Meditation, yoga, and psychedelics are some of the most consistent tools for leaping up the Spiral.
Research shows that people who meditate end up jumping 2 stages higher than wherever they started in a few years.

This is like asking how long does it take to earn a million dollars?
For most people. Never! Because it's not a function of time, it's a function of doing the right practices.
You cannot become a millionaire by doing what you've always been doing. You must do something new. And then it can happen quickly.

@Leona
That can be tricky.
The best way to figure that out is to contemplate honestly in your journal.
See my video: How To Contemplate Using A Journal
You need to really lean on radical honesty. Before you contemplate start by saying, "Okay, I'm going to be radically honest now..."
This isn't rocket science. You DO have the answers within. You just gotta squeeze yourself a bit to get them, like the last few drops of a lemon

@MadisonAlyssa Well... sit down and contemplate why you are so attached to vanity and appearance.
When contemplating this stuff, you must probe beneath the stories and excuses like, "My Dad caused this", or "It was because of my childhood" and get to the root of why you are still attached to it. Attachments like this are always rooted in your survival needs.
So what do you fear will happen to you if you let go of vanity and appearance?
What would happen if you became ugly and everyone thought you were a cheap nasty whore?
How would that hurt your ego/survival? Why are you giving people that power over you?
What is vanity/appearance REALLY giving you? Love? Happiness? Success? Self-esteem?
Hint: it's giving you something positive, otherwise you wouldn't keep doing it.
What if your self-esteem was completely independent of your appearance? What would be bad about that? What if you were ugly and yet you still loved yourself just as much as when you were pretty?
Sit down and really contemplate all that in a brutally honesty manner.
Also, get very specific and clear about what you mean by "vanity" and "appearance", as these are very vague notions.

Seems to me like you're thinking about this too narrowly, too externally.
In the case of boxing your goal is not really to beat some opponent, your ultimate goal is to become a good boxer (let us say).
In which case, you start to strategize on that goal. How do you concentrate your limited time, energy, and resources to make yourself a good boxer over the next year? Perhaps you identify that your greatest undeveloped asset is stamina. You sense that you could outlast other boxers in the ring. But you'd need to train up your stamina to do it. And so that's where you decide to focus your energy. So you do lots of cardio training, etc.
Alternatively, you could determine that the best strategy would be to hire an exceptional boxing coach. So you spend your energy and resources looking for the best coach you can find, in the hope that he will give you that extra edge that you need to win.
When it comes to competition, you need to find some unique thing that will set you apart from everyone else. Maybe that means you train twice as long each day, or you develop amazing legwork, or you find an exceptional rare coach, or you do lots of visualization, or you learn to meditate in the ring, or you study lots of boxing videos to learn new moves, or you do yoga to raise your baseline level of consciousness, etc.

You can make a copy-cat business but it's a bad strategy. It will be hard to market and eventually you will go out of business unless you bring something new to the table.
A Seth Godin says, you must create a Purple Cow.
The bigger picture of business that people fail to see is that marketplaces are constantly evolving and self-optimizing. If you offer something of genuine value, then you will be optimized out of the marketplace by evolutionary forces.
You cannot go copy Bill Gates or Elon Musk. You must bring something new to the table.
Practically what this means is, you cannot create a good business using a cookie-cutter business-in-a-box plan. This is why get-rich-quick-schemes and multi-level-marketing schemes fail. What you cannot do is follow a 1-2-3 step formula for creating wealth, because if you could, everyone could do it, but that cannot happen by definition because wealth depends on a disparity between you and other people in society. So you must offer more genuine value than other people offer. You must differentiate yourself from the poor and maintain that differentiation.
I say this specifically because there are a lot of tempting business-in-a-box plans out there. But the ones who get rich off those are the ones selling the plans, not the ones buying the plans.
No one can sell you a plan for how to create something like Actualized.org, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Uber, Ebay, Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, etc. Because the plan itself is the whole value of the company. And the plan is always time-sensitive. You cannot create another Amazon today. That ship has sailed.
The more original your plan, the more money you stand to make, the greater your competitive advantage.
Of course you can still study all these great companies and learn lessons and gain inspiration for building your own.

