Ninja_pig

This is the best answer. Trump's administration will do pretty much anything to make sure the S&P 500 doesn't fail. Additionally, you can equip yourself with marketable skills which is the surest way to acheive financial security in the long term. This is timeless advice.

I wish you good fortune

@nerdspeak well got-dayum. Didn't know I had it so wrong! I have often theorised that college would be less expensive if student loans weren't a thing though. Collages charge such insane tuition because people are able to pay for it. I'm just personally glad I have a degree and no debt.

@Majed I think going to university would be a good idea and it would allow you to make money. Just a couple suggestions: 1. Don't accrue any debt, or at least accrue very little debt. If your plan is financial freedom then debt can totally screw you. Work on the side and do coege part time if that's what you have to do. 2. Don't expect it to be super easy to get a job, but don't think it's impossible either. Make sure you do side projects, network, and try yo get internships or do research at your university during your undergrad. A degree without any other experience is worth very little. 3. Make sure you leave a little time on your path to financial freedom to pursue your passion on the side. Be writing music or otherwise perfecting your craft in order to keep your heart beating and your passion burning. Also, you never know when you will die, so don't delay too much to get your art into the world. But yeah go to college it is a good idea. Degrees are valuable even if they aren't an automatic ticket to a job. I wish you the best of luck.

Hello everyone, a little bit of relevant background: I'm 22 years old, and I have been watching Leo since I was around 14 or 15. When I was 20, I spent a month at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand in between semesters in college. It was a theravada Buddhist monastery, and they were basically running a program for foreigners like me to experience being a monk. (Here is the link to their website if anyone is interested. Ihttps://monklifeproject.com/ I would highly reccomend this program to anyone on this forum. There many wise master meditators here that you can learn a lot from.) In college, I studied physics and mathematics. Right now I'm serving as a peace corps volunteer in Guinea teaching 8th grade math. I have had many awakening experiences, all except 1 from psychedelics such as dmt, mushrooms, and weed. So if you can't tell, I'm very passionate and serious about spirituality. I watched so much of Leo's channel during middle school and high school that he's basically a father figure to me. It was his work that inspired me to go to the Buddhist monastery and take psychedelics. Now I have made a lot of progress I think, but I'm really torn as to how to live my life going forward. The routine at the Buddhist monastery came down to wake up, meditate, do chores, eat breakfast, meditate, eat lunch, meditate, take a break, meditate, go to sleep. This routine was extremely effective for me. Never before had I achieved such a level of of peace, innocence, consciousness, and meditation skill. I basically told myself that I would come back once I had "burned through one piece of karma", if you will. That karma was getting a PhD in physics. At the end of college though, I did not apply to graduate school because I thought there was little chance of me getting in, and also even if I did get in I felt as though I was not prepared for graduate school. I did not want to get a normal job so now I'm doing Peace Corps. Doing peace corps and having some time away from academia, and reading some great books on spirituality, I am starting to feel a greater and greater desire to live a monastic lifestyle again. That combined with an extremely deep religious experience I had a couple months ago has really got me seriously considering spending the better part of my twenties with a guru or at a monastery whether thay be theravada Buddhist, zen, or maybe even Christian. I have recently been moving away from the idea of going to graduate school for physics, as I have been learning on my own through textbooks and online resources and have made substantial progress. So I have decided I don't need academia to learn physics to a satisfactory level for me. So what's the problem? Why don't I just go to a monastery? Basically, it's because I have a girlfriend whom I feel is the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me. I had applied to peace corps before the relationship started and then we were dating for about 6 months before I left. Now we are doing long distance, and I have been in long term relationships before but I have never felt so close to someone like this before. I didn't really understand the concept of marriage but now it makes sense to me. So I basically don't want to lose this relationship by becoming a monk for probably a long time. I really don't know if that's wise or not because I feel like she is the love of my life, but shouldn't I persue my life's purpose over that? I just feel like relationships like this only come once in a life time. She loves me so much too, how could I do that to her? I know many of you will now say that I can persue spirituality without leaving society and abandoning my relationship, but I disagree. I personally think it takes a huge commitment to make real progress spirituality. 2 hours a day of meditation is like doing 30 pushup every day and expecting to get ripped. I mean, 30 pushups will definitely allow you to make progress, but not that much. I think that to really make a lot of progress you have to be fully committed, focusing almost completely on that one goal. I'm saying this based off of my own experience. That's why I want to live that lifestyle mostly only available to a recluse or a monk. What if the relationship ends for some reason? Well then that simplifies things a lot for me. I can just persue the monastic lifestyle because at that point I wouldn't really have anything super value to lose. If I choose not to pursue the monastic life I will pursue a career in engineering probably and try to make enough money to retire at a young age like 35 or 40. At that point I can devote all my time go learning physics and meditation. Although if I did that I wouldn't have the expert instruction of experienced monks or a guru. So basically just looking for if anyone has any advice on how I should make a choice like this or can point out something I'm not considering. TLDR: I want to become a monk for a long time but I don't want to give up my relationship.

