Search the Community

@beastmode Nonduality negates the very thing the solipsist holds as the most certain thing.

Don't confuse solipsism with nonduality. They are subtly different. Nonduality is actually more radical.

Loa is a guide to freedom, to nonduality. (I am referencing Ester, not ‘the secret’) It takes some serious commitment, but one can learn to wield the actual nature of creation.

@Serge Careful not to get carried away with your radical models. Don't confuse nonduality with anything-goes. It's the opposite of that, actually. You want to become hyper-aware of the narratives your mind is building about reality, and drop them as much as possible. The fact is, most of the stuff you believe, you have zero experience of. It's very easy to abuse this work and hurt people. So be very careful with your theorizing.

I had thirteen years of spiritual searching, but was not looking for enlightenment and I was not really suffering much so I wasn't trying to get out of deep suffering either. I just wanted to know the truth. I was taught past-life regression, various healing modalities, and I did meditate (sporadically - guided meditations, heart centered meditations, etc.). I did not really care for meditation, so I did not do it consistently and often months would pass between meditations. I never did self inquiry...I learned of that after awakening. My practices were all ego driven...self-improvement and human potential. I studied whatever seemed interesting...even magick (The Book of Abramelin, the Green Grimoire, etc.). You don't get much more egoic than wanting to control the world. I have a very wide band of general spiritual knowledge from this, but funny enough I did not study nonduality or enlightenment at all. Even the day prior to awakening, if you asked me what was nonduality...I would not have had a clue. After thirteen years of general studies, I hit a point where every new book seemed to just talk about things I have already read elsewhere. So I gave up the search. I quit reading, practicing, and meditating completely. I have been fairly intuitive since starting the spiritual journey, and so anything I bump into multiple times in a short period of time...I take notice of. I kept bumping into the name Eckhart Tolle. I had heard of the 'Power of Now' but hated the title so much that I never read it. I didn't want to read it, but would begrudgingly watch something - so I went to the library. They had a DVD called "Flowering of Human Consciousness". A talk Eckhart had given. As I watched it, it seemed it was more of the same. Be present...something I thought I was doing - even though I was very much in the head and thinking all of the time. But then he went through an exercise to inhabit the body - to be 100% devoted to the experience of now. I actually became present for the first time. Thinking stopped, and in that silence there was only feeling and experiencing what is here and now. In that moment of profound silence in November 2005, total stillness and presence seemed to come out of hiding from behind everything. There was no future and no past…just what is – that is sort of timeless. There was no “I” or identification with anything. The senses functioned and so I saw, but there was no seer…no “I”…just seeing. It was a direct, sudden realization into what is as it is. It was nondual...no separation. There was a clear and deep seeing through the false “I”. At the same time, as it is connected and not separate, there was a clear seeing of the nature of the world. I had spent years trying to let go of attachments, release myself from fears, self integrate, and basically become better. I saw in that moment that those very actions were in part keeping the illusory “I” alive. In that moment there were no attachments, fears, problems, sorrow, anxiety, suffering, seeking, etc. They never returned. I then read and studied nonduality to get some vocabulary regarding the realization and see how others talk about it. Why did it happen? I was ripe...and in being truly present (so there was no thought)...there were no distractions and a clarity occurred. In the end, there was nothing that I did that caused it. It just happened...of itself. Like surprise...you can't create a surprise for yourself. I clearly saw that is the problem with all practice is that an "I" is doing it and trying to get somewhere...without actually looking at the "I" itself. Upon awakening, I clearly realized that all of that time people spend in the process of freeing themselves from bondage was the delusion of bondage itself. We ask irrelevant questions and do a multitude of practices that only distract us from really looking at this "I". I love Ramana Maharshi's teachings...simple and straight to the point - who am I? He would never let people wiggle away from that point. They would ask him about reincarnation and he would reply - who are you now? I felt deep wisdom in this approach...not letting you look anywhere else. The direct path...a path with no steps. No where to go...just who am I? I recognize the limitations of practice and potential dangers of practice. So even when I suggest something that could be called a practice...self-inquiry for example...I point out that this should not be an efforting or doing. We have no choice but to be aware when we are conscious...so just look at yourself. Question - what am I...really? I try to minimize the egoic action involved. Also being present...this too is not a doing or effort. We are making efforts (thinking) that take us out of the present (experience) and into the head (thinking). So I talk about ceasing to do...again removing action and doership of the "I". If you did nothing (not even thinking), you would automatically be present. I try to be careful to not inflate the sense of "I" and doership...which is a danger of practices. As for your last question...I am currently working with someone who has panic attacks just about every day, in constant fear, and feels hopeless. I just keep pointing him back to this "I" he thinks he is. He keeps trying to distract himself...asking questions that have nothing to do with the "I". I point him back to "what am I?" He later tells me that he sometimes has revelations, but recently said he has spend many hours and days contemplating "who/what am I"...and he says he logically sees that he is not the body/mind...but he still worries and fears. I told him that he still believes he is the body/mind...that is why he fears. His fear of travel (one of many) would not be if he was not worried about something happening to the body/mind which he is so strongly identified with. All I can do is point him back to "who am I?" and tell him to be present (without referring to past or future or mental imagination...where can there be fear?). Cease doing...and as you have no choice but to be aware...look at who you feel yourself to be and delve deeper (keep looking).

