mandyjw

@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.

The fear is your ego resisting and holding on. Fear is nothing but energy in your body, your mind experiences it as fear. So fear is a beautiful opportunity to experience that energy but you must let go of the thoughts about it, the thoughts that come from the place of fear and the idea of fear itself. If you are not able to at least momentarily experience the fear as energy and accept it, don't delve too deep into the things that bring it up strongly. Self love is a huge part of this practice. Spend time in nature, do short meditations, go for walks, start running. The focus is not doing some incredible spiritual feat and getting somewhere by going through suffering. The point is to bring love and peace into every moment of your life. I don't think age is any limit to anyone's potential but when I was 19 I thought mindfulness practices were the stupidest thing anyone had ever thought of. It didn't click until I was 26 and had experienced a storm of frustration and disappointment with life. So you're way ahead of where I was!

I probably wouldn't go to college until I had a really good idea of what I wanted to learn and what job I wanted to get qualified for. College is so over-priced right now, but hopefully that's not true in Australia like it is in the US. My concern would be that if you're into yoga and mindfulness you're going to want to have the financial freedom to set your own schedule and have time to pursue those things. But if college is what you really want to do it's never too late to go, you're better prepared than ever.

You're exactly right that karma that is meant except karma is a word that like God means different things to many people and has a lot of dogma that is attached to it. Not that people can't bring dogma into the law of attraction either. I just like to keep an open mind and study different things but I've found a lot of missing puzzle pieces by listening to Abraham Hicks teachings. The dedication to focusing on myself and my own piece of mind instead of feeling like I have to link into the pain of others in order to have compassion was an epiphany for me that I got from her teachings.

It definitely has some benefits. For years I thought it was at its best a scam, but life has shown me otherwise. I'm glad I did a lot of spiritual work before getting into it though because I think there is a huge danger or misunderstanding. I think stage green denies material things and desires but when you move to stage yellow you see the problem with demonizing them and creating a duality between material and spiritual. Basically true law of attraction teachings says that you have to be content with the way things are to get what you want. You have to feel love to get love, you have to feel abundant to receive abundance. Being at peace and being conscious is what you end up wanting in the end anyway. If you get really into it Eckhart Tolle teaches the Law of Attraction, but in a very subtle secondary way. Is the law of attraction putting the cart before the horse? Maybe. But everyone has a unique path.

If I'm in public I just people watch without judgement (that's the goal anyway lol) because I get a lot of insights and interesting interactions that way. I think it's just a valuable as meditation if you're really conscious about doing it.

Your gut feeling is both your intuition and the connection with energy levels in your body. Your mind will cut you off from feeling your body which is what clues you in to your own feelings of deeper guiding intelligence about what you are doing. When you are upset or in an off mood, don't think about what made you upset, go into the body and check in to know exactly where things feel off. If you focus on letting go of your thoughts, you'll only get more thoughts which is why you need to instead focus on a sound, your breath or as Tolle describes the feeling of aliveness in the body to successfully meditate. The thoughts that come are just the breaks between that focus.

The other thing I've noticed in this community, is that there is a 20 something male tendency to take the "badass" road to enlightenment. I love Leo and I love Wim Hoff and others, but don't limit yourself to taking very masculine or extreme approaches to awakening. If you can balance this stuff with the small and simple things, it can lead to major realizations and the underlying sense of joy and peace, flexibility and fluidity that is the whole point of this work.

The more conscious I become the more I feel like my introverted nature is a huge part of my ego, and was formed as a reaction to childhood. People are a huge challenge and I've noticed that I keep having unconscious expectations that other people aren't as wise as me so they can't offer me any value, but then when I interact with people with openness and without judgement I am humbled and find that that's not the case. Or if people make me angry or disappoint me it's almost always because I don't like a part of myself I see reflected in them. I do wonder if people who are extroverts would benefit from long solo retreats though.

The choice is not either or, you can live a normal life and be enlightened. There is no duality between spirituality and materialism.

I think you are very wise and on the right path. It seems like most people aren't really able to dive into this stuff until their late 20's or 30's. I don't think there's anything wrong with that because when you are young you need to focus on the world of form to ground yourself. Have faith in your own unique journey, don't try to do what other people think is the key for them if it isn't for you. Your own guidance and intuition are worth more than you know. If it doesn't feel good or right or light you up it's not getting you to enlightenment because enlightenment is feeling good, right and lit up right now.

New relationships bring out intensely the same bliss that enlightenment can bring you, only because it's conditional and depends on the person being there and acting a certain way towards you, it has a powerful flip side when things go wrong. Enlightenment is a less intense form of the same feeling, only more prevalent. For example, that love attraction, seeing yourself, being your best self kind of high can come from something mundane like looking at the sky. You're stuck in future and the present moment is the key to lasting fulfillment and enlightenment. Check out Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now and try to stay away from too much theory right now. By being present you can enjoy this relationship without ruining it by clinging or ruining your own experience by having dark nihilistic thoughts about the future. Stay present. There's only ever this moment. Focus on the good, beautiful things that can ONLY be enjoyed in the moment and know that they soon lose their beauty as soon as you feel the need to lock them in to having them stick around in the future.

I think Leo's answer is correct. I've listened to hours of Tolle, read all his books and he has said similar things multiple times and never refers to spiritually awakened people abusing drugs but rather the general population. However, I also wonder about how Alan Watts drank himself to death. Most of us can only be awake in the moment, permanent awakening is after all only a concept of the mind and awakening in its essence is not of the mind so the two cannot meet. You can definitely be both awakened and addicted. If you are the universe and the universe contains addicted people, you're also addicted yourself.

Yes. Look at it closely though, it's what we hate within ourselves that we hate in other people. They can show us what we need to change about ourselves.

For some it is. Almost everything we do is motivated out of fear of death. Even seeking enlightenment. As you become more aware you'll notice easier how unhealthy foods and habits cause suffering so often you'll naturally begin eating better.

Can one become enlightened simply by working with fear? It seems like all manifestations of ego are some low level of fear. Fear of not getting a mate, fear of being insignificant, fear of not being accepted, etc. Is the primal, raw sort of fear, like being startled by a sound, also from ego? If I become fearless will I also be free of ego or do I need to become egoless to become fearless.

Is that why we're so embarrassed after someone scares us and makes us jump?