Scholar

Too many people worry about the President, and not enough worry about those who voted for him.

I would say the opposite is the case. If you are unhappy, you tend to develope a narcissistic personality, because as long as you are suffering you will care about yourself first and foremost. It's like, if your cup is empty, you will try to fill it no matter what cost. If your cup is full though, you can worry about other people's empty cups, because there isn't much to improve about your own one. If you are truly happy and fulfilled, there is no need to think about yourself anymore. Why would you if you have everything you need? And keep in mind that just because you are smiling and laughing all day, doesn't mean that you are happy. Sure, Trump seems like a happy guy on the surface, but his behaviour clearly shows that he is desperately trying to fill a void in his life. When you look in the mirror and check if you look good enough, are you doing it because you are happy, or are you doing it because you need reassurance, because of the fear that you might not be enough? The constant worry about oneself is rooted in suffering, not in fulfillment.

You don't know what enlightenment is, you don't know if it exists. You don't know anything at all. Believing in what Leo tells you is the first mistake you made. You are seeking something, but why are you seeking it? Why do you believe that the world is illusion? Is there any real curiousity within you, or are you simply chasing an "expirience" that is supposed to benefit yourself?

The question is wether you need a psychiatrist to understand you, or wether you just need someone to understand you. I think there is a problem with how mental health is approached these days. Often for proper treatment a psychiatrist needs to know almost everything about a patient. But that's not really how the world works. Any psychiatrist has multiple patients every day, a limited understanding of the mind and a very specific view on how to treat certain psychological conditions. It's not possible to understand all patients in all their complexity, with the limited time they can spend with them. So the best is to just prescribe some meditation and hope it somehow solves the problem. I think the rise of mental illness and depression might be rooted in a greater problem that we face today. People become more and more disconnected because technology is isolating us. There is less deep, personal connection. What a few centuries ago a family member or friend did, now has to do the psychiatrist with his doctor in psychology. Who is more likely to actually understand you? Someone who spend most of his life with you, or someone else who sees you every week for an hour and gets paid for it? Today the world is filled with superficial relationships. The quality doesn't really matter anymore, instead people tend to go for quantity. More friends, instead of stronger and deeper friendships. The human mind was simply not designed to function in the enviroment we have created for ourselves. It seems as though society has constructed many taboos and restrictions as to what we are supposed to talk about with our friends and even with family. I mean, if you have a son and he seems deeply troubled, it seems completely fine to just send him to the psychiatrist. After all, the psychiatrist is a professional who deals with these problems. Of course, sometimes a psychiatrist is a very helpful tool , but I think in a lot of cases people are just looking for replacements to have someone to actually listen to them. Having someone really listen and understand is often healing enough to deal with traumata. Just visualize how you would feel if you had a person who would actually want to know how you feel, and why you feel the way you do? In a tribal setting this might not even be far fetched. Humans lived in small groups for thousands of years. There was no sea of billions of people who are accessable. Almost all sources of entertainment were social activities, and taboos as far as what you could talk about were probably almost non-existant. If there was a problem, people talked about it, and they were most likely genuinely interested in each other, simply because there were just a very limited amount of people around. People are wired to enjoy drama, especially women. Today we watch TV and movies, and back than people listened to each other. The problem is that the TV is not listening back. Today, we live in houses, seperated from each other. Most of us don't even know all of our neighbours. Why would we, everyone is moving around constantly anyways. So what we lack are real communities and deep interpersonal connections. Those are simple, psychological needs, and we have to keep in mind that our brain evolved in a way to deal with situations in that kind of manner. Traumata are not supposed to just ruin your life, they have a very specific evolutionary purpose, otherwise there would be no place from them in the psyche. In the enviroment traumata evolved in, it was beneficial to the survival of the human being, or whatever species we were back when it evolved. Now, we live in a completely different enviroment, and instead traumata becomes a "feature" of the mind that is doing damage, rather than being beneficial what so ever. The question is wether just treating the symptoms instead of the root causes is the best way to deal with this. You are definitely not alone with this problem, there is infact an epidemic of "mental illnesses" that relate to the disconnection of human beings. I wouldn't advice you to stop looking for a psychiatrist, but if you can, try to tackle the problems from more than just one front. Simpler said that done, but you might want to start building true and deeper relationships with people. And of course, you can try to meditate and tackle the problem from a spiritual front, as people already adviced. You have to keep in mind though that there is no perfect, easy path for this, especially with how the world is like.

