Derek White

Is that a confession. lol

Here’s a bonus trap: 11. Expecting clarity, inspiration, and awareness to come to you without any effort, while you wait in your comfort zone. This is procrastination. Monkey mind will not magically stop or enlighten you. Without conscious effort you will not go anywhere.

@Serotoninluv There is a "how do you do your research?" thread in self-actualization. You should tell how to do proper research in that thread considering the misinformation, wild theorizing going on in the forum. It's your responsibility as a moderator and scientist to educate folks.

@Serotoninluv What's your research process.

@Leo Gura I am interested in your answer. @Pilgrimage of Self I use my university's library to access research papers. Trusted websites like google scholar. My local library has good resources too. Finally textbooks and encyclopedias. If you enroll in a decent university they teach you how to do proper research.

@Leo Gura Unreliable sources or no sources, wild theories, eugenicists, anti-vaxers... what's next? Flat Earthers? Do you realize where the forum is heading Leo? Thought you were going to purge the bullshitters. Not very high consciousness.

@Raptorsin7 Hey, have you tried Bhakti Yoga? It's all about love and joy plus it's super easy. Sorry to interrupt the thread.

you are an inspiration.

The quality of perspectives/opinions presented here is definitely an issue. For many of the subjects discussed here, It takes a large knowledge base and technical detail to form a high consciousness (yellow and above) perspective. For instance, I have come across posts which question if some races are genetically less aware than others. To me it's like asking if the Earth is flat. Now, it is a perspective and you can have that discussion, but it is not a high consciousness perspective, certainly not something which deserves to be discussed on this forum. Such perspectives/opinions make me question the quality of people this forum is attracting. Also, a lot posts are a rehash of perspectives in Leo's videos. So there is a lack of new insights on here. Like I said, it becomes repetitive. How many times am I gonna read, everything is God, everything is Love, examples of spiral dynamics, etc. We do not discuss technical details here. I would like to explore more technical details and minutia in the future, as opposed to just big picture understanding. I am not planning to leave forever. I would share any future spiritual experiences if I feel like it. For now I would limit my time and posts.

I touched upon this subject in another post a while back. Feel like I should share it here. I feel sort of the same way as you but I touch upon other things too like repetitiveness. I just wanna say I love what Leo has done for us and this forum has definitely helped me. I have nothing but respect for this place. But there's the fact that people use this casually and there are a few low consciousness posts. These low consciousness posts are hard to ignore. Some people's writing is not even legible, some feel threatened when you ask genuine questions, others use it as a feel good Instagram quote page, others have mental illnesses (no disrespect to them). Some people are genuinely fun to read. All sorts of people here. Perhaps the biggest reason for wanting to leave (for me) is that there is only so much you can talk about Big Picture Understanding. It becomes repetitive and you're talking about the same things over and over. Leo talks about it cause it's his job but for us ordinary people it can create a stubborn thought pattern. After a while you just have to live your life... At some point you have enough intellectual understanding (or just understanding) that you move on... and it becomes about living more consciously everyday. Sort of like finding peace in the mundane.. Going from big picture to small picture because you can't talk about the big picture 24/7. Hope it makes sense. Here's my old post, I illustrate more about repetitiveness in this (I edited out the parts not relevant to the topic, ik I talk about his videos but this can be said about the forum):

@Leo Gura Alright. I have two more questions. 1) What do you plan on releasing after your break cause your recent videos were great but kind repetitive, for old followers and folks who do the ‘work’? 2) Are you pursuing enlightenment further? Cause last time you said you would die so your not. What are u working on?

@Leo Gura This article might be insightful. https://isha.sadhguru.org/ca/en/wisdom/article/drugs-and-the-spiritual-path-possibility-or-pitfall (In this one he clearly says it is a possibility to use drugs to awaken) ”So drugs are the lowest possibility, but still a possibility.” - Sadhguru

So would you agree that people like Sadhguru and other gurus, yogis, and teachers have a higher waking state consciousness than you? You said yourself that you have defilement such as a need for sex, subtle addictions, various fears, etc. And no offence but I don’t agree with you when say you intuitively know Sadhguru is less conscious than you or when you say you’re the most conscious. Idk about the West but in India people have been saying life is dream for a long time. Hindus say Brahma is imagining everything and you can find equivalents in other religions. He claims he can teach you to be highly conscious while remaining in the body. That’s his thing and he claims to know occult too. Maybe he can teach you something that would remove the neurotransmitter barrier because after all you are imagining that barrier.

