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Young Leo before he got into self-improvement. But in all seriousness, the transformation from fat Leo to current Leo is like the inverse of what happened with young Vaush to current Vaush.

The masculine approach: taking a stand against what no longer serves the feminine approach: creating an environment friendly and ideal for healing/transformation to take place the question is: who’s actually seeking to evolve their patterns/truth? It’s futile to change another’s beliefs, however, to plant seeds is a step in the right direction Speculation is a form of ignorance, an imbalance in ones receptivity to challenging beliefs and or forms of truth

@mandyjw at least it would be natural... likewise it took me time to understand why people would get it, once i opened up to that potential truth, it showed itself. Basically it can help/assist in the transformation of light/cell expression (dna structure), even though it may evoke fear or discordant energies to arise to the surface. These have the potential to overpower the individual, keeping them bound to separation/division till death. We are one with all, on a journey into the light of pure serenity It's still deemed unnecessary in my less is more mentality toward health/vitality

Thinking about this in terms of static quantities prevents you from seeing the obvious truth that tigers don't compete with plants for soil minerals. Competition arises out of lack of differentiation not out of supposedly limited resources. Relative reality isn't static, it's dynamic, so competing for resources is grounded in not understanding transformation. Instead of trying to be a plant because you saw a plant, be yourself and use what you need to give your gift.

(I’ve added notes from the book in this summary. There are videos on George Leonard’s book “Mastery” on youtube. Here’s two worth checking out: Animated Book Summary (6 min), Summary and Review (8 min)) 9. Summary: “Mastery” -It’s hard to be fulfilled and successful when you don’t have Mastery over anything. Mastery is a mindset and process of becoming excellent at whatever you choose to do. (Read “Mastery” by George Leonard) -Mastery can be achieved by everyone, not just the “naturally talented.” Mastery says there's a methodical, scientific way to achieve excellence. -Mastery is paramount to personal development because it applies to everything you want to get good at in life. (Health, Success, Relationships, Life Purpose, Love, Sex, Business, Cooking, Sports, Hobbies, etc) It’s one of the most important topics. -Mastering meta skills that improve everything will compound all your efforts (superlearning, health, discipline, emotional intelligence, epistemology, relationships, etc). A tide that lifts all boats. These core skills you master will be part of you forever. They will pay huge dividends over your lifetime. It’s what makes people seem magical. -The biggest obstacle to Mastery is naive, unrealistic expectations. Having realistic expectations means you won’t be blindsided when reality hits. -There’s the Imaginary Mastery curve and the Real Mastery curve. -The Imaginary Mastery curve falsely says progress is easy, constant, linear and predictable. This mindset sets you up for failure. It’s also what most people believe. -The Real Mastery curve is like a staircase with deep steps, small rises with long plateaus. True progress challenges your comfort zone. -A plateau is a period where you're putting in effort but not seeing any improvement. You may even regress a little bit. This throws most people off, but it’s normal. Don’t get disheartened! -No one can avoid plateaus, not even the “naturally talented.” No one experiences smooth, steady upward growth. You need to get comfortable working while being on a plateau to become truly masterful at anything. -You deal with the plateaus by expecting them and bracing yourself. When you commit and work at it you'll get some progress, but it’ll be erratic. If you're putting in deliberate practice, working everyday, improving what needs to be improved, trust you're moving along the Mastery curve. -Mastery takes time. It takes time to practice and condition the Mastery mindset. It’s easy to forget that and get demoralized, especially during long projects. -When you see a top performing athlete, actor, entrepreneur, it's because they've developed Mastery through this gradual process of improving bit by bit. They didn’t find one overnight quick-fix scheme. ◦ In Japan, top sushi chefs start by learning to properly prepare rice for two years. ◦ Mozart put in 10 years of practice before writing his first world class concerto. (Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”) ◦ Chris Evans did 13 years of theatre, tv and movies before booking his first superhero movie which bombed with critics (Fantastic Four). He then spent another five years acting before booking Captain America in 2010 for which he got $300,000. His payday in 2019 was $43.5 million. (such a poor ugly overnight success ) -Consumerist culture promotes shortcuts, novelty and distractions. It’s anti-Mastery. It’s focused on “get rich quick” schemes. Marketing is a huge contributor to this. “Give me what I want now, without any effort on my part.” -What’s wrong with shortcuts or luck? Luck runs out if it’s not based on skill and work ethic. Shortcuts are unsustainable because they worry about results instead of learning skills or finding joy in the process. -Ironically, the “get rich quick” mindset gets promoted by the culture, but it's not actually rewarded by the culture. Mastery, however, is devalued by the culture but highly rewarded. Three Common Anti-Mastery Attitudes that Lead to Failure: —The Dabbler: Always seeks novelty, chases the highs. Gives up when it gets hard and makes excuses. Bounces from one thing to the next, never building anything substantial. —The Obsessive: Unsustainably gung-ho. Thinks he can avoid plateaus by overextending himself. Hitting the first plateau is a surprise which leads to frustration, then crashing and burning. Chaotic and unstable, high highs and low lows. —The Hacker: Learns just enough to get by. Not willing to go past his comfort zone. Gets stuck on a plateau. Progress is halted for fear of hard work. Can do okay work, but doesn’t accomplish anything great. Boring, doesn’t grow. Mastery is a Mindset -The Master does not worry because he has grounded success in himself. The non-Master lives in fear that they’ve stumbled their way into success. They know their success could be taken away. -When you’re masterful you can create results on demand, consistently, not based on luck. This gives you confidence. Even if you lost everything you would be able to replicate that success again. -There’s emotional richness in doing what you really love and working hard at it. This is one of the best things about being on the path of Mastery and staying on it. Visualize your success to stay motivated. You are amassing this power within yourself through self-development, through Mastery. That feels amazing. -Mastery is Process Oriented, Not Results Oriented Process oriented means you’re focused primarily on doing the process well and enjoying it. Not just getting a result. -Masters Create an Upward Spiral. Masters focus on joy and learning because they love the practice. Because they love it, they do more of it, and the more they do the better they get. The better they get the more they enjoy it. -No One Can Sustain 10 Years of Grind. (Maybe a year or so) If it takes 10 years to become great at something, you won’t sustain that on a short spiky burst of emotion. You’ll become resentful, and you still won’t be great. Mastery is consistent, even keeled, the tortoise not the hare. Don’t worry about your results. Track them, but don't chase them like a thirsty blood-hungry dog. -A sustainable pace is one you could do for the rest of your life and it won't cause you energy problems or money problems. Think long term. (episode: Develop Patience) -Consistent, good, imperfect practice is better than short, unsustainable practice. 10 years of sustainable productivity is better than 1 year of fast unsustainable growth. -Love the minutia of what you're doing. Be fully present and detail oriented about your craft. Minutia isn’t boring. The essence of boredom is found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness as subtle variations on familiar themes. It's a pleasure, not a grind. Learning slowly forces you to look deeply at the process and discover the incremental steps that you might otherwise gloss over if progress came easily. The master develops subtle distinctions (episode:Learning = Making Distinctions) ◦ Kobe Bryant describing the process of Mastery. Challenges to Staying on the Path of Mastery -Homeostasis: Our body, brain and behaviour have a built in tendency to stay within very narrow limits. Psychological homeostasis is your mind's tendency to go back to how things have always been, whether or not that’s healthy. Your mind is like a thermostat that has been set by past experiences. Learning a new skill will require shifting this thermostat, and your body will naturally resist this. Your mind will refuse to do new stuff unless you push it out of its comfort zone. -Discomfort or fear from trying something new is actually a sign of growth. It’s not to be avoided. If the learning doesn’t challenge your comfort zone you’re probably not growing much. Negotiate with your resistance to change. Plan for two steps forward, one step back. (Understanding Resistance) A non-Master would go gung-ho, not expecting resistance, like those people in the gym on Jan 1st who quit after a week. Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is favourable or unfavourable. Too much change too quickly creates a backlash, reeling you back to your comfort zone. Focus on one thing, one new habit, at a time. Don’t wear yourself out. Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive. Denial inhibits energy while realistic acknowledgement of the truth releases it. -If you refuse to adopt the Mastery mindset you’ll waste years of your life frustrated, bouncing from one thing to another, not making any progress, never getting what you want. You might get disenchanted with the whole process of growth and you’ll settle for mediocrity. That’s not the life you want to live. “To practice regularly, even when you seem to be getting nowhere, might at first seem onerous. But the day eventually comes when practicing becomes a treasured part of your life. You settle into it as if into you favourite easy chair, unaware of time and the turbulence of the world. It will still be there for you tomorrow. It will never go away.”—George Leonard Five Guidelines on the Path of Mastery 1. Be aware of homeostasis. Expect resistance and backlash. Don't give up at the first sign of trouble. 2. Negotiate with your resistance, by using pain as a guide to performance. Play discontent, the inevitable escort of transformation. Keep pushing, but not without awareness to the warnings. Pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the possibility of backsliding. 3. Develop a support system of other people who share the joys of the change you're making. 4. Regular practice - the path of mastery for its own sake. A stable base during the instability of change. 5. Dedicate to lifelong learning. The lifelong learner learned to deal with homeostasis, because he is doing it all the time.

By early 2013 I found myself quite deeply disappointed that we had not experienced The Singularity Event which I had been expecting on December 21st, 2012. I began the following conversation with my Ego, to seek some answers. As so often happens, I received a great deal more than I had hoped for. My Ego used the opportunity to share, in some depth, who he really is and what his role in this reality has been. To me personally this was a revelation! Greg: Anybody home? Ego: I am here. Greg: I am a little puzzled by something. Quite confused, in fact. Ego: Ah. Have you noticed how some of our very best conversations, featuring some of the richest realizations begin when you take that position? When you are willing to admit to your internal dissonance, describe it carefully and then open yourself to a new transcendent understanding you do a special kind of magic. An alchemical transformation. Lead into Gold. Fear and discomfort into love and delight. And of course we are going to do the same thing right now. And it all begins when you describe your difficulty. Greg: The experience called The Singularity Event. A wonderful, exciting, blissful moment when we will all FEEL and KNOW that we are one with the Oneness. And then after that everything will be different. Ego: I am familiar with the subject. Tell me your problem. Greg: Well, 2012 has come and gone (it’s January 2013 as I write this) and I thought this was going to happen in 2012. I mean, it wasn’t exactly PROMISED that it would happen, but with all the hype around December 2012 I had hoped just a little bit would happen then. So I suppose I am wondering if this is still going to happen. And if so, when? Ego: There are many different answers to your question because the answer depends entirely on who you are creating yourself to be. Your perspective is everything. You held a particular perspective on the day in question. What perspective are you now willing to take? Who are you, right now, willing to create yourself to be? Greg: Okay, I’ll play. Here is who I am creating myself to be right now: I am a spark of eternal, divine light who has chosen to express itself in physical form. One who is currently, momentarily, experiencing incarnation as a human being on Planet Earth with the name of Greg Margolis. How’s that? Ego: I like that. Now tell me, is Greg Margolis a powerful creator being or a victim to his experiences? Greg: A creator being, of course. I am becoming more and more aware, as I wake up and discover who I really am, that I actually do create my experiences with my deepest beliefs and choices. Ego: So do you wait for someone else to give to you the things you seek, or do you create them? Greg: The latter. I guess that is what being a creator being means: you create, right? Ego: Right. And so, you need to take a moment and see that you created a small paradox for yourself on December 21st, 2012. The Singularity Event, which is an experience of that which is most real and true. An experience of The Oneness cannot be given to you from outside of yourself. It can not come, like a Santa Clause in the night and leave presents for you depending upon whether you have been naughty or nice. Because something as inherently TRUE as a direct experience of The Oneness of All cannot begin with you being a child like victim awaiting gifts from some outside agency. I remain silent. Ego: You are silenced by what I have said. Somewhat shocked and some deep disappointment is beginning to well up. But before your mind begins to run circles, before you leap to any conclusions at all - let me remind you of something that, by now, you know well: If you can’t see the perfection, you are standing too close to the picture. So what I am saying is that this too is perfect. And you will, over the course of this discussion, come to see how that might be so. Greg: But why could I not get this new “perfect” version of the story back on December 21st? Ego: Think back. Think back carefully on who you were then. Who you were able to create yourself to be. Think of your inner struggles then. Think of your fears about your own inadequacy, your victim mindset, your self limiting beliefs. There is still SO MUCH you fail to understand. Firstly, I said The Singularity Event cannot be given to you from outside of yourself. Greg: So it can still happen? I can create it by MYSELF? Ego: If you are willing, then absolutely, yes, it can happen. Indeed, that is the only way it CAN happen. And if you enact your creator nature then it WILL happen.

Is your last letter of your myers briggs type 'P' by any chance? That sort of behavior is called Prospecting and it's quite usual for xNTP/xNFPs. Remember your purpose isn't some field or some set of tools. Biology, math, chemistry, these were just sets of tools created by some people in order to help them achieve their vision. Biology in itself isn't the purpose, engineering human life is. Fields come and go, there was trapanation, now there's neuroscience, none of these are the actual purposes, your purpose is basically answering the question "what would you like to create" then you just pick up the necessary tools to achieve it. I would say that you aren't dabbling, but prospecting because you are looking for a deeper understanding of life rather than some field to study. And since these fields are almost always bound by the same paradigms you tend to lose interest fast when you see it isn't going anywhere. However at the same time you are also picking what's good from each one and making your own theories and tools on the way up. Fields are just a bunch of biases nothing more. It's very likely that your purpose will be a vision for a certain kind of transformation in society which you think is critical for making the world a better place. Transformational/Transmutational mindset is the new paradigm of society that's coming to replace the old static shit that doesn't work (e.g. medicating people as if they are a static sculpture not a living system) so it's very likely that you are starting to wake up to this truth and you want to participate in the distribution of this new paradigm in society in some way shape or form. Maybe you feel that non-actualized people are why society is so fucked up and ape-like and you will want to become an actualization coach. Maybe you feel that the old medicinal paradigm is why so many people are sick so you want to become a holistic functional medicine practitioner and guide them towards the new paradigm that restores health rather than suppresses symptoms. The key to your answer lies in understanding Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how the current society relates to it as well as in contemplating transformation/transmutation rather than trying to pick some field as if the field can tell you want you want to create.

Well, lazy people are dangerous for a dude who wants to be active and active people are danger for lazy people's laziness. Both get challenged. Don't bother, do your thing. Let that pain lead to transformation and Self-acceptence. Over time you will develop more and more self-trust, when you act and see your models working.

More likely to "heal" them by avoiding the trap of forcing transformation on someone out of their natural predatory self; most of these things occur because it has alignment with reality so it's better to have an outlet for rape destruction and evil through virtual reality/roleplay or use drug therapies because rape/destruction/evil/torture is good when both the perpetrator and the victim are benefited/feel pleasure from the acts which isn't the case in our immediate reality; loving someone with the exclusive intent to transform their behaviors is not full love or rather in a way it lacks the constructive hate of the love/hate duality this constructive hate means that you should feel "hate" for the universe and it's fundamental mechanics themselves because then at least the observer, the perpetrator and the victim are in some level of agreement; people are too obsessed with sentience/social ego they forget the entire universe and it's mechanics are involved. One example, the observer can have his guru power trip/victim mentality healing fantasy fulfilled through whatever means(including me as a 4th observer); the perpetrator can have his rape and get away with it with zero karma(just one example in the space of possibilities) and the victim can have pleasure or fulfillment from being acted on again with zero karma or even positive karma; you can then maintain the complexity of the play and all the general regular actions of a universe where suffering exists but with no suffering like "revenge" and "recovering from trauma" by the victim; the "healing" from the observer through preventive measures and therapeutic assistance; "trying to get away with your assault" from the perpetrator or/and "getting reformed through therapy". Just a super metaphysical gamified version of reality where you can maintain everything but also change anything and it still makes perfect sense and the spookiest thing is even though I personally experience suffering I cannot say this gamified reality is not already the case; extremely clumsily explained and simplified here but you guys are pretty smart. My view of true love where hate/evil can exist without suffering being involved and also allowing evolution as if hate still hurts just as much.

I would say the reason for this is just the rapid transformation of lifestyle from a hard-working labour worker to incredibly sedentary (often lazy), fat and eating garbage. Here in UK, 8/10 people in streets are obese or overweight, asthmatic, eat junk, have chronic stress and at least 5 major addictions. These are the main reasons for all the cancers and diabetes. I assume the situation among poor suburban areas in US is even worse. These people make a majority of statistics for cancers and mental disease. Of course there will be some small dose chronic level of toxins but compared to the huge shitload of other lifestyle factors I just can't imagine it being that much of a concern if all the above are fixed. That's not to say you should go and sniff a glue or use the shitties pan but I think the type of coating on the pan is peanuts compared to the other factors that most people haven't even looked at.

