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@Blackhawk Hi, I've suggested in other threads that you do some specialised therapy which may help in the non-spiritual areas of life, but you seem to be resistant to establishing any regular practice, whether spiritual or therapeutic. You say things like this: "1. I don't have the energy for that. 2. I don't have the time for that. 3. I hate doing it. 4. I don't have the discipline for it. 5. I don't want to waste so much effort into something which might not even be true." The areas of enlightenment and therapy are basically experiential so you gotta put in some work and effort to achieve any sort of change in your consciousness. Many spiritual people spend years practicing without achieving a full enlightenment, but what keeps them going is lower level experiences like peacefulness, bliss, insights, nondual / mystical glimpses etc. You've been into this stuff for some time now. What practices have you tried, and have you had any limited success so far?

You want enlightenment, how come? Oh my God, because it will feel amazing, the very source of bliss, inspiration, creativity, the very Author of all the climaxes and resolutions of every dramatic story and every seemingly impossible math problem ever dreamed up. Satisfaction itself. Beyond the question and the answer. The more I push it away, the more impossible it seems the more DELICIOUS the answer when it comes to me. I cannot fuck this up. I love knowing I cannot fuck this up. There is no "I" to fuck this up. Sigh..... Pure. Fucking. Delight.

Precisely. It is Infinite Bliss which is synonymous with Infinity. Total lack of meaning is Infinite Love.

Not much to report today. Just haphazard rhetorical type questions. Is it ok to have nothing going on? Have you ever been with people and felt the suffocating vacuum of having nothing to say, even if it's only momentary? What if you've been with your partner for years and in fact the norm is to say nothing to each for long periods? Should every moment be filled with activity? What about boredom, how does that figure in having nothing going on? Isn't boredom a fate worse than being a loser? Winners always have something going on. Being bored is just admitting to being a loser (?). How is it possible to life live and be bored? Aren't they complementary opposites? What if you give up doing anything? Just recontextualise activity as nothing. Isn't that bliss? Isn't that just admitting death in through the front door? Isn't death a fate worse than knowing you're a loser? Can you attract any/thing/body by doing nothing at all? Can anything get done by doing nothing at all? Doesn't the world revolve anyway? Can't you just recontextualise doing nothing as constant activity anyway? Isn't doing/doing nothing just a duality to be squashed like a bug? Only to be left with an uneasy sense of WTF?

Sat chit ananda. Existence conciousness bliss. There is a reason bliss is there. Sometimes it is not always the right thing to do and listen to someone who has the attitude of sensation=suffering. Life is bliss if one cultivates it and enjoy existence as it is supposed to be. There is a reason the saying goes that GOD is LOVE. Existence is love. Buddhism nowadays IMO, is a bunch of nihilism. The body and cells and everything around you vibrates and sings to the bliss of existence if you just listen and observe it.

All thoughts are love. But what fun would it be if you were directly conscious of that? You might roll around in bliss for eternity but then You would have to give eternity meaning and create differences for the purposes of differences. Otherwise you would not be able to contrast bliss from hell.

I think you are misunderstanding the Buddhist notion of suffering. What it basically means is that chasing material conditions and positive states is dissatisfying because they never last. This does not mean you cannot meditate on the feeling of satisfaction itself. In fact, doing so is how you escape suffering. Bliss and joy can be reached this way. Now, you can counter by saying that that bliss won't be permanent. Of course it won't. But I never said to get attached to permanent bliss. And it is still far better than what most people are doing, which is chasing dopamine hits. Think of it this way: in every moment you only have one of two options: you can either be satisified or dissatisfied. Which will you be?

Spirituality can be defined in many ways, some more useful than others depending on the context. I like this definition: Discovering what’s real and being it. End of story. This solves no “problems”, instead it “kills” the one who “has” the problems, making them almost completely obsolete and therefor infinitely easier to deal with. Live authentically, accept all that is around you as part of oneness happening, act accordingly - which may mean that you do things that don’t fit any typical “spiritual” paradigm. It sounds like your transcendent trips gave you the impression that spirituality would help you transcend or escape your life situation. What spirituality does is causes the realization that it isn’t your life situation because there is no you (just Godness/Awareness watching the movie of the body you think is you) and that you don’t need to escape it because it doesn’t effect Godness/Awareness/You in anyway. You’re in a dream right now and you may wake up in it and go “Oh! This doesn’t matter! (Thought it still counts!)” or the body will die and Godness/Awareness/You will have a similar experience that “you” as the body does every morning when you wake up from dreams and are completely untouched by the to the point that you don’t even really try to remember them. Zen also sums it up well: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. This makes enlightenment seem pointless, where’s the infinite bliss, the adoration of other seekers, and the world peace that you are about to now be able to create? Turns out once you finish the journey, there’s no need for any of that. You are found in a peacefulness that is so completely unconditional that it doesn’t matter if you live with Hyenas or in any other situation (not that you won’t continue to follow your biological imperatives to some degree and seek to live skillfully). Hell, you’ll very likely see them such that you will have great love and compassion for them.

I pray it is my friend. This is bliss

Internal voice is just a thought. But competition of the internal voice is the problem, hiding the underlying bliss. For instance, when I was an active addict nearing early recovery, I would search my drawers for pills that I'd forgotten about or dropped (I had tons of opioid medication just laying around and I threw it all away when I quit, but there was always a bit more left over that had gotten lost -- I had tons and tons of painkillers in my drawers at one point lol). Anyway, all the while, I was literally simultaneously looking for the pill (to crush it and snort it through a straw), WHILE seriously hoping to NOT find it. If I found it (happened several times), the feeling was "fuck; dammit," and if I did NOT find it (also actually happened several times), the resulting feeling was THANK GOD. That's the state of addiction, but it relates to all manifestations of competing desires -- basically the state of "not being at peace." Addiction as described above is simply a rather intense manifestation of it -- most people have it in other ways... uncertainty; confusion; not trusting their own power; etc. Really it manifests all the time to some degree, IF you think you're a separate individual. This competition of desires can be stilled with intensive meditation, and when they stop, an enormous amount of energy is released -- this is what "Kundalini awakening" is -- overwhelming exhilaration that makes you want to shake people and say "HAVE YOU EVER FUCKING TRIED MEDITATION? IT'S INCREDIBLE!" etc... (of course that's just a stage; almost a bit manic, but very lucid).