Enlightenment has to be a strange loop. It can only exist as a strange loop. There is this description in zen of enlightenment being a gateless gate. You walk through the gate and realize, that there was no gate to walk through in the first place. On my last AL-LAD trip I was mindfucked by this paradox of enlightenment being a "state" that can be reached vs advita nonduality tells us that we allready are enlightened and can't get any closer to it. The psychedelic confronted my mind with the question of how it's possible to reach a "state" that I am allready in. What I now know, after watching your new video, @Leo Gura , that I became conscious of the strange-loopieness of the concept of enlightenment. There is this description of the substance of enlightenment by Peter Ralston that captures this, that rings very true with me. The insight here is, that there is no difference between enlightenment and me. That's were the metaphor of the cat unraveling the yarn unraveling the cat comes in. I am enlightenment, I just have to realize what I am.

@Monkey-man Jed's writing is dramatic at times, but as Leo points out, they are indeed a work of love. I've talked with him personally, and he does have a compassionate air about him. I'm so glad I read his books before any other nonduality books, because they really cut the crap and get to the chase. However, don't take the drama too seriously, or else you risk zen devilry, which was the trap I fell into afterwards. I gave up meditation for awhile after reading his books, a mistake on my part. I became dogmatically anti-dogmatic, closing my mind down to all "New Age BS," which is precisely what I needed at the time. So, do take his work seriously, but maintain a holistic open mind. Enlightenment is a mastery process, not a neo-advaitan "there's nothing to do" farce.

careful, better to say "we" than "me" - the self is not YOU, it is not-you: the belief that you are you and that there is nothing beyond your being there, is NOT the understanding that all is as one. Necessarily there are things in which we aren't aware of, because our awareness is limited in order to exist at all. this is the trick. in the life that we see before us, we know that there is an infinity of possible awareness's we will never obtain, look to the stars! we can see that they are there, we see evidence of their existence, and yet we can never be existent as the stars exist. we can come up with ideas about how atoms are a true thing, yet we cannot truly be the atom. at the best, we can be a human who pretends to be the atom. or we can be an awareness that once thought it was human, which now thinks it is an atom, which later will return to being a human, and then trick itself into believing it knows what it is like to be an atom. but the only way to be an atom, is to have no true capability to understand what it is like to be anything else but an atom - just as we have no true capability to understand what it is like to be anything else but a human. we can pretend to know and come up with reasonable claims as to what alternative experiences of awareness are - but no matter how authentic that belief can be, it is still just belief. maybe it'll be easier to understand what others are if you imagine that they are a fabricated dream that you do not understand. and then from that basis, work towards realizing that instead they are a trick of the mind to process information on a deeper level than just the first level of direct awareness, a way of storing memory. and then from there, work towards seeing that you are just as fragile as they appear to be, that in an instant those dreams could shatter the dream that is you just as quickly as the other way around. in fact, we all shatter the dream of each other on a regular basis - move on with the day, forget (temporarily) of the existence of some individual. this is the nature of duality within nonduality. existence is nondual, but an essential part of experiencing existence is duality. how can you experience something if it is all one thing? you can only experience something if one thing experiences and the other thing is ethe experience. this is duality! nonduality is to realize that the experiencer and the experience are as one. the light projected onto the screen is as one. to stop seeing the screen or the light or the light projected on the screen at all, as seeing that is that! of course the world has consistency. it would just be a dream if it weren't consistent. oops but, it is a dream but you can make it inconsistent. in fact, necessarily it is inconsistent, lol, you say that the math explains why this or that or the other thing, well the math also fails to explain those or these or this other other thing. you just weigh on the consistency more than you do on the inconsistency, in order to convince yourself that reality is different from a dream. that's a fair enough thing to do. it is different, but not as different as you think. both are just a belief of experience, taking an observation and applying deep meaning to it and searching for consistency to rely on. please continue to rely on consistence, but work to start to notice that its consistency is just as illusory as its inconsistency, and its inconsistencies are just as real as its consistencies. (wait, did I say anything in this post? I hope I made any sense...)

