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Ofc what you actually are is what you actually are. So in actuality this reality might be non dual. But still there’s a difference between perceiving yourself as limited vs when that limited perception is not there. Aka awakened

The seed is still only the seed, not the tree yet. You have the capacity to jump inside you, but you haven’t jumped yet. You have the capacity to awaken but you haven’t awakened yet, I would say.

We might inherently be non dual in the absolute sense but we perceive ourselves as limited humans so in that sense we aren’t awakened inherently . As we grow up our self concept forms and is the veil

You learn because you have the innate capabilities to learn. You did not invent the processes that goes on in the learning process which involves the brain and motion receptors - however you put it, but you get the drift. All you know is that you can learn. Dance is just one thing to learn, so is math. The learning capabilities were already programmed within you to be able to learn the same way the awakened capabilities are already within you to awaken. TO LEARN/TO AWAKEN. Same thing, different activity.

You are assuming that i'm here to work. You are assuming that I think i'm enlightened. I don't even think there's any such thing. Only to recognize what and who you are. Done? What's there to do but live life. I never started the seeking to become enlightened or awakened. Don't project your beliefs unto me. I'm truly in love with existence and I don't need anything from it. Only to manage staying alive and to feed and clothe myself until I die. I wanted to understand what this is all about and to get to know what Reality is and consciousness and awareness. Not to become enlightened. Not to do something to change myself other than normal self-improvement. Now, from what I've learnt and the information I've gathered I've fell in love with this stuff because of understanding and curiosity. It's marvelous and intriguing, That's all I'm doing here. Investigating and wondering and in awe of the beauty of it all. The mystery. I didn't tell my mom and dad to bring me here and i had no say in it. Why the hell should i worry about getting enlightened. Then what. Huh? Then what. Please tell me. Just to say I'm enlightened. I'm already learning how to not let the mind control me and learning how to love myself and others and to give back to the world the best I can and to be compassionate and kind to others and to give and receive love and to try to guide others in ways that they ask to be guided and for advice. What else do i need to do other than that but to keep living and trying to enjoy the beauty of nature. Go ahead and do all your work related themes to get enlightened. I'm over here basking in the beauty of existence through all the pain and suffering of mankind and i don't need to change myself in that respect because I didn't make myself and I'm not in charge of anything Universal. It knows what it's doing and I'm at peace with all that. Anything I do is for the love of it, in this field and not because I'm trying to get somewhere. There's no time and no space so where am I going in the illusory relative world? Take your wisdom elsewhere and to someone else who needs it, I've got the Universe on my side and i don't worship false Gods. I don't need anything other than the light of Awareness that I AM and to go within. It's everywhere I go and I can access it at anytime. I have not forsaken it like you have by trying to look elsewhere for love. I know who I am and you don't that's why you're running around looking for yourself. Good luck with that. I don't care about non-duality and all that. I enjoy watching the videos and I think they are hilarious. I find existence hilarious and fun and exciting. Much more than humans and their bullshit. Including mine. This is not work for me, it's my fucking life. It's what I fucking live for. It's me. What else do i need to do. I'm not lost. I'm right here.

In the absolute sense sure, but for the time being your part of this experience of being human. Even if you are awakened, there is right and wrong action in the relative sense. Those two are not mutually exclusive. I understood that it was driving some people crazy and he stressed that if solipsism is appropriate for you than you are capable of deriving the answers you need yourself without Leo spoon feeding you.

Here are some things I wrote down after a spiritual awakening I had on weed. It has been slightly edited to be more coherent and some extra things have been inserted to explain the thoughts. Extra thoughts will be marked with {}. God is actually the ultimate good and the universe as it is is actually perfect. You just can't see that because you are looking from the perspective of a human. {You are God but you are pretending you are a human}. When you awaken you start looking form the perspective of God. God is speaking directly through all spiritual masters. All spiritual masters sufficiently awakened will all be God speaking through them. This is because they are all speaking from the perspective of god. This is how Fred Davis can know through {your own} words if you are awakened. He is just recognizing himself. God evades all concepts. Only when you can transcend your ego and look from the perspective of God can you truly understand the nature of God. It is always god doing the human, and never the other way around. The nature of the universe and the physics of it are not at all related to consciousness, it's just consciousness is imagining the best possible dream. Because it is the only dream. {The fact the universe is the way it is right now makes it the best possible universe, and that's the only way it can possibly be.} You weren't born, you won't die, you are eternal. You don't go anywhere when you die because you don't exist. You are just the light coming from a TV, but even less material than light. "You are that" {A commonly uttered phrase by certain spiritual teachers}, what an unhelpful phrase. It won't help you wake up but it instills faith when your spiritual journey reaches a critical point and you awaken. Faith is the realization that other masters are more awake than you, and doing what they say because you can see God in them. Faith is trust in your spiritual teacher. Trust that God would say {what the teacher said} if he was fully awake. God wants so badly to wake up. Therefore a spiritual master will lure anyone partially awake like a magnet. You are not God, you are God. Both completely correct, just different ways of saying the same thing. {Talking about Islam now} When Mohamed made these crazy and ridiculous rules {Misogynistic and archaic recommendations for living}, he was just awakened and trying to explain things and make people do what would bring them closer to God. But Mohamed was unwise {He lived during an earlier time in the history of civilization} and the methods he gave to become closer to God are very flawed. Being the people we are today, more evolved {societally speaking}, we can see that the way of life of fundamental Muslims is wrong and nonproductive in many ways. The praying is good, bug not the misogyny. The worshiping God thing might actually bring us closer to God, but there may be more efficient ways. We kind of have to decide who we follow and how we go about that by deciding what teacher to follow. If we follow the Christian path, you will reach God in the second person, if you go the Buddhist path, you will reach God in the first person. I need to read ken Wilbur again to see which one is more correct, if either. Also they are both correct totally. They are not over-simplifications. Yes the bible is the word of god, but that was God speaking through ancient people. They were less evolved when it came to their thinking (not their genes). God has something different to say now that he is speaking through modern humans. He will say some things that agree with his past self and some that will contradict, but both are him saying it. Those that do not have the God realization, you didn't quite get there yet. Keep following who your favorite spiritual teacher is and do what they say. There is an unlimited amount you can awaken I think. If you think there's a limit it's because you haven't awakened enough.

Well maybe if you awakened to how you were creating your disease you'd have an easier time not creating it? Just saying

