r0ckyreed

IPEC. That’s where Leo got his at I think.

Do you find it worthwhile so far? How has it helped you? What new skills have you learned? Is it worth $50/month? Is it a scam? (I assume you can cancel at anytime). Thank you!

You're welcome!

Please keep us posted on how it goes. I am curious if it is legit. It sounds too good to be true to me.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

I need a book on how to read a book. Look at that strange loop! The best way for visualization is to just commit to doing it each day. Reading about visualization isn’t visualization. Read Into The Magic Shop. It talks about manifestation. Also, check out David Lion on YouTube. He’s got a great course on how to channel.

Read John Gorman’s book Making Marriage Work and implement the 7 principles he lays out. It is very enlightening. Gave me a brilliant point of view. Wish you the best.

?❤️? Turn everything spiritual. Don’t let anyone convince you to be anything but your most authentic self! (Whatever the hell that is for you lol). Keep making spiritual threads. Haters/critics are a good sign that you are on your path. Because nobody who is high on life and on their path will try to deter others from greatness. People on their true path uplift. At least that is how I see it. ?

Playfulness and seriousness are two sides of the same coin. David Lion teaches us to be playful with life and Leo Gura teaches us to be serious about life. Both are true. If you aren’t serious about playfulness and playful about being serious, then both sides will always be at war. Being serious about your play means caring about what you create and caring about honoring yourself and greatest gifts to serve life. If you aren’t serious about your play, then the default is mediocrity. But if you aren’t playful about being serious, then the outcome is a life without fun. Both outcomes lead to suffering. Art is work and art is play. That is the paradox. Anytime you think “either or” you can be sure that you are wrong. Reality is always all-encompassing and too damn intelligent to be put in the “either or” box.

Freewill assumes ownership of choice. There is no owner but Consciousness. Nothing outside of Consciousness to own and control it.

What is the assumption of freewill? That there is a mind behind it. Does a chair have freewill? An animal have freewill? An atom? A cell have freewill? Does a human being have freewill? If a human has freewill, then what part of the human has freewill and which parts don’t? Does the human toe have freewill? Does the human heart have freewill? Immune system? Brain? Neuron? Where is freewill located? Does the mind have freewill? Freewill is making distinctions in consciousness that aren’t really there. When you say a human has freewill, what do you mean by that? You already assume that human has a mind separate from your own. Really, the human mind and will is one with all of the universe. The human mind and the wind and lava and gas and the water cycle are all the same process. The Mind is constructing freewill. But is the mind free to construct freewill? I think so. When the Mind is fully present in the Now, all ideas of freewill become just that, ideas. Choice is an idea that you as a human can choose among many options. But if you aren’t even aware of your choices and freewill, then it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all. The freewill debate is also about the mind debate. It seems weird to argue freewill exists without also assuming that mind exists. But freewill debate is also deeper still than just mind. It is about whether choice exists or if it is all just a game of dominoes, cause and effect. Are there multiple possibilities or just one possibility? The mind constructs this. If you believe in one possibility that will be real for you. If you construct multiple possibilities for yourself, that will be real for you. Determinism is flawed because it takes the Intelligence out of life. It assumes life is linear, predictable, and that it is all just dumb matter. Determinism = materialism. But if we assume the freewill paradigm is true, we are also assuming that the Universe is an Intelligent Mind rather than a chain of linear cause and effect.

That's why I always laugh when somebody gets offended online. It is just words on a screen, and you never know the person's backstory, intentions, context, etc. Why give meaning and why care so much about what someone, a stranger, who you will probably never meet, thinks of you? If someone offends you with their words on here, that is on you to take responsibility for what you choose to do with your time. Turn off the computer, cut the people out of your life by literally "unplugging" from your computer. It is so much easier and satisfying than in the in-person life sometimes. Much harder to cut people out in "real life." If you can't do it online, then in-person life is gonna be harder.