I was wondering whether anyone else had experienced Kundalini as a Goddess. During the initial stages of my awakening, during 2011-2012, I experienced Kundalini as a serpentine energy, as descibed by most people and classical works on the subject. During the latter stages, the sensation became physical and whenever Kundalini was active inside me, I experienced a black serpent wriggling around in my body, along the spine, gradually rising ever further upwards and bumping its head against energetic blocks in my body in a rhythmic fashion. When the serpent got stuck, just above the heart chakra and couldn’t push its head through the knot found there, I experienced intense chronic chest pain, heart palpitations, neurological symptoms, such as memory loss and slowness of movement. I then prayed for divine intervention and the Goddess appeared to me in person, performed shaktipat on me, then united with me energetically and allowed me to experience enlightenment, a breakthrough at the final knot at the top back part of the head (I believe this is called Brahmarendra, the cavity of God), which broke with an audible cracking noise. Then, liquid light came roaring in, I expanded in all directions in an ecstatic bliss and became boundless and all-knowing, at least for a short while. In that state, I felt universal and understood everything about reality, universe, life, or whatever else you can think of. When i eventually returned to my body, I only retained a tiny portion of the knowledge I had access to in the universal state. I also felt constrained and suffocated by my own body, but I gradually returned to normal consciousness. The Goddess aspect of Kundalini is rarely emphasised, or if so, usually only in abstract terms, but I wonder how many people have been visited by her as a living Goddess and how common this is? I found a reference in the book of essays, Kundalini Rising, by Lawrence Edwards, whose experience closely mirrors my own. I’m not sure how much I can quote from his work, before triggering the copyright bots, so I’ll try to quote only the most succinct sections, that are most relevant to this point. Chapter: Kundalini Her Symbols of Transformation and Freedom LAWRENCE EDWARDS, PHD THE GIFTS OF MAHA KALI “ Once a renowned author who had written about Kundalini came to meet my guru, Swami Muktananda. Baba, as my guru was known, was revered for his exalted visions of the Kun- dalini and his rare ability to give shaktipat. The author, too, had visions of Kundalini, but to him she appeared quite unimpressive, looking like an ordinary woman, not like a God- dess at all. As he waited outside the room where Baba was receiving visitors, he was astonished to have a vision of the Goddess Kundalini herself entering the room where Baba was—only this time she appeared in her most regal and resplendent form, magnif- icent and awe inspiring … Baba, he asked why it was that she appeared so ordinary to him, while for Baba she came as the Goddess of the Universe. Baba replied simply, “Because I worship her.” … The intense practices I began doing culminated in a series of meditation experiences in Baba’s ashram meditation hall during a weekend retreat in 1982. Various forms of the Goddess began appearing fully and spontaneously in meditation, as real as any person standing in front of me. I worshipped each in turn, trembling and awestruck as I did and only able to do so because of the strength the Shakti gave me in the moment to withstand Her Divine presence. Goddess after Goddess appeared until finally Maha Kali was present there before me. I prayed with all my heart to be able to stay conscious. Her skin was blacker than black, like deep black velvet in a darkened room. Yet in some miraculous way Her form was radiant, revealing Her own richly magnificent blackness. A thought ap- peared in my mind: “My God, this is Kali! She’s the Great Mother, Goddess of the Uni- verse, creator and destroyer of all that is!” But She was in the most exquisite, beautiful, loving form, not the fearsome presence She is usually depicted as having. This was Her hidden form. I did the only thing I knew to do: I did puja to Her, an ancient Indian form of worship, while shaking with a mixture of fear, awe, and overwhelming love. Tears flowed down my cheeks. Then the Goddess came forward and embraced me, wrapping Herself around me. Everything slowed down. I could feel myself gradually merging into Her, and I could hear Her laughing the wildest, most ecstatic laugh! We disappeared from the ordinary world. My awareness shifted, and I could see the whole solar system with all its planets, and then stars and galaxies being withdrawn into Her. The entire universe was merging into Her, and all the while it was merging, the infinitude of the cosmos rever- berated with Her ecstatic laughter. Finally, I disappeared into Her as I dissolved into infi- nite Light and Love, and then into a nothingness beyond even that, beyond the mind, be- yond any duality of experience. There simply was no “me” left; I was gone, gone, gone be- yond. … The experience ended; feeling profoundly grateful, I bowed to my inner guru, my Goddess Kundalini. This had all unfolded as a re- sult of shaktipat from my Siddha master, Muktananda Baba, years earlier, and my prayer to know the highest form of worship of Kundalini. Complete worship merges you with the one you worship. Through worship and prayer, the Goddess reveals the mysteries of Her creation to Her creature: the seeker—you! … No words can describe how overwhelmed and truly awestruck I was by the appearance of the Goddesses classically depicted in the chakras, followed by Maha Kali Herself. These were the Goddesses that Kundalini manifests, as well as Her primal form as Maha Shakti, the great power, that takes the form of Maha Kali, the Black Goddess. It is this highest power that dissolves the universe as She merges into the sahasrara, creating it once again as She descends from that transcendent realm. … Just as the aspects of Divine Consciousness were being presented to my awareness sym- bolically in the forms of the Goddesses, in the same way the union with those Divine forms was symbolized by sexual union. Readers familiar with the experiences of mystics of many spiritual traditions will recognize that this is a common way for union with the Di- vine to express itself. Very often the Tantric traditions, both yogic and Buddhist, that deal with the Divine Feminine depict union in this way. Carnal symbolism and the experience of that form of symbolic merger in meditation are often confusing for people, especially Westerners, who take it literally. From: Kundalini Rising: Exploring the Energy of Awakening. Sounds True Inc. Short Excerpts from pages 294-298 “ So, this is really interesting to me, as it is so close to my own experience of Union with the Goddess and her many visits to me. Maybe it is a bit esoteric (on in other words, Tantric), but I would really like to hear from others who may have experienced this.

@justfortoday You are much more advanced than I am but I see a clear blind spot. It is called the full circle. This is was very common in ancient Egypt and it was the last secret revealed. When one arrived to a super conciousness state by mastering all paths (wisdom, devotion, Mind, non-dual...) one arrived to a see through the ilusion and understand the core of all existance, which then formed everything else. Therefore, the master asked to reconstruct from this core existance layer by layer again his ego reality, for it is also real in the sense that an ilusion is real and also must be understood. Understanding how from the God-Head of his being all the transformation and alchimical processes happened till one finds himself in this existance where, even though it's pretty clear it's nothing, it's also pretty clear there is more. This is at least the main blind spot I see in all masters, where the are enlightened about enlightenment but not about non-enlightenment (Unless they are God-Realized where then this is all non-sense). For the one that is truly interested in Truth, it is not only enough by going to the source and understanding it but by also how the whole game of existance is played. Because this is not just random nothingness, this is armonious beyond our understanding. For it is deconstructed to know the most juicy insights, then it must be constructed to engage in the divine game of existance. For this is a great cosmic play. Knowing that the dream is a dream is also a dream, that insight must be had, that insight must also be left, as well as all those that have been stated here. If u wanna Truly be liberated.

Cool! I’ll add a little more with some links. Facets of Unity is just about my favorite book on the enneagram. By the way, I’m a counterphobic 6. Mapping Certain Levels of Reality We use the Enneagram as a tool and a map at specific junctures in our work of spiritual unfoldment. Initially, we use it as a psychological map that aids self-observation and study. Students also work with our theory of holes (see Essence, Almaas, 1986), which describes the loss of Essence and the consequent development of the personality. Then the work of uncovering the essential aspects proceeds. The theories of depth psychology on object relations, narcissism, and the like, constitute a major portion of the tools used to access the various essential dimensions. The Enneagram is then used at particular points as a map of certain levels of reality, in order to facilitate spiritual transformation. For example, work on the Passions and Virtues helps students in the process of purification of the soul. The Enneagram of Holy Ideas is most useful at the juncture between personal and cosmic realization of Being, as previously mentioned. As with other concepts from various schools, our approach utilizes the Enneagram for the purpose of direct, experiential understanding. It is not used only for psychological observations and typology, nor only for guiding various spiritual practices, but specifically for guiding and supporting open inquiry into one’s experience. Facets of Unity, pg. 16 This is the forth of nine excerpts. Link just below https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enneagram-and-diamond-approach https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enneagram-holy-ideas O https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enneagram-specific-delusions https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enneagram-specific-difficulties https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/enneagram-specific-reactions

Dunno, I focus on doing various kinds of yoga 4 hours a day, an ocassional retreat, or a psychedelic trip here and there. But I would like to have a meaningful work, like really helping people, easing their suffering, but I have no idea how to put myself into this position. It's not money or time that constrains me, it's something psychological, that requirement of transformation. Leting go of who you are to become someone else. It's not scary or anything, just... hard. I am not a kiddo anymore, but being 23 yo I still have a lot to understand about the world and even a few things to figure out about who I really am, as a human, not in a spiritual sense. I mean, the spiritual, too, but the human aspect gets priority for survival reasons. Sometimes I feel like there's not much in this world to live for, I mean material stuff, like travel, luxurious apartments and expensive gadgets. It's worth so little and gets old so fast. But loving people, loving life is cool. Being useful to others is cool, too. Yeah, observing stuff is always good idea, can't go wrong with that.

I need to get back on it. I’ve taken a break from the last two. I’ve just had so much transformation recently it seems kinda silly to watch videos.

I've been getting back into music making through guitar and electronic production and was seeing what some of the younger musicians were doing. I started watching this one lady's Indy electronic interviews and discussions she had on YouTube. I looked at her face & her I though her nose was very straight & odd. I figured maybe she was born like that. I didn't think much about it. Like with most beautiful women, the comment section was filled with typical one-track minded guys talking with their trousers warming their ankles. So as I went backwards in time on the videos & discussions to watch her creative process & the gear she used, just a few years ago, a place showed her apartment & "Holy Shit", it was like I was staring at an entirely different human being!!! The previous form of this human being was not as pretty as the one I'd been watching. However, after seeing the old version, I thought the new version looked entirely fake. After watching that video of her "before" face & then watching some afterwards, I could no longer listen to what she was saying. I was completely put off by the fact that the face I was looking at was a surgical creation...done for no reason than vanity. And also hearing in that last interview how the discussion went from music production to the dull world of money & business (the kind where you sign other artists & take a cut off the top or commission). I had to stop watching her & this transformative process from ugly, music producing person to beautiful, business/money-oriented person. I daresay I found it quite repulsive. At any rate, I recall Leo saying as one of his missions was to get us to improve ourselves in such a way that in 10 years time, we would no longer recognise ourselves! I can't think of any other more extreme measure in personal transformation than getting plastic surgery! I mean, once your face is altered, you're treated differently in the environment. For instance, in the above example, the woman went from no real comments about her looks in her normal form, to every guy wanting to fuck her & saying so in the comments section. Her looks "trumping" her talents by offering an improved illusion of flesh. It's not something I've normally seen with someone so young before either. But I was curious: does it work? If you get your face fucked with by the knife, wouldn't that lead to unrecognizable transformative effects? I'm sure there's a lot of risks, but you see shit-tons of people doing it. Like tattoos I guess. Anyone know anyone with positive plastic surgery effects to self-development? Maybe we should get nose jobs? hahaha.

Many people think being 'selfish' is a no-no word. Something that's bad, something that's not spiritual. Also, people often think that being selfish means hurting others. It may happen that other people get triggered and thereby they basically hurt themselves, but that's not your fault as long as your intentions are pure and that your intention is not to hurt anyone. It is perfectly possible to be selfish yet being compassionate and at the very least be aware and caring towards the feelings of others. Sometimes, however, you will have to do certain things that others may not like but which ultimately is for the better. In reality, existence is an interplay of giving and taking/receiving. It's just that you make sure that when you take or receive you generally want to try to make it a win-win situation. Mind you, something being a win-win situation might not look like a win-win situation. For instance, if you're in a phase where you really want to develop a sense of autonomy where you want to listen to what feels right to you, where you want to protect your boundaries, and where you want to learn how to do what YOU want, you might for instance simply refuse to do certain tasks other people ask from you if this strains you too much or takes too much energy for you. What allows you to be able to justify that for yourself is to see how important it is for you to learn to really listen to yourself an protect yourself, and to see that what you're doing is for the greater good; especially if other people asking you to do certain things is just something they do habitually, but which wouldn't really hurt them if they did it themselves. Take my own example; it's maybe a bit extreme and I'm certainly not saying this is the ideal life or even the ideal outlook, but there are important lessons to be learned from this: I went through a phase where, living with my parents, I refused to listen to anything they told me I should do. I didn't clean up anything, I didn't want to study so I didn't, I didn't want to do any work; All I did was to really be in my room, read spiritual literature, to contemplate a lot and think about life, to entertain myself with Youtube video's and start getting some enjoyment in my life, and to do video gaming. Eventually I also decided not to eat with them at the dinner table anymore, because every time there was dinner there would be this tension between us and I could just sense the tension, and sometimes my parents would indeed start saying I should do certain things or I should change, which I really didn't want to do, so eventually I started to avoid them even there. All of this was to protect myself from the outside world and its demands and expectations. I wanted to shape and create a life that I wanted, that I saw fit, not what other people wanted me to do or become. I wanted to live towards the vision that I saw for myself. I understood that I was triggering people but I had not intention to harm anybody. In fact, the anger that people towards me was not because I was doing something to them, it is because I was not doing the things they wanted me to do. I failed their expectations but I wasn't actively trying to bother anyone. In fact, I wanted to keep things as much to myself as possible, to be as independent as possible. I understood that other people being triggered and angry wasn't necessarily my fault, but that this was a part of themselves that they were responsible for, not me. Whatever emotions are yours, you are responsible for them, not the other, and the same applied to them, I knew. But that also means you are responsible for the conflict and distress you will come to feel if others get triggered by you And all of this I understood was important because I was important. I don't mean that in some egoic comparative sense, that I am superior and better than others. That's not what I mean. I mean that I knew that there was great potential within me to be a great force of love, light and Goodness to the world, and that it was my time to cocoon, to form my shield and go through an inner transformation comparable to when a caterpillar becomes a cocoon to start forming a butterfly. A cocoon needs a strong protective shield and it needs to a certain degree hide from the world in order to fully focus on its transformation, to fully focus its energies on its inner journey. Too little people take full ownership over their lives. Too little people are willing to take the steering wheel and boat their ship, listening to their inner voice to go into the direction that that inner voice is telling them to go, even if the whole world including their social conditioning is telling them otherwise. I'm not saying that saying f*** it to the world and being as selfishly as possible is the ultimate solution. We do however grow impartially, so taking some years to really focus on yourself, to follow your intuition, your vision and your desires certainly isn't a bad thing. It's the growing of the roots. Learning how to set boundaries means you're creating a shield for your energetical space (your aura, you could say), and now that this aura is protected you have the chance to really work on it without constantly worrying about it being affected from interference from the outside world, which is distracting and disregulating you. Learning how to fend for yourself, how to protect your energetical space and following your intuition, gives you a great sense of grounding and confidence. You get to know who you are and what you want, and you start to become clear about what it is that serves you, and what it is that does not serve you, and you will be able to communicate this very clearly and directly to others. You know who you are and what you want, and therefore it is not difficult and therefore it is not difficult to say NO to someone or something if you know that that is not going to serve you in the greater good. Mind you, there is mature selfishness and immature selfishness. Be very conscious about that distinction here. Immature selfishness means you're blaming others for your own situation, feelings and shortcomings. You do not take responsibility and as far as you are concerned the whole world is at fault except yourself. Mature selfishness sees that these things are your responsibility, and that you are responsible for solving them, and that you're willing to set boundaries to first close off interference from the outside world and then correct these situations, feelings and shortcomings by taking responsibility for them and working with them. Immature selfishness refuses to do certain things for others because one feels offended by someone else trying to burden them with something, and refuses to cooperate out of anger, hatred or bitterness. It is much more like a middle-finger approach. Mature selfishness may also refuse to cooperate or agree with requests or demands, but here one does not refuse to do such things out of anger or bitterness, but because one is conscious that one wants to utilize their time, energy and resources for things that one sees to be more valuable at that point for their psychological, energetical or spiritual development. One has a vision for themselves which is a top priority, and many things that are not in alignment with that vision have to be left aside, at least for the time being. On top of that, things that are being asked or demanded from the outside world may also simply be experienced as very stressful, draining or demanding and here one realizes that doing things from this negative place is ultimately not going to do anyone any good, not in the big picture at least. In a nutshell, immature selfishness is about blame and bitterness, mature selfishness is about self-protection, ownership and authenticity To come in better contact with this capacity of self-governance or ownership of your life, just start asking yourself questions as to why it is or as to why it could be important. What purpose does selfishness fulfill? What does it give me? What does it allow me to do? What do I sacrifice for not protecting my own boundaries? How, in the big picture, can me being selfish also serve others in the long-term or even short-term? (Very important question!) How can me developing these qualities ultimately serve the greater good? (because it certainly can and does). Contemplate these questions, and really go deeply into it. Then you will start to see that there is much more depth and validity to selfishness than you would have previously imagined. Also, if you're maybe afraid to make changes to take more ownership over the direction of your life, ask yourself these questions: What am I willing to make sacrifices for? If I don't take certain risks or make certain sacrifices, is the life I will have then going to be worth it? Is the bad really going to outweigh the good that could come from this? If you have any more personal questions or comments, you are free to send me a private message

Also, notice that when you walk you have the impression of moving with the current of time and it seems like you go from one place to another. In fact every move you make and any distance you walk, no matter how far you go, only what appears to be the world of form changes it's content, but the existence you feel that you are is static just like a movie. "Wherever you go there you are." As an analogy, what happens in the movie is in a constant transformation yet the screen is not going anywhere. Same thing with reality. You've always been Here. But not here as in the same dream, here as the eternal consciousness. Here as not affected by time or space. Since time & space are part of your dream.

The meat industry is cruel but killing animals or any life form for food isn't cruel. It's simply the nature of transformation. Believe it or not you can kill with respect and appreciation, just look at the reverence Native Americans have for their hunt. In fact you keep killing all the time whether you want it or not. You kill millions of bacteria as you breathe, you kill millions of insects with your cities and you even kill millions of animals with your plants. As long as you transform one energy form into another that has a higher potential you are fulfilling the purpose of your DNA, but if you are transforming that banana or that steak into a psychopath CEO scheming to rob people of their savings, then you should probably leave any food alone and not survive.

I don't think surrender is a good word. I think transformation and embodiment is better.