Good morning… alright things seem to be lining up and it’s getting me excited… which seems to be a regular thing for me… but I need to get some thoughts out and see if I can clarify my thoughts a bit more…so I thought it’s time to Journal again. But where to begin? Hmmm…. Well I’ve been having some amazing experiences since I’ve returned back to my home state of Indiana. Last time I wrote was after my cousin’s wedding and the following weekend I went to my buddy’s hostel for the inaugural caving invent. I had such a fun time. So I knew I was going to enjoy myself… I wanted to talk to the founder, my buddy whom I’ve been watching for the past six years. He’s been very impressive when seeing what he’s building in his community and his creativity… so he’s been standing out and his two events on caving and intentional communities were on my radar before arriving to Indiana. The last time I was there was six years ago but it was impressionable on my subconscious… I’m not sure if I said how I met him but to my memory we met through a mutual friend who is a shaman from Mexico who specializes in sound healing with his sound bowls. I feel like we were talking as we were there and as he was talking about his hostel we left our friend’s place to go visit his community that next day. Not only did I enjoy his property, but the community he was attracting was very impressive. So I knew I was excited to see whom I would meet at this event. Again another Mecca of amazing and creative minds draw here… and needless to say my expectations for conversations were far more than I could’ve imagined. But the caving experience itself was also far more than I could’ve imagined. Caving has been something I’ve been wanting to explore. I feel like this setting would be amazing for meditation and hopefully ceremony in the future. But I wanted to see how it went. I was oddly extremely comfortable in this space. I felt like a child playing in the subterranean world of the unknown… and I felt like I could do much much more of this. So the setup was to choose from beginner, intermediate, advanced, or meditative. Originally I thought my friend was leading the meditative trip so I signed up for this…. But also I thought I wanted to be more intentional on the first adventure before I would be more explorative on the second day. Of course it’s hard to not have a little expectation on what a meditative trip in the caving world would be… but I tried my best to just keep it open since meditation is subjective. There were only four guests that had chosen this style and I think it was assumed that the ones who chose this were beginners who were a bit hesitant or even scared to be inside caves. I guess in a way that makes sense, but of course that wasn’t the case for myself. I guess it’s easier to explain that when I go hiking… I don’t normally enjoy going with people whom just want to get to a destination and back. I’m much more wanting to enjoy and immerse myself into the environment and take my time to allow the environment to speak to me and feel my way through. So that’s how I wanted to approach the caving situation as well. I also brought my flute and drum with me… so I thought it would be nice to bring with me for the meditation. I had mentioned this to the group leader and it was interesting to see how seemingly uncomfortable she was to have me to my belongings with me. I could see it in her face but she didn’t address it right away. It wasn’t until we were at the location in the parking lot that she said she was thinking and asked her management about it… and it’s recommended to not bring it. They also recommended to not bring any phones or things to record because of safety and obviously they didn’t want anything to happen to our property. But the thing is… it is our property and I’d definitely take responsibility if any damages came to them without blaming them for my choices. I briefly asked her of what I had heard about the trips. I had heard our trip was going to be shorter than any other trip. And everyone car pooled so we were going to have to wait for the other groups to return before we would be able to leave. So I asked if I took full responsibility for my belongings… I wanted to have the opportunity to play my instruments in a meditative way once our trip was done and we have to wait for others to return. I told her that I don’t ’want to disturb anyone with my music, but there should be a way I can do this alone for myself. And she said that was up to me, but she doesn’t recommend it. It didn’t take much thought for me… I was taking it… I knew it was going to be extremely easy trek for the meditative trip and I was confident I wouldn’t have any issues with my iPad or my instruments…. So they came with me. To begin our trip we sat in a circle outside of the entry to the cave to relax and regain focus and connection. We were asked to explain why we had chosen the meditative trip instead of another. I was explaining a little bit of my background as an Enlightenment shaman, intentional spaces of exploration before trying to get to a destination, but also this was a weekend of caving so why not start with a meditative trip and then step it up a notch for the following day. I listened to the other three guests and one had stood out to me was a guy who was with his friend who emphasized that spirituality comes first in his life and that triggered me to want to find a chance to see what he means by this…. And it was easy to discuss because they were curious about my background… so we all had great conversations throughout our time inside and out of the cave, especially when we were waiting for the other groups for an hour. So we were walking to the entrance using the restroom before we entered… I heard a few times from different staff that some basic rules of caving is to not go number two inside and also try your best not to touch anything as much as possible so our oils don’t deconstruct that natural formations that’s been creating themselves for centuries. That all made complete sense… this was the first time I had a helmet and light to go exploring inside a cave. And I knew how important a helmet would be for me because I know I’d get pretty excited in there so bumping my head would definitely be expected… hehe Ok… a little unexpected interruption to the train of thought… I am trying to arrange this weekend with my friend and he and I had a great conversation that I’d like to write about real quick. But… I actually have to call my girl friend to discuss… so I’ll be right back. alright… I’m back… so where to go… so I saw a post from my friend who founded the hostel who is hosting his first intentional community event at his property. He mentioned that if anyone is interested in joining to contact him. It was late… so I waited til this morning to remind him that I’m very interested in attending, but I also was wanting to take a friend with me and also hoping to arrange a time for us to talk one on one for a possibility to partner up for his next season. So originally he was open for us to join and said that he would like to send some information for my friend to get more details of what a work trade program would be like for his community and asked for her email. So I got her email and sent it over to him. After awhile he ended up sending me another message to the roundabouts of he’s not sure how I’ll respond to his inquiry but how well do I know this friend of mine? Is it an enthusiastic yes I know them and would be able to be confident in their participation or am I kind of a crossing my fingers that it goes well. I was chuckling at this message… because it was very intentional and insightful… and pretty much something I’ve been working through as well. So I responded to him by saying that both applies… hehe… Yes I enthusiastically know and adore my friend I’ve known since sixth grade… she’s super sweet and inquisitive and would add value IF she’s comfortable… so I do have my fingers crossed as well because I wasn’t sure if this was the event to take her to meet my friend and visit the community. In fact I had given her an assignment to see if she was really ready to go to this event or not. I asked her if she could think about what intentional community means to her, and if she was wanting to be a part of one… what would her expectations be to be or how would she think it would be like. I didn’t really give her much more information than this to see how she interpreted the questions… in fact the first thing she said is she’s like to talk to me about it first… and I said I’d like for her to see where her thoughts go before we discuss. We plan on making cream puffs together this week and we’ll discuss it then… giving her a few days to think about it. And I told him about it… I too was uncertain that this event was going to be the correct time to bring her and since I’m so close to her and want to introduce her to experience the hostel and my friend its hard not to want to invite her to everything. I would have loved to have her go with me to the caving event there but she’s currently struggling with an ailment with her leg and has to where a brace when she walks long distance and recently got a cane which seems to be embarrassing for her. We’re trying to convince her mind that this doesn’t have to stop her from having a fulfilling life. She’s strong and she’s been able to overcome obstacles specifically her addiction to drugs that is very impressive. But since she has come to the other side… she hasn’t found how to be the new person she’s become. She’s trying to figure that out but doesn’t have much direction to find that out. So socially she’s getting challenged for years now. She continues to live in our small town from childhood and so there are the same people that have helped in her addiction and she’s removed most out of her life. But a few still linger around whom respect her changes… but also doesn’t want her to change to an extent that makes them comfortable. Needless to say… I’m trying to motivate her to meet new people. With her circumstances with her drug addiction it has put some challenges in her path that is now what she’s trying to overcome. At the time she was engaging in drugs this led her to having seizures. I was there when she had her first seizure and I remember how everyone reacted when it went down. We were at her current boyfriend’s house and he had roommates… and we were there having a good time partying… and we flipped on the lights to a room we were entering and all of a sudden she went collapsing down and shaking. I have a cousin who has seizures and the first thought was to call the hospital and make sure she’s not biting or trying to swallow her tongue. So yes I was asking everyone there to call 911 and get the ambulance there while I was trying to get a spoon to place into her mouth. And the response from the people there was they were too afraid of getting into any trouble because they’re partying with underage people and if the police comes they thought they would go to jail or get into trouble. I remember being so upset that no one was willing to call 911… I mean that was the time that we used home phones… I didn’t have a cell phone and all I know is that I need to get her help and I need to get it as soon as possible. It’s not my house and they don’t want the ambulance at their house. I said well I’m going to take her to the emergency room then. And there was only one other person who was there that was willing to help… and no it wasn’t her boyfriend. It was our classmate friend and he helped me pick her up, put her into the car, and got her into the emergency room to help. Fast forward… because her drug use continued and amplified I had to make a decision to not have as much contact in fact we went several years not talking. I believe I might’ve discussed this last year when I was starting this Journal… but I reached out a few years back and saw a difference. I told her that she’s not stoned or wasted right now.. and that’s when she told me she’s been sober from drugs for about two years now. And that’s when our relationship continued. To bring it back to the thoughts I was talking about… .because of her seizures they continued and got worse. When we were not in communication she was working somewhere where her seizures were often enough that the company she was working for recommended she goes onto disability. And without knowing the consequences or options… she went through with it. And I admit at this time… I would say she was definitely at a state that would be considered fully disabled to function a normal life at that time. But now that she’s off of her abdications…. Being on the fully disabled list doesn’t apply. With this on her record… she’s unable to work unless it’s getting paid under the table, she’s unable to drive, she’s unable to even have her own bank account… so even though she wants to move forward with her life…she doesn’t even know where to begin to get out of this hole. I continue to encourage her that there are options to find out there… and steps to take… but I’m not the one to take these steps… she’s going to want to do it for herself… and she’s at the point of wanting to but again the actions steps aren’t known and so it’s prolonging the progression… but of course this is the period of time that is getting her to be ready… there’s progression but it’s not obvious because it’s not manifesting physically but mentally it’s progressing forward… and again when I’m around I’m looking for opportunities to help her… in some way I can give her a bit more confidence and I’m not afraid of making steps or mistakes.. so I suggest things that might help her out in many avenues in her life. But we will focus on is this specific event. So I was telling my friend that she has situational confidence and this will be perceived as something that is going to be out of her comfort zone by going to a new place… meeting new people… nervous about being socially awkward…. Nervous she’s going to be a burden because she’s having issues with her leg… and the fact she’s not even aware of intentional communities… that I’m not sure that this would be the right time… but I told him that in the next few days I’ll get a better idea if she would be an asset or not. I also had to admit to him that I’m not sure of what her degree of neediness would be while we’re there. When we’re out of our comfort zone, we tend to be a bit more needy to the ones you know and trust… so I’m afraid that I wouldn’t be as fully engaged in conversation because I’ll be concerned of her comfort ability. If she gets there and relaxes and enjoys herself… she won’t be needy, but if that’s not the case… then neediness will be there and since I adore her… and introducing her to this new situation I’d feel responsible to help her through that. Just to mention… I did not say all of this to my friend… but in a shorter version… but definitely not as concise as one would normally… that’s not my communication at this time. But his response was a relief… in fact this entire conversation was very intuitive and I love that! he said that if it’s not an absolute yes at this time… why don’t we arrange a different time for us to visit together… is that good for me? And admittedly… it was a relief and thankful for his communication and curiosity to our situation… he said that this is a different event… most of what he hosts are fun and social but this Intention Convention is another animal… it’s more intense and professional and serious.. the group that’s going to be there are fun and social people… but when we find people who shares in the same passions… we can geek out on it… and we want participants to all want to geek out on it… he assumes it’s going to be a bit chaotic and if he removes any wildcard variables it would make much more sense… and honestly I’m grateful that my friend is letting me join too because I don’t own or manage an intentional community but I’m looking to connect a network of intentional communities globally. I’ve been able to gather information from my observations from the communities I’ve been involved with and I feel like I’d have insights to contribute to the conversation. Most recently at the ashram temple in Utah… they wanted me to manage their community but by doing this there were implications that I’d have to be something I am not and have a thumb on top of me not allowing the freedom and creativity that is the main asset I bring to situations. In fact one of the reasons I’d like to address here during this Journal entry.. but there’s other moving parts I’d like to address as well while I’m here today. I responded simply that we will arrange another time that we can come and visit together… I’ll be there and super excited… and that is quite an understatement… hehe… this is a huge part of my purpose and I’m looking forward to meeting other passionate people in intentional communities… I had confessed to my friend and his staff during a staff discussion where I briefly mentioned that some may see easily that I”m a community minded individual, but what they don’t see easily.. is that I’m a global communities minded… I didn’t get into much detail because of brevity but I hope to discuss with him when we get time to share with one another. Hehe… a little interruption… I was hanging out with another girl friend this weekend and she’s been curious about cyber security specifically with ICAC and I have two contacts that I met with connections to different types of cyber security and I reached out to one and waiting for the next one… but he’s monitoring voter fraud in Colorado elections… so yes he’s swamped… but I’m going to get to this weekend which was very insightful and fully of clarity especially after talking to this friend in particular… hehe… many moving parts in my head right now… and I’m trying to figure out how to write it all out in a not so chaotic manner… but I guess that’s not what’s going to happen right now… but I want to just say… the caving event went extremely well. I know I’m going to dive deeper into meditation and ceremony in caving situations… It was fun to go in a group setting but I also had the desire to find a way to go by myself… the way I approach space and my intention doesn’t have to be compromised when I’m solo. My friend who is the founder actually drew out a cave that he recommends going to if we want to go alone… it’s one of his meditation areas… and after going I can see why. He shared this with a few of us… one girl went the day before I did and she ended up in a field and a bit lost… so I was wondering how the directions would be for me too. But honestly she didn’t even take a picture of the map he drew out… she said she would remember it… and we chuckled knowing that wouldn’t help find the cave entrance… but the map worked well… I found myself taking notes and videos as I was following the map becuase I absolutely love map making.. and I can already see a map I can draw to make it easier for people to find. But sometimes that’s part of it… it’s not supposed to be that easy for everyone… it takes courage and effort to get the results.. but I had an amazing time going alone and exploring this area. I didn’t have much time… I spent a few hours but I was heading back home which is three hours away and I needed to stop at my cousin’s house too while I headed back home. She accidentally broke our grandmother’s pearl necklace and I fixed it for her and needed to drop it off. But there was a beautiful green pond that looked inviting but I didn’t take a dip at this time… but as i like orienteering it was fun to not know what I’m looking for and just follow the map. I thought it was fairly easy to follow… except there was something that I questioned… there were marking to cave entrances and I know he probably said things specifically to the one we enter but I couldn’t recall and when I looked at the map I was questioning whether the third entrance was it? Or did I have to go around and find another entrance on the other side? So the third entrance looked like what he described by going down at a 45 degree angle to enter and leads to the underground river…. Which is what it was… but again if I just looked at the map I questioned and so I took a look around to make sure I’m not missing another entry point… after looking for awhile I decided that the third entrance has to be it… and it was! I didn’t have a helmet with me this time… just a head lamp. I had to climb down rocks before I found the cavern dome where the beginning of the river was seen. I sat down and I could hear the rushing water in the distant tunnel ahead… it was calling to me… begging me to explore… I didn’t know at this time whether I was going to go or not… in fact I thought I was going to but I sat first… I especially enjoy lights out in a cave and so I wanted to do this here. When I first heard of a friend who enjoyed caving he described moments of sensory deprivation… I feel like I have a memory where he was wedged into a crack and it seemed liked he was suspended in space, but I also feel like if I was submerged into water with lights out could really get the feeling of sensory deprivation. I had mentioned this during our initial meditative introduction of why I chose this… sensory deprivation opportunities to see what can be observed or possibly awakened… excites me! I’ve had messages about ceremonies in caves… so this weekend was my next steps into exploring this. But I chose to lay in silence and pitch blackness on some rocks next to the river… I love it! In the silence except for the music coming from the running water what I could assume is rushing down the rocks dropping in elevation… I found that I decided this would not be the time to explore… I don’t have a helmet and I definitely will need a helmet… hehe… also I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get wet at this time either… this was like my last pair of clean clothes and I need to drive still so I was just going to spend time here in the cave at the entrance of the unknown… ok with it being the unknown until I return. So I was curious to see what I would see in the darkness. At few interesting things happened the days ahead when I was in the caves with the groups… the meditative group trip we went to a place to do our guided meditation… again it’s always interesting to experience everyone’s take on what they think meditation is and how to approach it. So our guide decided she was to guid us in a meditation… which seemed that there was a projection that we might have stresses in our life that we are trying to be ok with and at this time if we notice any troublesome thoughts to notice it but also be open to have it dissolve… which again is all well intentioned and helpful but specifically if we are all in this state… which I was not. I love meditation in silence for me to be able to observe myself internally I usually do not opt for guided meditation… for me that’s more like visualization practices at least the whole thing about a person talking the entire time and asking you questions and just talking…which again isn’t as helpful for me to get into a deep internal state of connection with the All that we find ourselves in…. But I witnessed my response to the talking… I saw that I wasn’t as irritable as I might’ve been in the past being opinionated that meditative practices in my experience is best in silence but this wasn’t my guided tour… this was hers and so I respect that and she did a great job… but I did attempt to mute her out… and connect to the surroundings and see what I could discover for myself. So I took off my helmet and everyone had their lights off and I laid on the dirt with direct contact with the earth. It was cool but I didn’t get cold… I was warned to take extra layers of clothes because once you stop in a cave most people get cold… I’m glad that I didn’t need this at the time… and I just relaxed into the moment and connected… it was funny to me that even though I was in complete darkness I decided to close my eyes still.. maybe it’s just a habit I’ve learned… but this is what I found myself doing and I allowed it and waited and watched… shortly after I started to see a very faint light almost as if it was a flashlight that was running out of batteries… this light seemed to cross the ceiling of the cave very very slowly and it continued to the point I started to think and question… did someone turn their flashlight on? And so I opened up my eyes and saw that no one had.. and so I went to closing my eyes and observing… It continued… this slow roaming dim light as if looking at the details of the rock texture of the ceiling. The details couldn’t be seen but that seemed to be what I was trying to do. I wasn’t able to continue doing this because the guided meditation was over and I think people were getting cold… but I remember the guide saying to take as much time to become aware of the present moment and to move slowly from our positions until we’re ready to turn on the lights and continue the trip. I definitely took my time… hehe… but also aware that I”m not alone and to respect the other parties involved… but again a longing to just be slower in my experience was desired… again hinting at wanting to be there alone without having to go with the crowd. On the second cave adventure which our guide classified as an intermediate to beginner trip there was another opportunity for lights out. I didn’t bring it up but of course I was excited about it. And it was funny this time because I assumed when it’s lights out that also meant to imply no talking… this wasn’t a meditative trip so there wasn’t going to be a guided meditation so I was hoping for silence in the darkness…and for a few brief moments there was no talking… again easy to here any water echoing off the cave walls and as if water is plunging on top of itself falling from rocks that are higher then the stream the water fell onto…and awwww…. It was very pleasant… but again I understand these moments I wait to be in but most will feel impatient or uncomfortable… so two people started talking… they started talking about the tales of cave monsters that people tell… again I observed my response to their conversation not really caring what they were talking about… just the fact theirs conversation going on in a brilliant moment to connect to our surroundings in a different manner… a deeper manner in my opinion… a respectful manner to the environment we find ourselves in. The inhabitants and the earth, rocks, water… whatever is normally in this space does not usually have humans there… and humans seem to appreciate their environments but to what degrees? It would’ve been nice to experience how this space is in it’s normal circumstances… because they were talking more people started talking after they told their monster story… and someone mentioned they could hear the bats… we found a single bat over the area we were in which was cool… but I was thinking to myself… darn it… I didn’t hear the bat with those few moments of silence before the talking came into play… I was thinking so much about how I wished they’d stop talking that I didn’t hear the bats… so at this moment I didn’t want to not say something… I apologized but I asked if there was anyway that we could stop talking and sit in silence with the lights out for at least a minute… I just want to be able to see what I can observe at this time and be with the environment. I didn’t want to be rude or bossy but it did feel that way just to ask if there could be a minute of silence with lights out…and I felt like some were like why do we have to sit in silence… but others thanked me for voicing my requests because they wanted to ask the same thing… these others were a newly wed couple who joined us who were not directly involved with the caving event from the hostel.. they were naturalists and I was absolutely thrilled to have them join our adventure and found myself relating more to them then the few individuals I came with from the hostel. I observed that they were wanting to explore the cave as I’d like to… take their time… looking at all the details… it was fascinating hearing them talk about all the rock and animal life we ran into. And as I am recording… because they took their time… I got the best footage recording them… and I was grateful to capture their footage. And I was able to thank them as well after the wife found me on facebook… they just got married the night before and this caving adventure was part of their honeymoon… which I was so delighted to here and again after experiencing this with them… so thankful to have met…and who knows if our paths will meet again in the future… I hope so. But in those maybe 90 seconds of silence in the darkness… I did focus enough to hear a little chitter that could be a bat… I heard the water again… and it allowed for a brief light show similar to the one I saw the first day in the meditative trip. I was enjoying myself and it seemed like everyone was waiting for me to be ready to say that it’s ok to talk again… hehe… as much as I could’ve sat there longer I said that I was thankful they allowed that time because I enjoyed there cooperation and appreciate it. We continued as we did afterwards… but so that night when I went to bed and as I watched the darkness behind my closed eye lids I found those lights returning to my vision. Instead of it being a small circle of lights that were dim slowly moving across the ceiling… it was a little different… it seemed like the light was far larger… I’m think eight times larger than in the caves… it still moved very slowly as if looking at all the details that were hard to see but it also seemed like it wasn’t scanning over the ceiling anymore… it was as if I was walking or most likely crawling it seemed to go over a hump of clay into a hole of darkness and the light got swallowed up in the darkness and the dim light disappeared. All of this is interesting to me and I look forward to see what happens when I’m alone and have the freedom to literally sit in the darkness and semi-silence for as long as I want. So I was sitting at the entrance of the river in the darkness wondering if I was going to see any lights this time… At this time… there was nothing… and I just continued to lie in peace for awhile. Eventually the thought of playing my instruments in this space came to me…and so I turned on my head lamp to get my flute and drum out to play. I grabbed my flute first… I played the sequence that I seem to be finding myself playing when I grab the flute… it varies each time but it’s very similar to what I play… this instrument is still new to me but I loved it bellowing into the dome… there are times where it gets hard to play the flute because of moisture… mostly from what I assume is my spit… but I also think in this case because of the dampness of the cave as well which wasn’t as helpful for flute play. But I played it until it didn’t want to play anymore… and so I moved to my drum. I remember a few rhythms from last summer being a part of the drum troupe… and so I find myself practicing and tying to remember these patterns and so I usually start off slow and then pick up the pace as I relax into the rhythm… I decided that I’ll go ahead and record some of the music I’m playing and placed the light and camera onto the ceiling and continued playing. Drumming is so satisfying… again taking steps to be more confident in my play… After time passed I placed the drum and flute back into my bag and pulled out my pipe… ground my experience with tobacco and how much pleasure I get when I’m conscious with my smoking… I decided to go into pitch blackness again for awhile… this time I didn’t close my eyes… I kept them open and watched and waited to see if I could see anything… this time I did.. but it wasn’t like my times before… there was very subtle moments that I started to see… let’s say everything was black well the color was a dark grayish i guess… it didn’t stand out… but there seemed to be movement similar to what I would see actually if I have my eyes closed. I guess I could try to describe seeing the reflection off the water onto plants and rocks that capture the lights reflection? I understand but not certain the words to describe it now, but again… i was enjoying this movement aware that this wasn’t behind my eye lids but with my eyes open observing the space. All of a sudden in the corner of my eye there was a glow that started to become in my awareness… I looked at it and it looked as if there was something glowing underneath something… so it wasn’t all over and super bright.. but definitely stood out… I looked away to see if I would still see it when I looked back and it was still glowing and this time there was no movement… it was one specific spot that was glowing… after a few moments I noticed another area where I saw glowing but it was a bit different and after observing and thinking about the layout of the room… these were lights of daylight reflecting off the rocks near the entrance. I wasn’t far from the entrance but there’s a descension and a turn to the left so at first I didn’t notice that there was any daylight anywhere… at first it was black… the glowing I was first describing wasn’t anywhere near the other lights… the glow wasn’t far from me which couldn’t have been daylight… I didn’t know what it meant but I thought… I’m going to see where this spot is… and so I looked at the glow and turned on my head lamp to see where it was… it seemed to be a single rock in the water… I located it and I made my way there and placed my left hand on it… I turned the lights off again and observed the environment to see what would happen… and after a few minutes of acclamation the space was no longer black… it was light gray and similar movements that I saw as if reflections off the water but the brightness was increasing in size and took over my entire vision… it was a bit overwhelming and unusual that I didn’t see any blackness right now… but it also didn’t look like a cave anymore… I closed my eyes to breathe in slowly and opened them again… and it seemed like it was the same thing going on… and so I decided to turn on my lights. It was crazy to think that being in this space for this amount of time that I didn’t even see the darkness anymore, but I also didn’t see any details of the space either… so I didn’t know where the water or rocks were. But my vision is different even when I’m in Aya ceremonies.. and so I was curious to see what my vision would be like in a cave… again all of this helps excite me for integration steps to help assist my performance with Ayahuasca. I felt amazing when I climbed out of the cave back into the light of the sun and surrounded by the woods… almost a bit dizzy once I started to retrace my steps back to the pond. I looked at the time knowing that I probably didn’t have time to go to the second cave he put on the map… but I thought I’d walk around the area to see if I could spot the area he had mapped out… but I think there might be a little flaw in the hand drawn map… but I enjoyed taking my time leaving the space… I saw about three blue jays flying around from one tree to the other going back and forth… and once I got back to the van to head out… I knew caving is something I’d like to attract more of in my future… but specifically intentional caving Ok.. I think that might be where I’ll switch away from the caving and head into the next focal I wanted to share today… the unexpected chicken game at the hostel… hehe… so I’ve already been talking about preparing myself to having more possible romantic or sexual encounters for the past six months… it’s been apparent that I’m trying to get myself ready for opportunities to explore this. This is an area I need to work on and I guess this is a time that I can be more deliberate on my practice to explore my relationship to sexuality. When I was in Colorado and I was trying to create the event with sexual adult play… I found out that the community I was in wasn’t quite ready for this event and also I didn’t have the time either. I realized when it comes to large gatherings of sexuality it doesn’t make me uncomfortable… but thinking about being completely vulnerable and sexually intimate and expressive is the area I am out of my comfort zone… which again is the area I need to work on and so I wait to see how it will introduce itself to me. I’ve been talking to friends and I’ve kind of found a way to explain it a little… I started getting messages that sexuality was going to be addressed in my reality and so I know I’ve kept that door closed for years now, but for six months I’ve cracked the door open… but I was going to kick it wide open when it came to the sexual entertainment party I was going to host… but I wasn’t able to kick the door open… and so it was still cracked waiting to see how things play out… when I finally spoke and verified with the Australian that we are not mutually wanting the same things that door I had closed wasn’t going to be closed any longer… I know I’m feeling I’m looking for affection and intimacy again… but how was reality going to introduce this back into my Reality and how was going to handle it? lol… well I guess it introduced it back with a little game of Chicken. So… the founder is absolutely brilliant man who is very creative and comfortable in his sexuality. This board game is something he offers to guests that he thinks will be open and curious to play and there were ten of us in this group which were down to see what it was about. Let’s explain the rules which again I think is interpretive depending who is leading the group to how it’s played. So the guy leading explains… there are eight levels with it’s own designation of cards… it starts out at level one which has a single chicken on it and moves up to level eight which is called extreme I believe. And so as we choose the cards, we can choose to stay in the lower range which could just be answering questions as what’s your favorite color or to give a simple kiss a peck on the cheek or the mouth… more of the tame activities while if we continue to go higher the cards start to ask for more daring encounters with the participants involved which I hear can get pretty damn extreme.. hehe. Well…. The group dynamic determines who wild it gets and how quickly the wildness will come… but in reality it can stay pretty tame if the group wants it… and so I found it interesting to be there with this particular group… I had a fun time. But anyway… another part of the rules is that we try to get an equal amount of genders to play… we had six girls and four boys… but one boy and one girl was nonbinary… and what I’m trying to say is that it was pretty even. One of the die had curved corners for the females and the sharp corners for the males. There can be up to twelve players and everyone gets designated a number. I was number two on the curved die. So.. when we play if the person who is choosing the card gets an activity card not a question card then they role the dies to see who the choices are to participants of said activity. So again this group leader said that consent is of utmost importance and so if you who chooses the card doesn’t want to do the activity or answer the question then you can choose to drink alcoholic or not or choose two cards from lower levels. If you are chosen as the participant for activity, you can too decide to say no and use your words to express this in a nonjudgemental manner… everyone should be expressing if it’s a mutual exchange of experience. So… I won’t go into details of what all was being done.. but I want to focus on was my thoughts and observations of myself while I was playing this game… and I might go into some personal ones that the game asked from me. So first of all… most should know by now if following any of my Journal… I’ve been practicing celibacy for seven years now and the last time I kissed someone