Theprofessional

@r0ckyreed nooooo!!! That is a non-answer!!! C’mon, man.

Sadhguru has several videos explaining that “if you set your mind in a direction, over a period of time, everything you want will be manifested.” In the same videos, he says that although you can focus on goals, if you instead focus on creating a “peaceful, loving and joyful world,” it is actually better because that is what all human beings want, and your goals will be manifested as part of that focus. I’ve used his manifestation strategy to focus on certain objectives and make wonderful things happen in my life. However, several months ago my intuition gave me a big objective and I’ve been stuck on it, because I’ve been closely following Sadhguru’s advice of focusing on creating a “peaceful, loving, and joyful world,” instead of the goal itself, because I want to do the hard thing and follow his advice. There have been some very positive changes in my life since I started focusing on this, mainly just in my daily routine, but there have also been awful things that have happened to me since I started focusing on creating a “peaceful, loving, and joyful world”. Not only have I made almost zero progress toward the big goal I have, but I have also had many things in my life take a turn for the worse purely from coincidence. All 3 of my family’s cars were totaled this month, which means I have no transportation to go to my college classes anymore. A close family member passed away without warning. My sibling has had a sudden rapid decline in his mental health, to the point where there is no communication with him, he just intimidates and says abusive things and the rest of the time he’s in a kind of an unresponsive vegetative state. He’s been like this for weeks, I don’t know if he picked up a drug habit (he goes to college far away) but I’ve never seen him act like this and it breaks my heart. My motivation for school has also dropped and I’m falling behind in my classes. Honestly there’s a lot more, but this post is long enough. I’m wondering if I’m wrong for focusing on “creating a peaceful, loving, and joyful world” and I should instead focus on the big objective I have, like my intuition is telling me to do. But I want to follow Sadhguru’s advice as closely as possible. What should I do?

@r0ckyreed thank you.

@EmptyVase fantastic insight, thank you.

Hi. So, some of my fellow "doers" out here might agree with the statement, "when you set your mind in a direction, and you are clear about exactly what you want, everything must yield." I've found this to be true with many projects I've had. When you set your mind to a clear thing and solely that thing, in time you will achieve the goal - no matter how big or scary it seems. However, here's something interesting I've discovered over the years. Doing this will indeed allow you to accomplish wonders, and even seemingly supernatural things can happen. But after you achieve your goal, if you push forward and try to continue that same activity without a clear plan, the results will be catastrophic and it actually can undo all of the progress you made before. This sounds weird and abstract and maybe even schizophrenic, but I've found this to be the case with numerous things in my life. For example, setting my mind to having a great Spring quarter at my college, then going into Fall quarter (without a clear picture), and having awful events coincidentally take place. Things like that. What's funny about this technique of "setting your mind in a direction" is that it does work, and you can achieve great things with it. However, it eerily goes directly against the principles of Mastery, which state that you should never be obsessed and you should never be completely focused on a single objective. Instead you should discipline yourself with continuous goalless practice and focus on the practice of whatever it is you're working on, without a clear objective in mind for end results. No need to "train your thoughts," you just do this thing for many years and eventually you will yield incredible things with it. The Mastery process in the end leads to far more results than "setting your mind in a direction" for something, but it takes years and years before you will see any kind of growth at all with this method, and even those initial results will be minuscule, perhaps negligible. So right now I'm caught between these concepts. Which is better - "manifesting" results by setting your mind in a direction, or disciplining yourself now with no results and seeing potentially more growth later down the road? Is there a middle ground with these methods? Thanks.

Used to be into this technique, just getting back into it now and I forgot how great it is. My question is, is it better to just do a visualization for a single goal every single day until that goal is reached, then move on, or can you do maybe three separate visualizations every day to focus on three different goals? Will that "dilute" the vision? I have one goal that is less than a year from now, another that is three years from now, and one that is ten years from now. Would it be better to just focus on the first one until I reach it? Or can you do visualizations for all three, as long as you consistently do them every day? Will that hurt the process? Thanks.

@EmptyVase motivation is short term, inspiration is long tern

@Jacob Morres Maybe. I'm just confused because in the book Mastery by George Leonard, he explicitly states that "goal-less practice" is the way of mastery. I've read the book several times and this piece of information has always bothered me. On the one hand, I understand that repetition is the best way to learn something, not paying attention to the outcome. But also, there can't be any repetition unless you know what you're working toward in the first place.

@EmptyVase What do you mean conflation?

