jjer94

No need to create rules for yourself. Just do whatever you feel moved to do! However, if you become neurotic about it (as in, you need it for your happiness instead of playing it because you are happy), then you will suffer and you will know it. At that moment, ask yourself what you're getting out of it. Catch yourself being neurotic about it and understand your neuroticism, and you will naturally play less, as you will see less value in playing. I used to be a video game addict for a long long time. This past summer I contemplated very deeply why I was so addicted, and the addiction magically fixed itself through my understanding of it. Entertainment's not evil until you need it to be happy. On occasion I'll boot up Minecraft because I love the building and exploring aspects of the game. Play because it's fun, not because you need it. Again, no need to set any rules for yourself. Cheers!

Here's a nice list that'll keep you occupied: Vanilla Sky/Abre Los Ojos "Even in my dreams I feel like an idiot who's about to wake up." - A near-perfect allegory of enlightenment. The Truman Show "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that." Dark City "Sleep, now." - Reality is not what we think it is. Blade Runner Philosophy on the trustworthiness of memory. Great for dispelling beliefs about who you think you are. The Fountain "Death is the road to awe." - Ego's failed attempt to live forever, and then finally saying 'yes' to surrender to Truth. The Matrix Plato's cave allegory. One of the best allegories for enlightenment, except for the fact that Neo's new reality is not the Truth. Also, really entertaining. Joe Vs. The Volcano A fun, allegorical presentation of the path to enlightenment. Pan's Labyrinth On overcoming fear and ego. American Beauty Disillusionment upon disillusionment. A man who wakes up halfway through his life. Watch for Ricky Fitts. Apocalypse Now The horrors of realizing the truth and what you have to do to get there. Also note how ego exalts their leader. Cast Away A man forced awake. Wilson represents everyone else. Dead Poet's Society Think for yourself. Be a heretic. Nineteen Eighty-Four 2+2=5. You can believe yourself out of an idea as powerful as love. Pleasantville More heresy, and ego's resistance. A fun one. Star Wars (+The Empire Strikes Back) The hero's journey. Dying of the flesh to be born of the spirit. Surrender. Unlearning. Human Adulthood. The Thirteenth Floor The unreality of reality. "Turtles on top of turtles". Waking Life Thought-provoking ideas. Belief-destroying ideas. The dream allegory explained well. About Schmidt The stark fact of your death. Total Recall More flimsy memory philosophy. What Dreams May Come Flow/manifestation. How To Get Ahead in Advertising Ego failing to overthrow itself. Pretty dang funny. Being There The wise fool and flow. Fight Club "Why do you think I blew up your condo? Hitting bottom is not a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! Let go!" The Thing Philosophy on what it means to be a self. Harold and Maude American Zen. A funny feel-good movie. 500 Days of Summer Love as we know it in modern society is bullshit. Is anything ever a coincidence? The Giver Human Adulthood, heresy, and breaking free. Read the book; waaay more powerful than the movie. Watchmen "We are all puppets, Laurie. I'm just the puppet who can see the strings." Enjoy!

That book is very dense and esoteric. If you haven't already read up a lot on enlightenment stuff, I suggest you try a lighter read. That being said... the noumena that he is referring to is Truth itself. He is referring to the fact that nothing in phenomena (everything you experience) can be noumena. Nothing in the dream state can be Truth due to phenomena being ephemeral. Noumena is everlasting. This is what he means when he says that noumena is the only 'thing' that exists, and phenomena are its temporary manifestations. Phenomena are not separate from noumena, but they are not noumena. Pretty paradoxical, huh? Another thing: you can know phenomena, but you can't know noumena. Noumena is pure not-knowing. It's what's there when all knowing is gone. How can you know something that is Infinite? To know Infinity would place you above it, which is impossible. Then you may be wondering, how can I directly encounter Truth if nothing in my phenomenal experience is it, and I can't even know it? The thing is, you're being it. Here's an analogy: you can't see your own eyes, but you can be conscious that you have eyes just by the fact that you're seeing. This is likely what Wei Wu Wei is referring to when he talks about in-seeing. To see that you experience form and emptiness in the phenomenal world, but by the fact that they're there you can infer that something else is witnessing all of it, and that witness is Truth. I think this is also where the common phrase "the seeker is the sought" comes from. Oddly enough, when you look for that witness of everything, there's nothing there. It's a very intuitive realization.