Was just about to make a separate post on this, but I will post my insights here. I had a new insight into free will. I used to be free willer before philosophy, then when I took philosophy, I slowly became deterministic. However, when I did spirituality, I have realized that determinism is an illusion and free will exists. You have free will because you are God. I realized I have free will by being conscious of all that I am willing. I can move my fingers. How am I able to move my fingers? How am I as consciousness able to will something at all? How am I able to will something without knowing how I am willing it? But you see, existence and will come before knowledge of how you exist and will. Even to analyze your own thoughts of how you willed your thoughts has to first be a will. You see the problem? Your act of knowing is a will - decision, desire, action, behavior. But where does the "free" part come in? Free will does not mean that the ego can do whatever it wants. People who are determinists or spiritualists will sometimes say that free will is an illusion because the ego is an illusion. But the ego is never the one who has free will. People who say free will is an illusion because the ego is an illusion are mistaken I believe because the free will debate to me is about whether choice or will exists or not. In a deterministic universe, there is no choice or will, it is just events and actions happening like dominos in a linear way, but this seems to be underestimating the power and intelligence of reality and dumbing it down to a linear progression. It may appear linear and causal to you, but that does not mean that is how it is. For clarity, when I say you have free will, I mean the awareness can will and choose what it focuses on. You are consciousness and consciousness can decide what aspects to be aware of. It is kind of a paradox, but from a certain perspective, you have free will by realizing you have none as an ego. The reason why I say you have free will is because you as consciousness can do whatever you want. If you want to move your hand, you will send signals to your imaginary brain, to fire electrochemical impulses and move your imaginary blood so that you can move your hand. But to move your hand, you also need to will the entire universe around your hand. For instance, to even move your hand, the sun has to exist and be a certain distance from earth, plants have to grow for there to be life at all. Why is this? You willed it to be like this because this is how you designed reality but you just forgot. You are willing everything right now, it is just that you don't know how you are doing it. Alan Watts says that you can say that you are breathing right now, and you can also say that it is happening to you. Both are true. You are willing the circumstances for breathing to happen, which is another way of saying that you are God. So yes, you have free will, you just don't know how your doing it, and the Self or Consciousness is not the one who has free will, it is free will. Your ego is just the idea of separation which doesn't actually exist. You can whatever you really put your mind and heart to. The mistake is that there is a subject who is willing. There is just Consciousness with the properties of intelligence and will. EDIT: Also, your first response to the poll is backwards, it should be that free will is true in the ultimate sense but an illusion in the relative sense, which is what this response is about. The human being doesn't have free will because it is subject to the Will of the Universe or God's Will.

Enough? Lol. Reading Leo’s entire booklist is only the beginning of self-education. Aim beyond the booklist, which means you first have to read the booklist. You only grow relative to the quality of your aims. If you aim for enough, you will hit that. If you aim for extraordinary and exceptional then you will hit that too.

I haven’t been following much, but will your new awakening course be strictly focusing on psychedelics as a means to awaken or will it also focus on contemplation and sober ways of awakening as well? While I grant that psychedelics can raise consciousness, I am skeptical that they “produce” awakening. If that were so, then anybody who takes them could awaken, but the thing is that realization is more than just a pill, it is a state of mind. How is it that there are psychonauts who aren’t God-Realized if all it really takes is a drug-induced state? That’s why I stress mastering the sober state. Until the sober state is mastered, all other “higher states” will be inhibited or reflected by the other undeveloped states (I.e., sober state). It’s not as simple as plugging 200 trips of 5-meO. With some peoples minds, no amount of psychedelics will breakthrough. Behind the scenes contemplation and integration needs to happen.

I have been holding back on posting this trip for a while now, but I thought I would share it because I do not see a lot of information about anesthesia on here. I would like to make better sense of my experience. This trip happened back in 2016. I was needing to get my wisdom teeth removed. Back then (Senior year in high school), I was a cross-country runner. When I walked into the room, they measured my heart rate at 42 beats per minute. The person there was kind of shocked, but I told her I was a cross-country runner. Anyways, as soon as I got the shot of anesthesia, that was the last thing I remembered before waking up to the sound of my dad's voice. Where was I in the space between the shot and the wake up? It felt like I woke up in just a blink of an eye. I had no ego at all in that space. As I was beginning to wake back up, I remember still existing in the egoless void for a bit. I could hear sounds of my dad's voice getting me to wake up, but I still had no registered what it was. The sounds were all part of Me but the "I" character did not exist. It was as if going back into the world (reintegrating back into the world) was like recreating myself again. "The procedure" did not exist. All there was in my experience was the shot in my arm, the egoless void, and the waking up. Which all happened as if it did not even happen at all. This all makes me really wonder whether I experienced death. What is the difference between the short death I experienced and the long-term death that we assume will happen at the end of our lives? Is there really a difference? The "death" I experienced was so short that it was as if it did not even happen. This makes me really wonder whether physical death is even real. I mean what was I before I was born? There is a blank. Yet, from this blank, the idea and story of me was created, and I imagined it being recreated when I woke up from anesthesia. Billions of years can pass as if it is nothing, a blink of an eye. Maybe it is nothing? But what is nothing? That is probably one of the deepest questions I could ask. It hits into all things that we think of when we call something "reality." Reality is consciousness and consciousness is nothing at all. This trip also revealed to me at that time that I am consciousness. I never lose consciousness, I just lose an ego for a "brief time." There are many forms of ego-deaths that happens in our lives when sleeping, life/personality change, or anesthesia/drugs/meditiation, and death. But this seems contradictory to me because my direct experience suggests that those events of sleeping and anesthesia never happened but were merely constructed to create reality from a blank. The ego never really dies because it never existed. This trip was the closest experience I have had to have having my entire reality wiped away. What are your all's thoughts? Have you had similar experiences on anesthesia? How different is the ego death of psychedelics different to that of anesthesia? This ego death was so intense that I did not have any experience at all. I had no colors, no hallucinations, no ideas, not even an idea of myself being under anesthesia, no memory, etc. It was as if I was really dead.