@DIDego No, but i think that if one has a natural and normal desire to date women and improve in this erea of their life then it can be a beautiful source of motivation that can be used as a leverage into transfromation, and that the real sollution for guys to improve with women is becoming a overall self-actualized man.A lot of probelems guys have with women would be solved by persoanal developement. Ultimatley one has to do it for themeselves and their own life and their own fulfillment and meaning, but the sexual drive within human beings is a strong one and much of human behaviour is driven by reproduction. One should move away from just women and dating as sole sources of motivation but if it gets them into persoanal developement and transformation then i think that is a good thing. The purpose of this artical was just to discuss the genuine things that make a man attractive and internally grounded and that helps him have the ability to meet women successfully, and the reality is, being a psychologically developed, self actualized man, is the ultimate sollution to the dating market and all the problems that men face in their dating lives. I see people posting on this forum that are getting hung up on very specific issues in dating. Personal development and self actualization would help them solve and make a lot of those issues non existent. Dating seems to be a very big entry point for guys into personal growth and the high level solution is ultimately moving towards genuine personal growth. Nonetheless specifics as to how it relates to meeting and dating women is welcome, i personally also just find dating, social and sexual dyamics pretty fascinating.

Here are all the quotes I've collected last year. Enjoy. "Do not make a distinction what is filthy and what is sacred. This is where the key is. Because involvement means unprejudiced inclusion." - Sadhguru "The juvenile idea of freedom is you want to do your own thing. A wrong idea, a wrong attitude, a wrong emotion can cause much, much more damage than poison." - Sadhguru "Once you get identified with something that you are not, your intelligence is no good. It just becomes repetitive. This repetitive intelligence is what we are referring to as karma. Your experience of life is 100% your doing." - Sadhguru "What you do in this world should be relevant to the situation in which you exist. Action is always about the situation, not about you. In a given situation, you simply do what's needed." - Sadhguru "Create wealth, because only after creating wealth, do many other dimensions open for you. Use everything as a step. Don’t deny anything. If you have money, you can meditate more easily than the poor person. You can have more time to yourself. You can have a small temple in your house; you can have a garden, rosebushes, where meditation will be easier. You can allow yourself a few holidays in the mountains; you can go into isolation and live without worry. If you have money, use it for something that money cannot purchase, but for which money can create a space. Wealth is as significant as beautiful music, as great literature, as masterpieces of art." - Osho "Success in any venture is simply the automatic consequence of being the best that one can be as a lifestyle, without looking for gain." - Doc "If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the maximum of what I mean by the term ‘a classic’, it is the word maturity. The qualities of the classic are maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style." - T.S. Eliot "The artist makes available for humanity knowledge that everyone knows but has forgotten. Great works of art are recognized universally. Although they may be clothed in the time and space in which they were created, they transcend that: they speak across generations; across borders, because they are putting into form something that is shared by everybody, and they give everybody access to what is in the depths of their own consciousness." - Spira “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” - Henry David Thoreau "Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung "A person who rejects things just out of the desire to be 'different' still conforms as their life, like that of the more typical conformist, is still shaped by an external source, that being the crowd. True nonconformity, in contrast, is displayed to the degree that one's life path, and thus character, are shaped by behaviors, beliefs, and values which are chosen for personal or authentic reasons." - Unknown "Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of nothing is the greatest; its essence dwells between the past and the future, and possesses nothing of the present. Nothingness has no center, and its boundaries are nothingness; this nothingness has the part equal to the whole and the whole to the part, the divisible to the indivisible, and it comes to the same amount whether we divide it, or multiply it, or add to it, or subtract from it. Everything is unfolded into everything. Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything." - Leonardo da Vinci "The hardest thing you'll ever do in life is to make that critical decision to say 'no' to yourself and to say 'yes' to truth at the cost of yourself. As soon as you do this, you will become an outcast. You will also be on your way to becoming a true hero." - Gura "Projection is when your needs, your fears, your cravings, and your agenda and ego color or distort how you see people." - Gura “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "If you are genuinely on the spiritual path, nothing will be clear. Everything will be a blur. The faster you travel the more of a blur it becomes." - Sadhguru "Suffering, in any form, is caused by a misperception, and a misperception is caused by a belief, an idea that's grabbed; a conclusion." - Adya "When we say pleasant, pleasantness happens in five different ways – if your body becomes pleasant, we call it health; if your body becomes very pleasant, we call it pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call it peace; if it becomes very pleasant, we call it joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call it love; if they become very pleasant, we call it compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call it bliss; if they become very pleasant, we call it ecstasy. If your surroundings become pleasant, you say, it is success." - Sadhguru "Transformation doesn't come through struggle. Transformation comes through awareness. The harder you struggle, the field of your awareness gets narrower and narrower." - Adya "You start to run up against archetypal patterns of holding. It's like a taboo against fully being what you really are." - Adya "To not struggle doesn't mean to not pay attention. To let go of struggle is a very engaged thing to do." - Adya "All you have is this moment of dreamstate being which can slam shut at any moment. The questions is: 'What are you going to do with it?'" - Jed "Only in silence do we have the stability to look very closely at our own experience — that's the usefulness of silence; in silence a question has great power." - Adya "There has to be the willingness to experience what is understood; what is seen. What is it like to not find a separate somebody there? What's the experience of it? What does it feel like? This starts to be the link between understanding and realization. Realization can only come spontaneously. This goes true for any and all spiritual inquiry: it has to be grounded in experience and a certain stillness of mind. Your thought processes don't have to come to a complete stop. Your attention has to be more on experience than it is on thinking." - Adya "We're dealing with a way of engaging what's the most important thing to you in such a way that you do not succumb to the ego pursuing its ideal and its image, and yet you also don't succumb to: 'It's grace there's nothing I can do, and it'll happen when it happens.'" - Adya "It's a willingness to be really honest with yourself: 'Okay, I'm resting in being. Is this what it's all about for me? Is this enough? Is this the ultimate truth?' That doesn't mean you leave being and start rushing, but from resting in being you keep your integrity. You always check in with your integrity of what it's about. Resting in being is the foundation, but then just because we feel good doesn't mean we have to throw out our integrity. 'Have I finished the job here? Is it over with?' Now you're resting in being, and you've got the energy of the question. It's very difficult to look at what's true when we're not in being. If we're all scattered, it's hard to ask the question in any useful way, but when we stop, and make room for the silence, we feel better, so we go to sleep. Can we not lose our integrity when we start to feel good? What am I really, even when I'm feeling good? That's the balance. It's like seeking without seeking." - Adya "Letting everything be is not an end unto itself, because if we see letting everything be as an end, then we actually end up in a certain state of total unintelligence." - Adya "If there is a belief pattern — that is totally allowed to be. If we're resisting the beliefs that we have or indulge in them, meaning 'I know my belief is true.' then nothing can happen. When you let it happen, you can see it. This feeling has a belief. This feeling is allowed to be, and it reveals the belief, and the belief is allowed to be, and the belief reveals itself even deeper. Never at any moment is one having the goal to remove it. The goal is what's true. What's it like to belief this thought? What has happened my whole life through believing this thought? What kind of life has this thought actually generated? No belief corresponds with what is, but you have to question them to find that out." - Adya "That's all that's happening: you have a thought, you believe it, you're living it out, you're manifesting the thought. The thought isn't true, but you can believe it and manifest it." - Adya "Inquiry must not be used with the intention of getting rid of something. There's a deeper intention which the love of truth, of what is. Just to do it to feel better will leave us continually still trapped in the confines of the ego." - Adya "There is this intelligence within us that arises when we're not manipulating our experience." - Adya "This isn't about removing negativity. This is sometimes removing thoughts that make you feel really, really good. Sometimes it's removing false comforts." - Adya "The illusion of personal will must be faced; it calls for the deepest surrender to truth itself. True realization comes through a complete relinquishing of personal will. There is no such thing as the personal, but until we see that there is really no such thing as the personal will, the experience of willfulness is something we must encounter. This is where we start to encounter the wisdom of being disillusioned. When we feel disillusioned with something, it means we're coming to the end of our willfulness, and it's only by coming to the end of our willfulness that this transformation happens." - Adya "It's not that one needs to destroy their opinions or their preferences. What does get destroyed, as we awaken, is believing them, is even the capacity to believe them. It becomes impossible to believe your own beliefs." - Adya "Start to meet them, face them, and see the truth of them: how is it that this body-mind unenlightens itself? What am I avoiding? What am I running from? What is it that I don't want to deal with? That can be internally and, or externally. The thing that we avoid will pull consciousness back to itself, because everything seeks truth, not only every being, but every situation. When we stop avoiding anything or any part of life in any way, it's often magical how staying in the presence of our being effortlessly happens. What do you really know about it that you really don't want to know? Act on what you know to be true. It takes courage, but moving from the truth and in the truth is always the safest way to go. Always. Moving in illusion pretends to be safe, but illusion always ends up hurting. None of us get away with denial. There's always a price to be paid." - Adya "What you judge yourself for is what you can damn near guarantee you're going to repeat." - Adya "It's not even bringing attention to consciousness. It's more like a recognition, an admission. It doesn't matter if you understand it. Just the admission, the recognition that it is present, and then stopping in that recognition. No speculation. No metaphysics. No ideas. It silences you all by itself. Right now consciousness is doing nothing. It's not a checked out doing nothing, it's not a dismissive doing nothing, it's not a lazy doing nothing. It's vital and alive and full of presence. It's the doing nothing where everything is being done. When it comes to you, you will see that everywhere. Realizing you can't make it happen really opens the doorway for the happening to happen. You can't make it happen, and what you can do is to simply come into a recognition and appreciation, an acknowledgement that consciousness is fully functional. Get the sense of it. Get the feel of it. Give your attention, your heart, and your soul to that. Just to the sense, the feel. The rest literally takes care of itself." - Adya "Our brain pays attention to what is changing. Our brain discounts what is not changing. Meditation is the art of paying attention to what your mind usually discounts. You might be amazed at how well life can figure things out through you. Life can clarify things for you, bring things to you. It does it for you, if you allow it to." - Adya "This is something you notice, it's not something you do. None of this outside of your experience. If you're thinking about it, and you're trying to impose it upon yourself, you're quite literally wasting your time." - Adya "When we're not in truth, no matter what our mind thinks, our bodies will tend to have some sort of contraction, some sort of discomfort. That is the underlying sense of spiritual guidance." - Adya "Self-improvement is just a dressed up form of self-conflict. When you discover the truth, bad habits can disappear." - Naval "You can save a lot of time by picking the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. Third comes how hard you work. They are like three legs of a stool. If you shortchange any one of them, the whole stool is going to fall. You can’t easily pick one over the other." - Naval "You can save a lot of time by picking the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. Third comes how hard you work. They are like three legs of a stool. If you shortchange any one of them, the whole stool is going to fall. You can’t easily pick one over the other." - Naval "Keep changing your objective until it arrives at your specific knowledge, skill sets, position, capabilities, location and interests. Your objective and skills should converge to make you number one. When you’re searching for what to do, you have two different foci to keep in mind. One is, 'I want to be the best at what I do.' The second is, 'What I do is flexible, so that I’m the best at it.' You want to arrive at a comfortable place where you feel, 'This is something I can be amazing at, while still being authentic to who I am.'" - Naval "Lean towards authenticity, towards getting away from competition. Competition leads to copy-catting and playing the completely wrong game. If the masses knew how to build great things and create great wealth, we’d all be rich by now. When you see a lot of competition, sometimes that indicates the masses have already arrived. It’s already competed over too much. Or it’s the wrong trend to begin with. On the other hand, if the whole market is empty, that can be a warning indicator. It can indicate you’ve gone too authentic and should focus more on the product-market part of founder-product-market fit. There’s a balance you have to find. Generally, people will make the mistake of paying too much attention to the competition. The great founders tend to be authentic iconoclasts." - Naval "Immediate doesn’t work. You have to put in the time. You have to put in the hours. You have to put yourself in that position with specific knowledge, accountability, leverage and an authentic skill-set in order to be the best in the world at what you do." - Naval "One thing that’s important in entrepreneurship: You just have to be right once. You get many, many shots on goal. You can take a shot on goal every three to five years, maybe every 10 at the slowest. Or once every year at the fastest, depending on how you’re iterating with startups. But you only have to be right once." - Naval "Your eventual outcome will be equal to something like the distinctiveness of your specific knowledge; times how much leverage you can apply to that knowledge; times how often your judgment is correct; times how singularly accountable you are for the outcome; times how much society values what you’re doing. Then you compound that with how long you can keep doing it and how long you can keep improving it through reading and learning." - Nivi "Adding more complexity to your decision-making process gets you a worse answer. You’re better off picking the single biggest thing or two. Ask yourself: What am I really good at, according to observation and people I trust, that the market values? Those two variables alone are probably good enough. If you’re good at it, you’ll keep it up. You’ll develop the judgment. If you’re good at it and you like to do it, eventually people will give you the resources and you won’t be afraid to take on accountability." - Naval "The first thing you realize when you’ve made a bunch of money is that you’re still the same person. If you’re happy, you’re happy. If you’re unhappy, you’re unhappy. If you’re calm and fulfilled and peaceful, you’re still that same person." - Naval "You want to figure out what you’re uniquely good at — or what you uniquely are — and apply as much leverage as possible. So making money isn’t even something you do. It’s not a skill. It’s who you are, stamped out a million times." - Nivi "People don’t understand what accountability entails. They think accountability means being successfully accountable. No—it means you have to stick your neck out and fail publicly. You have to be willing to let people criticize you." - Naval "Sometimes it takes suffering through the wrong thing to motivate you to find the right thing." - Naval "Judgment takes experience. It takes a lot of time to build up. You have to put yourself in positions where you can exercise judgment. That’ll come from taking on accountability. Leverage is something that society gives you after you’ve demonstrated judgment. You can get it faster by learning high-leverage skills like coding or working with the media. These are permissionless leverage. This is why I encourage people to learn to code or produce media, even if it’s just nights and weekends." - Naval "Early on, find things that interest you and allow you to take on accountability. Don’t worry about short-term compensation. Compensation comes when you’re tired of waiting for it and have given up on it. This is the way the whole system works." - Naval "There are two forms of specific knowledge: timely and timeless." - Naval "Technology is, by definition, the intellectual frontier. It’s taking things from science and culture that we have not figured out how to mass produce or create efficiently and figuring out how to commercialize it and make it available to everybody. Technology will always be a great field where you can pick up specific knowledge that is valuable to society." - Naval "Investing is one of those skills that can only be learned on the job. When you find a skill like that, you’re dealing with specific knowledge. Another good indicator of specific knowledge is when someone can’t give a straight answer to the question: 'What do you do every day?' Or you get an answer along the lines of, 'Every day is different based on what’s going on.' The thing is so complicated and dependent upon circumstances that it can’t be boiled down into a textbook form." - Naval "Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology. What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage." - Paul Graham "How to grow revenue fast? Make something people want. How to make something people want? Make something you want." - Graham "Creativity is the art of hiding your influence." - Unknown "When you feel a lack of something, or notice that you should have had this or that, you are thinking original thoughts. You see things differently and if you start researching the subject, you are probably very close to making the new big thing, or at least the newer and better version of something that already exists." - Unknown "If you do a business and your only plan is to make money, and you're gonna make a game like somebody else's game, and then you take two years and work hard, late hours, and you make that game, it comes out, nobody buys it, and then what? You wasted two years of your life maybe doing boring things. That's my biggest advice: don't do that. The human species has enough people just trying to pick low-hanging fruit and do the easy thing. We need people doing the hard jobs, and scouting unknown territory. 'I'm gonna out there and look for the fruit that nobody even knows what it is yet.'" - Blow "Don't take surface knowledge too seriously, because it won't matter in two years, but there is deep knowledge that will matter always." - Blow "Insights do not bring cure." “It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” - Marie-Louise von Franz "The four basic premises of writing are clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity." - William Zinsser "Let us have an end to such phrases as these: 'it is also important to bear in mind the following considerations' .... 'or consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect'. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word." - Churchill "The deeper question is to ask what’s worthy of orienting your entire life around. I’d also add to that, what is worth suffering for?" - Adya "God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear." "Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do." - Rowling "Take your time and enjoy it; that's what should be number one." - McMillen "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things. And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches." - Hill "Let fear be your guide and always go into the darkness are good mottos for spiritual autolysis." - Jed "Your authentic narrative — your unique pattern, your spiritual DNA — is not being hidden or withheld from you, but you won’t find it in any classroom or textbook, or get it from any so-called spiritual teacher, and you certainly won’t find it in the herd." - Jed “You can only discover your unique path by traveling it. Awakening within the dreamstate is not a one-and-done deal, it’s an on-going journey. Every step is the revelation of a new vista. It’s a process of continuous unfolding, but to discover your unique pattern you must first break out of the herd’s pattern and find your own way. That’s the death/rebirth transition no one likes to hear about, but there can be no adulthood without first dying out of childhood.” - Jed "If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future." - Paul Graham "It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting." - Graham "I think we just have to face the fact that elegance and curtness are two names for the same thing." - Graham "I studiously avoided all so-called holy men. I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own…I must shape my life out of myself, out of what my inner being tells me or what nature brings to me." - Jung "One’s absolute reality is beyond consciousness itself. It is the substrate of consciousness; it is beyond Allness or Voidness. It is prior to Creation, beyond the manifest and the unmanifest. It is prior to existence, beingness, or is-ness. It is beyond identity, yet out of it arises the Self. It is neither transcendent nor imminent, yet both. It is the infinite potentiality out of which the All and the One arise. The Self is the Presence expressed as existence, and out of that consciousness arises the sense of Existence." - Doc "Once you've set your intention, then you don't resist, because the intention will carry the rest of the way." - Doc "People will rise to be that which you see them as; people will rise to the expectation." - Doc "Intention increases the likelihood of what is held in mind. A person who calibrates quite high, if they hold something in mind, its likelihood of manifesting is sometimes close to hundred percent. People with a low negative calibration probably tend to manifest what they don't want. It's the power of who one has become and is." - Doc "One who can change his breathing, could then change his thoughts and feelings, which sets the breath on the foreground of any change you desire in your life." "Life is the energy of God." - Doc "Everything is much more powerful on the unmanifest. Whatever is on the unmanifest must, sooner or later, manifest. That's how it works. It must manifest." - Adya "Many people have many resentments about many things in their life, and, if you check back on them, you see that they were earned." - Doc "There is nothing stopping you from using your creative mind to invent some new gadget, product, service, or art which will generate $1 million in value. If you'd put as much energy into being creative as most people do in playing victim, you'd solve all your money problems." - Gura "Naivete is different than ignorance, and that's different from innocence, and they're all different than denial. What passes as spirituality is often denial." - Doc "Life is nothing but a fight against your own disbelief. Whatever you don't believe you can do is what you're fighting against." "Each and everyone completely and totally themselves determines their ultimate faith via their own choice and by no other. There is no arbitrary God that has to see to it that you go to bad places." - Doc "We're only going to experience that which we already are, because there isn't anything else." - Doc "The 'ancient craft of communicating events and experiences, using words, images, sounds and gestures' by telling a story is not only the means by which people passed on their cultural values and traditions and history from one generation to another, it has been an important part of most forms of entertainment ever since the earliest times." "Do work you’re proud of." - Neil Druckmann "Worry about fighting your way out of your embryonic pod first, then you can worry about what you’ll do when you’re out. Think in terms of the expansion, exploration and expression of your own unique pattern, and discover the one thing you can create that no one else can." - Jed "Don't grasp onto anything. Don't grasp onto the hells and don't grasp onto the heavens. They're all projections of mind." - Adya "Awakening has to have to do with a fundamental shift of identity. It leaves its rigid confinement to the psychological structures, to the physical structures, so we no longer have a rigid self-definition in our mind. Identity lets go. What it goes to varies from person to person. Someone can realize total unity or absolute pure awareness. There is various degrees. The similarity is the shift of identity." - Adya "It's one thing to have that understanding when you're in a room by yourself. It's quite another to not only sustain it but be able to bring it forth and live from it, not only exteriorly but how we relate to our own psychology, our humanity, our fallibility. That unfolding is the real journey. That requires a fierce amount of humility and determination." - Adya "We all hold vastly paradoxical experiences that combine totally opposing points of view at the same time." - Adya "It's easy for the ego to hide in clarity, to hide from our humanness, our fallibility. To be honest with oneself, it's not how to deal with all the issues, it's the vital thing that begins to open the door. Honesty is to no longer lie to yourself. Am I clear here? In that conversation, was I clear? How about my reaction to that? When I contracted, or got angry, or got jealous. Honesty is to say: 'Oh, I got angry. I got jealous. I really did.' Everyone is walking around trying to be so untouched by everything, it can be hard to admit everything." - Adya "Spirit leaps up and out. There's another movement: spirit moving down and in. It is endeavoring to embody, and, as it does that, it begins to put pressure on the dark places. The unresolved, psychological material, anything that you don't want to look at, you'll feel increasing pressure put on it. It will become harder and harder to sustain not being honest." - Adya "Life itself is the crucible that brings these to the fore and develops the avenues through which spirt can operate." - Adya "Compassion is a quality of love, but there is a quality of love that really deeply opens us and really makes us available. It's hard to be honest with yourself, if you don't have a deep access to love. A love for your own humanity. The hardest thing you'll ever accept fully is your own humanity. Once you've got that, you will have accepted everybody else's in the world. To be able to not just see what's happening for them but to have a real deep tenderness for what's happening for all of us, for the whole human experience. I'm not talking about creating an emotion but the opening of the heart." - Adya "There's the intellectual hiding with beliefs and opinions and misunderstanding, there is the emotional shutting down, and then there is the ultimate fear of non-existence." "The experiences are important, but after those what's important is how easily do we get triggered? How much are we grabbing hold of identity? How much we grasp onto ideas that aren't really true?" - Adya "Silence isn't just a lack of sound. It seems like that at first, but it's a door opener." - Adya "Spiritual experiences do not confer human perfection upon you. Yo can still not have your emotional human ego act together at all, even if you have really big powerful spiritual experiences." - Adya "We don't actually get to successfully repress anything. It just comes out in a different form." - Adya "Who you become begins to have an effect beyond causality. You're getting out of the ego, and you're seeing who you are is now determining a field, and the experiences of the field are different than what they were. What you need begins to appear of its own." - Doc "The clue to