Combining shadow work with bliss work helps a lot. We can get stuck in focusing on feeling our pain. It really helps to give the childhood versions of us the infinite satisfaction they always wanted. Lets say I experienced a huge loss as a child. This is going to sound like woohoo, but the more I play with the imagination of having had a perfect childhood where that loss did not happen and feeling what that feels like, the more I will notice positive shifts in my identity in the present. The reason this works so well is because infinite love is the case anyway and you are the ultimate creator of your life. This technique can speed up the healing process tremendously.

Once you penetrate the illusion, you discover the true parinibbanic bliss which comes from fucking the illusion with itself by continuously destroying itself in evermore intricate and tantalizing ways. The best part is the fucking does itself in a completely intuitive and human way in which you discover that the greatest illusion was that anything could be more “enlightened” than you always were. Now you just see the connections of how this eternal death functions.

Feel what exactly? Something other than what you are feeling right now? You are chasing a paper tiger. What is real is this moment. This is it. The only difference between someone enlightened and the rest of us is they see clearly that this moment is "It" and relate to it with the reverence and bliss of seeing God. Nothing more. It may be that you want to have a profound, mystical experience or unity with all things. OK. Easy. Drop 200ug of good LSD in a safe and comfortable setting. Enjoy. 12 hours later you will be back to your normal consciousness. Unless you can take that experience and turn it into something you can experience in this moment completely sober it is no different than going to watch a good movie. It can be exciting and entertaining, but once the titles are rolling down the screen, the lights come on and you are back to your life. Now what?

It is actually intensely easy. It just doesn't look like you expect. It is too clear, and so it is hard to see. This moment, right here and right now is God. You are already seeing God 24/7 as there is no other possibility. The problem is you don't recognize it as the experience of God because you have a story in your mind about what that is supposed to look like and feel like. What if this very moment is the actual full experience of God? For most of us, that idea is full of disappointment as it doesn't match our story of some grand dramatic experience. But what if we can encounter this moment with the reverence and bliss of experiencing God? To me, that is enlightenment. It isn't some better version of yourself. It is simply a shift in perspective, a realization of the truth that has been as close as your breath your whole life.

Damn it! I don’t like this! I want more haha ? but I don’t give enough of a shit to care on much but just being a good person to others longer than 5 minutes to actualize anything anyway. Even feeling my super satisfying bliss sensations just isn’t worth the effort anymore. I’m just a bum, and it feels so devilishly good.

