Yarco

If there was ever a time to take a gap year, it's this year. By the sounds of it, most classes at colleges and universities will be online anyway in the fall. You'll be paying premium prices to basically teach yourself. Work a part-time job and then spend your free time working on your passion for a year.

Short-term gain vs long-term suffering. If you choose to eat your favorite sugary snack, there's a 100% chance it will taste delicious right now. Getting heart disease, diabetes, or cancer is something that seems far off in the future and may or may not affect you. So it's easier to mentally minimize those chances. If you hate your job and life, and you have no energy or willpower, junk food might be the only opportunity you have to get an easy win and some enjoyment.

Paying a significant amount of money for it will make you take it much more seriously. You'll actually do the work once you buy it. The currency exchange situation makes it sound tough. Not knowing how much of an impact that has, I can just give the general advice of making a budget and really examining where you can save a bit of money for a few months to afford it. Like if you buy coffee or food from restaurants, try making it at home instead. While you are waiting, you can look at the full lesson plan section on the LP sales page and try to study some of those topics yourself. Some topics listed like hero's journey, law of attraction, zone of genius, the purple cow, 10,000 hour rule -- give you a strong indication of what they're talking about. You can look up some of those topics on Youtube and start researching them yourself. That won't get you all of the actual exercises and assessments in the course, but it's a start while you save up.

Meeting deadlines - Just willpower, assuming you have set a reasonable amount of work for yourself. I find waking up early is best for me. My willpower and energy peaks when I wake up and steadily goes down throughout the day. By noon I'm pretty much useless. So if I have a lot to do, I wake up at 6 and can have a full work day done by lunch time. You might be the opposite and be a night owl who does best sleeping in and working after dinner. I've found the one huge difference between super productive and successful people, and unsuccessful people, is normally just willpower. Whether it's work, diet/exercise, or whatever else. Willpower is a muscle that you just have to train. I'm not perfect, I fall off the wagon and junk food and play video games for 1-2 months straight sometimes. It's just catching yourself and getting back on track. After a while the time between falling off track will become longer and longer, and you'll realize that it's less painful to just stick with it, instead of facing the resistance of getting back on when you fall off. If you procrastinate, you have to live with that nagging guilty feeling in the back of your head. You can't even enjoy slacking off. So it's better to just push yourself and get everything done as quickly as possible. Then you can truly enjoy your free time, guilt-free. Inhumane deadlines / enforcing boundaries - If someone gives you deadlines that you describe as inhumane, you shouldn't work for them lol. When taking on a job, let them know what your turnaround times are along with rates, and any other expectations. Have a separate "rush rate" for jobs that they insist on being done on short notice. Make it at least 1.5x to discourage them from using it. Just don't respond to emails/calls on evenings or weekends. Try to train them, and if they won't learn, you just have to let them go and find clients who aren't shit, unless you absolutely depend on them. Finding balance - Set time aside each day or week for meditation/personal development and guard that time fiercely. Again doing it first thing of the day is probably best.

I'm an all-or-nothing kind of guy. If I try to eat in moderation I'm super likely to fall off the wagon and just start snacking and eating way too much. I don't have the willpower for portion control, but I can just stop myself from eating entirely with less of an internal battle. I've been using what I think is called the "zig zag diet" to try and keep my body from getting accustomed to it. I'll eat a very low amount of calories like 1,000 for two or three days. Then I'll have a day of 2,500 - 3,000 calories where I eat pizza or something. Plus I'm taking a multivitamin to make sure I'm not deficient in anything... although on my low-calorie days I'm mostly eating rice, moong dal, and lots of veggies. So I hope this will offset some of the health issues. Even if it's going to hurt my health in the short-term to fast, I think it's better to fast and get to 180 lbs than stay at 240 lbs and develop diabetes and high blood pressure within the next few years. In Ayurveda there are three doshas, or body types. It sounds like you have the same one as me, pitta. Which is prone to acid reflux, always being hot, etc. You might want to check out this meal plan of what foods to eat and avoid and consider it, and do some research into pitta dosha and see if it applies to you. https://ayurvedichealthcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/AHCWS-Food-Brochure-Pitta.pdf

Historically looking back on past similar events like the LA riots, king assassination, etc... these events usually last 6-7 days max and have never led to a civil war in the past. So the chances that a civil war will occur this time seems quite small. I lived through the 2011 England riots and I know that in the moment it can feel like society is collapsing, or like the violence is going to spread across the whole state or country. But chances of that are probably lower than you think. Best thing you can do in my opinion is just stay safe at home, don't go outside after sunset. People are in a frenzy and not behaving rationally, there isn't much you can do to help. It just has to burn itself out. As long as you don't live downtown above a shop or something, chances that residential areas are going to get looted or set on fire is low.

