Snader

Hmm yeah a bit, indeed.

"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place" - Eckhart Tolle.

I've thought about that too to a point where the boundaries of that definition melt away. It's used so widely in mainstream society and can mean so many different things to different people. I personally once thought I'm depressed, until I later realized after done work on myself and pulled myself out of it, that to me ''depression'' in the end was just a label I used to justify myself to not be responsible for my own problems. Of course that is just how I see it was with myself, and my view is strongly powered by my own attitude and values. But it really was my attitude that helped me to get out of it. I don't feel I cured depression by defeating depression. I cured other problems and dysfunctions in my life, and the feeling of depression disappeared. Although even today I sometimes have same sort of ''negative'' feelings and emotions that remind me of those times, but I've learned to frame that stuff differently (mostly through spiritual work I think), so that it's not negative as it was before, instead there is more understanding and grace. If I had to give a short definition for depression, it would be something like: The more depth and complexity your psychological problems have, the more ''depressed'' you are.

We are his kids

For every 1 person who finds Leo interesting there would be 1000 people ridiculing and making memes of his teachings. Nice idea, but that would be like putting a pet dog in the middle of a wolf pack.

Started listening the first one this morning. As with the one you made with Charlie, what I find especially interesting on top of the discussion is examining and observing how you answer and choose your words when questions are asked -- not to put you any pressure though I see how hard it is to give a quality answer. So many dynamics and meta points to consider. People expect an easy and simple answers and don't realize how much stuff interconnect and how sneaky an ego mind is, and so how necessary it is that a proper groundwork is done before diving deeper into details. It would be easy if you could just give the answers, and it would be much easier if you only had to communicate with Curt, but you need to frame the stuff in a way that a newbie can have a chance to digest the words in a correct way instead of creating ammunition out of them that their egos can use against you or to misinterpret and abuse the wisdom there. Like in a basic conversation about some conventional topic you can stay at a basic level where everybody ''knows'' what's going on and from time to time dive deeper into more nuanced area while being able to pull back to surface if necessary. With such topic you guys talk about, you are all the time in the deep end (from a novice and intermediate perspective), and considering that some people with no experience of such topics listen to those talks.. Damn, it's hard. Perhaps in 10 000 years we can have discussions where all the deep stuff you talk about is basic stuff. Or before that happens, maybe discussion in itself will be outdated and a form of communication that we will look back to like we now look at hieroglyphs. Who knows.

So it's like there is different layers of reality, and peeling back the layers brings you closer to the core (Truth) like an onion? And video games is like a layer that's very far away from Truth? Any pointers? Perhaps the pursuit of Enlightenment and Life Purpose? I personally get the most satisfaction when I live knowing that my way of living is aligned with Truth. It doesn't mean I should be a monk or a yogi or meditate 24/7, but that I'm with understanding of my own psychology and basic understanding of life and human development doing the best I can do to live as consciously and lovingly as I can at the moment an so slowly moving towards something, that we could maybe call Truth. Can't say what's the best way of living to you, but I would advice you to be active in life, try different stuff, experience life, travel, have relationships, gain wisdom through good knowledge and personal development work and keep exploring the life you are given and you will find out what's the best way of living to you. Having a life purpose is a very strong and important aspect of that process I think, and if spirituality and pursuit of enlightenment comes during the process, then great, if not, then great, then it's not the right direction to you. Getting on track with life will make your path unravel. Also, the answers might not become totally visible and clear, you might need to listen to your intuition and find trust towards that. If you like to play video games, then do so, video games are not bad. It's the ramifications of doing nothing but playing video games that is destructive and will lead you to miss the juice of life. With video games maybe you need to contemplate whether you can create a healthy relationship with them or quit them altogether.

That's very good news that you found out that factor! People make imprudent decisions when faced with too much life challenges at wrong timing. It's very important to acknowledge this and hold yourself until your situation is settled. Good work! You are not conscious enough right now to see this. Maybe this fog is only temporary as your mind is busy trying to settle you for less than you know you deserve. If you keep working on your mind and improving yourself, I bet you will see there is much better stuff for you to do. By the fact that you started this thread. You have hesitation, it's the wisdom within you that's sensing there's something wrong. If you didn't have that wisdom, you wouldn't question this matter. That's exactly why you should contemplate and trying to get back on track with your higher self to get to look at this situation from a higher plane. That's your ego talking right there. It's trying to use spiritual wisdom to justify it's needs. But it's totally fine, as long as you don't give it full control. This is a spiritual matter that requires direct experience to be understood and is really hard to be communicated properly with language. But we can say that reality is basically layered and as you develop and become more conscious and closer to Truth, you move upper the layers. You want to live from upper and upper layer, from which the plane of playing video games all day is pretty far down somewhere. From the absolute perspective it doesn't matter what you do with your life, but as long as you are a finite being, you can't justify anything with the absolute, because your human life is very finite and relative in practice and your practice is linked with your whole sense of reality and your sense of self -- if that makes any sense. That you need to figure out for yourself. Actualized.org does great work helping you with that.