Some emotions don't even need a label or language to understand. I wouldn't worry about it too much. What do you mean by emotional mastery, anyways? You mean having a lasso around your emotions? Being able to control them? If that's the case, I don't think you're going to get anywhere. What I think you're actually referring to here is self-mastery. Divisive, painful emotions are generated by ego. Instead of just labeling emotions or trying to control them, maybe you ought to go deeper to understand where those emotions are coming from in the first place. There are certain triggers that make you tick. What are those triggers? Learn to understand why you react the way you do, and you will be on the path to mastering not only your emotions, but yourself.

No. That's just a word. What it's referring to is True.

In order to say that "we don't know anything," we need to examine what it means to know something. What is KNAWLEDGE? (Here in my garage...) I just looked up the word in the dictionary, and the philosophical definition is "true, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion." The key here is the first part. A piece of knowledge is justified belief. What makes a justified belief? If the hypothesis behind the belief is confirmed and all other hypotheses are refuted...but can we actually refute all other hypotheses? Let's take a classic example here. We say with absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow, as if it's an objective fact. We have studied the laws of gravity time and time again, and we can predict with absolute certainty that it will rise tomorrow. The sun has risen every single day since I was born, so surely it must rise tomorrow... Call me crazy, but what if it doesn't? What if a supernova causes the sun to explode before it can rise tomorrow? What if a black hole swallows up the sun? I can come up with a million-and-one hypotheses as to why the sun may not rise tomorrow. The point is, in order for something to be objective knowledge, 100% true, ALL hypotheses that attempt to falsify the knowledge must be refuted. And since there is always a new hypothesis that can be formulated...objective knowledge is impossible. No statement or justified belief can be proven absolutely true. We can falsify a bunch of other hypotheses which leaves us with the justified hypothesis, but 0.0000001% false is still false. All knowledge is belief, and no belief is true. Hence, whatever's absolutely true can't be in the realm of language. Words can be used to point or orient to absolute truth, but words themselves do not hold absolute truth. A fair warning to all Truth seekers out there.

First of all, you shouldn't do anything. There's no rules to becoming enlightened. In fact, do whatever you feel moved to do. You don't even have to listen to me, because my advice below contradicts this point. Secondly, you're asking "Outward?" when you ought to be asking, "Inward?" You're looking for some pre-determined path, some sense of certainty that guarantees you will be enlightened. Like a clickbait: "Follow these 10 easy steps to become enlightened!" But if you're really serious about this stuff, you have to strike out on your own. You are the only authority there could ever be. You have to do what feels right, and you have to examine yourself. This is the most personal journey you will ever take. It's your head that's on the chopping block. Enlightenment is not about adding new trinkets to your belief system; it's about destroying all of your beliefs about you and the world. If you think the Bible can help you with destroying beliefs, go ahead and read it, but I doubt it'll help because it's also covered in the muck and mire of false beliefs. In reality, anything can move you towards enlightenment. Anyone or anything can be your guru if they point out any hidden beliefs, any forms of resistance in yourself. I suggest checking out Leo's book list for more direct books on enlightenment. Cheers!

The witness, or the "I Am" is just a facet of consciousness like sense perceptions. You see them as separate, when they're really one and the same. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. What is a sense perception without the sentient witnessing of it? Some more contemplation on this should allow you to see the non-duality of everything. Don't confuse these ideas with Truth though. The witness and sense perceptions are ephemeral; Truth is and always was. To go even further, ask yourself: Who is witnessing the witness? Just a heads-up: you can't experience the answer; you can only become conscious of it. You can't know Truth, but you can become aware that it is.