Here’s an insight I just had on a run and it’s this. If you aren’t frustrated with yourself for being mediocre then you’re doing it wrong. If you are happy with being mediocre then you are reinforcing mediocrity in your life. The Buddha is wrong the goal is not to eliminate suffering, it is to learn how to bear it with it and use it to grow yourself to success. Think about it if you were completely happy and didn’t suffer and weren’t frustrated with being mediocre then you would be mediocre. You will become whatever you are content with. If you are satisfied with playing video games all day and don’t feel anything wrong with that, then you will never level up. Without suffering there could be no growth and no success. Think of any person you think is highly developed. David Goggins, Sadhguru, Alan Watts, Leo Gura, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or whoever. The common theme is they are all not content with being mediocre. If they followed the teachings of Buddha or Christ to be satisfied with themselves, then they would have never leveled up in life. This comes from my personal experience. I excel at anything I really care about whether that’s tennis, trumpet, or whatever. With caring comes suffering. But suffering is good. Attachment is good. It is good to be attached to things that deeply matter such as your vision for your life. If I followed the Buddha, I would have never excelled at anything. Yes, I got mad at myself for failure, yes I suffered, but what is a good life without suffering? It’s counterintuitive. The good life isn’t infinite bliss, it is falling in love with life, which means to set challenges for yourself, fail, and to suffer. The good life is falling in love with suffering, not trying to get rid of it. That’s the key point. I could not be attached, not care about my results, but the fact is, you aren’t going to enjoy your life if you don’t care about it or the results. Your life is always happening now. Fall in love with the Now always because that is where you live, but that is no excuse to not care, not plan, and not have a vision. It is paradox to be in the Now while also being a Visionary. You have to know the right balance for you to be at your 100%. If you aren’t at 100%, it is okay to not be satisfied. Always love yourself, but never be satisfied if you aren’t living up to your fullest. That is also a paradox as well. How do I love myself if you are telling me to not be satisfied with myself for being mediocre? Because the highest love you can give yourself is your fullest creative potential. Being dissatisfied and angry is good because that is a sign that you are acknowledging some area of your life is unacceptable to you. That is good. If you are satisfied doing drugs then you will never stop doing them. Real change comes with you being real to yourself. At some point you have to admit that your poison is unacceptable. Your highest love is to not be satisfied with everything in your life (particular that which doesn’t serve you; mediocrity), it is rather to strive to be satisfied with yourself now with a vision to be in alignment with your higher-self. Hope this is helpful. This was a big trap for me. It is easy to take teachings to limit your growth. The key takeaway is to allow yourself to be angry with things that don’t go your way. If you are a happy Buddha with everything, then you are signaling to the Universe that you are also okay with being mediocre. You will manifest what you accept. Contemplate what improvement really means and entails. If I am satisfied with how fast I run, then can you see how that would hinder me from improving? Improvement requires a big change in your mentality to always strive to get better. There is no finish line. Whatever you are satisfied with, that is what you’ll get.

