UnbornTao

It empowers your contemplations, gives you the land to cultivate, so to speak. Study, contemplation and practice are essential aspects of any subject or activity that is multi-dimensional. They feed each other. But study is different from reading. The point of the former is to gain a rough, incomplete, intellectual understanding of the subject matter, not merely to memorize information. Reading could be used as a way to experience what the author is pointing to, which seems to me the most effective way to go about it. The way most of us do it is by consuming words, much in the same way as watching TV. Try to bring in some mindfulness to the activity.

Under the airy-fairy, spiritual-sounding BS, a deeper principle might be expressed. Look into the principle itself without getting distracted by the fireworks. What's the principle about? What do these kind of practices point to? When it works, what really happened in your experience? Of course in order to accomplish something, wishing and focusing on what you want isn't enough. But that's an adequate starting place. Certainly when your mind goes down ineffective thought patterns, for example, you might start to get stuck into a certain way of thinking. In the same way, one can imagine having achieved her goal. That mind image is going to set an empowering disposition for you, helping you be more effective and flexible. Positive thinking needs to be balanced with groundedness: "If wishes were horses, the homeless would ride." I mostly agree with its underlying principle but it needs to be contemplated and experienced for oneself and not adopted as dogma.

Primarily to make a living. Ideally you'd want to turn what you like (your life purpose) into your career or business. But yeah, you work primarily in order to be able to buy groceries, rent an apartment, own a car and computer, be able to travel, buy books, etc. If you don't, it'll be harder for you to fulfill these needs -- by hunting your food, building your own shelter, etc. Not very practical for my needs and wants. You can also live austerely and reduce your expenses so that the need to work is reduced. You'll gain time but lose some capacity to buy stuff you'd probably want (smartphone, internet, car, console, various services, etc).

"Through" implies process and medium, which are indirect. When it comes to enlightenment those are irrelevant. The only real "requisite" is consciousness.

@Leo Gura maybe you're still under its effects, you're just dreaming that you aren't.

Playfully grab the guy's ass. Jokes aside, I'd confront and tell him, "What the hell dude?" Something along those lines. I rarely see the need for violence, unless the guy didn't get your point, kept being an idiot, etc. You'd be creating more problems for you down the road.

Linux Mint, not Ubuntu, is currently the ideal distro for beginners, imo. Mint unfortunately doesn't support ARM64 so I decided to virtualize the ARM64 Debian Testing build with Cinnamon. So far it's been a seamless, stable experience. Debian is rock solid but contains pretty old packages, which is why I installed from the Testing branch. This build provides one of the latest kernels and much newer packages than the iso offered on the website. My favorite desktop environments are Cinnamon, KDE and XFCE, in that order. Gnome is probably my least favorite as it feels slow and is resource-intensive (that might have been fixed already in recent versions). Also I'm not a fan of its UI. Unlike Windows, which I dislike, Linux is free, private, generally stable, extremely customizable, modular and efficient. My first custom-made PC will run Mint or another Debian-based distro, and eventually vanilla Debian or Fedora. As a beginner, learning to use Linux and some of its components has been challenging and lots of fun. Mastering it will basically have to become a hobby.

I'm watching Life of Pi right now. Love it. It deals with spirituality and metaphysics.

If you don't make decisions deliberately, you'll fall into the default one which often is predetermined by others. Metaphorically speaking, it -- the decision -- catches you due to your complacency. This is done unconsciously. The operative word here is making; a decision is created. Learn to make decisions deliberately or you'll make them unconsciously and suffer the consequences.

You're likely being too harsh. That doesn't mean moving away isn't a good choice. Perhaps avoid causing more harm; try to communicate with them in little ways, begin to establish some boundaries. These situations can be challenging. But we don't know what's best for you. Just some opinions and suggestions.

@Oeaohoo Thanks for your input. I suggest checking out the creation vs destruction video.

Not you in particular but people in general. Truth as a term sounds too abstract in this discussion. The truth of what? Objects? Being? Perception? An emotion? Relative or absolute? I'd imagine that once you are conscious of what those are -- and that's a big if -- looking for agreement will be seen as irrelevant, and you'll be in a much better place to facilitate others get clear on what you became conscious of, if that's something you want to do. So why worry about it?

Because you don't know what it is.

No ideology will change the fact that you don't know what anything is. Assuming one thing or another is irrelevant in this regard. What's reality? What am I? What is an object? What is perception? The goal should be to contemplate those questions and become directly conscious of what they are for oneself, otherwise what's the point?

You could compile them all into a textbook. Actualized.org Textbook Lite.

In a Russian accent lol

With lack of integrity, your expression contains a hollow ring to it.

haha, cool.

Useful reminder, thanks. One trap you can continually fall into is assuming that you're already open, which fundamentally seems to be just disguised closed-mindedness. That stance might be based on arrogance too, even if just in a subtle form. It might not be recognized as close-mindedness until you open up -- until the space or contrast for the recognition to take place is created. Or some such.

Mainly, you just have to do it. Read a book and take notes. Choose a topic, research it and then take notes however you want. A digital format is best, imo. A fun aspect of this process is coming up with your own system/structure and customizing it to your liking. At some point you'll likely intuit ways to go about organizing your notes organically. There're also many templates and ingenious ways to structure your commonplace book out there. Check out the Second Brain by Tiago Forte and Obsidian tutorials on YT.

Better learn to interact and communicate effectively with them.

I've taken up authenticity as an operating principle for myself and my life. It isn't always comfortable and is worth the effort. As a practice, it kicks your ass. You become less. Pretty soon your pretension, lies, manipulations, hiding, withdrawal, are burned away by such principle, as if it were a fire that consumed dishonesty. This practice eventually leads to the truth of Being, whatever that is. It isn't just an easy, intellectual exercise but rather a real, powerful, experience-based discipline. Authenticity demands that you drop everything in you that is false, inauthentic, phony and fake -- anything that isn't "you." Whether something is authentic or not is based on your own estimation. Once something is found out to be authentic, dig in, you'll find out even more.

The most effective way to learn and master anything is to throw yourself into the work. Teach it. You won't realize the depth and scope of any kind of work by dabbling in, and resisting it. If you're gonna do it, commit to mastering it. Deeply immerse yourself into your field of interest over a prolonged period of time.

Why ask abstract and closed questions? Seems unnecessary and based on false presumptions. First become conscious of what you are. Get busy contemplating. Good luck!