I was stuck on this one for a long time. Yes, ego death is an illusion, since ego never existed in the first place. But in the realm of the phenomenal world (i.e 'reality' as we know it, our sense perceptions) there's a body and a sentience ("I Am"). That body + sentience was birthed, and eventually, it will cease to function and dissolve. That's what most people refer to as physical death, and it's most definitely real in regards to the phenomenal world. Your sense perceptions and sentience will cease at some point. So, yes, the sentient focal point you call "I" will cease to be. The way to confirm this is to examine what happens when you go to sleep. In deep sleep, there is no awareness of being alive, no sentience, no thoughts to confirm your existence. The focal point you call "I" is not the Truth due to its ephemeral nature. How does the transition happen from one state of consciousness to another? Nobody knows, and nobody can know. We don't even know if reincarnation exists; that's just a baseless assumption. How does physical death happen? It just does. Why? Because. At this point, you're probably pretty down in the dumps reading what I just wrote. Fortunately, you're not any of these ephemeral things. Even when the body and the "I Am" dissolves, there is still something there...but it's not a thing at all. That, whatever that is, is Truth. Truth was never born and hence can never die. It's always been. Here's a quote that helped me contemplate Truth: "Imagine that an ultimate Big Bang in reverse, a sort of anti-Big Bang, suddenly blows up all existence. Absolutely everything that could possibly be experienced is gone. Add to that: time has also been blown away, and space is non-existent. So there is really nothing at all left. Has Being ceased to be? Has existence disappeared or diminished in any way? No. Not at all. We confuse being some thing with Being. We confuse experience with what is. Notice that with nothing at all, existence still is. It just isn’t any thing. It doesn’t exist in or as space or time, and so not as process or experience. In other words, is can’t come or go, it can only is." -Peter Ralston Ultimately, even if the sun explodes and everything gets destroyed and nobody is sentient to experience it... Truth still is. It's just not in the form of anything. To acquire a grounded consciousness of that is another story.

If you read closely what I wrote, I'm not asking you to stop the journey altogether. I'm asking you to look for the obstructions that prevent you from seeing Truth. So yes, the you that you think you are is one of them. I'm asking you to look into yourself and your own agendas, to understand the character that you play. Why you do the things you do. No amount of words on these forums can help you with that. Self-examination is a very personal endeavor that only you can do. All the best, mate. "Rather than continuing to seek the truth, simply let go of your views." —Buddha

Hey Jess, What you're experiencing is resistance, also known as emotional pain. The most prevalent method of dealing with resistance is to search outward for relief, e.g. meditation, breathing methods, praying, having sex, eating ice cream, having people say "it's all okay," pity parties, playing video games, going on Facebook to rant; the list goes on and on. I'd like to dispense some bad news: that doesn't work, and that never did. All that distractions do is bury the emotion deeper and deeper, where it continues to stew in your gut. It only covers up the pain temporarily. Then what happens is that you become addicted to these things because you need to keep your emotions buried, you need to keep running, you can't face them... Trying to get rid of resistance through distractions or agendas is like trying to punch a brick wall with your bare fist. It not only doesn't work, but it causes you more pain in the long run. So then...what is there to do? You're not going to like what I have to say one bit, but here it is: you have to face the anger. Stop trying to control the situation by trying to get rid of the anger; you never had any control to begin with. Instead, let the anger flow through you. Let it all bubble up to the surface. Go on a rampage, punching pillows, screaming swears; do whatever you need to do. Release the dam you have on your anger. Want to be angry. And then, in the midst of it all, stop and ask yourself, "What is this emotion trying to accomplish?" Expose the self-agenda the emotion is trying to fulfill. It will be a very personal agenda, and you will have to dig deep. It will feel like a part of you is dying when you do this, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to get rid of the boogeyman, you have to face the boogeyman, exposing your chest to it in total surrender. You can use this inquiry any time resistance pops up. Resistance is the lifeblood of ego. To try and get rid of the ego is just yet another agenda: ego trying to get rid of itself. Very unlikely. Instead, want the resistance to be there and understand its purpose. Once you understand the magic trick, it won't surprise you anymore. Be brave Jess. Cheers, JJ

I recently used this quote, but I think it applies here. Some food for thought on your self-actualization journey.... "Anytime you’re practicing renunciation, you’re deluded. How about that! You’re deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands." -Tony de Mello Cheers!

Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself that you should do one thing over another, when you've probably have been doing that most of your life, and it hasn't worked. This quote explains the phenomenon well: "Anytime you’re practicing renunciation, you’re deluded. How about that! You’re deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce... The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands." -Tony de Mello Don't try to convince yourself that social media or any of the things you think are 'distractions' are bad just because some people say they are. Instead, understand why you feel so drawn towards these distractions. What do you get from them? Go on Facebook and ask yourself that question. Be honest with yourself. Let yourself indulge, and then figure out why you feel so inclined to indulge. When you understand the magic trick for what it is, it won't be so exciting for you anymore.

You can't want to be aware; you already are. Instead of striving to add stuff to your present experience, you may want to ask yourself what is the rubbish in the way that is preventing me from seeing that awareness is my natural state? The pathless path to enlightenment is not one of adding awareness, of 'trying' to be aware. It's one of subtracting out all the bull---- your mind says so that awareness becomes your natural state. And for that...sorry to say, but you're going to have to stop running away from your anxiety and instead face it. You will need to enter into the things you fear, the things that cause you emotional pain, in order to understand the stories you tell yourself that give you a reason to suffer. “It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” -Bruce Lee

This is very subtle, but humor me for a second. Could you consider that chasing enlightenment is just as much an ego game as anything else? Anything with a self-agenda is ego-based. Why do you want to know the Truth of your being in the first place (you can't know the Truth, by the way)? Because you want to be happy. You expect that some time in the future, you will be enlightened and boom, all problems solved, you will live happily ever after. As if salvation were in the future. Sounds pretty familiar to the ego's games, doesn't it? Yes, all external happiness is temporary, and yes, true 'eternal happiness' would only arise when one discovers who they are. But that very idea is creating a self-agenda for you. You said it yourself: you're chasing after enlightenment, as if it were some external thing you can acquire. What if happiness were right here, right now, and it was never a matter of chasing after anything externally, but a matter of looking inwards to see what ideas are preventing you from seeing that happiness is already here? What hidden beliefs and agendas (like this one) are causing your suffering? Examine your own personal beliefs enough, and you may just arrive at Truth. In the end, all games are pointless games, and the point of the game is playing it, not to win the prize at the end. Happiness is just a matter of being happy.

You need to re-examine your assumptions. You assume that there exists some ego that has control. What's actually there in your direct experience? From my point of view, it's like you're asking whether Santa Clause has 8 or 10 reindeer, or will he give me a lump of coal for christmas, or will his elves accompany him on the sleigh... Do you see? Santa Clause doesn't exist. Santa Clause and all the stories that come with him regarding reindeer, coal, and elves, are just stories. The same goes with ego. What's actually there are thought sensations that tell itself that there's an ego. It doesn't really matter that there are desires, or negative emotions, or boredom, that arises when you do your inquiry work. What does matter is that you're taking them so seriously, as if the stories they told you had any reality. Instead of trying to get rid of all of these apparently negative things, why don't you inquire about them? Why are they so negative? Why do I feel so moved to post on this forum about them? Am I expecting someone's words to solve my own problems so I don't have to do the work of examining these painful emotions myself? Stop running, my friend. Run towards. Let all of these emotions come up, look them in the eye, and learn to understand the illusory beliefs behind all of them. Then they won't bother you so much, you can let them be, and they will go away naturally on their own.

Hi! An enlightened being is not some transcendent superhuman. They still see the same exact things you do, and they still feel the same exact things you do. They may have transcended the ego, but that doesn't mean the body's survival mechanisms are completely destroyed. If they feel pleasure, they feel pleasure. If they feel pain, they feel pain, and they may wince and cry from it. That's life. Sometimes there are moments where we feel physical pleasure, and sometimes there are moments where we feel physical pain. The difference between you and them is that they suffer a lot less. Suffering can be defined as resistance to what is. If they feel pain, they may try to avoid whatever is causing the pain, but they don't say in their mind, "That shouldn't have happened." The average person that is punched in the face would come up with a million-and-one stories as to why that shouldn't have happened, thus making them angry and hurt, thus causing them suffering. An enlightened being enjoys music even more because they are (mostly) free from their own judgments about the music. An enlightened being still has preferences, but they don't see personal preference as an aspect of themselves and don't try to defend them. Enlightenment doesn't require anything other than seeing clearly. In order to see clearly, you don't switch world views: you destroy all world views. You can do that any way you want. Some meditate, some contemplate, others write. Do whatever feels right to you, and don't let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn't do. Enlightenment is a pathless path. You don't have to do anything. Cheers!