success is to just be exactly what you are, be completely and totally, a hundred percent, what you are, and the world will provide all that you need." - Doc "When the prefrontal cortex was added, the animal brain was not removed. There you got the whole human experience explained; the source of all suffering." "The downside of blame is guilt. Every time you lie, even though you intellectually believe it, on the unconscious level, you realize you've lied." - Doc "Own that you are the source of all the phenomena that happens in your life." - Doc "The way to transcend the mind is to just watch it, because it dawns on you, after doing this for a while, that you are the witness of the mind." - Doc "Each thing is what it is by virtue of its karmic inheritance and not by anything else. You are not at the effect of anything else than except your own spiritual intention. There is no cause out there. You are it. By virtue of what you are, and by virtue of what you are, is what you've said 'yes' to." - Doc "When something throws you out of easygoingness, that's something in yourself. It's like a light going on: look here. When you're not thoughtful, when you're not tolerant, when you're not calm, then that is pulling up something that you gotta clear. You clear it by looking within yourself, and finding it there, owning it, forgiving yourself for it. The kindness that you show to yourself, the willingness to forgive yourself then transfers in the willingness to forgive others." - Doc "A thing is only true by definition within a stated field, which is called proximate field. The proximate field can be political positions at the time, it can be the weather, it can be glamor. One of the most powerful proximate fields is the media in which you can take anything and glamorize it. The infinite context is not the proximate field but it's the field which has the power to transform the unmanifest into the manifest. The power of creation comes out of an infinite field of the unmanifest becoming manifest, and the mechanism is intention. Truth, then, can only be defined within a certain context. The content of the field is the ego. The proximate field is the spiritualized ego. The infinite context is the spirt. The content is linear and specific. The proximate field is semi-linear. The infinite context is beyond time." - Doc "You're encompassed by the infinite divinity, and the presence is within, but something precludes that awareness." - Doc "This world is becoming that which we hold in mind." - Doc "Whatever we do, do it in a beautiful way, because that's what communicates to people. That's more important than simply focusing on what we're doing. We're conveying something through 'how'. All the time. What part of myself I really throw into this is the most important element of anything. Do what you do with great commitment, but it's all a temporary thing. You might as well enjoy the doing of things. Because it's all a sand mandala, including our lives. Something's going to come by and do the old cosmic sweep right through the middle of our life." - Adya "Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence." - Watts "I haven't tried my hardest. I'm going to really try my hardest, and see where that gets me. I made a deal with myself that I wasn't going to pussyfoot around and sit on my hands all day, that I was going to work as hard as I possibly could, and be as honest as I possibly could with what I was working on, and only work on the stuff that I loved and felt passionate about, and see where it would take me." - McMillen "Trying to get rid of yourself is a very self-centered activity." - Adya "Your relationship with yourself is projected upon the world." - Adya "It's important to take responsibility for the shit you're dreaming up. If you don't like hell, then stop creating it." - Gura "The web of life is about the opening of our senses to the marvelous system of intercommunications between the individual organism and the cosmos, which gives us the feeling of being literally one body within the external world." "When we bring children into the world, we play awful games with them. Instead of saying, 'Welcome to the human race. Now, my dear, we're playing some very complicated games, and these are the rules of the game we're playing. I want you to understand them, and then you learn them, and then when you get a little bit older, you may be able to think up some better rules.' Instead of being quite direct with our children, we say, 'Maybe when you grow up a bit, you'll be acceptable. But until then, you should be seen, and not heard. You're a mess. You gotta be educated, schooled, and whipped until you're human." - Watts "The strategist takes responsibility for their interpretation, evaluation, and sense-making, and life stories. You become responsible for everything. There's nobody to blame, other than your own mind. You take responsibility for how your mind is interpreting, evaluating, and making sense and meaning of reality." - Gura "The strategist is infused with a grand purpose and vision of what mankind could become, of what the world needs to move forward in the evolutionary process. The strategist is a midwife to the birthing of a new humanity through this evolutionary process by understanding it, and working with the various systems that are involved, and by transforming oneself through self-actualization to become a better midwife for mankind." - Gura "The strategist worries most about failing to observe universal principles. They will tend to want to walk their talk; hold themselves to that high standard." - Gura "There is a deep appreciation of how challenging it is to be a mature, responsible adult, and how rare one's capacities are. Unlike pluralists, strategists have a more realistic sense of what it takes to actually change old patterns, habits, and systems." - Gura "The strategist has a very deep understanding of human nature, but it comes with the trap of self-inflation." - Gura "Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun." "We labor over the stories. Four years on Toy Story, the first year and a half was story development alone." - Lasseter "For me, two principles are truth and love. My orienting value is, 'I'm going to be as truthful and honest as I can possibly be. No matter what. I'm going to commit to speaking and articulating what's most truthful as far as I experience it, and also what's most helpful.' If I don't live this out, I'll be violating my soul." - Adya "It's the perennial appeal of magic; hiding in plain sight, there is a world within a world that we could all access." - Rowling "With the twin powers of focus and intent, look harder and see better. Behold the quotidian miracle. The implications of that single observation can change everything, if you let it. If you want to pierce through the segregated cosmetic layer into the integrated structural layer of the dreamstate, you can do it the same way you do anything else. Shine the light of your mind upon it with focused intent. Begin with little miracles, and progress to actively watching for pattern. See how things unfold along certain lines, watch the relationship between your thoughts and feelings and your surroundings; between the inner and outer; between hopes and outcomes; between all the ways something didn't go, and the one way it did. Feel your own energy within the larger energetic environment. The barrier between you and the integrated state is of your own making and fueled by your own emotional energy. Make a pronounced declaration of intent by journaling about it." - Jed "Self-honesty needs to be cultivated in a radical way. Every single day you open yourself up a little bit more to the truth, to painful, bitter, stinging truths. They sting your ego, which is that which is inauthentic within you. Let it sting you, and slowly kill that ego every single day. Every single day, every single hour of your life, you're being presented with little opportunities for either killing off your ego, suffocating it, or aggrandizing it, expanding it. Go head-on into legitimate suffering. Legitimate suffering is the suffering you encounter when you face the truth in whatever way. Just face the truth with your relationship, face the truth with how you feel about your physical body, face the truth about your financial situation, face the truth about all the stuff you've been procrastinating on." - Gura "Rebirth is the basis of all life. The one rule, the first concept, that got into their head was the idea of life and death." - Coppola "All of your desire is a perversion of the desire for God. When you desire pussy, what you really desire is God. And you get God. You get God in that limited form. If you desire pussy, you get God in the form of pussy. And you see God in that thing you desire. You see God in that pussy, and that's what makes you fall in love with it." - Gura "When you have a lot of ideas about how reality is, or should be, you stop being open to direct experience. A belief is an idea, a thought, of something that you either think is true or false. Every belief held, feels true. You build up your web of beliefs, and then you use that foundation to judge all new beliefs. Beliefs generate strong emotions. Beliefs are self-fulfilling. Beliefs are circular: the only thing that justifies a belief is another belief. Beliefs determine what's possible or impossible. There exist meta-beliefs: beliefs about beliefs. For example, 'I don't hold any beliefs. Most of my beliefs are accurate. It's good to believe certain things. Some beliefs are safe. If I stop believing something, I'm doing something wrong. There are no alternatives to holding beliefs.' Beliefs are not looking out for you. Beliefs create paradigm lock. A paradigm is an entire perspective on reality. The danger is not that you're gonna hold wrong beliefs; it's that you hold beliefs at all. When you stop the game, you're going to open yourself up to true growth." - Gura "Our thoughts, without realizing it, tend to be in tune with a prevailing energy field, which we have brought in out of our own agreement. One has agreed by propinquity, and the energy field now dominates one's consciousness. " - Doc "I like to take themes that I feel strongly about, and then put them in different kinds of situations, and explore them in different contexts." - Lucas "Deep issues don't get resolved by surface level external solutions. When you experience real growth, the issue simply becomes a non-issue. You won't need defensiveness anymore. There's no longer a need to exert willpower over the situation. Here's a litmus test for real growth: you look at your emotional responses to challenging situations in that specific area of your life that you're trying to develop in. Have my emotional responses improved? Am I less reactive? Do people no longer push my buttons? Do I have less emotional need in this area of my life? Do I not think obsessively about this area of my life anymore? Fake growth is success and achievement. Real growth is not about getting what you want externally but about releasing your need for it internally. The way you presently are is reinforcing all the stuff that you don't like about yourself. You can't stay loyal to that, and at the same time remove all the crap in your life. The two are one. All the crap in your life comes from the way that you are, not from your external surroundings. It will be tempting to go for the stuff people can praise you for. No one praises you for internal work." - Gura "Becoming great requires doing a lot of challenging things that will force you to grow. The ego would much rather play video games than face all that crap." - Gura "Do it. Just do it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Yesterday you said tomorrow. So just do it. Make your dreams come true. Just do it. Some people dream of success while you're gonna wake up and work hard at it. Nothing is impossible. You should get to the point where anyone else would quit, and you're not gonna stop there. No. What are you waiting for? Do it. Just do it. Yes, you can. Just do it. If you're tired of starting over, stop giving up." "The people who have the intention to live an awakened life and put their lives behind it, not just practices on the cushion but their whole life, after five or ten years their life starts to look more and more like a real awakened life. Somebody else that could've had the most mind-bending experience on earth but did nothing to follow it up, it is like a dream that once happened, it has not transformed their life." - Adya "Happiness is not something that you acquire. It's your capacity to surrender yourself to this very moment right now." - Gura "You're constantly interpreting, making meaning, filtering things, coloring things with your own biases, and putting your goals on certain things. This is all the work of your mind." - Gura "Do you how you develop passion for life? By taking control of yourself." - Gura "The prize of life is living beyond survival, connecting with life itself on an emotional, intuitive, spiritual level; that's what makes life satisfying." - Gura "You need to take responsibility, and you need to realize that actually it is you who is responsible for perpetuating your stuck situation, and that the only one who can turn it around is you." - Gura "Stop living according to the standards and norms of everybody around you. Take control of your life, of your own mind. Your mind is keeping you stuck in patterns of thought, emotions, and behaviors which are perpetuating the mediocre results that you've been getting, that have made you demotivated, lazy, depressed, and frustrated with life." - Gura "Logic is a handmaiden to emotion." - Gura "Your mind wants all the fruits and benefits of the change, without actually changing itself." - Gura "Oftentimes, you have to make a change for the worse, before you can make a change for the better." - Gura "Total understanding of reality is possible." - Gura "Self-deception is inescapable. Mistakes are inescapable. Do not beat yourself up for making mistakes. Make more mistakes. Fail faster." - Gura "We don't get beyond our narrative by disparaging it." - Adya "The people that we least want to see in ourselves, that's usually our blind spot. There's a bigger part of that person in you than you want to recognize." - Adya "The quality of our connection before we open our mouth and engage is so important." - Adya "Slow, incremental, voluntary encounters with our fears; it can really transform a life." - Adya "Awareness alone is curative. For this to work, it requires constant awareness. Awareness is not the same thing as logical knowing. Awareness is an in-the-moment observation of what's happening. If you want to eliminate the deep, underlying neurotic needs that you have, which are the sources of unwanted behaviors, the only way to do that is by shining and penetrating those with the light of your awareness: overeating, porn, internet, procrastination, shyness, guilt, perfectionism, workaholism, depression, anger, anxiety, fear. Believe that the deepest change will come from awareness of the damage that you cause to yourself, and from a natural desire for reality and truth." - Gura "The solution to dealing with strong negative emotions is very, very simple: it's to allow yourself to fully feel the emotion." - Gura "Early on in your childhood, you received wounds. You opened yourself up and you were vulnerable. You got hurt. You started erecting defenses to protect yourself. You adopted vows. You spend a lot of your mental energy maintaining these defenses. These defenses are all a sham. Part of becoming a mature, emotional adult is to dismantle all the defenses that you erected in your childhood and in your teenage years. They prevent you from being aligned with the truth." - Gura "Your automatic ego reaction, when you get a stab of negative emotion: you want to act stoic and cool, you want to deny that this is even happening, you want to distract with entertainment, suppress, control and manipulate." - Gura "Give yourself permission to fully feel. A strong emotion usually comes in waves. Every time you get hit by a new wave, open yourself up, allow it, feel it, do nothing." - Gura "A neurotic individual holds back and resists reality. To resist reality, you have to deny the present moment, which includes all the emotions in your body. The only way you can deny the present moment is to disassociate from your body by going into your mind, into fairytale land." " - Gura "The feeling of being hurt does not actually hurt you. What causes psychological damage is resistance." - Gura "The definition of magical pill is avoiding of emotional labor." - Gura "Thoughts create emotions. If you are not conscious of this filter, and you don't take control of it, then your life is going to be very miserable, and you're going to struggle, and you're not going to create the kind of results that you want, because you're leaving the interpretation up to chance. You have the power to assign meaning and interpretations to external circumstances with your mind. If you abdicate that control to somebody else, or you just leave it in the hands of fate or God, then you've got a lot of randomness in this system." - Gura "You think negative thoughts, you create negative emotions, you take negative actions, which create negative results. And this cycle continues. That's one option you have." - Gura "Lazy interpretations lead to suffering." - Gura "Many people are not able to identify emotions. We don't understand what the messages of our emotions are." "Relative means that it's relative to other things and that it's a conceptual construction. Absolute means that it's inherent to reality." - Gura "Significance is relative to your life, to a life. If you didn't have a life, nothing would be significant to you. Things are significant to you because they can either help or harm your life." - Gura "Significance is relative to survival. The most meaningful and the most significant things in the world are those which threaten your life." - Gura "Your mind uses meanings to manipulate you. You need to notice that you are a puppet of your mind's meaning-making apparatus." - Gura "You've been creating meaning in your life way beyond what you need to survive to the point where it has become toxic and neurotic." - Gura "You are creating meanings unconsciously to get yourself into action. Whenever you're not getting the thing that you labeled as good and you're getting the thing that you labeled as bad or harmful, all your negative emotions come up, and you suffer." - Gura "You're not satisfied with life because you've assigned all these meanings to things and you've disconnected yourself from being. You're wrapped up in illusions, and illusions are hollow, and therefore your life feels hollow, because you keep chasing phantoms." - Gura "People get addicted to reasons. You construct reasons in order to get yourself to do stuff that you probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place. You need all sorts of reasons to motivate yourself. But when you really want to just do something, when you have a natural spontaneous desire to do something, you're just gonna do it; you don't need a reason to do it." - Gura "You can grind through life, which is obligating yourself with all these meanings and reasons. Or you can free yourself of those and then you can play." - Gura "Being will give you unconditional satisfaction. You will no longer need to chase circumstances in life. You will be free to play life however you want without moralization, without obligations, without feeling pressured." - Gura "Build your emotional vocabulary. Apathy: depression, defeated, bored, lazy. Grief: sad, hurt, betrayed, disappointed, guilty. Fear: terror, nervousness, worry, insecurity. Lust: craving, possessiveness, greed, frustration. Anger: disgusted, pissed off, vengeful, annoyed. Pride: gloating, icy, judgement, arrogance. Courage: confident, creative, happy, secure. Acceptance: compassion, glowing, loving, playful. Peace: awareness, calm, tranquility, complete, freedom, centered." - Gura "Looking at an emotion is the best way of managing it." - Gura "It's not going to stop, 'til you wise up. So just, give up." - Aimee Mann "Do the important things that are non-urgent." - Gura "Slow down your pace, but still work. Explore fresh mediums and sources." - Gura "Masterful word-class creators, they know how to mix and match otherwise weird mediums and weird sources." - Gura "Focus on the technique instead of the output." "Create a sandbox for yourself: a creative sandbox where you can mess around and experiment." - Gura "Create a catalog of inspiring ideas." - Gura "Beige is basic organism survival: babies, mentally ill people, senile people, bum on the street. Each stage has a transformational dilemma. For beige the dilemma is that he has to learn how to interact with other organisms. Purple: magic and tribal. Purple needs to let go of the tribe. Red is egocentric power: this is pure unadulterated use of power for self-gratification. Red starts to backfire. There is an alternating pattern of the psyche fighting for itself and then the psyche sacrificing itself for the sake of the community. Blue is called absolutist conformist rule or civilization: tradition, rule of law, heritage, family, obedience. There is a strong believe in good and evil. There is a strong believe in a god and a devil. Orange is individualistic: success and science. Orange believes that the point of life is material abundance and comfort and scientific progress. With orange comes the rise of business. Green is relativistic, caring, and communal. The problem with green is that it's overly idealistic. Yellow is systemic thinking and integration. Yellow is the first stage that understands and is aware of the prior stages. Turquoise is holistic global actualization. The ego likes to think that it's two steps above where it actually is." - Gura "There is a boundary between the lower and the higher self. When you are threatened, you go into your lower self. Are you aware of what triggers you to cross this boundary? Make a commitment to never make decisions when you're in your lower self. Make a commitment to disengage from people when you're in your lower self." - Gura "We're not very good at seeing the true value of things." - Gura "Successful people are passionate people; they're inspired by life. They're very, very hardworking. Abnormally hardworking. Successful people are extremely persistent. Successful people are rule breakers. Successful people are clever; they're good at manipulating situations and people to get what they want past through. Successful people are highly creative; they generate massive value. Successful people have a training in technical skills. Successful people value excellence. Successful people are visionaries; they're leaders. Successful people are intuitive; they're guided by their heart and by their gut. Successful people are decisive. Successful people are motivated because they want to impact the world, they want to have a positive contribution to society. Successful people are highly focused; they're able to select one field and invest years of time and build up a lot of experience in that one field. Successful people are ambitious. Successful people have a rapid speed of implementation. Successful people have a spine; they stand up for themselves. Successful people are optimistic and hopeful. Successful people are courageous; they're willing to act in the face of fear. Successful people value knowledge and learning. Successful people are willing to endure the cost, and they're willing to make sacrifices to get success. Successful people are highly self-motivated. Successful people are long-term thinkers; they think ten years down the road. Successful people are pragmatic; they're practical. Successful people work for themselves." - Gura "Self-actualization is the realization of one's potentials, capacities, and talents: the fulfilment of one's mission in life, a fuller knowledge of one's intrinsic nature, getting really in touch with your authentic self, and becoming a whole human being. It's an unceasing trend towards unity and integration within yourself." - Gura "There are two types of pleasure: scarcity pleasure and abundance pleasure. Scarcity pleasure is the relief that one gets from the loss of tension and anxiety. Abundance pleasure is the ecstasy of functioning at one's prime." - Gura "Self-actualization is the pursuit of humanity, creativity, knowledge, fairness, rationality, playfulness, authentic love, virtue, truth, beauty, and a feeling of joy, and real deep gratitude, and fulfilment with life." - Gura "Self-actualization is living to the peak of human capability." - Gura "It's possible to free yourself of your neuroses and your fears and any kind of other limitations that hold you back and sap your aliveness feeling." - Gura "Create a life where you never have to worry about money again, where your work is your greatest joy. Develop full emotional control. Become a really grounded, emotionally imperturbable human being. Have a deep understanding of how the world works. Cultivate deep self-love. Physical vitality and energy. Become a leader. Be creative to the ultimate degree. Live a life with integrity, a life based on principles. Realize the true existential nature of yourself, other people, and reality. Contemplate and reflect on life." - Gura "Step number one is knowledge: you're lacking accurate, high-quality information. Start making small changes in your life right now: eliminate toxic habits, start building good habits. Focus your attention on mastering your emotions. Become financially independent. Think wiser, and hold this vision in your mind every single day." - Gura "The root cause of all addictions is fear of emptiness. The degree to which you're emotionally mature is the degree to which you can sit alone in an empty room without any external stimulation. Your life is empty, but you're running away from that reality. Sit with emptiness, and do nothing. Don't go into fantasy. All addiction is basically emotional immaturity." - Gura "Self-actualization is not about fixing problems. It's about living life to its fullest." - Gura "Instead of hating your sins, which only makes them stronger, you want to love your sins to death." - Gura "What's the best life possible for a human being?" - Gura "The greatest human beings who ever lived were sages and mystics. They are true masters of being human, of understanding reality and life. They're comitted to truth, consciousness, goodness, and love, and a deep mastery of these things to the point where it's embodied effortlessly. They radically turn inward to completely transform themselves." - Gura "There's a big difference between being enlightened and being a sage proper, a masterful sage." - Gura "A sage is not a cold, smart-aleck intellectual who just lives in theory land but has no knowledge of himself, his emotions, no mastery of relationships, no mastery of his body, his energy." - Gura "If you have a strong vision, and you're comitted to it, the 'how' will solve itself." - Gura "Set your top value as truth. Purify your body, your mind, your emotions, and your habits." - Gura "The purpose is something you construct. Just because it's a construction it doesn't mean it shouldn't be constructed. If it floats your boat, if you enjoy it, then do it. It doesn't need to be true in some sort of existential sense for you to do it." - Gura "You need to take this enterprise very fucking seriously. You're very serious about self-mastery even though you realize that it actually in a sense is part of the illusion. You need a temporary objective. Your objectives will change on this path a lot." - Gura "The prime directive is to increase the quality of your consciousness. Everything else is a distraction. Everything that happens to you in your life, including the most mundane things, are tests of the quality of your consciousness. Every single action that you take in your life, every single domain of life that you interact with people in, family relationships, business relationships, these are all tests and opportunities for you to either show up in low consciousness or in high consciousness. High consciousness means a degree of accurate perception. Accurate perception is the key to living a good life. Every single problem you have in your life ultimately comes from inaccurate perceptions of reality and nothing else." - Gura "Low-quality consciousness is permeated with fear, dogma, ideologies, rigid belief systems, clinging to ideas and pet theories, little picture thinking, short-term gain thinking, blindness to backfiring mechanisms, mechanical behavior. The way you treat people is highly unequal. It's also characterized by moralization, projection, materialism, arrogance." - Gura "High-quality consciousness is selfless and giving. It's fearless and courageous. Focused on direct experience over belief. Committed to truth and accuracy. Values learning and growing very highly. It's an intelligent machine imbued with wisdom, foresight, intuition, and vision. It's creative, spontaneous, and organic. Takes one hundred percent responsibility for its actions, behaviors, results, and how it feels. It's humble. It's big picture understanding. Tends to think in terms of long-term gains. Becomes aware of backfiring. It's characterized by indiscriminate love." - Gura "Your feelings, motivations, always reflect the real you with perfect accuracy. If you feel anger, negativity, inadequacy, anxiety, that is a reflection of how you are and what you are on the inside, and not how other people make you feel." - Thomas Campbell "Two very important factors for gauging where your consciousness level is: the quality of your feelings and motivations." - Gura "Emotions tell you exactly how you are." - Gura "Motivations tell you exactly how you are. What are you pulled towards in life?" - Gura "How do I feel in an hourly basis? How loving am I? How fearful am I? How intellectually open am I? How well do I govern myself? How noble are my motivations?" - Gura "If the prime directive of your life is success, sex, money, that's going to be a wasted life." - Gura "Increase your capacity to love. Increase your capacity to feel happy independent of circumstances. Increase your capacity to be intellectually open. Increase your capacity for self-governance. How effectively can you control your behaviors and actions when you decide to pull the trigger? Increase your capacity to face fear. Transcend selfish and protective motives." - Gura "A goal has to be specific, compelling, written down, reviewed every