was about four years ago. At that time there was still a bit of the pandemic I was dealing with and my stepdad had passed and I wanted to get a ticket to Hawaii to attend his funeral. I didn’t have much time or options when it came to work… so I decided to become an exotic dancer for a few months. All my life people have asked if I was an exotic dancer… hehe… and now I can say yes for a few months I was. But I ended up kissing a girl for the first time while I was in the club. I hadn’t had any sexual encounters directly with females before this… the only thing was my girl friend back in middle/ high school days would make out with our partners in the same room together. But I didn’t even notice them since I was in my own world at the time… but once we played with her boyfriend which was just running our hands and fingers along his body… nothing too crazy I’d say… but that’s not what I”m going to go on a tangent about right now… hehe… but I first got to experience a girl in a sexual manner was a man asked me to dance with friend who was a girl. She was attracted to women and she found me attractive and would like a lap dance. I said that would be fun and so i did… while I was dancing he interrupted and said that he’d like to watch me dance with her and his girlfriend at the same time… and so I went with it… and goodness… it was fun! Women are so soft and ooey gooey… hehe I remember thinking I can understand why men enjoy snuggling up on us. Girls also seem to be more expressive of their enjoyment then I found men to be which added to the excitement. And so eventually working here I started to get the opportunities to work with couples… I didn’t know how well I’d enjoy working with couples in fact that was far more fun for me personally then just men I think.. I guess it depends on each situation.. but it was new and I liked it. Well… I’m just as honest as an exotic dancer as I am anywhere so the first couple I danced with in privacy I admitted that I had never kissed a girl before. They were surprised because I seemed quite confident and good at pleasure the girl but the girl asked me if she could be my first… and I was enjoying myself with them and so I did… I ended up kissing one more girl while I was a dancer but yes… that has been four years ago… and I finally got an opportunity to possibly kiss again in this game… hehe… so what did I observe in myself during the game. First of all, I felt very comfortable… when it comes to games and groups… I see it all as entertainment and I’m confident in being a good performer. So I was looking forward to entertain and please. What I also found out is that it took more than half of the game to go by without my number being rolled… hehe… I found that I was kind of a little disappointed that I wasn’t an option for anyone to play with me directly… hehe… people were choosing me to participate with others… but curved number two wasn’t showing itself and I thought that I’m too willing and this game is tame… so just relax and enjoy it… which I was able to…but when someone finally rolled my number I had to let everyone know that I had been waiting there patiently enjoying myself watching but we’re about over and I finally get a chance to be a choice to choose from… lol… so of course the person who rolled said well would you like to participate in the activity, then… and I said of course… and so I got to make out for the first time in a long time and for me it was fun because I felt like this game was more performance than anything else. Another interesting point I’d like to share for myself in this game is that I got the questions… who are you most attractive to who is playing the game with you right now? And I had to laugh because I did have to answer the favorite color card too… and I said remember how I answered that questions… I said probably shades of green… hehe… I should’ve said rainbow… so yeah picking out favorites is not my thing… so everyone agreed that I could pick my top two instead of one. So again I couldn’t just answer because looking around I didn’t know who to choose at first… so I was delaying my decision and was confessing that I find almost everyone attractive… and I know I’ve disclosed this information before… but its true attraction for me isn’t just physical… everyone I meet I seem to find an attractiveness for in one way or more… so I was telling everyone this and I was specifically looking at everyone’s eyes… so I was saying that I find them all attractive and it’s true but to be able to pick the top two of this group I thought… to be honest I have spoken to two of you more then the others in the group and so right now I find you guys more attractive… I said and touched one girl that we have been having great conversation to and from the caves… and then I said and touched the one guy who shared the meditative trip with me and with an hour of waiting on the groups to return we were really able to dive much deeper in our spirituality which is attractive. I believe because of this one card… it led to an engagement this past weekend which I’ll be discussing I guess next… hehe… so after this game I was buzzing a bit… and curious to see how different my life is going to be by having this door cracked open a bit. And I started to definitely see a difference in myself and my thoughts. They’ll come out but I’m going through the steps of how I understood them more than I did just two weeks ago at this event. So how does this unfold? Well… I stayed after a few days from the weekend event to volunteer… I love community and helping out and I have time to see how things run on the daily… I’m curious. I’ve been watching my friend the founder for six years now through social media and he’s been standing out in my attention and I’ve been impressed again already wanting to attend his two events of caving and intentional communities. But I also was offline when I was there. So as I was exchanging my information I’d mention that I wanted to be offline while I was there so I can immerse myself fully and to just get a break from online activity. I believe it was late Monday that I finally got connected and I was getting several messages. When I got back home I felt like I had much more time to give my full attention and that’s when the guy I chose as one of the most attractive during the game asked if we can meet up. We thought the following weekend but I told him that I’d like to stay home for a weekend because I’ve only been back two weeks and I’d just like to adjust a bit more and honestly wanted to spend time with my cat who is freaking out right now because I’ve been gone so many days since we arrived back to Indiana… he’s doing fine, but he’s also not leaving my side when I’m back at my dad’s place where we are staying at the moment. I also told him if I go to Indy area that I’d like to spend a few days there and so I want to make plans with friends… this will give me a week to do this and he was fine with it. So I was able to reach a few friends that I wanted to see first and spend time with… and so we decided that Friday night will be our night to hang… when we were deciding what to do I didn’t originally think of this as a date… but as it continued… I was like is this a date? I guess this could be considered a date… hehe… I just haven’t thought about hanging out with people as an opportunity for something sexual or romantic to be involved in such a long time… when I started to question if this was a date that’s when my mind became weird… hehe… I was like holy shit… I’m awkward as hell when I think of being romantic or sexual with someone… and I’m telling you this is something new to me… before my shamanism journey I felt like I was confident in this area of my life… I’m realizing that all of those memories and moments in the past I was just really good at performing or acting… even so much so that I didn’t even know I was performing for myself. I wasn’t really ever ready to give myself fully to a relationship even though I thought I was… I’m sure more insights will come out.. but anyway how did our conversation go setting up this ”date”. He sent over some ideas to do together and mostly involving haunted houses… and so I told him that it sounded like fun but really I just want to talk to him and get to know him better… in my mind at first I’m still thinking he might be someone I’d like to invite to join in Ayahuasca ceremonies… hehe… I told him let me look around and see if there’s anything that doesn’t involve so much money that we can enjoy together… I haven’t looked for a gig since I’ve been back and so money is tight right now… and as I was looking… which it wasn’t as successful in the option I was seeing since everything I wanted to do also costed money and not much difference than the haunted house… and while I was searching he said it would not be a problem for him to pay for it… in fact to not worry about cost… he just wanted to have time to share and get to know me better as well… and so I said if it’s ok with him then it’ll be ok with me too. He said that with his kids and his parents spending the weekend at his place… we can meet at his place but after the haunted house we could go to one of his friend’s house or go to a hotel or find something to do to talk. I told him I’m open and all of the above would work for me. If nothing else I’ll be taking blankets and pillows with me and I’ll sleep in the van if I have to. He laughed and said there’s no way I’m going to be sleeping in the van, but a girl does what she has to… and it would be great to not sleep in the van, but if I have to I will and it wouldn’t bother me… there’s ton of space in there… hehe. So we said let’s get a hotel… he found a bed and breakfast which looked gorgeous and one of the pictures showed a large jacuzzi tub and of course I had to mention how a bath would be awesome. He called to book it and I guess they had a two night minimum… I told him I could look for spots on Airbnb… maybe there’s options there… which I wasn’t successful at finding but as I was looking he said he found a hotel that had a whirlpool tub in the space… and if he should book it… I told him that we don’t have to have a tub… but I love soaking in them and I figured we could maybe have some fun enjoying it together… there I go this is when I was like is this a date? But he immediately said… yessss booking it now… lol… unfortunately there wasn’t a tub in the room… the people he was talking to wasn’t actually onsite and there was a pool and hot tub but none in a room… so I was hoping to have some fun with him in the tub… I was going to pick up some oils and see if he’d like a nuru massage… oiling each other up and using all of my body to massage his without focusing on using my hands… I love to slip and slide… this would probably be the closest thing to a fetish that I might have even though I haven't actually had many sexually experiences with this involved. But afterwards I was going to get some bath salts and suds with some candles and we could bathe each other while we soaked. I guess bath time and shower time has been the closest things I’ve done a bit to my slippery fantasizes… I’ve done nuru twice but again for professional activities not personal pleasure. I was running late to meet him and so I didn’t stop and get the supplies I went straight to the hotel and only being five minutes late I found him talking to the front desk asking if there’s a room that has a tub in it.. but they didn’t have such things at this location. So I found out I didn’t need to go buy these items anyway… and again it wasn’t necessary to enjoy ourselves. In my mind it was going to be an easier way for me to relax and enjoy myself in sexual play… as if I needed something to help me into this zone. We had fun at the haunted house and we went to visit his friend which I had a good time… I guess I was bringing up conversations that he didn’t know about his buddy… we had top notch conversations about spirituality and he doesn’t find anyone to talk this way with. He’s a philosophical theologian. And throughly enjoyed our talks in fact I told him I’m glad I wasn’t the driver because I would have pulled over to talk than to try to drive… hehe… he missed a few exits too while we were talking because it was noticeable we enjoyed our conversations. Also I noted his friend is pretty cool… he designs apps and is into psychedelics both recreationally and spiritually… these things I noticed because maybe I can see how intentional he’d like psychedelics to be… but no rush… I’ll see if it comes up in the future. But then we returned to the hotel… and it was a lovely room with a king sized bed which also came with a king sized television… lol… he was watching the goonies when I arrived back from the bathroom. I didn’t care what we were watching… I was to much engaged with talking more if he was up to it. I had things I had to talk to him about especially if we were going to go where we anticipated it to be leading to… I told him how seriously I’ve taken my spiritual practice specifically when it came to my sexuality… celibacy has given me so much insight but that game we played might have given him the wrong impression… one on one I feel like I’m going to be more scared and awkward… and that I didn’t know where my boundaries are at this time. Admittedly I didn’t tell him that I figured I wasn’t going to have sexual intercourse with him… I think I was challenging myself and seeing how I was going to respond in this situation… if I was going to cave in or not…but I just wanted to see how it went and again respond in the moment. So I don’t think I’m going to go into all the details of what we did… in fact I haven’t gotten his consent to discuss much details on what we talked about and activities we mutually shared together… so I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible but enough information to get my thoughts out. First of all… I wasn’t as scared or awkward in this position… just like it was a surprise for the guy I made out with during the game that he was the first person I’ve kissed in years… he probably wouldn’t have known I hadn’t been in this situation for closer to six years when I attempted a sexual encounter with a friend I met in the Florida airport and met up with wile traveling in Peru and met up again in Colorado… but I think I went through those details before and not relevant for this conversation… well.. actually it is relevant because I remember how crazy I did feel in those moments… I was so new to practicing celibacy and it was a huge internal battle of wanting to and not wanting to… that battle was intense and I felt a bit crazy while I was in it.. but that wasn’t the case this time… I wasn’t battling much… I did notice how responsive my body was to this encounter… like holy shit girl finally… you know you enjoy this… but I did have thoughts going on asking are you actually wanting to have sex with him? If you’re not going to have sex with him… how are you going to tell him? Are you going to voice your thoughts? And so I found myself telling him that I’m down for pretty much anything but I am not ready to actually have intercourse with penetration by his member into me… lol… I probably chose the wrong time to state my boundaries but I know for next time when I find myself in this situation again. He definitely wanted to penetrate and I was allowing his fingers to and he loved how wet and tight I was… I started chuckling and was like yeah… I’m not lying to you…. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this position. But I wasn’t going to let him go unsatisfied… I do love to please… and so I think I might have introduced to him a new position for going down on him that seemed to give him enjoyment. Again the next morning I was buzzing… my body was tingling and it almost felt like I had sex the night before… I can see how much my body and mind enjoy being in this unknown territory… but once we parted I was better able to contemplate what all went down and what all I observed in myself. I didn’t realize all of this until I was talking to my girl friend I went to visit on Saturday night. But there’s a few encounters before this so I’ll continue and express insights while talking with her. So I was meeting with my friend whom I also visit when I’m back in Indiana… we actually met each other in the salsa dancing scene… and he met me when I was in my polyamorous phase and there was a short stent of sexual encounters we shared… but this has been nine years ago now… very close to it at least… but our relationship has gotten stronger and more depth because of course I’ve become more spiritual and intentional and so this deepens our bonds. But right…. Going to meetup with him… i didn’t see this as a date… this is my friend and I care for him deeply but I haven’t been looking at him in this manner for years now… but of course we are catching up… talking about what’s has happened this past year when I went to Utah and what insights and direction I’ve been able to find there… so I went into that but of course I told the most confusing thing going on in my life is my relationship to sex. So again… I haven’t gotten permission or consent so I’ll try to keep it mostly to my thoughts as much as possible. Let’s just say I’ve been blunt and open to all the things that go on in my thoughts as I was leading up to the date the night before. I got to the point where I thought I was going to be awkward and scared… and how I don’t feel like I’m good at one to one engagements anymore but when it comes to sexual entertainment in groups that I’m fine… we both laughed because we both remember our past sexual encounters and said I know it might sound crazy but that’s how I feel now… he was laughing and said he can’t believe what I’m saying because there’s no way he’d believe I wasn’t confident in this area. He had a blast… I told him about the game I found myself in at the hostel which really got him going. He found a walking trail alongside a community with beautiful neon colored fall trees… loved it! We sat on the bench as we were heading out and he said… tell me more about you kissing girls… lol… I laughed and said well… I haven’t kissed many girls… told him how I started and some details about the game but I told him that kissing a girl does seem to have differences to the men I’ve kissed. I mean there’s nuances but in general there seems to be a difference. And so he wanted to know. I said that when I’m kissing a guy… there seems to be an expectation that this kiss is leading to a destination… and honestly maybe that’s a projection I have on myself but that’s how I explained it… and when I kiss a girl that expectation of a destination isn’t there…. It’s as if we’re ok if the destination is just to being kissing and enjoying the kiss we’re sharing in the moment. This subtlety makes a difference. And honestly I don’t really know if this is a gender thing… I’m sure to guarantee that it’s an individual thing… but I was talking with my buddy and was just having a conversation casually and not thinking about being political correct or something. I just was expressing my opinion at the time. I told him that I’d like to be a master of foreplay… where the destination isn’t the point… almost similar to the idea I get from people who I know who talk about the kink scene… to have mutual pleasure in as many ways other than intercourse… intercourse isn’t there intention going into a sexual sharing. He laughed at me and said that he’s definitely down to be a partner if I’m looking for one. We have a history and he enjoys foreplay as well. I looked at him and asked how his girlfriend would feel about this? Is she open to this? Are these things you’ve talked to her about? And he said that he’s brought things up like this to her before… he implied that she doesn’t seem to be interested in sharing sexual experiences with girls but might consider sexual experiences with other partners… he didn’t go into much detail and I figured we’d be talking more and so maybe I’ll get more out of him the more we talk. And so I said that I don’t want anything I do to be a secret or hidden. I respect you but I also respect your girlfriend… I’m not going to be doing anything behind her back. He said he’d love to watch me and his girl together… he said that he doesn’t know of any guy who doesn’t fantasize about this. I told him that I’m not really sexually attracted to women. I tried to explain that I find women beautiful and attractive yes… but when it comes to sex… kissing on their lips and maybe neck and shoulders… massaging and running my fingers on their skin… this seems fine with me yet not something I’m going to go seek out… but if I find myself in this situation I can engage with it and enjoy myself… but I don’t actually want to get dirty with women… I want to get dirty with guys…hehe… I don’t see myself wanting to go down on a girl or sucking on her nipples… or fingering a girl… I mean things can change but that doesn’t seem to be where I’m at and again I don’t have an interest in going to find that experience. We were able to get away from this topic and go more in depth in spiritual matters which I’m usually pretty at steering towards… but he said that he’d like to see if he can set something up with his girl or someone else when he left… oh my goodness… I’m literally kicking the door open and seeing what the hell I’l respond too… but is that really what I want? Oh…. At the beginning of the weekend I didn’t plan on meeting another gentleman I met at the caving event. He messaged me right before I was leaving on my date Friday. He said that he had work in Ohio and he was driving through Indy to get back home. Would I be available to hangout this weekend. I told him that I was planning on being in Indy this weekend but I have made plans so I’d be available Sunday… we jumped back and forth of possibly doing a group activity on Saturday night but we finalized eating lunch Sunday before he headed out and I needed to be at a drum cicle. So yeah I just wanted to add to the dynamics of holy shit… I met this man at the hostel… and we had some deep conversations as well the first night there… at the end he was asking if I wanted to join him in his rental spot because it was going to be a cold night. I told him that I want to sleep alone tonight… but let’s see how tomorrow night goes… and that’s when we played chicken and he wasn’t a participant and I don’t think we finished until 4am… so it didn’t work out.. but I thought there was a possible attraction there… and I was like wow… when I had this door closed to my sexuality… it seemed like I was so easy to keep my boundaries and state clearly where I’m at. And now that I’ve cracked the door open… I wonder if I”m literally sending out vibes like I’m single and ready to mingle or something… because I feel like I’m not really doing that but something is going on… and since I’m ready to face this challenge in my life I want to observe myself in these situations… but also these are fascinating people and i know I’ll enjoy my time with them. So why wouldn’t I want to meet up with them. But we’ll get to our encounter after I move to my girl friend I went to see after I left my salsa friend. She lives with three dogs… two boxer terriers and a little chihuahua…. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen them and oh how excited we all were to be together… hehe… the big boys don’t know how big they are and want to be lap dogs… hehe… but I love them so much and they’re like the cherry on top when I go to visit my girl friend. Now… once again I haven’t gotten her consent to talk about all the things we were discussing but when we talk to one another… it’s absolutely phenomenal of what we can release and process together. Since we are still in the sexual sides of things I’ll probably continue this string of thought… but we were able to engage in far more and specifically a particular gentleman and intentional communities… but those will be in the next chapter to today’s entry… lol… I knew I needed to express myself in this Journal today…. I just didn’t know how long it was going to take…hehe… it’s good for me though… and honestly most of this had been worked out after speaking with her… but they’re still lingering and so I wanted to purge it out… so what was I able to express to her that I was only thinking about and hadn’t had the contemplation time to digest until I was with her? Back to the date night… so it seemed like I wasn’t as scared or awkward in this encounter… but definitely expressing where my boundaries are at this time before we start is definitely the most appropriate time instead of in the middle of the engagement… but I found out that I was able to do this but to be respectful and intentional with my partner… being able to make informed decisions without unknown expectations would be appreciated for everyone. I’d like to know where the boundaries are for my partner too if any. I also found out that it was a bit too fast and too casual for me. I admitted that I felt like it was still a performance in a way… while I was kissing him I was thinking a lot of what I should do next? Where should I touch him? How far will this go and how far do I want compared to how far he wants? So to please I wanted to do the things that I think are pleasurable for him… how I can describe it is as if I am performing sexually… I really don’t know if I can remember not performing during sexual activities. When I’ve been engaged in meditative intentional sex without expectations and truly engaged in unknown possibilities and with no time restriction or no destination. I know I’ve spoken many times about not having an easy time having orgasms… and I know it was very mental block.. but I placed an expectation and destination on myself and partners too… I expected it was going to be hard for me to orgasm and my destination is to fucking have an orgasm… hehe… and when it came to my expectation and destination for my partner… I expect that I’m going to do my best to please my partner and the destination is for them to have an orgasm. How many destinations have I placed on myself when it comes to having sex? Sexual intercourse, mutual orgasm, intuitive pleaser and expressive communicator. I can see this could be accomplished but if I remove this destination idea maybe some of these things might start to naturally occur? How do I not be a performer? I was talking to my girl friend about this… I think the first thing that I notice to not be a performer that was obvious when I was playing the game or on my date… is the depth of getting to know the people involved. I hadn’t known them long I don’t know much about their history or their purpose or dreams for the future… and it wasn’t like a natural sexual attraction I’d say. I wasn’t really looking at my haunted house buddy as a sexual partner until we started to take things to a sexual play date… and I wasn’t going to engage in sexual play date with any of the participants of the game before they asked if I wanted to join in on the adventure. So I would say that yeah it wasn’t a natural sexual attraction. And specifically even though I find the haunted house buddy to be physically attractive… I found myself not really responding naturally while we were making out because… I don’t know him… i wanted to perform and make sure it was a fun time for him… but honestly it’s not how I want to continue my sexual exploration. I told my salsa buddy the next morning as well that i”m not interested in having a three way engagement with me and another girl… it would be so much pressure and expectation… if the three of us are alone in a space and we are to start something… I feel like what I’d like to do with the girl wouldn’t be all the satisfying for all the parties and I’d feel like I’d have to go to places I didn’t want to go. I also told him that I’m not ready to reignite a sexual relationship with him either. Talking with my girl friend… I did realize and admit to her and specifically to myself that there is a partner that I’m attracted to. I started to express how I self sabotage in the past when I liked someone starting all the way back in high school… I had tendencies to like someone but I’d try to get my girl friend to date them instead… because they’re both amazing and I want them to be happy… I just didn’t think I’d deserve that happiness. Now this varies in degrees and I’ve been happy with partners and was attracted to my partners… but I do remember occasions where I would do this. I remember when I started to want to have sex I was dating a guy whom I really liked who already had sex before and I was a virgin… I broke up with him because I didn’t think it was fair for him to be dating someone who wasn’t experienced… I had a one night stand with a friend for my first time… and I dated someone my senior year where we were rabbits… it wasn’t until my freshman year in college did I reach back out to the guy I broke up with because I felt like I could give him a good time now that I have some sexual experience. I mean we stayed together for 13 years… but even then I didn’t have a clue what I was doing… and in a way I still don’t… it feels like I’m starting over as a virgin… but in a way… my muscle memory in my body is still there… it knows what its doing… but I’ve noticed how I was trying to self sabotage myself in just these past few weeks. I noticed it but I hadn’t really admitted to myself that I wanted to pursue a potential romantic relationship with him though either to myself. I guess it wasn’t really apparent until I saw him and was observing how he was engaging with people and when he expressed himself so openly and clearly. I mean… this is where I saw my conditioning of toxicity from my past become aware to me. So… I’ve been observing him and he’s been attracting my attention… he’s gotten many similar attributes that I share but of course the difference intrigue me. He’s extremely creative… I’ve enjoyed looking at his photography and his paintings and his digital art… he possibly produced, shot, and scored an indie film… I haven’t asked the details but I wouldn’t be surprised. What I’ve seen him be able to build within the last six years has been awesome… what can be obvious on social media is how many structures that have been built but also able to see how the structure of his staff’s interactions and daily implementations shows just how much he cares for his community. And just his commitment to building communities of course rings all the right bells because I find myself loving this passion as well. He’s openly polyamorous which also makes me attracted to him at this time too. I don’t think I’m going to be labeling myself at this time… but having experience in polyamory and monogamy and celibacy… I find them all to be valuable… for me at different times in my life. It looks as if he has had a steady partner that is his foundation. I don’t much about her or their relationship but I don’t know much about him either… just what I can gather and interpret. But I’m definitely interested in getting to know him more. When I originally saw these qualities in him… I was yes… he’s someone I want to get to know more and partner up with… I want to ask him more about his spirituality and how open he is for spiritual practices because I want to invite him to join the team of Aya ceremonies to Enlightenment expeditions, to linking communities, and possibly the nonprofit… I mean absolute checks all the boxes… and so confident I go into his environment and have all the intention to find time to speak with him about these things… lol… but when I get there I see just how much attention he’s trying to share with everyone. Everyone is attracted to him and wants his guidance. He’s good at what he does… I figured I’d get time to spend with him after the event and so I didn’t really engage with him much directly. But again I’m always in observation mode and he’s hard not to notice. I found myself a bit shy I would say… I know no one would think that this would describe me… but for me.. I know when I tend to get shy because it stands out to me as well… I seemed to be shy around him. But before I left I was trying to figure out when to return… I knew I wanted to come back and I thought as soon as possible so his next event was an art event. So I asked more about the art event… I was thinking multiple art mediums… music, dance, painting, sewing, sculpture… to call it an art event… but I found it was a single mural painter who was teaching… for the price she wanted I didn’t think I’d like to participate… but the intentional convention was already in my radar so I can wait a few weeks and go back then. So what has seemed to change from then to now? Well… first of all when I was watching him through social media I was watching him with my door closed phase. I saw him as someone I have to talk with because he’d be perfect for future partnerships… and so I was confident to go and chat… then it moved to holy cow… my door is not closed anymore… it’s been creaked open to get me ready to address changes I”m going to be working on… hehe… it’s already been kicked open to see how I responded… but now I find my door is half way at this moment. I want to not kick the door open but intentionally push the door open slowly most likely but feeling my way on the pace not predicting it. This is what I was able to admit to myself when I speaking with my girl friend. My confidence was strong when I thought of him with my door closed… and now that the door is opening my confidence started to waiver… I mean once I started to actually experience that I am available for romantic/sexual intimacy into my life it’s like i don’t know what to do right now…. lol… I know I’ll figure it out quickly I’ve already done a ton in just one weekend to gain clarity… but I didn’t realize how I was questioning my confidence… I was assuming that I was going to be my past self with my past memories… and since I’ve gone this long shouldn’t I be scared? Shouldn’t I be awkward? But after this weekend… this is not the case… I saw tendencies of thinking of different dear girl friends of mine who would find him amazing and thinking of possibly getting them down there to meet him to see if they could have a spark together… at the time I also wasn’t sure how long I was going to be staying in Indiana too… I spoke with my girl friend earlier before I arrived to Indiana about how I want to have a romantic relationship…and she was asking if I’m ready to change my traveling decisions? I told her at the time that I’d need to attract someone who understands passion and purpose. I’m not just traveling to be traveling… there’s strategy even though it’s not a specific planned out strategy… but there’s a bigger purpose to my travels. And I’ll find someone who would understand this and would not want to keep me put for selfish reasons… I don’t see how I could attract anyone who would want that for me… I love myself too much to want to settle for less than I deserve… and I deserve to follow my spiritual path… but as I was talking to her I did start clicking into place that… well.. I have a ticket in to Indiana but I don’t have a ticket out… everyone wants and expects me to tell them my exact plan how long I’m staying where I’m going… details and details… I try to explain this is not the way I’ve been taught through my spiritual understanding. I listen for intuitive conversations and nudges to direct my choices. I do have a vision but the details aren’t given and I love spontaneity so I honestly don’t want all of that information most of the time. We discussed how my brother in Hawaii wants to buy my ticket back to help him build willpower for his obesity but it’s something I don’t want to do at this time because he’s not ready to make the changes and steps yet… in a physical manner… I can see the steps playing out in his mental body… but his physical body is not ready and he thinks I can go there and be a militant guru for him but that doesn’t sound like anything I’d like to do really. And he still lives with my mom and there’s not an ounce of me that wants to live with her again. I’ll go and visit and enjoy myself but I don’t want to obligated to live with her because I’m short on financial resources at this time. Hawaii is definitely in my future but it’s not only to share time with family… but I’ve got my own explorations to discover there… I want to go to the outer islands and volunteer and see whom I find and what communities I’ll find… I’d like to go on my own terms… and as much as I don’t want to spend another winter in my dad’s house… I don’t want to go to Hawaii right now. With the ideas I’ve been thinking… I. Can make some money here in Indiana for a year and when I return to Hawaii I can do just that… visit with family and spend time and share love… but then continue on my purpose and explorations… before I go to Japan…etc. until Nepal. But anyway… she said about not traveling… I told her I’m willing to spend time to see if a relationship can grow, but I’m not going to stay in one spot forever… at least not right now. I agree that time spent together to get to know one another and building a relationship and a bond needs time… I can give a year to this but I’ve got a calling. And I don’t want to just stay for a romantic relationship either. There are too many opportunities for me to develop skills that I want to build to better prepare me for my future endeavors that would be easily found here too. The first thing is to find time…some one on one time with him and see where he’s at and if there can be an agreement. Regardless if it’s not a romantic relationship… I’m completely down for a professional relationship and we’ll both get value from that as well. I found myself at the temple in Utah and I didn’t know where I was going to fit in but it became apparent to me that I was there to help the leader of the temple… to give her confidence in someone she can trust to help run the temple to give her rest. I feel like she saw the value of rest and how much it’s just as important as progression and actions. I found ways to help which wasn’t part of her agenda she usually has for volunteers… she’s so close to the situation that having a outsider who is intelligent and aware and creative come in and see the gaps that aren’t noticed but extremely effective was appreciated by the time I left. I will continue to observe them… but I know I’ll be returning as well to check the status and help when I’m there in the areas needed. I didn’t give her my 100%… i was using the space as an ashram so I gave 50 to her and 50 to myself. She wanted me to be different to who I am… I became an exception for her… I didn’t come to her in the normal terms she’s used to… I came out of no where… she didn’t allow pets but she made an exception… she didn’t allow smoking, but we made agreements… I showed her my potential before we spoke about me moving in…and because what she saw… she was willing to take the chance to make me an exceptions… and she doesn’t regret a thing and got so much more than she expected. Next time… I’d love to give her my 100… I’m taking the steps to better understand to sustain my energies the more I know myself the better I can help the ones I’m engaged with when I see the tendencies I found myself doing. I’m going to go much deeper into the intentional communities to prepare myself for the weekend… but man… I’ve been on here a long time and I’ve been able to express quite a bit and I feel satisfied leaving it here for now. I hope to continue tomorrow… I’ll be helping my dad pick up supplies for his cellar/shelter… I’ll be making cream puffs with my girl friend on Wednesday… I’m thinking that I might ask if there’s a Halloween party maybe going on at the hostel for Thursday… maybe I’ll go a day early? We’ll see… I don’t have any outfit or anything but maybe that’s not really necessary. Ok.. until next time… thank you

