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There are landmines everywhere in this work. If one teaches: "Only pursue enlightenment, drop everything else." Many people will get lost, because many people are not ready for that. If one teaches: "Heal yourself. Then pursue enlightenment." Many people will get lost, because most people will get distracted and never put in the necessary focus to attain enlightenment. If one teaches: "You are already enlightened." Many people will get lost, because they will not do any work. If one teaches: "You are not enlightened. Go pursue enlightenment." Many people will get lost in seeking. No teaching is fool-proof. And the most advanced teachings especially so. All personal development work is filled with traps. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. If there were, it probably would have been found by now and there wouldn't be as much diversity as we find within the fields of personal and spiritual development. When one ignores this context, it leads to even more traps, because then one can take anyone who misuses a teaching as evidence of the teaching's failure. This is how nonduality wars get started. I see one person misuse your teaching and then condemn your teaching for it. When in fact, it's virtually impossible not to misuse these teachings, because the nature of the thing being taught is so tricky. So there needs to be latitude in your assessment of teachings, otherwise you will become an ideologue. And that is just one more landmine in this work. Try to see this whole issue from a holistic, meta-perspective: there are billions of unconscious people in the world, and most of them are not going to successfully navigate any teaching. So expect some casualties, delusion, failure, and collateral damage as people strive to become conscious. How else could it be? The only solution to unconsciousness is consciousness. All teachings and techniques are ultimately mechanical. It's the student that really has to do the heavy lifting. He must supply the consciousness.

I've recently realized that the reason that I've felt as though I already have some understanding of what enlightenment is like because I underwent depersonalization/derealization back in high school when I tried weed and began smoking regularly. According to Shinzen Young, DP/DR is like the evil twin of enlightenment. Based on the other perspectives I've seen on DP/DR, the experience is incredibly dark. It's some weird sort of "half-realized" state where the ego doesn't entirely surrender itself and the person begins to see the flimsiness of reality and the movie-like qualities of life. My own experience of it nearly destroyed my life, although I didn't know what was happening to me at the time. This makes me wonder whether guys like Jed Mckenna or Steven Norquist whose interpretation on enlightenment is much darker than guys like Echart Tolle are "wrong" in their interpretation of nonduality or if their's different forms of truth-realization or if all these people just have a mental illness. It's all quite confusing.

@Visionary You've been misunderstanding whatever you've been reading. No serious teaching tells you to drop the desire for enlightenment before you've completed it. You drop it only AT AN ADVANCED STAGE, once you've attained many breakthroughs. You're not capable of being in a state of being! That's why enlightenment is necessary. You guys are way too worried about spiritual seeking. You should be much more worried about your lack of seeking. 99% of you aren't seeking nearly hard enough. Not even close! Your efforts are so weak you got more odds of getting hit by lightening than getting deeply enlightened. The reason I say things like, "Enlightenment takes 10,000 hours" is so you understand the depth of the work and effort involved. Most people undershoot rather than overshoot. If you're using very direct methods like self-observation or mindfulness meditation, seeking is a non-issue. You can seek that way for your whole life and it will yield fruit. The problem of seeking only arises when you're seeking in totally wrong areas. Like if you think that joining your local church study group will get you enlightened. That would be a problem. Or if you think merely reading self-help books will make you enlightened. That would lead to the seeking trap. You can seek that way for 100 years and not get anywhere. But self-observation will not lead to a seeking trap, because it is the heart of the work. It is a fact that you don't know what you are yet, so you must invest time looking. The looking will not magically happen for you. If you build a deep conceptual understanding of enlightenment, you will be able to navigate all the traps. And to do that, I recommend studying a lot of diverse teachings. If you only study one teaching, I can pretty much bet that you'll fall into one trap or another. If you study 50 different nonduality teachings, you'll see all the traps and potential Zen devilries. Of course studying alone will not make you enlightened. It's only the prelude to the core work. And if you're tired of studying and what to dig deep into the core work, discipline yourself to sit down and execute the process outlined in this guide. It's extremely direct. No bullshit. In fact, the problem is, it's so direct you will come up with every excuse imaginable to avoid doing it. The first 6 months are a bitch.

I ask this because it suddenly occurred to me that I remember nothing of my deep sleep. When I am in the state of pure consciousness called sleep, though it is infinitely peaceful, I return and there is no memory: not even a passing memory as would be expected of a dream. So I ask, is pure consciousness blind to itself; does it need The Witness in the form of the organism to observe itself? In other words, does nonduality need duality to know itself?