single day, aligned with your highest values." - Gura "Man assumes that he knows himself. But man doesn't realize that he's a machine. You really need to appreciate how deeply asleep you are, before you will take up the quest for raising your awareness." - Gura "There are four main features of your mechanicalness: lying, imagination, talking, negative emotions. And distraction, criticism, and judgment." - Gura "In order to become a different being, man must want it very much, and for a very long time. A passing desire, or a vague desire, based on dissatisfaction with external circumstances will not create sufficient impulse. The evolution of man depends on his understanding of what he may get and what he must give for it. If man does not want it, or if he does not want it strongly enough, and doesn't make the necessary efforts, then he will never develop. Man must acquire qualities which he thinks he possesses but which he actually deceives himself about." - Gura "What does it mean that man is a machine? It means that he has no independent movements, inside or outside of himself. He is a machine which is brought into motion by external influences and external impacts." - Gura "Life runs you. It triggers you. When you have higher states of awareness it's because someone or something triggered you into them." - Gura "All the absurdities and all the contradictions of people and life in general become explained when we realize that people live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and yet do not know that they're asleep. The first obstacle in the way of development of self-consciousness in man is his conviction that he already possesses self-consciousness, or, at any rate, that he can have it at any time he likes. It's very difficult to persuade a man that he's not conscious, and he cannot be conscious at will." - Gura "All the logical understanding of the world will not get you awareness." - Gura "If you're listening to advanced advice, and you're not taking action on it, it will actually retard your growth." - Gura "We're in the era of modern capitalism. Business is shaping society, culture, government, science, religion, and everything else. There is no facet of society which is not touched very heavily by business. Marketing people are architecting systems to trap your lower self. You get trapped into low consciousness patterns." - Gura "Eyeballs directly equate to power. Power directly equates to money." - Gura "The chimp part of your mind: salt, sugar, fat. Sex. Power and status. Fun, play, and entertainment. Validation. Security and comfort. Desperate love. Vanity. Gossip." - Gura "Ways in which businesses and society exploit your lower self: food, education, celebrities, books, video games, shows, popular culture, fashion, tech, romance. Society is an amusement park for the ego. You're being distracted from being conscious of your own death, the shortness of your own life, and you're being distracted from the lies you tell yourself." - Gura "You're aim in life should be to find your true self. Not achievement and progress and power and efficiency." - Gura "The culture you grew up in has imprinted your mind with norms and values and beliefs of which you are unconscious." - Gura "The biggest likelihood for self-deception occurs when you ignore the possibility of self-deception occurring." - Gura "When you don't know something, you don't know that you don't know it." - Gura "The Zen master and the yogi have realized through self-observation that there is no such thing as a self. That allows them to flow with life. From the outside, it looks like they have complete self-discipline. In fact, they have gotten rid of the idea of a self. And now everything they do, there is no resistance in it. There is no internal suffering or struggle anymore. They are flowing with life, and that looks effortless, and that looks very rigorous and disciplined." - Gura "There is a very huge difference between being a victim and no free-will." - Gura "Your biggest problem in life is internal struggle, self-interference. Your biggest problems are not external problems; it's how you interpret these things and how you react unconsciously to these things." - Gura "Faith is the surrender to nature. Faith is not believing blind ideas. Faith is the recognition that you actually were never in control in the first place." - Gura "When you live in falsehood, you create your own hell." - Gura "There is nothing to lose. The only thing you lose is the illusion of control." - Gura "Consciousness is only raised on an individual level." - Gura "Learn the big picture. You need a vision and goals. Unhook from distractions. Build positive habits. Purpose. Journaling. Meditation. Reprogram your subconscious mind." - Gura "You're suffering from the problem of having sloppy vocabulary. You talk about things without knowing what you are really saying." - Gura "There is a big difference between knowing something implicitly and explicitly. Implicit means you haven't bothered to articulate it, to explicate it, to make it clear." - Gura "The most conscious teachers, how do they communicate? Extremely clearly, extremely simply." - Gura "Reality, existence, being, hallucination, magic, time, energy, matter, mass, reason, perspective, truth, God, emotion, concept, psyche, science, religion, delusion, illusion, consciousness, absolute, relative, wisdom, spirit, ecology, insight, creativity, paranormal, philosophy, psychology, mind, integrity, profound, basic, evil, virtue, excellence, confusion, logic, theory, knowledge, awareness, experience, belief, universe, epiphany, enlightenment, depression, love, self, meditation, contemplation, thought, perception, essence, skepticism, substance, intelligence, evolution, suffering, karma, mysticism, occult, am, is, I, be, sex, love, relationship, happiness, sadness, money." "There is no contradiction between enlightenment and becoming a clear thinker. There is no benefit you get from remaining a sloppy thinker." - Gura "The quality of people's life and the psychological maturity and the degree of self-actualization that they experience in life is directly proportional to the quality of the questions they think about." - Gura "Projection is when your needs, your fears, your cravings, and your agenda and ego, color and distort how you see people. It's when you superimpose your emotional baggage, your own stuff that's happening with you, all your own shit, onto others. You make a lot of assumptions about the other person based on your own needs. You try to think what the other person is thinking. You see others as they are for you which gets you into a lot of trouble in the end. When you're relating to other people, you're relating to yourself. It's about how you're reacting to yourself, your own expectations, your own assumptions, and your own story you created about that person. When you start to take responsibility for that, that's when your relationships start to turn around. That's when you can start to learn from people. Until then, you're only listening for what will serve you. The closer the person is to you, the more projections you make on them, which is why it's so difficult for you to relate successfully with them." - Gura "Signs of when you're projecting with teachers: when you have imaginary arguments with the teacher, when you get into the teacher's life story, when you start to criticize based on little nitpicky things." - Gura "Your true authentic self would be: -Confident. Completely confident. -Assertive -Disciplined -Internally grounded in his own values -Emotionally stable -On purpose in life -Deeply passionate. About all he does in life. -Having zero limiting beliefs, of any kind. Believing in a pragmatic way that you can accomplish whatever you want. -Having a sense of strength and power. -High self esteem, knowing that you deserve. -Having the desire to explore all life. -Being completely self expressive. -Zero fears. -100% positive. -Social and extroverted. -Generous. With yourself, your time and the work you're doing. Doing work that's promoting the well-being of other people. -Selfless. Idealistic, driven by values. -Having high consciousness. -Healthy. Completely clean, sober and fit. Vital. -Sexual. Comfortable and open about his or her sexuality. -Comfortable with his or her masculinity/femininity (or, if it's the case, with something in between). -Accepting of the opposite polar (masculine/feminine, opposite sex). Comprehensive and understanding. -Completely open-minded. Willing to consider that you're wrong and to readjust. -Having a sense of nobility about the way you approach life." - Gura "All ideas and all perceptions that you have are not the thing you're looking for. You have to come back to obvious things over and over again. Anything that you can imagine is not it. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is elsewhere. The best approach is to become very present. You have to be very honest: what is your present identification? Don't try to pretend that you're nothing. Observe existence itself. With a lot of focus, patience, and time, you need to trust that pure observation will produce huge for you. Long stretches of focus are required to make serious traction with this work." - Gura "Neither blame nor excuses preclude consequences." - Doc "You feel like you are going backwards, but you are not. You have earned the right to see how awful you have been." - Doc "As soon as you start underestimating your ability to be fallible, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. Anywhere that you're feeling certain about something, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. Any assumption that you take for granted, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Anything you think is self-evident or obvious, you're setting yourself up. Anything you think you know based on belief or hearsay, that always sets you up for a mindfuck. Anytime that you're relying on authority that you just blindly trust, you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck. You set yourself up for a mindfuck, any place that you don't have direct experience of a thing. Anywhere where you have a vested interest, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Anywhere where context is ignored or underappreciated, you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Life is much more perspective dependent than you have ever thought possible." - Gura "Mindfucks you will encounter in your life: you think you're the body, you think reality is real, you think truth is logical, you think materialism is correct, you think religion is just superstition and myth, you think your favorite ideology is correct, you think your thoughts are trustworthy, you think that society and culture is healthy, you think success is equivalent to happiness, you think evolution is random, you think science has no blind spots, you think the twenty-first century is advanced, you think what school taught you is correct, you think history is objective, you think that death is real, you think evil exists, you think you're the good guy, the hero of your story, you think that other people hold you back from getting the success you want in life, you think your problems are material, you think your fears are real." - Gura "Always investigate deeper." - Gura "The biggest mindfuck comes when you think there can be no more mindfucks." - Gura "When a person is in denial, they may feel happy because nobody is pointing out to them how they’re ruining the lives of everyone around them. So you come out of denial, go through the pain of facing what you’re facing, work out the guilt about it and forgive yourself–then life gets beautiful again…until the next thing comes up. This is characteristic of the whole spiritual pathway." - Doc "The higher the level of consciousness, the more powerfully you affect the collective unconscious. An unconditionally loving individual has a profound impact overall, you see. You look at this person and he’s not doing anything, but what you don’t know is that without him, the world would probably collapse." - Doc "Balance cannot be taught. You have to find the right balance for you. Complacency versus neurotically disciplined. To know when too much is too much and too little is too little, and when it's hurting you in either direction. Being gentle versus being harsh. You'd be wrong if you weren't context-sensitive. Left brain versus right brain. Theory versus practice. There's problems with every extreme, even with always being in the middle. It's a dynamic equilibrium that you're going for. Life purpose versus enlightenment. Pragmatic versus idealistic. Rejecting culture versus studying culture. Brutally honest versus compassionate." - Gura "I recently discovered that configuration in the collective: only by suffering and pain can you save your soul. This looks to pain and suffering as the savior." - Doc "Writing a resume is all about understanding what the employer wants, who you're appealing to, and what their needs are. Be very clear about what you're offering specifically. The best resume is a simple bulleted list of exactly what you do, what you specialize in, what you're going to provide for this employer, what your skillsets are, how much experience you have in them, and some of your personal characteristics: on time, good working with other people, friendly, sociable, diligent and hardworking. reliable. Lead with the portfolio. The resume should be sparse, an outline of exactly what you're providing to the employer. They don't have time to read through your garbage, flowery language, and philosophy. All they care about is what are you providing? Are you a good match for exactly what they need? Put yourself into your employer's shoes." - Gura "Marketing is all about how to sell something or convince someone of the value of what you have to offer." - Gura "Judgement is a rejection of reality." - Gura "What leads to improvement is not criticism but self-reflection." - Gura "The core of why you care about what other people think about you is because somewhere deep down inside of you, you feel like what they offer you can have true and lasting value. You're after approval. There are real costs to being you. There's a cost for standing up to truth." - Gura "Success will come to you, if you hit all these points: you're working hard, you know yourself, you're aligned with your life purpose, you've chosen a path of mastery; that means you're going to be very committed to it for years and decades." - Gura "You acknowledge all the uncertainty and mystery of life and you let reconciliation happen organically." - Gura "Awareness of homeostasis will increase your odds of successfully changing your center of gravity. The mind will resist, the body will resist, people around you will resist, when you try to make a change. Negotiation means that you know when to ease off the gas pedal a bit, and you also know how to press on the gas pedal when you know that there's a little bit more room to grow. It's knowing when to push yourself and when not to." - Gura "The cure for procrastination is action. Act in spite of the resistance. Break the cycle." - Gura "Self-Love is the only teaching." - Gura "I would rather be right in the end rather than insist that I was right from the beginning." - Gura "Your life is the actualization and realization of what Self-Love means and why it's important and why it all boils down to this and not something else." - Gura "We're lacking Self-Love the most, and that is the ultimate lesson of the universe, not just for humans; it's much more profound than some feel-good emotion for humans. It's an existential force that drives all of evolution." - Gura "Make a list of all the ways in which you don't love yourself." - Gura "Learning Self-Love is the point of human life. If you loved yourself completely, you would have no more problems in your life." - Gura "The difference between knowing what a thought is and not knowing what a thought is, is the difference between living in a self-constructed mental prison, a hellscape, in which you suffer all the negative emotions that you suffer: all your anger, sadness, all your frustration, all the difficulties you have in relationships, with money, and health — all those problems are largely conceptually created — and living in freedom." - Gura "There is a key distinction we have to make to meditate effectively: the distinction between thinking and awareness. Your best days are your worst days." - Gura "Stage one: just watch. Don't try to control anything. Stage two: active detachment. Release every thought that comes into your mind. Stage three: awareness focus. Put your awareness on awareness itself." - Gura "Purification equals pain multiplied by mindfulness." - Gura "Mythology was designed to give a society the tools they need to be a society: they have to have a common belief system, they have to believe in the same gods, they have to believe who their leaders are, they have to believe what their history is, they have to believe who their heroes are. Those are the things that combine to make a society. If you don't have those things, then you don't have a society." - Lucas "Art tells a narrative of society. That's how people come together and have a common belief system. You can give speeches, but it doesn't resonate that much. In ancient times, they had statues of their heroes, they had mosaics of their religion; those were all things that told people in a very emotional way — it's done emotionally, not intellectually — that this who we are." - Lucas "The only thing that is real is what exists right now in the present moment." - Gura "You're not aware of how judgments backfire on you. Judgments that you make about others always apply to you. Judging is like creating a law or a rule, which then your mind stores, and then that law or rule gets applied to all future situations, because your mind tries to stay consistent. That makes you inflexible in life. You're not able to flow with the circumstances of life. You're not able to be spontaneous in life." - Gura "The love that you've ever felt in your life, that's a little sliver of infinite love. The very being of consciousness is love." - Gura "Love is absolute acceptance of everything. Love is to be conscious of the beauty of creation. Love is tolerance of the intolerable. Love is surrender of the self. Love is selflessness. Love is the dissolution of all boundaries. The purpose of life is to love. Your job here is to learn how to navigate all these obstacles and still love despite all of that, and that's the most difficult thing. That means you have to get over yourself." - Gura "You don't want to be waiting for love to come looking for you, knocking on your door. Love is something you need to create. You are meant to be a fountain of love: a walking, talking, breathing, fountain of love. That’s what you're trying to become. This is done proactively, deliberately, consciously, not accidentally and randomly when good stuff happens to you. You put the love into everything. The biggest problem with people is that they expect love from external sources." - Gura "A true test of your love is non-judgment. How non-judgmental can you be?" - Gura "What prevents love? It's the ego's fear of dissolution." - Gura "What is the opposite of love? It's egotism, narcissism, fear, hate, judgment, unconsciousness, violence, intolerance, manipulation, tribalism, exploitation, power-games, ignorance, closed-mindedness, and division. You cannot love so long as you're preoccupied with food, sex, survival, status, success, money, addiction, drugs, ideology, politics, religion, or logic." - Gura "Every fear you have is one roadblock to you being infinitely loving. And, ultimately, the fear you have to give up is your fear of death. If you're afraid of death, you will always choose your own life over truth and love." - Gura "Practicing acceptance, non-judgment, and surrender is a great technique. Being more kind, more giving, more caring, and more vulnerable is a really good practice. Allow yourself to cry. Practice unconditional self-love. Love your body. Feel love during difficult and bad times." - Gura "It's going to be impossible for you to love fully until you accept the ignorance of mankind. There needs to be a very deep acceptance of ignorance." - Gura "To create a great life you need to summon the courage to tap into love. Cowards do not have great lives. Love requires the greatest courage." - Gura "Love is something you have to work for. It's not just an emotion that comes and goes. Being strategic, being pragmatic. It's not just about being airy fairy and always believing that everything will just happen for you. Love is having a vision for your life, a vision of what you can offer to mankind, and then waking up every morning on time, and working ten, twelve hours a day, figuring out how do I train myself? That's necessary to be able to actualize it." - Gura "Practical structures are necessary to live the kind of life you want to live, the life that is aligned with your highest values; that's not something that happens by accident: that's something you have to create, construct, architect, and you have to be very deliberate about it. Construct your environment, an environment that's suitable for living your values, which makes living your values easy and automatic." - Gura "Don't get so spiritual, or so idealistic, that you forget about the pragmatic, utilitarian requirements of life. And don't forget that your spirituality and your ability to stay in a high-consciousness state is going to be highly dependent upon the environment that you're in." - Gura "When you get the small stuff down, the big stuff becomes easy." - Gura "To become that which people talk about, to be kindly, to be forgiving, see and witness the sacredness of all things." - Doc "Liberation is when you don't have to work towards anything. You work from it." - Adya "Divine relativity: how to be awake in the world." - Adya "Just holding things as possible can be quite profound. It's possible that the whole battle with life can cease. No prerequisite has to occur. You can just stop." - Adya "To surrender into a radical letting go is a death which allows us to wake up. But to surrender back into life and your humanness is also a death." - Adya "Find the divinity not jut outside of humanity in the great unborn space of emptiness but find the divinity right in the world of form through a complete embrace of life as it actually is. Embrace everything that it is to exist. It is not a movement of seeking to avoid it. When you completely and absolutely embrace it with an immense cosmic 'yes', you experience life with a buoyancy and joy and peacefulness. It's a way of finding freedom and liberation both beyond life and also in life." - Adya "Everything seems to be complete. Not complete because you've left it behind but because you've discovered the completeness within it. You've discovered the grace within the chaos." - Adya "Step outside of your own imagination and open to something larger than anything you know, something larger than your own personal resource. That's what faith is." - Adya "It's useful not to just know but to feel that that part of your being that's unconditioned has no problem with your humanity. It's important for the humanity to feel that, because that's what it's looking for: something in the universe that's not judging it, condemning it, or even praising it." - Adya "In every conversation you have, even conversation that you have with yourself, endeavor to speak only from what is true, really honest. What is the deepest truth in this conversation? Just become aware of what you're doing and why you're doing it." - Adya "All human forms have an endless capacity, potentiality, to more and more clearly reflect the ground of our being; that place of profound wisdom and love and joy." - Adya "Meaning orients our lives, it gives us our direction." - Adya "Each thing and each being is of infinite value." - Adya "Turning points are little moments of choice when you can choose to pivot an interaction towards understanding and peace." - Adya "Enlightened action is action that's not distorted by the self, and so it tends to feel clean, instantaneous, unpremeditated, and unselfconscious." - Adya "The negative side of self-consciousness, the kind that leads to hesitation, doubt, and criticism, all forms of unnecessary suffering happen right in that gap." - Adya "Little things in yourself can end up to be immense things." - Adya "As soon as you see how something's working, you see that something could be engaged or resisted or neither one of those. You start to realize that each moment actually becomes a choice. These are moments of what you want. And life doesn't care what you want. If you want to desire, there's no entity up there that will punish you. It's just unsatisfying." - Adya "We see what happens when someone's not truthful. Chaos ensues. Internal chaos, internal division, and external chaos, external division. Be truthful, honest, and sincere. Not only with others but with yourself: do not be deceitful to yourself, do not lie to yourself, do not hide from things, from yourself. Tell the truth about things. The cost of not being truthful is very high; they're higher than people imagine that they are. You can be afraid and still tell the truth. Just because you have a hesitating emotion doesn't mean that you have to be dishonest. You can tell the truth anyway. As you do it, it feels like a deep quiet. Because you're no longer running from anything. Truth and love are the two most powerful embodiment tools to lead an undivided, good, beneficial, benevolent, useful, beautiful life." - Adya "We need to drop our head into the heart." - Adya "Spiritual inquiry is a way of questioning every idea, every belief, every assumption you've ever had about yourself. It's taking that light of awareness and intellect and focusing it down and starting to dismantle what's untrue." - Adya "What is worthwhile orienting my entire existence around? If you don't decide, your conditioning will decide for you." - Adya “It is all about paying attention, about being extraordinarily conscious of what is happening inside you and all around you.” - Adyashanti “Embrace and love the part in you that you want to get rid of.” - Adyashanti “Real awakening leads to a deep and profound sense of compassion and courage—without your compassion becoming a burden.” - Adyashanti “It’s not about getting out of the challenges of life, but it’s about pouring oneself into life, as an act of redemptive love.” - Adyashanti “Harmony doesn’t always look pretty—it has reality to it.” - Adyashanti “The more undivided we feel, the more we have to offer the world.” - Adyashanti “Be with all parts of your experience, or you’re a prisoner of ‘shoulds.’” - Adyashanti “No matter what’s bothering you, keep trying to find the you that is having the problem.” - Adyashanti "Whenever you have a choice to see things through the eyes of fear or love, choose love." - Adyashanti "When you were distressed, when you were angry, when you were confused by any incident, no exceptions, that is your refusal, at that moment, to give up your false riches." - Vernon Howard "Everything's okay, and then you simply see how the heart responds." - Adya "The past doesn't create the present. The present creates the past." - Adya "If you're more open, more available, more trusting, the antenna, the way of perceiving life, starts to reach out beyond the boundaries of your skin." - Adya "Encounter another human being heart first instead of head first. Encounter everything and everybody that you meet heart first." - Adya "The magnetic field draws to you that which is of your own level of consciousness. You become an energy field as you let go of negativity. You draw to yourself that which is the consequence of that field." - Doc "Just by holding awareness on something, you come to understand it with great clarity without even trying to understanding it. Awareness is highly intelligent." - Adya "When a conversation gets challenging, that's an opportunity to see what set of unconscious ideas you have. What is your underlying philosophy that you were operating by? They're not just abstract ideas that float around in your mind. They're ideas that you perceive through. They dictate the way that you experience life." - Adya "The freedom to take the form that the moment demands or calls forth: our orientation to life becomes what our true nature really is which is an infinite field of potentiality." - Adya "Do we know how it translates into activity, conversation, and disagreement?" - Adya "The price of staying awake is every reason you have to stop loving. Who are you so resentful and bitter towards that you would never ever want to let them into your love?" - Adya "To be awakened is to have no more argument with yourself, no more argument with the world, no more argument with others, and no more argument with God." - Adya "What would it be if I was in this moment from my depth?" - Adya "To look within means to attempt not to distract yourself." - Adya "Divinity is existence beyond self. As soon as the verb, the activity, of self emerges, it distorts and disregards divinity, it takes the place of divinity. It takes the place of that freedom, clarity, and love, and it lives in obsession with itself." - Adya "If the bodhisattva thinks there are sentient beings who need to be saved by a bodhisattva that bodhisattva is not a bodhisattva at all." - Adya "We're always in a state of becoming. The becoming isn't a search for completeness if you've already found the completeness that's always there. The becoming is the capacity to always embody that completeness more clearly, more compassionately, more wisely, more fully without end." - Adya "The attempt will be made to crucify you if only with a thought, an idea, a judgment coming from the outside, but usually the greatest crucifixions happen from the inside; we crucify ourselves." - Adya "The belief gets turned into emotion and very deep and profound feeling. If what you think and what you feel tells you the same thing, you feel really stuck. Whatever you belief, your body duplicates and turns into feeling. You're not experiencing reality, life. You're experiencing a thought in your head that you believed. Everything you feel is just because you believe this belief; that's all that's happening. This has no connection to anything other than belief. It's not connected to reality. It's all made up. What keeps it alive in your system is you really believe that it's real. " - Adya "One can bypass one's conditioning, one's karma, completely, and, every