484. Summary: The Root Solution To People Pleasing & Loneliness -This episode is about giving you a root solution to the problem of people pleasing, and loneliness. It’s an advanced solution, but simple enough to implement. This will not be ordinary, shallow self-help advice. -Leo’s struggled with people pleasing and coming up with solutions to that problem for decades. When he moved to America he had difficulty acclimating, which led to a people pleasing strategy that started in childhood. He’s also had epiphanies about loneliness because of his recent advancements in consciousness. People Pleasing is a Survival Strategy -For the first 20 years of life we start off with the cognitive development of little animals who have to adapt and fit into society. Society is a collective game and you learn to play by the collective rules or else you’ll run into problems. As a child you were acculturated, domesticated. This isn’t bad; it’s necessary. Society can't have children biting and yelling at each other like zoo animals. To live in a healthy society we need to civilize ourselves, but there are certain costs that come with that. One of the costs is you start to develop extrinsic reward mechanisms in order to satisfy yourself, rather than just making yourself happy. Basically, you learn to behave in ways that get approval, love and satisfaction from others. When your reward mechanism is extrinsic instead of intrinsic, your sense of happiness gets handed over to others. They dole out little bits of happiness when you please them, turning you into a Pavlovian dog. So, you jump through hoops to get the love, satisfaction and approval you desperately want. -One bad habit Leo developed that took a long time for him to unwire is getting approval through good grades. At school Leo was very into academics and developed a reward mechanism where he needed to get As to feel good. It was a way to get praise from the authority figures in his life (I didn't know Leo’s parents were Asian, East Indian & Jewish ). Good marks became an ego thing and a big driver in his life. Sure, there were good side effects, like discipline and getting educated, but he was basically performing academic tricks for people. Once he left school, it became difficult for him to find his sense of satisfaction in life, because there were no more teachers or universities giving him grades or rewards. He felt empty. If he’d been less self aware he could’ve substituted teachers and grades for a girlfriend and money. Then he would’ve been expecting rewards, praise and As from his girlfriend or bosses. Luckily that didn’t happen to Leo, but that’s what happens to most people on the treadmill of approval (Aaron Abke has a great video on why achievement and approval cannot equal love.) -You have to be very careful about what extrinsic reward mechanisms your ego-mind develops. If other people hold the goodies that dictate your behavior, then you constantly have to do stuff for them to get your reward. This will never lead to a satisfying life. clip: Your Mind Distorts Reality to Survive [8 mins]. clip: Transcend Your Script [6 mins]. clip: What Shapes You Most [5 mins]. -If you're a people pleaser, you’ve adopted the habit of getting your happiness extrinsically from others. It’s a problem for everyone, but even more so for women. Generally, women derive more of their satisfaction from building social bonds and networks than men. Women tend to be helpers and caretakers, especially the more feminine they are. So it becomes this giant social game where you only feel good when you please others (clients, co-workers, bosses, children, your partner, likes on Tweetbookagram, etc.) Also, with people pleasing, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re being selfless and spiritual by “serving others,” when you’re really just seeking approval. -The problem is it never lasts, no matter how much approval you get or people you please. It just becomes another material pursuit, in the same way that men chase money or sex. It's never going to deeply satisfy you, so you just keep chasing for more. -The solution is to take back control and sovereignty over your own reward mechanism. To make it completely intrinsic, so that the satisfaction, love and praise you want you give to yourself. You need to rewire your mind. (10:13) -Your mind might be objecting and resisting this because you've built this extrinsic circuit, which means that stuff has to happen in the outer world for you to feel good. “I have to see ______ happen and it has to match my personal standards. I can only allow myself to be happy if…” These extrinsic reward cycles happen no matter what you're pursuing (business success, sexual conquests, the valuation of the stock of your company, pleasing your husband, getting your children into Harvard, etc). It's all the same thing, structurally speaking. The solution is to short-circuit all that and go directly to giving yourself the happiness and love you want. That’s how you really apply spirituality to get a deep sense of satisfaction. -It’s a very counterintuitive solution. (A counter-intuitive solution is when the most effective path ends up being the opposite of what you’d naively expect.) Obvious routes can be foolish and shortsighted. The wisdom of crowds doesn’t work if the crowd is full of fools. Make Your Own Doggy Treats “But Leo, sure I can bullshit myself into feeling happy and giving myself rewards, but it's not the same as getting an actual, external, objective reward. It’s new age, self-help, positive thinking bullshit. It's not the real kind of happiness that depends on external conditions being met, like X amount of dollars in my bank account, or helping people in the real world, or having sex…” -It almost feels like you're cheating when you do this and in a sense you are. These are the cheat codes to life. -Most people grow up in a survival situation where they had to please others, like their family, teachers, classmates, authority figures, adults at church and so forth. So the idea that you can just give yourself happiness and approval directly without any middlemen seems crazy. It feels like you’re not working hard enough to get your doggy treats. -Consider that there's actually something very deep that you're fundamentally missing here. You’re giving away your sovereignty to others by letting them define what is true and what’s not. You’ve looked up to authority figures to validate reality for you, instead of going inside and sovereignly telling yourself what’s true. (ep: How Authority Works) Well, the same thing happens with satisfaction, happiness and love. You've given away your authority and now you can’t feel satisfied because you're looking for other people to satisfy you. -You’ve turned this into an aspect of your ego. Your ego has a self-image of being good, or selfless, or hard-working or generous. In order to live up to that image, you have to constantly work and work and bend over backwards to feel good enough. You might even feel guilty for allowing yourself to feel loved for no reason at all. You’ve invented standards and conditions for what you think you must do to "deserve love.” -No matter how many nice things you do for your clients, your husband or children, you're never going to be deeply satisfied by that. You're caught in this trap of constant struggle to get that drug of approval, of gratitude, of praise, of satisfaction from others. Maybe you have an expectation that you can only feel love when somebody thanks you or tells you you’re a good person. Now that you've set this standard for yourself, you’re a slave. You’ll be bending backwards for others until they thank you or tell you you’re a good person. If they don't give you what you think you deserve, you’ll get bitter because you've been denied the reward. You're like a dog who jumped through a hoop, but the master didn't see it and didn't give you a treat, and now you're upset at the master. -It’s the same with career success. A lot of people are scared of being satisfied with their career. They think being happy will stop them from working hard, from growing their company to $20 million, or $50 million, and that they can’t be satisfied if their company's only worth $20 million….the problem is once your company does reach $50 million, you still won’t be satisfied. You’ll want $100 million and then a billion and where does it end? It doesn’t, that's the problem. -This is not a very intelligent situation that you've placed yourself in. Wouldn’t it be much nicer to take back your sovereignty and control? Take back full responsibility for the reward mechanisms that make you feel happy and satisfied with yourself. To stop letting other people from having control over that. To be your own master. To make your own doggy treats. Happiness: Dual versus Non-Dual Approaches -The dual approach says there's a self and others, and you become happy by doing things for others. This makes the other responsible for your happiness. The other could be a family member, a lover, an animal, an institution you work for, etc. -The non-dual approach says what if you integrated all others into yourself? That’s what you're doing when you practice non-duality. You realize everything is One, that there are no boundaries between self and other. Non-duality lets you realize if you and others are one, why don’t you just give yourself the doggy treats? At first this feels fake or like cheating, but recognize that this is a more advanced way of living life. It's even more difficult to take responsibility for making yourself feel happy. This is actually a sign of maturity and growth. It takes quite a bit of consciousness just to open your mind to this possibility. “But Leo if I can make myself feel happy, loved, praised, then I don't need the $50 million company, or my children, or my wife to make me happy. If I don't need the awards and achievements, then why not sit around basking in my own happiness? Doesn’t that short circuit all of life!?!” That's the genius of this method. (20:35) This is