Here's a little metaphor/analogy/whatevz I came up with that I think encapsulates God/Consciousness as a strangeloop: Imagine yourself as standing before a mirror. The "objective" self you believe exists is actually just a reflection in this mirror, where the mirror itself symbolizes consciousness. There is no underlying physical "you"—the reflection is the only reality. The subjective experience you see in the mirror isn’t a mere image of some deeper truth; it is the entire truth. Consciousness isn’t observing a separate reality; it is creating and sustaining it. In this view, you and your reality are one and the same, both emerging from and existing within the reflection of consciousness. There’s nothing beyond this reflection to discover—this is the entirety of existence, looking back at itself in an infinite strangeloop. Edit: I just looked up this metaphor and it seems to have been used by others too. Cool

First You should be relatively a Happy Person if Your Awakened as You say, then this Life becomes a Game, just play it.. Its like sitting down with a bunch of 3yr olds in a park, just play with them, run around, throw a ball, laugh, jump, skip, no care in the world..just do that, that is how You integrate it.. Thinking about it all day, calculating how to do it all day, wondering if I am right or wrong, or what is happening to me all day, is not it!

@JoshB The moment you make a pot out of clay, the unmanifested nature of the clay is gone due to its manifestation. I agree with @Davino that pure awakening is antithetical to your survival (not just your physical body but your idea of you). But, again, the manifestation just appears. It is an illusion. Pure awareness is beyond this manifestation (you coming back as ego trying to integrate life) and unmanifested (your awakened self). Try to renunciate both what's manifested and what is yet unmanifested.

Exactly. People who say that after awakening then have problems to to relate to others since they are at another level, it is because they have not really awakened. If you are awake you see that the others are you, and you relate in a much more direct way. No are you as a ego, you are not imagining them, they are you as substance, you and them are the same. You're not looking for people who know things, you're looking for people who don't put up barriers. The connection that occurs is not mental, the mental does not mean anything, it is real connection because you are open to what you are. It's like when you were a kid and have friends in the school, the problem is that when adults most of them put a lot of barriers, the thing is don't do the same

Seems for so many awakenings your ego has bult an AWAKENED IDENTITY. Keep the work going because you havent even started. When you actually Awaken you instantly Connect because you know they are literally you and your ego can not construct more dualities or feelings of specialness vs others. This does not mean that you will match with all people btw, is just that you won't have trouble relating to people because they will no longer be other people.

In my belief I think that everyone has a zone of genius they can tap into. But it requires you to gain a lot of experience in life and to do it very consciously. I've discovered mine quite recently after many years, and now I'm working on applying it into every aspect of my life. So there is no average person, but if you compare an individual to a certain societal standard, then sure you can judge based on that. Still I think you have to work hard for it, you can't just lock yourself into your fears. An identity is not a constant thing, it changes and goes through certain stages. It might be a bit selfish to make yourself believe you're an above-average person, as long as it stays as a belief. I like to think of people as a catalyst or whatever you wanna call it, for the universe's expression. The more awakened you become, the more connected you become to infinite intelligence, and your zone of genius will be there without effort.

@ExploringReality That lil book is a great place to start. Actually, it might be all You need. Practical and traight to the point, with easy but powerful techniques. Might get you Awakened. Follow to the letter

Very nice. Great work! Haha. I had my share of I am God awakenings for 2 years in the "good old days" when I was taking psychedelics. Of course I don't remember anymore. I'm kidding with the "good old days" of course. It could be described as more exciting then, but now I feel I'm more mature and building understanding "from the ground up". Letting go of psychedelics for now was a conscious choice. But there will come a time when they'll return to my life. That's very nice to hear, I really appreciate it. My heart is breaking! I tried to provide value to the forum with other posts of mine in the past but I decided to hide most of them a while ago (trip reports, "awakened insights/messages", etc). Then I especially wanted to show the emotional difficulty of this work and be an example there. Lots of love to you as well. @integration journey Thank you! ❤️

He does it on purpose, obviously. With every message zios discredit themselves and their case, demonstarting how blind one can get, for all to see. It's actually amazing to see messages from Inliytened1, given how he larps as awakened being on the forum. Well, there goes that title. or Gennadiy1981...notice, nobody even engages him or his messages.. they stand on their own proof that psychedelics without inner work, deep contemplation and introspection is worth jack shit. Nivsch... trying to demosntrate that "dialogue is possible", but when push comes to shove, justifies everything that's happening, including settlers. Pretends to listen, but hears nothing (not surprising). I don't know why you engage him, guys. His job is to muddy the waters. And if shit will go sideways for Israel, the likes of him will be responsible for throwing netanyahu under the bus (notice he already does that to extent) to clear israels image. TYPICAL. Hasbara failed on this forum misserably. Kvetching intensifies.

Maybe he was awakened but the mis-interpretation is what ruined him

Yes, looks like many here has expanded/ dissolved their ego and awakened to infinity and bliss closing their senses, but is it possible to maintain that same state in our day to day life, while doing everyday activities? What about when you interact with others or where you have to make choices? Can you maintain that blissful state while doing so?