once in a while, you'll bypass it, and the revelation will be so deep that it will wipe it out of your system. Even though you've transcended it, the mere fact you've transcended it, and realized the ultimate, doesn't necessarily mean that it's all got flushed out of your system. Anytime you go to the absolute, it is like a washing machine for karma. You never come back from an immersion in the absolute the same as before you went. It is the most powerful purifying element there is. It's very rare that someone will transcend everything and then all their unconscious belief structures will just fall out of their system. There usually will be some there. And you know they're there, and you know you have to look at them, if they keep repeating and repeating. You have to bring consciousness to them." - Adya "Nobody has the power to make you happy or miserable. You do that to yourself for yourself. If somebody comes up and says something and you feel miserable, you feel miserable, because you've told yourself something about yourself based on what they said. That button gets pushed and you take responsibility: your mind is doing it to you. It's not them, it's not the situation, it's not the world. The body goes into contraction, into upset, into hurt; these are the ways that truth has been biologically hardwired into your system: when it goes into conflict, the system is saying, 'Take a look. You're veering from what's real.' There's always a hidden belief that you're believing." - Adya "When you have a negative emotion, the only thing you're experiencing is a negative belief." - Adya "Clarity knows how to meet anything that happens. Your mind doesn't need to know how. You don't need beliefs." - Adya "If something is recurring, you have to go in there — not analyze it, figure it out — just notice what you're experiencing is a belief. What is the belief? And then sit there and feel. Don't try to get rid of it. This is the feeling that your belief produces. You can willfully take on the belief, and then see what it feels like." - Adya "The core belief holds all the others intact. The ultimate belief is, "I am separate. I am separate from God.'" - Adya "True compassion isn't something that I feel for another. True compassion is when I know in every fiber of my being that you are me. This is life meeting life, it's not me meeting you. That perception breeds compassion. Even if you have to say, 'No, you can't do that.' in your heart, you haven't separated from them at all. There's a natural spontaneous flow of love, of compassion. Your actions naturally reflect that. You don't have to try to be compassionate or loving. When you go up to somebody, anybody, you can feel there's an energetic connection. You can spot the exact word that you speak that severs the connection, if you speak anything that's untrue. You'll start to get the hang of how to be even in challenging situations with very challenging people, how to be with them in such a way that you don't sever it. You can say 'no' without severing it. As we realize our true non-separateness, we also discover our true human autonomy. Life gets to live itself through you in the way it chooses, and then you're not a carbon copy of anything or anybody." - Adya "You love but it can't change something. Don't expect any result." - Adya "There's into and out of infatuation. There's not into and out of love." - Adya "Sometimes life moves on even though there is love." - Adya "Why am I born? This is it. To have this experience right here. The meaning of your existence is to take that next step. This is not a philosophy, it's the feeling that starts to come alive in you. And then one moment isn't sacrificed for a better moment. There's something sweet about each moment, even if it's not what you expect. You can't fake that. It's who you are. It comes from the lived experience of your true nature." - Adya "Any part of yourself that you've pushed aside is that part which will keep pulling you back from whatever place of revelation you're in. Nothing gets left behind. Nobody gets the option of leaving any piece of themselves behind. Whether you deem it illusory or real, it doesn't matter." - Adya "The whole manufacturing of a false self needs one of two things: it gets its energy from resistance or indulgence. Even indulgence is resistance. Because anytime you're moving away from something, you're moving towards something else." - Adya "Deep in human consciousness, there is the idea, 'I can't stop resisting. Because, if I stop resisting, nothing will change.' If you judge a thought, which is a form of resistance, it sustains. It can sustain for a whole lifetime." - Adya "As long as we're horrified with ourselves, we're stuck with ourselves. We can't start, much less sustain, anything, as long as we don't get over the beliefs that are creating blame and shame, and taking everything personally. Shame is arrogance inverted." - Adya "The central misunderstanding is 'I am aware.' That there is someone, something, who is aware." - Adya "Reality is playing hardball. It's not playing spirituality, it's not playing incense and candles." - Adya "Your life isn't falling apart. It might look like it's falling apart at certain times, but it's actually falling together; it falls into place." - Adya "That which continues to recycle that's worthy of looking at, because that's catching consciousness and dragging it back into a dreamstate. Those catches, it's not necessarily good enough just to watch them. They are formed by patterns of belief and assumption. What you're experiencing is an unconscious belief. If it wasn't believed, it wouldn't be happening. Look at those areas, and see what's being believed. What's the worldview here? How does this piece of conditioning see things? What's the structure that's holding it together? It's something very immediate, very in the moment. In this instant, there is a belief pattern, and that's what's recycling. Something is believed that's out of harmony with what is. Your system is showing you that. You can ultimately condense any piece of conditioning down to a single, short one sentence statement of belief. The belief has to see through itself. It's one thing to see the belief, but just because you see it doesn't mean that you're going to see that it has no truth. If you get conscious enough, there's a part of consciousness that knows that it's not true. But that's not the part that counts. The belief has to realize that it's not true. Then it lets go of itself. It will pop like a bubble. This isn't difficult. The difficulty is maintaining the focus and the simplicity." - Adya "Looking for something is a mistaken idea of what looking within means. Looking within can easily become narcissistic, totally self-absorbed. If you stop at the boundary between outside and inside, it's totally still." - Adya "What happens when this thought is believed? What's experienced? What's the impact?" - Adya "His consciousness no longer lived in that world, and, since it no longer lived in that world, it didn't have to solve that world." - Adya "We tend to attract what we're caught in." - Adya "When the recognition of you as the eternal presence gets strong enough and bright enough, then the dense energy field of pain can't live in your system anymore." - Adya "When you wake up from that generational transmission, you do a favor to everybody in that family lineage throughout time. It frees the energy field." - Adya "We're committed to things we don't even know we're committed to." - Adya "So much of human difficulty comes from what we imagine we know." - Adya "The more conscious we become of our essence, the less we know about it." - Adya "Words have great power to reveal and they have equal power to conceal." - Adya "If we're not listening, then spirituality is just the pursuit of one idea after another." - Adya "Spiritual inquiry is a way of directing your listening." - Adya "What would it be like to not be moving around in life with this endless narrative? What if the narrative was just to cease? No conclusion. No good or bad ending. Just stop." - Adya "Real awakening leads to a deep and profound sense of caring. It's caring without anxiety, caring without your compassion becoming a burden." - Adya "While the ego is often using spirituality as a way to escape from life, spirit is seeking its awakening as a means of a deeper, more conscious embodiment into life." - Adya "Own and accentuate your feminine qualities." - Gura "Caring about what other people think of you, trying to get approval from other people, worrying that you're going to make a fool of yourself, or going to get rejected, or going to get embarrassed, believing that what you have to say is not as valuable as what other people have to say; these beliefs get into your system, because, as you're growing up, you have different conditions that you're put into. One or two traumatic events in the past have suppressed your natural extraversion." - Gura "The six pillars of effective communication are: assertiveness, authenticity, open-mindedness, empathy, clarity and listening. If you have something to say, say it assertively, so you will be taken seriously. Identify your values, boundaries, and own agenda, so that you can communicate them authentically. Smiling and being afraid to contradict someone may be interpreted as being inauthentic. Be open-minded to the positions of others, which helps you grow as a person. Be empathetic to your listener, which builds common ground. The more clarity you use in communicating, the less likely it will be misconstrued. And don't just hear; demonstrate active listening." - Gura "If we're going to love well, we have to stop seeing people as problems or their situation as problems." - Adya "The only way to be happy in any relationship is to discover absolute truth and love. Otherwise, it's what we get on the movies: sticky, gooey, ridiculous nonsense." - Adya "'Something's wrong.' and 'I don't want to feel this way.' What do you experience when those thoughts are believed? Your body is experiencing your thought." - Adya "The resistance to what is, is always much harder to manage than what is." - Adya "We are constantly having to respond to existence. Even if you've realized that you are all of existence, it doesn't mean that you know how to flow with existence." - Adya "Simply returning to the state of clarity is not necessarily going to solve the apparent dilemma of the world of relationship." - Adya "You can be very, very clear but also be holding on to a lot of nonsense. Your clarity may be very situational." - Adya "Throw yourself into your life, even though you don't have all the answers, because only then do you come upon that reservoir of wisdom that we only come upon when we have to, when there are no other options left." - Adya "You have to want to be clear more than you want to hold on to what's making you not clear." - Adya "What does God want? This right now. How do I know? Because this is what's happening right now." - Adya "When we consciously allow it to be what it is, allow it all to be unknown, there's magic that happens there." - Adya "You don't know what's right and what's wrong, because so much in your life that you would say was wrong, and you didn't want it to happen, are the very things that led to a deeper state of consciousness. Often it's pain and suffering and hardship that's an intimate part of the progress of our lives." - Adya "Suffering is optional. We're insisting on our position. We're holding on desperately as life's trying to do everything it can to help us. If you can see that you're holding on and let go, it doesn't need to be more than that." - Adya "Don't wait. If you're going to sit, sit, but don't wait. No expectancy." - Adya "Your unconscious views the lack of doing as death." - Adya "If you're going to do, do something worthwhile. The doing energy, if used wisely, will take you back to being." - Adya "The deeper it goes, you get a much more grounded experience of what oneness is. Oneness isn't just a suffused experience of being grabbed by the beloved into oneness." - Adya "Can you feel inside you, the very deepest place within you, that you would want people to be as they actually are more than as you'd want them to be?" - Adya "The more conscious you become, the more painful untruth becomes." - Adya "Whatever we're doing, we're doing simply because that's just what it's doing through us. And we don't have any ulterior motive, or some holy motive, or some noble motive, because it's not true. It's just the way life's flowering. It's entertaining itself. If someone gets helped, fine. If they don't, fine. I'm not here to help anybody, anyway." - Adya "Every activity or desire will reveal that the basic goal is to achieve a certain feeling. There are no other goals than to overcome fear and achieve happiness. Emotions are connected with what we believe will ensure our survival, not with what actually will." - Doc "Self-awareness is increased much more rapidly by observing feelings rather than thoughts." - Doc "Every life experience, no matter how tragic, contains a hidden lesson. When we discover and acknowledge the hidden gift that is there, a healing takes place." - Doc "The mind projects onto the future with the expectation that the past will be repeated." - Doc "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as You, not I, would have it. If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, Your will be done!" - Christ "Resign yourself to writing lots and lots of rubbish, you just got to write that out of your system, and, sooner or later, you'll hit what you should be doing, and what is your genre." - Rowling "Harry is our eyes onto the world. That's his function. Ron and Hermione are colorful, interesting characters. Harry is a blank slate. Different cultures are able to project onto him what they want him to be. It's the archetype of the hero: the guy without the quirks; he's the vessel." - Rowling "'I don't want to do this unless I can change the world.' Geez, how big of an ego is that?" - Adya "The impulse for enlightenment is the first arising of enlightenment in your consciousness. The interest itself is a sign that there is a spiritual maturity that's already arising into consciousness." - Adya "Part of the journey is to go from a walking contradiction to a walking paradox." - Adya "A fairy tale takes place out of time. It's a timeless story. It takes place in an entirely imaginary kingdom. We pleasurably leave reality. We all understand 'once upon a time': you're going to a different space. The themes are timeless." - Rowling "Dive into the well of being so that you can reemerge with something deeper and more beautiful to offer." - Adya "People are hoping to have an experience that's big enough and complete enough and total enough so all of this will happen without any intention forever. That's not a very reasonable thing to shoot at. That's not a very good ultimate aim. You don't have to wait for the experience. You can step up right now." - Adya "It's almost like a willing suspension of higher truth so you can get down into where it hasn't penetrated." - Adya "Anything that's happened to us that was too big for us to remain conscious while we experienced it, it gets trapped in our system. Those things are waiting for you: can you experience this now? If you can, then it can go through you, and you can start to find some release. If you can't, then you tend to go in circles again." - Adya "I would love everyone who came to see me have had two or three years of arduous meditation under their belt and two or three years in courses that taught them how to think well for themselves. Inquiry is a way of using your thoughts and your perception in a really clear and in a really precise way." - Adya "We have to be open to seeing how extraordinarily wrong we are." - Adya "Say what's true for a day. Before you open your mouth and say anything, internally, while you're looking at this person, just say, 'I love you.'" - Adya "Be aware of your human limitations. Don't make them wrong." - Adya "When your life becomes the continues unfolding of miracles, there's too many stories to tell." - Doc "In a freer state, that which is chosen manifests in our life effortlessly." - Doc "The way to become that exciting person whom people want to know is very easy. We simply picture the kind of person we want to be, and surrender all the negative feelings and blocks that prevent us from being that. What happens then is that all we need to have and to do will automatically fall into place." - Doc "Everyone in our life is acting as a mirror. They are really reflecting back to us what we have failed to acknowledge within ourselves. They are forcing us to look at what needs to be addressed. What aspect of our smaller self needs to be relinquished?" - Doc "A conscious breath has the power to turn around automatic, conditioned responses within us. It's the way we relate to our conditioning, to our experience, that is the difference between freedom and bondage." - Adya "There's very few things that you could choose in life to do that's trickier than to be a spiritual teacher. You need to have your human growing up part pretty well established. To be a good, mature, adult, functioning human being is the second consideration after the awakening itself. Because they do not come together." - Adya "When we remove the blinders of ignorance, wrong-knowing, we'll see where we can be and that's where we'll want to be." - Jed "The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity." - Rowling "It's connected and it comes out of the whole fabric of English history and folkloric mythology; that's why it works. Things don't work if they are a result of feeble-minded fantasy." - Fry "Magic is perennially fascinating. The appeal of the idea that one can do something that will influence this large scary environment in which one has to exist is still enormous." - Rowling "Children's books have dealt with ultimate questions: where do we come from? What's the nature of being a human being? What must I do to be good?" "The only reason anyone has ever, in the history of mankind, committed a single evil action, a single selfish action, it's because there was something they were going to gain from it: money, sex, power, prestige." - Gura "You face every fear and conquer it with love, which is the ultimate rule for living life." - Gura "When we say that someone is good, we mean that he has God-like qualities. God's qualities: truth, honesty, integrity, concern for all rather than just oneself, doing what is necessary for the benefit of all, working for the benefit of others, selflessness, self-sacrifice, love, non-judgment, humility, acceptance, non-attachment, consciousness, the recognition of beauty in everything, giving rather than taking, benevolence, fearlessness, wisdom, intelligence, creativity, flexibility, holism, the ability to see the whole and not just the parts, forgiveness of anyone for anything, balance, not selling out. Such people offer the world hope, and a glimpse of what they could become. This process requires conscious participation. Devote your whole life to actualizing goodness, and then take the actions that goodness demands." - Gura "Non-attachment allows me to participate in life, and be totally at one with it. I have nothing to gain from it, and nothing to lose from it. Consequently, I can one hundred percent participate without getting caught by it." - Doc "Our comfort zone is our conditioned zone." - Adya "The spiritual instinct is aiming at becoming deeply conscious of itself. It will put us through nice life experiences and very difficult experiences in order to accomplish its task." - Adya "If you don't have your own center, the world is going to define it for you. Your psyche is unconsciously going to go out there and it's going to attach at whatever gives it meaning, because that's what we're hooked up to do." - Adya "The gaze of eternity is that which is never caught and defined by what's happening in the world of time and space." - Adya "What might deeper alignment look like?" - Adya "A museum is a way of improving the educational experience of children in a city without having to go and trying to solve all the problems of every single school." - Lucas "Use well-chosen words to engage sound, sight, taste, touch, smell, and movement. Then create unexpected connotations among your story elements, and set your readers' brushfire imagination alight." "Vocabulary, grammar, style." "Imagine if your founding myth was, 'I poured myself into the world, as an act of loving sacrifice, in order to redeem everything that was hurt, in pain, confused, about my own human incarnation, which will allow me, then, to broaden out and touch others." - Adya "Stories were the means that you conveyed massive truths. You don't convey massive truths through facts." - Adya "Peoples', individuals' lives will contain a lot of archetypal elements. Those are the kind of lives that tend to live over the centuries. People refer back to them, because there was something about their life that embodied a huge amount of archetypal material." - Adya "I'm in no way capable of having a personal relationship with God. It's gone. Hasn't been here for a long, long time. Something better took its place." - Adya "Just imagine if nothing you did was based on a feeling of fear or insecurity." - Adya "The paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing — the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-levee and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like — whole mansions, if you have the energy." - King "Book-buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on a plane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages. This happens when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviours, their surroundings, and their talk. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story." - King "Stories consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from A to B and finally to point Z, description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader, dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech." - King "Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translation what you see in your mind into words on the page. If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it in a way that will cause your reader to prickly with recognition. Locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story that any physical description of the players. Nor do I think physical description should be a shortcut to character. Good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else. In most cases, these details will the first ones that come to mind." - King "What people do tells us more about what they’re like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they — the speakers — are completely unaware." - King "Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him out." - King "Somebody did something, the environment did something, and your mind interpreted in a way that makes you feel small, or contracted, or angry, or jealous, or fearful. And those are really valuable moments. The body will go into discord as soon as we're not in harmony with truth. It gets nervous, it gets upset. You can get very specific: 'Exactly what am I telling myself that's shrinking me?' Get very precise. Sometimes you can't just wait till it all goes away. When you start to take seriously that nothing can cause you to suffer except yourself and your own mind, you're really onto something. You're experiencing your inner virtual reality. And a well-placed question can turn it upside down." - Adya "Turn that light of awareness in: what is this thing called 'me'? Really? Have you spent much time with the not-thereness? You're asked to do much less than you ever imagined. The only part you have to play is to get yourself to the frontier, the boundary, of your mind. When you can't find anybody there, at that instant, you're actually at the boundary. There's nobody there, but there's something noticing that there's nobody there. There may be a sense of self, but even the sense of self doesn't define who you are. Just stay at the frontier, just sense it. What does it feel like, that state of not-knowing? Of not finding? If you found nothing, why don't you experience that? There is no next. The next thing has to come from the other side. That's grace. But what you can do is to get your consciousness to the frontier, realize that you're there, and experience that amazing, that lovely, unknown of it, that mystery: feeling the mystery of what you are. That's the doing, and that's a very powerful doing. Trying to do more than that is a way of making horizontal movement along the gateless gate. It's extraordinarily simple, and it's very arduous for a human being to do something very simple with any consistency. Stark, raving existential terror that you will die, and the void will suck you up into infinity, and you'll never know anything ever; that's the doorway into heaven. All it needs is a good 'yes'. Yes to whatever the fear threatens you with: 'I'll die.' 'Yes.'" - Adya "We can't give our gift, if we're always looking around us, going, 'Do you like it?'" - Adya "The most beautiful ones, the flowers of humanity, are the ones that are willing to be alone, and what arises from that aloneness, something unique, creative. Unique means alone. Some people lean on ideas, they lean on their intellect, some people lean on people, some people lean on substances." - Adya "There are times when you simply cannot manage your experience. At those moments, self is being dissolved, crushed, annihilated. That is self's constant effort to not be where it is, to constantly be in control. If you boil down all of spirituality to one simple principle, it would be having all sense of control yanked out of your little hands. There are certain things you go through that you're just going to go through, and just the going through them is sometimes exactly what's called for. And sometimes it's absolutely unavoidable. We play games pretending like it is avoidable. Sometimes we're trying to mitigate the very force that is trying to awaken us. You stop thinking that when things feel good that means that you're at a higher place. And when they feel rotten that means you're at a lower place." - Adya "The ego's agenda has a simplicity to it: I want things to go the way I want them to go." - Adya "When you're trying to be aware, it's actually a denial of awareness." - Adya "Sometimes what we desperately need is what we desperately don't want. Sit there and suffer with it until you stop trying to control it." - Adya "The fact that you are and that you are in all states of consciousness; that's the intriguing thing, that always you are." - Adya "To know and not to feel is not yet to really know." - Adya "When you're right on the edge of seeing something very deep, all the fear, all the shadow side within you, will rally to the forefront of consciousness quickly and powerfully." - Adya "Find the inspiration itself. It will take a form. Start with the small things." - Adya "The exterior adventures, they're nothing like what's really inside. They're nothing like adventuring into the infinite, into your infinite nature." - Adya "Techniques are not useful unless the attitude behind it is there. Wanting what's real, once that catches fire, that's the path. Without that, the rest is empty technique." - Adya "We're dealing with a way of engaging what's the most important thing to you, in such a way that you do not succumb to the ego pursuing its ideal and its image, and yet you also don't succumb to 'It's grace, there is nothing I can do, and it will happen when it happens.'." - Adya "What's part of a dark night is a closing down of your affective system, your emotional energy. The first dark night is the dark night of the will. You're experiencing the limitation of will, of wanting, of seeking, of grasping, of a will to try to break through, of a will to give yourself. It depends on how much resistance there is, how much you mistake the truth of being for some of those fancy spiritual experiences. The more you realize that you are this conscious loving presence in which delusion and that which is not true can unfold, the easier this goes. You hurt yourself when you run from any part of yourself. You're not weaned away from those experiences, because they may come and go, but you're being weaned away from your attachments. And you're dying into a profound simplicity, a deep ease and a depth that's very hard to describe. Go into that quiet desert. You gotta dance your dance out. You can't pretend that you're somewhere that you're not. Be true to what you're experiencing. Feel what you're being called to let go of, and feel what you're being called to let go into." - Adya "Get clear on what you want to do in life, start to look at from where you are doing it first, and then what you do will carry forth the transmission of your own value." - Adya "Taking responsibility for your orientation, your state of consciousness, is absolutely essential in the spiritual life." - Adya "The very things we often are drawn to, to help ourselves, make it worse." - Adya "You have to teach them how to use the grammar of language: it's a communication class; it should be taught as a very practical tool that you use to sell and influence people and get your point across and communicate to other people." - Lucas "George doesn't make things up; he creates new things out of what exists: old stories. And he's taken those old stories and put them in the most modern idiom we have, which is film." - Moyers "It doesn't have anything to do with special effects, it doesn't have anything to do with spaceships; it has to do with the same thing that made people sit around and listen to a storyteller go on about Helen of Troy." - Lucas "If you have an artist who is pigheaded and stubborn and determined to get his vision the way he wants it, he's going to have to learn how to manipulate the situation to get what he wants. Mozart didn't have that ability; he was a genius, but he didn't quite figure out how the system worked." - Lucas "Yoga is not bringing trouble; it is just hastening up the troubles so that your quota of troubles will be over as soon as possible. The very process of life is put on fast-forward. When situations keep changing more dramatically than ever before, one needs a certain amount of balance and skill to handle the external situations; if you don't handle them properly and they collapse around you, then most probably you may give up your spiritual process." - Sadhguru