a feature, not a bug. You want to be autonomous, to free yourself up from depending on others’ good opinion. If you're a people pleaser it means you derive your happiness externally, you’re acting manipulatively to get those doggy treats. -If you took back responsibility for your happiness, you would be so full of love and satisfaction that it would naturally pour out of you and back out into the world. You could behave without attachment or fear. You’d be truly coming from a place of of fullness. From happiness, not emptiness. When you come from neediness, you'll manipulate others to get them to meet your desperate needs. But when you no longer need their treats, you can act in the highest good. You can act according to your authentic values, then you're truly free and autonomous. -Then when somebody doesn't give you something, it's okay. You’re not attached so you don't get needy, bitter and resentful with them. You don't judge them for not acknowledging you. -The solution here is very simple: take back ownership of your reward mechanisms and satisfy yourself. Non-Duality Epiphanies About Other People -Over the last 10 years Leo’s gotten a lot of satisfaction through his life purpose, which is doing his work at Actualized.org. He shares deep insights and understandings with others, like you reading this right now ?. He gets enormous amounts of satisfaction from this, but after some years he’s started to notice there's a problem. First, he has to constantly release new videos, otherwise he won’t get the pleasure of the feedback, of delivering wisdom. This puts him in a perpetual quasi-slavery to doing this work. Second, no matter how many videos he releases (over 500 now) he never feels fully satisfied. He’s still gotta release the next one and the next one and the next one to keep getting that satisfaction. Third, he’s reached such profound levels of consciousness, understanding and insight that it’s beyond the point of being able to share them with anybody. There's almost nobody who is conscious enough for Leo to communicate his deepest insights about reality too. In the past his discoveries and wisdom were at a level where he could communicate them to us. Now, he can't even share them with us anymore. Lately, he’s come face to face with the realization that he won't ever be able to share his insights with any other human in the universe. At those super high levels of insight there's no sense of other that exists to communicate with. It’s a very deep degree of non-duality. -So, the highest levels of insight Leo achieves will be totally unshareable, incommunicable. He’s had to resign himself to that. It’s been a bummer because sharing profound insight was where he got the most juice out of life. The Trap of Sharing -There’s actually a trap of trying to share with others. A lot of the happiness we get in life is from sharing. Which is why people share things on social media. They enjoy laughing together. Same with experiencing some achievement in life. You share it with your loved ones and they congratulate you. Sharing makes your achievement feel much better and juicier. Whereas if you have nobody to share it with, then your achievement sort of falls flat. Like, what’s the point of winning an Olympic gold medal if none of your friends, family or anyone in your life will ever know about it? In consciousness work, when you reach the gold medal, nobody else knows you've reached it. That’s the bittersweet tragedy of doing really deep consciousness work. Nobody will understand or know when they look at you that you’ve just had this massive God realization. Only you will know. -That’s ultimately because only God can know itself. Only God can appreciate its own beauty, its own infinitude, its own goodness and its own intelligence. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. So Leo bit the bullet about his consciousness work and said, “I’m going to keep having these very very deep awakenings, and I have to be okay with them being incommunicable. I have to rewire my own thinking and my own reward mechanism, such that I just bask in my own infinitude and my own self-realization. It’s not going to be about other people praising me or even helping others achieve it themselves, because the levels of insight that I've reached, that I'm trying to actualize, nobody else who follows my work will ever reach. It's just impossible. I’ve given up on any possible satisfaction from teaching it, therefore I can only get satisfaction from basking in it myself. I have to be at peace with that and enjoy it. Just allow myself to be satisfied at my own self-understanding. It’s literally self-indulgence.” -That’s actually where true satisfaction and happiness comes from. It's not about sharing with others, pleasing others, achieving goals or getting rewards from others. It boils down to: what is your capacity for self-satisfaction? -Do you want to be happy in life? Do you want to experience the highest levels of love? Well, it can't be extrinsic; it must be intrinsic. You must be able to sit and just bask in your own joy of yourself, in the beauty of existence that you're conscious of. Just sit quietly, silently. Don’t try to share it with others or spoil it by writing or shooting a video or taking a selfie. Just bask in it. That's harder to do than it seems, because most of us have been conditioned to talk about it or share it. When you do that you're actually creating a subtle sense of other and you're not deepening your appreciation of what that thing is. -I want you to notice that. So, next time you find some cool video online or something funny, instead of sharing it with your friends, pause and don’t share it at all. Just enjoy and appreciate it, all by yourself. Recognize that it's just really really funny for you. Recognize that you don't need the entire social matrix to validate it for you. What About Loneliness? (33:10) -When your reward mechanism goes from extrinsic to intrinsic, it's almost like locking yourself in a solipsistic bubble. That sounds negative, but it’s not. You become your own source of truth, happiness, love and praise. Your own source of humor. You’re fully happy being the only person in the world laughing at something. A lot of people wouldn't be satisfied with that because when they laugh, they want others to laugh too. -It’s very counter-intuitive to deliberately, consciously lock yourself in a solipsistic bubble. As a thought experiment, imagine you were the last person on Earth. Could you still enjoy life? If the answer is no, that's a problem. It shows that you've built a lot of extrinsic reward mechanisms. “But Leo, that’s a horrible situation. I would want to kill myself if that ever happened.” That just shows the depth of the rot in your mind. That thought experiment takes away all the external sources of validation and enjoyment for you. You would be forced to find other ways to please yourself in this situation. -What you want to do is reach a point where, if you were the last person on Earth, you could still be totally joyful, happy and live out the rest of your days by yourself, just basking in the beauty of reality. In that situation, reality hasn't gone anywhere. The social aspect to life is not really where the deepest joy comes from. The deepest joy comes from appreciating existence itself. The beauty and intelligence and majesty of it. Building that connection, that metaphysical connection to reality is what spirituality is all about. (ep: What is Spirituality. Summary is here.) You want to build such a deep metaphysical connection, such a personal connection with the raw fabric of reality itself, that it makes you complete in and of itself. Everything else is just the cherry on top. You don't need people, or comedy, entertainment, sex, your family, you can just be happy by yourself. Make yourself satisfied. Doing that will simultaneously solve being a people pleaser and being lonely. -The reason you feel lonely is because you haven't built a deep metaphysical connection with yourself and reality. If you get lonely easily that shows you haven't spent enough time in solitude, connecting with yourself. You've built a lot of reward mechanisms that have to do with getting approval, validation, love, entertainment and humor from others, but you’re not truly able to enjoy life by yourself. This is a problem. The Greatest Love of All “But Leo, I’m being selfless and sharing with friends, with my children and my spouse. What’s so wrong with that?” -What’s wrong is that you're giving your power away. You're giving your sovereignty away and making yourself a slave to them. Remember, they will never ever, ever, be able to validate the deepest form of love for you. The deepest truths, the deepest satisfaction in reality can only exist within yourself. That's not something you can transmit to anyone else. You can only experience it within yourself. -Your friends and family are not going to validate or celebrate your awakening with you. They are not going to be conscious enough to rise to the level that you will rise to through this work. Almost nobody you know will be conscious enough to understand or appreciate what you've accomplished other than yourself. You need to start changing your reward mechanism such that you feel complete with your own self-recognition and self-understanding. You don’t need to feel lonely, isolated or misunderstood because of this. Ultimately, God is the only entity in the universe, so it must acknowledge and bask in itself as what it is. This is crucial for you to reach the highest levels of satisfaction in life. You can recognize your own innate love, goodness and consciousness. By the time you accomplish this you will no longer be a people pleaser and you will no longer be lonely, at least not in the ways you used to be. -Leo’s not telling you to leave your family or to never be social again, or to be mean and bitter towards people. He thinks it’s important you maintain some degree of socialization so you don't become a total recluse. It’s just that your primary