I used to work as a cashier and one time this guy came and me and him looked each other deep in the eyes and I saw “it”. And I think he saw “it” too. A week or so later he was outside sitting on a bench and saw me and waved at me and I also sensed “it” this time too and I bet he sensed “it” too. The encounters were not flirtatious it was something I’ve never experienced before and I saw hundreds of people working there but this one stood out for me

[ posted this for myself ] we need to have a discussion about the dangers of spiritual work this is an especially poignant moment at which to have this discussion we've had it before but we need to have it again because recently we've been made aware on the actualized.org forum that one of the members there killed himself so i'm going to talk about that situation i'm going to answer many questions i'm going to then lead into a discussion about suicide and into my thoughts on that and we're going to talk about many of the traps of spiritual work and just many of the traps of any kind of system of beliefs or ideas in general so there's going to be a lot of very juicy and important information here so stay tuned with me and i'll try to answer all your questions and objections so now what happened uh well we're not exactly sure with 100 certainty what happened but the best that we can piece together and as we've been informed by the family by the sister of this individual and and his family is that a few weeks ago he got the idea to literally jump off a bridge and for spiritual purposes uh it's not exactly clear what his logic was for doing so what he thought he would really gain from it or why it would be necessary but somehow he got it in his mind that jumping off a bridge would i guess be a quick path to god or towards the afterlife or the next life or whatever and then he literally jumped off a bridge or so we're told again i don't have independent verification of this i'm assuming it's true let's just treat it as though it's true all right so let's say it happened so now what do we make of this because i take this very seriously sometimes people get the idea that i treat these ideas kind of casually or flippantly about enlightenment awakening and so forth um and my teachings in general uh very much no very very much no um in fact i'm going to point out repeatedly again and again and again how many warnings and disclaimers i've given how many times i've talked about the traps of this work this is a recurring theme if you watch my content through to the end you notice this recurring theme what we're always talking about is we're talking about the mind the ego mind and all of its wacky crazy ideas and how it survives and how it fools itself and how it deceives itself in many different ways including materialistic ways but also including spiritual ways as well and we talk about the dangers of ideology and belief systems and getting locked in a paradigm getting locked into a single perspective of closed-mindedness of cults cult psychology so we we've covered this topic so much i have videos for example about with titles such as the dangers of spiritual work the dark side of meditation act is actualized or occult which i just released actually recently in the last month or so i released that one and in that one you know some people criticize me and say that well leo you spend three hours that's a three hour long episode three hours explaining how actualized rig is not a cult but if you watch that episode carefully it wasn't just three hours of me selfishly defending myself it was mostly three hours of elaboration upon many of the misconceived notions people have about this work and spirituality in general and many ways in which it can be misinterpreted and misunderstood and in fact most of my episodes are so long in general precisely because i go into a lot of detail about the traps of the mind how easy it is to make mistakes in this work and to get things wrong to make sure that you're not misinterpreting something that's being said there's a fundamental problem here though in that the longer i make my episodes the less likely people are to watch them or to just they're more likely to skim them and when they skim them then they can actually skim over the disclaimers the warnings the traps the examples the rebukes that i give and the problem is that if i harp too much on the obvious things you shouldn't do in this work for intelligent people that's going to tune their mind out because they've heard it once they've heard it twice how many times leo do you need to tell me not to jump off a bridge isn't that obvious does it really need to be said that you shouldn't be jumping off a bridge that is not valid spiritual work and that has nothing to do with what we're doing here if the teaching was to jump off a bridge that's what i would tell you to do that's not the teaching you might say of course if you're reasonable and intelligent but the problem is that hundreds of thousands and millions of people watch out of all these people we're talking about so many people you have to keep in mind that in the united states alone there were 40 000 suicides in 2018 by the statistics only in the united states alone that's not counting the rest of the world so we're talking about literally millions of suicides every year and i have a global audience people watch me from everywhere around the world it's quite amazing my videos have received close to 100 million views in the last eight years and so from the beginning i was concerned that people can take these teachings and misconstrue them misinterpret them in whatever ways they will and misuse them and abuse them in fact i've talked about that in the past quite a lot oftentimes i ended my episodes with some sort of you know final word where i would say something like be very careful not to abuse these teachings in some particular way and then i might mention the way or explain what the traps are i do that for a reason because when you teach millions of people eventually somebody's going to get some stupid idea or is going to misunderstand something and it's very difficult to make these teachings foolproof so the challenge is that what i teach is rather advanced stuff and really it's not suitable for people who have mental disorders or who do not have a stable mind or who do not just simply have a good reasoning process who just don't have common sense right you can't get far with my teachings without common sense and basic reason and a stable life the ability to just survive in your life and one of the challenges that i face is that honestly i come from a rather healthy mindset myself i don't have a lot of experience dealing with seriously mentally ill people or very depressed people or suicidal people or people who just have weird ideas about life or reality and some people are like that they just have weird ideas they have a weird reasoning process you get people like that and by no means is this something special to actualize.org this is a general problem for all spiritual teachers and all spiritual schools and the more you teach the bigger your audience the more of a problem it becomes because what happens is that if you're a very specialized narrow teacher that teaches something very advanced and you get maybe 100 students a year coming to you you can have very tight control over that and the people who come to you tend to be of a much higher caliber they're not coming from just off the street the problem with youtube is that anybody who's doing any work on youtube their fan base if it's of any significant size let's say over a hundred thousand people is going to consist of some very intelligent people some a lot of average people um a lot of stupid people and then some really really stupid people or even not that but actually sociopathic criminal psychotic schizophrenic bipolar and god knows what other conditions depressive suicidal and and and even things you can't even really imagine you get some very fringe edge cases when you have a hundred thousand followers let alone a million followers you get a really wide distribution of that bell curve and overall it's fine except once in a while you get some extreme cases and what makes the situation worse is that within spirituality and personal development this area especially attracts people who sometimes are especially prone to having mental problems uh trauma that they're working through in their life sometimes mental illness depression or who are suicidal because that's usually the kind of person who wants some sort of health self-help advice if you're totally happy in your life you're usually chasing money and success and you don't even turn to self-help or spirituality so a lot of people come to spirituality with the purpose of escaping suffering and that already creates sort of a bias in the distribution curve because who suffers the most are the people who have the most chaotic minds they suffer the most and they probably need therapy and self-help and spirituality the most but they are also the most prone to misunderstanding or misusing these ideas so in general this is a problem that really goes back to the dawn of human civilization it's important to put this into context so i'm laying out a lot of context for you here so you understand the depth of the problem teaching truth or consciousness or spirituality at an advanced level where you have really deep insights of the nature of reality metaphysically existentially to the point of penetrating through uh life and death these sorts of of topics these topics have always been to a certain extent taboo within society and culture and there's a very good reason for that because these topics these types of questions when we start to deconstruct the mind or when we start to talk about and question the fabric of society of reality of social structures of gender of cultural norms of money of politicians of the economy of ourselves and our relationship to others in the world when we start to question what am i what is another is there even such a thing as another person or am i just imagining that what is death what is life is life even meaningful is death really scary is that a bad thing or a good thing like when you start to ask these questions and you don't just invent ideologies and belief systems about it but you really probe into it deeply and you try to reach some kind of truth of the matter through consciousness this is very threatening it's threatening to the entire social order it threatens the politicians it threatens the business owners it threatens the advertisers it threatens the the academic systems it threatens the school system it threatens your parents your family your friends your co-workers it threatens religion it threatens science so very quickly you develop enemies which is why historically these sorts of teachings were not mass available to a casual audience they were kept within very narrow specialized esoteric sects which were not known very well by the majority of people whereas the majority of people practiced exoteric forms of religion and spirituality which was sort of like advice for dumb people it was dumbed down mysticism effectively which just gave you some rules to follow like don't kill people don't steal don't be an [ __ ] don't judge people don't jump off a bridge these sorts of things need to be told to normies because you're sort of gearing the teachings to the lowest common denominator so there's a tricky trade-off between how advanced your teachings are and then who they're geared towards and then how widespread they can be like a lot of times i will teach something about the nature of fear or survival or religion or the origins of religion and things like this and then people write in the comments section people tell me all the time like leo oh my god why isn't this taught in school well the reason is because ideas can be dangerous and i've said this in the past that ideology is not just fun and games ideology is deeply connected to your survival and survival people don't appreciate how deadly serious survival is survival is as serious as cancer as a heart attack as a bullet to the brain now if you want to take the position that none of these things matter from an absolute absolute perspective because it's all just a dream yeah you can take that perspective but you have to also be very careful here because you can say that or take that perspective while you're sitting at home on your couch listening to a video and it's all very comfortable and easy but then when someone runs over your dog with their car if someone robs your grandmother as she's walking home from the grocery store if uh you know if a burglar breaks into your house while you're asleep with your children with a gun are you still going to be able to hold that lofty metaphysical position of it's it's all just a dream yes it's all just a dream of course but how do you want your dream to unfold and what are your attachments to the dream i bet you have some attachments i bet there are ways your dream could unfold that you would really hate to see happen and hey i'm not wagging my finger at you here i also have attachments to the dream again people get this so wrong they think like oh well leo since you say you've you know you've realized god and other such things and and you've said you say that everything is a dream that means that you don't care what happens in your life right no of course not of course i care because i have relative goals for example one of my relative goals that i'm pursuing in my life is that i teach that's what i do that's my life purpose is to teach this stuff to spread this wisdom and these insights so look at how this works it's a bit paradoxical because on the one hand the wisdom and the insights tell us that all these attachments that are all just illusory standard buddhism right all these attachments to life are just illusory at your attachments to money to your children to your family all illusory and is that true yes of course it's true from the absolute perspective it's true but at the same time just to be able to teach that to people requires that one be alive the buddha can't teach you unless he has air in his lungs food in his belly and a comfortable place to sit the buddha can't teach you without food water air a safe environment a climate controlled area where it's not too hot and not too cold he can't teach you on the surface of the sun he can't teach you in the middle of a of a desert where you're dying of thirst so very narrow conditions are required for survival and for the propagation of spiritual teachings and work or any kind of life for that matter this is obvious stuff but it's worth thinking about in this context so for example for me to teach the things i want to teach i have to be concerned by very petty mundane issues that most people would think well leo surely you should be above this like leo you're so awake and so forth you should be above concerns for money but no see if i was above concerns for money i would literally not care about money and if i literally didn't care about money then i wouldn't even check my bank account and if i didn't check my bank account it would run out eventually and once it ran out my electricity would shut off my cable would shut off i wouldn't be able to power this camera that i'm recording this video on and i wouldn't be able to upload it anywhere you see how that works so it's actually perfectly okay for me not to care about money but then there are consequences the mistake that naive people make is they think oh well it's all just sort of a dream and i could just like stop caring about these things and everything will just be okay like god will guide me through life not so fast what kind of life do you want god is not something above you that is guiding you through your life this is god your thought process itself is god so when you think to yourself [ __ ] i gotta put more money in my bank account so i can pay today's electricity bill so that my electricity is not shut off so that i can do my work tomorrow when you think that that is god doing its work that's how god works that's not the only way god works but people overlook that that is how god works god works not just in supernatural ways god works in very practical ways in fact mostly that's what's happening in your life so if you care about your children not suffering see maybe you're above suffering and you might say oh leo i've i've become so enlightened that i'm not even worried about suffering anymore okay but you have children are they as enlightened as you do you care about their suffering now maybe you say leo i'm so enlightened that i don't even care about their suffering okay and that's possible that is perhaps a valid state of consciousness you could one day reach although i highly doubt any of you have reached it but let's say you've reached that point okay fine but then your children will suffer and die are you okay with that now if you say yes then what's the problem well technically there is no problem but the problem is that you're not going to be okay with it see you fool yourself telling yourself that you'll be okay with it but actually you won't be so that's where you have to be very careful so what you have to understand is that ideas inherently are dangerous things we tend to treat ideas as mere philosophy some sort of armchair stuff that we do and frankly a lot of what you see on youtube in terms of the sort of idea sphere on youtube is that it is just armchair philosophy it's it's ideas that have little real world consequences but even in those even in those areas it's still not true i mean look look at what's going on in our culture in our society for example with ideas within politics there are dangerous ideas within politics both on the left and the right now i would say that there are more on the right than there are on the left but hey you could say that i'm biased whatever but you can certainly find some very dangerous ideas for example if you wanted to on the radical right and that's not to pick on the right wingers but just like honestly there are some really toxic and dangerous ideas and ideologies floating around within conservative circles the extremes of conservative circles nationalism racism xenophobia people who want to start an ethno-state people who are happy with ethnic cleansing and they spread these ideas online and they gain traction they're sort of a battle over these ideas going on recently in the last five years online um that is not to pick on right-wingers here that is just to point out that ideas can be dangerous and this has always been the case throughout human history we tend to have reached this very point of luxury today in first world democracies where we tend to consider free speech as the highest goal and right and that you know everything is okay with free speech free speech makes everything good but it was never that way never to get to this point human civilization had to be built on deep restrictions on speech and on ideas because some ideas are corrosive to the very fabric of society and they're threatening to social hierarchies and to the economy and other such things for example an idea like that that the dollar is imaginary seems like an innocent idea right it seems in fact so obvious that the dollar is imaginary i mean if you if you corner anybody with this question they will admit to you that the dollar is of course imaginary we imagine it's value and the only reason it has value is because we collectively agree that it has value and then we're going to use it but if for example one keeps questioning the idea of a dollar more and more and more and more until literally everybody in the world stops believing in the dollar that can crash the entire economy that's the power of one idea and spiritual ideas are a special class of ideas which are the the trickiest in a sense they're the trickiest precisely because as we've talked about in the past a lot of times the human psyche all that it's doing as part of its survival function is that it is constructing various worldviews and perspectives and ideologies taking on various beliefs and it's using these to navigate its way in the world that those ideas shape how you see reality and how you interact with people animals things family members how you view your life whether you even believe your life is worth living this is all based upon ideas as soon as you get the idea that your life is no longer worth living that's the doorway for you to suicide and 40 000 people in america do that every year so ideas are very very powerful especially your ideas about yourself and especially your ideas about the structure of reality and so the problem though is that when you start to get closer to truth by deconstructing various fantasies and illusions and ideas what happens is that the ego gets very threatened and so there's pressure put upon the ego the closer it gets to truth to squirm away and to come up with some sort of fantasy or illusion or deception to again cloak itself in more ideas that's what the mind is doing that's how the mind survives and it had to be this way for you to be sitting here listening to me otherwise you'd be dead and i'd be dead if you and i and our ancestors for the last 100 generations were not like this so we're all like this nobody is immune to this so the problem fundamentally is this how do you teach deep truths about spirituality without people misconstruing it or weaponizing it or demonizing it or going into ideology belief worship messiah complexes spiritual ego and you know taking it too far in that direction because there's there's a problem with both sides on this side you have extreme skepticism and cynicism and sort of demonization so these are sort of like the people who don't like the ideas at all to begin with their minds are so closed that they just find any excuse imaginable to attack the ideas as false they smear they demonize whatever they can even do violence that's sort of the skeptical end of the spectrum and a lot of times the most skeptical people of spiritual ideas are the scientific and the atheistic and the rationalist people so you create enemies out of them when you teach this stuff uh but then there is uh the other end of the spectrum which is people who who love the ideas so much they get so enamored with the ideas that they stop thinking critically they lose common sense and they start to turn it into an ideology and they become cult-like about it they start to worship the teacher or the guru they hang on every word and then from that all sorts of problems can happen but that's not all the risks and dangers in a sense those are easy to control the stuff that's really difficult to control is that when you have people starting to engage in large numbers in serious spiritual work by doing meditation yoga psychedelics vision quests shamanic breathing exercises even stuff like going out and camping in nature i mean like look if i give you some advice like you know hey i went on a on a camping trip into the wilderness and i just sat around there all day and meditated and had a great time and i became peaceful and very spiritual i felt one with the universe you know out there in the in the forest and then you go try to emulate that and do it i mean that's in general that's great advice right you should be out nature more great advice but what if you go out there and a rattlesnake bites you what if there's a bear and you're not prepared what if there are wolves what if you get bitten by a spider what if a tick with some sort of disease bites you and infects you right so there's there's a lot of ways you could screw up your camping trip what if you get lost in the woods what if you get snowed in and run out of food and water you could die up there on in the mountains in the forest if you don't know what you're doing what if you're hiking up there and you break your leg or your ankle twist it somehow and you don't have any help what do you do well yeah there's dangers with doing that and you see it's difficult to give any kind of advice without without like over qualifying all the dangers because if you give the advice for a million people to go camping over the weekend uh a few of them are gonna break their ankles a few of them are gonna run into bears a few of them are gonna get bitten by snakes and god knows what else happens up there and of course i'm very well aware of this when it comes to doing meditation and self-inquiry and various kinds of spiritual work which is why i have those two videos i have a video called the dark side of meditation where i talk about all the downsides of meditation that normally you don't hear about very much from spiritual teachers and uh i talk about uh in my other episode the dangers of spiritual work i talk about many of the other kinds of dangers of spiritual work not just with meditation you see so actually a lot of people who get into spirituality are not aware of the risks of spirituality there's quite a lot of risks and in fact it would take a couple of hours to articulate all the risks and even if that was done you would still likely fall into these traps because it's not enough just to hear them really you don't appreciate their significance and depth until you're in the thick of it i want to share some of these with you here i mean i've shared them in the past but i want to share some more poignant stories because i really want to get it through to you because one of my biggest concerns is that my teachings are not corrupted or misused or abused in some way this is not just something new that i've adopted yesterday this is something that if you uh if you're a long-time listener of mine you should be aware this is something i've been doing for years now perhaps not as well as i as i could do and recent events are now getting me to think much deeper about what are all the precautions and safeguards that i could put into place within reason uh you know to reduce harm because the general rule with my teachings is this right like if you're ever confused here's the general rule and i think i've said this in the past as well is that if you're applying my teachings and that is leading you towards something that is harmful or leading to to your own suffering and suffering of others or endangering yourself and others especially physical bodily harm then you should immediately stop and ask yourself wait a minute why would leo teach that and you should recognize that ah maybe that's not what he taught maybe i'm misunderstanding something or i'm misapplying something because it doesn't make sense that leo would teach that these teachings are about improving the quality of your life fundamentally so if these teachings are not improving the quality of your life that's a immediate common sense sort of litmus test that you get to use to realize that either this teaching is not right for you you're misapplying it you're applying it at the wrong time in your life in the wrong way in the wrong place you misunderstood something about it you got to change how you're applying it or maybe just this particular technique is not right for you you need a different technique common sense common sense basic common sense is absolutely required in doing spiritual work but that's not enough common sense is not enough you also need care and you need intelligence and wisdom you need the ability to see how your own mind is fooling you when it is you need to have awareness of different traps that people commonly fall into in this work so within spirituality there's a a phrase actually coined i think it's by stan groff if he didn't coin it he popularized it it's called a spiritual emergency spiritual emergency uh stan groff teaches holotropic breathing he's a psychiatrist he's written many books upon various problems that are encountered with people who undergo serious deep spiritual purification work he was also an early pioneer of lsd research back in the 1950s before it was banned and so he's been working with with with people for his entire career for like 50 years either through psychedelics or through sort of this shamanic breathing method in workshops and so forth and uh and basically what happens is that quite a few people who who do serious spiritual work will have these spiritual emergencies what is a spiritual emergency it's when basically you sort of deconstruct the mind so much that your reality starts to melt and you're not sure what's up and down anymore and then you get very emotional you get very confused maybe you have a mental illness and that feeds into it and makes it even worse uh or maybe you have some sort of trauma from your childhood that bubbles up and now is making you irrational and so you start to behave in confused and paranoid ways and and you're not sure what's happening to you maybe you're starting to experience mystical visions for example from doing lots of meditative work or breathing work or whatever and then you're not sure how to interpret those visions or what they mean these visions can be demonic in nature if your mind skews in that in that direction and so on and so there are so many different possible permutations see the difficulty is accounting for all those possible permutations i've been for example on meditation retreats where i had a meditation partner we would you know we would partner up i had a meditation partner i remember on one retreat it was sort of a classic 10-day vipassana retreat and we you know we were just chatting about he told me he was going to this retreat for the last 10 years and i was kind of impressed that was my first time there he was going there for 10 years in a row and i sort of asked him like well what were your experiences early on like and he said like man you know on some retreats on some years i would go so deep into the meditation that like stuff started happening to me i thought i was losing my mind in the middle of the retreat i had to actually like leave the retreat and physically pay for a taxi to drive me to the nearest bookstore into their like psychotherapy section i would just sit in that aisle for the whole day and just read books on you know psychotherapy conditions to try to explain what was happening with me from all this meditating i don't know exactly what was happening to him he had some kind of visions or you know hallucinations or whatever and he was starting to feel like he's losing his mind his his reality was collapsing around him and he wasn't handling it very well because he was sort of like a normie he didn't have a very good foundation theoretical foundation for what could happen and then and then so that happened and then you know he got over it and in that case he was successful but that could also turn out very negatively he could for example after his meditation retreat is over you know and he's in that very fragile state he could end up going back home and then um you know shooting himself in the head because he doesn't know how to handle it he doesn't know what's happening and he's spiraling out of control and maybe he has a sort of a a borderline mental disorder that he didn't even realize he had it was triggered by the you know intense meditation and that happens i'll give you another example uh i was at another retreat it was like a consciousness workshop that i was at some years ago and i specifically because i you know i'm a teacher of this stuff so i was very curious i asked the facilitator he was sort of a master you know enlightened master i asked him um you never talk about this but like i mean you've you've taught for like 40 years you've taught awakening and enlightenment and no self and these sorts of things you know very very advanced stuff and i'm just curious in all these years of running these workshops have you ever had anybody like lose their mind or lose their [ __ ] or you know something bad happen and he kind of looked at me rather dismissively and kind of flippantly and he just kind of said no i was i was rather surprised now this wasn't a teacher who taught like hundreds of thousands of people he taught in very small groups and most of his clients are rather advanced elite clients they pay a lot of money to go there so that weeds out a lot of the riff raff and the crazy people um but even so i was surprised because other spiritual teachers i talked to they do talk about these sorts of like edge cases where things go horribly wrong and but later later i actually like a year or two later i talked to one of the one of this facilitator's assistants i talked to one of his assistants and just to kind of like you know get a little bit of behind-the-scenes scoop of you know what what happens what goes on there and then the assistant told me oh like oh yeah one yeah i asked him like you guys ever get like crazy people because you know i'm like sometimes i get