If Leo shared more personal information it would help build trust and it shouldn't be too difficult since Leo has already shared so many deep things with his audience. I would love a video on his daily routine, his house, his history, etc. We don't know much about the man. It also seems that as Leo becomes more and more obsessed with becoming more and more "enlightened" he seems to care less about the mundane, ordinary "normal" life. He seems to look down upon enjoying the average mundane experience and it seems he cares more about chasing states of awareness. I resonate a lot with seeing God, oneness, and love in every situation, not just on psychedelics, since this work is about self-actualizing our entire lives and not about merely becoming enlightened while wearing a diaper. What happened to "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water?"

@SamueLSD You are right in a way but I was not looking at it that way. Maybe I should have been more clear. Of course we don't need to trust him, we can experiment to find out ourselves if he's right. I want him to talk more about his personal experience because the channel seems to be going in a more personal direction for quite some time now. Like the awakening videos, updates, and even some of the higher consciousness videos like what is Love, Purpose of Life, etc. I know he would say that the latter is absolute truth but because most of his audience (most of us) have not realized it ourselves, it feels like he is talking about his own personal awakenings even in those videos. The fact is that his channel feels like it's more about his personal journey to awaken: a vlog. It's about explaining his awakenings. Another important fact is that we have hit a limit on how much can be conveyed through videos. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to realize reality is imaginary by watching an hour long video. His recent videos, although great, had insights he has already covered in the past. If you watched his old videos and did the 'work', you already knew them. For example, insights in the "Implicit vs. Explicit" video were discussed previously when he talked about intuition, debunked logic, infinity, etc. For people who were following along and studying other resources, it was not that new. You could intuit the insights of "How Society Evolves". "Content vs Structure" was like 'Sameness vs Differences" and "Systems Thinking". I could go on but the point is that the videos are getting repetitive because words don't do justice to his awakenings. I think we have hit a limit on how much he can convey through them. Lastly, it appears, from his recent forum posts, that he doesn't wish to pursue awakening further. He wrote that he feels if he pursued it further he would die, which he doesn't want. So if he's not pursuing awakening, unless he decides to delve into minor details of a topic which is not his style, maybe he should talk about how he is applying his awakening to his everyday, mundane life. Because his "higher consciousness" videos already feel like his personal opinion (ik it's not) and he has talked about them ad nauseam. Plus it would be cool to know more about him since we only know a few snippets of his life story. (Draw my life maybe...) I love Leo, but I can't watch him talking about the hundredth time that everything is God, everything is Love, everything is Imagination, etc. I know it's suppose to be deeper every time but I don't think the depth can be conveyed through videos now. I go back to his old videos sometimes but If this keeps going I would have to stop watching his videos in the future. P.S: Maybe it's just me and I'm being ridiculous. But Yesterday I had this very strong feeling that I had gotten what I needed from Actualized.org and it's time to let go, sort of like when you suddenly stop an addiction one fine day for no reason without any effort. Or when suddenly one day between teenage and childhood you stop playing with toys and watching cartoons. It's sort of not my choice, it happened to me. Leo has given me all the techniques, explanations, his opinions, practical advice, a book list, a course, and more. But this post seems like my lower self still trying to cling on, hoping that Leo would release something in the future that would maybe resonate with me more. Everything was resonating... until I woke up yesterday and it wasn't; it felt like a chore. I have had my fair share of realizations but maybe I'm entering a new phase where I want to focus on the mundane and the ordinary as oppose to what Leo talks about; God and enlightenment.

That is surprisingly accurate . But I have also been doing a lot of meditation and self-inquiry about the nature of reality, more so than the average person. That did not show up in the reading. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I truly appreciate it.