What have I gained from my spiritual path/what is different??? Short answer: everything. A limited list of benefits I’ve seen would include. Less anxiety More clarity/focus Integration of rejected parts of myself Emotional healing and better emotional regulation Better physical health Better relationships Less needy/clingy Much calmer mind More mental fortitude/resilience Im now secure in solitude. I’m taking a more authentic path in life as well as more comfortable being physically by myself. Really man the list goes on. My spiritual transformation has seeped into every single area of my life and benefited me tremendously. How I’ve gotten here: Meditation (including retreats) Psychedelics (LSD, shrooms, DMT) Trauma Therapy Getting Coaching/Hiring Mentors Coaching and observing others and recognizing common pitfalls Cleaning up my diet Reading 100+ books Endless hours of self reflection What wall am I running into on my path: It’s difficult to focus on self inquiry when I’m stressing about always being behind on my rent Lack of mental focus/clarity and being unable to afford metal detoxing protocols or an entirely organic diet Turning everything on my spiritual path into a belief system and mental masterbating over it rather than doing the practices (lack of discipline) not having the time to do really put into consciousness pursuits because I’m working 50-60 hours per week just make make ends meet Really my biggest “walls” I’m hitting are around time and money. I need more freedom to pursue my spiritual growth at a higher level. To obtain this freedom I need to hone myself so I can provide more value to the world and therefor be rewarded financially. I know all that’s probably a jumbled mess but hopefully that answers your questions. My root system needs strengthened before I can grow proper branches.

