ChimpBrain

Ahhh, you're right, I did misinterpret you, my bad! You really think there's a radical amount of self improvement left to be done after enlightenment is reached? I thought it was the end goal and that after reaching it you'd switch from spending so much time on yourself to spending much more of your time helping others to realize this profound truth. I'm clearly speculating, and speculating based off of zero first hand knowledge at that.

You don't have to agree man. If there's one thing I've learned since starting to watch Leo's videos and read this forum it's that I really don't know shit. I wouldn't take me seriously either. I've never heard that self development begins with enlightenment, but frankly that seems pretty silly to me. We can't improve our health, relationships, finances, mindfulness, happiness, etc., until we become enlightened? What Leo says in his "what to do after discovering enlightenment" video is that you need to have all of the above things squared away and be in a reliably solid place in your life before you start chasing enlightenment. Again I make no claims about being "right". This is just my perspective on the matter.

It's not that I think self development is at odds with enlightenment, just that enlightenment appears to be the last step in self development and it seems like a lot of people are trying to jump straight to the last step without doing the necessary lead-up. Maybe everyone here is just that much further ahead of me in their development and I'm in denial. I know a lot of members are because when I read their posts the language is so vague and new-agey it's almost literally meaningless to me. But a lot aren't, and when I see them already chasing the enlightenment dragon it's disappointing. Leo presents enlightenment in such a sexy way that after watching a few of his videos on it, it's easy to think you've found the answer to all life's problems and now all you have to do is meditate until you reach this mythical state. I'm in no way faulting Leo, he's speaking from his heart, but he's so much further along the path than most of us and is actually in a state where it's appropriate to be striving to attain this goal. Also to be fair, in his "What to do next" video he specifically talks about how you really need to get all aspects of your life in order before you attempt enlightenment. Your right, it has been a sticky topic for me lately. And I await a minimum of 3 posts below telling me how all of this is just my ego fighting against the beauty and awe that is enlightenment

I'm starting to view it about like playing the lottery. Sure, if you win the payoff is huge. But what are the odds? And would that money (in our case time) be better spent on other productive endeavors?

Coming at the whole self improvement project from an orange/green level of development, I've squeezed a lot of juice from both stoicism and positive psychology by reading the books relating to each from Leo's book list. I've gained not much more than confusion from my foray into enlightenment research. I guess it's made me more open minded which is an obvious positive for moving up the ladder to the next stage. Am I the only one who thinks people considering themselves to be green or below could get a lot more from 100 hours of effort focused on creating their own happiness than chasing enlightenment? Frankly, to me, full blown permanent enlightenment seems like a complete pipe dream for the vast majority of us living in the 21st century West. Look at Leo, if he can spend years chasing it and not achieve it with his intellect, resources and level of open mindedness what chance do I stand? Enlightenment is a very sexy idea that people love to research, speculate on and imagine, but that is unattainable for most of us, but any average Joe can improve their life greatly by implementing principles of stoicism and positive psychology. With all that said obviously this is just my opinion and I fully realize I'm far below a lot (maybe most) of the posters here in regards to my level of development. If you've already mastered your emotions, psychology, relationships, discipline, income, etc, etc then of course moving to the next step makes sense, but it seems like a lot of people are putting the cart before the horse because of the allure of enlightenment. Please tell me what I'm overlooking here

"I'll say I consume probably about 500 calories a day on average." -- this is *extremely* unlikely. 1) if you're very out of shape you can both build muscle and lose fat at the same time. The closer you get to "in shape" the harder this becomes. So it depends on where you're at as to what you should focus on. 2) Don't stop doing cardio, but stop jogging. For improving body composition jogging is literally the worst form of cardio there is. Look into different methods of HIIT instead. 3) For a beginner trainee frequency trumps intensity and volume, go with a full body routine or a push/pull/legs type routine. 4) Of course calorie counting matters, but if you want to do it you need to buy a food scale and actually track what you eat, not just guess and say "I think I eat 500/day". Who says you should eat a portion the size of your fist? a portion of what? A salad the size of your fist might be 80 calories with 1g of fat, a handful of of mixed nuts might be 350 calories with 30g of fat.

Weight training and increased calories & protein. Well, if you want to gain weight anyway. Listening to your body is not going to help you gain weight if your natural body type is very thin. When I was 24 I was 6'2" 153lb, I started lifting weights and forcing myself to eat more and gained to 205lb in a year. Some of it was fat, but over the years I've kept at it and now am around 210lb at 7% body fat. If it's truly a priority to you, it's a problem with an easy solution. If you're saying you have conflicting priorities, you'll have to decide what's most important and focus on that, or devise some sort of compromise. One option if eating too much during the day is affecting your energy is to eat fairly light like you do now during the day, especially light on carbs because that's what makes you tired (serotonin & tryptophan), and then have a huge meal before bed. This will allow to you to both keep your energy levels high during the day, increase your overall caloric intake, and aid in better quality sleep from the pre-bed carbs.