@Prabhaker @WaveInTheOcean I think what we can gather is that there is a kind of cycling effect. At one moment, you are consciousness (nonduality) and at another you are conscious (duality) as an organism. And the goal of spiritual practice is to be both together. This goes beyond just enlightenment, which is simply a realization of your true nature. I like when Sadhguru spoke of Kriya yoga, he made it clear that the path of Kriya is for much more than just enlightenment.

@Samuel Garcia How can your heart beat even though you clearly aren't controlling it? This is a non-issue. Maybe you aren't constant. People are just telling you things they've discovered about reality. Maybe you could be variable. Maybe you're a hairy rainbow walrus. But if you look deeper, you'll discover that is not the case. Why? You'll only know when you get there. The present moment is literally you. But what exactly is presence? If you knew what it was, you'd already be enlightened. Nonduality means you are everything and nothing. The ultimate paradox. You are the sensations, but they are not all that you are. The essence of you is Shiva: void. Sensations are Shakti. Reality is the union and dance of Shiva Shakti. Shakti needs Shiva like paint needs a blank canvas. Your mission in self-observation work is to locate Shiva. This is hard to do because you've become addicted to seeing Shakti. Shakti is easy to see because its colorful. Shiva is colorless, so much harder to find. Keep looking. The mind cannot ever grasp this! The only way for mind to access Shiva is if mind surrenders. If you are strong-minded, this may take a while. It would be much easier if you were weak-minded.

@Motus Debate does not serve an educational or consciousness-raising purpose. It serves an ideological, egoic purpose. Debate is about winning, not about actually understanding the other perspective. If you observe yourself very carefully as you're debating, you will feel this. Your very desire to have a debate is already the problem. A debate has nothing to do with discovering truth. The truth is never uncovered in a debate. All debate does is drive people deeper into their webs of belief, creating distraction from doing the inner work. There is no need to convince anyone of your version of nonduality. Whatever your favorite method of nonduality is, just pursue it. Preaching it would be an ego-trap. What I do is a form of teaching. I teach because that is my purpose. I generally do not debate. Sometimes I "rant", but even that is tongue-in-cheek and mostly done for entertainment purposes. If I do a rant, I usually understand the other perspective. I am not in ideological opposition to it. If your purpose is also to teach -- great! -- then do that without debating anyone. You are not teaching through debate, you're just making people ideological. Debate also quickly devolves into ad hominem attacks, name-calling, trolling, and simply creates a virulent toxic atmosphere. The level of consciousness of people who like to debate is usually so low that they aren't able to engage in true open dialogue. They don't care about understanding or fairness, they only care how to defend their position at any cost. Of course, that's exactly how ego functions. What better way for ego to maintain itself than to engage in a debate about how other people's spiritual paths are wrong? Notice that when you go to a spiritual retreat, ashram, or Zen monastery, the atmosphere is never one of: "Hey guys, let's debate these teachings and poke holes in everything. Wouldn't it be beneficial to debunk some of this stuff?" If you did that, you would get kicked out. Not because the teacher is afraid that you will somehow dethrone him or undermine the truth of his teaching, but because you're behaving unconsciously and infecting others with that unconsciousness, defeating the entire purpose of that gathering. If you make your approach one of quietly seeking to understand every perspective, you will come out 100x stronger than if you make your approach one of loudly undermining all perspectives you disagree with. To be clear: engaging in thoughtful, constructive, open dialogue is NOT debate. And it is allowed here.

It also includes those who confuse their first enlightenment as the end of the road. And those who behave like cocky fools after enlightenment, thinking they've figured everything out. And those who use enlightenment to bash duality, not realizing that nonduality includes duality. One's behaviors speaks louder than one's enlightenments.