@PenguinPablo I could probably go to a monastery for many years without accruing any debt. The challenge would be that I would have no career experience by the end of it so I would have to work a low skill job for a while probably. That or I would just have to remain a monk indefinitely. @r0ckyreed Sex itself isn't a big motivator for me. It's more the connection and love that our relationship offers. Maybe it could be spirituality beneficial, but would it compare to years of hardcore meditation? @ryoko I didn't want a normal job when I got out of college, and I would go into engineering because it pays well and is something I'd be reasonably good at and enjoy. The main purpose of pursuing any career for me would be to make enough money so that I wouldn't have to work any more and thus have total freedom to work on less monetizable pursuits. The last time I stayed in a monastery it was an extremely positive experience for me. It was a community of master meditators who were all there trying to help each other along on the journey. Yes, they indoctrinate you into the dogma of theravada buddhism, but the focus is always on meditation, practice over theory. I think it is actually the optimal environment for spiritual growth because you can focus almost completely on only meditation. I knew monks who would meditate for 10 hours a day, which would be hard if you were a solo monk and you had to worry about doing alms every day just to eat. Naramada parikrama sounds interesting though. I will look into it.

I have blood caked on my walls, I have shit stains on my carpets, I have holes in my ceiling, I have shattered windows, I have scars and permanent damage to my body from my Awakenings. That's how profoundly my dmt syinge penetrated my asshole.

Why does practically no one care about the intersection between physics and spirituality? Leo, of course, has a very well prepared answer to this. The answer is that the modern scientific establishment, which is a giant mass of self validating authority, cannot move beyond its materialist paradigm and start to consider the importance of the observer as part of the physical systems they are studying. (Someone correct me if I didn't get this right). The trouble for me is that even given this explanation, there are no "wackos", no "fringe" or "pseudo" scientist, no internet conspiracy theorists, NO ONE who have both a deep understanding of spirituality and physics, and also have a humble respect for truth and epistemology. Of course, you have to exert zero effort to find someone who claims to be studying, or has found some theory of everything which ties together biology, consciousness, the standard model, GR, and God into one self consistent theory with a nice little bow on top. Whenever I find someone with this type of claim though, the theory will be either utter speculation (neither based on direct experience nor experimental observations), supper narrow in scope (for example, a mathematical framework to tie together QFT and GR), or a leap from some physical phenomenon to consciousness with absolutely no logic or critical thinking in between (for example, Roger Penrose positing that consciousness arises from quantum effects in the brain. Anyone who has perused spirituality deeply will know that this is definitely wrong, because consciousness does not arise from physical phenomena but instead is responsible for those phenomena. Penrose is about as academic establishment scientist as you can get though). So like, can we please find one person who for example: 1. Knows that they are god, and all of reality is part of their mind. In other words they have discovered absolute truth. 2. Understands the mathematics and logic behind physical theories like general relativity and quantum field theory. 3. Seeks to use their understanding of these two fields to build a cohesive model of the universe. Starting from the one absolute truth and from there deriving all the relative truths that we know and love today. I mean, this is definitely a big ask, but at the same time you would expect to see a couple people working on this. In reality though, there are NONE. I think someone might be able to to point out a couple contenders for people trying to work on this, such as Christopher Lanigan or maybe Joseph Campbell. But their theories are unsatisfactory to me. So I'm going to try to be as clear as possible as to what I'm looking for: I want an explanation of everything, nothing less. I want someone to be able to take the unopinionated ground truth of all of reality, which is nonduality, god, consciousness itself, or whatever you want to call it. I want the theory to start from 0. From nothing. From the point of total nothingness and ending in the exact nature of the reality which we see before our eyes today. A theory like this would be totally logical and be based on subjective experience of absolute truth at the most basic level. From this point, I want to be able to describe the nature of our conscious experience, and the objective reality which we seem to be experiencing living in. I want U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) symmetry to be explained, and I want every physical phenomenon in the whole universe to be able to be explained. I don't really see anyone who has a really good understanding of the foundations of physics right now and at the same time has a really good understand of consciousness and absolute truth. Personally, I have what I would consider a surface level understanding of both of these things. I'm working on it myself, but I don't see anyone else who I would consider to be like me. I have spent some time at a Buddhist monastery so far, and I have bachelors in mathematics and physics, but I have waaay more work to do before I really even know the exact questions to ask. Anyway, all the theoretical physicists today are materialists and if they are talking about consciousness it's because they want to be trendy, but really they have no idea what they are talking about once they get away from physics. All mystics I know of who know about direct experience of absolute truth seem to not really care about physics, or have a very lazy understanding of it. So yeah this was just a rant let me know what you think.