It's not that hard, just stop eating. Watch out for your mind finding excuses... telling you that you need to read whole books or watch hours of videos on fasting before you can do it for yourself. If you want to try fasting, just do it. If you aren't healthy, consult a doctor first. Otherwise just start slow. And use common sense... if you start to get light-headed, eat something and don't drive or do anything potentially hazardous until you feel better. Just look up "intermittent fasting" on Youtube and watch a few videos that come up and appeal to you. That will give you more than enough to get started. If you are interested in the science behind fasting, "autophagy" and "ghrelin" are some good keywords to start with. TLDR: I started by just skipping breakfast and not eating until noon each day. Then you can decide how strict you want to get. If you wanna have an 8 hour window each day that you eat, and 16 hours a day you don't eat. Or if you want to try one meal a day, or more. I wouldn't try dry fasting or full day fasting until you can do intermittant fasting or one meal a day. Fasting means nothing but water goes into your body. No coffee or tea, no gum, no vitamins or supplements. Nothing your stomach and liver will need to break down. Typical approach for buddhist monks is to only eat from sunrise until noon, or once a day around noon. (I am not a doctor and this post isn't medical advice, just my opinion and experience)

Whatever the highest paying job is that you're qualified for. If you have a degree, something related to that. If not, start applying for every minimum wage job like McDonalds, grocery stores, etc. that you can find I'm not sure how you're defining those terms. A business can provide a service, so they aren't mutually exclusive. Business, service, or product all produce money. But if you're desperate to make money in the short term, starting a business is not the way to go.

You can organize your life purpose in such a way that you don't need any kind of intimacy or much contact with people. I work from home and do everything via email. No phone calls, video calls, or in-person meetings. Although I'd also look at whether you just want to cut out human contact out of avoidance, and perhaps it's something you actually need to grow as a person. Ultimately though it sounds like if you go deep enough into enlightenment, you're going to realize that you're utterly alone in the end anyway.

I'm not a financial planner, do your own research. But in my opinion, the younger you are, the more risk you can afford to take. If you're in your teens, 20s, or 30s, then you can stand to take bigger risks like starting your own business or other risky choices. I would say once you're either in your 40s OR you have a kid (whatever comes first), then you have to start playing things a bit safe with your money. You probably want to keep an emergency fund of at least 6 months to a year where you could survive if you lost all income. It's also not all-or-nothing. You could leave most of your money in indexes, and put something like 10% into startup businesses, crypto, or other things.

When you get into the exercises of the course, that's where you'll start to separate out high consciousness vs low consciousness values and I think it will make more sense for you. There are some things that you could do as your life purpose, but you'd be doing them for the wrong reasons like money or fame. Your life purpose also doesn't have to be static for your entire life. You may do the course and find being a game designer is your life purpose now. But then if you do it in 5 years, you may realize it's time to move on to a new life purpose because you've grown and developed as a person. Most passions aren't at odds with the lifestyle and work environment you want. Even if your passion is playing with lego, you can create a huge lego Youtube channel and comfortably support doing what you love. You just have to be strategic about it and have at least a little bit of business sense.

I've been doing one meal a day for the past week and I've been losing at least 1 lb per day. I'm far from lean and toned, technically obese, so the weight is probably coming off me faster than most. I feel better energy level, also less inflammation when I wake up in the morning. It is really a test of your willpower though, especially combining it with low calories. The first couple of days, it basically took all my willpower to just suffer through the hunger and not allow myself to eat. But your body adapts and it gets easier.

There might be some days you don't sell anything or get any income. But there will also be times you're asleep and get paid, or on Christmas day when you aren't working. Don't expect that following your life purpose is going to make you financially free. You should expect that your life purpose isn't going to generate a single dollar for at least the first year. If that means you need to have another job for a while until it takes off, and work on your life purpose in the evenings and on weekends, then so be it.