@Extreme Z7 No, more like psycho-spiritual purification or chakra cleansing. As your "energy-body" is purified, energy blockages are unblocked and you become more spiritually attuned. Very much like a Jedi gets attuned to The Force. Your mind and body become clear, untainted by low-consciousness cravings and fears. You're permeated by a thirst for consciousness, love, and the Infinite. Materialistic matters become irrelevant in your calculations in the same way that as an adult you no longer crave kids toys. You acquire a kind of glow or radiance. Most people have no idea how much emotional baggage they have locked up in their entire body. The energy flow is all twisted up from a lifetime of low-consciousness living, repressed emotions, and repressed passions. Ego takes a heavy toll on the body. When you're stuck in your head, you're not aware that you're also very much stuck in your body. There is no hard separation between mind/body/spirit. It's one interrelated system. Fixing this whole mess is another one of the very important aspects of spiritualy/nonduality that Zen Devils neglect. When it comes to your happiness and well-being, clearing this up is probably gonna have a bigger impact than enlightenment.

Justification is an ego game. Nothing is ever wrong. Reality IS Love at the most existential level. Hate is just a low consciousness manifestation of love. This is where the distinction between small nonduality and BIG nonduality is really helpful. Nonduality includes all of duality within it. It's NOT a rejection of duality. It's an embrace of Absolute Infinity, without any cherry-picking. Duality is what happens when you fail to embrace BIG nonduality. You guys would REALLY benefit from reading the entire The Law of One series and paying very close attention what Ra is teaching you about how intelligent infinity works. It's really hard to explain this to someone who hasn't experienced Divine Love. It's indiscriminate. Go have a direct experience of Divine Love. Then all this will make perfect sense. This is where a psychedelic might be helpful. Do some MDMA or mushrooms or 5-meo until you experience more love than your head can handle.

I'm 18 years old and I've been blessed so to say with an incredible philosophycal construct since ever. Two years ago I've got depersonalization/derealization, in which the world around me seemed to be pointless and my sense of self totally gone, not feeling alive/human anymore. I went to two different psychiatrists, but the magical pill cure didn't worked, as I was unaware of nonduality at the time, being an atheist. I've been addicted to video games and pornography and I soon as I managed to erase them from my life, everything seem to be falling apart, due to ego death I assume. I basically found out that I'm going through a Kundalini experience (dark night of the soul) and it's a horrible necessary process, but it seems so hard to cope with it. All the existential crisis, OCD, pannic attacks and exhaustion are totally fucking up my life. I've been meditation and contemplating for some months now and I'll continue onward with the self inquiry work, hoping to see the light again. I wish that Leo could respond and encourage me, as he knows what I'm going through. My Intuition/God wants to change me, but it's hard as hell, man. Thank you for your time.

What I've learned: I will be less effected by my circumstances though honesty, letting go of value, detachment from this social person and taking things less personally. I need to be careful to distinguish what my intuition is telling me and what social conditioning wants me to do. Beliefs = consciously adopted beliefs + programming + assumptions Through eliminating beliefs one will become radical open. Life will become magical again. I need to master one domain. Otherwise I will not be able to create something valuable. I am absolutely free. Only my mind/social survival is limiting me. I just need to get free of social survival. Many philosophers have discovered aspects of nonduality. They knew that language is an illusion and cannot display absolute truth. Many people today are not aware of this. Physics is fascinating. When matter and antimatter come together a huge amount of energy gets set free. Or all those thousands tiny particles that make up our matter (quarks, leptons, neutrinos...) I only work out to stay healthy and to feel good in my body. I don't want to reach some ideal. Just working out for one hour, a combination of endurance, strength and mobility is totally enough if I stay relatively active throughout the rest of the day. I am annoyed when the day does not work out how I imagined and others occupy my free time. I am easily influenced by my father and other persons with authority. There is a huge gap between poor and rich. The poor people become more and more. They make the government responsible for their circumstances and therefore search for other types of government (Trump or the AfD in Germany). We need to care about these people, otherwise conflicts will arise like we are seeing at the moment. Be the change that you want to see. Raise the consciousness of humanity. I am still very very closed-minded. While I read a few pages of "The Law Of One" I noticed how much resistance I have. But it clearly could be possible. Contemplation Pre-Contemplation: Presence, Clarity, Possibility Contemplating: Intent, Openness, Focus, Questioning I don't take Enlightenment seriously enough. I need to study other traditions more. Enlightenment is just the beginning. How I am moving towards becoming a sage: Eating less raisins and exchanging it through tea and raw fruits. It starts to work out. Reading a lot in the Book of Not Knowing. I am getting to the really interesting parts now. It is getting easier to take really cold showers. Feeling and observing my emotions. Not repressing them. Dealing with them. Creating an intuition incubator - simply a little journal/note book with things my intuition told me. I review it every day and look what I can do, so that I really act upon it and don't forget it. Surrendering to this confusion whether I should just listen to my intuition or to be more realistically. Visualization and assessing my values. I found a technique to stay awake in the morning. Just sitting upright in bed, and not lying down again. A big difference! Working out intuitively without any plan. Self Love. Feeling strong emotions of love with become almost painful. Having quite a few "successful moments" with neti neti and contemplation. I feel like I am growing a lot at the moment. What my intuition is telling me lately / how I will become a sage: Taking more and longer cold showers My life purpose could be AI and programming. I could develop apps which analyze how people think, their beliefs and how they should move towards Enlightenment. But I also could become a coach because I recognized how much I like analyzing the psyches and shadows of other people. I could combine AI and coaching! Writing a big review about 2016 Meditating and Contemplating throughout the day for short periods of time Doing more mindfulness meditations Creating a strong morning routine Not spending much time on the Internet in the morning

