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I believe that what Leo is saying is that atman is imaginary and therefore not real (therefore no atman). That only Brahman/nothingness/Everythingness is real because it cannot be imagined. While the atman POV can be imagined. I guess! (we are imagining it right now )

So this is a new (or new old) way to try to conceptualize reality and make sense of it. The distinctions here are arbitrary and completely relative but nevertheless here we go. There is basically only two things in all of existence.. Forms and formlessness. That's it. There isn't and never was and never will be anything else. The forms ALWAYS are limited and impermanent. The formless ONLY is unlimited and permanent. The two Are actually identical but it's hard for the mind to make sense of that (how could these forms be formless?). Instead try to think of it this way.. The formless is the container of forms. You might ask "where are all these forms taking place"? "where does existence happening"? And the answer is really nowhere.. Reality is happening inside of nothingness. If we erase all forms from existence.. What's left? Only pure formlessness. Pure nothingness. So that's like what's underneath all forms. Or the container of all forms.. The original state that then comes different forms and appear inside of it. So this present moment that's happening right now is 50 % forms and 50 % formlessness. We usually don't think of it this way.. We think "it's just forms ".of course you can't see it because it's not a form. It has no qualities whatsoever and that's precisely why and how it is present everywhere and every when yet you can't see it.. Because you can only see forms. But how come forms are present without a container? There must be a container that contains all these forms and it can't be anything else but formlessness. Think about an empty glass that is necessary to have some water or any substance inside of it. But instead what we have here is not an empty "glass".. But rather pure emptiness. Now you might ask.."where did all these forms come from then"? Here there is really no answer. It's pure magic. But the trick is that ultimately all forms appear and disappear.. They are just like dreams or hallucinations.. Forever appearing and disappearing. There is no rational explanation whatsoever why forms are here (the answer is actually that form is formlessness but it's near impossible to make sense of it rationally without a mystical experience). But the only way to relate to it is by understanding that all forms are ultimately a temporary passing show that means absolutely nothing and was never ought to be anything substantial or to form a "reality".

@Someone herewhat the fuck is nothingness

Sounds like you all have been reading up on Douglas Harding and Richard Lang's work on the Headless way. I am trying to understand the bible verse What I gather from this is that YOU CAN see MY FACE and LIVE because the No-Face is All-Face. The Face of No-Face is the same for all. Oh but I think I am getting another interpretation here in that No "man" meaning ego can see the God-self of No-face and continue to exist. The No-Face shatters the illusion of having a head or ego and thus when you see my face, meaning the no-face of nothingness in all of us, then your ego is gone and you no longer live, meaning living as a self in a world, but rather a world experiencing a self. Did I get it?

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

Yeah, I have the same situation with mine. He usually gets annoyed because I have this habit of talking about absolute nothingness and death before we go to sleep. He told me I give him nightmares so I had to stop

@tatsumaru it looks to me like you're playing a war over vocabulary. In addition to talking about delusions of mathematicians. I can exclaim and call my experience infinite as the word I want to say, there's nothing complicated about that. There is non-mathematical infinity, the same way I can experience nothingness which isn't the empty set. That's a separate issue from the delusion of mathematicians, which by all means you are free to rant about. I understand that you're ranting about that with a context, but to say there's no non-mathematical infinity is limited to whatever scheme of words you're reference. But yeah I do kinda get what you're doing with infinity. Since conceptually there with infinity, there is division into many infinities. And you're going after division. So I guess what you're also fundamentally going after is perception of "many"/division vs "one", which is cool. Also sounds like you're talking about whether there is just one absolute and that's that, or whether there are levels to it. Insert Ralston vs Leo debates.

Well yes, everything moves through consciousness, but I'm talking about when you actually start losing your identity, start letting go and you die. my awareness definitely went out of the body literally into emptiness/nothingness and that's where all realizations began. 5-MeO doesn't work for me somehow, might need to start plugging. Smoked up to 13mg now slowly building but nothing. Only experiencing heavy body loads.