crazy people like emailing me and stuff do you ever do i can't believe you guys don't get that and he's like oh yeah actually we uh just the other year we had we had someone come to our workshop and and then when i looked in his eyes i could just tell he wasn't all there and i'm like wait a minute he wasn't all there what does that mean and he's like well well he was basically like a psychotic i'm like psychotic what happened and then he's like well as we went deeper it was like a week-long workshop as we went deeper and deeper into this workshop um the the person just became more erratic and more erratic and uncontrollable in their behavior to the point where you could look at him and try to like communicate with him but you could see it wasn't registering in his eyes he was off like living in his own reality and i said well what did you guys do and he said well eventually we just had to call the police called the police they they came over and just took him away they didn't like arrest him but uh just you know um basically he he had they had to evacu evict him from the workshop and then and then what happened after that well the police just kind of drove him off i guess back home or somewhere wherever he came from yeah that kind of stuff happens another example i'll cite to you is um there's these enlightenment intensives i've done several of them three or four different ones around the country around the world um of these enlightenment intensives and there was this one interesting anecdote i was talking to one of the facilitators of this enlightenment intensive and just kind of picking his brain about you know what kind of crazy stuff happens at these intensives they're called intensives because they're they're [ __ ] intense people lose their [ __ ] at these intentions they start to yell and scream i've personally experienced this where like you're in a you're in this quiet intensive it's like it's almost like a meditation retreat and then somebody just stands up with this violent almost homicidal rage and just starts yelling and like throwing [ __ ] across the room because they were they were doing some deep self inquiry you know that came up some trauma came up or somewhat of some rage came up whatever and then they encourage you to not to hold that back but to actually express it in a safe in a safe way but it can also get out of hand uh like in one of these intensives the facilitator told me that uh uh you know he was you know the facilitators are supposed to look after everybody in the intensive you know there's like usually 30 50 people at an intensive you know people everyone's doing their own thing it's sort of like herding cats and so the facilitator you know he was hurting the cats and doing all this stuff and then there's like lunch time and so lunch time comes along and everybody sits down at the dinner tables or the lunch tables and they're they're eating their lunch ordering their food and then he notices this one lady who was just kind of quiet the whole day and you know he he he kind of saw that there was something weird about her he was kind of keeping an eye on her the whole day but he notices that you know she's just got this like stole stone cold look on her face and and and he sees her like in the corner of his eye he sees her walking into the kitchen the back of the kitchen where you know students aren't supposed to go that's just for the staff and then he just kind of gets curious and he walks back there just to check up on her see maybe she took a wrong turn somewhere and then he sees her and she's standing there with she takes a a giant chef's knife from the uh from the kitchen you know the kitchen you know prep area there where the chefs were making the food for everybody she takes that knife and then and she's walking out out towards the kitchen area and he just kind of asks her what like hey what are you doing what do you think you're doing with that knife and she says i'm gonna go stab somebody and she names the person she's gonna go stab and she just says it very calmly like i'm going to go stab this person very commonly as though nothing is happening she's sort of like in a trans like a zombie like trans and so the facilitators you know he was very good they they train you if you're a good facilitator you don't you don't like fly into a rage you stay calm and he just said no you don't want to do that here give me the knife hand me the knife you know she refused for a minute and he's like he's like hand me the knife you don't need the knife she handed him the knife and he's like okay now go back go back in the kitchen area and sit down and eat your dinner or your lunch and that's it that's it that was the whole story so what does all this mean what this means is that spirituality has inherent dangers to it it's not easy work and honestly many people are not suited for this work because their minds are unstable their lives are unstable they can't even handle the basics of life like keeping a job or paying their bills or not being addicted to booze and whatever else and then they get into serious spiritual work and they get in way over their head and they also probably lack the theoretical foundation because honestly how many people have enough time and patience and wherewithal to sit through 300 hours of my talks not many and i would say that even if you did sit through 300 hours of my talks it would not be enough to cover all of the edge cases all of the possibilities you would really need to also listen to other teachers read a bunch of books like on my book list watch a bunch of other videos you know attend workshops and go to retreats and do all this stuff and only then would you be in a position where you can sort of guide yourself down this path another story of a lady i've told this story in the past there's actually a book about this on my book list this lady who who was part of the transcendental meditation movement back in like the 1970s and she became one of their sort of teachers and facilitators and she became so advanced as a yogi uh and a meditator that she was invited to like the highest levels somewhere in europe in switzerland or some place where they would do these advanced yoga trainings with with the master yogi who you know who pioneered trends on transcendental meditation i don't remember his name yogi magesh or mageesh something like that i forget his name anyways um she became very advanced with the practices it came effortlessly to her but but this spiritual school at the time like transitional meditation they didn't give you a lot of theory they didn't tell you about what all the different states of meditation and yoga are what all the possibilities are they didn't really even explain what enlightenment was or awakening or no self or god they didn't explain any of this stuff really they just taught you a technique so she started doing this technique doing this technique and then and then she quit and she got married and years a few years passed she she had a child with her husband she got married she she even stopped meditating by that point she was sort of out of it but she did spend like five years there you know in europe meditating but then she came out of it and then and then she's just literally walking out of the bus at the bus stop doing her chores as you know a mother does and then suddenly she had an instant enlightenment where she lost all sense of self and she was completely dumb struck and paralyzed by this occurrence because she had no reference point for what it was she lost her sense of self entirely as though it never even existed and then she kind of came home to her husband and she's just telling him like i have no more sense of self and he's like what do you mean where to go what does that even mean to not have a sense of self right a normal person doesn't understand these things this was some time ago this was before youtube this was like back in the 80s or something i don't know um so there wasn't a lot of literature available about this she didn't have a lot of information and then so she struggled for he for years with the sense of no self she was terrified she she thought she was having some sort of mental disorder she started going to therapists and shrinks who also didn't understand what was happening to her they didn't know what awakening was they didn't know what no self was they didn't understand what yoga and meditation would do to a person uh you know advanced stages and so uh and yeah she she got depressed she got she had panic attacks every night she couldn't sleep she was stressed this went on for years for years and years and years and years until finally she accidentally ran into some kind of new therapist who had some sort of understanding of non-duality and awakening and was able to actually introduce her to some sort of spiritual master who then was able to explain to her like oh what you're going through this is just a these are just the early stages of classical you know buddhist awakening nothing to be worried about this is normal in fact it's a good thing that you lost your sense of self and that completely reframed everything that was happening for her and then she could be happy again it took her a while but she could be happy again um after a certain point people like to talk about eckhart tolle as though he's a sweet lovable innocent little man just sitting up there he's being so sweet to you telling you sweet little things this little little eckhart tolle german man but what people don't realize they don't connect these two simple dots using common sense is that the reason eckhart tolle is this sweet little innocent man sitting there before you now is because in his like early 30s or 40s i don't know how old he was the dude was massively suicidally depressive for years he was on the brink of killing himself the way he writes it as i remember it that he was basically to the point where he was gonna kill himself like today and then in his mind it's sort of something clicked and said like his mind said something like well either i'm going to kill myself today or i'm just going to completely surrender and stop resisting and then he just surrendered and stopped resisting and he had his awakening now people hear that and say oh well how lovely how wonderful and all that yeah it's lovely and wonderful but you don't know how it felt to go through years of the depression that led up to that and you have no idea how close he came to killing himself you see because um see for eckhart tolle now in retrospect you look at him you see his whole life it looks beautiful and wonderful and all this but i want you to try to imagine how many people there are in the world like eckhart tolle who have been depressed and suicidal for years and then they reach the point where they've had enough and that's it they're right on the break and then maybe they're gonna have their awakening but they don't and end up killing themselves with pills or with a gun or something and see you don't hear about those people nobody ever tells you about those people those people don't go on oprah winfrey and they don't write a book that sells 50 million copies and their face isn't all over youtube and everywhere else and they're not these sweet people they're [ __ ] dead or they're criminals or they're in an insane asylum and you never hear about them again these are some of the dark realities of spiritual work and it's important that you be aware of these also of course it's important that you understand that we shouldn't fear monger about spiritual work so even though there are these rare edge cases and things can go horribly wrong things can go horribly wrong with almost anything if you do it enough things can go horribly wrong with airplane travel with car travel with marriages with relationships with sex with business with investing in wall street things can go terribly wrong it's just that these tend to be more socially acceptable and they're not threatening to the ego therefore there's no incentive to play up when there's this kind of screw-up see when an airplane crashes it's tragic people you know mourn the loss but we quickly move on because there's no incentive for the ego mind to latch onto they say ah you see airplanes are evil look how bad i told you how bad it was flying in airplanes is a cult people in a cult flying airplanes are [ __ ] crazy that's what's really going on see there's no incentive for the ordinary mind to do that with airplanes because airplanes don't threaten the ordinary mind but with spiritual teachings there is that incentive and so the mind becomes very selective in how it cherry picks its data and what it emphasizes and what it doesn't now even though i tell you all this it might sound like it's some kind of excuse it's not an excuse and i'm very much committed to sharing honestly with you these sorts of edge cases and other traps and helping you to avoid them and honestly many of them can be avoided simply through awareness of them and discussions like these the problem is how do i make sure that everybody who watches my content listens to this episode and watches it all the way through again the more detailed i get the longer the video runs the fewer people will watch it and also many people in fact some of the craziest and most reckless people they're not concerned about safety so when they hear some disclaimer from me or they see a video from me which is sort of safety oriented are they going to listen is a criminal going to listen to my warnings about not turning these ideas into some sort of justification for his criminal actions for example you've heard me say in the past that morality is absolutely relative there is no right and wrong what is considered criminal and legal and illegal these are relative social constructions they are that's the truth now someone hears that and says ah okay so that means leo says that i can go rob a bank and it's not bad yeah it's not bad in any absolute sense but you have to consider the consequences see uh what are the consequences of you doing that first of all what i said the truth has no prescription to it it's non-prescriptive it's not normative and this is a general point about any truth all truth is non-prescriptive what that means is regardless of what is true what you do about it that's on you that's your responsibility you can't derive an ought from an is so just because robbing a bank is socially constructed and relative does not give you license to rob a bank nor does it excuse you from the consequences of your actions when you rob a bank god is not going to punish you but your fellow humans will you see you're not punished by some sort of external rule or moral system which tells you that something you're doing is bad you're punished by the action itself when you cheat lie steal kill rape do violence to when you manipulate exploit corrupt when you're doing those things when you're being selfish there's a natural consequence that comes from being selfish it doesn't come from god it's challenging for me to preempt and to pre-envision every way in which people can misconstrue and misinterpret what i say i try to address many common traps but there are many extreme edge cases which don't even enter my mind because i'm not even that creative most of the time for example it never even occurred to me that someone might get the idea that jumping off a bridge is a legitimate spiritual technique because the way my mind works that's so [ __ ] stupid that it would almost be an insult to my own intelligence and to the intelligence of my audience to be mentioning in a video that you shouldn't jump off a bridge as a spiritual technique but hey apparently some people find that a valid spiritual technique i often see all my forum people coming up with just stupid ideas for for doing things and i can't personally monitor all of it for example i remember one time i caught a guy on my forum who sort of came up with this technique of of uh i guess his baptism um so he would fill his bathtub and he would like put ice in it and stuff like ice cold water and then he would attempt to like drown himself in that ice cold water to the point where he was like totally out of air so when i saw that i mean obviously obviously that's dangerous and then he was trying to like promote this as a technique to other people and you know i contacted him and i told him like i mean you're doing some crazy stuff there in a very hardcore in a certain sense that's admirable that you're willing to go to these lengths to you know to awaken yourself or to i don't know what you're trying to prove there um but uh but like we can't have this as a technique for the rest of the people on the forum people get crazy ideas people get desperate and the the real difficulty here is that the mind is so constructed that it can literally take any truth or any teaching and twist it and distort it into its polar opposite very very easily it almost takes no effort for the mind to do this for example like you might say well leo but aren't all these problems just showcasing the fact that new age spirituality whatever you teach let's say it's new way of spirituality that this is all this is all sort of newfangled unexplored territories all dangerous stuff that's why new age stuff is dangerous so you should go go to the classical religions that's where it's safe in the classics in the classics you know christianity catholicism judaism buddhism islam but see this is this is a this misunderstands the depth of the problem you see an ignorant mind will find a way to make almost anything dangerous and the amount of people who are actually killed as the result of christianity catholicism islam and other religions is way more than new age spirituality if that's what you want to call what i teach although i myself wouldn't call it that um new age stuff is actually something separate and i'm not i'm not a big fan of the new age for you rationalists and atheists and debunkers in the audience i'm not a new ager i have many critiques of new age thinking and there's many problems with it but also they get some stuff right so it's a mixed bag but um but i mean really think about this you think christianity is so safe it only seems safe because it's culturally accepted and just normalized in the same way as that airplane example it's not actually safe uh think about how many people commit suicide because they have homosexual urges but christianity tells them that homosexuality is a sin and these people they try and they try and they try to be heterosexual you know they do these sort of conversion therapy on themselves and it doesn't work because they're just gay but they can't admit it to themselves so first of all they're living with years and years of guilt and it's corroding their mind and ruining their life millions of people like this around the world exist but that's just you know never mind that kind of suffering which goes on for years and years and years and then some percentage of those people actually kill themselves maybe one percent but since there are so many christians and catholics who believe this stuff seriously one percent of all those is still going to be thousands of people maybe they they have some sort of gay affair because they were trying to suppress their you know sexual urges they have a gay affair and then their family finds out that they that they had this fair then they can't live with that shame and they kill themselves same thing in islam too it's probably even worse than islam for example the catholic church tells you that if you if you repent your sins to god god will forgive you and you will go to heaven sounds like innocent advice right what what could i mean beautiful beautiful loving advice this is advice from jesus right this is what jesus taught what could be wrong with this well so does that mean that if i murder my my neighbor and rape his wife and then i go to confessional and confess it to the to the priest he forgives me god forgives me i get to heaven right is that what that means you see if i have the kind of mind that thinks that way i can take that crit the most powerful and beautiful of christian teachings and messages christ's message of forgiveness and redemption and heaven for for all and i can abuse that into a justification to rape my neighbor's wife because i will be forgiven and god doesn't judge and everyone who repents even the worst sinner is saved or how about let's say i've been a good person my whole life and then what does the christian church tell me if i've been a good person my whole life and i die in a car accident i'm going to heaven right so i go i ask my priest hey you know father i've been a good person no i've gone to church i've been faithful to my wife i've been a good provider for my kids what if i die in a car accident tomorrow am i going to heaven he's going to say of course you are son okay and then i say to myself you know i walk away from me and i say okay so that means that if i jump off a bridge i'm going to heaven why wait why wait for the car accident why wait for my life to end why don't i just jump off a bridge i'm going to heaven after all it's heaven it's beautiful up there why would i want to stay in this earth here i would be an idiot not to go to heaven and so i go jump off a bridge you see even very innocent teachings can be horribly abused and twisted because that's the mechanism of the ego mind it can twist anything into whatever it wants it's constructing reality it's constructing fictions and illusions it's justifying whatever it wants to itself it can justify murder rape terrorism suicide bombings hatred racism slavery all of these things have been justified using spirituality and religion for over 2000 years so now here is where the scientifically minded rationally minded atheistically minded person comes in and says ah leo well you're just proving our point is that all of this spiritual new age old age religious mumbo-jumbo all of it is [ __ ] all of it leads to all sorts of evil so let's just throw it all away okay let's do that and then what do you got what do you got what do you replace that with you replace it with materialism reductionism scientism and i don't mean just materialism in the sort of atomic realm i mean materialism in the because there's a there's a going to be a there's going to be now a pragmatism that comes along with this and now your whole life is just about running around earning money also no moral code no ethical code you don't believe in ethics you just believe in maximizing profit and doing whatever you can get away with practically speaking whatever technology you can build let's build that technology there's no limits on what technology you're willing to build who you're willing to sell it to uh and so you've got this capitalistic materialistic system very pragmatic no no spirit no soul to anything this means you can cheat on people you can be sexually promiscuous you can objectify the opposite sex you can use them manipulate them exploit them you can start to experiment with drugs recreational drugs and pornography and all this stuff and alcohol so all of the classic stage orange excesses and so you go into that for five or ten years and what happens you become even more suicidal even more depressed than if you were classically religious or new age and then you kill yourself the majority of suicides don't actually happen from religion they they happen from a lack of meaning a lack of purpose a sort of a hopelessness a nihilism that people get drawn into a sort of a hollow materialism where you just acquire more and more and more wealth and then eventually you realize that there's no amount of wealth in the world that will make you happy and then you end up in a situation like anthony bournein or avicii both of whom killed themselves some years back so first of all you should recognize that the the problem of suicide is a very general problem it is not confined to religion or to spirituality or to the new age it's a it's a very broad problem next you should recognize that actually religion and spirituality when done properly and responsibly saves thousands of people from suicide it does because it gives people a sense of direction in their life it saves a lot of drug addicts from overdosing you know that's that's one of the most effective ways to save a drug addict from overdosing because most drug addicts they're sort of spironic stage red what comes after red blue so many drug addicts and actually criminals too for that matter you know violent criminals if they can get reformed and you know it's rare but it does happen some percentage of these people maybe five ten percent they do end up reforming themselves and becoming you know well functioning members of society what happens is that they move up from from red to stage blue and what that means is that they find god they find religion now it's not a very advanced you know kind of thing that i teach it's it's a kind of a crude dogmatic religion but just the fact that they start to go go to church they're part of a community they have some rules to follow you know some simple basics they do the jordan peterson thing that gives them a sense of direction and grounding in their life and allows them to kick the addiction the opioids the heroin the meth have a family saves thousands of lives and also the same dynamic sort of exists on the transition between orange and green a lot of orange people they dry themselves crazy with their endless materialistic pursuits and then when they you know when that endeavor exhausts itself and they get no satisfaction then they start looking towards you know what else is there and then they find some sort of new agey stage green spirituality some meditation some yoga practice some vipassana retreat they go to maybe some psychedelics you know then maybe they start micro dosing some mushrooms some lsd it starts to help them a lot of people cure their depression and their anxiety with with mushrooms there's actually going to be approval clinical fda approval of mushrooms and mdma soon for treating depression ptsd anxiety other such disorders legitimate therapeutic uses the science behind this is undeniable at this point absolutely undeniable it works it's very effective it works better than antidepressants and other things you know ketamine very effective for treating depression so this is we're on the cutting edge of this now i'm actually very excited about this these possibilities for psychedelics um so there's that transition from orange to stage green where at stage green you do open yourself up from the rationalism and the scientism and the materialism to something higher something more spiritual and you know maybe you smoke some wheat or whatever and you have a little bit of insight opens your mind opens your heart a bit and uh and then that can save you from from suicide and depression too because again you find something higher so there's a sort of a isomorphism between the transition from stage red to blue and from orange to green and personally i get emails from people quite often who tell me that they were suicidal then they you know were desperately searching on youtube found my content started listening and then now they're free of that they're free of their depression their their anxiety they have a sense of direction in their life and that literally actualize or save their lives and it's very rewarding to to receive those emails thank you for sending me those i've i've gotten dozens of those over the i don't even check my emails that much if i check them all there would probably be hundreds of them like that now of course i also get emails from from crazy people i do get sometimes emails uh from people who say that you know they started going down this rabbit hole and now you know their life is less stable than it used to be they're less happy than they used to be they're suffering more well part of that of course is just the nature of the spiritual journey there has to be a cost you must figure there has to be a cause for awakening because if there wasn't everyone would be awake what is that cost that cost is this massive dip of of nihilism and spiritual turmoil that you go through in order to finally break through and i wish i could say that everybody you know is sort of everyone gets a happy ending and everyone goes through the dip and then just comes out the other end all happy and awakened but that's of course not the case some people will go into this dip of nihilism and it'll spiral out of control and they're going to end up in a mental institution or they're going to make some very bad reckless choices in their life or in the worst case scenario they'll kill themselves how do you prevent that what do i say to prevent that it's challenging because you're sort of you're damned if you're doing damned if you don't if you stop teaching then the net result of that is that actually that hurts more people because the teachings help more people than they hurt significantly more orders of magnitude more but there's always those few edge cases that make you wonder what could be done to make the teachings more robust more clear more foolproof one of the things i want to do is i want to i want to make people more aware of the what they're getting themselves into so one of the problems is that sort of like youngsters come along they don't have any foundation in their life and then they they go down this rabbit hole of awakening and they start learning about these advanced insights that i share and honestly my work is designed to be advanced this is not entry-level work it's advanced advanced stuff i talk about stuff that's very psychologically threatening especially some of the latest stuff i've been talking about and it can get misunderstood by people who just adopt it as a belief system and don't have a direct consciousness of it which is why grounding all these insights in direct experience is so crucial and i keep stressing that all the time but no matter how much i say it people are going to take it as an ideology anyways but one thing that i will do going forward is i will try to stress and disclaim more when a topic that i'm talking about is sort of an advanced topic and that it can it can it has the potential to destabilize your mind part of the challenge for me is that see you see the way my my mind you probably should understand this by now but my mind doesn't work like a normal mind my mind actually enjoys it literally enjoys the process of deconstructing reality to me it gives me pleasure to do this now not always i i experience plenty of suffering and sometimes i hate it sometimes i get an insight that you know bothers me um and i struggle to integrate it that does happen to me but in general i enjoy deconstructing reality but that's not all people and actually it's taken me a long time of teaching and getting feedback to start to understand that about others see part of the part of the biggest challenges of being a human is that whatever you are whatever your strengths are you just tend to assume that everyone has that strength you just sort of assume that that's just a innate human ability for example my strength of being radically open-minded that's like an innate ability that i have that i see that it took me many decades of experience to realize that most people don't have that and so i have to take that into account when speaking to them well well likewise with this idea of deconstructing the mind i love this idea i'm very passionate about this idea this is what i teach i will continue to teach it because that's my area of expertise and where i can help people the most i feel but it's important you understand that deconstructing the mind is a very long and deep slippery slope and so on the surface many of my episodes will start to help you deconstruct the mind here at the beginning of the slippery slope but then you're gonna start sliding down and you're gonna if you take it seriously you're gonna deconstruct more and more and more and then once you sort of get to the to the lower third of the slope that's where you have to be careful because you can deconstruct your mind in a sort of a dangerous way what do i mean by that well let me give you an example a good example is with fear you know i have episodes for example that talk about how fear is an illusion now is that true yes in the absolute sense all fear is illusion and ultimately the fear of death is illusion um and the reason i say that is because it's true and my priority is to say what's true but the problem is that people can misinterpret that because someone could say well if all death is illusion then i got nothing to fear so why would i inhibit myself in any way from doing anything so for example why should i worry about pressing the the the brake pedal on my car in fact why don't i just saw the