Ethan_05

I took the course in ~1 months putting a couple hours into it each night. Although the price you pay is for 1 year. It costs $1500. Well worth every penny in my opinion. There's a live workshop every weekend through zoom to go over what we learn in the course and the community is next level.

@Aaron p I just went through a seriously powerful coaching program a month or two back. It's called Ouroboros by a guy named Jordan Bates. Got my first client 4-figure client within a month and a half of taking the program and have many more warm leads. All through using facebook as a medium to get on calls with a bunch of people and then when you resonate with someone you ask if they'd like to hear about your offer (just a basic landing page that takes maybe 3 hours to create).

How can we live a life with a radically open mind without going down some obscure path and believing everything that falls into our laps? And how do open-mindedness and skepticism relate, cause they seem like opposites but they also both seem valuable to have in one's life?

Thank you Leo and @Serotoninluv, these responses really helped me start to clear up how to approach openmindedness in my life and while doing research on various topics.

Free Solo is a great movie, would highly recommend.

Just graduated and will begin traveling around the world full-time soon. What might be some actions to take to get girls/start a relationship with someone in a new country?

@Manjushri If you're serious about getting out of your depression, a good start is this 8-week course https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Way-Workbook-Depression-Emotional/dp/1462508146 You've probably already practiced most of what is talked about in this book, I myself had been meditating for years but when I finally was humble enough to admit maybe this basic mindfulness guided 8-week course would help that's when things really took off. I haven't had a depressive episode since and things are going well. The book called "The mindful way through depression" also gives so many insights into why depression stays with us. I guess I don't fully understand you when you say that you feel fine but still have thoughts about wanting to die. I've had plenty of those thoughts but usually, that shapes my mood and puts a filter on my entire experience even though I don't understand why I'm having those thoughts. But from experience, realize that being tired from depression requires taking action because being tired and being depressed-tired are different things and the best way to overcome is to change our relationship to thought and to stop believing in our own thoughts as much as we do know, and also to stop resisting is a huge thing and instead feel fully into it. The mindset shift I had is that all people get feelings of sadness from time to time, which is the root feeling from which depressive thoughts arise. But by resisting this sadness we create this monster called "depression" which grows and grows and grows until it becomes too much to handle. The mindful way through depression centers around this idea called "being mode vs. doing mode" of mind. Meaning when we are constantly thinking about the future in which we're not depressed and what needs to be done this is counterproductive because this is showing us that we're currently faulty. Instead, we can live from being mode which is just experiencing whatever it is in the moment without judgment and this can help us overcome depression if we stick with this approach for long enough. Through basic mindfulness training, amazing things are possible. But I will note, the proper mindfulness techniques must be performed otherwise the entire practice can just perpetuate your depression if you think that meditation is just a way to get into a certain state of mind. Whereas in reality depression is just a mode of thinking in which we have persistent thoughts that we don't want to be wherever we are right now and want to be somewhere else.

As I watched Leo's latest video on the Dangers of Spiritual Work it really resonated with me. What if I'm just not ready to pursue awakening? So I've been wondering, how exactly can I go about reflecting and turning inward and understanding what it is I actually yearn for and which of my yearnings have been placed by Leo, culture, etc. I know Leo's life purpose course is a great one but I'm not ready to drop that kind of cash as a broke college kid until I know that it's really going to have some impact on how I go about my life. One great resource so far that I've been working through is this article: Wait buy Why's Guide to Picking a Career but I want to go deeper and am wondering I should just spend more time in solitude so I can understand better what I actually want and not what external sources are telling me that I want. Thanks in Advance

Think back to Leo's video on ego backlash or if you remember the picture that you posted on his blog about progress in this work and how you always have ego backlashes and go back in progress before you can go even further. In my life i've found that these two polarities are very extreme like I'll be going to intense zazen practices at the local zen center and reading a ton then I'll have this ego backlash and i'll retract back into extreme comfort for days or weeks at a time before I get back into practice. Like i'll just not do anything at all except go to school and come home and stimulate myself. I guess my question is does anyone have experience or have any insights on how to lessen the extremes and to continue reading/practicing even when you're in the midst of an ego backlash?

@Gabriel Antonio Good point, didn't really think that through. I think it would be more truthful to state that we all have creativity but that creativity is suppressed as we grow older and the curiosity muscle is just gaining our innate curiosity back. Thoughts?

@Sahil Pandit What do you mean by survival paradigm? How we're so disconnected from our survival instincts, and understanding our survival mechanisms? Not sure if this was what you're going at, but I think we're so disconnected from surviving like we live in these temperature controlled boxes, we have so many different ways to stimulate ourselves and make ourselves feel good whereas in the past we needed to work to feel good. And like living off the grid or just like running and performing physically exhausting tasks can help us get back to our survival paradigm and feel good through work not just easy habits in modern society.

What might be a few things @Nahm that can be gained from ego backlash? I'm sure there are many, but just curious about a few example so I can understand ego backlash better and not have such a negative perception on it.

@Nahm What do you mean by disrupting the diet?

Please feel free to share other spiritual lessons that are similarly epistemology lessons, I would love to hear them.

For example, the teacup metaphor in buddhist traditions. Paraphrase: The master pours too much tea into a teacup so that the tea overflows and the student doesn't understand why he's doing it, then he says that you need to empty your mind to understand what he's trying to teach and your mind is like the overflowing tea." Isn't this the same as epistemology?