http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence Key points....... One of the researchers who’s examined this question is a Duke University regenerative biologist, Imke Kirste. Like Bernardi, Kirste wasn’t trying to study silence at all. In 2013, she was examining the effects of sounds in the brains of adult mice. Her experiment exposed four groups of mice to various auditory stimuli: music, baby mouse calls, white noise, and silence. She expected that baby mouse calls, as a form of communication, might prompt the development of new brain cells. Like Bernardi, she thought of silence as a control that wouldn’t produce an effect. As it turned out, even though all the sounds had short-term neurological effects, not one of them had a lasting impact. Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested. Here’s how Kirste made sense of the results. She knew that “environmental enrichment,” like the introduction of toys or fellow mice, encouraged the development of neurons because they challenged the brains of mice. Perhaps the total absence of sound may have been so artificial, she reasoned—so alarming, even—that it prompted a higher level of sensitivity or alertness in the mice. Neurogenesis could be an adaptive response to uncanny quiet. The growth of new cells in the brain doesn’t always have health benefits. But in this case, Kirste says that the cells seemed to become functioning neurons. “We saw that silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system.” ------ In 2001, Raichle and his colleagues published a seminal paper that defined a “default mode” of brain function—situated in the prefrontal cortex, active in cognitive actions—implying a “resting” brain is perpetually active, gathering and evaluating information. Focused attention, in fact, curtails this scanning activity. The default mode, Raichle and company argued, has “rather obvious evolutionary significance.” Detecting predators, for example, should happen automatically, and not require additional intention and energy. Follow-up research has shown the default mode is also enlisted in self-reflection. In 2013, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Joseph Moran and colleagues wrote the brain’s default mode network “is observed most closely during the psychological task of reflecting on one’s personalities and characteristics (self-reflection), rather than during self-recognition, thinking of the self-concept, or thinking about self-esteem, for example.” During this time when the brain rests quietly, wrote Moran and colleagues, our brains integrate external and internal information into “a conscious workspace.” Freedom from noise and goal-directed tasks, it appears, unites the quiet without and within, allowing our conscious workspace to do its thing, to weave ourselves into the world, to discover where we fit in. That’s the power of silence.

Those aren't fears for me. Moving to a cabin in a remote wilderness sounds like a dream come true TBH, although I'm not sure my wife and daughter would come along which creates a problem or "resistance" for my ego I guess.

I am not seeking enlightenment. Only trying to learn about it because Leo seems sold on it and I trust his judgment. And since it's been the primary goal of buddhism and Hinduism (to the best of my knowledge) for thousands of years I have to believe there is immense benefits to it if you can actually achieve it. What does enlightenment look like to me? I've never met an enlightened person so my idea is just a caricature. I just envision someone who's truly happy and fulfilled, who truly loves his fellow man, and sees reality as it really is. Whatever that means. How are they different from me? I'm none of the things described above. What would I be like if I became enlightened? Not a clue, but I'm sure it would require renouncing my current life altogether. I think I'd be compelled to move to a cabin in a remote wilderness, or possibly to a developing nation. I can't imagine becoming enlightened and continuing to work 60hr weeks behind a computer at a job I don't like surrounded by people and culture I don't like.

Thanks for starting this. I've been wondering the same thing. I feel like I'm absorbing sooo much info lately and only implementing a tiny fraction of it because I have no plan or system in place to help guide me or keep me on track.

I didn't mean to imply that they had no value. I just felt the need to voice a little skepticism because this looked all too familiar. You're right, from what little I know all the ways of achieving a higher consciousness seem to have some value whether it's through fasting, meditation, sweat lodges, psychedelics, ceremonies that involve severe pain, yoga, or whatever else. I'm just more skeptical of those achieved by organized religion because of my first hand experience with it I guess. Which is probably not even fair because when I look at it objectively I would of course rather achieve it by being "saved" than I would to go through a bullet ant glove ceremony, have my foreskin removed with a sharp stick as a teenager, have a thousand little cuts from head to toe, or whatever other heinous shit various cultures have come up with over the centuries.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I expected to get flamed and told I'm just too low in the stages of development to "get it" or something along those lines. I now understand better than I did before, and also found a Ken Wilber video in another thread I'm working my way through right now that deals with this same topic.

You all will have to forgive me because I know this won't be a popular opinion here, but this strikes me as not much different than the types of things I witnessed all the time growing up in Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Only with a guru instead of a preacher. Just a bunch of mind-fuckery. You've spent months/years building yourself up to this point, then go on a guided exercise lead by an authority figure whom you trust which you expect to have a certain outcome (in front of a crowd who also expects the same outcome no less), and what do ya know, outcome achieved. Call me crazy but this looks no different than someone being "saved". Maybe that's the point though and I'm denying it? That these experiences really are the same (or similar) but there's different ways to get there? Different access ports to the same knowledge so to speak. The thing is, I would venture an estimate that something like 1% of those people I saw "saved" actually remained in that state for any length of time. Hell even my grandpa and uncle who were preachers for their entire lives and theoretically should have been the most enlightened of the bunch were just regular people. Caring, compassionate men, sure. "Enlightened", though? Not a chance.