@Emerald Getting quality backlinks is hard. That's the whole point. It's a full-time job and it's quite tedious to do.
I would focus more on content and other forms of marketing. For example, getting on popular podcasts is good for getting your name out there. Or writing guest blog posts. Or giving public speeches.
There is no easy solution to marketing. Marketing is hard, time-consuming, and expensive because it is so valuable.
It's also very hard to market something which isn't Purple Cow. Make sure you're bringing something new to the table.
Success in business requires extreme creativity. You cannot just copy what other people did. You must innovate. You are being paid to innovate, and if you cannot do that, then your business will not succeed.
Your job, as CEO, is to come up with new original strategies. That's why they pay you the big bucks (or at least they will if you succeed). This is why only highly ambitious and extraordinary people can start businesses. Most people only know how to paint by numbers and follow others. Entrepreneurship is about leadership. You gotta find cutting-edge emerging opportunities in the marketplace and creatively exploit them.
No one can tell you what these new original strategies are. Because if they knew, they'd have your job. You gotta do lots of research and connect dots.

Green never really stops buying nice things. If anything, Green buys fewer but nicer things. Green people love expensive Apple products and expensive yoga pants, for example.
Green just realizes that happiness is found more in relationships than in material objects.
Don't over-simplify Green as being against material objects. Healthy Green is not against those things. In fact, Green should realize that life cannot work without material objects. It's just that Green understands that material objects are not what life is about.
Green is also conscious of how buying up useless material objects affects the environment in unhealthy ways. So Green will be mindful of what they consume whereas Orange doesn't give a shit as long as it suits them.
For example, Orange will drive a Hummer and doesn't care about how much gas he burns. Green will prefer to drive a Tesla. Tesla is a nice, expensive material object. But it is also eco-friendly.
Green buys nice material objects, but for different reasons than Orange.

@Recursoinominado Visualize for 10 minutes every day for the next 30 days yourself being hardworking and successful.
Visualize it hardcore, like your life depends on it. Put full confidence and feeling into each of those 10 minutes. Forcing all negative thoughts and doubt out of your time for those 10 minutes.
That will fix it.
But only if you actually do it every day.
Don't make the excuse: "But I can't visualize it because I've never seen it." That's nonsense. You have an imagination which can visualize all sorts of things you haven't seen, like a flying rainbow mammoth. Your imagination is how you bootstrap success.