thats the whole point. Nobody knows anything. Not even so called nonduality teachers. How can anybody know anything about your current experience/life right now? nobody has been there yet. nobody has been you yet

also piggybacking @Girzo @beastmode I really agree! there is certainly space for PD to become successful right now - a low supply of PD advisors/counselors/etc - if there weren't, we wouldn't have a huge ol' country all panicking about some silly president and there's definitely truth in the "nonduality" of considering all professions as personal growth. the #1 question of nearly every career is, "how are you going to advance your career" this inherently leads to self-growth. humans in fact, naturally without trying, they develop themselves over time too! old fogeys are stereotypically wise and stoic, and young whippersnappers are notoriously foolish dreamers not worth a damn personal growth is secretly everyone's passion, or is it really the other way around - everyone's diverse interests in life all involve personal growth in some facet. We all here just like Leo so we talk a lot about consciousness work, and think it's all the highest form of personal growth, but those plumbers dedicated to plumbing sure as hell are passionate about plumbing being the truest life purpose.

Leo's blog entry got me thinking. Imagine the following dialogue at the doctors office: Doctor: "I'm sorry to tell you this, but we found this advanced tumor in your brain. It's growing in a dangerously fast rate. You might not have that long to live anymore...." Patient: "Cool story bro, you should definitely write that down! Doctor: "I understand this must be shocking for you, but we will do everything we can..." Patient: "No, you don't understand. You are literally just hallucinating a story inside of this infinite hallucination machine. It has no grounding in reality whatsoever." I understand that no story is true. Because it consists of just noises made out of thin air. The noise "cancer" is not the actual unknown unspeakable phenomenon. The noise "Cancer" is supposed to be a symbol for the phenomenon. As Korzybski said "Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object." Now, with "objects" like a tumor, chair, pencil, etc. it is relatively easy. It's really just colour/light (But of course, not "colour"/"light" ) and it is not isolated. There are no isolated "objects". The isolated object is just created with language. "This colour-form combination is a tree!" "Really dude? Isn't it just also colour-form like, well, everything?" But what about stories like "Outside of my experience" or "death" or "soul" or "planet earth"? Do they symbolize anything? The noise "soul" might be just a noise, and not even a symbol, because what is there in actual experience that this noise is supposed to symbolize? The same goes for God. Or Nothingness. Or time. the languages cannot succeed at building a model of "reality" faster than experience occurs. What we think we observe is limited to what we can translate to each other via the slower than "reality" tool of our languages. What about "outside of my current experience" or "Objective Universe"? Might those terms symbolize something that might be a "reality"? At my current stage of contemplation I think it is forever unknown. There might be "outside of my current experience" There might be "Objective Universe". Those terms could be abstractions of something unknowable. There might be nothing seperate from consciousness, but there might aswell be. It's an open question, even if it sounds like nonduality has "figured it out" and is the final answer to consciousness. It can seem like "nonduality teachers" really know something and are the final consciousness authorities.. you gotta be fucking kidding me, lol. atleast I was believing this nonsense... It's just a desparate attempt to escape the obvious reality of slowly aging to death, paradoxically through story-telling of stopping the story-telling. So what value do stories offer us? It is neither good to ignore nor to believe in any story. But they seem to give us a valuable map for the territory (Even if you think about it, there is no map, but only territory, the map is also territory.. you know what I mean) I'm especially interested in what you guys think about concepts like "outside of my experience" "other minds" "Physical universe". Are they abstractions/symbols for something that is in one form or another a reality? Like the word "Cancer"? Or are they just noises, not words/symbols standing for nothing at all?