The problem with responding to critique is that it makes one look defensive, and only further feeds accusations of acting from ego. It creates debate, which is always anti-consciousness. There is no consciousness to be had in a debate. All ego needs to do to win, is drag consciousness into a debate. Instant win. Sorta like fake news. In the battle between low consciousness vs high consciousness, low consciousness has more latitude and power. High consciousness has to stay high consciousness, which often just looks like silence. It's sorta like waging war on terrorists. Every time you do it, you're forced to stoop to their level, and by definition you lose and they win, because their goal it to drag you down to their level. Dragging people down is much easier than lifting them up. It's interesting to see how a spiritual master like Jesus allowed himself to get nailed to a cross by refusing to stoop. Now that is true embodiment of nonduality. And a very rare thing.

A) This is trivial because when one speaks of "raising" consciousness, it's a linguistic device. Not a literal existential claim. It's a way of speaking to help people understand certain things about this work. Again, you assume I'm naive about these things because you like to nitpick rather than seeking to be inclusive and hearing the intent of the communication. This is what happens when you let the left side of your brain become a lawyer for the ego. It can nitpick anything anyone says. You could take the words of Buddha himself and make him look like an ignorant devil if you so desire. B) All nonduality teaching and communication is METAPHORICAL. As it must be. You cannot speak of enlightenment non-metaphorically. EVER! So whether you choose to speak of it in religious metaphor or scientific rationalist metaphor, it's all metaphor requiring decoding. C) The self resides in EVERYTHING. Thought is an aspect of self. EVERYTHING is an aspect of self. Atman is Brahman, Brahman is Atman. Your conceptions of nonduality are excluding duality, which is an immature conceptual of nonduality. No masterful nondual teacher rants against duality, mundane life, education, mastery, or other people teaching nonduality using alternative styles. Because he understands the game. I could choose to teach nonduality by only speaking of it in terms of Jesus. Jesus this... Jesus that... Satan this... Satan that... And that would be no less valid than whatever your favorite way would be. I encourage you to seek to be more inclusive and generous, rather than nitpicky and harping. The ultimate goal is full acceptance of reality. So long as you harp, you aren't really understanding of reality, or embodying nonduality.

You haven't researched this topic deeply enough, so you can still handwave it away as "merely placebo" in your mind. With more research, you will no longer be able to do that. Again, I'm not a fool. You think I haven't taken into account placebo in my research? The bigger question is, have you taken into account circularity in your thinking? The problem is that you guys who think you know about nonduality by learning it from Jed McKenna or the like, is that you generally don't do research. Because, hey, your premise is it gets in the way of enlightenment. And then when you hear something "different", you easily handwave it away because, hey, it's not related to enlightenment. (Notice the circularity?) But of course that's only because you haven't done enough research to have of a bigger picture to see that there are many other facts left unexplained. In your mind everything seems explained, but that's only of course because you haven't exposed yourself to the broader set of experiences available. If you did a powerful psychedelic, or seen a person channeling, or spoken with a real healer, or spoken to a shaman, or seen an actual spirit, or encountered a non-human entity, or had an enlightened master read your mind, or had an enlightened master transform your body-energy, or seen an aura, or traveled out of body, or had a near death experience, or did a past-life regression under hypnosis, or re-lived memories of being in your mother's womb, or researched schizophrenia, or researched multiple-personality disorder, or researched many other edge-cases in brain science like split-brain patients and phantom limb phenomena... you'd be MUCH more openminded, and better off for it. But all that stuff is "just a distraction from enlightenment" so I guess you don't care to waste your precious time investigating it. Although I find it odd that you don't mind wasting your precious time arguing about how nothing but enlightenment matters. The problem with modern "skepticism" and "rationalism" is that it isn't real skepticism, but a veil for ignorance. It's become a weapon to shoot down all edge-case phenomena -- the very thing I've been warning you about and trying to inoculate you from by teaching radical openmindedness and concepts from epistemology. But people still think I'm kidding. Don't think that just because you understand enlightenment, or have had an enlightenment experience or two, that all the sudden your web of beliefs doesn't have you by the balls. It still does.