I see suffering as being of the body, which I think of as pain and discomfort. Then, there is also suffering of the mind, which I think is dissatisfaction, unhappiness, depression, greed, anger, etc. Basically taking the present moment for granted and not liking it. Yes. What I’m talking about here is learning to accept what naturally arises. So I am speaking learning to love the suffering of the body, pain/discomfort. And learning to accept and love yourself when you are frustrated, sad, or whatever as a natural consequence to things that can happen. If your house burns down, people you love die, or you fall and break your leg, you are naturally going to suffer if you care about those things: your house, family, and your health. And that is okay to feel those emotions. When I say love your suffering, I mean to give yourself love as if you loved a child when they are suffering, so self-compassion. I am saying that you can always see the magic of life and fall in love with it and still experience all the emotions too. In fact, I suggest it is important to be emotionally sensitive and not closed off like I used to believe. I used to take a Jedi approach where you were always calm and happy and never expressed any other “negative” emotions. The thing is to never lose sight of maintaining self-control and self-love when feeling frustrated or fear or sadness, etc. A deeper level of love is to love all the emotions you feel, not just the “good” ones. The “negative” ones can give you great power and can keep you on track, but if your not careful, they can break you. Even positive emotions can also break you. Too much positivity can collapse into negativity if not careful. What does it mean to “transcend suffering?” Do you still feel fear, sadness, pain, etc.? That’s right. I am willing to put in the work to achieve my goals, but I still backslide in my pursuits. This is normal. To me, it is okay to be frustrated with backsliding. But like I say, never lose sight of loving yourself fully, which I see as accepting yourself and striving to improve. I don’t think I’m above mediocrity. I think I am exceptional at some things, but am mediocre in other areas. I strive to be exceptional in all things that matter to me. The hard paradox is if I am satisfied and complete as I am, how do I improve? Doesn’t improvement imply something isn’t complete? If it is perfect, why improve it? The thing is that I am complete as I am already. Improvement is something I give to myself because I love how complete I am already and know the potential of more that I can do with time. The default position is complacency which is being satisfied with no striving to improve. I agree. No amount of achievement will ever satisfy you if you cannot be happy with yourself now. What I am saying is that satisfaction for life is critical, but being satisfied with no aim to improve (complacency) is a trap. If I run for an hour and meditate for an hour very deeply, I will strive to improve that. My goal is to have fun, enjoy the process, but also to improve as well. I set high standards for myself. If I don’t follow through on it, I am dissatisfied. Not in myself, but in my performance. I totally agree. Maybe I was unclear in my communication. But what I was saying is yes, the deepest levels of satisfaction come from within but that it is okay to experience dissatisfaction to help you grow. Not dissatisfaction in yourself, but in your performance. That is the key that I was trying to illustrate. Always love yourself and accept the performance you gave, but don’t be satisfied with it if it doesn’t live up to your standards. Set high standards for yourself to honor your life is basically what I am saying. Aim for the sun. If you land on a moon, keep going and enjoy the ride. Yes, you are complete even if you land on a moon, but the sun is where you are fully blossomed. A seed is perfect and complete as it is, but if the seed wishes to become the highest of what it is, it will have to be willing to bear through droughts, heavy rain, wind, and storms. The same is with us. At least I think.

Stated that question and answer in my original post. There is a difference between loving yourself and being complacent/satisfied. It really depends on what you are meaning by satisfaction. If you being satisfied means that you are complacent, satisfied with just eating junk food and watching movies, then satisfaction is an obstacle. Like I keep saying, if you are happy where you are at, then you will stay there. But if you want to live up to your full potential, that is gonna take a lot of work and suffering to attain. Whatever goal you have in life, you gotta ask how much am I willing to suffer for this goal? It’s important to have realistic expectations. If you aren’t where you wanna be in life, then don’t be satisfied with that. Go after your dreams and fight for them. Of course you always wanna strive to be satisfied with yourself existentially speaking, but I am focusing on circumstances.

If you want something to happen, you gotta model it yourself. What is your positive insight without coming on here just to argue or judge?

Assuming Buddha and Christ actually existed, I agree totally. My issue is that it is really easy to misunderstand the Buddha. If you interpret him as the goal being to eliminating all suffering, then you also eliminate all that is good about life as a natural consequence. That is what I was saying he was wrong about if in fact he meant it in the way I interpreted it. All I am saying is that I realized for myself is that it is okay to feel other emotions besides happiness. It is okay to let yourself feel frustrated when you don’t perform your best. In fact, I suggest that being happy with a poor performance in life is a reinforcer to repeat bad performances. If you are happy doing drugs, you will continue to do them, but if you are mad at yourself for doing them, that could be what you need to bring about a change in you. People can easily turn Buddhism into a trap where they want to let go of all their attachments, desires, and dreams, and strive to have no emotion other than happiness, contentment, and bliss. But the issue is that the Buddha’s teachings on attachment for instance and suffering, don’t seem to me like they apply to the majority of people today. I hear a lot of people say to me that if they followed the Buddha, they wouldn’t care, and that hit me because I realized that the reason why I studied philosophy, and why I excelled at all the things I excelled at were because I cared. I still loved myself and was loved what I did, but my perfectionism showed how much I cared about being good at the skills I cared about. Maybe this is my misunderstanding of Buddha’s teachings and if so, I guarantee I am not alone. For instance, I do agree with Buddha about striving to live in the Now, but the thing is that if you go all the way with any teaching, it will stunt you and become a trap. Living in the Now is always a reality for you whether you are thinking about future or not. All teachings need nuance. Meditation is good, but like I said, at some point you gotta get off the mat and learn how to meditate when you are in the moment of suffering. Suffering is eliminated not by avoiding it and emotional fakery and toxic positivity, but it is rather “eliminated” when you no longer perceive suffering as suffering. That is my take on it at this point anyways. I appreciate your all’s thoughts and feedback so far.

