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I know the question is very open ended. I'm not asking how you would change the specifics of your country's legal code. I'm asking how to improve people's sense of justice. How to improve forgiveness. How to reduce the tendency to hold grudges. How to change society from a rigid organization aimed at tyrannical efficiency, to an adaptable one that is based on improving people's lives and alleviating their actual grievances, rather than exacting impersonal revenge. Here's an example. One could reduce the number of superfluous laws by mandating a review for every law after every 5 years. If laws are not passed after this period, they would be automatically rejected. Another example, and this is hardly an novel idea. You can alter prisons in such a way, that when a person is released after having server their term, their overall livelihood would be improved. For example by teaching them practical skills, and turning their prison terms into paid but mandatory jobs.

If it is neuronal death, it's dead and irreversible. For example with spinal cord injuries or exposure to highly neurotoxic chemicals like methamphetamine. Neuronal damage can take many forms. The healing potential depends on the type of damage. For example, a neuron can suffer loss of neurites - these are neuronal extensions that communicate with other neurons. As well, there can be loss of neural plasticity - this is the ability of neural networks to rewire to allow learning and new perspectives. Neurotrophic factors stimulate the formation of new neurites and increase neuronal plasticity, yet we haven't developed effective ones that can cross the blood-brain barrier. Recently psychedelics have been shown to act a neurotrophic factors in cell culture and in mice. They are part of a new class of molecules referred to as psychoplastogens. . . As well, meditation has been shown to increase grey matter. For example, in a region of the brain associated with empathy. Even people that had never meditated in there life showed increased grey matter after eight weeks of a meditation program. This grey matter increase represents formation of neurite extensions and is reflective of enhanced abilities. For example, the new meditators showing increased grey matter would be correlated with an increased ability of empathy. Regarding the creation of new neuronal cells. . . Differentiated neuronal cells have exited the cell cycle and no longer divide. There are a very small number of adult neural stem cells that have the capacity to re-enter the cell cycle and create new neurons. Yet, we currently do not understand this mechanism. There has not been a lot of research regarding the effect of releasing emotional blockages on neural health. I think this is a wonderful area of research to explore. I believe this is an unexplored region for two reasons: First, releasing emotional blockages is still within the areas of psychological therapy, meditation, yoga, reiki etc. Neuroscience is still contracted within a reductionist and materialist paradigm. They are expanding, yet it is slow. Second, I believe science has become more and more influenced by corporations and capitalism. Most research funding is dominated by utility. What scientific gadget can we create and profit off of? What profitable new drugs can we develop? Even nonprofit academic research institutions are restrained by this. Studies involving the neuroscience of meditation, emotional blockage release, reiki etc. just aren't profitable and aren't funded. Hopefully as the collective consciousness increases, so will this type of funding. In particular from highly conscious wealthy donors. This would depend on our definition of "trauma" and "real". I am using the term trauma in a holistic perspective that includes both the immaterial energetic systems and material systems. To see if we are using the term "real" in the same context. . . Imagine a person is being chased by an aggressive dog. The person's mind is hyper alert. There body is breathing heavily and filled with hormones creating stress. Would you consider that heavy breathing and that hormonal stress response the body is experiencing as being "real". I do. And if we agree that it is real, then I see no way that one can conclude that traumatic experiences have real effects that can persist for years. I think we may be using different usages of the term trauma. If you could explain how you are using the term trauma it would help me. I am using the term to include both the immaterial, such as energetic systems (chakras, energetic blocks, meridians, intuition etc) as well as material biological systems (neurotransmitters, hormones etc). Together, they would yield mind-body sensations referred to as anxiety, panic, stress and terror. I think an integration of both immaterial and material is necessary for a holistic view of trauma and removing one would yield an incomplete perspective at the human mind-body level. I don't see "enlightenment" as a thing and I don't see a "you" in enlightenment. I don't see a path to "enlightenment" because there is no place for a path to lead to. The One Everything/Nothing does not have any separation. I see psychedelics as a powerful tool to expand one's consciousness. Imagine going from the conscious level of a mouse to that of a human. Psychedelics can greatly expand human consciousness beyond the ordinary state. Psychedelics can also produce whacky nonsense and I don't think they are effective for a mind-body until that mind-body has reached a certain conscious level. In particular, I think the mind-body needs to develop a grounded "observer + object" stage. If not, the psychedelic trip is often recontextualized in a way that is counter-productive to consciousness expansion. I would consider both sober experiences and psychedelic experiences to be enlightenment, since there is no escape from enlightenment. I think trying to manipulate with pills is a contracted view that is counter-productive. It is trying to isolate one component of an integrated system and manipulate that component. This is a highly limited view that does not consider the holistic view, including the energetic systems I mentioned above. If I was to develop research and treatment plans, I would only place about 5% of my resources in pill development and usage - and this would only be temporary to help allow more holistic healing. 95% of my focus would be outside of pills and medication. There are much richer and more productive areas to explore. Neuroscience is associated with pills and medications, yet it is beyond that. The strength of neuroscience is observation of the physical realm and how the nonphysical impacts the physical. For example, FMRIs and EEG brain scans can help us develop treatment plans for a person. A person could consider both their subjective experience of meditation, yoga, reiki etc. with brain scans revealing physical activity. I think a major deterrent in progress is separation. I see so many divided camps. There are the neuroscientists, reiki masters, yogis, exercise enthusiasts, psychologists etc that are all in their own camps defending their own views. It is all inter-related. It is holistic. Imagine a Reiki master of energetic systems that is also a neuroscience master. She does Reiki and uses real time feedback of intuition, empathy, energetic sensations and EEG feedback. Or a healer that integrates psychotherapy, Reiki, yoga, mediation and brain scans. Whatever tool is appropriate, or a combination of tools. I think it's a deterrent to categorize things as this and that and insist that my tool is better than yours. It's like a carpenter that will only use a hammer and is anti-screwdriver. Its absurd. There is awareness that my mind-body is being chased by an aggressive dog. There is awareness that the mind-body is running. There is awareness that the mind-body is experiencing stress and panic. Awareness does not remove the sensations of what is occurring in the mind-body. The mind-body is still running and experiencing stress and terror. Quite often, higher level awareness can help relax the mind-body and help dissolve anxiety, yet not necessarily. At a trans-personal level, there is an unconditional peace and stillness in that higher-order awareness. Yet that is independent of the mind-body sensations. The mind-body could be experiencing relaxation, joy or terror and that higher-order stillness is present. Yet, that is not what I am referring to as trauma. I am using the term trauma in both a metaphysical and mind-body context. There is a still presence even if the body is undergoing trauma. One could make a distinction here and say from a trans-personal level that the suffering of trauma is not real, yet the mind-body pain of trauma is real. Again, we are using relative terms. Sure, if we remove distinctions then joy and trauma is transcended. And so is love, anger, frustration - whatever. To me, that is a different conversation above the human level. An interesting one yet different. It seems here we are talking at the human level of consciousness of experience. I would say acute trauma is an integrated experience of thought, feelings and energetics. I don't think one can reduce it to thought. I knew an 8 yr. old boy that was forced to watch his mother being brutally stabbed to death by his father. At the human level, that experience had widespread effects on that child - including memories and thoughts. Yet, not limited to that. His whole limbic system and HPA system was altered. His energetic systems of intuition and empathy were altered. I could feel it just being around him. Even if he wasn't thinking about memories of the event. You could remove the thoughts and memories and there would still be after effects. I don't see it in these dualistic terms. I don't think one can separate a within and a without. They are an integrated whole. I think higher-order awareness is very helpful for the mind-body, yet the stillness of higher-order awareness does not necessarily relieve the mind-body of the experience. If a mind-body was being beaten, would trans-personal awareness remove the pain of the mind-body? This is at the human level. At a trans-human level there is a still presence that transcends the mind-body experience yet does not eliminate the mind-body experience. This awareness can be help alleviate symptoms of the mind-body, yet not necessarily. One mentality I see over and over is that there is some thing called "enlightenment" that will remove one's ills. Panic, depression etc. The One Everything/Nothing includes everything. The idea that there is a thing called enlightenment that will relieve one's experience of pain is highly dualistic and at the level of the personality. The trans-human level includes the human mind-body and beyond. It doesn't care about the wants and needs of the self. That energetic motivation is at the level of the self. At the trans-human level of consciousness it doesn't matter if the mind-body is experiencing joy, pain, love, terror or whatever. It is an unconditional freedom. When you say you overcame OCD, that is at the human level. When you say "OCD" I am assuming you are referring to mental and physical symptoms commonly called "OCD". The physiological symptoms of OCD dissolved. Yet that has nothing to do with the trans-human level of consciousness. With that said, I think it is very important to have a healthy mind-body at the human level - that includes the dissolution of sensations such as OCD, depression, panic etc. The trans-personal level of awareness can help immensely with alleviating the symptoms of various neurosis. Yet I would not agree to the statement that neuroses are not real at the human level. This level is highly subjective. Right now, my mind-body is experiencing neck and shoulder pain. There is a higher-order awareness of this pain that is detached from the pain and does not identify with the pain. Yet, the pain is still present. From your perspective, are you saying the pain in my shoulder's and neck is not real? I think awareness can help relieve blockages and many neuroses, yet there are also structural problems. Awareness of leg paralysis won’t do much to restore leg functionality. Thank you. My mind is highly in tune with psychological dynamics and likes to deconstruct psychological dynamics. I try to do it in an impersonal way. Yet, it can often come across as overly-assertive and personal. It is not my intention, yet often the impact. It is something I am working on to be a more effective communicator. I appreciate your openness. Your English is excellent as a second language. These types of conversations can be highly abstract and nuanced. They are at an a very advanced language level. I speak Spanish at an upper intermediate level and there is no way I could come close to having this type of conversation in Spanish. Your ideas regarding trauma has led me to contemplate this and gain some greater clarity. For that, I thank you.