pedal off my car i don't need a brake pedal only cowards press the brake pedal when they're driving i only need a gas pedal and then if i tell you no no you need a pedal you should have a pedal a brake pedal on your car you might respond to me as like but leo you told me fear is an illusion what are you afraid of leo what are you afraid is gonna happen you afraid i'm gonna crash oh that's ego that's ego in you leo it's only the ego that's afraid you see a lack of basic intelligence and common sense will get you into a lot of trouble very quickly with this work the things i say are advanced they're nuanced they require oftentimes years of contemplation on a single insight to really understand it for example the insight that self and other are the same the self other distinction is the same you can collapse that distinction that's something i've talked about that's a that's a core tenet of non-duality there cannot be a distinction between self and other if there is you've got a duality so now when you say that in the abstract of people you can say it in sort of an innocent sense where people hear it and they kind of a little bit understand it and then they say oh yeah okay i accept it i buy it makes sense to me but they have no idea how radical that insight is they're not conscious of that they're not conscious that self and other is a conceptual boundary within one's mind and then see they hear a lot of other sort of more soft neo-invited teachers teaching this same truth but in a very sort of casual milk toast way they hear it and it just it's all it sounds all lovely and beautiful but then oftentimes when i teach it and i go really deep on it i will go so deep on it that i will really make you feel the solipsism of it and this is where a lot of people struggle is with the solipsism of it because then at some point it hits you that wait a minute if there's no difference between self and other that very much seems like i'm everything and this is all that there is and it's solipsism and solid system is bad right and then we go down that whole road um and i'm not prepared to talk about solipsism that's a separate topic i want to shoot a video on i've been planning that video for a while now to address it in detail i'm not going to address it here my point though is that many of these insights are very challenging to integrate and to accept fully when you get to the rock bottom of it whereas on the surface it seems nice and and wonderful when you really feel it it's a totally different animal like i remember the first time that i became conscious like really deeply conscious that there is no boundary between me and anybody else and when that happened i i freaked out i couldn't believe what i realized i i it was so radical because what happened there for me was that i literally became conscious that my parents were imaginary when i became conscious that my parents were imaginary it threw me for such a loop it was such a mind [ __ ] that it it took me a few days of sort of just like sitting there like that in disbelief wondering like was that did i get that right i can't it can't possibly be right i must be mistaken but then the more i thought about it the more i realized i'm not mistaken it's just something that's so radical like i need to figure out how to how to integrate this and i'm not sure how it even got to the point where i i i actually uh i messaged one of the moderators on my forum who who's conscious of these sorts of things just just to get some some input and some feedback about that just to kind of check myself you know am i going crazy or not um and that's me i have a i have a rather unique and not to brag but i have a rather rather strong mind strong in the sense that like i love these kinds of insights to me when i realized that my parents were imaginary on the one hand it's like kind of horrific to realize that on the other hand it's the greatest joy it really depends on how you look at it and i can see it both ways in fact i do um and you know now i love it now i love it it's good um but you know again that's me like see it's hard for me to get into your mind and to see how you would react to that i imagine that most of you would react quite badly to that uh it might throw your life into disarray you might even feel like you're losing your mind you might feel like you're going crazy a bit and i've been there like i mean i've i've taken psychedelics that that sent me into a into a full-blown madness full-blown man like i know what madness feels like uh i've been there it's a very good experience in retrospect now you don't want to be stuck there um and i integrated it but how many of you are going to be able to integrate it or not i don't know so in these kinds of situations i want to give more warning you know pre pre warning for folk that this is sort of like deep waters where you could get yourself into trouble and i've done that a lot with psychedelics you know i talked positively about psychedelics a lot but actually before this incident happened with the forum i actually i already recorded i have i have in my render pipeline right now i have a episode about the dangers of psychedelics where i go through all of the risks and dangers of psychedelics very methodically um because i was looking i i'm always looking on my forum for instances where people are misusing psychedelics because i'm i'm very touchy about that because to me one of the most important things about psychedelics is precisely because they're so [ __ ] powerful and so important as a technology that the misuse of them this is one of the greatest this is one of the greatest tragedies and problems that we that we have collectively that needs to be solved so for me anytime i see somebody on the forum misusing psychedelics even something as simple as like not weighing a dose just eyeballing it i'll generally you know chime in there and i'll all sort of get into space about it i'll make him feel bad for doing that but leo isn't everything good didn't you say everything is good and perfect in the world why is anything bad of course everything is good and perfect in the absolute sense but in the relative sense in the survival sense if you care about surviving then you have to ask yourself how do you want to survive do you want to survive in a in a society that's crazy and chaotic and people are slitting each other's throats or do you want to survive in a comfortable society that treats you so decently see so it very much matters and it has always mattered to me the practical effect and influence of these teachings on ordinary people's lives that has always mattered to me and in fact you have to understand where i began i began this whole thing from personal development i was a personal development teacher i didn't even know about spirituality or awakening when i started this thing actualize that org eight years ago i learned along the way what you see with me is you see my own evolutionary process unfold in these talks and a lot of times what i'm sharing with you is insights that i've had recently and sometimes i'm figuring these insights out and you have to understand that i am fallible i don't always say the right things sometimes i speak just because i'm sloppy sometimes i misstate a factual statement here there on occasion um sometimes i misanalyze the situation i get it wrong sometimes i have an insight but the insight isn't fully baked it needs more time to bake it'll take two more years to bake it but i still share it with you because it's part of my process and because i expect you to be verifying all these things for yourselves as i've said multiple times and as as i stressed in my three-part series called self-deception that's one of the most important series i have is the three-part self-deception series it really addresses a lot of these straps here and really the core issue that we're talking about which is self-deception because that's how you get yourself into trouble is through self-deception uh i said at the end of that series that i am not immune to self-deception nobody is immune to self-deception i don't care how awake you are how enlightened you are you're not immune to self-deception i've seen even the the most respected of enlightened masters deceiving themselves in one way or another i've seen it it happens trust me you can trust me on that um and if you don't want to double check it for yourself like you should with anything i say so an important safety feature of all of actualize.org is this idea that you have to verify the things that are said to you through your own direct experience i don't know how many times i can repeat that anymore it's tiring to repeat it that's part of the problem with these disclaimers it gets tiring to say them and then those people who are smart and wise and conscious they get tired of hearing them because they don't need it said because it's obvious but the safety feature is that you gotta run it through your own direct experience and verify and cross reference these things with other teachers teachings books and so forth to make sure that you're interpreting things correctly you have the right view and if your view is leading you down a road which is socially irresponsible which is going to cause social damage damage to your family to your loved ones to yourself to your bank account to your health then that's a clear sign to you that you're misunderstanding something there's nothing about these teachings which should be causing anybody physical harm or damage and when i talk about awakening and i talk about god and i talk about love and i talk about death when i talk about ego death this does not mean any kind of physical harm to your body or to anybody else this is not a license for suicide obviously i want to shoot a separate episode about suicide and people who are suicidal there's there's a lot that i could say on that topic but for now what i'll say is that the entire point of awakening is to make you appreciate the beauty and gift of this life that you have this life is a gift all of my teachings are predicated upon the premise that you are conscious of the fact that your life is a precious gift and that it's because of this that you self-actualize it's because of this that you develop a life purpose it's because of this that you develop responsibility and discipline you see i don't teach you just how to transcend the self and and go into some sort of you know spiritual abyss a lot of my work is very practical and just teaches you the foundations of how to put your life together i teach about responsibility and open-mindedness and reading books and studying and doing spiritual practices and uh getting your finances in order having a life purpose being creative with your work relationship sexuality this is all positive life affirming stuff the reason we're interested in all this is to get you mastery a basic level of mastery with survival i talk about that i don't dismiss the importance of survival survival is important so long as you are interested in surviving and i assume you are and i am i'm not above survival in case that wasn't obvious at the very least because teaching can't be done without surviving spirituality cannot be taught without surviving and also because people aren't ready to learn spirituality unless they have at least the basics of their survival handled so the whole point of this work is first you have to recognize how amazing your life is most people don't recognize that they take their life for granted and that's why they don't self-actualize and they don't put a lot of work into their life you cannot put a lot of work into your life unless you really value it so why would you then squander it by jumping off a bridge when i talk about ego death we're talking about a conceptual death of the self not the body now you might say leo but doesn't nonduality mean that there's no difference between a conceptual death and a physical death because now you're drawing a line between concept and material stuff physical stuff and technically speaking from the absolute point of view there is no boundary between conceptual death and physical death in fact to be perfectly frank physical death does not exist it's purely imaginary but that only applies if you're ridiculously conscious and you don't care about survival you're not attached to survival now again some people will take this and they will misconstrue this and they will come up with an excuse to use this to justify their suicide and 〰️〰️〰️ 〰️〰️〰️〰️ health is very important you should be taking better health of care of your health and coming soon i will have some episodes about how to improve the health of your brain improve the health of your body cure gut problems like i've been dealing with i'll share that with you very strategies that i've discovered i've discovered a lot of stuff in the last year about nutrition and health and so forth these are all these are all important take care of your body take care of your health one of the things that i learned in the last year and a half suffering through this health problem that i had with my gut is how foundational health is to anything else you do in life a lot of times spiritual teachers will make you believe that like oh well health isn't so important as long as you're just awake enough you can you can power through any kind of health problem you won't suffer no i don't think so your health is ridiculously important and the only way you can have such a flippant attitude about your health is if you have good health and it's extremely easy to take health for granted when you have it and you've never lost it it's only when you start losing it like i have in the last year and a half that you really start to appreciate and become conscious of how foundational health is to everything including your consciousness including your consciousness that's the twisted paradox of consciousness is that on the one hand consciousness transcends the body on the other hand your consciousness is so limited by what is going on in your body if i give you a glass of mercury to drink and you drink that mercury your consciousness is going down the [ __ ] you are not going to be this this blissful happy uh super woke above it all person no your conscious will crash back down into a condensed state as that mercury leeches through your body and into your brain and disrupts the functioning of your neurotransmitters and neurons and all of that that it'll happen and all of that despite the fact that your brain is imaginary there's no contradiction because it's all consciousness so taking care of your brain health and your body health is very important and even your gut health you might think well the gut has nothing to do with consciousness oh yeah try going through what i went through in the last year and a half with my gut when you get some nasty bacteria in there and then every time you eat food that nasty bacteria releases toxins into your bloodstream through your gut and it feels like a anti-psychedelic psychedelic raises your consciousness you can feel it you know you take a tap of lsd and then 15 20 minutes later you can notice your consciousness is just elevating and it's beautiful well when you have a gut bacteria and then you eat some food it has exactly the opposite effect you take it and then you just notice rather than your consciousness rising you notice your thoughts start to get scrambled and chaotic and you get washed over with this wave of chemicals that are just like they feel toxic and you get brain fog and you can't concentrate and you can't meditate you can't do anything you can barely think straight and you're in pain that's what i went through for the last year on many days it was very humbling and very challenging so in general what i want you to understand is that this work is a lot more complex than you ever imagined and i feel like that's one of the hallmarks of what i teach is i teach the complexity of this work a lot of other teachers oversimplify this work now there's pros and cons to that of course there are negatives to to making everything too complex um but the reality is that life is infinitely complex survival is infinitely complex even spirituality is ridiculously more complex than you ever imagined if you truly start exploring it all of its different facets and so it's easy to get lost in that complexity that complexity is what allows your mind to fool itself because you think you got something figured out but actually later you realize you didn't you might think it's a good idea to jump off a bridge because it'll bring you closer to god but maybe that's not the right way to get closer to god so anyway going forward in the future i will be putting more disclaimers and warnings into my videos i haven't yet decided on what format that's going to take it might be right at the front of the video maybe towards the end of the video i don't know um i also have to think about putting it into the audios because people don't watch they listen you see so there's a lot of complexity here i'm we're definitely we're going through and we're changing all the disclaimers in the text boxes for the videos to make them more robust um we've already been doing that for for the last few weeks um and we're gonna kind of go back and and retool some of the old videos for that purpose um unfortunately youtube doesn't allow me to change my old videos if they did i would have changed a lot of stuff already a long time ago but they don't like allow me to insert slides or anything into into videos all i can do is just edit like the text descriptions um so there will be some of that coming forward in the future you can look forward to that but also i i will simply just be talking more about various traps and dangers and stressing them more like i said and pointing out where the advanced stuff is and where you can get go go wrong and maybe potentially harm yourself but also i want to say another thing here which i haven't touched upon yet which is that like i said very powerful and truthful teachings and wisdom has been demonized throughout all of human history and so one of the greatest things that concerns me here with this incident is that as tragic as the incident is there's also the consideration of the actualize our brand and i'm concerned that people will take this incident and twist it into some sort of weapon to discredit the brand and the teachings there are a lot of people out there who would love to do that because that's historically what is done with powerful and truthful teachings is that the ego mind the collective mind will look for any excuse they could find to to demonize it discredit it or weaponize something against it which is why it's very important to put it into proper context and so i've laid out a lot of that context here today so that anyone who's reasonable and objective can can weigh and understand the um the full complexity of the situation that we're dealing with here for example i know saad guru faced some [ __ ] when his wife committed mahasamadhi at least that's what he says his wife had a child she was a yogi she was in her early 30s good health and then just poof mahasamadi there were reports in the newspaper that assad guru killed his wife there are websites right now online you can go and type into google saad guru killed his wife and you'll find websites you'll find something like saadgurukilthiswife.com which will post news clippings and theories about how he killed her and how he lied and manipulated and this sort of stuff so um this is the kind of thing that i find very distasteful and that i am defensive about because it happens there are people out there who will smear in this way uh and a lot of times they just it's simply because they don't understand right so the things that i teach like try to imagine this from the point of view of somebody who's sort of like a normie who's a materialist who is an atheist who is a rationalist or whatever and uh they hate all this stuff and all these ideas are sort of an affront to their entire world view and they have no interest in any kind of spiritual stuff and they have no interesting kind of nuance about it in their mind they just know that all this stuff is just pure [ __ ] that some cult leader is spinning to earn money from gullible fools that's how they see me that's their view of reality that's how they see actualize.org and they're not conscious of that they don't really understand what they're doing or how their own mind is playing this trick on them they don't understand projection they don't understand self-deception they don't understand the limits of materialism they haven't had profound mystical experiences they don't believe they're even possible they just think that love and god is just some new age mumbo jumbo [ __ ] and this is all just about money and so of course when they see me and this work in that way then they can't help themselves but to go into some sort of attack mode and look for any kind of sort of gotcha and so uh that's that's virtually inevitable by the way with with most teachings spiritual teachings uh there was a you know there's actually um well everybody knows the story of christ um nailed to the cross but uh there was a there's also a similar story with the buddha where like there's a story in buddhism that that goes you know after the buddha became awakened and he was teaching people and he had like a little cult following going there of his loyal disciples there was like one one of his students or villagers or disciples i don't know who it was who was disgruntled with the buddha and you know thought that what the buddha was teaching was like all [ __ ] and stuff and then um and then the story goes he he unleashed there's like an elephant that was tied up there in the village he untied this elephant and unleashed it and kind of you know goaded the elephant onto the buddha to like run towards the buddha and trample him as the buddha was walking down the path um and then the elephant ran towards the buddha and the buddha just like put up his hand and the elephant eventually um stopped and bowed before him so um the only reason i bring that up not to compare myself to the buddha but just to say that um there's a there's always a tendency to suppress truth and to manipulate it to distort it to corrupt it to demonize it to outlaw it to discredit it because the job of the ego mind the job of the devil is to muddy the waters so much that ordinary people around him cannot distinguish truth from falsehood anymore in all the mud and they just equate truth and falsehood they throw their hands up and they say well it's just all a wash who really knows we don't really know what's true so let's follow this guy who happens to be the devil and then they follow the devil and he leads them off a cliff there are many ways to lead people off a cliff not just physically but there are much worse ways war capitalistic exploitation genocide ideological battles back and forth partisanship that lasts forever and leads to endless gridlock riots and protests and insurrections so what's to be done about all this is there a a solution there's no algorithmic solution to the truth falsehood problem the only way to distinguish truth from falsehood is through careful conscious investigation through personal experimentation through direct experience there's no algorithm for it it takes intelligence and there's no algorithm for safety either people often look for an algorithm for safety they say like well the ten commandments are like the algorithm for safety just stick with the ten commandments you'll be safe oh really will you be safe or will that lead to a genocide or a holy war you're not safe following some ten commandments because reality is far too complex for that and the dangers are far too complex for that see there's no commandment that says don't jump off a bridge so if you're foolish you might say well i follow the ten commandments there's no commandment telling me not to jump off a bridge so i guess it's okay by god's standards i guess i'm going to heaven you see there's no amount of rules you can invent no amount of algorithms that will prevent ignorant people from doing ignorant things the only way to cure ignorance is to cure ignorance and to do that you need consciousness which is what i'm trying to teach but for you to learn consciousness you can't just hang on my every word and trust what i say you have to do consciousness you have to be consciousness you have to be intelligent intelligent comes intelligence comes from being conscious and being conscious comes from studying your own mind and doing these practices carefully and only in this way by cultivating consciousness and intelligence will you then be able to avoid all the many land mines and traps that are out there for you in the spiritual and even in the material landscape there are plenty of material traps that people fall into all the time and the way you avoid those is by com by building up your consciousness and being more intelligent about how you go about things being more responsible and one of the things that i learned by doing this work and by going through these uh situations and uh scandals and so forth is that i'm also learning like how to be a leader as well so one thing i'm realizing is that it's it's it's quite challenging to be a leader there are many things as a leader like that i don't want to do or don't care about but then they're kind of thrust upon me that i have to start to care about otherwise i'm not being a good leader and then people don't want to follow so what this incident is teaching me is how to lead more responsibly more carefully and so you're going to see better leadership for me in the future as a result of this and honestly i'm still processing and deciding what this means and how i should change if anything about what i do and how i teach but what i definitely know is that the teachings are important and so i'm going to continue doing my teachings as i always have because i believe in this work and you know some people don't believe in this work and aren't interested in this work or or don't like the way in which i teach this work in which case i recommend you don't waste time don't waste your time you don't need to waste time hate watching me um just go go develop yourself in whatever way you want that works for you if it's a non-spiritual way do that if you want to do purely materialistic self-improvement go do that if that's what you think is the best thing go do that don't waste your time with me or if you want some other approach to spirituality go do that don't waste your time with me or you know explore many perspectives as i've always recommended from the from the very beginning um and then cross-reference everything and then find out your own system in the end basically what i teach is hopefully what you get from me is how to sort of build your own system not my system but build your own system based on principles that i teach you the principles are very broad once you learn the principles then you can apply them in in a way that that tailors and fits to to the way that you want to do this work and this work is just sort of honoring your life and building out a great life and that includes both personal development and spiritual development both of those are about building out a great life just in different ways there are different aspects to life that need to be built out material and and spiritual both the material is spiritual it's just a lower level of spiritual it's important if you're young and i've said this before but i'll say it again that you develop some survival foundation in your life you need some mastery of survival before you go hog wild into spirituality so work on the basics make sure you have that handled make sure you have a good common sense i remember that uh i read a story about yogananda and his guru sree yukteshwar and they were discussing like you know under what conditions does does the guru take an apprentice and the conditions that were pretty strict the conditions were that yuktaswar's sort of conditions were that he would ask basic questions of of his you know disciple prospective disciple before they sort of locked in the relationship he would ask him like well what are your grades like in school how are you with your friends and your family are you fulfilling your family obligations are you able to do that um uh are you able to support yourself to feed yourself to cook food to clean laundry do these basic things or do you struggle with these things and if you said you struggled with any of these things then he wouldn't take you on because you're not ready because how can you do that stuff when you can't handle the that's the basic stuff of course the challenge with our communications here virtually through youtube or whatever through the internet is that this is not a guru disciple relationship i'm not your guru and it's really important that you understand what i am because people get this very wrong about what i am what function i serve i am literally a guy on youtube who is sharing his philosophical insights about life that's all that i am and you should treat me as such i don't know you personally i can't read your mind i don't know what's going on with you in your life and each one of you of the thousands and millions of you out there have your own stuff going on some of it very weird that i can't even relate to that's not even within my my general ballpark of what i know and understand about life some of you got very weird lives and that's fine weird is not bad per se it could be great um but in the end all i'm doing here is i'm sharing ideas with you ideas can be very powerful a single idea can change your life but a single idea taken the wrong way can also destroy your life so you if you continue to listen you have to be very careful about how you make sense of these ideas how you apply these ideas and in the end i don't know how you're going to apply them and what kind of twisted way you're going to imagine something's going to happen in your life i don't know remember that truth absolute truth is not prescriptive in any way that means whatever i say the absolute truth is or whatever you discover the absolute truth to be it doesn't mean anything likewise with love when you discover absolute love infinite love god's love you might fall into the trap of thinking that it means something it means you should do something in the material survival world it means you should hug your kids more it means you should have more sex it means you should get a divorce it means you should get married it means you should have sex with your mother i don't know what you think it'll mean but whatever you think it means it doesn't mean that why doesn't it mean that because everything is love so when you say oh i'm gonna do this because it's love well what you're not realizing is that the opposite of doing that is also love so when you say i'm going to hug my kids that's love okay but if you don't hug your kids that's also love and if you hate your kids that's also love everything is love that's infinite love absolute love it's very radical what this means is that the ego your little ego cannot control or manipulate or use or justify with this love anything that it wants to do so take ownership of that rather than concocting these elaborate justifications for like oh i did this today i went to the grocery store because of love and i did this to my kids because of love you didn't do that because of love you do that because you're selfish and you're surviving that's why you did those things and then you and you invented some stories about love to make yourself feel nicer and sweeter to you to your own self truth and love make you free they don't constrain you to a limited set of options you have to use intelligence and consciousness to figure out very skillfully in a very nuanced way what would be the most loving expression of your love in any particular situation and you could always be wrong about that you might think that oh this is going to be the best expression of love and then you realize i tricked myself that was actually selfishness masquerading as love you see that's self-deception inaction and i'm not immune to it don't assume you're immune to it don't assume your favorite guru is immune to it or above it they aren't this is the whole challenge of life you never solve this problem permanently this is something you're constantly juggling and balancing like on a surfboard you got to be dynamically balancing as you're on the wave and that wave is your life and as soon as you become too rigid on that board and you decide that well i'm just gonna i'm just gonna shift my weight to the right and just keep it there forever because i got it figured out now that's when you're going to screw up and wipe out you