The documentary "Planetary" is pretty good too!

The past few days I've been focusing on a visual field exercise while meditating. When you look at something, whatever that is, it is always in the middle of your visual field. When you move your eyes, the next thing you look at is still in the center of your visual field. The center of your visual field never moves, but the image does. Yet, the brain tricks itself into believing that the center moves. It believes that you are looking up and down, or left and right. So, what I do is basicly focus on that feeling, and try my best to sense the entire image moving through my visual field, instead of my eyes moving in a certain direction. Once you kind of get the grip of it, the visual information will seem flat instead of dimensional. Instead of your sight being a laserbeam that is moving through the room, the entire room will be moving through your visual field. It gets more difficult when you get closer to the corners of your eyesockets, because your eyebrows, nose etc. signal your brain that your eyes are moving to the "border" of your visual field. But what really is happening is simply the border coming closer to the center of the visual field. So in the end what I try to do is lose the sense of space, as far as my visual perception goes. The movement of the eyes is becoming the movement of the content. I think it's similar to making the sense of the outside world disappear when you close your eyes, but that's something I'm far from being able to do. I'm not sure if there is any point in doing this, but it's fun and challenging.

Can someone explain to me what movement that is, which you can see at 2:30? I noticed it because it's what I tend to want to do when I meditate, usually I try to suppress it because I'm trying not to move as I meditate. Is there a name for it? And what purpose does it have?

Hey there, I've stumbled over an interesting study: http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(15)00321-2/abstract Apparently, if you look into someones eyes for as much as 10 minutes in a dimly lit room, you start to dissociate and hallucinate. Now my question is, couldn't there be a way to use this with a partner for a meditative practise? Maybe there already is?

I've watched the guided Neti Neti Meditation before sleep yesterday, and I had quite a vivid dream afterwards. I can't remember details, but I do remember that at one point in the dream I watched a video of a guy meditating, opening his eyes and smiling almost frantically. The moment the corners of his lips went up, I knew that he became enlightened just in that moment, and suddenly I realized that there was no difference between me and him, that the me and him does not exist. And then everything went completely crazy, I had an incredibly feeling of fear that overcame me, and I immediately tried to escape the dream. I remember that feeling from sleep-paralysis, it's like something is pulling at me, and there is the strong sense of death in case of me letting go. Like, "if I don't fight this right now, my heart will literally stop beating" kind of fear. I have always fought that feeling, I remember I had this quite often in my teens. It never takes long to escape the dream and wake up. Now, today I was aware of the fact that maybe I could just let go and see what happens, but I literally couldn't. The fear was just too great. I think that shows me that I am not remotely ready to be enlightened yet, if I can't even face death in a dream. But my question is, is it possible to become enlightened by a dream, if one is willing to let go? Or has something like this been described in any historic recordings of enlightenement?

Oh, I wonder if it works with a mirror and yourself? I hope it doesn't make one crazy.

@sgn 3-4 weeks is where most people fail, because the effects abstaining are almost non-existent and the craving is the highest. So that's nothing unusual. This time I'd suggest you try it for half a year, and once you see results, you'll simply decide not to do it ever again. Maybe it won't completely resolve the problem, but I highly doubt there is any chance of you resolving any problems if you don't overcome this addiction. And also, if it is placebo, who cares? It clearly helps, and that's what you want, right? Aside from some very reasonable explanations to why exactly it helps on a neurological level, you should have a leap of faith and just trust in it. We do the same on the road of enlightenment.

@sgn For a while means how long? Did you abstain from it completely? If you don't know if it is placebo or not, find out if it is. You have to be honest and be aware of why exactly you don't want to do it. Are you addicted? Are you unable to just stop for half a year and see what would happen? Why do you make up excuses for something that could potentially transform your life? The fact is probably that you are mentally too weak to stop. Do you want to stay mentally too weak to abstain? Clearly you can't stop, do you want to stay that way for the rest of your life?

@sgn Limiting your time on your computer would be good, if you really do it that much. But I know that's hard to do with social anxiety. What about porn and mastrubation? Both can contribute greatly to social anxiety and general self-esteem/confidence problems.

@sgn Alright, but I need to know the actual habits you have. What you do throughout your day now, and maybe habits you have had for a long time.

@sgn I would say there is no use in feeling guilty. The situation was simply the way it was, all you can do is change it. Also, listing your habits would be important to know if there might be something that causes the social anxiety.