Yes, I understand there is a personality dynamic that believes it is simply speaking from personal direct experience. Yet there is an extrapolation of personal direct experience into broader truths that apply to others. This is a conflation of the relative with the universal. Once this was revealed in the thread, there was a shift in tone and an expansion of consciousness. The comments offered here are impersonal. They are not directed at you personally. They are observations of what appears to me as a common contracted mind dynamic that when deconstructed can lead to consciousness expansion. No it wasn't at all. The below statements are broad statements of application that extend beyond one's personal direct experience onto others. These statements are not limited to a personal experience. They are universal statements. They literally describe what trauma means for other people. Observe how a personal direct experience is extrapolated to apply to others. I am revealing that that is a very limited and contracted view. The exact opposite of your relative direct experience may occur in someone else's direct experience. Or hundreds of different forms than that of your own. Lack of awareness and acceptance of this relativity will restrain a mind within one limited perspective. In terms of spiral dynamics this is an absolute key in evolving from the Orange level to the Yellow level. Trauma is highly complex in relative terms and there is no objective statements of trauma that can be universally applied. As described above, severe trauma effects the individual and collective in various ways. For one person, trauma may end after the event and recovery may simply be letting go of memories. For another, trauma may have widespread effects. Memory may be just one piece of the puzzle. Multiple physical and nonphysical systems may be effected and the traumatic effects may persist for years. The person may be re-traumatized repeatedly. Traumatic effects can even be passed on to children. . . I am intentionally using terms like "may be" and "can be" to reinforce that this is not always the case. What may be good advice for one person may be horrible advice for another person. In the big picture, both research and direct experience matter. Their integration forms a more holistic perspective.

I'd be cautious with this idea. I think it has different meaning on two different levels, depending on the interpretation of "you". On the human level, the "you" implies a personal chooser, which can add pressure into the personality construct. That is, if I am creating all my fears and anxieties, then I have to make better choices and stop creating these fears and anxieties. This may provide a temporarily sense of personal empowerment and may be useful for personal development. Or, it could intensify fear and anxiety. I also think it would tend to restrain consciousness within the personality. As well, it can veer off into victim blaming. "It's all in your head. You are creating all your fear and anxiety". This can be counter-productive - for example someone who has been abused. I know that is not the intention of the statement, yet I can see how it might have a negative impact with those suffering at more immature stages of development. On the physical level. . . Mind-bodies that undergo childhood neglect and abuse have epigenetic alterations in the brain that change gene expression. For example, there is a gene that inhibits production of the stress hormone cortisol. Children that have undergone neglect and/or abuse often turn this gene off. As a consequence, stress cortisol levels are high. This is helpful in the moment as it can help the child deal with the situation. Yet this effect is seen for years, even decades - so that the person has chronically high cortisol levels (promoting anxiety) throughout their life. So from this perspective, I don't think it would be fair to say "You create your anxieties in the conceptual domain". These individuals have chronically high stress hormone levels throughout the day - regardless of whether they are conceptualizing or not. At a physical level one would need to epigenetically reformat their chromosomal and genetic structure. Science has not figured out how to do that yet and metaphyscially I think a mind-body would need to be at a very high conscious level to have that type of ability. This starts to get into Deepak Chopra heal thyself areas. On a post-personal level, I think it has a very different meaning. At this level, there is awareness of the personality,. There is detachment and disidentification with the personality and personal deconstruction has begun. Statements such as these are now impersonal. This gets into areas of healing oneself, e.g. Deepak Chopra realms. This is an area I've been exploring within my mind-body and I think there is enormous potential in this area of higher-order healing.

This is all within the personal level. What is being pointed to is at a post-personal level. The “you” and “me” has no relevance in this domain. There are appearances of thoughts and ideas, yet nothing to take ownership of anything as “mine” or “yours”. It is impersonal.