With stuff like art, dance and music you get to express yourself in infinitely creative ways that will inspire other to do the same. During that process you expose yourself to spiritual aspects of existence and so get much richer and deeper life. As a comp video gamer you inspire others to compete others and your expression is very strict and your limits have already been decided by the game developers. I do agree that there are exceptions and that this 1% is always ignored, but there is this exceptional 1% in pretty much everything and that cannot be counted in example when giving general life advice. However, even in those exceptional cases, there is that endless grind and most likely exposing to toxic gaming community and culture you need to go through to become good enough to even be able to get to those flow states. Is it really worth it? And no matter how much and how many flow states you experience, your impact is still pretty much zero, and that will haunt you and eat your soul over time. Video games are not bad. You can in example entertain people through Twitch with your personality or your high skills or whatever, but if you are really aiming high in life, you might want to reconsider. Deep satisfaction of existence lies beyond what the world of video games can offer.

Exactly. This might not sound too bad or problematic right now, but it will as you become more conscious. And it's not only about not contributing to society but also about not contributing to yourself properly. Your willingness to have the green light to go all in with video games might be affecting your judgement and so silencing the inner voice of wisdom that tries to whisper in your ear. For that reason I want you to contemplate if there is any outer stuff happening in your life that is causing extra fear, discomfort, stress or pressure to you? Because it's especially when that's the case and you're not aware of it, when your mind tries to trick you into selling yourself short. Maybe you do love video games, but love tends to turn into hatred and misery if it's taken too far and not given the proper place in the name of balance in one's life.

After you've grinded yourself to be the best Warzone player in the world and you've ended your hero's journey after 10 years and gently starting to move to next one, what have you gained, what will you have? You will have no impact, which will affect you on a deep level. You will also have very little useful skills developed you could use to fuel your next hero's calling. If you are doing personal development, you will sooner or later awaken to the shallowness of video games. You start seeing how it plays role in your life in a big picture. Especially competitive gaming -- which I assumed you're into -- is all about being selfish and gaining pleasure to yourself in expense of others. When you go deeper into yourself you might find that backfiring to you big time. Not to mention the toxic comp-gaming community, which will pretty likely condition you with very dysfunctional mindsets that will make your pursuit of happiness even harder.

Spirituality can and should be done with proper limits. You want to see your life as a whole and integrate spirituality into your everyday life, in the limits of balance that you personally require. When people get into spirituality they often see it like they can't be a functional citizen of a society at the same time, that they should go all in. That's not how it is at all.

@Vision He did all kinds of different practices from which most irrelevant ones to him were breath work and psychedelics. What other things he did or which psychedelics he used is irrelevant. It was his irresponsible attitude and lack of basic psychological work that caused him all the struggle and confusion. He has exhausted his Orange desires pretty well. He's still Green but a bit more humble and healthy. I sense there is some Yellow complexity arising in his thinking, although he's still ignorant against lots of stuff and will probably have to hit his head against a wall for a while longer. Right now he seems to be a bit confused and for that reason is being quite passive. Dealing with his relationships and some other fundamental life aspects at the moment. Lots of that suffering he has I think is part of the package of doing spiritual work, but there is so much unnecessary suffering that is caused by a conditioned mind and unresolved trauma and most importantly, lack of understanding.

Getting too radical insights through hardcore practices and psychedelic use, of which implications he is not yet ready to integrate due to lack of development, emotional serenity and understanding of spiritual phenomenon.

Of course Not only is it not enjoyable, it's deeply frustrating and even physically painful. Of course they lied to you. If you want a reliable way to piss a man off, get him really hard and then just walk away. Don't tell that to David Deida

Yup. I learned to not be too concerned about sharing my ideas and values as I noticed they are not appreciated and often times even pissed on. Same principle works in every social situation. Although if you can tolerate and conform their stuff, you can gain some trust and respect, that will grant you more room to share your own ideas, if that's what you want. I don't know what your actual job is like, but from what I've experienced, you can also pretty much avoid the social stuff and just focus on executing your tasks and grinding through the day, in case you can't stomach their toxicity. For a social personality, that's not so easy to do.