How old are you? And list all habits you have that are especially enjoyable to you.

@renegade_bee Let me try to explain to you what suffering is. Suffering is caused by a strong will to change from one state to another. It is a function that developed through millions of years of evolution. The body creates feedback for the brain, it first collects the feedback and then it evaluates the feedback. Let's use the example of pain: I put my hand into fire, my body immediately sends out signals of pain. These signals contain the location, intensity and kind of pain (pressure, heat/cold, damaged tissue etc). The brain first collects these information within a very specific part of your brain, it so to speak becomes aware of the signal. From then on the information travels to another part of your brain which serves to evaluate the information. What happens here is basicly taking the information and then deciding what action to take based on the information. In the case of intense pain the response is usually an extreme desire to escape the state of pain, in other words to find a way to stop the flow of that particular sensory input. This desire is what we would describe and define as suffering. It is the desire to change from one state to another, or the desire to find a way to somehow change a specific set of information. I usually describe this as negative motivation. For any action to take place, one needs internal motivation to take the action. Throughout the countless years of evolution, the most efficient way for action-taking was exactly this kind of system: Reward and punishment. Your mind punishes itself for feeling pain, and it rewards itself for feeling pleasure. This creates motivation to take action towards pleasure and away from pain. In our example, the pain and the negative evaluation create the motivation to pull the hand away from the fire, thus ensuring the survival of the organism as a whole. Without the negative evaluation, action would not take place. Your brain is required to have a negative evaluation to create this kind of action. You feel hungry, your brain wants to escape the state of hunger, it eats. You are lonely, the brain wants to escape the state of loneliness, it socializes. You feel pain, the brain wants to escape the state of pain, it creates actions towards resolving pain. Very important now is that the feeling itself does not create suffering at all, it is the craving to escape that state that creates suffering. There are people who even have a natural tendency to enjoy certain kinds of pain, their brains evaluate pain as a positive state, such, they seek out pain (masochists). Happiness, or fullfilment, is the lack of desire to change current states. This is literally what happiness is. If you have everything you want, you are happy. One way to become happy is to get everything you want. It is almost impossible because our brain is wired to create and seek states from which it wants to escape. If you get everything you want, your brain will create more that it wants. Why is that? Because an organism that keeps creating negative states from which it wants to escape has far more chances of survival, and thus outsources the competition. The organism that is satisfied will simply die or atleast not reproduce as much. That is why materialism is so inefficient in creating true happiness. No matter how much things you have, and how rich you become, you will always seek more. In a paradoxical way, the brain doesn't want to be happy , because unhappiness creates a desire for action, and action is what ensures your survival. Sadly most educational systems promote this kind of negative motivation, so people really tend to learn to act out of unhappiness and never really learn about passionate action-taking. You learn for your tests so you don't get bad grades. You get good grades so you don't end up jobless. You get a job because you don't want to end up on the street. This kind of motivation is usually very unstable, but it does it's job, even if it puts the students in a high-stress enviroment. Anyways, there is another way to reach happiness. Our brain is neuroplastic, basicly meaning that it can change in unimaginable ways if conditioned right. You can literally change the way you view the world. Knowing that, we recognize that we can change integral parts of cognition within our minds. Infact, we can change the evaluation of certain information. We can change the systems within our brain to evaluate pain as something positive, or to not evaluate it at all. So instead of playing along with the system of negative evaluation, we try to change the evaluation itself. For example, if we suffer because we want to eat a cookie, instead of finding a way to get the cookie and eat it, we will find a way to stop wanting the cookie. We find a way to be absolutely satisfied with whatever we have. Of course, one must know how to change the system of evaluation, or how to shut it down. And one way to do that is to inflict pain and focusing entirely on the pain. By doing that, you will get a sense for the negative evaluation of the pain. Be aware of the negative evaluation, and ignore it. Your mind will scream "STOP IT! THIS HURTS! STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP!...", but what you will do is keep focusing on the pain. Focusing on the feeling with every bit of focus you have. At first it might be difficult, but at some point you will develope an awareness for what exactly the evaluating part of mind is, and what the part is that processes the raw information. You want to use the part that processes the raw information. You will feel the pain, even much more than usually, but you won't evaluate it in any way. You will accept it completely. You will train your brain not to create the desire to escape the state, and pain is one of the best teachers there is to learn this. You can do this with any emotion there is. Loneliness, anger, fear, sadness, all of it. All of them serve a very specific purpose to create very specific kind of actions to ensure survival. And this system is based on an hostile enviroment, which most of us do not live in. Of course the more intense the pain the more work you will need to do. But you can literally develope yourself not to suffer when someone dies who you love. If someone loses a child, the pain they feel usually never goes away. It becomes part of them, and the only way they can stop the suffering is by accepting the pain completely, by removing the desire to change out of this state. People suffer the most when the brain creates an impossible task. When someone is dead, they stay dead, but the brain wants to find a way to escape that state. In your case it's the pain that you want to escape, and there is just no way to do so. The only way to stop suffering for you is to find a way to accept the pain. The pain will never stop, but you can learn to completely ignore it. It'll be like the feeling of your breath. Unless you try to be aware of it, it'll simply be there. You can overcome any emotional state if you put the work into it. Infact, you can use the pain to exceed faster than anyone else. That is literally what the Zen-Buddhism tradition is about. They inflict suffering to get faster results. Once you completely disassemble this system you can put a new one in place. One that creates action out of passion instead of pain. If you manage to do so, you'll be at the highest possible state of happiness, and you'll be able to do whatever you want. You will be more happy than the most wealthiest individuals on this planet. Infact, you will be luckier than anyone who won in the lottery. You will literally win the game of life.