@ShardMare Psychidelics can be very dangerous and I've had many trips where i got violently sick etc. But I've experienced complete personality shifts on psychidelics after resting as pure awareness and breathing deeply into this experience. Felt like a completely different person. It was like my entire being got a software update. Complete transformation. But psychs are not a quick fix. I had already meditated for years and I essentially combined self inquiry with my trip. Just the drugs alone won't work. And even then It's not a guarantee they work everytime

How I became enlightened FAST and how you can do it too Warning: Be radically open-minded before you read everything below. Don't seek too much information, seek massive transformation. Be one(awarness) and let go of all meaning. How to: - being focused only on breath. Redirect your attention to your breath when thoughts arise, you do this every second for a few months. You can't both be fully focused on breathing and thinking at the same time (hearing mental sounds). After sometime of doing this 24/7, the mind surrenders. By doing that your grounding yourself in consciousness, and your enlightened when your fully grounded in this consciousness. - drop every arising meaning creation for extended periods of time by being in this awarness which is connected to your breath - having a serious intention to raise your consciousness. - Being fully open to new experiences, rejecting nothing. Radicaly open minded. - Following intuition. (when your following intuition there are not present as much mental sounds, intuition gets to the point faster than logical mind) - the most important step is realizing that you have nothing to lose. Only than you can fully immerse yourself into it. To destroy the ego you have to be in the being state, and if you want results with enlightenment fast, you have to have a serious intent to raise your consciousness. You have to be this awarness continously to get rid of all thoughts. This means that it's harder to become enlightened by being aware just when your doing your traditional meditation practice for up to 60 minutes or 3 hours or even 5 hours. Being aware of that is easy compared to being this awarness all the time without even making a distinction between sitting meditation and the rest of the day. It's very very important to keep expanding this awarness moment to moment and don't stop for a long period of time. But overall it's not even a long period of time, You can do this in 1 year or even 4 months if your extremely serious to be in this awarness every second for a few months. It's extremely easy but with all the thinking your making it complicated. Reality is so fucking simple you will NEVER understand it with thought. Understanding awarness with the mind is like lighting up the sun with a cigarette lighter. Also with that approach your not creating a sense of linearity, you are non-linear and that method just destroys the illusion of linearity. After I got enlightened I became aware how the body just moves automatically without me thinking anything(hearing mental sounds). I was like shit, I have a lot of work to do to undo all of that programming. So I was starting to do more and more personal development and consciousness work simultaneously. Enlightenment changed nothing . Enlightenment just made me more aware of the functioning of existence, how everything is happening without effort inside me. At that point your mind and ego die, because you surrender to to effortlessness and ego and mind is all about effort. So after you become enlightened everything you could accomplish is effortless. You really don't need any thought anymore to function and succed in life. So... that means you don't have to go to meditate in a cave for 30 years. You can do your life purpose and enlightenment simultaneously. Yes it's hard but if you apply everything I am talking about here you will be enlightened extremely fast. Probably none of that stuff has been discussed on Actualized.org yet. We can be enlightened much faster in this time and age. You have to become increasingly aware moment to moment and maintain that intention for a few months. To not pay attention to the content of awarness but to awarness. And after that you will arrive in utopia, you will want to go back but you'll recognize that you can't. You have embodied that which is permanent. The mind surrendered to consciousness. Now... Imagine the app store. When you click download, the application needs to be first downloaded and only than it can be started. It's the same with enlightenment. You need to embody the higher forms of consciousness and that is pure being. You embody it by being in awarness for an extended period of time. The more interrupted you are, the longer it will take you. Ask yourself how fast is your connection. If it's slow it will take you a lot of time to get to enlightenment if it's fast the higher consciousness will anchor in your 3D vessel and you'll become enlightened fast. Ask yourself how conductive you are. If you want to be enlightened fast, you need to drop all resistance and drop arising resistances for extended periods of time with awarness, by observation, without being judgemental, attached, not building any meaning when thoughts arise, not labeling anything as good or bad for your own gain (because when you do you start constructing meaning and that is illusion), not gossiping not comparing yourself with others, not creating a sense of linearity, being aware that your not what you sense as yourself, existence cannot be perceived with senses it's only trough consciousness. Consciousness is an expanding fractal. Have a serious intent at the start, like your life depends on it. As you become more and more conscious this seriousness will vanish and all that will be left is playfullness. You will start playing with all of the content of awarness and not seriously indulge in it by assigning it meaning, thinking of it good or bad. You will be detached, and after a while that detachment will become automatic, a part of you. This intent must be present for long periods of time, interupptedly. Establish a meditation practice first. I have started with meditation with headphones, at the start it is much easier to establish a meditation practice by listening to meditation music, 7.83Hz resonance, solfeggio frequencies and 432Hz frequencies and music. Meditating in nature or on nature sounds (birds, creek...) is also very powerful. Meditate in the morning and keep expanding that consciousness after you finish your sitting meditation trough the day without making even a distinction between that sitting meditation and the rest of the day. I have trained every second for a few months (3 moths) and then the mind surrendered to existence. Now I have to force myself to think (to hear mental sounds). I think when I want to think and I can stop constructing meaning out of arising thoughts. So if you really want to be enlightened now see every moment as a meditation practice from now on. That's it. After a while it Will become automatic. You could than completely change everything your doing in your life and still maintain that awarness of awarness. It becomes permanent and this is enlightenment. How my journey began. A spiritual experience happened, a paranormal one. I saw a spirit, a ghost, and that being was watching me, I became aware of him and he was aware of me. I Will just sum what happened. I was walking at 5:30 in the morning and saw a light a few meters away from me, I was walking by that light and was looking at it. I was questioning myself, from where this light comes from, if it's something there that the light reflects from, I was looking at it and couldn't find anything. Than I had a realization this light was moving like somebody is turning their head as I was walking by. I had a thought of "What if it's an ghost", and that very instant the ghost moved for about 20cm, it was like a being without a physical 3D body. Than my fear programming kicked in, I didn't know what to do, I have grabbed a stone an threw it at the ghost, and when the stone was in air the being disappeared into the ground. I had the strangest feelings that moment, feelings that I didn't felt anytime else. When you see stuff like that your perspective is radicaly altered. I have researched a bit after the event and came to some strange and mind blowing conclusions and after that I have decided that I'm not yet ready to accept that reality but I told myself that it Will come a time when I Will understand, so I have put all this aside and was not thinking of it at all. After a year and a half, some strange events happened and I was invited to a secret forum not publicly available but only trough invitation. I have found about spirituality and all progressed from there very fast. I was curious to find out more because I knew I couldn't trust what I see and hear anymore. I knew there is something more to reality than my perceived self, my sense of self. I made the intention to raise my consciousness to the highest level possible. This is what I did aside from all of the things I have already mentioned. Everything already mentioned is enough to become enlightened. This are more the things that happened after enlightenment. I still think they are related and can lead to enlightenment and Will help you tremendously if your are open enough to accept them. - When the teacher in school was talking the theory from the textbook we had to all write it down. I have witnessed for long periods of time how thoughts automatically triggered when I had to write it all down. So I have trained to write without hearing mental sounds from the teacher (to repeat that which the teacher said in my mind). I have directly become the teacher. I was in this ever present awarness that is everywhere. I was all of the connections. I have become a channel for the teacher who was talking. I had no thoughts and my arm was automatically writing down every word the teacher said. Try it yourself without stopping till your arm hurts. In this practice it's not important to pay attention to content of awarness it's just being while your bombarded with thoughts. This is just a side practice that was born out of being aware of breath all the time, but found it to be really great in raising consciousness, so I had to write it down. - I have used many activations to activate energy channels. The are a lot of different activations but the ones I have had are easy to perform for everybody who has an internet connection and speakers. You go on youtube and learn about Light language activation, you read articles, just immerse yourself in this for a period of time (for 6 hours at least) because it's abstract and not tangible to the mind. Then you listen to Light language channelers. Channels are people who are channeling higher dimensional codes from higher dimensional beings. And after you listen to them you transform in unspeakable ways. You have to sit, palms up and listen to the sounds, be a sponge. It's best to listen before going to sleep so the subconsciousness processes all of those codes when you are asleep so the next day you wake up with new established templates, with new wakefulness. It's also very important to study many perspectives in this field by listening to different youtube channels and reading multiple articles. You really need to be curious here if your not curious about what I'm talking about here your probably close-minded, just drop that resistance now and do your research, you will not just learn new concepts you will come out in a different plane of existence because you become more attuned to non-locality. The best Light language channeler I had the best experiences with is this one. He has removed most of his videos 2 years ago but he said that for a fee of 70$ or something like that he can give you all of them if I remember correctly. I have those videos but will not share it due to the respect and out of support for this man. This activations are extremely powerful. Search on youtube: newaeonawakening https://www.youtube.com/user/newaeonawakening/videos - Becoming more aware that I am an interstellar galactic citizen. Becoming aware of that raises your consciousness to to galactic level. The path to universal consciousness is trought enlightenment. We are evolving. We are becoming more and more aware that we are visited not only now but from the start. I'm talking about beings from other solar systems, other galaxies who are assisting our evolution from the start.. You become aware of beings in other dimensions and that raises the consciousness because you don't trust what you see and hear now. They operate just on higher electromagnetic wavelengths and our eyes cannot perceive those light frequencies so we don't see any of that. They can materialize in this dimension and disappear in an instant. They are just not fully approaching us because that would trigger a mass fear response. When The tipping point is reached, when there are a number of awakened and conscious beings, then there will be contact. And that contact, when they will land and fully show themselves will transform the earth extremely fast. And that time is by a lot of channels coming in the next 15 or 30 years, we'll see. I have an important question for you. How do you approach something so different that you can't relate in any imaginable way? ....It's consciousness, that is the only reletable way. Because the same consciousness that's present inside me is also present inside them. It's the same. You have to be aware enough to recognize that and only then you can connect on a conscious level. I had conscious contact with light ships materializing in the sky more than 100 times but most of them were not not like youd imagine, like looking at them for long periods of time. The longest sighting I had was long around 80 second I think but most of them were just for an instant, to just show me that they are there and that they know and recognize that a peaceful conscious contact wants to be established. I have also remote viewed places that I canno't even describe in words. It was not random at all. I had raised my consciousness to the galactic level with the intention to do so. I had many more paranormal experiences but that is not the point of this topic, I just want to make clear what is possible when your serious about rising your consciousness. Crazy stuff Will happen. - Pay attention the the wholeness in which all content is happening, like you look at a picture in you phone and tap left or right. When your doing that your detached. Your not attached to the content of the image in that photo. So look reality as a photo. Pay attention to all perceived light and all perceived sound. Don't indulge in the content of those two, just become aware of those. Also become more aware and increasingly aware of sensations in the body. - journal and write a lot about your insights in the start and after the download is complete drop all of that and be that. Find masterful teachers to learn from. And refine your intuition. I have learned the most in my early days from Arcturus RA https://www.youtube.com/user/SIRIUSSTARSEED/videos and Ehani https://www.youtube.com/user/DesiignMS/videos - The fastest way is to be just aware for a few months that you're reality, see reality as a picture the whole time (maintain samadhi). That will be enough to embody an amount of consciousness that will destroy the ego without psychadelics or anything else for ever. That is all it takes. Yes psychadelics are very usefull for enlightenment purposes but you don't need them to get enlightened. I have had only 1 trip before permanent enlightenment (which was good enough) I have taken 3grams of magic mushrooms (or after enlightenment, I don't know for sure all happened so fast). The important thing about psychadelics I would say is that you can't expand consiousness if you don't have any (yes you are conciouss all the time but you get lost in thought). So first start a meditation practice and after a while try psychadelics, otherwise you Will just be lost in though and no long-term insight Will be gained. This way is much more powerful than just hoping to attain enlightenment by gulping psychadelic substances. Yes you can do that but in reality you don't need it. Reality is a psychadelic trip by itself no addition needs to happen to make it more psychadelic it is already psychadelic. Perfect. - Learn how to ground yourself. Ground yourself in nature with barefoot walking, exposing yourself to Schuman resonance (7.83Hz) - Listen to 432Hz music... Meditation music, ambient music with 432Hz is best. - Listen every day to Solfieggio frequencies. I have only listened to those frequencies for many months. - Sun gazing in the morning and/or at night for a few seconds and than start building from there to up to 44minutes a day. - Using cristals. Learn about cristal therapy and start using them. - pay attention to your breath, and when you get lost in thought return your awarness to breath. Be aware of your breath more and more. You can't simultaneuosly be lost in thought and have awarness of your breath - altering my DNA trought sound and vibration - maintain a rhythm with sticking with the basics. Optimum sleep, nutrition and diet. - biohacking my light body. Using photonically enchaned quartz nano sperical sand in a pendant. That's powerful. Most of my light ship sightings happened after having this pendant. (Gammatron key) http://www.ra-key.com/keybio.htm https://www.youtube.com/embed/xj4_0bUEV5g - using alchemy, higher dimensional vitamins and minerals for my etheric, magnetic and light body. This elements are not located on the 3D periodic system of elements, it is plasmic. This is a game changer and I have found out that from one of my masterful teachers Arcturus Ra (creator of gammatron key). I recommend you watch his videos on YouTube, he's extremely deep, a lot of stuff Will be abstract but that's not even important when your raising consciousness. Your higher self Will understand all of that. You Will be activated by just listening to him, if you remain non-judgemental. I don't want to reveal what that substance is, because I want you guys to listen to this guy first. This stuff alone can make you enlightened without psychadelics and you can make it at home if you want to. What I'm talking about is the holy grail as described in many ancient sriptures around the globe. This is extremely powerful stuff for the purpose of enlightenment. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Va6y_pR6Or4 @Leo Gura Thank me later