing its usual cause and effect shit and various new kinds of things are popping up. Now, it is rather tragedic that we have in our ignorance taken the "self" for granted and as something real and rigid, creating boundaries and fences in our own experiences which obscure our perception and disable us to see the underlying unity. Now did the universe give you birth for a reason? Yes, because for the appropriate function of cause and effect according to the so-called laws of the universe, it was necessary for the processes to occur exactly in a way so as to give rise to "your" body structure. So you can also say that you were given birth because you were needed by the universe to function properly . Also then, the reason "You" are alive is because the universe needs you right now in order to be stable. If i were to remove you against the universe's will (Lets say), the whole universe would become unstable (A hypothesis), all the star systems, galaxies, planets will go nuts and who knows what would happen. That's how important you are !!!! The things that you were meant to do are things that you did and the things that you will do in future will be the things that you were meant to do. So whatever you are, whatever you do, that's what's meant for you. Here are some lines from the movie " The Last Samurai" : Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny? Algren: I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed.

When someone pushes you off a cliff without your knowledge then without taking any time or complaining about it you just enter the game and fall down. But if you were given a choice whether to jump or stay you probably would take a lot of time fighting your inner fears. This part, right here, where you are to confront and overcome the emotional clutter arising due to the anticipation of the fall is skipped completely when someone else pushes you without your being aware of it. Now if you dig deeper, you'll see that this gap (time before you jump), which you subconsciously fill with all sorts of judgment about the anticipated event, isn't really relevant. That is, to jump off the cliff you don't really need to judge and anticipate the event, jump can take place without being completely ignorant of that part. Starting something just becomes harder if a lot of anticipation and judgment is processed before you start. So skip that part. And just become completely ignorant of it. That's also what desperate people do. They just completely skip the whining part and get right at the action. There is nothing in the way if you look close. There is no start. There is just action.

The only reason enlightenment sounds plausible to us is because it too has a price of bliss in the end. If enlightenment would offer a lot of awareness with a lot of pain and misery instead, why would someone want to go that road. More generally, the only reason people sacrifice pleasures is to gain a more permanent state of pleasure in the future. So one way or another, there is always a higher price of pleasure we seek. When we are kids, we are involved in instant gratification, then as we mature we realize that there is a more effective way to gain pleasures which are more permanent and that is to get out of our habits of instant gratification and sacrifice certain things for the future, then as we mature even further we realize that there is an even more permanent state which involves the surrender of our ego. So Isn't everything that we do is a trajectory from pain to pleasure ?

Try not to react at any sort of emotional inconvenience. Just watch objectively no matter what arises. Also learn not to react with craving at the moments of joy and achievement. Just watch. If you feel sexual impulses, then also just watch. Do not identify with anything, just watch as if you are sitting on a riverside watching the river flow. Do not react. Do nothing.

This is the first enlightenment related book I read and it astounded me. I didn't know that love is that important in life and how much of everything i do is only in order to feel desirable and loving towards myself so that i can feel comfortable and safe being myself. Love is a completely different and radical path to awakening which actually fucking works. After reading it, I am sure you would be healed of many problems in your life and would have a fresh and positive perspective about yourself and everything and everyone around you. Such is the power of this book. Its a must read.

There are several editions of that book. Actually think and grow rich is a condensed version of hill's earlier book "The Law of success" which is a thousand page book to which he dedicated most of his life to. Of course, I haven't read all the versions of think and grow rich but I'd say you go for the classic edition as the new ones also contain the text from the classic plus additional commentaries and examples.

@Christian Strategic thinking might be necessary to make you aware of the problems that may arise beforehand. But if you think about it, all there is to plan and prepare about is how to endure the inconveniences when they arise. All the growth is centered at these critical moments when you are required to go straight through the fire. That's where most of us start to flutter and start making excuses.

You either cry when you feel too fucking retard or too fucking blissful.