@Roy I feel I am addicted to Facebook. I check facebook atmost 25 times a day. I have posted that God is nothingness on facebook post . And my post haven't recieved a like. I still feel urge to post . But this is damaging to my social life. People think I am weird. My likes has decreased now. For normal post too I receive less likes as compared to previous. My intention is only to enlighten people. But they are very religious.

@bejapuskas I truly feel there is no use in this all. I am a random piece of stardust, a speck of dust in time and space. Why do anything? This nihilism is pulling me down, it doesn't feel healthy to me. I feel like I have to watch out not getting depressed. I can't grasp this profound nothingness. Well maybe , when meditating I can feel happy in a sort of no mind state. But I loose this when I stop meditating.

First post on Actualized.org so why not start with a trip report ?. Sorry if it’s a little long. I’ve been a long time watcher of Leo’s videos (first introduced to them by my partner maybe 5 years ago now). I come on the forum from time to time and have a read. I’ve decided maybe a good time to start posting because I have more and more questions going through my head that the community may be able to help answer. So let’s get to the trip itself. A little bit of background before I start. I’m in my 40’s now, I tried mushrooms twice in my 20’s in an immature fashion. At a party with no real idea of what I was really doing. First time was a little whacky and fun, the 2nd time was challenging, negative thought loops, going crazy etc etc and this put me off them. Now in my 40’s I’m much more grounded, I’ve worked through many parts of my life and got my shit together much more. Aside from Leo’s videos I’ve been watching and reading more about the studies at Imperial College in London and the Johns Hopkins in the US and the ground breaking work they are doing with psychedelics, which is amazing to read and watch about (all be it from a more therapeutic stance). So a perfect time for me to pick these substances back up and see if I can expand my mind a little more. The first trip I tried (this was a couple weeks before this trip report), I was starting on the light side, just to get a feel for them again. I had 1g psilocybin cubensis. I ground them down in a coffee grinder and steeped them in tea (making sure the water was not boiling) I had chamomile to help with any nausea and a little honey for taste. The effects of this trip wasn’t so great. Little effect in terms of insight / sensory, it mainly felt heavy bodily, nausea and a slight heaviness in feeling. This lasted maybe 4 hours in total. I’d not eaten since dinner the previous evening (so a good 16 hours of nothing in my stomach). Which kind of puzzled me because I wasn’t expecting much nausea being steeped in tea. But from researching I do realise it’s very individual. The next trip I had was a couple of weeks ago, again on a Sunday morning 9:30am ingested. This time round I opted to up the dose to 2g (same batch from previous). I’d also done a little more research because I was hoping to avoid the nausea. So I did a lemon tek this time round. Also realising the trip maybe a little more intense, but I was ready for that. I had my partner trip sitting me, she was sober and holding space and there if I needed her, without really getting involved and shaping any of the trip. Again didn’t eat for a good 16 hours, grounded down the shrooms and steeped them in lemon juice, stirring every 5 mins or so for around 30 mins. I strained the bits of mushrooms twice really squeezing ever last bit out of them and then discarded them. I had the lemon juice with water to make it a little more palatable. I went to the living room, lay down on the sofa. Eye-mask and music on and relaxed doing some light breath-work. My mood was great, my intension was set (to try and get a better sense of what reality is and just go with the flow of what the mushrooms wanted to show me). After around 30 mins I could feel them hitting me the waves of euphoria started. I taken the eye-mask off and the general signs that I was tripping had started, colour distortion and general distortion in things like the carpet patterns. These were fascinating to get sucked into, the more I focused my attention on items the more magical and trippy they became. Each time I had a drink of apple juice when I brought the glass to my mouth the colour of the juice in the glass would then interact with everything in my line of sight changing the colour to match. This external trippiness went on for some time. Then the peaks of the trip came in what my partner said afterwards were 3 waves. I can’t remember the first wave. But with each wave the the body load was very intense, not in an uncomfortable way, it basically smashed me to the ground (my body was so heavy that movement was difficult). The nausea was also intense with each wave. I had a bucket ready, each time these waves hit me it made me retch, thankfully empty stomach so nothing was coming up. The second wave was powerful and my awareness was through the roof. I lay with my eyes closed and felt really connected with myself, visuals were strong with my eyes closed and had a strong sense of compassion for myself and this was really emotional, it allowed me to really forgive myself for not taking care of my body in my younger years (20s). Although I’m perfectly healthy, I did abuse my body a little when I was younger. My partner held my hand through this period, which really grounded me and helped massively. The 3rd and last wave was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Again massive body load (I could hardly move). I closed my eyes and the only way I can describe it, was the whole of reality (and everything contained within - including myself) just started to fracture away in many many, almost an infinite number of parts. This went on for god knows how long (time no longer existed at this point) and when it finally stopped fracturing away there seemed to be nothing, just an infinite expanse of nothingness. I had no sense of anything (who, what, where I was) it just felt like pure love (I know it sounds like a cliche). I felt connected to everything it was the greatest feeling I’d ever felt and I seem to bath in it forever. My partner said I had my eyes closed just saying “this is amazing” over and over. Then after some time my general sense of me seemed to return. I’ve not pieced together yet exact how I returned (and I’m not sure if I will). This last wave eased very quickly and it was like I’d gone from totally tripping to being generally back to my base reality very quickly. At this point visuals were very much back to normal. I could then move around, so got up and had some food and went into the garden to play with the dog. The total trip length from ingestion too feeling relatively normal again was 4 hours. Im still spending time integrating what happened and how it effects my everyday life. I had a total loss of self, some might call this ego death. Although I’m a little shocked at doing this from only 2g of mushrooms. Other reports I’ve read are generally 4+gram at least before this happens. I guess everyone is different and maybe I’m sensitive to psychoactive substances. I’ll spend more time integrating before I go again. I’ll do this dose more times because I still feel there is loads of insight to be gained. I do have many questions, so maybe I’ll just post them separately in the main ‘Meditation, Consciousness, Enlightenment, Spirituality’ forum. Thanks for taking the time to read ?