What is God? Part 2... FAQ -Are you saying that I Am part of God or that I Am God? You are God and part of God, it depends what you define “You” as in that sentence. If you think of yourself as a biological creature that was born, the ego mind, that you, is part of God, the deeper you, the one you will discover through practice, that thing is fully God. When you are fully awake, you realize that you are the whole of God. That’s radical statement that exoteric, orthodox, religious teachings do not tell you, but it is the case. When you first realize God, you might experience that you are a part of God but not yet realize that you are the whole of God, that requires doing more work. -If I Am God, why Am I not experiencing it or feeling it? God is a trickster in his very nature, because trickery or illusions is the substance of reality. Reality is possible when you imagine that it’s possible and you believe in it in a sense, you have to trick yourself to experience reality in the solid physical way the way you do. In fact you are experiencing God right now. When you are born as a human being, you mistake God for this physical reality that you are in right now because of the sense of self, the ego that helps you to survive. You are in God all the time but you are not realizing because it is not important for your survival. The substance out of which everything is made is completely irrelevant to you in your everyday life, which is why you ignore it. There is nothing but God, you are not just conscious enough to realize this. -Why is God hiding from us? Why is God so tricky? For you to be born, you need to be born as a lie, as a deception. God is a shapeshifter, it is formless, pure potentiality and can materialize in all forms, it’s an infinite chameleon. The nature the Godhead is pure formlessness, pure potentiality. God is a shapeshifter, it’s difficult to spot because you confuse the form for a physical object. There is actually no difference between illusion and reality, this is how God creates, this is the very mechanism of the creation of anything. Appearance is reality, illusions is all you can have. What we call our physical world is constant never-ending process of forms emerging out of formlessness, like every word Leo is saying. The nature of creation must be tricky. -Why is God invisible? Isn’t that convenient? When you go to rock bottom to what is true, you have to accept what you find. It is actually highly inconvenient that God is invisible, because it makes it challenging but still possible to find it. You believe you are an observer inside the body… What is that observer? Isn’t it some invisible being…? Which of course is God… -Is God falsifiable? Is the Truth falsifiable? God is prior to science and the notion of falsifiability. Theories are falsifiable but God is not a theory, it is pure Truth. God is verifiable, not falsifiable. You can verify what Leo is saying. Falsehood doesn’t exit, only delusions exists. -Can you give me proof of God’s existence? No, it’s a personal journey that you go on, you have to cut through the illusions of social conditioning. It’s called Truth seeking, the spiritual quest, the “Hero’s Journey”. Don’t expect anybody to deliver it to you. God has the power to fully deceive itself and also the power to awaken. -Don’t you exploit the gaps of science? Science works to demystify reality, it succeeds to some extend, but it will never fully succeed because reality is infinite. In fact the more it tries, the more deluded it becomes. Take an apple cut in in half, you get more surfaces, cut in half, you get more surfaces and so on. There are always surfaces, but no substance to anything within reality. The substance of reality is nothing, the gap, the emptiness between the surfaces that unifies all the surfaces into a Oneness. -What do you mean with God is nothing? A nothing that exists and you can become conscious of it. An atheist and materialist have fully bite in to the illusion of physical reality, but also they also don’t recognize that reality is subjective and relative. There is no objectivity. Reality is however you hold it. There are no human beings, human being is the Universe being sentient of itself, God consciousness that you’ve confused for human beings, your parents, your friends are just figments of your imagination. Leo explains he had the traumatic insight that his parents never existed. Reality is alive, sentient and a-mechanical. The sentience, the aliveness that you feel, that is not yours, that’s the universe being alive and you are just a piece of that. That’s a big reframing of how you see reality. Reality is one spontaneous occurrence, therefor you can’t explain it through any mechanical process, it’s instant and direct. Atheists are also missing the importance of love, not recognizing that Being is Love. The physical substance of existence is made of love. Atheists don’t recognize oneness, they think of the world as being fragmented. But you are not really interfacing with the universe through perceptions, you are the universe. Atheists don’t recognize space/time, matter/energy, cause & effect, birth & death as illusions. You might say yes you know that time is relative and so on, but you are not conscious of that… they are all concepts. Atheists don’t recognize higher states of consciousness, and believe that everything can be understood from their currant state of consciousness. If you’d change that state of consciousness just a little bit, all your doubts, fears and concern would change! Science is completely contingent on your courant state of consciousness. Atheists don’t recognize that consciousness is not a by-product of the brain. Atheist don’t recognize science as limited. To understand God you got to use other methods. Can you prove that science can resolve every question? Atheists don’t recognize the existence of paranormal phenomena, at higher states of consciousness you can access various paranormal phenomena. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he as God has created himself. The atheist doesn’t recognize that all dualities and all knowledge he uses to understand the world is manmade or conceptual. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he is God. The atheist doesn’t see that reality has no limits. Outside the physical universe is infinity where anything is possible. -Can God be an hallucination or an illusion? You can trick yourself that you are conscious of God, but when you are conscious of God, that is unmistakable, you become conscious of God through no intermediary, not through language, symbols, perceptions, not even through experience. It’s direct. -Can God be a brain state?If you can experience God by taking 5MEO-DMT, doesn’t it prove that God is just a chemical? No, everything is consciousness, the 5MEO-DMT that you take is consciousness, consciousness interacting with consciousness. When you take 5MEO-DMT, you forget you ever had a brain and the existence of the universe, you realize that it is not brain state, not a chemical, not a neurotransmitter, it is God. God is absolute Truth, there is nothing like it and you whole reality collapses when you realize that. -How can you trust that psychedelics reveals anything true at all? This can’t be explained to you unless you take psychedelics in a sufficient dose that you have a breakthrough experience. You will say “oh that’s impossible!”, you got to stop trusting your mind of what is and what’s not possible. You cannot know what is outside the matrix when you are inside the matrix. -How can you be sure that you’ve been outside the matrix? To exit the matrix is to realize that there is matrix inside of another matrix inside of another matrix to infinity. To realize God is to realize that there is nothing but matrix within matrix. What you’re living right now is just hallucination and psychedelics show you that there is no other possibilities than hallucinations, a meta-truth. -Could there be something beyond God? Could God be part of a computer simulation? You are treating God a s a phenomenon, like seeing some alien. You can replace the word God with “everything” or “totality”, those terms are expendables and goes beyond itself forever, it’s the process of “beyonding” forever by definition. If you imagine something more is possible, you haven’t understand the notion of totality. A computer simulation is a very finite thing. They occur within God but God doesn’t occur within a computer simulation. -How do you know that the infinity you are talking about wasn’t generated by something else? God can only interact with itself. God has to limit itself for not being conscious of everything all the time. How do you play a chess game alone? It’s like playing chess alone with the right hemisphere of the brain running the whites, and the left hemisphere running the blacks. God tricks himself with false separations and generate the possibility of surprise. -Can God create a rock that he himself cannot lift? The Godhead is infinite potential, it can limit itself in forms, forms have limitations. -Can God destroy himself? Destruction is a concept that make sense within the roam of forms, but you cannot destroy the vacuum of empty space. It can destroy himself as incarnated versions like you, or as a star, it’s the fate of all forms, formlessness itself is the only permanent thing. -How do you know that your experiences of God are not confirmation bias of some stuff that you’ve read? When you have these absolute Samadhi experiences, all your conceptual knowledge flies out the window, you are in truth of it and this is self-validating. You can read about all human beings being unreal, when you have the experience of it, you won’t want to accept it, it is the opposite of confirmation bias. Leo never wanted God to be true, he studied ancient texts -How can you be so that you are right? Shouldn’t we be more humble with our truth claims? False humility is no virtue… Leo is just being honest. Absolute Truth is the nature of absolute Truth, wether you are conscious of it or you are not. If you are not conscious of it, you can’t understand how absolute truth can be possible. It’s a certainty, it’s not like scientific knowledge, you need to experience it to find out. To make the claim that we don’t know what God is a big agnostic mistake, because you are actually saying: we can’t know. -Is it possible to have a false experience of God? If so, how can you be certain that you haven’t misunderstood God? Yes it is possible, to have a false experience, but when you have awaken, you know what awakening is, but even so, you can trick and delude yourself, self deception is still occurring after your firsts enlightenment experience, this is why Leo is always crosschecking with other mystics and texts, continuously studying himself, and even so, he never claimed to be infallible, he is still open for recontextualisation of any kind. But the actual experience of God is not a self-deception. Certain lower degrees experience can be self-deceptive. -If God is all loving, how come there is so much evil in the world? Why is there so much suffering? There is no such thing as evil, it is a projection of your ego mind. From your point of view, you are a limited biological creature and you need to survive. What you call evil is what is threatening to your survival as a limited formed being within this larger universe, you are vulnerable to having your form radically changed… death. You believe suffering exists, because it is a mechanism within you that helps you to avoid dangerous situations. Without suffering, you wouldn’t be alive. When God incarnated itself, it makes itself limited, it obligated itself to play the game of survival which necessitates pain and suffering. From God’s perspective the world is perfect. It’s like looking at a horror movie from the audience point of view or from the point of view of a character of the movie itself. The goal is to not feel too much sucked in the movie. You can’t believe that this actually applies to your life, and it is the most important thing that there is, death is the worst thing there is, suffering feels so bad, you confuse all the suffering and the pain for reality because you are egotistical and selfish, you had to be to experience the universe at all. You are God caught in a bind. As human beings we are addicted to excitement, violence, horror, sex, food, suffering and pain. Secretly you don’t want to give up your suffering to be happy, if you did, you’d be awake a long time ago. -If God is all loving and good, how come he doesn’t care if we are murders, rapists and so forth? It’s because it is so all loving that it doesn’t judge. You as an ego, because you care about survival and have something to lose from it, you judge murder, rape, criminality and war as bad and wrong. You created an identity of being moral, good and upright, viewing yourself as a defender against all the bad guys. But you are full of hatred, you hate murder, rape and war… God loves it all, which is why they exist. This love is too radical for you, you are not ready to embody this love because you have way too much to lose, you have life, your children, your money, your business,…, to defend. You are not ready to be all loving. For you to be all loving, you’d have to be dead, you’d have to be the Godhead, not this incarnation as a human being… or you’d have to be conscious. -If God is all loving, why is it not evenly hateful? Evil doesn’t really exit, it exits only from the ego mind’s point of view. In a sense, God is evil and hateful, but it is doing it through humanity. God loves evil and hate so much that it doesn’t mind living through it as a human being. God wants to know what it’s like to be murdered, getting raped, being a slave or in concentration camp and so on. Hate and evil is visible only from a limited point of view. Do you think God created everything except murder and rape? He created everything included all the stuff you consider evil. It’s only evil from your point of view. -Is there a devil? If so, did God create evil? The devil refers to the mechanism of survival, the ego, separation, illusion and falsehood, not a red man with horns. You are the devil, the thing that is going to die is the devil. God created that, not only created it, but God is the devil. We are talking about oneness, totality. You cannot separate ego or the devil from God. Stage blue people in spiral dynamics looses it right here saying that the devil and God are polar opposite… If the devil exist, then it is part of creation, who created everything? God. The devil is God in disguise. God will incarnated himself into devilish forms, create selfishness and through that, God experience what it’s like to be a devil. -Why is mainstream religion so confusing, diluted and inaccurate? Why don’t they explain it in a straight forward manner? Religion is very tricky and you have appreciate where it comes from. It’s problematic to evaluate old religions from a modern perspective. There was no notion of science back then. They didn’t share modern values. How do spread the idea of God with very tribal people that are not scientifically minded, who don’t know how to read, ethnocentric and racist and so on, you will use a lot metaphors and analogies. This stuff was passed down often times as stories, not even written down. The people who wrote it down and passed it down hundreds of years after Jesus’s death , were not even enlightened. Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed were maybe enlightened but they didn’t have video recorder or even write any books themselves. Back then, what is good and bad what advanced stuff, you didn’t even had countries. The ego corrupts all these teachings. Countries and states, rulers and kings used religions to enroll the masses, justify their own rule, make war and so on… The problem with God is that it is such a personal subjective realization that you can’t spread it through mass means. Some fanatics will only believe the teachings, not doing the teachings by himself, wait until you are dead and then create a cult, an ideology. -Why do all the religions disagree so much? How do you know you study the text properly? They all agree with each other, if you look and study the text properly. You need direct experience, mystical experiences. When you have those, it becomes easy to sort the wheat from the chaff and to see the commonalities. The attitude to try to integrate religions is only a 50 to 100 years old notion. When you don’t see religions holistically, than a lot of surface disagreements will seem as though they run all the way down to the bone, but they don’t. -Isn’t religion responsible for most of the war and evil throughout history? Yes, but technology, capitalism too. People are very tribal, selfish wether they know religion or not -Why use the word God and not “reality” for example? Everyone believe they know what reality is. Whatever word you use, there will be a lot of confusion around it, people will find ways to delude themselves about it. The ignorant mind can’t help to be ignorant. -Why do different religions have different visions of God? Reality is one giant mind that uses different kinds of symbols. Even scientific understanding that you might think is literal, is actually symbolic and metaphoric. Your mind needs to make sense of the formless in a formed way. So the christian will have his vision with a vision of Christ and vice versa with a moslem, a Hindu, and also as an equation for a scientist. Your understanding of God is going to be filtered through your culture. -Aren’t you stealing ideas from eastern religions? No, but the eastern teachings are less corrupt than the western teachings. No culture has a monopoly on God or the Truth. -Buddhism and hinduism are different. Buddhism doesn’t have a God! Buddhism has a God: The Ox, Buddha mind, Mu, nirvana, no-self, the Dharmakaya. The mistake many buddhist and Hindus makes is that they think there is a difference between the “buddhist no-self” and the “Hindu Self”, but they are degrees of awakening. For having consciousness of God you need to go beyond, not just being a self but to realize what is the ultimate self ,what is the nature of reality itself. You need to realize God as the formless but also as the form and unify the two together and that there are no distinctions. Buddhist have a God, but they don’t speak about it in the traditional sense. Buddhist don’t believe in a God per say, but they got practices that get them to the consciousness of your true nature, which is God or Mu, nirvana… -How can God be an experience? A more proper word than experience would be Being or direct consciousness. When you come into contact with the Godhead, nothingness you have to integrate it with the experience that you are having here, see that the pure Void is identical to the sensory feedback you have “down here”. You can recontextualize the experience you are having here to the point that it’s not an experience anymore, that will be absolute Truth. -Why do you cross-reference your sources if God is a direct experience? Because you can trick yourself and become a Zen-devil, which is pursuing Zen practices without reading the scriptures. -Why don’t you kill yourself and become God? There is a reason why God incarnated this life, you are here to experience this life. If you kill yourself, you are going to end up right back here, there is nowhere to go, God is constantly reincarnating himself, you will just have another form. While you are in this incarnation, do the most out of it, do the work to become enlightened. You don’t want to wait until your last breath to realize God and do spiritual practices unless you want to realize on that day what you have missed and be miserable with yourself and others. The point is to live a conscious life. -How can ego exist in the presence of God? God is all powerful and is able to present a situation where it forget itself, it has to awaken to itself. The God’s head incarnated itself into forms it can see the full ramification of what it is. God is becoming conscious of himself, not only as humans but also as animals and bacterias. -What is the point of talking about God? To realize that it’s a possibility, it transforms your life, opens the possibility to live with a true genuine joy, health and well being. To point you to technics to achieve that and point out the trickeries and traps. To inspire you to live it, not only to listen to the possibility. -Will science ever be able to understand God? The way science is defined today, no. It will have to open itself more to mysticism and non-symbolic methods of investigation like first person experience, scientists will have to take psychedelics. The bridge between mysticism and science as we do it today is already starting to happen today by a few pioneers. The line between science and mysticism is a line that the human mind is drawing, it’s not a hard line that exists in the world. -Can’t we give more time to science to answer all questions and realize that we don’t need mysticism at the end? No, it has to include mysticism. Modern science has serious limits, it only works through language, concepts and through the mind and there are aspects of reality which are true and are beyond the mind, that needs to be access through methods that are not equations or rulers and particles colliders and photographs. -Is it possible that science and spirituality work together in the future? Yes, to help to integrate the two together is Leo’s greatest contribution to mankind, laying the epistemic foundation to the reform of science. -If God is alone does it feel lonely or is God sufficient in itself? The Godhead doesn’t have any quality but when incarnated as form, God feels lonely! When you will be awake, you won’t feel lonely even if you are alone. -Why are some people very curious about God and others are not? People are born with different brain types and genetics and also went to different schools. Some people are more interested than others in metaphysical questions. Some people are born more spiritually gifted. Many spiritual advanced people might have been killed throughout the ages in favor of the kings, dictators and tyrants who wanted to rule the world. -By what mechanism does God create things? There is no mechanism, what you see is exactly the mechanism. The entire universe is spontaneously, a-mechanicaly existing, it’s just being. The mechanism only appears to you when are looking through it using the human mind, making sense of little pieces of it, breaking it apart and making it seems like there is a mechanism of cause and effect. The problem is, you are not conscious of it, it is literally one solid miracle. Scientists are pushing the experience down to the point where they can’t explain it anymore (with quarks or even equations being at the source of our experience) and say maybe we will know in a 1000 years what is beyond those. But it is so direct you can’t point to it, you can’t know or explain it, but you can become conscious of it, the pure manifestation of nothingness -Where did God come from? God always existed and will exist forever. The formless Godhead is eternal, but forms needs to be created, so you created your own body and mind. It’s a paradox, it’s both eternal and you created yourself. -Why did God create itself? Because it want to experience itself, it’s a never ending process of self creation and being. -Can God be an alien or artificial intelligence? No, God includes both. -Could God have evolved? No, but at the same time it is constantly evolving. -How do you reconcile God with darwinian evolution? Design and evolution are actually the same thing. When a human being designed buildings this is evolution too. All this happens in a larger context in the mind of God, all that is happening with intelligence and sentience, it didn’t happen through randomness and chaos. -If I created myself as God, why did I create this shitty life? You do have the option to change your life at anytime, feel free to exercise the option of spiritual development to grow yourself and awaken. Imaging what it was like in the roman days where 40% the roman population were slaves. God is in love with any situation you can imagine to be, it doesn’t judge, it lives through any possible scenario that a human can live through, you as God will live through all that, so depression, death, cheating, lying… That’s why the Buddha said that life is suffering, the only solution to that is to awaken. Awakening allows you to deal gracefully with any kind of shitty life. It’s so easy to loose your happiness in life because it is so conditional. -Is it possible to become conscious at all times, not only as peak experiences with 5MEO-DMT or only in some meditative state ? Yes, it is called Sahaja Samadhi, the ultimate state of Samadhi. -How come people realize God and than fall back into duality? The absolute Truth is such a huge thing that you are rarely going to get with one go, you will have to deconstruct your old way of building reality. he illusion is so powerful, it is almost hypnotic in how it sucks you back in, it requires a lot of work to overcome the temptation of going back to your previous state. -Why does it have to be so hard to realize God? Because of the survival drive, it is significant and responsible for everything in your life, it dominates your entire life. God is the undoing of the survival drive. God is the opposite of life, it is death from the ego’s point of view. Ego is also in your genes, forms of life without it must have been erased a long time ago. Changing the mind is a slow process, and it depends on how serious and committed you are. -Can you realize God while having a family? Yes, but don’t try to do it all at once. -How come God can be realize through visualization, shouldn’t it be an obstacle? One of the key to realizing God is concentration. Because the universe is a giant mind, what you imagine tends to become your reality, you can sort of materialize a vision of your deity and merge your sense of self into it and that can be how you realize God. Be careful with your deity like Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Krishna or anything else, as the biggest awakening is not going to have any form to it. -Am I too young as a teen to pursue God? No, if you like metaphysical questions, go for it. But you have take care of solving your survival too. -Can God be experienced at any stage of the spiral in spiral dynamics? Yes, how you experience it will be affected on where you are on the spiral. If you are at stage blue, you will have a very limited, ethnocentric, moralistic version of God. At stage orange you will have a very scientific version of God. The higher you are on the spiral level of development, the easier it will be for you to have mystical experiences and to interpret them properly. So it’s important you evolve to stage yellow or even turquoise. -Why does God needs to self-realize? It doesn’t. God’s whole point is just to be and exist. -Is God personal or impersonal? Both, we can think of the universe as filled with impersonal objects and atoms, but at the same time, as you as a human are part of it, you are the universe, so the universe has human qualities. You are the human quality of the universe. You have to integrate the personal and the impersonal together. It’s a very personal experience when you become really conscious of who you are as God and at the same, there is a sense of no-self. -Does God take an active role in manipulating our lives? The Godhead itself, no. But as everything is moving in and outside your body it is also manipulating our lives all the time. -Does God have an agenda, where is creation going? No, there is no point besides just being, but at the same, that evolutionary process from our human perspective that is unfolding, it seems like it evolves to greater complexity, greater self-awareness. God is getting more and more complex and might one day reach infinity. -Which is more true pantheism or panantheism? Pantheism says that everything, all of reality is God. Panantheism says all of reality is inside of God. Both are true, you might experience them separately but also simultaneously and overlapping each other. -How did mankind first learned about God? Back then, there wasn’t so much distraction so they could have been seating around a lot, meditating, but also through the use of psychedelics like mushrooms around the entire world. Herbalism and shamanism dates back from tens of thousands of years at least. And some people are naturally born spiritually gifted. -Why did God decide to take on my particular human form? God is taking all possible form simultaneously, one of which is particular human form. -Why did God create humans and animals? God is going to take on anything that it can. In comparison with a rock, humans and animals can experience what it’s like to be some sentient entity. Humans are a step above animals in their ability to interface with the universe. -How can the realization of God be used as a human perspective? The ego loves to ask this question, you can become famous and get a lot of sex, but you can also elevate the consciousness of mankind. You can teach, master your emotions, improve how you do science, become hyper-creative, become a better athlete, a better parent, improve your relationship and sex life. Consciousness improves everything do, even business, it can transform your business or your relationship. Awakening might end one relationship and form new ones that will be much healthier and conscious. -Does realizing God gives you special powers and abilities? Yes it can. Magical healing, clairvoyance, telepathic abilities, abilities to see auras and so on, but there is no guaranty. -Are miracles possibles? Everything is a miracle, this very moment right now is a miracle. But, yes paranormal stuff can happen, synchronicity can happen, we can’t know how much from the past is true, if Jesus walked on water for example, but healing can definitely happen. -Is everything in the Bible false? No, but there are racist, ethnocentric, closed minded and factually incorrect stuff. There is also good stuff like when Moses talks with God and he ask God: “Ok, I will go back to my people and tell them that I saw God but what shall I call you?” God answers: you can tell them that “I Am”, my name is “I Am”. Or when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is found within, that’s a good pointer, nirvana is found within. But there is a lot of misleading stuff in the Bible, so Leo doesn’t recommend it as a high quality spiritual text. There are much better modern books to teach you the practices and make you realize what the Bible is pointing to. -What is our duty towards God, shall we worship and pray to God? In the greater sense you have no duty, you just have to be. In another sense, your duty is to awaken, raising awareness of the entire cosmos, to participate in this evolutionary game that God is playing. The problem when you pray to or worship God, people are doing it under the presumption of a duality between God and themselves. So the thing you are praying to is exactly yourself. Worshiping and praying is a sort of masturbation. There is nothing to worship but yourself. -What does God want from us? Nothing, be whatever you want to be. But try to be as conscious as you can, try to appreciate your own magnificence as God, otherwise you are going to miss the beauty of life. It’s like going to theater to watch a great movie and not looking at the screen. You can just turn around and look at a beautiful movie. But if you want to sit backward, it’s fine too. -Will following my religion lead me to God, shall I abandoned my religion? Leo is allergic to ideologies, dogmas and fundamentalism, he recommends that you abandon your religion because it’s going to get in the way. It’s brainwashing, you can never lose the only truth that there is, which is God. You don’t need a religion. You don’t need a belief systems. -My religion, already says all you are talking about, aren’t you just rehashing the same stuff? Leo talks from a higher level, the books from the main religions are very ethnocentric, there are not truly holistic, religions try to be exclusive, it is also dogmatic, it is not empirically based and not integrated with modern science. You need to go beyond. We have modern psychological insights, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, anthropology, sociology, economics, linguistics, post-modernism, modern philosophy… there is so much stuff beyond what you learn in the Bible, the Koran, classical Buddhism or Vedanta. You have to adapt your spiritual practice to fit the modern world to deal with new technological complexities and realities. Holy books don’t talk about spiral dynamics, shadow work or psycho-pathologies that weren’t known back then. -What are the most important requirements for realizing God? 1)Lazer focus concentration abilities for hours on end 2)Radical open-mindedness 3)Genuinely metaphysically curiousity. -How can I know that I can trust you? You shouldn’t, you have to validate and verify everything that Leo says, discover what is true for yourself. But don’t mistrust Leo in a cynical sort way too, you have to have open-mindedness to consider this all as a possibility. You can’t be as much untrustful that you can’t run the experiment for a few years. These questions and answers can go on forever, these are just stories, you are not going to figure out God through question and answer because it’s a great way to avoid to do the actual work. Actually, at some point these answers becomes an obstacle. You have to discover those answers by yourself, it’s like discovering the answers at the back of the book of your maths problem, rather than solving them yourself. The only way to understand God is to awaken to God, to become God, to look and feel yourself as God, from that will come all the answers. Remember that you can’t awaken before you awaken. Try to be comfortable not knowing for awhile while doing the practices, trust that one day you will figure it out. One awakening is not enough to understand everything Leo says here, it took him over a dozen awakening experiences to come that far. actualized.org will help you find God with the latest potent and cutting edge stuff.