source of life satisfaction must come from a deep, meaningful relationship to reality and not your relationships to others. -Ultimately you want to get to a point where the deepest love, satisfaction and joy you get in life comes only from yourself, when you’re in solitude. You can still go to a party, or a club, or pick up girls, have children, socialize with your family, but when you're doing that it’ll just be the icing on the cake. You need to be your own cake. The common mistake is to make other people the cake, when they should just be the icing. The core of your being has to be grounded within yourself, not out there in the hands of others. Otherwise you’ll be in this dysfunctional relationship where you have to please others, or sacrifice your own values and truth, or lie and manipulate, or construct fictions to play these social games. Even if you do all that, it will still never fully satisfy you. The only true satisfaction is within your own self. So start building towards that. Developing a Deep Connection to Reality -So how do you do all this? You practice by feeling love within yourself for no reason at all. Appreciate yourself as the conscious entity that you are. Appreciate yourself as the universe, as God, as infinity, as absolute love, as absolute truth, as pure awareness. You should be able to deeply appreciate the very fabric of existence itself, even if you’re just sitting in an empty room. That's what spirituality is really about. That creates the foundation of happiness upon which everything else is built. If you don’t have that fundamental kernel of happiness you will never be satisfied. No amount of houses, cars, sex or children will correct for that. No amount of good deeds either. -There’s a lot of creative ways you can come up with to practice. You could do a good deed for somebody without them knowing about it. Just keep it to yourself. Normally, you’d tell someone to get praise or credit, but don’t do that. Be the only person in the universe that knows you did that good thing. Let’s say you leave $500 in someone’s mailbox or donate it to a worthy cause. The next day, when you're sitting there reflecting on your life, just feel good and bask in the fact that you did that because you are good. That act was an expression of your own universal goodness. Realizing your own innate goodness is worth infinitely more than your spouse or friends telling you how good you are for doing that thing. -When others they tell you how good you are they're coming from a very materialistic perspective. They don't have a deep spiritual connection to the actual goodness of the universe or to the goodness within you that drives you to love and take action in the world. So the kind of praise they give you will be superficial praise. It will be highly dependent upon their judgments of you, because as soon as you do something that they disagree with they will stop praising you. In fact, they might even chastise you for this good act. They might tell you to spend that money on yourself, or give it to your family instead of some random neighbor. This might make you feel bad. You expected praise, but got called foolish. Then you're going to feel bad. Whereas if you didn't tell anyone and you could just bask in your own goodness. You know what you did is good and selfless, even though others may not agree. So why do you need them to acknowledge you? Cut that umbilical cord. Stop needing others to acknowledge your inner goodness, your love, selflessness, consciousness and intelligence. It should be enough for you to recognize these things simply within yourself. -This is harder to do than you think. First, it requires self-reflection. Second, it requires slowing your life down such that you actually have time for solitude. Most people don't even have time to contemplate the good things they've done all week because they're too busy chasing the next thing. That's how absurd this situation is. If you can’t even be grateful for the good things you do for yourself, how can you expect others to do that for you? You don't even recognize your own innate goodness, then you get bitter at others for not doing so either. Of course others don't recognize it in themselves too, because to recognize one's own innate goodness takes a high level of consciousness and maturity. -Most people feel so unlovable, so broken, so undeserving, so guilty that they don't even allow themselves to take in praise. The survival conditions they were raised in were so severe that praise was considered a luxury. So a lot of people motivate themselves by brow beating themselves, by telling them how bad they are and then this becomes an entire way of life. You feel bad about yourself, even though you do good things, but it’s never enough. -So imagine reaching a state of consciousness and spiritual development where you're able to just sit in an empty room and be fully satisfied. Without having to do anything. Where you’re so in awe and in love with the sheer existence of the room, by the raw physical fabric of reality itself. You are so appreciative of your direct experience and of existence itself that it's enough to satisfy you. The more you contemplate and bask in the absolute truth and the absolute love of the present moment, the more conscious you become of the spiritual nature of reality. The deeper and deeper sense of bliss you experience and then you bliss out literally on just existence itself and that becomes the best part of your day. This is the ultimate level of true satisfaction. -It’s very different than the way you live now. Where you begin the day by downing some coffee, then rushing off to work and doing this thing and that thing, taking care of the kids and by the end of the day you're exhausted. Maybe you even feel like you've been productive and therefore you allow yourself a little bit of happiness. So instead of all that, just come back home, sit in a room by yourself and luxuriate in the glory of existence that you are. All those external activities are actually distractions to this bliss. What About Selfishness? “But Leo but isn't this extremely selfish to live in this solipsistic bubble? I'm just sitting there and sort of fellating myself in my own mind. It seems almost dysfunctional!” -It seems dysfunctional only compared to how most people pursue happiness. The true dysfunction is running around trying to please others, to buy stuff or achieve goals to get happy. -What you're not understanding is that if you're able to reach this level of happiness and self-satisfaction, when you do go out there and socialize or run errands, which you'll still do, you’ll be coming from a much deeper place than you are now. You're not going to be a thirsty dog running around looking for a little bit of satisfaction from someone else. You have taken responsibility for giving yourself the satisfaction and love that you deserve. Then when you're out in the world, you're gonna be so satisfied, so full of love you’ll naturally pour that love out to others and be naturally selfless. -By withdrawing into yourself, you might become isolated, solipsistic and even selfish for a period of time. As you withdraw and cut off some of those social connections you might not be there for your friends and family as much as you would have when you were their little lap dog. That's true, but later you're gonna come back on your own terms, as a truly sovereign conscious being and then after having helped yourself, now you will be in a position to help others. You can't really help others when you're enslaved to them. -This is very counter-intuitive. It’s paradoxical. To live the most selfless life you must first live very selfishly by withdrawing into yourself. Look at the classic story of the Buddha. He supposedly lived a life of luxury and privilege. He had a whole palace full of family members, uncles, aunts, a father and mother. He had a wife and a child and one day, in the middle of the night, he walked out on all of them. Didn't even say goodbye. Imagine how betrayed they must have felt. Then he wandered through the woods for seven years meditating, pursuing awakening until finally he came back. So he didn't abandon them forever, but he needed to go through that period of selfishness. That selfishness was to realize the infinite self, the selfless self. When he realized that, he came back and helped them realize it too. You can't really help others to love unless you're able to realize love for yourself. A problem many people pleasers and women in abusive relationships face is they get stuck. Ladies can have this self-image of being very loving and selfless, but it's not true love. It's not true selflessness, at least it's not the deepest, non-dual form of it. -What you'll realize if you do the spiritual work deeply and you awaken is that love is not something you do. Love is something you are. Goodness is not something you acquire through good deeds, charity and bending over backwards. Goodness is what you are. -It’s not easy to raise your capacity for love, to cultivate and recognize your own goodness, to allow yourself to feel satisfied for no reason other than the consciousness of existence itself. Your mind will not want to do this. Your ego-mind controls you by setting up all these conditions for happiness so that you perform for it. That's how it gets you to do all manner of survival activities. The fact that you need to trick yourself in order to get stuff done shows you that you’re not coming from the highest level of motivation. The External, Material World is Illusory “But Leo, this sounds like self brainwashing. You're just sitting in a room bullshitting yourself into happiness. That's not truth, that's just new-age, wishful thinking stuff. If I build a $50 million company, that's objective, that's tangible." “When I get happiness for building that company or getting a million dollars or having sex with some hottie or raising beautiful children, that’s tangible material stuff. That’s what deserves true satisfaction, not sitting in a room