Have you studied this stuff, @Leo Gura? from what i understand, Magick is basically another word for Consciousness, and more specifically, the "miracle"-forming quality of consciousness. I purposely avoided it until now, because i figured this type of western spirituality attracted all sorts of wackos and i wanted to have a more stable mind and awakening before diving in. The most interesting part so far is understanding everything i know about God and Love and Consciousness and Nothingness and basically all the stuff you teach, through the new lens of western symbolism. It has been some time since i felt like i'm learning something completely new. It definitely connects some dots. I also enjoy the process of patiently filtering all the information and all the biases of the teacher. This channel Mystery School seems to explain things pretty well. He isn't God-Realized, but then again, most people aren't (and that's not what i'm on his channel for anyway) I tried starting to learn this stuff from books and other people, but so far this is the only guy that made me stick to it, because i feel that he explains thing well for beginners. (or maybe i'm just dumb, who knows XD). I found out valuable stuff from Jason Louv and Damien Echols also. They got me a rough idea of the areas that are worth exploring in Magick and what supposedly actually works best.

Generally the progression is this: 1) You realize no-self. 2) You realize Nothingness/Emptiness/Formlessnesss 3) Then you realize The Self. 4) Then you realize Formless = Form It does not have to happen in that order, but this a very common progression. You need more consciousness to see that Formless = Form You progressively realize deeper and deeper that everything is ONE. All dualities merge into each other more and more and more and more until it gets so radical that you literally cannot tell the difference between anything. It's a slow process of defragmenting the mind until your mind becomes a perfect Unity. You are healing and unifying old divisions in your mind like, self vs other, life vs death, love vs hate, good vs bad, reality vs illusion, God vs self, truth vs love, something vs nothing, relative vs absolute, etc. In the very end you realize that everything equals everything else.