The impersonal Self (no-self) cannot experience an absence of Self. It is self aware (self knowing), self existing, with no need for anything other than itself to know itself. Absolute Nothingness is simply the absence of the objects of perception such as the external world ,universe, body, mind, thoughts, feelings,sensations,etc., Self only ever experiences Self, with or without objects. Including the imagined "conscious" personal self or "ego". Pure Consciousness is prior to the thought based/imagined (i.e, non-existent self) which claims itself to be conscious. What is aware of the nothingness,in which That itself,cannot be described as neither something nor nothing?

Being doesn't really benefit too much from the Ego-Mind trying to understand it. That's why it's called being. One must be, which really isn't an understanding. You ride a bike, but that's not really an understanding. You just ride the damn thing. There's no conceptualization needed in the first instance. Same thing with hunger, you just eat. You're not sitting there conceptualizing your hunger in the moment. This is really hard for the intellectual mind to grasp. Same thing with peeing. You're not sitting there pondering the nature of peeing when you have to go pee, you just go pee. To me it's kinda sad to see all these books about being because being is very simple and non-intellectual. People get confused into all this Metaphysics by reading these books, and then they cling to that which sets up a block for being. Being is so simple that you have to find more sh*t to say about it to write any kind of book about it -- that's why all the Metaphysics has to be brought in to fill up those pages. This just ends up filling the Ego-Mind with concepts about being, which moves you further and further away from being. Being is like noticing a pretty woman, you don't need to say anything to appreciate her look. Rather than turning Enlightenment into Philosophy (or Metaphysics), I think a much better idea for a book is to write an autobiography of your own experience on the Path. That's where you'll get your fat book without all the misleading conceptualization of being. That's an Enlightenment book worth reading. All the abstract stuff, all the conceptualization, is trying to turn being into some detached thing that can be theorized about in the abstract, which is not only impersonal, but misleading. It's hiding out in a concept of being, which is just the Ego-Mind using Enlightenment to stay the same. No, Enlightenment should be changing who you are both externally and internally, with manifestations that are apparent to others too. Enlightenment is not some conceptual odyssey for the Philosophical Mind. In fact, Enlightenment should be bringing you back down to earth from that Philosophical Mind, see. If that's not happening, then you need to look at that.