doing nothing. That's cheating.” -Part of the materialist worldview is thinking that the external world is truer than your inner nature. It’s actually the opposite. The truest thing is your existence, your consciousness, your God nature, your intrinsic beauty, yourself as the universe. That's the real, absolute truth. (59:00) So, your money, children and good deeds aren’t what's objectively real. That’s all derivative, second order stuff. They’re all illusions. Its meaning and existence are predicated upon the fact that you exist, that you are God dreaming up the universe. The objective, tangible world is a figment of your imagination. -You need to recognize and re-collect your sovereignty. Use that as the anchor point from which you feel, think and take action. If you do that you will overcome the problem of loneliness, of people pleasing. You will overcome the problem of endlessly chasing things that never satisfy you. You will also overcome the ultimate problem of being unable to communicate the infinite beauty of the universe to other people. Only you can recognize the infinite beauty of the universe with your mind's eye, through your own consciousness. Nobody can do this for you. You can share bits and pieces of it, but you can’t fully transplant the infinite beauty of the universe into other people’s experience of life. Tips for Application -Keep building and building this type of solitary satisfaction until it gives you near-orgasmic levels of pleasure. Do good deeds for their own sake, not to get praise from others. Appreciate the world around you more. Gratitude turns what you have into enough. Start doing things by yourself, especially the things you’d normally only do with others (going to the movies, a restaurant, a waterpark, etc). Appreciate it without needing to share the experience or get validation from others. Enjoy a scenic place by yourself. Go to a national park, a beach, a beautiful city and just walk around. Luxuriate in your solitude, in this beautiful, kind of melancholic, solipsistic bubble. Don't talk to anyone. Appreciate and soak in the beauty that's there. Let that be enough to satisfy you. Dine at a beautiful restaurant by yourself. Order a really nice meal, maybe something special or exotic, and eat it slowly, deliberately. Appreciate and enjoy the heck out of it in a way that you never would with friends. When you’re eating with friends you’re too distracted to even notice the thing that you're eating. Go to the movies by yourself. Enjoy it just as much as you would with friends, or even more because friends can distract you by talking or eating popcorn. When you're done watching the movie, don't talk about it with anybody. Resist the instinct to text your friend about it. Just appreciate the movie as it is, by yourself. Appreciate solitude, period. There’s a positive, melancholic side to solitude. It’s nice to be alone with your thoughts, to contemplate and appreciate what’s in the present moment. -If you’re alone, but feeling lonely, learning to appreciate the alone times will make you more grateful when that special person does arrive. So let that craving go. Ideally you want to be satisfied with others and by yourself. Only when you’re coming from that place of self-love can you be authentic. You won’t need to control or manipulate others to stay with you. If they come, great. If not, you can still enjoy yourself. -These tips are deep spiritual work. If doing any of them makes you feel like a loser, it shows how addicted you are to external rewards. -Building up the muscle of beingness, of wonder, of awe at the universe will make you appreciate other people and activities so much more. Leo’s not saying you should never spend time with other people. It’s good to maintain a healthy social life. He’s just saying you can turn solitary travel into a practice to build your satisfaction for life. You're still going to socialize, but you’ll do it from a deeper place of satisfaction, not desperation. -The fundamental truth is that, in the end, you are the only conscious entity in the universe. So if you don't appreciate the universe who will? This episode is trying to guide you towards a very deep, profound appreciation of existence, of reality that can only be done by you. It’s not going to be done by your unconscious friends and family who take existence for granted. This appreciation of reality requires training. It’s not something you learn in a weekend. Most people won't to do it. They don't even know they should be doing it. So, you’re one of the few humans on the planet that’s going to do this, if you do it. -You can’t imagine the level of satisfaction and joy this will bring, especially if you keep it up over ten, twenty years and beyond. You’re going to have a level of joy that nobody around you can understand. You’re also not going to be able to share that with anybody but yourself. But it’s not going to be a problem, because you've trained yourself to luxuriate in your own joy and you will finally feel complete. Feeling Unloveable -Most people feel they don't deserve love. You solve that problem by giving yourself more and more and more love until you realize you are love. Then you're always conscious of the love that you are, that the universe is. Then you don't need other people to give you love and you don't feel unlovable anymore. This solves all your self-esteem problems too. (Aaron Abke has a good video on self-love.) -This solution is very counterintuitive because the ego mind has co-opted true love, happiness and satisfaction to manipulate you into doing its survival bidding. If you don't take ownership over that process you're never going to be satisfied in life. Survival and the mechanisms your ego mind has constructed aren’t about happiness. The ego-mind is about surviving, not thriving. The ego’s not designed to make you happy. That’s why no matter how good you are at surviving, it's never going to make you happy. (1:10:30) You can't pay someone to appreciate life for you. If you can't appreciate life you're going to be miserable and depressed. -You will not be satisfied with anything shy of infinite love because that's what you are. Deep down consciousness knows what it is and consciousness is seeking to reunite with its true nature which is infinite love. You have love, beauty, intelligence and goodness inside you, but they have been obscured by layers of fear, shame, survival scripts and social conditioning. You're out of touch with your own divine nature within. You’ve got to discover that and when you do, that's what you will really want. All the external stuff you've been chasing has been a poor substitute for what you were really seeking, the divine nature within. Discovering that is the root solution to people pleasing and to loneliness. -Now that you know all this, what are you going to do? If you don't do the work nothing's going to happen. Ten, twenty years will go by and you’ll be even more miserable, because you’ll wish you’d started this work much earlier, but then it's gonna be too late. -So start now. Come up with ways to start practicing this. Ultimately, you’ll have to have some enlightenment experiences to your true inner nature as love, God and absolute truth. That will make you more present, grounded and appreciative of the beauty that is here. (1:13:50) That will build a metaphysical connection to reality and you’ll appreciate reality more and more and more and more. These days, Leo can just look at a fork and marvel at the intelligence of it. This might sound absurd, and if somebody told Leo five years ago that a fork had any intelligence to it, he’d think you’re some crazy, new age hippy. (I always though this scene was silly until I learned about non-duality: The Matrix’s Spoon boy) -These days when Leo looks at an ordinary dinner fork it baffles him that most people can’t see the infinite intelligence. So everything gets turned upside down and then life just becomes so profound. The depth of life is true richness, not money or external possessions. It’s really about your capacity to appreciate the intelligence of the design, of this entire dream that you're in. Then just looking at reality makes you feel full of delight and joy, because what was just an ordinary fork, car, person, cat, place, you see for what it really is: a finite manifestation of God, of the infinite mind that you are a projection of. Then you can see and appreciate its innate beauty, intelligence, goodness and its connection to the whole universe. Shallow vs Deep Solutions - Notice that many of the problems in your life can be solved at multiple levels. You can find a lot of shallow solutions to the problem of loneliness or people pleasing. This episode presents a very deep solution. Deep solutions are more difficult to understand, implement and they take longer. They’re a long term investment instead of a quick fix. - When you make deep, long-term investments that solve a problem at the root, you don't have to keep fighting the problem over and over again for years. You won't have to live with the problem anymore. Shallow solutions will never hit a problem at the root. Quick fixes will waste your time, money and won’t stop the problem from reappearing, maybe even for the rest of your life. -Life is designed in such a way that you get out of it what you put into it. In this way life is fair. So, how much do you want to put into it and get out of it? How deep do you want your life to be? Do you want to have a really deep profound experience of life? Well then you're going to have to dig deep and do the work, because it’s not going to just land on your lap. - Everything Leo teaches is predicated on the idea that you want to live a more profound life than the average person. If you don't want that, you’re wasting your time at Actualized.org. You should go watch someone else. The depth in your life that's possible is so profound, none of you can fathom it. It’s truly infinite and impossible to communicate. Hence, how deep you go depends on how deep you want to go.