The Lesser Jihad isn't to be demonized, it's just a distraction, a red herring. In the same way that having a giant porn poster hanging on the wall in your office would be a distraction from getting any work done. It would be foolish to hang such a poster up in the office. This doesn't mean porn or sex is bad, it just means you have to be careful with not letting it distract you from the bigger picture.
What you are complaining about is survival. If you feel other people are threatening you, or dehumanizing you, that's a survival issue. For example, someone might complain, "But Leo, I can't do enlightened work because I live in war zone. What am I supposed to do? Meditate while people are shooting bombs around my house?"
The answer is: you must engineer your environment to minimize threats to your survival so that you can focus on what's really important: truth-realization. Yes, it's very hard to focus on truth-realization when you can't feed yourself, can't pay your bills, get into fights with people, have family breathing down your neck, have toxic friends who want you to do drugs and watch TV, etc.
You must strategically extricate yourself from all of that so that you can focus on the real work. It might take you several years just to fix that part of your life so that you are in a stable place where you can focus on the real work.
For someone living in a war-torn hell-hole, there is no self-actualization, and awakening. For them, just getting safe shelter and food is #1 priority. You cannot meditate if your life is being actively threatened.
Then again, most threats to your survival in 1st world countries are purely conceptual and self-created. You could be a billionaire living in Hollywood and still feel like your survival is threatened every day, and so you distract yourself from ever doing truth-seeking. Survival is the whole game of life, and it feels very real at all times, and it's very addictive. Your mind's whole job is to only focus on survival at all times. Truth-seeking is all about overriding this primordial drive. Which is why it's so counter-intuitive, challenging, and rarely done.
This is really a question about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Those who are very low on the pyramid will find self-actualization and self-transcendence extremely difficult.
Do other people's ideologies REALLY dehumanize you? Why do you care what other people think at all? Why not focus instead on what you have control over, like meditation, self-inquiry, yoga, psychedelics, etc? Unless Nazi's are physically threatening your life, then you are probably blowing this ideology thing way out of proportion.
Conflicts over what other people think of you are some of the biggest time-wasters. They are almost totally unnecessary and self-created, unless your physical life is seriously in danger (in which case, fix that situation ASAP and get back to inner work).
Fighting ideology with counter-ideology is the Lesser Jihad. It is a trap, a distraction.
You don't need to be a carpet. By engaging the Greater Jihad you put yourself in the strongest possible position. In doing that, you gain all the power. Those who get far enough along on the Greater Jihad become invincible to outside forces.
Going out into the woods and mediating for 30 days straight is the very opposite of being a carpet. And almost anyone can find a way to do it. The problem is, no one wants to because they have a bunch of excuses. And it's not fun. It will the be the most challenging thing you've ever done in your life.

He'd have to do at least a dozen trips, yes.
Otherwise what would we be talking about?
Just because a person is enlightened does not mean he knows psychedelics.
It would be pointless discussing pizza with Sadhguru unless he ate some pizza first.
This is really just common sense. People who talk of things which they have zero experience with end up saying stupid things. I know cause I've done it. I am now much more careful about what I choose to speak about so that I don't over-step my experience too much. It's a constant problem. The mind loves to speak of things which it has not experienced as though it has.

I’m trying to categorize and subdivide infinity into smaller pieces, in order to put it into tiny, defining boxes we call words. I see the impossibility there and it makes me smile. every word, every thought makes infinite possibilities collapse.
but I really want to try, as I feel that writing could help me with the integration process. I also want to share this experience with all of you, since I would have never, ever had this experience without this wonderful place full of inspiring souls <3 thank you
I feel like everything’s perfect and exactly the way it should be. this is such a relief. I’m still in awe by all of it. it’s still hard for me to communicate, linear logic I used to rely on so much seems to fail me.. but I don’t mind, it feels like I’ve madly fallen in love with life
 
I drank ayahuasca for the first time right after a 1 week long retreat in a Zen monastery. how perfect is that? 
the monastery was a beautiful experience. meditation, zen books and the most amazing garden I’ve ever seen. (I finally understood why Zen monasteries are actually Blue by the way, huge insight for me) soothing and healing nonetheless. 
 