Where on the globe can you walk south one mine, west one mile, and north one mile, and end up in the same location? If you said the North Pole, you are correct. But there is another location. can you find it? Think before reading the answer. Take at least a few minutes. The answer is if you are exactly 1/(2*pi) + 1 miles away from the south pole, then you can walk south one mile, walk in a circle that has a circumference of one mile, then walk north one mile, and end up in the same spot.

Personally, I have no idea where my insights come from or even how to induce them. They just come to me at totally random moments when I am deep in thought or between thoughts, or sometimes when I am working on something completely unrelated. Best advice I can give to you if you want to have good deep insights is just study and think deeply about things you are curious about, and do so playfully. Don't worry too much if epiphanies don't hit you left and right like Leo describes in his video. Just explore, don't stress!

Truth with a capital "T" means something that is not a matter of opinion, relativity, concept, or perspective. Absolute truth is just base reality with no additional material or ideas. Tangibly, this will look like a direct experience not stemming or subject to words or concepts. Any attempt to contain absolute truth within a concept will fail because then it becomes an object of the mind which is merely a form of information. Absolute truth is beyond the mind and beyond all concepts, but it is also totally undeniable once realized directly. It will be quite easy to know when you embody this value, as in a direct experience of the truth, although it may be difficult to realize all the implications of your experience. There will be no room for doubt in your mind. You are done when you are done.

I think in a metaphysical sense there is no such thing as good and evil. It is us humans who have created these concepts based on our own survival needs as a species. It is indeed a mistake to fight against evil at all costs, because what is truly evil will eventually die off of its own accord. I think it is also a mistake to say we should accept and embrace all evil, as we should also think about our own survival.

This image is truly historic. It may not be fun to be seeing modern history unfold, but a t least it's interesting.

Also, I believe it might be quite difficult to really understand spiral dynamics from the stage blue vantage point. You might not be stage blue but stage green or something like that. Few adults in modern America are stage red. It's primitive by today's standards. It might be best for you right now to use religion to move beyond that stage, rather than the advice of integral psychology. Embody the best you can the values of Christianity or Hinduism or whatever your faith may be.

I think when it comes to integrating a previous stage, it's not about trying to act out that stage, but trying to understand it, embrace it, and accept it. What you have to do is bring up these shadow qualities within yourself, and understand where they are coming from. Then you must fully accept them into your own identity/being, and then you will have the ability to transcend into the blue stage. You can identify shadow elements in yourself by seeing the insecurities you have or negative qualities you project into others. Usually our projections are actually just the unwanted qualities within ourselves. A technique for working though your shadow is using the "3 2 1" method proposed by Ken Wilber. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bhavanalearninggroup.com/wp-content/uploads/321-Process-for-the-Shadow.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwix5Yn6x9uJAxUIMtAFHULZIY4QFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0Cq9RxBkWRsdpQcNQ7BocK

I like how the brand new forum member's first post is accidently very meta in a forum that prides itself on being meta.