HEY guys, I do agree with Leo that non-duality is just one mode of existence. One lens of perception. This is why I distinguish between non-duality, non-locality and uni-locality. You could say that those are all different stages of non-duality, but there are on the relative level degrees of non-duality. Here are some quotes from AH ALmaas's website that most resonate to my current mode of development, and might point out some of those difference (Beyond non duality) All Forms Exist Within One Another "The Freedom Vehicle makes it possible to have these types of unity experiences – we call them experiences of unilocal unity, or unilocality – with another person, a group, or the whole universe. Unilocality is the view of reality related to a nothingness that has no sense of space, extension or distance. The experience of being in union in this nondimensional nothingness is unilocal unity. It can arise as the experience of two or more individuals sharing the same location often experienced as being inside each other. Unilocality is neither dual nor nondual. We are not talking here about an ocean of consciousness that unites all forms as they arise within it – the nonduality of the boundless dimensions; nor is it dual, when individual forms are separate and relating spatially. In unilocality, all forms exist within one another. As we become comfortable exercising the view of totality, we can consider all kinds of other questions from its perspective. One of the central issues that we deal with in this book is the relationship between duality and nonduality. Discerning the implications inherent in the nondual view opens up whole new possibilities of experience. We will spend some time exploring these new frontiers by examining the nature of time and space, the role of the particular individual, the paradox of nondoing, and the various mysteries of emptiness—all from the perspective of totality. What is revealed as we do this is that reality is far more indeterminate, far more mysterious than anything we can conceive of. No single view—whether dual, nondual, unilocal, or something else entirely—can capture the dynamism of reality. Freedom is the freedom of reality to reveal its dynamism, to express itself as form, as formlessness, as both, or as neither. No single feature and no combination of features can exhaust the potential of reality. It is a mystery without end. Reality is always revealing itself by knowing itself; and knowing reality and living it becomes the fulfillment of our life. The purity of reality expresses itself to us, through us, and as us, all at once. Our life becomes the life of true nature—the purity at the heart of reality—living consciously and expressing itself as us"

Those are all good and valid. You have no form, but you also have form. The human form is also Absolute. Do not overlook form. Those are all facets of God. But you still have yet to grasp as a whole what God is and how it works. What is God? << that's the key question to crack. Answers such as "awareness" or "consciousness" or "nothingness" are partially correct, but not good enough. Those are glancing strikes. You must hit the nail right on the head to reach complete self-understanding. Of course. It's just a matter of realizing this more holistically. Look at your hands. Your body is God. This is what God looks like. God has a human body. God is a singular being who creates itself using infinite imagination. You are that being pretending to be human. You are an Infinite Dreamer. YOU! YOU! YOU! No one else but you. Just look at what you dreamed up.

I had this idea earlier today - we care so much about religion/ideology/values/identity/story because they are the context we set for the character "skin" of our reality. If there was no "skin", there would be nothing to see/interact with - nothingness. but is there something or nothing?

I overlooked so such thing. I was not talking about a selfish desire. You guys here way over-project egoic desire. Not everything other than Nothingness is an egoic desire. This kind of redictionism is problematic and stunts exploration of consciousness. This is why I shouldn't even share my deepest goals with you. You don't get.

Nothingness = Formless = Form = Something = Everything = Void Void is right here, right now. Your ass is the Void even while it looks like an ass.