I don't get it

Hi. I've been watching Leo for a long time, and saw a video that really clicked with me a few months ago. It was newer, and in it he talked specifically about how the idea of success can't hinge on a single project, but your goal instead has to transcend to the mastery of the field. And your goal should instead be, instead of doing one project really well, to become amazing at whatever skill that is. This hit me at a crazy time, when I was about to go all-in and make an indie film I'd been thinking about for a long time. I dropped the film and read several books on Mastery to grasp more of what he was talking about. I've wanted to get better at filmmaking for a long time, and it's something I'm very passionate about. However, focusing on filmmaking from the perspective of "becoming amazing" or "mastering the field" is absolute torture, and I've actually completely lost productivity by studying Mastery and trying to apply it to filmmaking. I've been paralyzed for months because I don't know how to even begin training with that kind of mindset. "Becoming amazing" is not quantifiable, so my brain can't process it, no matter how hard I try. However, "Making X film" is concrete and tangible, so my brain has no problem moving forward and working on that. I know how stupid and neurotic this all sounds, but I'm now haunted by the fact that I shouldn't focus on making a single film, and my results have waned. The goal of Mastery seems WAY too big and abstract, and I don't know how to approach it. Is Mastery even a goal? Will your skills decline once you reach that goal, since getting there is all you cared about? Thanks.

@Leo Gura Oh, so I can focus on the one, but Mastery is basically just "Be consistent", "Study your errors," and "Never quit". Never quitting, even if you're succeeding. Thank you Leo!!!

Pardon me for the edginess this post will contain. Hello everyone. I am a 20-year-old college student, and there is something I need to share that has been on my mind for about a month now, and that is the dilemma of seeking out relationships while on the path to creating an enlightened, actualized life. As we all know Western culture is very toxic, and very anti-enlightenment. We tend to value materialism and status over everything else, which sends most people on empty journeys throughout their life which are very unfulfilling at the end of the day. So, I've found that the best solution to combating this toxic culture is to have a very select group of friends and people I spend my time around. The times when I've had the most friends and tried to integrate myself the most into the "college lifestyle" are the times that I've felt the lowest and most depressed in my life. Going to lots of huge parties, drinking all the time, doing random hook-ups... it's very soul-sucking, and doesn't hold a candle to spending time studying my passions and hobbies. This brings me to the paradox of looking for a relationship while seeking to set up an actualized life at this age. I know nobody's perfect, but so far the girls I've dated have been locked into believing in the toxic values our society holds, and I haven't been able to find someone who is trying to see past all that and is trying to live an actualized life. Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I've found that most people my age simply want to smoke weed, get their degree, and live an easy lifestyle, which has made looking for relationships very discouraging. In the relationships I've had, there's always been a moment where my partner finds out about my inclinations and ambitions (meditation routines, long term goal-setting, self help book list, etc) and there's a disconnect where they suddenly think I'm a quack. I've even had one relationship where my partner directly discouraged me from living my life this way... needless to say that one didn't last much longer after that. What do I do? Do I just keep looking for someone on the same page as me, or should I just tune it out until I'm a little older?

"The Fleshlight is a big deal"... You've got to be fucking kidding me.

I have a dilemma. Since I was a teenager, I've been following Leo's rule to "always do everything that is emotionally most difficult" as best I can so that I can live a self-actualized life. This has resulted in many low points, but also many high points. However, it's time to pick my major in college, and I don't know what to do. I've been forcing myself to take some of the hardest courses I can, which has brought down my GPA significantly and made me start to absolutely hate school. Math isn't my strong suit and I have no interest in it, so I was planning on majoring in engineering, since that is the most emotionally difficult thing to do. Everyone in my life is telling me that I shouldn't do that, even engineers that I know. I am more mentally geared toward "easier" bullshit subjects like art and philosophy and English, the ones that are absolutely worthless, so that's unfortunate. In my dream world, I would major in mythology. I'm taking Calculus the second time in a row this quarter, because I had to drop it the first time, and it is absolutely killing me. My general mood has worsened and over the past month I have felt my inner spark of inspiration and motivation grow dimmer every time I wake up. My parents say "take classes you are inspired by," and "you need to stop making yourself suffer," but I don't want that. I want to do the emotionally most difficult thing to do, and I want to kick its ass. What do I do? Am I just going to crash and burn on this path, or am I doing it right? Thanks.