Wow! This feels like a stage Orange version of enlightenment to me. "It's all a dream, so just achieve things for the hell of it!". I very much like your description philosophy. Depending on what spiral dynamics stage you are at, you will form different conclusions from the perspective of an awakened state. The stage Green person might reason "Life is just a dream, so let's just love one another and hold nothing back". The stage yellow person might say "Life is just a dream, so free your mind and behold the beauty of creation through the pursuit of understanding ". Of course, every conclusion is the correct one, so just keep going for that dream Life of yours... Until you don't want to anymore.

Beautifully said. The universe is a verb, not a noun. God is just god-ing in the eternal now. Because of this reality is actually the ultimate good. It's pure divinity and nothing else.

The purpose of life is to live

I personally like "do nothing" meditation. You can also try transcendental meditation. I recommend experimenting with a few techniques to see which one gives you the best results. I said in my original comment you should do 2 hours a day, but this is probably too much to start out with. Two 20 minute sessions each day will suffice at first and then you can increase it later as you see fit. As I said, just practice it for like 2 weeks and the results will speak for themselves. The purpose of meditation is to still/calm your mind to the point where you have a highly enhanced ability to focus. Once you have stilled your mind sufficiently, it is much easier to see your thoughts, emotions, and ego for what they are. You will be able to observe an internal experience or think about something for a very extended period of time. This basically corresponds to an increase in consciousness because now your subjective experience is more cohesive and stabilized. There are probably more things that meditation gives you but this is what I have noticed myself. Increased consciousness won't "solve" your social anxiety. It will probably help you work though it though. By become more aware of your emotions you will be able to see social anxiety as a natural feeling that simply exists in your experience, rather than a force which completely prevents you from talking to strangers. The only real way to solve social anxiety is to find some good friends that you feel comfortable and accepted around, and also face your fears by talking to strangers. If you are having trouble with motivation, start small. You clearly WANT to increase your consciousness, you just don't have the discipline to do so because your mind is too messy. It's a mistake to want to go and start doing 2 hours a day right at the beginning because you will inevitably give up before a week has passed even if you are already starting to see results. Start with 2 20 minute sessions each day, and just do that for 2 weeks or a month. If you feel so excited about it that you want to do more, spend that energy doing something else like getting work done, exercising, or whatever. Meditation is very effective at calming the mind and after a little while you will be more able to discipline yourself because to a calm mind discipline comes naturally.

@ChrisZoZo True. I definitely only do it moderation (< once per month). It doesn't have psychedelic effects otherwise.