I think some people are getting confused with the word formlessness. Nothingness, the Void, or whatever you relate to is absolute stillness, no motion, no energy in action, no thought, no consciousness or awareness. It is absolute zero. Formlessness, on the other hand, can have two meanings, or possibly more. Formlessness is sometimes referred to as a dream state that has not materialized, or it can be referred to where no patterns, shapes, or designs are created or exist, which could be interpreted as nothingness! Having said that, patterns, shapes and gestalts of thoughts, ideas, images, beliefs, emotion, energy, sensation and non-physical textures etc., are “formed” within the ocean of consciousness, or what some people refer to as the dream states, or realities that have not materialized in to physical matter as we know it. Think of consciousness as energy in action, thoughts in motion etc. Consciousness is an ocean of energy, which allows thoughts, ideas, images, belief, emotions, sensations etc. to “form” into patterns, to form into psychic gestalts of energy, to form into electrical patterns, blue prints of beingness etc. These “forms” of energy are one with everything, they exist within consciousness, they are all interconnected and interrelated, and yet they “create” an invisible independence or identity that purposely forms gradations of intensities and densities that simulate invisible, non-existing boundaries to purposely experience “forms” of beingness, separate and yet “one” with absolute consciousness. Do not get forms, patterns, or shapes that exist in the dream states confused with objects within the material reality of physical matter, time and space. Forms, patterns or shapes of energy, thought, ideas, etc., are “Not Formed” in “time and space”. They are formed within gradations of energy densities, densities within densities within intensities, which do not take up time or space as we know it. These units of conscious psychic gestalts of energy, thought etc. eventually get so intense and focused that they burst into physical matter, creating infinite fractals of “physical” conscious units of beingness. Consciousness is an absolute ocean of independent psychic energy gestalts, which cooperate to create infinite forms of non-physical and physical realities that are truly independent, yet interconnected and interrelated, forms of “Real” “Beingness”. Just sharing a few thoughts, ideas and beliefs!

Haha no, seriously. I wasn't serious about what I wrote. I just thought it's one perspective which makes sense, at least for me. I personally like the idea that all experience, normal or supernormal is still a distortion of mind and is just as unreal like every experience. Only when you dissolve the mind you experience that which is beyond mind and matter. Only that can be true and not distorted by the mind. Buddhism stresses a lot that you can only a have a real taste of this beyond mind and matter phenomena in cessation where there is no experience left only awareness is there. Well this you can argue if you want. I'm just saying what they are saying. I'm not a buddhist even lol. And I have no bias towards buddhism. I just think they make sense here. Also buddha sayes that every samadhi state is just entertainment for the ego. It doesn't necessary dissolve the mind. According to them only dissolving all experience of life is important. Total cessation. Everything else is just your imagination. When there's no imagination left then Truth remains. And that Truth is a state of cessation. Well it makes sense my friends it makes sense to me a lot. Of cource I'm not attached to it much. You can say everything, every moment is absolute truth. Everything that comes from emptiness is emptiness. No duality formless = form etc. It's the same thing. Just a different side of the same coin. I enjoy all perspectives My personal theory about psychedelics (which could be totally wrong btw) is that they don't dissolve the ego they trancend the ego. They push awareness temporarely by releasing a lot of energy from the Ojas above the mind and you experience this beyond mind and matter phenomena. In that moment you get an experience of absolute truth without dissolving experience. And at the same time you know that all experience is not true and imaginary. It's just a sensation of god's mind. That's what self-inquiry does in a way. One other thing that buddha sayes is even if you get this experiance of 8jhana of self-realization of god and everything is not real etc., you are still stuck in this game and are forced to experience life untill you dissolve this imagination into nothingness. Realization of god is not enough to end life, you have to dissolve all imagination, all mind. When there's no more experience, total cessation, that's the end of suffering, end of life, end of mind, end of creation. Buddhism can sound pretty dark sometimes lol. I'm just pondering stuff here. Don't take it seriously Regards ? @Leo Gura @Adamq8

