Extreme Z7

Noone's worrying about you getting hit by a bus, Leo. We're only worried you might spontaneously vanish into the ether.

@Leo Gura Have you ever fantasized (or at least thought about) what it would be like if your work and teachings became part of (or at least mentioned in) future academic curriculum.

Embrace your weirdness

@Psyche_92 Don't be surprised when 1-2 hours of daily meditation does not magically eradicate your strongest addictions. The process will still take years and you have to push through a LOT of struggle and backsliding. Deleting accounts barely helps either, you could still end up creating a new one months from now. You may have not yet "moved on". It's a sneaky tactic the mind comes up with in order to get an illusory feeling that you've actually accomplished something. But it's a matter of slowly weening yourself off it, not abruptly giving it up and "moving on". If you've found yourself successfully not visiting the site after a year or two, that's when you've truly made progress. Just keep going and the cravings will slowly dissolve. You have to find other things to replace your bad habits, and apply focused mindfulness to the sensations you feel when you're craving and engaging in your addiction. Also remind yourself that you're going to die someday. Do you really want to be spending more and more of your time fucking about with video games while the "icy hand cometh"? Probably not. (Also note that I myself still struggle with video game addiction. Played games for most of my early life so I know what it's like. Most games are suffering but they're addictive suffering)

I don't want to waste my time thinking about them.

That's a really absurd way to put it. God is YOU! YOU are God who is dreaming that he is not God. God waking up from the dream means YOU realizing that you are literally God. It doesn't rely on other people.

Have you tried uninstalling coffee.exe? Yeah, it's tough getting rid of a physiological addiction that's also an emotional crutch. I have the same problem with video games. The trick is to be as aware as you can when you are 'enjoying' your addiction. Because your 'enjoyment' is only causing suffering and it's just about becoming more and more conscious of it.

Just be prepared to admit that you don't know.

@Leo Gura You've talked a lot about 'Epistemic Blunders' and how people, including intelligent, scientifically and rationally minded people, 'get into trouble' because of it. Would love to see you expand on what you mean by 'get into trouble'.

So what? You can get injuries by exercising. You can fall into dogma through studying science or by becoming a 'skeptic'. You can commit evil by trying to do good. You can cherry-pick whatever stories you like to prove a point but the fact remains that meditation is overwhelmingly beneficial but ONLY when you're open-minded enough to take it seriously and achieve direct experience of what's possible. But of course when you haven't taken it seriously, when you don't even want to take it seriously, what your mind will like to do is latch onto stories that already confirm your preconceived notions of what the reality is. Human bias at work. Classic closed-minded dogmatic ramblings. Clearly you're more interested in pushing your beliefs rather than breaking them down for yourself.

Nothing is inherently "positive" or "negative". Those are value judgements. Positive-Negative, Good-Bad, these are just illusory labels your mind uses to distinguish between what it will and will not pursue. Growth just means becoming more and more aware of how various systems in reality work and how they interconnect with each other. I don't watch the news not because I think it's 'negative', but because it's, more often than not, very low-brow, sensationalizing, and highly drenched in mainstream culture mentality. Does that make news inherently a 'bad' or 'negative' thing? No. Everyone still has the freedom to watch it. But it sure as hell makes me avoid it anyway. Because I also have the freedom not to watch it. That's growth.

From the reddit post. What do you guys think? I don't know. To me, he sounds like he's being too much of a pussy to go deeper but then again I haven't tripped once yet so who am I to talk? But I do find it weird that he says life is meaningless then immediately contradicts it by saying that we should be more social as if that holds any meaning too. He strikes me as way too attached to his social life seeing how he strongly avoids isolation.

You should become more aware of the fact that all hedonistic pleasures are ultimately unsatisfying. You don't need to stop it. Just be aware of it.

Ditto. I'm from the Philippines too.

Don't care much about my reputation or anyone else's. But that's just my perspective.

@Source_Mystic Never said non-duality is the only essential thing and is above everything else. That would be a duality.

Non-duality means there is no side-dish. Just one infinite main course.

@Alien It's normal on the path. You WILL fall off track a lot so just be patient and keep going regardless. The reason why you're so upset is because you're not thinking long term.

I don't recommend theorizing when it comes to self-inquiry. I've pretty much abandoned, for the most part, on focusing on Leo's lessons for self-inquiry because they feel like too much unnecessary mental effort. Now I just self-inquire by just BEing or trying to BE at least. I try to just sit and notice all the ego-illusions for what they are until I break through to a state of higher awareness. Today, I had a pretty strong self-inquiry session and I felt like I died a little bit. But I'm still far from enlightenment.

Steal other people's jokes

Most people don't do self-help/personal development for various reasons. They might think they've already got life figured out. (Couldn't be more wrong) They might be so depressed, self-help content literally cannot resonate with them. They're dogmatic and closed-minded. They're too lazy to even bother to look into it. They're too distracted with all the other stuff they've got going in their lives. They think they can just "figure life out on their own with logic and common sense!" (Couldn't be more wrong again)

Yeaaahh. . .Maybe do some Epistemology 101 first, dude. Direct experience is King. Yes, you can intuit that some things are not worth trying out at all but without the deepening of your experience, there is always going to be the possibility of not discovering something you don't know that proves you wrong. For example, I probably will never try smoking (tobacco) in my life ever but I won't say that I KNOW with absolute certainty that it's not good for you. But you can have intuitive certainties that can help you separate what's worth pursuing among what isn't. On the other hand, just because you've experienced something, doesn't mean you actually know anything either. Because often times, things may not be as they seem. Just look at any person who's deep into organized religion.

That's exactly the point! You don't know about the veracity of a something if you haven't actually tried it for yourself. Which is why open-mindedness is extremely important when it comes to exploring reality. Until you have some deep psychedelic trips and have spent time studying the foundations of science deeply so that you really get what science is and is not (and I mean REALLY get it!), you can't even imagine yet how the paradigms you cling to could possibly be wrong. The scientific method is not about "just presenting evidence" for a thing. That's an incredibly naive and simplistic notion. It is limited to verifying expectations on the behavior of phenomenon. The behavior of phenomenon says jack about what the substance of the phenomenon actually is.