I drank aya in a beautiful place in nature with to kind souls taking care of me (good thing, I was completely out of my mind. in a good way though)
I lied down with my eyes closed, focusing on my breath. the effects came in subtle waves. tingling, my meditation started to feel deeper than usual. it became easier and easier to ‚reach‘ that state were I completely let go and forget ‚myself‘ and merge with my surroundings. as I didn’t feel any difference between ‚me‘ and the girl lying next to me, I knew that aya had started to work in me.
and so I surrendered. 
the whole trip could only be described as a huge game of surrender - deeper and deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole. and wow, I didn’t know….I couldn’t have ever imagined how deep this goes. the more I died, the more infinite ‚I‘ became. 
inside became outside, the deeper I went ‚in‘, the further I came ‚out‘. the more layers I stripped off me, the more I gave away, the richer I felt. rich in everything, everything.
I screamed out in pleasure. I didn’t know that was even possible. it just got better and better, infinite joy and bliss. I couldn’t believe it was so, so fucking amazing. it made me cry. every time I thought "oh fuck, this is it. it's so fucking perfect. it has to be it", it went even deeper. I couldn't believe the bliss
I saw life in a flow and resistance against it being the biggest problem. but I really started to get good at letting go, so I surrendered all the resistance again and again. each time merging with the overwhelming stream. the flow was everywhere, I infinite melody, the sound of life. it was in me, around me, flew through me. 
I surrendered a million times, consciously. I died and died and died and each time I felt more one with the universe. I couldn’t believe the bliss. unimaginable. it still brings me to tears. I am crying right now <3
at one point I felt the earth sucking me in. the soil ate me, tore me into infinite parts until there was nothing left of me. then it spat me out again. I felt the earth giving birth to me, again and again. it felt so..organic, dirty. it was both painful, disgusting and also the most natural and beautiful  process I’ve ever been through. that cycle went on for a while. each time I felt more and more connected to nature. like nature streaming through my veins
as the effects started to lessen.. I was too in awe. I couldn’t speak for a while. all I did was sitting on the ground, crying and shivering. I looked around like I’d never seen a forest in my life before. and I hadn’t. not like that. 
I literally felt like a newborn. I looked at the world, unable to conceptualize it. they spoke to me, I could only listen in awe. no words came out of me. everything was new. my whole body felt like it had just been reborn. every movement seemed so foreign. (my trip sitter told me later that my movements and whole coordination looked very weird. they said "literally like those of a newborn") 
I think this will change my life. I don’t know how yet, but I really hope I can integrate this into my daily experience. I want to embody everything I’ve felt. 
I still feel kind of different than before. there is something deep inside me, like peace and calmness. like I’ve stopped searching because somehow I know that it’s all in me. nothing „out there“ could ever fulfill me. it’s all inside.
I also realized that it will never end. awakening is not an endpoint like I’d imagined it to be. it’s a beginning, again and again. there is always deeper to go, more to surrender and more infinity to expand into. that’s the beauty. it brings me to tears
 
<3

@Michael569 No other way than the LP Course. That course is my life's work, struggling to figure it out for myself. It is no small thing. The course is really just the tip of an iceberg. If a person is unwilling to do the course, they are not remotely serious about this issue and will never resolve it anyways. Life purpose is not something for lazy slobs.
I invested about 10 years figuring it out until I finally did. The principles are all there. But it takes serious work to actualize it.
It's worth the work in the end. Unfortunately so few people will ever see that. Just like enlightenment. It's so amazing, but who will ever get it? Almost no one. Almost no one will realize what life can be.
There is no cure for too little vision.

Hey. I just felt really inspired to post today. Some people might recognize a couple days ago I was extremely down if you seen my earlier posts.. like a couple more days and I probably would have made a very stupid decision...
 
For all of you who are new to self actualization / just never heard of him, there is a YouTuber named Matt Kahn (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCHyGxx33FQ2cbZqPMh4hi_Q)
He deals a lot more with self love and heart centred consciousness rather than trying to “get enlightened” or stuff like that. He sometimes mention his content is for “energetically sensitive souls”, which I think is just another way of saying sensitive people, which I was/am. So if you’re the type of person who gets caught up with self judgement, other peoples’ opinions, etc., this can be huge for you. I’m definitely not all the way there yet but after just a short time my life did a 180.. 
 
Really give him a listen if you haven’t. I think he balances the logical part and the spiritual part perfectly, so he can be understood by a wide audience. It’s good shit. His videos made me cries tears of joy and laugh as he’s unraveling the ego. I wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t think it had the possibility to help out a lot of people .
 
I haven’t seen all his content, not even close to half, but here is some videos I highly recommend:
 
 
Peace and good luck 

It's very important to figure out how you are going to offer value to the world.
Your mistake is thinking of this as "work" or "making money". That's super shallow. You need to think of it as: "What is my art? What do I want to contribute to mankind?" The money follows from your passion.
You will have to make a living in the world no matter what, so might as well do it on your terms.
I make a living by doing what I love most. This was by deep design, not luck.