Notes You are god and you are part of god, ultimate you is god, saying your god is part of god Why don’t I feel part of god? Reality is only possible when you imagine it to be true (not important to you right now) Substance of which everything is made is not needed for you in day to day life God is tricky and hiding because he is formless (takes every form) pure potential, confuse form with the illusion World of form and formlessness are the same thing God is an invincible being - rock bottom of reality, god is not falsifiable because he is pure truth Everything is absolute truth but you didn’t acknowledge it yet Cut through all illusion (truth seeking) No one can tell or show you the truth unless you go out and proof it for yourself Exploiting loopholes in theory by explaining god for everything, always surfaces no substance so god is the nothingness in between Atheist / materialist - reality is whatever you hold it for Sentient is not yours, it’s the universe, you imagine your friends and family into existence You are the universe there is no separateness between you and the universe you belief in time and space but it’s not real Brain is happening in consciousness not the other way around paranormal phenomena are real atheist doesn’t realise he made himself Reality has no limits God can’t be an illusion because he is absolute truth present and conscious (dmt is god) god can be an hallucination and brain state to exit the matrix is to realise that there is always another matrix containing this matrix you experience Why isn’t god part of another god (replace the world god with everything / total) How do you know infinity is not created by something else, because infinity includes all Totality of oneness There can’t be 2 gods because he’s everything god can’t lift the rock he created itself, god has to limit himself to something that can lift the rock God can destroy himself as he destroys different forms of himself backwards rationalising god is real, absolute truth misunderstand god, yes you can so be sure to understand absolute truth Saying you don’t know is a great way to speak the truth But you don’t know that you don’t know Evil doesn’t exist, it is what threatens your survival, suffering is there for you to survive Movie is bad for the actors, not for the viewers You are god, caught up in your own mind You hate murder, rape etc.. but god loves everything so also the ‘bad’ things Why isn’t god not infinite evil, because everything is labeled good God wants to know what its like to be murdered, raped etc.. God and the devil are the same thing (devil is a disguise of god) Why is god hard to explain (tribal language for earlier humans, not very enlightened people that filtered it through there own mind) Story gets misinformed Why differences in religion - actual there are a lot of overlapping similarities just different ways of telling the stories religion responsible for most evil and war, but so is science and humans in general Why use the word god? - there is a lot of confusion around it Minor realisation of enlightenment, therefor there remains a lot of confusion No religion or teaching has a monopoly on the truth Realise god is the form and formless Bring your experience with god, back to earth and here and explain it so it makes sense for you high quality sources to check yourself (cross reference) why not kill yourself and become god yourself, god reincarnated himself to be here right now enlightenment now! because you want to fulfil a long and rich life realising god ego exist in the presence of god, forgot itself and have to realise itself / awake again god doesn’t know itself until it life through itself science will never be able to understand god, can’t get there with symbols so science has to reinvent itself and become more mysticism if god is alone does it feel alone, god doesn’t feel anything, you create other people so you don’t feel alone mechanism of god is direct, what you see it the mechanism, cause and exist only exist if you think it’s there god always existed, it created itself (formless god was always there, but it created the form full god) God is always evolving create your own life and make it amazing sahadi samadhi - full awakening, doesn’t happen with a few insights realise god by doing nothing for 30 days (including thinking and visualising) never to young to ask questions about god most stage blue people are to much caught up in there stage blue thinking to even grasp questions about god god’s whole point is just to be and experience life god is personal and impersonal god has no agenda for the universe other then the being of the universe, but god is becoming more and more complex, aiming towards singularity / easier to experience god god is experience all at the same time how can a realisation of god be used to elevate consciousness, control emotions, raise family, teach others does realising god give you paranormal powers, yes it can but doesn’t have to be are miracles possible, yes, everything is a miracle but it depends what you call a miracle is everything in the bible false? no there are good stories and clues in there but not all ]you have no duty towards god, cause you are god, there is no duality between you and god, so you can’t worship him only yourself whatever you do god is fine with it will following my religion lead me to god. let your religion go and chase the truth higher level - stage turquoise, take into account all viewpoint and integrate all worldview realise what god is (real curiosity) validate everything what leo says and verify for yourself god is a really confusing topic even after all these question only way to understand god is to awaken to god

One approach would be, before you say (or type) anything, first pause until you can see the opposite perspective as equally true. The relative (ego) is conditional perspectives, absolute is unconditional (all & no perspectives). This is a way of peeling conditions (thoughts & perspectives) off to realize unconditional (what is - prior to thoughts & perspectives). Another way to say this is the point is amplifying / realizing the impersonal unconditional awareness (you / truth) which knows the experience of all personal conditional perspectives (duality / ego). Another way is to let every thought / perspective go, and agree with no perspectives. Only detachment, always impartial. This flirts with suppression, careful with the distinction. If desire for achievement is strong, this might not be the ideal practice. Another way is expression, in any form. Expressing your perspective all the way through, until there is no desire to express anymore. Journaling daily is great for this, and it’s an accumulative practice / result. It’s key to make note of when the perspective has been expressed all the way through, and no longer remains. The nugget in this, is realizing nothing changed for having expressed the conditional perspective - that thinking and emotions arose in the expressing, but afterwards returned to ‘baseline’ (awareness is constant & unchanging). Seeing that you are still you, now (didn’t actually go anywhere, nor change what you are). It was just a perspective, just an expression. You were always prior to it, through the entire observation, and part of what was observed is the appearance that you were attached to the perspective. Another approach is inner self study. Observing the inner proccess / experience / causation of: what is seen (object), what is seeing it (object), & what knows of the seeing & thinking (awareness). Anything observed with ample scrutiny literally disappears (nothing was there the whole time is revealed). With ample oberservation it is revealed there is no proccess, and that it was a deep rooted assumption all along that there was, leaving only the truth (I am / being / now). One more way is “understanding understanding”, knowing understanding as “of the true identity”. This is a little more complicated, and sounds silly initially. Pick something which you don’t understand how it works. For example, a combustible engine. Read / watch videos about how it works. But be mindful that the aim is not about the engine, but attempting to witness the actual understanding itself. I didn’t understand how it works, now I understand how it works - where did the understanding itself take place. Isolate & locate the understanding as specifically as possible, point to the understanding, describe properties of it. One more...not very popular but... Take the most basic, fundamental, scientific pragmatic approach, to looking into the distinctions between the known, and the knower. For example, a cup sitting on the counter is known. You are the knower / what knows there is a cup sitting on the counter. Start googling / researching what the cup is, and what you are. Examples of googles might be what is a cup made out of, what are molecules made out of, what are atoms made out of, what are quarks made out of, and so on. Then do the same for the knower; what is a human body made out of, what are cells made out of, etc, etc. The similarities & distinctions realized can be profound in terms of self realization, but also, this is a practice. Thinking about doing this is the same as doing nothing, actually doing it can yield the realization. These are suggestions of which the aim is the outcome of knowing being through scrutiny, by exhausting the distinctions.

@SoonHei Well thank you, SoonHei I really like how you put that. I'd add to that by saying; it is your movie, actually. It is not just a movie. That would imply separation, again. Every other movie that possibly exits is also your movie. There is no other movie you could watch But there are infinite versions, genres and lenghts of movies. Which both are you and about you. It can be no other way. However, one cannot possibly be free while identifying with the main character in the movie, solely. Be it Ivan, SoonHei, or any other. The movie is centered around the character for a reason. This whole journey/movie is both personal as it can possibly get and completely impersonal as well. One can choose how to look at it. Watch whatever movie you like. Enjoy it. Watch other movies. Enjoy those. Now you know you created them all. And they are all telling you one thing; this is a movie about you. It is about love; life and death.

@ivankiss And if the decisions we make come out of nowhere, they are still impersonal and just happen without us contributing anything. Free will and no free will are two sides of the same coin.

I think that the marketing strategy you use is highly dependent on what value you're providing. If it had been an impersonal product, Eben Pagan's marketing would have been way more useful. Most people do not really care about the hand-made quilts, howsoever cool you may think they are. While some may and they'll put the word out. Since you're a coach, personal recommendations are going to much more effective than an ad-I-didn't-ask-for before a YouTube video or on Facebook. Of all the personal/ business development ads I've seen on YouTube/FB, the only one I looked up is Tai Lopez because I had already heard of him from other sources - which is unlikely unless you're internet famous/notorious like him. However, the reach of personal recommendations is definitely limited in a sense. I'd say put 90% of your time and efforts in providing massive value and creating a following. For 10%, try doing effective ads and test the waters. Godin's strategy makes much more sense if your clients are internet-savvy millennials who already have a lot of choices on their fingertips. If your clients are middle-aged people, they MAY click an ad that solves their immediate problem/pain.