@beastmode how about a nonduality fitness center life coach ... ”you’re a piece of shit and you’ll never accomplish anything!!”, “you are infinite, you can have anything you dream”, “ you’re nothing you can’t run 1 mile without crying like a baby!!!” “You can do it!!! Feel source within you and you are unstoppable!!” ??‍♂️?

Meditation. everyday. While you are constantly reminded of the past & future, I am constantly reminded of the now, simply because of meditation. I wonder if this video would be helpful. 23 attempts by the illusion professing it is, and 23 times it is met by the absolute and silenced. The illusion (melody above middle C) try’s all of it tricks, expressing determinism, then vigor, then caressing, then authenticity, to no avail, taken under every time by the absolute (melody below middle C). Their claims of separation become the very things that reveal their non-seperate nature, and on the 24th attempt, they attempt together, with arpeggio’s sweeeping the full dynamic of the infinite (low c, through middle c, to high c) arriving at nonduality.

@Bichu Krishnan before the nonduality experience we are calling a few second delay ‘now’, but it’s not the now. The delay is thinking & beliefs. Meditation and inquiring, going within, letting go of thinking & beliefs, no thinking, wham! Now.

@Leo Gura I just wonder how one could become interested in nonduality without access to the Internet, books or teachers? It seems a birth right to self inquire but simultaneously if you have no options other than to listen to other people's dogma then how can it be done? Is it possible I wonder?

@Nahm What's interesting about Life Below Zero is that even though those people live isolated, their lives are basically identical to the average mediocre lifestyle: 24/7 survival mode. Surviving in NY or in Alaska is the exact same fundamental thing. Survival is relentless, no matter where and how you do it. Those people are still clueless about nonduality. Yes, being out in nature is nice and refreshing, but nonduality is far superior, and it doesn't matter where you do it. You can do it in a giant city.

I don't even recall what I said in that episode. I shoot and write down so many insights they are impossible to remember logically. Everything gets integrated into my mind, but I can't necessarily recall it in an instant on demand. Yes, I'm sure many more things could be added to that list. All my lists are just tips of the iceberg usually. I could make those lists 100 items long, but the videos are long enough already. Always. All my advice is to my current self, past self, or future self. I am not above you guys. What you see in the videos is just my thought process, which is always evolving. Every video I shoot becomes outdated the very next day for me, because just by shooting it and reading your guys comments, I already discover my errors and ignorance on the subject, deepening and refining my prior insights. We shall see how things unfold. I am just a vehicle of infinite intelligence. I will do what it beckons me to do. Sure, if that helps you feel warm and fuzzy After enlightenment your genitals wither away Currently my morning routine is nothing fancy. I'll probably improve it in the future and post a video about it. Psychedelics & contemplation. Of course it's a good idea. You will go super-deep. It's really the only way one should trip. And my "meditate" I simply mean: sit and observe without moving. No techniques. Just be conscious and fully alert without distractions. I listen to and read everything under the sun, from nonduality to evolutionary theory to brain science to cosmology. I have dozens of favorite teachers, but I am loyal to none of them. I'm sort of a nonduality slut Not very deeply. I don't see the point of getting deep into the scriptures and such. That would be a distraction. A general understanding is good enough for our purposes here. You can easily waste years studying that stuff without actually becoming conscious of what is being talked about. Yes, I would like to do a dark room retreat at some point. Hard to find the time. I have done float tank once. I didn't find it helpful. In the time it takes me to drive there and shower, I can already be tripping balls at home. Noises and sensations are not something that bothers me in meditation. They are all good things to meditate upon. If anything, I find the float tank to be a distraction because of the weird sensation of being in this foreign capsule of salty water. I don't see the point of it. Yes, I do want to travel to India at some point.