And that is my personal choice as to how to guide people on this path. Every teacher is forced to make a choice. There is no way to teach nonduality without making a stylistic choice. If you stay openminded, you may discover my choice has hidden merits beyond what you presently can envision.

@jse How easily one could use that very excuse against all nonduality teachings. That's the chief reason why the world is 99% unenlightened.

That's almost certainly false in my view. I've met healers (both enlightened and non-enlightened) personally who've spoken of their successes, I've had healers work on me, and if you spend even a bit of time doing research into various mystical traditions and alternative healing modalities, you'll see they don't make sense unless you allow for healing to be real. Just one of the cool perks of mastering nonduality

This is not true. The ego is not thinking. The "ego" is the sense of self created by conditioned likes and dislikes, desires and fears. Its a very very small part of the chain of causation. Surrender is a process of the intellect using non dual vision to gradually reprogramme the likes and dislikes so that the mind naturally rests in the vision of nonduality (spiritual purification) - the fact that there is nothing to resist in terms of everyday fears and desires. Once nonduality is established in the mind, there is still desire, but the desire is for harmony rather than egoic resistance. The ego is still there, but its seen as a notion in awareness and not mistakenly taken as the person. The enlightened mind is surrender and the way the mind achieved this is through using the intellect to neutralize the egos binding likes and dislikes.

These "paths" prepare the mind for enlightenment - they neutralize the likes and dislikes so that the vision of non duality is revealed in the mind naturally. The point is not to try to manufacture contrived kindness or compassion, but to understand that every time you make a judgement about something you are violating "dharma" because you are attacking the Self, your self, God. God is everything, it is nondual. The ego is the thing that likes to "play God" by deciding what is right and what is wrong. As you drop all notions of right and wrong your natural state will become peace, love, kindness, understanding, compassion naturally arises because your mind is not deluded by its likes and dislikes. I dont know whether you have noticed this, but maintaining a dislike (in the hope that you think it will make you more holy) does not make you any more compassionate. Its normal to dislike gross violations of dharma, like harm, yes harm is "wrong" but compassion should be your main focus if you want enlightenment, again not contrived compassion, but an understanding that people are victims of God's programming, nothing here is personal, although there IS freewill and that is the freewill for you to purify your mind and stop focusing on social or political issues (if thats what you are doing) because developing the ego is nothing to do with enlightenment. But all the other gratuitious likes and dislikes need to go in order to realize nondual vision in your subjective experience. Krishna (the personification of God) in the Bhagavad Gita says that "I am the mind that is not opposed to Dharma". This means the enlightened mind needs nothing yet desires to contribute. Its not really a case of saying there is no right and wrong, its just a case of getting rid of the arrogant ego that tries to impose "right and wrong" on Gods creation. Read between the lines when responding to me please, dont take what i say about "God" at face value Ultimately there is no creation or God, there is just awareness, but if you take yourself to be a spiritual seeker then you need to purify the mind by doing these neutralizing practices. Thats the "work" aspect of enlightenment. Also, just mulling over what you said about the selfless thing, its not really about trying to be a helper of people, its more about just doing ones "duty". In India nobody is thanked for doing what they do, because their society is built upon this notion of dharma, of contributing your part without making a song or dance about it. This is a desireless way to live, and is conducive to creating the kind of mind capable of understanding nonduality. In the West, if we dont say thanks we are discredited, because there seems (to me at least) this idea of entitlement. If we ask a favour of someone and they do it, were expected to roll out the red carper and thank them and owe them and such. Because this is a dog eat dog desire-fuelled society, its self serving rather than duty oriented. I would not confuse altruism with selflessness, the selflesness being spoken of in the traditions and enlightenment cultures is just a lack of the conceit, the lack of "entitlement" that we westerners seem to have bred into us from day one. Were taught that were "losers" if we dont get what we want, so it becomes a dog eat dog society. Being "altruistic" is the same vanity taken to the other extreme. I recommend heartily a visit to India, you can feel the sense of dharma there, but nobody is trying to go beyond that in an attempt to "help" others, its just a very casual I do my thing, you do yours but we both don't screw each other over to gain the upper hand. Yes, there are lost of little tax fiddles and all the usual selfish stuff going on too, its not a perfect place, (because were human, and the Self is the negative stuff too) but the point is that it isn't about being a saint either. Its just about not breaking the number one rule: "no harm".