Well the whole problem is you are a blend of everything. Just because you act blue in one regard today doesn't mean you are Absolutely blue. You may have become a mystic which is part of what Turquoise is as I understand it. So if he has awakened he now has a foot in turquoise. But the model bases what you are by the level of your mind's development. The issue is you may act a certain way even though your mind may know better or is more developed. In other words you are not demonstrating tier 2 qualities even though you know what tier 2 should do. Does this make you tier 1? Maybe. But whose to say tier 2 needs to act like tier 2? You see The model starts to break down because it deals in Absolutes when the world of form is 100 percent relative. There are no Absolutes. So when you see this SD crumbles.

The "I" experienced separateness. You haven't awakened to the realization that you are the cosmos yet, it is still speculative... You could ask ChatGPT to roleplay a philosopher and challenge you to why that is.. there are some mental tangles you have untangled yet

I dont get on here much. I was inspired many moons ago in 2007 when I read a comment "If you dont know RSD, you dont know shit" Anyone who is anyone has probably came from Eben Well I found Real Social Dynamics underground cult like a fightclub where I went virgin to dozens of women I had met and seduced. I got into personal development learning more authenticity, natural game - and found philosophy and Tolle. Wilber fucked me up, and I always felt like his ideas represented the pinnacle of human knowledge -- really, I feel like Leo has carried on the torch of the previous era like none have, with such an amazing breadth and depth of knowledge here. The guys who inspired Leo Gura started the era of self-development information-explosion that people are now born into. Are you able to see that we stand on the shoulder's of giants, and there is a giant call for visionary leaders and holistic-thinkers to wake people up to become at least critical-thinking, and hopefully empathic and systems-thinking? BUT IF WE ARE REALLY TALKING - HOW COME EVERYBODY IS STILL SLEEPING?? I believe truth is transcendence, and we must radically inspire a new era of self-transforming human beings. The Future Era Is Now Seriously, what is everybody doing like ChatGPT Mastermind? Self-Transformation Mastermind? How are we organizing? How do we change the world? Is anyone interested - I'm working on a book/course The Integrative Pathway: Unlocking Human Potential Through Holistic Transformation - working on making it holistic at every level. Created a 26 Aspects of Human Potential framework... still doing a lot of research, have many practices id like to check out. Lets maximize our evolutionary potential Leo told me I had not awakened before. I dont believe we can't co-create some ultimate guides to human transformation and be the seeds of a new level of human emergence. Welcome to a different perspective.