@Leo Gura I could cry Leo, this is exactly what I needed to hear right now. I hope you're doing well. I also just want to say that your work has been a beacon of hope for me ever since I found your channel. I was a freshman in high school with no confidence, tremendous anxiety, bullied on a constant basis, and I started watching your videos out of sheer desperation and out of a fear that the rest of my life would be more of the same. Thanks to you I began meditating daily and I figured out how to overcome my anxiety, along with many other things. I am now in the best place I have ever been (despite what the post above implies). You completely changed my worldview and I am eternally grateful.

I am young, 19 years old, but because of years of dedication to meditation I have experienced absolute truth many times. I have seen reality for what it is, how none of this is actually real, how I am the universe. I have seen how life itself is a manipulation in reality, how life itself is a disruption in the balance of the universe. I have come face to face with the devil and seen that evil is not real. I have spent a big part of my life with nothing on my mind except "expand your awareness" in all situations in the hope that it would lead to the truth... and it is destroying my life. I can now see through the illusions, but it is leaving me unfocused and causing my material human life to crumble. I go to college, but I now see that getting in debt just to be able to break my back at some public-approved government slave job is terrible and I am no longer motivated to get good grades. I have a job as a courtesy clerk at a grocery store to help pay the bills, and sometimes I stack people's bag poorly and crush their food because my brain is too busy thinking about my ego. I don't try to impress girls I find attractive anymore because I see that putting on a show for some temporary pleasure is a waste of time. I feel great on days when I give up looking for the answers, I do my jobs better, and people like being around me more because I'm smiling and thinking about being charasmatic instead of seeing them as pieces of cardboard in a grand illusion. IF I HAD IT MY WAY, I'd drop out of school, quit my job, and go to some abandoned location on a grassy hillside and spend a year studying the nature in the area and meditating, but I come from a family that is extremely ego driven and they would immediately disown me as a "bum" and a "total failure" if I did that, probably for life. They would never understand. I don't have the strength to go against my family legacy, so I think if I'm not going all-in in this I should just give it all up at this point. I think I have to "stay plugged into the Matrix" and just play the stupid game like everyone else. I don't know. What do you think? Can someone help me?

@tsuki I don't know everything, and I am rushing because I want to exploit the game of Time. I want to obtain these powerful insights early on so I can use the rest of my life to give them back to the world in various ways

@tsuki Because if I didn't feel I needed to do it, if I didn't have a purpose to go in that direction, what would be the point?

I have been meditating for 15-20 minutes nearly every day since November 5 2017, and what I can tell you is that it has helped a great deal with my confidence issues and anxiety. My awareness has increased significantly and I feel like I now truly see the world as it is for the first time in my life... with that being said, I also fear that increased awareness is hurting me. Two months ago I began practicing the guided meditation you, Leo, made and put a link to in one of your videos, and since then, I have noticed some radical changes in my life, like improved social skills and improved attention to details. It also led to my first real "enlightenment" experience in which I met with the devil and every evil in the world that ever existed but then I realized all of it was made up by my imagination and no evil exists or has ever existed. But there is a problem: at the same time, over the last 2 months I have fallen into a mental "fog" so to speak. I have lost interest in school, I have lost interest in becoming a psychiatrist (which was my life purpose, yes I know you're supposed to figure out other ones as time goes on but I'm in a position right now where I can't really do that), I have allowed my sleep schedule to fall into a routine that is mentally destroying me, I no longer care for having girlfriends, I have been experiencing short manic episodes fueled by either fear or anger (or both), and all I seem to want to do is write and make music. Music has been a hobby of mine for a few years but now I just find my mind always focusing on how I can become a fucking rockstar instead of how I can complete tasks at hand like homework or studying for a test or doing well at my job. I don't do drugs or drink or any of that, so that's not the reason for this. It's ridiculous, I don't want this path for myself because I know it will only bring me despair but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Please help

I seek self actualization. Unlocking the full potential of my brain has been a goal of mine for a long time now. However, I fear that it is not for me. I notice as I have been watching these videos and developing myself using methods suggested in the videos that I have become colder and emotionally detached, which is healthy I understand, to the point where I no longer connect with normal people emotionally on certain topics. However, my current passions in life that I am finally beginning to pursue are screenwriting and filmmaking, which are jobs that require the creator to be emotionally sensitive, in order to recognize what will connect with an audience and what won't. I was recently watching a film where a scene appeared that was intended to disturb the viewer and make them feel hatred for certain characters, but I felt nothing. How can I create emotionally resonant scenes when I can not actually feel them? Is it possible to still be successful in these fields and create soulfull, emotional works while remaining emotionally detached? Should I give up self actualization? Thanks.