Derek White

A lot of things don't make sense. Any concept used to describe consciousness, including this one, is incomplete because it is limited and consciousness is infinite. It's much more sophisticated than effort vs. effortlessness and more than our minds can make sense of. Consciousness includes everything, including differences in it. You can be in different states of consciousness and some states are more "truthful" and "higher" than others. Concentration, contemplation, shamanic breathing, taking psychedelics, yoga,... all this requires effort. Monkey mind will not magically stop or enlighten you, awakenings will not magically fall on your lap while you wait in your comfort zone. Even if you want to let go you need to put effort. There are certain things you can't let go off immediately. You need to have a strong intent to let go, a long term purpose and you need to keep trying the letting go technique, all this requires effort. And maybe those "higher" states require effort to achieve and sustain. If you don't put effort you will be sitting in the couch eating Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew while watching YouTube videos in your mom's basement, for years. You will go along with the flow of your toxic culture and your bad habits. A limbo. I fell into the same trap. It took me many years to turn the ship around. You need effort to stay healthy and to even stay alive. You will not be conscious if you are unhealthy, broke and fat. Your mind may be coopting spirituality to remain lazy. Don't theorize about it, actually try it and let your results guide you.

You need to put effort to raise your consciousness. I started on this forum by sharing this insight. Not putting effort is the biggest trap. Amazing quote. ?

Inspiring.

An hour a day is probably too little, spend at least two. Talking about teachers, in grade 8 I got into Euclidian Geometry, which was very interesting and built the base for how I approached math. It was heavily proof focused. But I don’t recommend it if you want to learn calculus. Calculus in university is about practice. Practice and learn to recognize the pattern of questions. I would recommend listening to this youtuber’s calculus playlist. https://m.youtube.com/c/TheOrganicChemistryTutor

That can be true, but other people can also be doing things for good reason. In which case it’s wise to learn from them. If you don’t prepare early, you just won’t be able to do some things. Your parents guilt tripped you into going to school, and it turns out reading and writing is helpful in life, even though many of us didn’t want to go to school. If it was up to me, I could never recognize the importance of school in childhood, I would never have gone and probably stayed illiterate.

If you have some money left over you can buy a house by getting a mortgage, and your monthly expenses may just be around the same as your rent. You can also rent it, which will help with mortgage and extra income. If you buy wisely you can expect the price to go up, then you can sell for more and buy a bigger house or two smaller homes that you can rent for more. I don’t know where you got this idea that all debt is bad or that being mortgage free is good. That’s not true. Quite frankly, you have some childish ideas about these things. I suggest you educate yourself about how these things actually work. You can be richer and live a better life than folks who are mortgage “free”. For eg. you can get a student loan and save the money for downpayment to get a mortgage in the future. You can get a house, now you have rental income. And guess what? If it was a good investment you can sell it for more, and earn a profit. You can buy more houses or buy a smaller one and be mortgage free. If instead you didn’t take the student loan, just paid the tuition, you won’t have money saved up for downpayment and you probably won’t be able to buy a house at all. Of course, if you don’t have a stable career you need to focus on that first. Goes without saying.

Meanwhile men struggle to even attract a woman. Try being a 5’4” guy and let’s see if you can attract a woman let alone one that’s good in bed. @Karmadhi Don’t let anyone fool you, it’s not “equally hard” for both men and women. It’s just the way it is, and remember not to turn this into a grudge.

This only further proves my point. I feel inclined to say many people may say that that's because we define mental illness in a very narrow way. And that many of these people are not actually mentally ill, it's that our definition of mental illness is wrong. That argument has some truth. But the thing is these people are suffering regardless of what you call them. And that may be a result of how we function as a society. There a danger of progressives calling someone healthy when really they are not and thereby not encouraging that person to get better. For example, this is a not a mental illness example, progressives may say to some lazy people that their laziness is part of them and that's just how they function, everyone has a different way of functioning and doing things after all. But does that actually help the lazy person? Maybe for them to succeed and be happy they would have to let go of laziness. This has to do with how progressives look at identity and it's a hairy thing to explain to people. My friend who wants to become a musician things along similar lines. I think progressives connecting mental illness with someone's identity is a problem. There is also the issue of the internet and how that plays into mental health. My generation has effectively eliminated boredom with ubiquitous access to seemingly unlimited porn and entertainment. And then there is social media. In the past it was a privilege just to see a woman's face, and now men can look at whichever type of women they like doing whichever sexual acts they want them to do. This is definitely affecting men's motivations and mental health. There also polarization and radicalization and much more. We live in a Brave New World.

I live in metro Vancouver and I can tell you we have drug addicts littered all around the city. Where I lived, you can't leave anything outside your house and inside your car, otherwise some addict will try to steal it. Our car's window has been broken twice by addicts to steal things inside. Addicts cut my neighbors' house's wooden pillar to steal their bicycle which was locked to it! My neighbor actually found the cluster of addicts who stole their bike (as they were buying grocery the next day)! But the police didn't make make any arrests. They just asked, "Did you steal this bike?" "No, my friend left it here, don't know where he went." Case closed. The authorities here doesn't do anything about them, they just ignore them. There will be druggies unconscious on the side and the police will walk by, no helping them or even arresting them. I should mention the police station was less than a block away from my house. Metro Vancouver has been giving free supervised drugs to addicts at pharmacies for some years now. Even if we give them supervised consumption and mental health sites, it still doesn't address the root problem. We are still working on the symptoms of the problem. There is something wrong with our society itself that people have to go to a mental health clinic to get off drugs that they shouldn't have been using in the first place. Why are people mentally unstable in the first place? I think our society doesn't want to look at itself otherwise the things it cherishes will come into scrutiny.