Here are some things I wrote down after a spiritual awakening I had on weed. It has been slightly edited to be more coherent and some extra things have been inserted to explain the thoughts. Extra thoughts will be marked with {}. God is actually the ultimate good and the universe as it is is actually perfect. You just can't see that because you are looking from the perspective of a human. {You are God but you are pretending you are a human}. When you awaken you start looking form the perspective of God. God is speaking directly through all spiritual masters. All spiritual masters sufficiently awakened will all be God speaking through them. This is because they are all speaking from the perspective of god. This is how Fred Davis can know through {your own} words if you are awakened. He is just recognizing himself. God evades all concepts. Only when you can transcend your ego and look from the perspective of God can you truly understand the nature of God. It is always god doing the human, and never the other way around. The nature of the universe and the physics of it are not at all related to consciousness, it's just consciousness is imagining the best possible dream. Because it is the only dream. {The fact the universe is the way it is right now makes it the best possible universe, and that's the only way it can possibly be.} You weren't born, you won't die, you are eternal. You don't go anywhere when you die because you don't exist. You are just the light coming from a TV, but even less material than light. "You are that" {A commonly uttered phrase by certain spiritual teachers}, what an unhelpful phrase. It won't help you wake up but it instills faith when your spiritual journey reaches a critical point and you awaken. Faith is the realization that other masters are more awake than you, and doing what they say because you can see God in them. Faith is trust in your spiritual teacher. Trust that God would say {what the teacher said} if he was fully awake. God wants so badly to wake up. Therefore a spiritual master will lure anyone partially awake like a magnet. You are not God, you are God. Both completely correct, just different ways of saying the same thing. {Talking about Islam now} When Mohamed made these crazy and ridiculous rules {Misogynistic and archaic recommendations for living}, he was just awakened and trying to explain things and make people do what would bring them closer to God. But Mohamed was unwise {He lived during an earlier time in the history of civilization} and the methods he gave to become closer to God are very flawed. Being the people we are today, more evolved {societally speaking}, we can see that the way of life of fundamental Muslims is wrong and nonproductive in many ways. The praying is good, bug not the misogyny. The worshiping God thing might actually bring us closer to God, but there may be more efficient ways. We kind of have to decide who we follow and how we go about that by deciding what teacher to follow. If we follow the Christian path, you will reach God in the second person, if you go the Buddhist path, you will reach God in the first person. I need to read ken Wilbur again to see which one is more correct, if either. Also they are both correct totally. They are not over-simplifications. Yes the bible is the word of god, but that was God speaking through ancient people. They were less evolved when it came to their thinking (not their genes). God has something different to say now that he is speaking through modern humans. He will say some things that agree with his past self and some that will contradict, but both are him saying it. Those that do not have the God realization, you didn't quite get there yet. Keep following who your favorite spiritual teacher is and do what they say. There is an unlimited amount you can awaken I think. If you think there's a limit it's because you haven't awakened enough.

When we're talking about raising consciousness, the practices you have listed would definitely work. Any practice where you are observing some part of your experience closely is effective. The most straightforward and most effective practice is meditation though. It would do you well to simply meditate for 2 hours a day. Your progress will speak for itself even after only 2 weeks or so. I would recommend reading some books or watching some you tube videos which detail what you will probably experience as your consciousness increases, so that you can gain more confidence in your practice as you see these predictions come to fruition.

@fopylo First of all, the book "Mastery" by George Leonard inspired me greatly. I saw with great clarity that if there was anything I wanted in life, it was to build a skillset that allows me to improve every day, contribute to society, and easily enter states of flow or deep work. I basically, many different times, sometimes using a journal and sometimes not, wondered "What is the best life I can imagine for myself that even has the slightest chance of being possible". I also have given myself a chance to try many different things throughout my college education that I have even a passing interest in. This has allowed me to observe how I preform in different settings and whether I like them or not. I have also tried on a plethora of different habits or techniques to see how I like them and what I have has worked the best so far. Mostly, I think for anyone who wants to make a good life vision, I think it is important to be curious about who you are, and carefully think about who you want to be. I think just doing this over a long period of time is how you develop a life vision that you like and are willing to work hard to achieve.

Personally, I write down my vision in my journal every day. It's part of my morning routine. I like your extensive list, but I try to keep my vision simple because it makes it easier for me to focus on. I often find that trying to create some grand plan for my life is not that useful when it comes to taking practical steps to achieve my vision. Instead, I try to focus on being consistent with habits that I know will get me to where I want to go. I keep a calendar and every day I make 4 quadrants in the box for that day. I have one quadrant each for meditation, exercise, reading, and skills development. I try to fill out all 4 quadrants every day with some kind of progress. So when I'm journaling about my vision I write down my 4 main goals and why I want to achieve them: I want to master physics so I can understand the world deeply, create new theories of my own, satisfy my curiosity, become smart, and be a master at something. I want to become very physically fit so that I look good, feel healthy, and have good cognitive health into old age. I want to feel comfortable in my body. I want to meditate often and become very conscious so I can have good mental health, have good self control, focus, and memory, and understand myself and reality better. I want to become a machine learning engineer so I can be on the forefront of technological development, have a job that gives me lots of freedom, pays well, and is something that I am passionate about. These goals may not seem all that ambitious or glamorous, but I have considered these for a LONG time. I am quite sure that these are the best goals for me right now. There are obviously a lot of details to sort out when it comes to achieving them, but I think that just reminding myself of them every day is a big step. It makes me remember to live my life on purpose and be cognizant of the future.