"To construct a metaphysics about the fundamental nature of reality- demands... a kind of disciplined introspection that critically assesses... the elements observed, the observer, the process of observation, and the interplay between the three in a holistic manner." - Bernardo Kastrup I hope all here are well and having a good day :). The following is a contemplation I wrote out in my journal, based on the above quote. I consider it quite good, and worthy of sharing (my life purpose entails being like Leo and sharing these ideas, I am now understanding ;). *Keep in mind, all the following insights were provoked by a single sentence in a book of over 200 pages! That, my friends, is a testament to how incredibly dense- singularity like- this "thing" called reality is!! What does it mean that reality must be understood through "disciplined introspection"? the cultural beliefs which are pervading are not going to cut it, reality is too weird to not map out very carefully How can I understand "the elements observed"? Mindfulness, first and foremost. study, study, study: human behavior, social psychology, masculine/feminine dynamics, brain science, physics, emotions, psychedelics, the astral world, paranormal phenomena and psychic abilities, all traditions of nonduality you come across, weird animals and plants, indigenous cultures, astronomy and cosmology, quantum stuff... do, do, do: immerse yourself in other cultures through genuine (non-touristy) travel; "when in Rome" fucking immerse yourself in the culture, without getting deluded. cut through the socially accepted bullshit and start asking other people what they want from life, what their mission is. Learn how to astral project and lucid dream. Take psychedelics in a shamanic sense; entertain the possibility that there are literal spiritual entities out there which interact with human beings (without getting deluded, of course;). Go to parties and nightclubs and stay sober, and take mental notes which you then write down, on human behavior when the higher brain is disabled by alcohol. Have a sampling of different friends with different preferences, and develop a genuine interest in them, seeking understanding of their perspective. Take a course in software engineering (you'll be dumbfucked at the insane complexity of the most taken-for-granted thing ever-modern microchip technology).... How can I understand the "interplay between the three" in a holistic manner? study,study,study: SYSTEMS THINKING (this will give you, not necessarily the facts, but the skills to understand the mind-body in a tangible way.) materialism, naive realism, and the alternatives to such ("open up the gates" so as to be open to a greater understanding). Also, study everything which you "do," in the next section. do,do,do: YOGA (literally "union"). Law of attraction and manisfestsion. Take those astral projection experiences you know how to induce and fucking confirm them through empirical science and corroboration, and while you're at it, learn to do telekinesis and move shit with your mind. WORK OUT AND HAVE SEX!!! The more gnarly (yet tender, in the case of sex☺️), the better. Art, poetry, dance, music, theatre. Life purpose! Eat healthy! And most important of all, deserving its own paragraph... Emotional Mastery. Emotional stability and mastery is literally the bedrock, the cornerstone, of EVERYTHING: self-actualization, self-realization. I want to direct you to a quote by Sadhguru. Too many people have been deluded by neo-advaita "already enlightened" talk into believing they can just abandon their humanity, even if it's in super lame conditon, and go directly to the Absolute. This quote is the antidote. On his Enlightenment, he has said, "What was happening was indescribable; I was fully conscious and aware, but what I had considered myself to be until that moment had disappeared. I had always been peaceful and happy; that had never been an issue. But here I was, drenched with a completely new kind of blissfulness. I was overflowing with an exuberance I had never known or imagined possible.” did you catch the critical piece of that quote?? "...I had always been peaceful and happy; that had never been an issue..." Ahem... EMOTIONAL MASTERY. (coming from one of the most enlightened beings on this planet;). Well, there it is. As you can see, I only addressed half of Kastrup's insights, and I didn't go into the ramifications of his insights, but this post is already veeery long so. Simply, this is what I consider a good contemplation, and I don't particularly know what value you will glean out of it; perhaps if you don't know how to contemplate this will help. Truly, it's just something I felt compelled to share. Love& Peace, William

Haha, nice try. But you've only scratched the surface of things bud. Keep contemplating. Inner/outer is a duality. All dualities are illusory. I have a very firm grasp of the relative vs absolute. I speak of many relative truths. But from the absolute perspective, realtive/absolute is also an illusory duality. You have yet to fathom the degree to which the mind contructs reality. One day, you may discover that it does so totally. You are misunderstanding Ken Wilber. Him and I are not in disagreement. He is just making a different point. What I am talking about isn't Green or Yellow or even Terquoise. It is his ultimate stage: Clear, Absolute, Nondual. At this level, Spiral Dynamics completely breaks down. All of existence collapses. There is only infinity. Wilber's quadrants are relative conceptual distinctions which ultimately all collapse. Don't take his quadrants as some ultimate metaphysics. There are no quadrants within consciousness. That is just a handy conceptual tool for talking about what we call "ordinary phyiscal reality". Wilber wrote a book called No Boundary. You have yet to understand what "no boundary" actually means. It's fucking unbelievable. The physical universe does not actually exist. But it is convenient to speak of it as-though it did, because most people have never experienced nonduality.

