Emerald

Thank you.

Your averse reactions are also part of reality. To try to approve of something that you don't approve of is also a resistance to reality as it is. But you do have to realize that it is an expression of source and that your dislike of it doesn't invalidate its existence. It is an extension of yourself simply for the fact that it exists in your reality.

I have noticed that I come in and out of resonance with particular spiritual teachers.

So, I am looking for ideas to deconstruct in Spiritual Autolysis. So, my challenge for this is to try to write something that is true. Here is an example of something that I think is true that needs to be deconstructed: "The only things that exist are sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, and thoughts happening in the present moment within the field of awareness. Everything else is the content of a thought."

This was what my experience was during my enlightenment experiences. I was able to feel the full depth and breadth of my emotions because I was allowing them into my awareness. I felt both positive and negative emotions and both carried wisdom with them. The negative ceased to be negative because they meant nothing about "me". They were just occurrences.

Certainly it is preferable to be free of ego because sanity is preferable. But it still doesn't invalidate being identified with ego. Being insane isn't inherently lesser than being sane. Most people are, so it is most natural to be identified with ego. So, it is ironically more natural to be unnatural. But honor itself is an invention of ego, so neither is more honorable than the other. Neither is more significant. Neither is less valid. If you think about it, we only have 80 years (give or take) to live as this ego. We only have a limited time to be insane. We have an eternity to be the existential self in its supreme sanity. Perhaps, enlightened people are like the slackers that decided to skip the humanity homework of ego-identification.

It is equally valid to live the illusion of ego identification or to see through the illusion. But if you're interested in experiencing what is true, then you have to see through your identification. The ego is a collection of thoughts centered around and related to a single (illusory) thought called "me." You can't get rid of that collection of thoughts, you can only see through the illusion of "I" which will decenter those thoughts and make them less important. This means that you will be free of all neuroses and complexes that arise from your attempts to protect this collection of thoughts called ego. You will realize that psychological harm isn't real because there is no ego to harm. So, it is preferable to see through ego. But it is also perfectly normal and natural to identify with ego. But it is an illusion that causes much unnecessary suffering.

Thank you. Then I will definitely do that.

I would but it's an app for a phone. I tend to stay away from my phone except for when I really need it. I don't want to run the risk of developing a habit of checking my phone too often and being plugged in all the time. So, I have to decline. But thanks for the offer.

You're welcome.

You're welcome. I'm glad that it was helpful. The reason why self-esteem problems come up in the first place is because of various ego protections that happen to conflict with one another. The ego isn't a real thing itself. So, it can't be killed, it can only be seen through. It is the difference between ego repression and ego transcendence. The ego is nothing more than a large collection of thoughts and beliefs organized around and connected to a single false belief, that you are a separate person from everything else in existence. Without this central "I" thought, all of the other thoughts within the collection of thoughts called ego become completely impersonal. So, thoughts that now catalyze feeling of low self-worth, now mean nothing about a separate self. So, these thoughts carry no personalized emotional charge. You can accept your traits as they are. Your thoughts about "you" can't harm you psychologically because there is no separate self to harm. So, I wouldn't wait on the enlightenment work. The more you work on it, the less charge your negative self-talk will have. But there are methods for questioning negative self-talk and replacing those beliefs about the self with more positive ones. So, you can do the enlightenment work along with the self-esteem work. But as you do the self-esteem work, keep in mind that your positive thoughts about yourself are just as illusory as the negative thoughts about yourself.

In that case, I recommend to just say thank you and to be sure to say things that underplay your successes. Like "Thank you for the compliment Uncle ... But he really exaggerates about me..." or (jokingly laughing it off) "you're making me blush." Either way, the tone you want to put out there is grateful and confident but modest.

I'm not 100% sure which one would work better. I think the "do nothing" would work because your psyche is basically like a self-correcting mechanism. If you don't get in the way, everything naturally moves back toward its most natural state. So, simply watching and not intervening can help in this way. Vipassana would work for the reason that I mentioned above because you're actually able to accept and be mindful of your emotions as they occur in your reality. Vipassana is also called insight meditation because it helps you access insights by focusing on reality as it is.