How many other countries have you actually been to?

Let’s not be credulous. There is something in the air, probably a dust particle.

@Leo Gura This is an eye opener ?, even though I’m not interested in dating. It’s good to know for general knowledge. Does your booklist contain books that explain these “harsh truths” about communication? It seems it’s one of those things where truth is the opposite of what you’re told, like “life is fair” or “everyone is special”. Life is not fair and everyone is not special.

How are we as men suppose to know that? It’s like we’re being told something else in school and the reality is completely different. I was told you have to verbally ask a woman every time you do something. I am sure I can find a video they showed me in school on YouTube. But here you are saying something else. That it’s okay to touch and kiss under certain circumstances depending on her mood and setting. We, as men, are getting mixed messages from movies, songs, media, school, You, and friends. It’s like you’re saying, you can do it, probably need to do it, but it’s also kind of against the law and a taboo. As I understand this.

I would say they are more “cognitively developed” because they are able to see more perspectives and be more open minded. But that doesn’t mean it’s arising from genetics or biology necessarily. That should be obvious. A stage blue person can have a higher IQ than a stage green or yellow person. I’m sure Ben Shapiro has a high IQ. So does Jordan Peterson. IQ is something separate but I think it does play a small part. It has to do with environment mostly but genetics on an individual level can play a part. It’s no secret that many folk like Sadhguru were more aware than your average child but that’s on an individual level. You can clearly see this in immigrants and children of immigrants. Some coming from blue countries change over to orange or green very rapidly, in a sense they have an advantage, being rased in two cultures helps you understand them better. 2nd and third generation immigrants tend to be very green. They would be blue if they had stayed in their countries of origin. Like Leo said, we have a hive mind. You can see the hive minds (cultures) evolving around the world. You can see cultures in history which were high consciousness then devolved into low consciousness (parts of middle east, Indian culture, fall of Roman empire) or cultures which were low consciousness evolve into high consciousness (American culture, Western culture, Chinese, Japan etc). These things keep oscillating.

Try getting rid of the notion of good and bad. Notice that from the thief’s perspective stealing is not wrong or unfair but from your perspective it is. They are both just perspectives, one is not better than the other. Whose to decide who is right? You can still have preferences for perspectives without calling one good and the other bad. If you like the colour blue that doesn’t make liking pink bad or wrong. In fact if you practice shifting perspectives and being open minded you can like things you otherwise hated, like changing what your favourite colour is, as oppose to it being fixed. Aren’t all your problems because you hate some things and love others? If you loved everything you wouldn’t have to move an inch to be happy. That’s when life shifts from ‘having to live’ to ‘wanting to live’. How can you be at peace if you hate? The more things you hate the more miserable you are. That’s why Nazis and racists are miserable people ?. That’s an example of Karma, it’s immediate.

Good point.

Wouldn’t you stop someone from committing a crime or a harmful act by arguing with them? Wouldn’t you argue with someone who’s suicidal or say misguided on politics?

@isabel It means that if you hate something it’s also inside of you that you’re suppressing. For eg. If you hate big noses on people then you’re constantly going to judge yourself to see if you have a big nose. If you hate homosexuality, then you’re going to watch yourself very carefully to suppress any homosexual urges. If you hate thieves, then you’re denying and demonizing the part of you that wants to steal. We all have the urge to steal right? Be it at varying degrees. Doesn’t mean you go out and start stealing. You hate Nazis but isn’t there a nazi inside of you too? Many Nazi-esq beliefs we have? After all they were also human. Maybe hating Nazis In some ways makes you like them You don’t have to hate something to not do it. You don’t have to hate Nazis to not be one. Understanding > hate. The notion of what’s fair and unfair is false. These distinctions don’t really exist. Notice that in order to be truly happy you need to come to terms with what you call ‘unfairness’. It also means that they’re YOU literally because everything physical is interconnected and ultimately one. We know that through science. You cannot separate an organism from it’s environment, or the background from the foreground; they are one.