You can learn all the techniques and psychology behind attraction and relationships. That is not a problem. In fact, it's very important and women will ultimately appreciate it.
The problem arises when you start to turn all of that into an ideology and identity, the way PUA culture does. Don't become that alpha-bro manwhore who runs around chasing women all the time and bragging about it.
Attract women, but above all, be a good kind man. Don't become a manipulative used dick salesmen. Learn to develop deep relationships with those women you attract. Don't do it for the sex or the ego, do it for the growth opportunities.

P.S. If you work on making yourself a great man, she will never want to leave you. In fact, being less possessive of her will make her love you more.
It's like reverse psychology.
If you are a weak man who isn't working on improving himself, then yes, she might leave you from something more exciting.
She doesn't really want another girl, she wants more passion, excitement, adventure. So give her more of that. You want that too.
The whole point of a relationship is to grow and explore together. That's what keeps it from getting stale.

So thoughts came into mind after watching the Relativity video of Leo ( the long one).
Relativity is like the start of the "tier 2 of concepts", thus it is aquired by contemplation as a yellow thinker. From there one you leave Systems Thinking as a paradigma and begin to utilize it as a tool for navigation in this, yet again, unknown territory.
Also,
I´m concerned about following you further LEO! As wisdom progresses, You have to choose acceptance and peace, it doesnt come naturally. It becomes a concious action. Just don´t go cynical, big void for people ahead, who are to much exposed to an online forum (or offline in older days). Instead, seek a new mentor, stick with him and learn. You need to meet a Master. A person that transcended your locks. Study him, and evolve under his presence!
 
Peace&Out
 

The question isn't whether self-disciplined and duty-bound people can have a happy, meaningful life ; it is whether those who lack self-control and who are convinced that nothing is better than they are can have such a life.

William B. Irvine, A guide to the good life

 

Integrated practice in the context of the hierarchy of needs incl. 3-2-1 shadow work and byron Katie's "the work"
 

@Gligorije You live pragmatically, just to survive and meet your basic needs.
This is no way to live. This is like being a zombie or a slave. So of course that will lead to depression. It's a guaranteed recipe for misery.
Imagine instead living as though you are inside a dream or a work of art. Full of wonder and passion at every turn.

you just gotta get out there more. that's it. you don't need visualisation or anything else fancy
the easiest way to improve your social skills is just to get momentum by consistently socializing. everyone feels the same when they have been in seclusion or not going out for a long time. the awkwardness, the anxiety, the feeling like there is something wrong with you.
you're likely attaching and projecting ideas of past traumas onto the experience but it's not necessary. It's just your mind trying to make sense of how you feel because it doesn't have context for just how reasonable it is for you to be socially rusty right now. 
even if you're an effortless social butterfly, after not having been socializing for a good while then you'll probably find yourself getting in your head by the most benign interactions. literally just saying hello to someone just walking down the street. "Man my hello sounded really weird... why did I say it like that? so stupid... why didn't they respond? are people staring at me?" 
just be easier on yourself - understand that it's not that weird and that a lot of people feel the same way you do. it's like freaking out that you're physically weak after you stopped working out and now you're trying to figure out what poisoned you to cause this atrophy. relax, learn to be ok with anxiety, push your comfort zone a little and you'll start to feel better.
stop labelling the experience as anything at all
 
 
 
 

@kieranperez Great example. Notice how differently Deepak responds to Trump vs the way Green might respond to Trump: by hating Trumping.
Green hates on haters.
Turquoise loves on haters.
That's a very significant paradigm shift and takes a lot of consciousness, development, and selflessness to embody. Green is not there yet. Green's ego is still too triggered by Blue/Orange to see the bigger picture.

@Widdle Puppy I like to think of it as two phases:
Exploration phase: where you learn about and sample lots of various methods. Little results but lots of options and new ideas. Consolidation phase: where you get serious, buckle down, choose a few methods to master, and get to work. Lots of results but kinda boring and grindy. Both are important.