Regarding the pain in your chest, there is a method that works well the many teachers (including Leo) advocate for. It is trusting that the pain has something important that needs to be communicated to you through the emotional body. You just focus on the pain and accept it as it is. Just observe the pain with full attention and mindfulness without needing it to feel better or be any different than it is. Accept the pain completely. So, during meditation, choose the pain in your chest as the point of focus to anchor your awareness to. So, when you find yourself getting swept away by thoughts and distractions pull your focus back to the pain in your chest. Continue to do this throughout your meditation. It is Vipassana meditation. The more you watch it with mindful acceptance and unconditional love, the more you will be able to reintegrate and heal. I call it checking your emotional email. You can't delete it until you've read it.

I'm not quite understanding. Do you mean that he was jealous of your success? Or do you mean that he was putting you down for your successes or insulting you for them? Or do you mean he was bragging about you to others and it made you uncomfortable and you didn't know what to say?

Four months ago, I started a Youtube channel, in the niche of spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents. So, my audience is likely to have some degree of cross-over with Leo's audience, but my channel is more about reintegration of disowned traits on the individual and cultural level. I also do book reviews and share insights from them. So, a lot of it has to do with creating mental frameworks and understandings psychologically and spiritually to get past the initial bottlenecks of the spiritual journey and to get on level ground to progress forward in life without fighting various repressions and complexes. It's also for people who have an insight seeking bone and a penchant for plumbing the depths of the human experience intellectually and philosophically. But I also intend to delve into the topic of deconstructing such spiritual frameworks to aide people on the path to enlightenment. I also have topics that relate less to spirituality too that could be enjoyed by people who aren't interested in spirituality or enlightenment. Then I have very New Age topics like my insights regarding my out of body experiences. So, my topics are a real Heinz 57. For this reason and others, I've recently hit a small dip in motivation and consistency, and I'm trying to get back on the horse extra strong. So, I would really like to market to others who are similar to me in the way that I think about spirituality. I tend to be put off by a lot of New Age stuff because much of it thrives off of wishful thinking that isn't grounded in anything solid. But I know that marketing to a New Age audience would be an easier market to target than the "rational spiritual in-betweeners" who tend not to have a strong group identity. I was watching a video today about social media marketing, and it was suggested to refine audiences down to various micro-communities. So, this seems like a decent solution to this issue. So, do any of you have ideas for smaller sects within the 'spiritual community', 'philosophical community', 'psychological community', etc. that I should target my videos to? Thank you

You're welcome. I hope that it's helpful.

Thanks! I use a Sony 3000 / 20.1 Mega Pixels HD camera. I have a green screen that I hang in front of my closet and I light those with two soft box lights. Then I create my rainbow pastel backgrounds in Photoshop to keep my thumbnails and video style consistent. But I pretty much decided on the rainbow color scheme straight off for the channel because the channel art and branding was what I started off with. So, I haven't done anything with any other types of backgrounds. Before getting the soft box lights though, the light backgrounds were difficult to deal with because the green screen was harder to key away.

Like @Jan Odvarko said, S.N. Goenka's 10 day Vipassana retreats are what I've heard the most positive reviews of. They are free, they provide food, and Vipassana meditation is speculated to be the one used by Buddha himself. If I were to do a retreat, I would do this one.

This is good. Vipassana meditation is where you focus on an object of focus, usually the sensation of the breath on the nostrils and use this as an anchor point so that you don't get swept up in thought as easily. As long as you're becoming mindful and pulling your attention back to the breath when your attention starts to wain, you're doing it correctly. It is the action of consistently pulling your attention back to the breath that enables you to build your concentration ability.

Thank you!

Was it in the sense of being afraid of being so small and insignificant in an infinite universe? Imagining how inconsequential your actions are because Earth is a small dot in space. Fear of being forgotten after you die? If so, I had a persistent, powerful fear of this until my first enlightenment experience. This fear has weakened as a result of the two enlightenment experiences that I had and years of inner work after the fact. Either way, I would say that you definitely want to explore this fear, and let it hit you completely. Be with the sensation of the emotion in the body without trying to make yourself feel better. Watch your thoughts as they arise but don't attempt to control them or get involved with them. Just allow the fear completely without trying to change it. When the fear comes up see it as an opportunity and not as something wrong.

When we allow reality to be as it is unconditionally, we transform our inner world.

It could be. Thank you for watching my video!

It isn't true that in order for emotions to exist there needs to be a meaning. Emotions consist of sensations in the body in conjunction with thoughts in the mind. Even if the thoughts (meanings) aren't there yet in the case of a baby, the bodily sensations still remain and are interpreted as pleasant or unpleasant.