Get a job. Any job. if you're asking this question, you're probably not high enough up maslow's hierarchy to worry about life purpose. Just create something stable for yourself first. Then once you have a steady source of income and start to build some savings, you can start thinking about bigger aspirations.

I used to get bored and sick of working an office job I hated Now I have my own business aligned with my life purpose. I still get bored sometimes and stuff gets tedious. But it's not that same feeling of wanting to rip your skin off. Or feeling like I can't make it 40 years to retirement doing the same job every day without killing myself. The big thing for me is being able to see the bigger picture. I see the end goal of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. If you work a job you hate, you're just doing a job for the money, and on a deeper level you know you're just helping to fill someone else's pockets. You're just a cog in a machine, and totally replaceable. After a couple of months following your passion, you should be able to look at what you've accomplished so far and be proud of it, and feel like it's making a positive contribution to the world. That will keep you going.

Icke has spoken about us all being made of pure love in 2 of the 3 interviews that I saw. Not regular love, he said unconditional love is the closest thing to it he can put into words. He also described us as "a point of awareness in an infinite state of conciousness" He may be misguided about a lot of the conspiracy stuff, but I think he may also have more in common with people on this path than we let on. I don't trust Icke to speak about science, but I've heard enough similar stuff coming out of MDs and other apparent doctors, scientists, and medical experts that I'm willing to be radically open-minded to the possibility that something other than a virus could be causing COVID-19. Youtube is just making the situation worse by removing these people from the platform. Sure there are lots of crackpot theories. If someone is giving dangerous advice or inciting violence then remove them. But there are also some plausible alternate explanations being presented by doctors which are being removed from the big tech platforms just because they go against the conventional explanation. But at the end of the day, we're all stuck inside our houses for the foreseeable future no matter what is true, unless you want to risk fines and other problems. So perhaps it doesn't really matter.

When you're starting at the bottom, you need to take gradual steps. You can't afford to spend years studying how to make money or pay for expensive courses right now. You'll likely have to start off getting a minimum wage job to work your way up. Once you get some semblance of stability, then you can start to build on that. Start off figuring out how you're going to afford the basics.... food, housing, utilities, and getting any steady income at all. Then you can worry about budgeting, establishing an emergency fund, etc once you have stable income and a little money left over. Then you can either work toward a promotion, or start a business on the side, and work your way up from there.

My dad is from Slovenia, told me the same things about no money in certain jobs and to choose something practical. So I think we are very alike. I took my parent's advice and went to university to study accounting, a safe stable job, instead of doing what I loved. But once I was working in an office I hated it so much, and I couldn't imagine myself sitting in an office for 40 more years. Every day sucked the energy and soul out of me. So what did I do? Eventually I quit to pursue my real passion of writing. Now I work from home and it's not perfect, but I make enough money to be comfortable and I can see a bright future of stuff I can still do. You can put your passion off, but it will catch up with you eventually. For me, I wasted about 5 years in college and university doing what my parents and teachers told me was practical, instead of doing what made me happy. But you can't do it forever unless you want a miserable life. It sounds like you are passionate about film/television and also your country. Maybe you can make a documentary about Serbia... either showing the beautiful side of it to the world, or exposing the corruption to try and help improve things there.

Use the life purpose course as an incentive to finish your final assignments. Then when you're done you can buy the course as a reward. It might be the motivation you need to finish all your work in 1 month instead of 3. From when I was in university, everyone seemed to procrastinate and do 90% in the final week anyway. Just get it out of the way and you'll be done.

So the problem is that I can't seem to think of anything that would make me happy. Not necessarily that I feel particularly depressed or miserable. But if I could picture any dream life for myself, there's nothing I can really think to do for the next 40 years that would be fulfilling and that I'd look back on as a good use of my time. I went back and watched the "Accept Drudgery" video from the course, and I think that sums up what I'm feeling maybe. Working on what I consider my life purpose is definitely more exciting than what I was doing before, but it's still not a thrillride by any means. There is less resistance than most other things I could be doing instead, but still resistance there. I guess I expected to feel more motivated and have more energy to pursue it.