I'm planning to release a video on this topic in the future. Been gathering my notes for over a year now on this topic. There's a lot to say from all the psychology and nonduality research. In the meantime, to avoid making your kids closedminded ideologues, guide them towards openmindedness and investigation of direct experience. Teach them not to accept ready-made answers, but derive understanding from direct observation. Teach them the difference between beliefs and awareness. Teach them the difference between hearsay and direct experience. Teach them that not-knowing is better than knowing. And demonstrate all this yourself.

Thats fine, thats your reality and it the results of your actions will fructify so you continue to see "sad little pathetic egos" and in the process destroy your own self worth. Because did you notice, youre attacking your own ego when you attack mine? Then ironically you look for "spiritual" or philosophical solutions to get rid of your own self inflicted pain. That is delusion. Im not offended because everything is the same. Thats nonduality. Are you learning something?

Another view on enlightenment....and spirituality....that's different. I copied and pasted my comment I posted on Leo's 5meo video interview with Martin Ball. Reiki is first off non-demonational or religious. Rei means spiritually guided and ki means energy, the vital life force or the universal life energy. Reiki is guided by spiritual consciousness. This is a non physical energy that animates all living things. And to some it would be interpreted as the Holy Spirit or God living within us. Reiki is a form of energy healing. Reiki guides itself with its own wisdom, rather than requiring the direction of the practitioner. Purging energy from your stomach as what Martin describes about 5-meo-HDTV reminds me of clearing the energy from your solar plexus chakra, which is where you hold all of your emotions. Ki, also known as prana, chi, ti, biofield energy, etc. is thought to be the underlying energy of everything that exists. Ki is influenced by the mind. If you have positive healthy thoughts, your Ki becomes stronger. If you have unhealthy, negative thoughts, your Ki is weakened or becomes unhealthy. It’s so interesting because I’m sure you’ve noticed that our physical health does have a connection to our emotions. Like when we are depressed or aka have negative energy we are sluggish and it can weaken our immune systems while being positive we have a tendency to have more physical energy and get things done. Life becomes so wonderful when we no longer allow ourselves to be governed by our emotions. The HOLY SPIRIT = ENLIGHTENMENT, nonduality, etc. like Leo mentions in his video.......

This is delusion. Its just snobbery. Mastery is a relative concept, born of relativistic ideas. Its got nothing to do with nondulaism. You cannot marry nondualism with dualism. In the egoic mind you can, you can have your stupid ideals and messed up distorted misconceptions about nonduality as much as you want. And hold both as paradox. This is still ego tho, and its nothing to do with nonduality. Nonduality is the vision you understand when duality is finished, uprooted from the mind. Its not a both / and, its one or the other. You cant be deluded and be undeluded at the same time.

@LetTheNewDayBegin Awareness is not trapped in the self. The self is an illusion within awareness. Self doesn't remain because it never existed in the first place. The self can NEVER become enlightened because enlightenment is the awareness of no-self. Free will isn't a miracle. It's an illusion (of control) which causes all your suffering and separates you from Truth. Ask yourself this: Why do you want free will? If you have it, you can never be happy, because it means you must always be on-guard. Nonduality is a path of surrendering control. This whole issue is one of power and control. You -- ego -- wants to think it controls stuff. But in fact it doesn't. And to believe that you do control stuff is the chief delusion that causes your suffering. So when you gonna wise up and give up the game? I mean... you can keep seeking power, but at some point you're gonna realize (hopefully) that the greatest power is total surrender. THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE SELF IS TO CONTROL STUFF! (But it always fails in the end.) So you're playing a game you cannot ever win.