You have some inner wisdom within you that your friend is clearly lacking. Listen to that wisdom of yours and you can't go wrong. The true potential of psychedelics shine when done in clean and contemplative manner.

Take time to find a proper sitter. You don't want to trip together with a friend on your first time. You want to have a clean, comfortable and safe orientation to the realm of psychedelic experience. You don't need an enlightened master to sit for you. A person with common sense and caring is enough. I had my cousin sitting for me on my first time. He was just chilling in the other room doing his own shit not interrupting me, while being sober and ready to act, if necessary. That was exactly what I needed to have a great trip.

Yup, most of them are sheeps. Some of them are probably concerned about those questions but they don't have room to ask them, because the majority (who don't care) basically decides what are the right questions to ask. They're not conscious of what they're doing. Most of them just want a decent career to look good by social standards with decent salary to maintain the common life they think they want. Big chunk of them will later in life find themselves miserable and uninspired and they will ether commit to a toxic and boring life or they will make a big change and start moving the trajectory of their whole life. You're lucky that you're already asking those questions.

@b_woo I might share more in the future if I ever succeed. Too little tangible results so far and too much talk already. As an additional insight I could share, that what I figured out for myself is not anything very special. It's something that's being done already and something I've thought about earlier, but didn't go for, because I couldn't figure out a way to do it the way I like. I thought it cannot be done in a different way than everyone else is doing it and I didn't just want to compete with others in their toxic ways. There are some technical skills that I learned that gave me more confidence to go for it, but I think understanding human and collective development gave me super important trust to start doing this. To me it feels like that learning to understand which values are arising in my society and how my field plays role in it, allowed me to start bringing something new into the niche that nobody else is not really bringing yet. So I kind of decided to bring new ways of doing into a thing that's been done for a long time before already. The current values of the niche are kind of getting old and need refreshment. But these are still pretty much empty words when in comes to REAL results. Only motivation, trust and some material baby steps are created so far. It could be that this is a dead end and I need to come up with a new plan, who knows.

I'm an engineer and through working in project management I've already seen different areas of engineering field enough and contemplated these things enough to say with pretty high confidence, that the actual work will have very little to do with the studies, besides the necessary certificates or some necessary software skills or stuff like that you might need to have. From research side I have no experience of, so can't say about that, but pretty much everywhere else what matters the most is the attitude you take when you graduate and you step into business life. You sell yourself as a human, not a robot. I had very progressive and achievement oriented mindset when I started working as an engineer and that way I ended up acquiring some very important business skills. Skills not only from my field, but also skills of human interaction and socialization. I later realized that I can not live up to my values there and I need to make a change, so I decided to create an exit plan. The problem wasn't engineering per se, but the more or less toxic structure that is fueling the field that I had to be part of. I finally found myself a niche, a market place where I could express my values, while also doing what I'm good at and what I like, while minimizing the things I don't like, while also keeping it profitable and market wise to create a living out of it. I'm still working towards fully manifesting that, but it's looking really promising. Point of telling this is that I'm pretty sure I couldn't have found such a great niche had I not attained those important skills through that progressive grind and experience. I'm sure there is a way for you to do your thing through engineering, but it's still vague, as you are still really unaware of the reality of business world. Real experience opens possibilities and it doesn't come from school but from the hustle in the desert. Anyway, you need to be interested in the field in general, which you seem to be, so I wouldn't be too worried about some boring courses in school. I like to think serious personal development work as an insurance in that field. If I had not been interested in developing my psychology when I started getting into business world, I'm sure I would still be a sheep and super stuck in the system. It is very tempting and it has so many mechanics to suck you into it for good. I think it's important that if you jump into something like engineering, you are really progressive and perhaps already looking into creating your own business or at least having an idea or agenda of making it possible for you to do your thing and live by your own values, no matter what it takes. You need to lead your career with integrity. Combining engineering and serious personal development work is a killer cocktail!

The dominant male pursuing works in pick up and attraction in general, but when the wheels are already rolling and there is connection, intimacy, honesty and trust, then it's exactly that back and forth oscillating synergy between feminine and masculine that makes it work like a smooth engine. Especially when the aim of the relationship is to grow together

I awaken to how cool it is to have visual perception Same with hearing, touch, and everything... I'm too busy to be amazed by the beauty of the structure so that it makes the content irrelevant.

I have a spiritually motivated (SD Stage Green) friend who's had total financial support from his parents to live a good upper mid-class life without working at all since he moved away from his parents like over 10 years ago. He's been constantly suffering and backsliding because he's tried to develop faster than his psyche is able to tolerate. Just now he's awakening to the importance of other relative, more ordinary life matters.