For the past months I have been hunted by this feeling. It comes back over and over. I would describe it as an existential despair/pain. It feels like I am in a free fall down a deep ravine. I know the ravine leads nowhere. When I hit the bottom my flame will be blown out. I try to grasp at the wall, try to slow down my fall by holding onto anything including people. Anything I hold onto eventually falls away. There is no way out, there is no special person, no event, there is nothing that will make it go away. Even if there was anything/anyone as soon as that one/thing is less available or closes down the pain is back, instantly. However the emptiness doesn't always feel empty. Sometimes it is very full, calming, soothing and just there. In a way it is pure consciousness. It is just there. Present, observing and in fact impersonal. It can feel like I am dead though. I usually don't fight the feeling, I just sit it out and eventually I forget about it. Though I was wondering if there are any techniques to breathe more life into me when I feel empty. I have found that breathing energy down the front while inhaling helps a little.

No spoilers Thanos acts very impersonally as goes on genocide which might seem evil to Tom, Dick and Harry. All his justification for his actions seem very impersonal (not ego driven) and big picture. I know he is just a fictional character but he reminds me of Krishna who had similar motivation behind his decision to destroy the whole Kuru Civilisation about 5000 years ago. Unlike Loki who acts out of Ego, Thanos is big picture guy. quotes of Thanos- 1. The end is near. 2. You’re strong. But I could snap my fingers, and you’d all cease to exist. 3. Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe. But this… does put a smile on my face. 4. Stark… you have my respect. I hope the people of Earth will remember you. 5. When I’m done, half of humanity will still exist. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. I hope they remember you. 6. You should have gone for the head. 7. I know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless. Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives. Or should I say, I have. 8. You’re a great fighter, Gamora. Come. Let me help you. 9. Going to bed hungry. Scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I was the one who stopped that. You know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It’s a paradise.(Justifications for genocide on Gamora’s planet) 10. I’m the only one who knows that. At least I’m the only who has the will to act on it. For a time, you had that same will. As you fought by my side, daughter. 11. I ignored my destiny once, I can not do that again. Even for you. I’m sorry Little one. 12. With all six stones, I can simply snap my fingers, they would all cease to exist. I call that mercy.” “And then what? 13. Thanos: “Daughter.” Gamora: “Did you do it?” Thanos: “Yes.” Gamora: “What did it cost?” Thanos: “Everything.” 14. Your optimism is misplaced, Asgardian. 15. You’re strong. Me… You’re generous. Me… But I never taught you to lie. That’s why you’re so bad at it. Where is the Soul Stone? 16. You should choose your words wisely 17. The hardest choices require the strongest wills. Whats your take on this Leo and my fellow seekers. Please do watch the movie.

Deficiency needs is a good answer, but I would also say lack of familiarity with the Spiral Dynamics model itself, and lack of epistemic inquiry. The dynamics of knowledge (epistemology) needs to be directly explored and contemplated. Also systems thinking. Seeing the world as a complex web of impersonal inter-related systems. Most problems are systemic problems requiring systemic solutions. Few people look at the world this way. They look at the world too personally, as if the world revolves around them and their judgments, as if the solutions are linear and black & white. Yellow is nonlinear thinking. Most people are highly linear thinkers. Yes, but Green still clings too much to its SJW perspective as being superior. Green is not able to detach enough from its own perspective.

@Arhattobe There is no need to make it personal and become combative. It’s an impersonal observation and was not linked to your username. Relativism is a yellow stage mode of being, while objectivism is an Orange stage mode of being. Selectively pointing this out occasionally within threads can help Green stage readers get a feel for the difference as they evolve into Yellow. Yet, this comes at the expense of triggering some Orange stage readers.

Actually I've thought about it. The truth of the matter is, Enlightenment is happening every instance. Right now! But alas! Most of us are having a really grotesque and mistaken translation of this godly 'experience' moment to moment. Let me 1st explain with an analogy. When we are watching a movie, we are only looking at a flat screen. That's it! That's all we are looking at in reality. But yet, we 'choose' to only see the drama and content of the movie. We wanna conjure up all this false sense of time, story, laughter, suffering, characters where in fact all we are looking at is a contentless, unchanging screen. Just notice how the way of looking can distinguish between Actuality and ignorant imagination. Sounds boring huh? Now let's bring it down in our own lives. ANY and ALL phenomena/experience, first and foremost inform us the presence of impersonal, non-located, unlimited, eternal Awareness. BUT, we are trying so hard deliberately(or not) to ignore this constant truth of our experience. Instead, we are mistakenly translating this very enlightening experience as stories of ourselves as people who were born, inhabiting a body, married to so and so, doing so and so, with a past and going to another future time, gonna die in the future, engrossed in pleasures and pains of life etc and etc. So whose fault is it? Is it a person's fault or is it the fault of the translation/perspective? ''Perspective is EVERYTHING''- Sunyamurti ''Right now I'm telling you about your real, unborn nature. But you don't see it because you prefer to be that monkey form!''- Nisargadatta Maharaj

@Angelo John Gage A decent explanation of a very tricky topic. I noticed you saying several times that you "believe" this. What is your direct experience of God? If I was shooting a video like this (and I do have this topic planned for the future as a video), I would make sure to stress that God is not a belief, or a theory, or a speculation, but a direct experience which the viewer can have. This is what's most amazing about God: you can realize it for yourself! This is what most people misunderstand. A newbie watching your video would walk away with the idea that what you're talking about it is just a philosophical theory of God. The viewer would think, "Well, how does this guy know? He's just theorizing. This is just his opinion." It's absolutely critical to plant the seed in the viewer's mind that consciousness of God is a real thing and requires doing concrete practices. Otherwise God forever remains an idea. The whole point of such a video would be to get people to realize that they must start doing the necessary practices. Other distinctions which might have been useful are realism vs idealism, and esoteric vs exoteric versions of religion. Really what your video was debunking were the exoteric versions of God. All mainstream religions are exoteric. Most religious people don't even know that esoteric religion is possible. It's a very tricky topic, so you did a decent job. The tricky thing about God is, it's both deeply personal and impersonal, encompassing every set of attributes.