@supremeyingyang actually no. I have some people to talk to about certain aspects of self-development / actualization, but I don’t have anyone to talk to about stuff like nonduality and enlightenment. I tried, like you to talk about it. And everytime I do it I regret it, as some concepts and experiences sound really absurd to a person who hasn’t experienced something like that. I even sometimes think I come off as crazy, seeing how people look at me. But I am not a hundred percent successful still. I’ve seen that sometimes it reaches out and some of my friends have told me a few days after, stuff like “I’ve been thinking about what you said” but I’ve never actually had someone take this thing seriously. I guess I’d rather not talk about it, especially at work because some people will never get it, label you as weirdo and make it hard for you to focus on your work, both jobwise and developmentwise. about things like quitting smoking, meditating, eating clean... these are all just too superficial, and subjective. You can chitchat about them but don’t try to make people change their behavior. Accept them as they are, or you will suffer. I never talk about this stuff anymore. These are just ideas about practical life, and can be disproved. Don’t waste your energy on these ideas, there are lots of low consciousness people talking about this every day. Carry your work next level.

Contemplate why you're so bothered about it. What do you fear there? Nonduality makes you MORE effective at life, not less. Watch out for such simplistic and wrong assumptions. Life is a bittersweet thing. It's not meant to be 100% sweet. Watch and see. Don't really have one. I do not fawn over celebrities or any authority figures much. Couple of years ago. Yes, enjoy it. Never, nor would I want to be. He clearly had some spiritual attainments. But nothing special about him over any other human being. Every human being is equally God. I liked smoked salmon. I like self-inquiry most. We're all basically racists. It's just hardwired into us. The ego's job is to be self-biased. I am highly introverted and I do get nervous in social interactions sometimes. Pick up helped me overcome a lot of that. But what helps the most is enlightenment experiences. Over the last year, with various enlightenment experiences, it's getting harder and harder to care what people think, or that people even exist. I'm not looking for a coaching lesson. I am happy with the trajectory of my life. I'm into letting it evolve organically. 1) It varies. I experiment with my diet a lot. Every quarter it tends to be different. 2) Probably, I don't really worry about them too much. My focus is on understanding reality, not states. I don't have any fixed schedule. I usually listen to an audio book for 30 minutes every morning while I shower. I tend to read organically. It depends on what I'm in the mood for and what great new book I find. I just pick a book which I'm most curious about at the time. Not all of them. I take fewer supplements now. Not for a while. And maybe never. I am letting things unfold more organically. I'm not gonna force it. If my heart doesn't want to create it, I will not push it. Glad you learned that lesson I have managed a sort of middle way. Not to say that I will never abandon it, but for now I have been able to get massive consciousness growth in the last year while still running Actualized None Yes, but I decided that's not aligned with my life purpose. My purpose is to be generate my own insights. Well, I have changed careers many times before starting Actualized. I would never quit personal development. If anything, I would quit Actualized in order to deepen my pursuit of personal development. Ironically, running Actualized holds back my own development. I would easily have been enlightened by now if I didn't invest so much time in Actualized. I rarely get lonely. For me, reality is just too amazing to be lonely. I would be happy if I was the only person alive in the world. In fact, even more happy. Get more in touch with reality/being and your life purpose, and you will never be lonely again. No! Wheat is evil. It's not possible to quantify. There are of course daily frustrations. But my connection to reality is pretty amazing. You start to feel a bit like a Jedi attuned to The Force which nobody else sees. I can see the infinite beauty of everything more and more. See above answer. Yes, it feels like there is a higher intelligence at work in every facet of reality. Both have helped a lot. Spirituality is starting to transform the very fabric of reality for me. The solid physical world is dissolving into a infinite sublime hallucination. Every problem in life simply dissolves into irrelevance, including death. I don't worry about that at all. I just let my mind organically interconnect everything, and it does so almost effortlessly. My problem is not getting distracted by tangents, but seeing too many deep interconnections. The interconnections are quite literally infinite. So it's hard to keep track of them all for sharing purposes. Yes I used to in the past. Not any more. Sometimes I just self-inquiry while playing trippy music. More fun that way sometimes. Mundane life distractions I don't make a big deal about images of enlightenment, so they don't bother me. I know what I'm after and I know what must be done to get it. It's as simple as that. Yes, I have chronic pain sometimes. There is no magic solution. You try to find way to fix it as much as possible, but in the end if nothing fixes it, you just carry on with your life purpose as best as you can. You have no alternative anyway. I don't worry about retaining information. All the information you really need you will remember. Don't worry about remembering trivial stuff. There's no ideal order to read it. It's gonna depend on where you're at in life and what issues you're tackling. Try to read the top-rated books about consciousness. They are the most important. But you might not be read for them yet. There are many. I tend to distribute my sources very well, so that dozens of the best teachers can influence me. I don't like sticking with any one teacher because all their teachings are partial and incomplete.