I've gone through the Life Purpose course entirely 2 or 3 times, and the results that I get are always similar and I always come to the same conclusion. I've also done Jordan Peterson's Future Authoring Program so I feel like I know what I don't want, as much as what I do want. I feel like I've set good, attainable goals based around my top values, signature strengths, high-consciousness virtues, and ideal medium. I feel like I have a good idea for what my life purpose should be and what I want for my life. I've even broken it down to specific steps that I need to complete each day to progress toward my goals. But I don't feel like achieving them or working toward them will make me feel happy. I don't know if they even make me feel fulfilled. For me, I would describe my life purpose more like a dharma. I feel like I have a duty or obligation to make specific use of my skills and strengths for the world, and that's my purpose in life. But I won't necessarily feel happy or fulfilled doing it. Is that normal, or is my life purpose out of whack and I should look for something that will make me feel happy and fulfilled?

After watching today's video, I'm worried that I'm intellectualizing the idea of awareness, emptiness, true self, etc and that I'm going to do it wrong for a decade before I realize. I'm concerned my mind is making false sensations or images of the emptiness, and I can't seem to get past the tricks of my mind. When I try to sense the emptiness inside my head, I go inside and try to see what the "perceiver" is that links at the deepest level to my senses like sight, hearing, and smell, and the general idea of being "concious". It gives me a weird feeling like there's a vacuum or negative pressure inside my head that's sucking my head and ear canals in on itself. That's a sensation so I know that definitely can't be it. When I try to sense the emptiness outside of myself, it's still just a single point of "nothingness" I'm imagining in space in front of me, as opposed so something that permeates everything. Even if I think I'm feeling pure awareness or stillness, it still seems like there's a physical sensation associated with that. How do I know for sure that I'm finding true emptiness / awareness / true self, instead of it just being my mind tricking me? Am I supposed to be able to find it? Or is this some neti neti thing where I'm supposed to struggle to find it for hundreds of hours, and then it will just suddenly click?

I think I may have been stage green in the past when the Zeitgeist movies were first being released and my younger self was dreaming of a utopia. And the popular culture seemed to be anti-war, anti-George Bush. But sadly, I feel like I've mostly regressed to stage orange/blue now, and can't seem to get back. For the past few years I've listened to people like Jordan Peterson, and much worse things like alt-right podcasts. I don't know what led me down the rabbit hole, but at its worst point I was listening to pro-Trump, anti-immigration, anti-refugee, racist, homophobic, antisemitic, transphobic messages for hours each day. And it's really infected my mind. I've since really tried to cut back. Unsubscribed from the majority of those Youtube channels, don't visit those subreddits any more. But my ego continues to rebel and refuse statistics and facts from "leftists", feminists, etc. And it continues to gravitate toward messages of the alt-right. Plus I feel like since 9/11, society in general has really filled me with Islamophobia which makes it hard to feel any compassion or empathy toward refugees, when my brain believes they're invading my country to ruin it. That's hard because I live in Canada, which feels like the general public has reached stage green in the past 3-5 years, and I'm fighting against the popular consensus of my own country. It's also a growing point of contention between myself and my girlfriend, who is a very liberal person. I know the answer is to cut off all the lower stage media I used to enjoy and immerse myself in higher stage things, but it's tough when it's been your worldview, way of thinking, and main source of entertainment for years. It's like an addiction and also linked with my self-worth and self-esteem. I don't know how to start fully living and embracing stage green values, let alone surround myself with stage green people, when my mind is still filled with terminology like "cuck" and "soy boy" whenever I see them. I don't know to start convincing myself of things like the wage gap when I've listened to people debunk it for months or years. My mind puts up a wall whenever I try to reconsider ideas like feminism, equality, diversity, etc and overwhelms me with facts and information that right-leaning figures gave me. I know a lot of it is bad info, but I still can't seem to actually convince myself that my old positions might be wrong. I can't stand to watch left-leaning media like Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah. It's actually triggering for me. Maybe the worst part is that my ego sometimes tries to rationalize that I've actually already transcended to yellow, and I can see the false right/left dichotomy. But I know that must be a trap, because I wouldn't have this much disdain for stage green people if that were true.