Maybe How your mind distorts reality?

Just as I expected, Leo came through with all the necessary clarification for me to understand how to apply it in my own life.

There's is a video where he explains it MUCH better than I'd ever be able to but I'm sorry I can't remember which one. Understanding awareness maybe.? Or The Benefits of Enlightenment? Hopefully someone else will chime in and tell us. I think you're probably already familiar with the line of thought, I'm just doing a poor job of describing it. It's been 2 months or so since I watched the video so forgive me. Basically "you", your self concept, is just another perception manufactured by your nervous system. You're in a constant state of Flux and there is no you at all, only a perception of you. But you can't be both the perceiver of these perceptions and a perception itself, so what the hell are you? I feel like I'm butchering this tbh so definitely find the video where Leo describes it because it was pretty damn mind blowing the way he laid it out.

First of all for clarification I have not used the 5 meo DMT that's being discussed in this thread. Not because I don't want to, just because I'm old and out of the loop on obtaining certain things nowadays. I've used LSD and mushrooms countless times, MDMA, and 4-aco-DMT a handful each. My favorite is mushrooms personally. Real MDMA is also an amazing experience in the right setting if you can get your hands on it but the "hangover" effect is unpleasant the following day or two. LSD might be the most "enlightening" of them all in my experience but the comedown hours of the trip, from like hour 6 onward, is always very unpleasant for me. They all have their positives and negatives but on the whole I vote mushrooms.

I've been following the whole DMT/ayahausca thing since about 2010 or 11 because of Joe Rogan, Aubrey Marcus, Amber Lyon, Graham Hancock, etc. There's really no denying that it is changing a lot of lives in a positive way. Is it THE answer to all of our problems? No. Is it an answer to a lot of problems for a lot of people? I think so. I've experimented with a lot of psychedelics and have had nothing but positive experiences and realizations from them.

I'm familiar with this line of thinking again because of your videos, but let's be real, if it were super obvious this forum wouldn't be chock full if people trying unsuccessfully with all their might to attain this experience lol. Before your videos I was already familiar with the idea that I wasn't my thoughts, but rather the perceiver of them, but your videos took it to a whole other level to where I'm not even the perceiver, I'm a perception, and I can't be both a perception and the perceiver of my thoughts. Needless to say this concept pretty much blew my mind. Logically I can piece this puzzle together no problem once it's presented as convincingly as you have done, but actually feeling it to be true within my own experience is a different story. I'm only just recently getting into this whole idea though and I definitely haven't yet put in the work required, and also have a ton of beliefs that I know will hold me back, but anything worth having is worth working for! Off topic - have you ever made commentary about your thoughts on the possibility that simulation theory is our reality? If so, where would I find it?

Frankly I think the expectation that you'll have the same kind of sex after 10yrs that you had during the first year is an unrealistic ideal put forth by pop culture. It's not that it becomes worse necessarily, just different. The physical attraction wanes but the emotional attraction should grow. It doesn't have to be less passionate, just a different type of passion based more off of emotional connection than lust. This is my experience anyway. Hope it helps.

I've watched all of your enlightenment videos several times so I'm familiar with this line of thinking. You're right, the idea that all people are some part of a greater whole or we're all one entity clearly isn't something I can logically understand but have to experience. The closest I've come was doing your guided Neti Neti video while on a mild dose of mushrooms. I had some kind of experience that was not like any other I've ever had where this truth really REALLY seemed to be the thing I'd been overlooking my entire life, and yet it seemed so obvious in the moment. The visualization I had of it at the time was that of a horses mane. Like every human was a hair on a horses mane that didn't realize they were all just part of a horse. Each hair thought he was a unique little hair with his own experience but it was all an illusion. To the horse itself or anyone observing from the outside it's obvious that the hairs are just part of a greater whole. I realize this analogy is far from perfect but it's what my psilocybin filled mind came up with in a matter of seconds when I was trying to understand the experience. A very odd feeling stayed with me for several hours after like I had just glimpsed something that would forever change my life but as the days passed it seemed less and less real. I don't think I'd ever get mad at you no matter how personally I managed to take something. You've quite literally transformed my life in a matter of 6 months. I can't thank you enough for your videos, this forum, the reading list, the life purpose course, etc. I'm not ready for the whole enlightenment trip yet and I realize that, I just want to be happier, more conscious, have better relationships, be a better dad, etc., but I expect as I work my way through the stages I will come to the same conclusion that you and many others here have- that it is of the utmost importance. Thanks again!

Thanks Leo, this was also very helpful. I can relate to the idea that "Hitler was as he should have been. We may not like it, but hey... why should what we like matter?". I don't think I'm ready to practice it yet without it being forced but I can understand it. Not to the idea of loving Hitler though. I'm on board with embracing your own "shadow" but I guess I can't admit that I have a little Hitler buried deep within me somewhere.

It was extremely helpful actually, along with several of your other posts in here. Thank you for taking the time to write so much on it.