Perhaps everything that you experience, every state you experience is a delusion. The only reality is That which is not experience. When all experience is dissolved then truth is left. Total nothingness. Cessation of all sense doors. Not a single thought or sensation like in deep sleep but still aware. I wonder if such experience is possible with psychedelics. This rises a good question. For example, christians when they take psychedelics, they experience Jesus, angels and stuff. Hindus experience Shiva or Krishna. Those who read about dmt entities start meeting entities. There are some who watch too much matrix and then take psychedelics and say I've experienced that life is a computer simulation. Everything is not real. And they're super serious they even end up in mental hospital. I know one person like that. So yes. I think potential for self-deception is a big one with psychedelics. The only thing you can trust is That which is not an experience. Because every experience is just a projection of your subconscious mind I think. I like what buddhist say that unless you polish your mind totally everything you see is not true. It's distorted with your own subconscious believes, likes and dislikes. The only way to know what is true is total purification/dissolution of the mind. Idk. Makes sense to me. Regards ?

I feel like Leo's video was too much for me. Especially the synchronicity, esoterik "you created your own path to wake up to yourself, but you also do everything to hide the truth from yourself." This is nonfalsifiable, hypnotising and strange loopey. It's clear where God would hides from me, if he wanted to stay hidden in plain sight. Behind the insanity of a psychedelic trip. However that might send me straight to the psychiatry. So let's be honest I'm not going to do it. If God realisation is as traumatising as the nothingness (without love), then I only want it to escape the suffering from daily life. Why would I even want to know? If the behind the scenes ruin the play, it's no guarantee that it'll be permanent. Or that it's the best case scenario. I already tried to stop meditating, stop asking questions, stop contemplating stop watching spiritual videos and stop doing self inquiry. It never worked. I also tried to convince myself that this forum is a very deceptive cult, but that's just me fighting with myself and I end up here again and again. I just don't know what to do, I don't even know what question I should ask. Tell me how to stop this neurotic chase for truth. Now I want to contemplate why I started the search, and why I want to stop it, and I'll end up right here again.

@The0Self I'm not sure if you are familiar with the nothingness, or in my situation DP/DR. But once you have it, nothing is real anymore. Nothing seems real... Keep in mind, I was 16yo at that time. And I have researched how people behave when they are confronted with nothingness. Basically, they do stupid shit as if it was a dream, because it is a dream. You basically just behave as usual, but sometimes you say: fuck it it's a dream. And it changed me. In ego terms, I make the correlation between this and behavioural changes, so the Now is still absolute, but still it happened. There is no doubt that such experiences change your personality, and fuck you up deeply if you aren't prepared. It's like thinking "I am definately crazy, but nobody would understand that, so why tell the dream people about it" Everything happening on it's own is an awakened state, but not comparable with nothingness. The ego always reacts to changes in consciousness. Euphoric highs, or fighting stuff, or going crazy. It often depends on the awakening. Furtunately, I am out of that state now.

Yes, that's actually one type of "meditation" I enjoy doing. Like sitting, or laying on my back and not caring about anything, once I reach that state of being, I actually feel what you could call contentment, without reaching profound meditative states. @Tim Ho The heaven awakening I had is not really a metaphysical truth, but more like a change in perspective + no-ego state. Not as incredible as Kundalini bliss or nothingness. Let's hope My head will show itself to me I also stopped torturing myself with SDS meditation, cold water showers etc, because I have a notion, that spirituality is a path made out of suffering, for it to be transcended, which is a very unhealthy perspective on life. I am aware, that once I let go of strong physical pain, I enter a state of equanimity, but that's harder for sneaky stuff, and I often don't see the point of that. @Gianna I don't only watch Leo's videos, I'm also in shinzen young's fb community, but I just love this forum too much. I am sorry you feel that way. It's really hard to remember the highs, when we are low.

I wished I had buddhist background or anything before I had a spontaneous nothingness a few years ago. I was just abusing the effect of the no self for egoic reasons, got really manipulative, provocative, outright deceptive, because, yeah this dream has no rules/limitations, why not do whatever I want. All this shit I did, actually backfired hard on me. Because once the dream feels real again, you have accumulated all that karma, all those lies and shame and guilt will come up. I'm so sorry for what I did to some people. But at least, now I know I will not do that again. (I hope though)