Leo has introduced me to and helped me to appreciate some of the most absolutely profound and lesser known self-help concepts (things like radical open mindnedness, skepticism, epistemology, belief systems, nonduality and enlightenment, etc etc), and yet there's a more obvious, well known self-help subject I've barely heard him mention: exercise / physical activity. People tend to have superficial motivations for working out, but besides those benefits there are the mental, mood enhancing effects (i.e. the effects on consciousness). I tend to notice that after a long walk, or even a more vigorous exercise, I can go deeper in my meditation, and am just all around happier, more confident, higher energy etc. Most self-help gurus tout exercise as one of the most absolutely crucial activities to integrate into your life, and from personal experience it has an immensely beneficial impact on my mood and well being. That being said, it can deplete some energy that might otherwise be used for life purpose or things of that nature (for example after a heavy weight lifting session I just want to lay back on the recliner feast and watch tv). And one source of mine claims that most folks really don't need much more than a light walk daily (the book "Perfect Health Diet" makes this claim... tbf this is the exception and almost everyone else says we should try to be quite physically active). Basically, I would just be very interested to hear Leo's take on this. I believe I recall in one of his videos he talked about how he used to go to the gym but stopped to focus on other things more. But whay about walking, stretching, yoga, etc? And how do these things lead to higher consciousness? Maybe touch on the connection between mind and body, etc etc.

A) Change is hard for everyone, regardless. B) You're misusing a very advanced teaching which you do not have any direct experience of. As far as you're concerned, you have free will because you're still playing the game of controlling life, and you don't even have an idea of what no-self means. You just took on a silly belief. That is not no-self, and that is not no-free-will. You actually believe you are in control of life, so stop pretending otherwise. If you ever truly discover what no-free-will means, that will be the happiest day of your life. Until then, do the more ordinary self-help -type work and learn how to function in society. You are trying to fly before you've learned crawl. You need a few years of just very ordinary self-help before you start barking up the tree of nonduality. If you're worried about your Autism, start buying books about it and doing your research. There have been hundreds of books written about every disorder known to man, especially Autism. Study people who have successfully overcome it. Practice what they did. C) Many people feel self-conscious, including myself. That is not necessarily Autism. Be careful with lumping all your issues under one label. Unless you've been doing personal development for a decade or more, you will have all sorts of emotional, neurotic issues -- everyone does. That's where the work begins. D) Everyone's mind is tricky. Don't paint yourself out to be some unique hard case. Most of the stuff you've described is totally normal human neurosis which can be overcome with years of personal development work. E) Stop comparing yourself to others so much. Most people who you think are "happy" and "normal" are anything but. Judging people by outward appearances is extremely deceiving. Focus on doing the inner work: exploring your own psyche, exploring what is reality. Don't treat this like a prison sentence. Personal development is supposed to be interesting and exciting. We are talking about you designing your own life, and then living it. What could be cooler than that?

Understanding nonduality is one thing ? I understand your statements from that point view but you can not talk to everyday people like that , unless they are specifically wanting to understand nonduality. Every conversation does not have to be a extensional dialog to convert everyone to nonduality. Nonduality is just one facet of reality. Explore More Learn more. Move forward How about move on to the next thing awareness of the present moment without thought. Or you could try to understand perception and how it colors our experiences. See nonduality is not about separating yourself or putting yourself higher in any regard it is about the fundamental unity and connection of all things namely oneness. Qualitative arguments on what things are defined as are really missing the point. That is for you and your inner work. But you have to be careful you do not fall into the trap of definition though language. Work on awareness in the present moment.

@SirVladimir You can't lay on the nonduality lectures on a wounded, grieving ego. In a situation like that, you apply compassion, then you bring up nonduality LATER, once he's not emotional. The whole point of an emotional reaction is that the mind is resisting reality. So of course at that moment the last thing it wants to hear is a nonduality lecture. That's like talking calculus at a mule.