@Stovo Most of the people, including you, who are defending him don’t know what’s appropriate for India. They have a disparaging attitude towards developing countries. It’s a misuse of spiral dynamics and ignorance of these countries. @Husseinisdoingfine If he didn’t support them he wouldn’t be able to run such a huge organization. Supporting the government is one thing, he supported and name dropped a toxic ideology there and equated it with Hinduism. He is setting a bad precedent, in the future people will say a great Hindu yogi supported Hindutva, it normalizes support for Hindutva for generations.

Well, Hindutva is basically fascism. “The Hindutva movement has been described as a variant of "right-wing extremism"[5] and as "almost fascist in the classical sense", adhering to a concept of homogenised majority and cultural hegemony.[6][7] Some analysts dispute the identification of Hindutva with fascism, and suggest Hindutva is an extreme form of conservatism or "ethnic absolutism".” – Wikipedia

@FlyingLotus There have been no changes to list recently. I wrote down the list on paper for my personal reference many months ago and I just checked. They are all the same. Maybe you checked after a long time and thought the changes were recent.

Apps like Tik Tok have systemic design flaws. No matter what content you push on it it will remain unconscious. You guys should check out this podcast by the scientists interviewed in The Social Dilemma. It's a great stage yellow podcast involving discussion by experts on the topic of social media and journalism. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4KI3PtZaWJbAWK89vgttoU Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305 They also have a website: https://www.humanetech.com/

I'm not saying saying he's a bad person. I think he's subtly supporting fascism (or needs to to run his organization), otherwise I think he's a good spiritual master. I don't care about other criticism of him and frankly I haven't watched the other videos. But I think it's a serious thing because he speaks out against anyone opposed to the current government, and his support for Hindutva will definitely increase conservatism and Islamophobia. It's a little hard to explain to outsiders, but Hindutva is not your garden variety conservatism, for instance Hindutva hates Gandhi (who was already quite conservative) because he was too progressive and too nice to Muslims. It's founders were involved in his assassination. He really shouldn't he name drooping and supporting it and equating it with Hinduism. BTW, he did say "they" have been trying to "dismantle" "Hinduism" for 1000s of years though, that's a little reactionary and paranoid.

In India too. People here are very ignorant about cultures outside of USA. You guys categorize China, India, Afghanistan, and Russia as one big blue when in reality it's much more complicated. TBH yall have a pretty biased view against other places.

He says Hindus need to stop discriminating each other and become united (I don't think he means non-hindus), but he says that... while supporting an ideology that hates other religions and promotes extreme conservatism. Being against caste system is as progressive as being against racism. Which is to say it is what we expect everyone to be.

Uuh... honestly she seems normal. Getting vaccinated and not liking those who spread false rumors is not extremism. If anything, you seem to be the one falling into the anti-vax trap.

You overestimate that. There are various gradations of stage blue. Stage blue has increased in India over the years and Sadhguru is fanning the flames instead of helping. India has less freedoms and more poverty than it did 10 years ago. People are more hateful now. Sadhguru is not supporting progress here. I lived in India and things like this were not as normal back then as they are now. If tomorrow a religious dictatorship takes over India and Sadhguru supports it, you will say, "India is mired in stage blue, Sadhguru know that, oh well, moving on...". It's a huge oversight on your part. I think you are using the spiral dynamic too much and getting lost in the big picture, not understanding the nuances on the ground.

I don't you understand what going on in India. You keep making dumb statements about it.

If you are having trouble with nihilism Leo has published a special episode just about it, and he has been talking about resolving this issue for as long as I can remember. I can name at least 5 videos where he resolves this problem. People following him really shouldn't be having this problem.

Is the difference that in do-nothing we are trying to chase a mystical experience and shutting our thoughts and movements, while in satisfaction we are not chasing and don't try to stop our thoughts and movements? I think I have been doing both of these at different times and merging them at other times without even realizing. I find that when I meditate I experience reality as it is on deeper and deeper levels, and that brings me a lot of pleasure, even if the experience is unpleasurable like sadness or pain, I feel pleasure on a higher level. Also, the thoughts stop on their own after some time. So in that sense these two merge together when I meditate; I don't need to do anything to feel satisfied, so I don't do anything.

@Leo Gura For me do-nothing has always been satisfying. I thought you satisfaction meditation was just another facet of do-nothing.

Leo says intermediate awakenings are almost impossible with normal meditation and yoga but, I have experienced all the intermediate awakening with very little do-nothing meditation, walking, contemplating, and listening to various teachers like Leo. I still feel I can squeeze more juice from these traditional practices since I didn’t even pursue then full-time. Does this make me special, idk? I’m guessing there are others like me. To all the people arguing and debating Buddhism and awakening, it is counter productive, it is not going to help anybody, you have to realize these things yourself not prove it from outside, you can’t even fully articulate these things, so please stop.

In my opinion, there are much more serious difficulties people face in work, like unfair job treatment, delayed salaries, no benefits, no unions, working in sweatshops, lack of safety regulations, corruption, abuse, racism, etc. All this is peanuts compared to colleagues not sending condolences. I don’t expect colleagues to do that, or wish me happy birthday or bring me presents on Christmas. That’s a very high expectation for any work environment. That’s something I expect close friends to do. I mean, in which work environment do they do that? Unless you’re a part of a tight-nit small business with family and friends, it’s doesn’t happen anywhere around the world. In my opinion, his expectations are too high, judging from a more global perspective.