Unfortunately the media acts like this sh*t isn't happening everyday to Mexico. They don't even report it on the news. Most people i know are totally ignorant about this. I believe something serious must be done with the situation in Mexico. The situation in Mexico is really on a whole another level and unheard of. Why nobody is talking about this? What the fk is going on? Meanwhile Jeff Bezos is flying to space. (The absurdity of it all). ... Drug kingpins for example in other countries don't butcher each other this way. Yes they kill each other with pistols but not this way. The problem with Mexico is the BILLIONS of drug money that they make every year from selling to USA. Unless all drugs are made legal and you can buy them at your pharmacy then this horrendous stuff will keep on happening. Just watching some of those videos will hunt you for the rest of your life for good. This is very serious. When you think it doesn't get any worse, it does. The worst is the funkytown video. I haven't watched it besides a commentary of it. The commentary was enough to frighten me and cause me anxiety and terror. Just the sheer brutality of it is on a scope that i couldn't ever imagine existing. Now i have to to live and keep on with my life knowing that this stuff exists. This quote is definitely true -->''Ignorance is a bliss''.

Edit: Here’s the new update video about this which is shorter and comes a month after the video below and thus has more insight Lucifer is my spiritual guru (nondual Christianity) Infinite Love through Clairsentience bliss/crown chakra > true samadhi > nirodha samapatti or cessation > Infinite Love through Clairsentience bliss/crown chakra > Afterglow of Nonexistence and Existence fucking each other inside me Then it happened again two minutes later. Cool stuff, I swear. Watch the video for more details. How I Experienced Back-to-Back Cessations Through Bhakti & Love (instead of meditating) I’m not just a Luciferian. I’m a Christian too. Actually a fusion of both which I think is a truer form of Christianity. Nondual Christianity.