Okay, this video left me with a few concepts and ideas that I can't seem to reconcile. Sorry, this is going to be a disjointed rambling mess... The video seems very focused on visual perception to determine what's actual. But how does it work with the other senses? If I put my hand behind my back and wiggle my fingers, is that actually the hand, or just sensations of the hand? If I see my girlfriend in the same room as me, she is actual. But if I turn around and she leaves my vision then she becomes just a concept. But if she speaks and I can hear her voice, is that actually her, or the only actual thing is the sound I am hearing? It's just a concept to infer the sound I hear is coming from my girlfriend? All the things I think about other people are just concepts. Such as their personality, the fact they are conscious, their preferences and expected behaviors. Even the idea that other people exist is a concept. Their body is actual when I'm looking at it or touching it, but everything going on inside is just concepts and ideas. There is no person, there is just a physical body there but everything else is just different overlapping concepts working together to create the illusion of one. This creates a really weird, empty world. All living things are just actual hollow shells like every other object. Well, hollow is a concept. It seems like something more than what I see is going on, but I can't say what. People aren't alive because life is just a concept, they are just pieces of flesh that are somehow animated. I can't even assume they are made of flesh/meat, meat is just a concept. Assuming people are alive is a concept. A living person and a dead body are actually the same thing from my perspective, the only thing that separates them is concepts? They look the same, they feel the same, except one is not animated. The same would be true for me, although obviously it's much harder to separate the illusion of my own self. Because it feels like I'm the one thinking and experiencing these things. ------------ If the inevitable conclusion that I am supposed to come to is that there is no "me", then how can this approach work if it's so me-centric? I'm saying that the only actual things are in my immediate awareness. Like the whole universe only exists because I perceive it. At any given moment, the universe is only what I'm actually concious of. But to function in life, I need to make assumptions. For example, if I actually put food in the oven and set a timer and go into the next room... I can reliably expect that my food will continue cooking and the timer will go off at the desired time. They still exist, to some degree. There is seemingly a continuity to things. I can leave my house and come back expecting everything to be where I left it. If I have pain inside my body, a doctor can cut me open and fix organs that are actually there. Where does stuff come from? I can't assume the pen on my desk is made of plastic, let alone that it came from oil that was drilled out of the ground and manufactured into a pen in China and shipped across the ocean. All concepts. Does it matter where stuff comes from? It's just here. Time is just a concept too... but I can't even wrap my head around that one. How do I reconcile the fact that God is infinite (concept) with the fact that actual things are only in my immediate awareness? If we are to assume that God (concept) is viewing the world through every other set of eyes on the planet (concept), then isn't everything that any other being sees actual as well? How can actuality be localized to my field of awareness? I guess that's my main question in all of this. How do I know the hand is actual when I have to rely on my eyes to see it. Is seeing through my eyes a concept? How do I know the actual is actual and not just another concept? If I was in virtual reality right now looking at my hand, that's not actually my hand. Literally nothing I could see or hear or feel would be actual. But how do I know that if I can't remember putting the virtual reality headset on? If I'm actually God that has slipped my body and mind on like a VR headset, how do I take it off? (Btw thanks for the video, it's getting me to actually think hard and take time to evaluate this stuff instead of just watch videos. I feel like by asking these questions I'm banging my head up against a wall, but maybe actually about to break through. Don't worry, I know there are 30 more walls behind that one. Look forward to literally descending into madness to figure this all out.)

Does anyone have experience doing Kriya yoga in a regular cross-legged sit? I'm not yet flexible enough to do any of the 3 positions in the book... Lotus is nigh impossible, Half Lotus immediately causes a lot of tension and pain in the knee, and Perfect Pose isn't much better. I'm looking into stretches and other exercises to help loosen my hips and knees, but it will likely be months before I can comfortably sit in any of these positions for 20 minutes. The book mentions sitting in a chair or laying down, but what about using a regular cross-legged position instead? I've not been able to find any info on how this would affect my practice. I don't want to sit cross legged if it will render all of the other practices ineffective, or if it can dangerously affect the energy work aspect of the practice. Edit: Just found the blog post about sitting posture... don't think even that easier posture is going to work, because I can't reach my heel to my perenium without knee pain, but I'll keep experimenting. I'm also overweight which may be adding to the problem... hopefully as I lose weight it will become easier.