Novels were included so I figured science fiction allegories ok. A One Thousand and One Words Review Of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson by Will Mesa The purpose of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is stated by the author at the very beginning of his book: "To destroy, merciless, without any compromise whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world." There is no question that the author, from his very first word, strives merciless in order to fulfill the purpose of his book. The Tales are the “Unofficial Story of All and Everything,” of God, Creation, the Universe, Earth and Man. Unofficial because it is not the account given to us by official history and the official philosophies, sciences and the arts; and official religion as well. It is the hidden story, the one rejected by the ancient Greek fishermen turned philosophers-scientists. The story is told by Beelzebub, a three-brained being from a planet close to the Center or Most Holy Sun Absolute, the chief Place of Residence of our ENDELESS CREATOR. Long time before the story actually begins, this Beelzebub is forced, because of a transgression of his youth, to live in exile in a remote corner of the Universe, our solar system. Instead of complaining and dwelling in self-pity, Beelzebub spends his thousands of years, (time in the story being relative to the place of birth of the observer), of exile learning about All and Everything, including the reason for his exile. Because of his meritorious work and indirect service to our UNI-BEING OMNI-BEING COMMON FATHER ENDELESS CREATOR, he is eventually pardoned and allowed to return home. He is now recognized in the whole Universe as a distinguished Sacred Individual and He is invited to a special conference in the solar system whose sun is the "Pole Star." While flying through space in route to the conference in the "transspace" ship Karnak, Beelzebub tells his twelve years old grandson Hassein about All and Everything he has learned during his years of exile. Of special interest to Hassein are those strange three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth, where Beelzebub spends great part of his exile. With time and attention, we the reader become Hassein. Everything we have heard of is elevated or brought in the story to unexpected levels. Entropy, we are told, is Time, the Merciless Heropass, the "Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon." It is precisely because of Time's Subjective-Merciless action that the CREATOR has to create the present universe. In this way Entropy is vanquished, in such a way that even Maxwell's clever demons could not have remotely figured it out. The secret, we are told, is very simple: "The Trogoautoegocratic principle of existence of everything existing in the Universe by means of reciprocal feeding and maintaining each other's existence." This principle of existence our COMMON FATHER ALL-GRACIOUS LORD SOVEREING ENDLESS ENDLESSNESS CREATOR actualizes by altering the functioning of the two primordial sacred laws, making them the two fundamental laws of World-creation and World-maintenance: the Sacred-Heptaparaparshinokn and the Sacred-Triamazikamno. Hell is elevated to a state of voluntary suffering; suffering itself to a cosmic necessity arising from the operation of the Laws. Good and Evil are impersonal forces operating in conformity to World Laws. Man's fall is caused by the "unforseeingness of Most High Sacred Individuals." Chiefly among them are the Great Archangel Sakaki and the Chief-Common-Universal-Arch-Chemist-Physicist Angel Looisos. They are responsible for the implantation in Man's ancestors of an organ with very astonishing properties, among which that of making them to perceive reality topsy-turvy: Kundabuffer. Although Kundabuffer is later removed, the consequences of its maleficent properties are still with us. The story at times gets very provocative. We are told about "that completely formed Arch-Vainglorious Greek, the future Hasnamuss, Alexander of Macedonia." We learn that the Divine Teacher Sacred Individual Jesus Christ is resurrected not in His physical but in His Kesdjan body. Judas is not a traitor but the "most faithful and devoted" of all the disciples of Jesus Christ. Darwin, in the words of the very wise Mullah Nasser Eddin, "is very successful, though not without luck, in finding the authentic godmother of the incomparable Scheherazade on an old dunghill."Mesmer is a humble and honest learned being who, had he not been pecked to death by his contemporaries, might have saved Man from the consequences of Kundabuffer. Mendelejeff is "a contemporary comical earned chemist." Atlantis is a place of the highest learning. A university "is just that `hearth' on which everything acquired during decades and centuries by preceding beings is burned..." America is, during the present flow of Heropass, "the fundamental source of the issuing of new causes of abnormality." Among Americans is the largest percentage of beings with "possibilities for the acquisition of Being nearer to the normal Being of three-brained beings in general." And much more we are told. Man himself is elevated to a Being with the possibility of attaining Objective or Divine Reason and thus becoming a conscious laborer of our ALOVING ALMIGHTY COMMON FATHER ENDLESS ENDLESSNESS ETERNAL CREATOR ALL-MAINTAINER, a cell in GOD's Brain. But Man, we are told with great sadness and great sorrow, is now asleep to his innermost essence, to the Divine Impulse of Objective Conscience, the REPRESENTATIVE OF THE CREATOR in Man. He takes the ephemeral for the Real. He can no longer Love with the "Love of Consciousness," Believe with the "Faith of Consciousness," and Hope with the "Hope of Consciousness." This is "The Terror of the Situation." Consequently, Man can no longer fulfill his highest destiny. The chief particularity of his strange psyche is to periodically engage in the process of reciprocal destruction or war. Everything is elevated or brought to unexpected levels in the story; sometimes with great humor; all the time with great humanness. Even the concept of everything itself is elevated, becoming the "common-cosmic Ansanbaluiazar: Everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything." After having read the book three times, following the author's indications given in his Friendly Advice, one wonders: Have we been doped by the "official story of all and everything?"

@Nahm Thanks for the recommendation brotha, appreciate it. @Alex bAlex I feel ya man, we all need some sort of mentorship in lives. I currently have someone I see myself. You can obviously pay to get a mentor like Nahm said. That’s usually the most direct way. But you could also find someone you admire and offer to work for free. Tell them you have XYZ skill they might need and that you’ll do whatever they want. Don’t even mention mentoring. Books and courses can also be a more impersonal sort of mentorship. So yeah, mentorship comes in all forms. It doesn’t have to look a certain way. Hope that helped. By the way, if you decide to go with a coach and you pick @Emerald over me, we are going to have to have a very serious discussion via DMs

Mi take on this is that everything has to come from nothingness. There must be a point where nothing was there, and matter manifested from that nothing... our mind can't not comprehend it, because we have an "idea" of what nothing is. Let's say that nothing is a state where there's all the possibilities for everything to manifest. It contradicts our logic. In that nothingness everything is manifested. The only thing that exist is nothing, or you can call it silence, the void. Our mind try to separate things to understand. It says, here there's a person, a tree, an animal, etc... but everything is made of the same substance. Awareness. Some people call it God, others the source, others nothingness, and so on... God has thousands of names. It is personal and impersonal at the same time... and I won't continue writing because everything I write is not even near of what reality is. God is the ultimate reality. Think of nothingness as the ultimate truth. Truth shall make you free!

From a Gurdjieffian perspective. For whatever it's worth,,,, In Talks on Beelzebub's Tales, J. G. Bennett distinguishes four types of suffering - Unnecessary Suffering, Unavoidable Suffering, Voluntary Suffering and Intentional Suffering: The first is Unnecessary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we incur because of our unreasonable attitudes and expectations towards others, from our ill-will, hatred and rejection of others, from doubt, possessiveness, arrogance and self pity. In other words, suffering arising from our self-importance. The second is Unavoidable Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that comes to us by accident or from events beyond our control, such as interpersonal conflicts, war, disaster, disease or death. Third, we have Voluntary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish a personal aim, such as an athlete who disciplines himself to win a race, or a student who labours to get good grades. And finally we have Intentional Suffering. According to Bennett, this would be the kind of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish an impersonal or altruistic goal, one that is directed more towards service to others or to the Work, and not for any personal gain. Bennett assumes that this is what Gurdjieff meant by Intentional Suffering.

Carl Jung, Kundalini Yoga, Lecture 2, Pages 39 – 40. Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. So in anahata individuation begins. But here again you are likely to get an inflation. Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist.You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection. For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self. Now, if anybody makes the mistake of thinking that he lives at the same time in the basement and on the fourth story, that he is the purusha himself, he is crazy. He is what the German very aptly call verrückt, carried off his feet up to somewhere else. He just sits up there and spins. We are allowed to behold only the purusha, to behold his feet up there. But we are not the purusha; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process. The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective. If you function in your self you are not yourself—that is what you feel. You have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell.Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusha. ~ --------------------------------------------- So as a crude model? A distilled Ego, Individualist, would be something like the dot in the middle with arrows pointing towards. The individuated person would be the dot in the middle with the arrows pointing outwards. In which case I could see why people, may become psychotic, from perhaps doing kundalini. --------------------------------------------- My question is, can anyone recommend any Kriya Yoga videos on Youtube, or perhaps a site dedicated to such a thing? I found this site http://www.kriyayogainfo.net/ videos of the guy clucking his tongue was a bit bizarre, the only thing I can think of is, I don't know, mimicking some kind of frequency the various parts of the body may respond to. Bit like how parents sometimes talk to the child in the womb. A lack of contact also kills a new born, heard something about that happening in Romanian orphanages. Overloads their opiate system or something. I came across a Book called "The Serpent Power." by Sir John Woodroofe alias Arthur Avalon. It's not on the Booklist, what I'm looking for is the most refined I can get, looking more at the past, to try and avoid any fads or corruption in the present. EDIT: Thought the following video was interesting with Carl Jung talking about a patient and finally Kundalini briefly.

Surprisingly, none of the career quiet-sitters have sought to help you (yet), kobe. Most people consider meditating with eyes open much more difficult than with eyes closed. I would recommend having the eyes open just a bit. I would not recommend that you use your eyes to do anything. Relax everything inside and outside; forget inside and outside, and just observe mind without deliberation. Completely dispense with rambling mental commentary without trying to stop it by force of will. Just intend to notice it along with everything else that occurs (or not). The ancient admonition is to not be afraid of thoughts, just be afraid of not noticing thoughts unawares. That's what rudimentary reformative meditation practice is. It's PRACTICE. It's practicing a subtle awareness of the mind that moves by the mind that shines. Don't make the mistake and think that there are two minds. The scattered mind IS the shining mind. It's an inconceivability. After a long long time, you'll find out less and less as the mind-ground clarifies. Whether your eyes are open or closed or somewhere in-between isn't as important as noticing thoughts as they occur without entertaining further commentary relative to habitual ingrained psychological activity. There are many ways to approach subtle observation of mind. Sitting meditation is effective practice for some people. I've never practiced "just sitting" myself. The point of reformative practice is to discover the means to see what underlies conditioned awareness and then endeavor to apply that potential in the midst of everyday ordinary situation by using impersonal subtle observation to fluidly meet the requirements of the moment without following habitual ego-reflective psychological patterns. In doing so, self-refinement is accelerated.