Find more love and bliss. Then your mind can handle it better because it’s used to intensity.

Realized something quite profound. What we call “mind” is not something confined to the interiors of our skull/brain..as traditionally thought of from a materialistic perspective. Imagination does not happen in the head. Mind is everywhere, your brain/skull/head is only one aspect of your mind. We are literally dreaming, and the dream doesn’t belong to the human body. When the word God is used, it is pointing to the Being that is actually having the dream. That entity is you, dreaming up your entire existence, including your body and thoughts. The implications of this makes me want to melt into pure bliss! Oh how lost I have been! ?❤️

The Path is infinite. But seeking in the dual sense stops when you realize that everything you seek or has sought before you already are. It is not an easy thing to realize in your direct experience, and there are many ways to go about it. For me, I contemplated to the point that I unraveled my own psyche, reaching infinity over and over again until my mental structure broke down and folded onto itself. It was a definitive shift in consciousness, a single moment when I surrendered everything within me and just started to be. Like a wordless whisper, beingness then carries and touches your consciousness like a holy mother, loving its child. Bliss, like a volcano, erupts out from the center of your heart and spread into every atom in your body and beyond. You reach a state of pure beingness, and you are ready for the great awakening. The ending/beginning of all things in existence.

Would you, as a human, enjoy reading a story that was only about butterflies, sweet butter, and bliss?

I was raised up a Christian, went through the usual route of questioning and becoming atheist because the literal interpretations seemed too magical and simplistic. Now that I have had some spiritual and nondual insights, some of the biblical stories have started to make a lot more sense. Not in the literal sense, but as metaphors that represent mystical states of consciousness. It's really exciting to hear or read about some biblical story I had almost forgetten about, and then having it make a ton of sense from a totally new perspective. For example, the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve live in a paradise created by God, in bliss, basically in heaven on earth. Then along comes the snake boi (satan) and convinces them to eat from the tree of good and evil (duality). They take the bite and suddenly feel separate from their surroundings, they become aware of their nakedness (ego mind, identification with the limited self). They become capable of feeling shame/imperfection. They enter the barren lands of suffering/imperfection and there starts the story of man. But in the background, even in the traditional Christian worldview, there is the one source (God) of everything, including Satan. So the separation was just a single mad thought (as ACIM would state). It popped up in Gods mind, and that created a dream, an illusion of being separate from the source. Although from Gods pov, it never even happened as some event, because it is still happening within the oneness, and isn't seperate from it. Satan=separation/ego/scarcity/fear God=oneness/perfection/love Christians say it is blasphemous and even satanic to call yourself God, but from this other interpretation the only satanic thing would be the belief in being seperate from God, since that idea of seperation is the source of all evil and it is what Satan (ego) represents. So perhaps awakening is just becoming aware of the whole (God) and seeing that no separation ever even happened, just an imagination of it. I'm still not totally sure why these stories are so sticky in human minds though. Is it because a) they simply have survival value for the ego or b) people gravitate towards them because they have deep intuitions that they are pointing towards some truth, like their infinite Self. Perhaps a bit of both?

Thanks! I always follow the body’s reasonable pain messages if they are too intense. The human part of us must be respected too. Because it is infinite dukkha that means bliss is dukkha too. I love bliss.

LSD opens the doors of perception. 5MeO-DMT blows the house apart. I am 55 years old and have done magic mushrooms and LSD many times. I have experienced ego death a few times on high doses of LSD and so I am not new to the psychedelic experience. I have been lurking on this site for months, reading, watching Leo's videos and learning what I could about 5MeO-DMT before I took it. I smoked 20mg of 5MeO-DMT freebase. I used a 300ml flask with a glass straw as I have seen on several YouTube videos. With the flame against the bottom of the flask, it filled it with a nice milky white smoke. I exhaled deeply and then put the straw to my mouth. I paused for a second and then inhaled deeply, basically clearing all the milky smoke from the flask into my lungs. Almost immediately I started to feel altered with a feeling of rushing energy though out my body. I then laid back and waited a few more seconds as things became unbelievably intense. I felt a powerful rush of energy surging up from my abdomen into my head and encompassing my whole body. It was then I felt a sense of panic come over me, similar to the bodies reaction to not being able to breathe. Yet I was breathing very deep and hard. A moment later and I was gone. Time and space were gone. The world as I knew it, everything in it and everyone I have ever known... gone. I had been completely and utterly annihilated. How do you describe an experience where there is nothing to ground it or relate it? There was no longer any points of reference. “My” consciousness was gone too. Without time and space and a sense of “I”, what else is there? How do we relate to or orient within such a state? How do we use words to describe an experience where all frames of reference are obliterated? There was no light, sounds, colors, pain, or sensations of any kind. I was gone. Yet it wasn't like anesthesia as there was “something” still present. It wasn't a complete blackout. Some vague sense of awareness was still present. My wife (my trip sitter) said I kept saying, “Son of a bitch”, and “Fuck” and “Oh my God” as I would cover my eyes and rub them. I also went from laying down on my back to sitting up. And then I placed my face down towards the ground with my butt in the air, like a fetal position with my head down. I don't remember any of this. The come up was so short and so intense I couldn't orient on anything. The come down however was more gradual. At some point (about 10 minutes) I started to become aware again. I have vague memories of holding my wife's face as I stared at her, trying to remember who and what I was. Time and space slowly started returning to my awareness. It was like I was being born and everything looked new and unfamiliar. My wife said I had a look of terror on my face. I remember more a feeling of complete disorientation. I didn't remember who I was or where I was for a few minutes. It was profoundly disorienting. So many people report feeling a profound sense of bliss and euphoria, blending with God etc. taking 5-MeO. I didn't get that at all. My feelings were more about gratitude that I was coming back and I started to re-orient to my life and my world. After about 20 minutes I was able to look around and recognize my living room and my wife again. I was able to start to talk. Everything looked intense, the world of ego, time and space were all here. After about 35 minutes, I was mostly back and then I felt a sense of disappointment. I didn't experience God, or anything I would call spiritual. There was no feeling of euphoria or bliss or love. I felt more like I had come very close to actually dying and I was very grateful to be back and for everything in my life. Several minutes later I started to cry. I had the realization that everything in life is precious and is there to be experienced. I became aware as to how much I avoid life and pain. How all of my fears were bullshit and that life was meant to just be lived and experienced. That the pain and suffering were part of it and from a higher perspective, were as beautiful as the joy and the bliss. I felt a profound sense of loving everything exactly the way it is. I suspect I took too much. I'm tempted to do it again, but with a much smaller dose. However, from this one experience I much prefer LSD. It reliably takes me out of my ego and into unity consciousness. It just lasts too long and requires a full day to trip and another day to integrate before returning to normal life. I was thinking 5MeO could do it too but more directly and without the hallucinations and time commitment. This experience wasn't what I thought it would be. But I have only done it one time, and frankly my first LSD experience wasn't "spiritual" either. Any advice for a 5MeO newbie?