@Sahil Pandit No it was actually very helpful. Even though we're trying to go deep and always have these very deep insights into the nature of self and stuff, I think basic gratitude can be extremely helpful. It's not the end all be all but I think it's very practical and can give people a little more motivation to take action. Would you say this could also mean that you can maybe develop a sense of how good your life is comparatively, because we so often forget what completely what other people have had to endure through history and even today in certain countries and we get so caught up in our lives and the small problems that we actually have.

So just sitting down and doing the work even though you don't want to might be the way out of mild depression? Chronic Depression or diagnosed mental illnesses is not what I'm referring to, just wondering whether a good way to combat a recurring sadness and low self-esteem might be to just take action even if you don't want to?

@Belay kelemework In my opinion that is too much, just because I was in that category at one point in time and I feel that when I watched his videos for that long I just didn't have the time and energy in a day to practice and delve deep into other teachings on nonduality that leo doesn't preach. But if you're already at the point where you can discern his view and other viewpoints and have a healthy understanding of other POV's and not just his then 4 hours/day might not be too much. I would just recommend from my own experience to make sure that you have enough energy left to practice and read alternative views on this path.

@Aakash Interesting take on it. I've had the same experience but where you don't regret watching all the videos I'm the other way around. I'm beginning to regret it because I've noticed that his viewpoints have had an extremely strong influence on how I view nonduality and other paths to enlightenment. Like i've found myself not being as open to other perspectives and paths to enlightenment because I subconsciously think that self-inquiry and kriya yoga are more powerful and can get me to experience the nature of awareness faster. Leo's videos are sooooooo valuable, but so are many other perspectives and having a healthy dose of different teachings and wisdom and of other paths is also essential. And also practicing what you learn.

@Shadowraix EXACTLY! I'm at the point where I don't want to watch more videos for a while because I've subconsciously but up this ideology and belief system around nonduality/enlightenment and this seems to be hurting rather than helping in progressing on this path. I think people don't realize how important it is to put it dedicated and deliberate work and not take what Leo says for granted. Although his videos have value, there's 100000000x more value in actually having direct experience, etc. The number was random, just trying to convey that it's SO important to actually experience this stuff and not just conceptualize everything.

Definitely, curiosity isn't innate. One idea that I have that is being studied and written about by people like Steven Kotler and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is that maybe you can grow your curiosity muscle by getting into a "flow state" more often and removing distractions so that you can focus on a very deep level.

This is an interesting thought, "insights are addictive" because although they're positive and something that can improve your life sometimes I find that because every time I have an insight I get this short burst of excitement that sometimes rather than going as deep as possible I start chasing insights. I try to make connections just because of the reward of an insight. Just a thought, wasn't sure where I was going with it but thought it would be interesting to discuss this idea.

Hear me out. I've tried many different online models. Youtube, Blogging, etc. and I'm starting to get this feeling, here it is. Most people fail in online businesses because they don't stick with it long enough. I wrote over 120 blog posts, THAT'S NOT ENOUGH! I made somewhere in the range of 50 youtube videos, THAT'S NOT NEARLY ENOUGH! After this amount of content that I produced my content creation slowed down, because it felt like INSANITY. You know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Now this is where I think I messed up. I didn't have a fast enough growth process. Many of my videos look the same, and growth from my eyes looks like this. You make massive amounts of mediocre content with little results. Over time your content gets better, you get better at your craft of making valuable content, you knowledge grows in the topics you're educating people on and then eventually you hit the beginning of exponential growth curve and eyeballs start flowing in. It looks like overnight success to all the people viewing your content, but in reality it took months, even years to get to that point. The key point is, you grow and your content grows with you. After hours and hours of hard work you begin to master the art of adding value to people's lives and when you do that they'll come back for more. Here are some things I hate about the modern teaching on running a business. Just the mere fact about how much it sounds like surface level personal development. They all say the same thing, work harder, become disciplined, blah, blah, blah. I think there really needs to be someone online who teaches people how to develop high quality, and conscious content. There are many spiritual youtubers, bloggers, etc. but most of them look the same. A spiritually inclined individual talking in front of camera about different topics with images being overlayed. I think it's time that someone starts making really great content in this niche. Leo's content is great, he's very interesting to listen to and has a very formal style that many people like. But just starting out in this field it's very, very hard to keep people's attention in the youtube space. I don't know how leo does it. So in the future this is what I think good content looks like, I would love to hear if people feel the same. Here's a few resources that I think if combined would be very effective in inspiring people to become more conscious. 1. Actualized.org(in regards to the value presented in the videos) 2. Matt D'avella(in regards to the quality of the filming and the value inserted in such a short amount of time.) 3. Recent "Your Mate Tom" Short Documentary(in regards to the editing work) This would be really hard to do because each of these creators have somewhat mastered the style of content that they put out, but I think the spiritual space on youtube and online in general needs more of this. Reply your thoughts and if you agree. I intend to start making content again when my life isn't so hectic, but I just wanted to throw this out there to others who are feeling this INSANITY feeling of doing the same thing over and over again in online business and getting the same results, which are no results at all.

Ancient wisdom is the best. Every time I read like the Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, etc. I just feel like these guys are wise and that I should be more open to these ideas rather than shutting them out.

...