Ah, my bad. Yes, the only difference between you and me is that I see through illusion, or I see "Everything as it is" . "What is" can't be explained or even known, only pointed to. It's not like I don't have a sense of self, or I had an ego death or any of that. A sense of self is still there, but I see it more as a perfume rather than an actual thing. That perfume can stink sometimes The 'state' of enlightenment, if you can even call it that, is always there. It's incredibly subtle because you wouldn't even guess to look there. I have a kundalini experience? It's still there in the backdrop. I get shitfaced? It's still there. I get high on DMT? It's still there. But, paradoxically, as Gertrude Stein once said, "Once you get there, there's no there there." The Truth is not something you abide in. You can't know it; you're too busy being it! I don't abide in Truth, but I'm learning to abide in the "I Am", which is that sentient emptiness that permeates all sense perceptions. Sorry, it's so hard to explain, but I reckon that gave you a basic idea of the 'state' of enlightenment?

I'm not sure what you mean by "real being". If you're asking whether there's a difference between what I'm experiencing right now and what you're experiencing right now, I would say, of course not. I'm no transcendent superhuman. The only difference is that you may still see some illusions as real, and I don't. What is the reality of an illusion? There is none. How do you destroy Santa Clause? Imagine that somehow, we were both in a dream. This dream looks exactly the same as what we call waking reality, with all the same 'laws' of physics and such. Now imagine that you believe it's waking reality, and I know it's just a dream. We have a conversation, and I ask you what the table is made of. You say, space and atoms arranged as molecules of cellulose. I say, no, it's just consciousness, all of this is consciousness; you're in a dream. You would think I was crazy, even if what I was saying was pointing to the truth of the matter. You believe that the 'space and atoms' in the analogy are actually real, when they have no reality at all outside of your believing in their reality. What's left when you stop believing in anything? "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick

With all this talk of kundalini and sensations of emptiness, I just want to clear the air for a sec. Experiences are fleeting. The Truth is eternal. Upon having an awakening or discovering the Truth, you may experience joy or bliss or kundalini or whatever, but that's just a side effect. Enlightenment is not an experience. It's not a sense perception. It's not anything you perceive in the world of phenomena. A lot of people like to confuse sensations of emptiness with enlightenment, when what they have likely found is the "I Am" or "the witness" or "beingness" as Nisargadatta puts it. The I Am is a very alive, sentient emptiness that is the backdrop of all sense perceptions; it's not just limited to your body. It's incredibly liberating when you first find the I Am, because that's your first realization that you are not the ego. The I Am is where the sense of Oneness comes from, because you see that the emptiness of the I Am is not separate at all from sense perceptions. After discovering I Am, you will spontaneously begin to abide in it. However, the I Am is a gateway into Truth and not Truth itself. Why is it not Truth? Well, where does the I Am go during sleep? Where was it before you were born? Who is witnessing the I Am? Do enough contemplation, and you see that the I Am is just another part of the dream world of perceptions due to its ephemeral nature. Just wanted to clear that up for anyone who's confused about the term "enlightenment experience."

There are so many great ones out there, but then again, great is a matter of perspective. Some teachers like to point to the moon with their middle fingers; some like to raise both their hands and point; some like to stick their fingers up their butts and point. What you consider 'great' really just depends on your personality type. Here are some that I've found useful for certain personality types: If you're the philosophical/analytical type, check out Peter Ralston, Ken Wilber and Goran Backlund. If you're the skeptical/monomaniacal/dark/Tyler Durden type, check out Jed McKenna and Steven Norquist. If you're the flowery/spiritual/all-is-one type, check out Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, and Mooji. If you're into the deep esoteric stuff, check out Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi. If you're the practical/straight-talk type, check out Tony de Mello and Leo's videos on enlightenment. There's no one best teacher. They all pretty much point to the same thing. It just depends on your tastes. However, if you're wondering whether a spiritual teacher not on this list can help you, here's a checklist of red flags to watch out for: [ ]Do they ask you to believe what they're saying? [ ]Do they talk about themselves a lot? [ ]Do they say that they can give you enlightenment? [ ]Do they say that you will slowly become enlightened in their presence? [ ]Do they sell crystals/buddha statues/trinkets and say you need them for enlightenment? [ ]Do they claim to be superhuman? If they check off any of these points on the list, you may want to approach with caution. On a side note, I've found my best teacher to be life itself. Learn to treat everyone and everything as your guru. Your interpretations/feelings towards a particular guru can tell you a lot about your hang-ups on the journey. And of course, if you're an animal lover, dogs and cats are your personal Zen masters. Safe travels!

You may want to be careful with setting a time schedule for enlightenment, Leo. Because what starts to happen, especially with self-inquiry, is that you begin to build illusory expectations. After enough consistent daily inquiry, you begin to build the expectation that you're going somewhere with it, that eventually (in 1000+ hours...) there will be some explosive flash of an experience and clarity will come shining down on you and you will be enlightened, boom, happily ever after. I'm not saying that's what you're doing; I'm just pointing it out to you and others as a warning. Hope that the self-inquiry will get you somewhere in the future is just another illusory trap you need to work through, because fundamentally, it's literally impossible to go somewhere when you're already there. I disagree that you can't short-cut self-inquiry. You can, but it likely requires some monomania, a stark raving madness for the Truth. That's the state I was in this past summer after watching your How to Become Enlightened video. From there, it took a couple months of self-inquiry alongside digesting masses of reading material to see through the veil of self. When I saw through it, it didn't come as a flash of realization or a change in sense perceptions whatsoever. It was incredibly subtle and incredibly beautiful. Afterwards was plenty of laughing and crying. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it; non-dual awareness just began to stick naturally. And now, a few days ago, the search just plain ended after a final realization. I hadn't done any formally scheduled self-inquiry since that first realization in the summer. My point is not to brag about how enlightened I am (or how stupidly contradictory that statement is) or how little time it took me or how superior I am to everyone else. My point is that there are no rules to becoming enlightened, no expectations, no requirements. Enlightenment is a pathless path, literally the most personal journey you can ever take. Sure, self-inquiry is a natural part of the process, but that can be done in many different ways, and it sure as heck doesn't have to take 1000 hours. After your first realization, you'll probably reconsider that statistic, because you'll be wondering how you didn't see it this whole time because of how dang simple Truth is. Now, the psychological clean-up/deprogramming process? That may take a while. All the best, Leo.

Yes...but not immediately. Just a heads-up: when you have a full-blown awakening, don't expect that it will solve all of your problems immediately. The fan of self may be unplugged, but its blades will still be turning for a long while afterwards as it loses momentum.

Yes, well said. Surely a body goes through birth and death, but the Truth of you does not. It's not that you came from Truth, it's that you are Truth. You never came from anywhere. You were always here. Truth was never born, and hence can never die. An eternity before you were born, Truth was there. Don't take what I say too seriously. They're just words. Since the Truth of you can never die, what Leo is probably referring to is your ego. When you expose the ego and start to see through it, it feels as though part of you is dying. In a sense, it is, because you identify so strongly with ego. To willingly continue to see through ego while it feels as though you are slowly dying is my guess as to what 'conscious dying' means. Another possible interpretation is death-awareness regarding the body: to realize that your time here in this body is limited and to consciously make the most of it.

Great question, because awakening is a poorly defined word indeed. I would define an awakening as an event in which you see through an illusion. The illusion is akin to a dream we believe is real, and it is from that illusion that we awaken. We can have several fleeting awakenings that recede into the background of our experience until we become what is referred to as 'awake.' To be awake is to no longer identify with the grand illusion that is ego and instead abide in the backdrop surrounding the thoughts that create ego.