It’s gonna mean something to you. That is what matters. I think this is a trap that even Leo warned about. Not all meanings are at equal footing. It is like saying that the Left Wing and Right Wing are both equal footing. But they are not. You can feel inside yourself and determine whether eating junk food or working out is more meaningful. They are both relative but that doesn’t mean junk food is healthy because it is relative. Life is meaningless but you living as a human if you treat it like that, then there is also no reason to breathe. I pointed this out in my Desire Contemplation post. Meaning needs to be constructed to survive in this meaningless universe. Life is meaningless which makes it infinitely meaningful because you can create whatever meaning you truly want. Life is meaningless goes full circle. I think it is important to be careful here with understanding of relativism. Relativism doesn’t mean that everyone is on equal levels. There are degrees. For instance, Hitler was more selfish than Gandhi. Is this just my opinion? Feel inwards and be truthful to yourself. Of course, Hitler won’t introspect truthfully and he will say he is selfless. But that doesn’t mean it is true. Relativism doesn’t mean anything goes. It means something is only true under certain contexts and parameters. Sure you can but be careful what you go for. Remember, this is a post in the personal development thread so while mediocre may be an illusion at highest level, I am talking relativistically here on insights around survival. To say mediocre and success is illusion to average person would derail them not help them. What do you expect lol. We are talking about personal development. And you make it seem like stage orange is a bad thing. You can’t reach the highest stages if you don’t have the basics from other stages mastered. This is a stage Orange thread and that is okay. Even after you awaken at Turquoise or beyond or whatever you wanna call that stage, you gotta be able to bring it back and integrate it with lower stages. Realizing you are God is one thing, but living like God is another. That’s true. It all comes from within. What I mean by satisfaction in this particular thread is more like contentment or complacency, where you are happy where you are at and don’t care about going forward. In a way, that is a low level of satisfaction. A high level would be what I indicate above which is to maximize your creative potential and not just sit around on the couch all day. At some point you gotta put on your shoes and take them off. Balance. I appreciate your all’s feedback and thoughts so far.

Being “hot” I assume you are referring to physical body is a facet society/culture has brainwashed upon you as a form of psychic control. All genders struggle with this notion of being “hot.” Heres the reality. It doesn’t matter how your physical body looks in terms of what society thinks. We are all gonna grow old (if we are lucky) and die. Even the hottest people in the world will become the “ugliest.” Everyone will be the same dust in the end. Hot is an illusion. Strive to be mentally hot not body hot because at the end of the day, the quality of your mind is what you have control over. Both your body and mind will decay with time, but the point is to develop yourself and live up to your best. At the end of the day, everyone has insecurities and just realize that you aren’t alone in that. Notice how everyone has insecurities. It is quite normal actually.

Yes. I love my time alone. My mind fascinates me more than other people. Social life can be very awkward for me because I only love talking about controversial things and things few people are interested in like philosophy for instance. I’ve always seen obsession and repetitive behaviors as a positive. I have always been obsessed by things that I love. Meditation and doing other activities may be helpful. But I think following your obsession can be good if your obsession is aligned with your heart.

If you are going to create an identity out of being Aspergian, it might be a good idea to have another perspective, possibly a mental health counselor/practitioner. Self-diagnosis can be dangerous if you don’t know what your doing. Of course, the diagnosis game is arbitrary. I have Aspergers and ADHD, but I never defined myself by it. I saw myself in a positive light. I was not very social, had trouble communicating, but I loved spending time alone playing with toys and things more than with other children. I still kinda do this today, but with my mind. I know some people who have autism suffer from negative outcomes of being isolated. But for me, I was always labeled as weird by others, but I never cared what they thought because I was more interested in music, tennis, chess, etc. I was also very hyperactive and never knew how to “act” in social situations. But I focused my energy on what I liked rather than social drama. I was obsessed with being the best at whatever I did. I was a perfectionist. I could spend hours doing the same thing over and over again, as repetitive behaviors are a symptom of autism spectrum or aspergers. Today, I am similar. I never had medication. Activities that trained my focus such as tennis, trumpet, chess, magic, etc. were my “medication” that helped me build the skills to manage symptoms and enhance them in positive ways. But remember, you are not a diagnosis. You are unique. However, diagnosis can be a great tool to help you understand how unique you are.