If we take the current understanding and model of the brain, how is it possible that there is a clear memory of the expirience within the mind of the "subject"? I understand the implication that awareness and the mind are non-dual, but how would one conceptualize that process? Let's say the human condition is a wave in an infinite ocean, and the rising and falling of the wave is the birth and death of the human (if we use an analogy that has already been used preciously). Now, the expirience of enlightenment would be the wave becoming aware that it never was the wave, but infact the water that composes the wave. And then it becomes aware of the fact that there is no seperation between the water that composes the wave, and the infinite amount of water within the ocean. It becomes aware of the fact that the condition is the movement of the water, that the human mind is infact awareness in a certain state. We could say that an unaware wave would be one that is merely aware of the surface. It tries to describe how the surface behaves (how our mind behaves) but it never really looks at what the surface is. But, how exactly does the ocean have direct influence on the properties of the wave? Because we know that becoming aware of the infinite ocean clearly changes the wave. We can observe that rather quickly by simply being aware of colour. Being aware of colour is a process within our mind that would not exist if colour would not exist. Does that mean that the model of our brain as in current scientific understanding is flawed in it's nature? Because as far as scienitific methods go, we pretty much try to describe everything with the model of atoms. But clearly, if we try to understand the mind, we see that there must be something that somehow influences the atoms in another way than we would expect them to behave, because there is the process of awareness that has a significant influence on the direct state of the atomic structure of the brain. For example memories created out of expiriences, and I mean expiriences of awareness. Now, is this model completely flawed because it assumes that whatever atoms might be are seperated from the awareness itself? I mean, at the current moment there are alot of scientists that completely ignore the mind-body problem, they literally denie that the mind exists. I think the cause of that confusion might be the flawed nature of the conceptualized model of the mind and the body. That infact, the non-dual nature is what would solve that problem entirely. Now, how do we conceptualize a model that is based upon that? In other words, how does the current desciption of physics leave room for something like awareness influencing atomic structures themselves? Or even better, how does one create a model the unifies both the behaviour and the function? Because clearly, if we want to conceptualize the mind, we will never get there with the current understanding of the mind. We have literally created an entire field that is based on a seemingly false presumption. How would we go about solving this?

So if they cannot remember, how can they even know it exists? I mean, the minds of people who expirienced no-ego are farely certain that it does exist. How does one know that it's not a trick of the mind?

Now we need to explain it in the framework of the conceptualized mind, because this explanation you have given does not help us at all to understand the brain. Or maybe I just don't understand.

The ego stopped itself. The desire not to do was greater than the desire to do.

