mandyjw

@Joseph Maynor Having been raised as a conservative Christian listening to it checks too many of those red flag boxes I'm so familiar with from organized religion. 1. Look at all these examples of people who fail. 2. These particular people are not worth spending time with. They are dangerous to your own spiritual growth. There is no light in them.

It's using spirituality as a way to make you more or better, the ego has latched onto spirituality as a way to separate it from other people who aren't spiritual.

The bird is already enlightened. Let the bird chirp and hear the beauty in it. Otherwise you get stuck in thoughts of should and should not and annoyance. Just keep coming back to your point of focus. If you didn't go away from it you wouldn't be strengthening anything by doing the practice. The bird is you own enlightened zen master.

A healthy ego is one that has been carefully weeded out so that you can use it when needed to survive as an individual in a world of form, create in a world of form and help others. Your ego helps you manage your time, care for yourself and others, plan for the future. Any past knowledge or future planning is all from your ego. You learn to use the ego and not have it use you. Denying the ego or not having compassion for the ego means denying your physical form and the physical world as whole. On the other hand, yes the ego IS the devil. But contrast is what allows our existence. There is no light without dark. They key is to keep as little of the ego around as possible and still have an amazing life while you are incarnate in the world of form.

I don't know if I've never seen a spiritual teacher give that much air time to negativity and judgement on other people's spiritual paths.

That's because you're splitting your attention, instead of getting completely lost in thought you're still grounded in awareness. Very cool.

God is always looking through your eyes.

It's your pain body, it's nothing personal. It's like a negative energy that comes over you. You were trying to be highly conscious and then engaged in an activity that put you an a completely unconscious state. It's completely understandable that that would bring it on. Try to be present with the energy of it. You're making a story about it, how it reminds you of a bad trip, how you have a history of depression. There's no story, there's just now. Just this energy. It can take years to dissolve the pain body. The episode get weaker and weaker and more infrequent. Staying in the present moment and not engaging with the story about it is the best way to dissolve it.

You became more aware and your awareness if focused on the inner body. You're nature is energy so you're literally feeling/experiencing your true self and aliveness. Your awareness has crossed over from meditation to everyday life. That's the goal, right?

That's not a question that should be answered on an intellectual level or that anyone can answer for you. Getting married and having a family is a bigger challenge than just focusing on spirituality but if you can stay present during all the responsibilities and distractions you can still evolve as much or more than if you set everything aside to focus. Because it's a bigger challenge you may be more likely to fail at it so it takes both a huge commitment to your family and your spirituality.

@now is forever You've got me thinking. Do you think people can truly be awake and at peace/ fulfillment without that Buddhist patience, compassion and understanding of suffering? I certainly agree that people can have enlightenment experiences at all ages and stages, but having a more permanent integrated experience and still missing that compassion element seems like something that if could be attained would not be desirable. I think I'd rather just be a regular person caught in the dream of form than to be able to see through the dream but have to cut myself off from other people to maintain it. Because other people are me too, so I have to accept them to accept myself. If I cannot accept other people and love them unconditionally I cannot do the same for myself and then I am creating duality and am not enlightened but fooling myself.

I can't answer the other questions because I only learned about spiral dynamics already mostly in yellow with still with a lot of green habits still set in. I think that the need to talk about, understand and conceptualize enlightenment ends with stage turquoise. Realizing how ridiculous talking about enlightenment is in the end is probably the key to getting to turquoise. I don't think forcing it is good either so I continue to follow my desire to talk about and learn about enlightenment while enjoying the times that I fall through the cracks of yellow into moving beyond thought. Then I come back and try to think about and understand the experience. It's amusing really.

There's a strong need in stage green to change others and change the world. Try to become very aware when you are triggered by other people or can't accept things the way they are. Not watching the news REALLY helps transcend stage green as well as not engaging in political discussions. Focus on seeing the positive in challenging people and accepting people and things for how they are.

@now is forever I do agree with what you're saying. I'm looking at it from the perspective that it is becoming more common for westerners to hear about enlightenment in stage orange, so it's the idea that you can take certain substances and do some grueling meditation and get stage turquoise is the temptation I'm trying to address. I think Leo's channel sets people up for thinking they can do A, B and C and get enlightened, but there are plenty of others who do the same like Tim Ferris. They started out making stage orange content and then themselves evolved but people don't see their journeys and only want to emulate. I'm not saying enlightenment can't happen at any age or spontaneously happen but I do think most of us are wired to only be patient and open enough for the real work a bit later in life. Stage orange to stage green to stage yellow. It's not stage orange, take some psychedelics, become stage turquoise for most people, for many it's stage orange, take some psychedelics, experience massive fear and ego backlash, perhaps even psychotic breaks. I keep hearing about this more and more. Leo has done the right thing, he's made the videos that "go into the weeds" as he says and explain spiral dynamics and the process thoroughly but there will always be those who skip over all of it in their impatience to enter a state of ultimate patience. When I was 20 and first heard about this stuff I had a lot of criticism, doubt and even disgust. That was a natural, healthy response from someone at stage orange. If I had been introduced to it by a role model I wanted to be like I probably would have seen it as a thing I could get to add to my sense of self.

Life and enlightenment IS about doing whatever you want and just having fun, the problem is whatever you want turns out to be the most miserable experience of all if you're disconnected with your deeper self. So do what you want, make yourself miserable, realize you are missing something important, and learn to connect with your deeper self. THEN you go back to doing whatever you want because for the first time ever you actually know what it is that you want.

@now is forever I think we all start out enlightened in a way, but it's the experience of living through thought, effort and duality and then choosing to go back that is the process most of us mean when we are talking about enlightenment. I was raised conservative christian and I remember being very young and just zoning out in church and just so in wonder with the sunlight outside the window. I was so stricken with the experience that told my mom that I knew what God was and she told me that wasn't God. I had to go through a lot of years and become an adult to relearn that that simple experience WAS God. Who knows what will happen with kids raised by enlightened or very conscious parents in conscious communities. Most of us were raised by materialist parents though.

@zunnyman Start with The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, an/or check him out on youtube.

That's so funny, I made this video today addressing this sort of dilemma. Leo has a very masculine, hard-nosed, dramatized approach to enlightenment. Look for teachers more like Eckhart Tolle. You're looking for more of a practice where you watch your thoughts and realize which thoughts cause you pain and are able to be present and stop those thoughts when they occur. You begin to recognize judgmental thoughts about yourself and others. Pay a lot of attention to your relationships with others. Spend time in nature. It's really easy in this day and age to get sort of sold on the idea of enlightenment and spirituality, and get excited about it and want to try to have enlightenment experiences. But lucky for you the real work is boring as hell. Nothing to be scared of.

Why does it bother you? Not just being smart, just interested in the answer.

It's a pretty fascinating thing to think about and study. Freedom and happiness don't go hand in hand if you're a materialist. It's like kids want and need structure and connection, and just enough freedom. We don't grow out of that as adults.

As you become more conscious and are able to tell when you are present and when you are caught in thinking, you will be able to tell the difference between thoughts, impulses and ideas that come through your heart and thoughts that come from trying too hard (the ego).

True reincarnation is falling back into the thinking mind and then awakening again.

It's like that but it's not really like that. You will get the wisdom to see that the victim and perpetrator are one. The dark and light are one in that you cannot have one without the other. Your experience isn't really what it seems, so if this current life experience is an illusion you cannot have other illusory experiences in the same way once you transcend the illusion of this one. You must consciously focus on the things you want to experience in this life to create more of them. Focus on love, light, the things that inspire you and don't get wrapped up in the dark stuff. You get more of what you focus on.

No, low self esteem is the same as an over-inflated sense of self. Both are comparing themselves to others to see where they stack up. One comes out lacking and one comes out on top but they suffer from the same flawed thinking. Just work on not judging yourself or others to overcome low self esteem. Otherwise you're always going to look to external factors for your self esteem and if you lose something, for example a job or a romantic partner you'll fall into it again. Most people who seem to have a strong confident sense of self have learned to appear that way and can be at war inside their heads. Don't look to thought or judgement for your self worth. You're alive and you're perfect. You can play around with external stuff going on in your life and overcome your shortcomings, climb the ladder of success, get a six pack or whatever you want because it's fun and playing around in the world of form is what life is about but it still doesn't really matter in the bigger sense of things, because you're always perfect. You were perfect on the day you were born and you will on the day you die and everything that's in between is just for funsies.

Mine was probably just the first time I realized that my mind was causing me a lot of pain and I just became aware of my surroundings and realized how perfect and stunningly beautiful they were even though I had been complaining and made miserable by them a few moments ago. It was late winter and we had had several massive snowstorms that were really hurting my business. I looked at the snow on the trees and saw that it was perfect. Ever since then I practice flipping from the mind to presence until presence is more of my experience and my mind doesn't cause me a lot of pain anymore. The more I train my brain to see beauty especially in the mundane and ugly, the more spectacular unexpected beauty triggers an enlightenment experience.