I think what you are trying to do is trying to find an easy way to get a cure. I think you are more likely to succeed if you really try to understand what Leo is saying in his videos. Me for example, I was literally afraid to go outside a few days ago. I'm kinda pale, and I was always thinking about what people were thinking about me. And then, I simply tried to make my brain understand that it doesn't matter what people think, that infact that process is completely unnecessary. So I just did it, I went outside and I allowed myself to behave how I want, no matter how it would feel. Look people in the eyes as they walk by, and not care if they think that you are crazy. You know you are not crazy, so what does it matter what they think. Your brain will hate it, but it doesn't matter. Just walk around outside and start whistling, say hello to people and notice how your brain cares about what other people think of you. You are the master of your world, and your world can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to define yourself by what other people might think of you, you will do that. If you want to define yourself by what you think you actually are, then you can do that. You have to shake up the priorities in your mind. When you enter a room, you naturally create these bubbles of expectations for every human that is aware of you. I know that process too well, and it can paralize you if it's strong enough. Just learn to not care at all. And recognize that you have to learn it, that failing it okay. If someone thinks you are fucking crazy, or pathetic, that's okay. You know you are not. What I do, I just dress myself horribly knowing that people will most likely think badly of me. And within three days I made significant process. The irony is that if you just be yourself, the person you are when you are completely alone, people immediately respect you. If you walk around whistling, they will be intimidated by your confidence. But don't fall into the trap to care about that, because you are not doing it to intimidate them, or to make them think that you are confident. You are doing it simply because you feel like doing it. Doesn't matter if they think you are the president of the united states, or some homeless person. You know exactly who you are, and you know that you can change in an instant if you want. That is the beauty, you are not bound to the past as your brain might tell you. Your identity is what you want it to be, not what other people might think it is. Maybe start out with family? Tell them something you don't want them to know about you because you think they might think of you badly if they do, and then try your best not to care. You have to learn not to care, it's not something that you can decide in an instant.

The thing is though that every single word you have used is a concept. Everything is a concept, being itself is a concept. You cannot understand enlightenment, and if you think you have understood it, it means you haven't. Everything you just said is another story. If aone truly understands enlighenment, permanently, then he or she will do nothing at ll. If Leo is permanently enlightened, he will sit until he dies. He will not even care about this site anymore, because this site is a concept part of a concept he calls existance. If he truly is enlighened, he will expirience that even existance itself is one more lie his ego tells himself. Infact, the motivation to become enlightened is part of the ego, if you are enlightened, you will not want to be enlightened anymore, because you will want nothing at all. Because in a deeper sense, you do not exist. Enlightenment, in deeper sense, does not exist either. One cannot be enlightened, because enlightenment is just another concept. If you are enlightened, your ego still exists, otherwise you'd recognize that you infact are not enlightened at all. But the problem here is that if you recognize anything at all, if you have any realizitation at all, you are not enlightened. That's why Leo says it's impossible to communicate, even to himself. Because the expirience of enlightenment he has is just a memory in his mind. And a memory is just another concept. So no matter what he tells you, what he tells himself, it infact is completely irrelevant. Even if I tell myself enlightenment is this process of expirience that is everything that exists, I just described it with concepts. It's like people say "I want to expirience enlightenment.", but they don't realize that enlightenment is no expirience. They do not recognize that it is no concept, so it's simply not describable. I cannot understand it, I can't even think about it. So how does one get there? Well, one is already there, and at the same time, one isn't. Everything we try to tell each other is a story. You see, the fact that you tell yourself that you need to be enlightened, or that you are not enlightened, is just another story. Leo might say "Enlightenment is the state where your ego is completely gone.", but what exactly is a state? What exactly is being itself? What exactly is existance? We all have concepts for these things, every single one of us. We cannot communicate it differently. You can let go of all the concepts, but letting go is one more concept. Concept itself is a concept. Very confusing, I do not even know if it makes sense. But sense is just another concept. Lies and truths are concepts aswell.

Hey guys. I have just watched part 3 of Leo's enlightenment videos, and I was watching it in my bed, lying on my back. It worked out quite well for some time, I got more and more relaxed and it felt like a really nice and calm meditation. Until at some point there was this weird sensation of spinning, like everything, including me, rotated clockwise. Every few seconds the rotation stopped and became a wobble, just to continue even faster. It became so bad that I was really afraid that something was wrong, that I might die if I'd continue on to just let it happen. I didn't even hear Leo's voice anymore until I opened my eyes. The spinning was still there, but more subtle, and I remember I could feel it especially in my legs. The sensation in my arms was strange aswell, it felt like there was a weird layer of warmth around them and as if my skin was kind of fluffying up. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, because I was definitely afraid and not calm at all towards the end. My eyes even filled up with tears before the spinning started, and I have no idea why. Did anyone expirience something similar, or is my brain just malfunctioning?

But what will I tell them? "I get weird spinning sensations when I try to enlighten myself." D: