Search the Community

I think that this forum has already reached its limit. Am not saying that to upset anyone or Leo. But I feel that there is way too much focus on the word "enlightenment" or "life purpose". This stuff confuses most people. And I cringe everytime when I read something like: "Omg, I had an enlightenment experience" or whatsoever. I always look back at Jiddu Krishnamurti when he once talked about the transformation of the mind. Jiddu died 30 years ago, so his words are at least 30 years old. I look at myself and think that at this point I am surely not the transformation that he was talking about. And I am really curious whether I can do that. But for now the transformation that I experienced were baby steps. So how am I supposed to expect faster transformation from other forum members? I just can't. I see the forum as what it is. It put me in a certain position and from that point I have to walk a very lonely road where no forum needs to be by my side. That is the struggle. I came to this forum because of some inner resistence. Now that I feel better in certain aspects the only thing to do here is to leave this place or help.

You see, in the old days of the Upanishads, most students were guided by a teacher, a teacher who was qualified to teach. It was a real tradition. Students had to practice a long time for Non-dual teachings, because their minds had to be ready to accept this experience so that it transformed into body wisdom rather than cognitive wisdom. Some people had to practice 12-15 years before they were allowed in on non dual. It was kept secret. Now, in this day of New Age bastardization and compulsive shallow congnitive Absolutization of the Relative, all that meaning has been lost and re-labelled "dogma". Everything now is dismissed as "dogma". This is innocent, but it is also ver ignorant. This happened because people listen to teachings that confuse relative and absolute and throw out the baby with the bathwater and screw themselves and the path because of the BELIEF that anything relative and meaningful is just "dogmatic". This is the problem here in these forums and in the New Age. It is the capitalist "quick fix" anybody can become "enlightened" fad of weekend Satsang. It's turned into like going to Church, except at least in organized religion you have some respect and reverence for relative duality! Now days the non-duality scene it just a big lie. So if you buy into the New Age lie, you will become an Absolutist who just walks around policing the language world and calling everything dogma and ego, but with no real understanding or transformation under their belt to back this up. Its just more ego pretending to be open minded.

Notes: SDS training wheels; how to increase SDS time rapidly WARNING: experimental technique I thought I would just briefly cover how I increased my SDS time from 1 to 3+ hours overnight for anyone who is interested. I combined technology, with some knowledge of physiology, yoga and hypnosis. I'll briefly describe exactly what I did and the theory behind it. In this video Shinzen Young explains how becoming goal oriented in SDS time rather than in psychological transformation can be a hindrance in spiritual development, so it's something to keep in mind. The goal is not to see how much you can take. Firstly, to be able to sit longer you need to develop your concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity. I presume that these are higher brain functions that happen in the neo-cortex/ frontal lobes. The Ted talk below explains how stress in the body causes a “self-lobotomy” of higher brain function. The biggest factor in this mental shut-down is irregular heart rate. It turns out that you can influence your heart rate by controlling your breath, there are a lot of details to how this works (you can follow your nose around these journal articles if you want to learn more about this) To cut a long story short, when you inhale your heart rate increases and when you exhale it decreases. To keep your heart rate regular the time you spend inhaling and exhaling in each breath needs to be constant and even, you can watch how Neil's rate increases and decreases evenly after he begins the breathing exercise. To lower your average heart rate the inhale should be shorter than the exhale, i.e. you spend less time increasing (inhale) and more time decreasing (exhale). You can increase your heart rate by doing the opposite - take long deep inhales and rapidly exhale. This is a cool hack I use to help me wake up quickly in the morning, it gets my blood pumping fast so I can metabolise the sleep hormones quickly. The problem is, when you begin this process you have low concentration and sensory clarity so you won't be able to keep it up very long. This is where I incorporated technology, yoga and self-hypnosis. I sampled one line from Sadhguru's isha kriya meditation using audacity (a free audio editing program) and put it on my phone to play in a loop. The idea is to take and hold the two thoughts: “I am not this body” “I am not even the mind” with inhalation and exhalation respectively. Notice that this ensures that your inhale will be shorter than your exhale and the duration will be the same for every full breath. This is what we want to keep your heart rate low and regular, and your higher brain function running so you can practice concentration clarity and equanimity better. With each inhalation and thought “I am not this body” I “felt” my entire body, washing my attention over the whole thing, noting any sensations, emotions and practising equanimity to the best of my ability with anything I felt. Then when I switched my attention to exhaling and the thought “I am not even the mind” I practised witnessing the internal talk and images that arose as I said “I am not even this mind” The subconscious mind is programmed by plain repetition, so as you're doing this you are basically brainwashing yourself to dissociate from the body and the mind to the witnessing state. I also used the insight mediation app to sound interval bells every 30 minutes, because it makes it easier to keep going when you have an idea of how much time you've done. Over the coming week I increased the time between interval bells until I was able to sit the full 3 hours without any time reference, then I stopped using the audio and was able to sit motionless, for a full 3 hours without any mantras or tech within a week. Additional notes: Begin with a growth mindset, your first sits don't have to be perfect. If you have to move to readjust your back or whatever then do it, an imperfect long sit is better than a perfect short sit because you will work through more resistance, it doesn't take long to perfectly still. To get a good posture I visualised a helium balloon taped to the top of my head gently pulling it up to the sky. I eventually found the sweet spot where my back was straight and stable without using any muscles. I noticed that breathing was difficult when my back/abdominal muscles were too contracted. You could just start out in a chair which would make this easier.

What's to become of the flower seed after full bloom It does not exist yet is told of its magical transformation "You were once a small seed in the dirt" the flower hears. "You will become a beautiful expression of nature" the seed hears. Non of this is there reality. Just stories of others from others, I am a seed in the dirt, catching water soaked mud and fleeting glimpses of sunlight. I am a brilliant flower blossom that gets bludgeoned by rain and misses the feeling of soil. Of all this, who is what and what is not?

Dunno what I am supposed to add here. When you ask us what kind of morals you are supposed to have, you basically behave like a very young child not knowing anything about the world, which actually isn't a bad thing. But being in your age (you are writing a thesis now) you have to have some sort of values. Look at your life. Be aware of what you are doing. What you are doing is what you are. Just think a lot about your own life and don't get obsessed with other people like ted bundy. You are upsetting me somehow. I feel like I am talking with a potential copycat murderer. There are people who are mentally ill, there are people who are/were very unlucky in their life, there are people who just find another reason to live a very dark life based on torturing and killing and whatsoever. But why should I look at such people? I don't define myself as a person that likes torturing and killing, because I have compassion. I have emotions. I believe that being is a great alternative to not being. Torture and killing for me is just some sort of sadistic stuff that is only covering stuff like fear. Defining morals as something very unique this sentence is total bullcrap. Every human being has its very own morals. It always depends on you and the other person. Will you let the other person influence you to become more and more like he is? Do you have some fundamental values that can't be changed that easily? Even if this ted bundy lives in your environment. Why should he influence you? Only because he is present? Do you think that you are soooo manipulative? I am not saying that the perfect human being should not be manipulative at all, but representing your own values or whatsoever is a strong trait, I guess. Well, you don't have to define what is right and what is wrong. This is just a way for human beings to simplify life as much as possible (source: religion or whatsoever). There are questions that can't be answered, in my humble opinion. But if you REALLY want to find an answer, you will. Believe me. Do whatever the fuck you want. Answer the question for yourself or just don't answer it. Having a great quote from my favorite dude Jiddu Krishnamurti: “You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is."

I intend to visit 2 weeks of the fall retreat. Which Workshop would you recommend taking? Week 1 Experiencing the Nature of Being Week 2 Pursuing Consciousness through Transformation Week 3 Consciousness Training Camp Final Week Contemplation Intensive

http://www.chenghsin.com/workshop-fall-series.html Peter Ralston has a 4 week retreat this fall. It conists of 4 different workshops: Week 1 Experiencing the Nature of Being Week 2 Pursuing Consciousness through Transformation Week 3 Consciousness Training Camp Final Week Contemplation Intensive It's 4000 USD for the 4 weeks. I have enough money for it and I'm highly considering it. Has anyone here worked with Ralston before, is he the real deal? @Leo Gura you have been to some of his workshops right?

@John I think Tolle the night of his transformation was really willing to die. He had enough. Maybe he discovered that one not need actually die in order to discover the peace a suicidal person is looking for? I had an experience like this myself, where I just let the identity die because I saw that it actually did nothing for me, only caused me problems. It was short lived though, and not a lasting thing, but I got a glimpse of what it means to awaken: Pain happens, but there is nobody there to suffer.

@charlie2dogs One of the biggest jokes in the current hive mind - the grand transformation of the collective human consciousness. Yes, even I bought into it.

I find that a lot of people - including myself - set these aspirations for the person that we want to become and very often fail to do so. And I believe part of the problem is that we tend to fix the behavior rather than the root cause that leads to it. This leads to maybe a change in behavior, but it does not really transform the "I" which is what I am interested in changing. I have recently red the book called "pursuing consciousness" and in this book Peter Ralston states that in order for real transformation to occur within the self, one must find the real cause to why the self is as it currently is. But how does one really become aware of the root cause of a partucular behavior? That is what I really want to know. Therefore, It would be great if u could cover this some day, Leo

Can You Change Your Life? (is a customer interview) http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod11-holly-interview.mp3 The real transformation that you create for yourself, is in actual practice. Those exercises can be found in the self mastery course. Before you start changing your life, you start with mastering yourself. You are the instrument with which you create your life. And without first tuning that instrument, you are likely to miss the mark of what you are aiming for in your life. Do You Need Guidance? http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod21-teacher.mp3 -Enlightenment is when you see things as they are. -All that one has to do to make that journey is to shift his point of perception -Choose to put your point of perception to a different view point at anytime, to take you out of victimhood and out of judgment. -To a certain point, you have to get free of the path, but to even get to a point where you can depart, you have to develop the skills to develop your attention and therefore follow a path. -Book learning is quiet different from developing consciousness. What do we do with that knowledge? We have to pratice. -Don't be under the belief that if you really care about someone, you have to point all what he's doing wrong to him. It's a different kind of caring, not as accepting or as respectful. In the structure of belief system, of how to become more spiritual by having expectations in being more perfect, doesn't fit. You have to adapt a point of view where you accept yourself (and others) completely the way you (they) are. -Wanting to become perfect on the spiritual path is counterintuitive. Finding Your Self http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod16-finding-self.mp3 -The quest starts the day you're not happy with the global situation you're in. -To make possible to express more love, you have to get rid of your fears. That means getting rid of fears made of beliefs, beliefs that are connected to fear. -We bounce between our good self-esteem and our bad self-esteem. Those self-images create an identity. -Within that matrix of who we are, having to find ourselves over the years, we' ve made hundreds of agreements "oh I'm this way, I'm not that way","I'm good at maths, lousy at english, I cant sing or paint". All those images exist in our mind. We've been defining ourselves by agreements and by imaginary characters, conceptual ideas of who we are, many of them based in fear. Some kind of self-rejection, some kind of "I wonder what they think about me" story. The thing the people mistakingly go do in finding out who they are, they go looking among those imaginary characters they have among themselves, that they've had created. And all these imaginary characters of themselves not one is really them. -That path to happiness or that path to love in your life is about uprooting all those false images based in fear even the positive ones based in illusions, because you aren't that imaginary character either. Your own mind becomes a big trap, it becomes a matrix of illusions and many of those are based in fear. You might ask :"well if I'm I'm not any of those character, who Am I, what am I?" The who Am I question isn't a so good question to ask, because it leads us to believe in an imaginary character! -At that point, it can be very frustrating to get more lost instead of finding yourself. But that is the nature of the journey. In the journey you have to dissolve all the illusions, and it can be pretty uncomfortable. As you honestly dissolve all these false images and illusions you have about yourself, you will find that you'll be happier, because there is more room in your life. -As your consciousness expends, and you dissolve the fears, you dissolve the false beliefs -From that divine point of view of truth, love or consciousness , only perfection exists. -The mind has an idea of what the body is supposed to do and look like, it judges the body as wrong in some fashion. It's kind of ridiculous. The world of the body is separate from the mind, and the mind very often tries to control the body, and therefore creates a conflict. When we are not aware, we create a judgement of our body, it can end up in feeling guilty, ashamed, being angry at our body. The body by itself is a beautiful being, the divine world by itself is only perfection. It's in the middle world of the mind that there is all those comparisons, judgments, victimization out of emotional reactions. -You have to let go all the egos versions of self in order to embrace the authentic self, witch is a divine self. It's a big and beautiful leap in consciousness. It allows a world without conflict, in yourself and in the world, and see everything as beautiful. Unconditional love and acceptance for life. -Why do get people angrier over the years? We learn to accumulate stories, opinions, beliefs and agreements in our mind and we collect all these ideas in the mind, but we never clean up our mind. We collect them and a lot of them are in contradiction. We are not taught to evaluate thoughts, we are not taught to let them go. -In that quest of finding oneself, you have to dissolve the world of illusions of the mind, to find who but more importantly what you are... which is life, conscious life expressing itself through that body. -It take consciousness, awareness and mastering control over your own attention, this is not an intellectual paradigm.

@Orange Hi The ideas presented by people, even here, are just ideas. There is no truth in borrowing other people's ideas at all. Yes borrowing ideas can be useful for fixing up certain life situations, but in the context of personal transformation ideas and concepts are mere representations, or personal/collective "models" of truth. The "Truth" we are speaking of here is the realization of Absolute Truth, where the idea of the separate self sense is transcended and reality can be seen without any filters of the separate sense of self distorting the view. In that place one can see very clearly what is true and what is not true about life because there are none of the divisions of separation present - everything is One. The Absolute is not a place one is able to hang-out in for long periods of time, unless one gets very good at transcending their ego! And also this Absolute state is not the be-all-and-end-all of life. As Natasha pointed out, it's also wise to re-inhabit the relative world of separate forms, but now with some knowledge, insight and background awareness of the Absolute. Having an experience of the Absolute nature of reality affords us the opportunity to now start working on shedding off the layers of our own personal and collective conditioning or what some would call our false identity. The stories which keep us bound to re-enacting certain negative patterns, attracting certain unwanted situations, addictions, anything that has a hold on us is a "story" and that story is kept in place by stored emotional memory which is then feed by a "story" in the mind of thinking. This is programming, and this is what we call our personal identity. Changing the personal identity is hard work, but it's easier if we have this background knowledge of the Absolute reality. This way we're able to work with these stored emotions without buying into the story in the head. The more one can learn this skill of releasing old emotions that have been causing us to fail without buying into the ideas attached to them, the more one can create a more realistic and "truth" based worldview based on our own inner intuition and less influenced by our past conditioning and beliefs. The less of a grip our past conditioning has on us, the more we are able to have a say in our own lives. This is only my take on this, others may disagree, I'm not sure if I got it right, even, but this is how my own understanding has unfolded.

@Emerald Wilkins, interesting answer! In the last year I had some periods - mostly a set of 3-5 days every few months - in which I felt completely enlightened. It then always went away and brought cycles of horrors and transformation after it. What I found so astonishing while I had theses enlightenment experiences is that I felt like somebody just pulled a cork outta me and I just felt like after all this time I am home. It kinda expressed itself in every little part: I moved a little bit slower, I acted and breathed very rhythmically just out of intuition and it felt a bit like flying - like you are weightless. If you meditate, focus on that one sensation of feeling unwell. There is this one feeling that nearly all of the time is inside of you. For me it is a lot in my upper body and brain. It's like a tension. This is your experiential guess that you are separate (in my experience). You feel this a lot if you sit for 90 minutes or longer. It is like the centre out of all the urges to stand up, to worry, to fuck your mind up comes from - it feels like that. When you have an enlightenment experience this tension just loosens up and by default you feel to be everything you can possible perceive. And out of this release of tension I felt that all calmness, all understanding, flow, tears of joy and knowing just came by. If you have this a few times and you see it then tighten up again - loosing tightness and you have this in cycles - you begin to notice how you are mainly talked into the illusion of yourself by your thoughts that come up and everything you come in contact with in the normal society. I just had to think about how as children you tighten up yourself if your mom and dad found out you had a little bit too much fun. This sensation probably manifests at some point in life because you feel it again and again and because this is so unpleasant you begin to play all kind of games to not feel this. And by that you let a seed of separation grow inside you.

So in the last few months I kind of purged through a transformation - I still am - which is completely new territory for me. I don't know if one can read and guess it through my posts on this forum but at some point you probably will. What happened is that after I watched Leo's "Free Will"-video I meditated on the question "What is my next thought?" and for the first time in my life I had the sensation of having a thought w/o having the sensation of originating it from myself. It's kind of like if you talk to yourself and then the sensation of "you talking" stops but the talking itself doesn't stop. I had this throughout the meditation a couple of times and I think I probably cried out of joy / fear / confusion - I don't recall. I proved the first time in my life - after meditating for like 8-10 months or so - that this enlightenment stuff is actually the real deal. Before all that, although I had some mystical experiences and what not a few times you could still write them off as something that's weird, not reproducible, mystical. But that meditation opened a whole other chapter and should introduce me to a few new things. And I cover them in detail in a sec. Basically from then on I had my typical meditation cycles of feeling good and bad but it deepened from week to week and a complete new dimension you could say came into picture - my awareness heightened (and still does). The following things happened and still happen to me and I connect them with the heightening of my awareness (basically through observation): 1.) You think you are mentally ill. One of the first reactions after and still in the meditation I mentioned is that I thought I'm schizophrenic, that I'm done. This really fucked me up for some time. You may have the intuition that this is your spiritual progress but at first it seems like you are getting worse then you ever were. Why is that? Basically, you are now - as a normal person - resting in your illusion that has been successfully built over the years. You have your problems - what is probably the reason you wanna get out of yourself - but it's mostly okay. When you start to break that shit down you will reach the moment where you are totally lost, you are trying to find yourself, thoughts come up, feelings come up and you just think you are ill. Maybe you have even moments in which you sincerely think you are dying - I had those. You will have to come to the point where this is okay for you. it's hard at first, trust me. 2.) You begin to see patterns in everything (you think you hallucinate). If you've ever done acid which SWIM has apparently done you know how it feels when you get out of your head and into your senses. It's not like you are seeing your dead grandma, it's more like you have now in your normal state a very clear hallucination of the separation of things that was implanted in you from the early days on. This vanishes when you are on acid and also when your awareness heightens. Of course not in such a dramatic way like when you are heigh on psychedelics, but you will have some very interesting moments. Like for example you take a walk and you feel a sudden recognition how the trees next to you represent the flow of nature, how the grass and the flowers are highly ordered in their flow and how even the most unnatural human-made thing is completely bound to nature. You can see that a lot in fancy hotels. They try to make it look like everything is always clean and fresh, but if you look closely you see how everything is falling apart - because this is just the other side of it. I could bring up a whole lot of other examples, basically you will rest in your senses way more and feel a intuitive recognition how everything is descending from this natural flow. (When I first had this I got really fascinated with Taoism and I still am highly addicted to that stuff. It's a real good sum-up of what is happening if you ask me. Probably the closest you can get with words.) 3.) You begin to be okay with not being okay. At some point it becomes very apparent to you that you actually have no control at all. This comes and goes but over the time you can prove that for yourself. I did and still do that sometimes. I focus a lot on the arising and vanishing of my thoughts and actions and are now able to at least see that I do not create them. It's scary shit as I said. But also - when you are through feeling scary about it - you will begin to rest in it because there is nothing else to do. As you do that you will reconnect with your intuition and through that be able to push the boundaries in certain situations and be totally fucked up and okay with that in others. Basically you become aware of the dance of love and terror in your day to day life and see that it is a game and that you were and are completely fascinated with trying to let one side win - well this doesn't work. If you become aware of that, you will find rest. And guess what, then you kind of sudo-won. Because even though you might be shitty at some times, you don't feel connected to it any more. 4.) You completely let go of what you think and do. This again, is very scary at first. But you'll reach a stage in which you have the sensation of not being the source of your thoughts and actions in such clarity that it seems like you are the container in which they arise and you are acting them out. At this stage, there is still some separation left (the feeling of being pushed around) but it's totally surreal. 5.) You begin to not care about your ego so much any more. At some point I just found myself making fun of myself in front of a buddy of mine and I felt complete peace. I laughed myself silly. In that moment it completely strut me that I would never do that. I would feel completely shitty and would try to manipulate the situation in such an advanced way that I don't make a foul out of myself. This intuitively stopped (to some degree). This is completely freeing if you experience that. Also, pain seems not to harm you so much any more. Not in the sense of you can cut an arm off and be well but you hurl yourself somewhere, feel the pain very consciously but not be affected by it very much. It's very strange to experience that at first. Well, I could go on and on with similar points but I think you get the drill here. Also, I want to mention that all of these experiences came and come in phases in which they presented themselves very clearly and then lowered again. But it seems like your base-level of mindfulness slowly gets adjusted by this and you tap into a whole new world. So, if you see any of those think back to this post, lay back and smile. You are on the right track. Cheers to you,

dissociation will fail eventually, it takes a transformation of the human being from the human identity to a being of consciousness which is their true and first estate.

See ya in the fall then I do not see enlightenment as an end goal. I foremost agree that self-mastery is the first step. However, I am not sure that it is necessary to separate service-to-self and service-to-others. In much the same way that it isn't necessary to separate enlightenment and transformation, if you have read 'Pursuing Consciousness'. I take a very integral approach to personal development. After the LP-course, I formulated a life intention (to grow and catalyze the growth of others). You may notice that with this intention, a positive feedback loop will be created; As I grow, I am better able to catalyze the growth of my environment and as they grow, they won't hold me back as much. Most of this is theoretical speculation though, I have yet to apply much of this in my own life... The future is bright!

I wanted to share something that came through while I was meditating a few years ago that actually has brought me peace about about peace it's self. While I was meditating and going through a lot I had a realization that came through the heart..."I'll never have peace in my life until the last person standing has it." which makes a lot of sense. I see people putting themselves through hell trying to attain a state of "peace" or avoiding certain situations or people that may rock it. Now I am a lot more weary and less likely to get sold on any kind of a illusion on peace. If there is a need to walk on eggshells to keep peace then it is not real peace at all. You can only do so much with your own life to maximize Peace on the planet. If someone is off it throws the rest of us off. eventually there is nothing special you can do to find against that truth, no book, or amount of meditation, class, yoga, food or anything special etc. (P.S doesn't mean you should do any of that stuff) Hopefully as a help to other people.... before you put to much pressure on yourself in your journey to act and think in a certain way especially "attain" some kind of peace or have been for a long time... just look out your window and look down street and realize all your neighbors and multiply that to all over the world that do not have peace in their lives that may also be effecting yours. You start realizing the commitment is also a lot grander then just personal transformation.

@Ajax You're welcome. The crux of the matter is, what are the "causes" of the different ways of responding to life? Development. Environment. Causes and conditions. This is what my preferred teachers advise. I listen to respected credentialed experts rather than random dudes on an internet forum who claim self realization. That's just who I am, through years of trial and error and contemplation and transformation. Of course there really is no free will. This however does not mean we are determined to act out our conditioned patterns, moralise and push our values onto others. There are self-realized people in our world who are also highly developed, and highly developed people, if you know any, you will know are much more tolerant and reflective than the average Joe. There are also highly developed but not yet realized people who look at some self-realizers and shake their heads with dismay. Take Satsang Gurus like Andrew Cohen for example, he had many devotees but his behaviour and the negative impact he had on people wasn't transformed through his spiritual awakening. His enlightenment became his Achilles heel because he was merely "one" with his shadow. As far as he was concerned being an asshole was part of the great perfection (which it is! But a fool is still a fool whether they are self-realized or not!) We develop the ego, and then we transcend it. But we develop it to the point where it's not going to cause us any problems in the relative world. The ego is a tool, what sort of tool do you want? A screwed up one that creates and attacks strawmen or something a little more humane and is able to take a much wider and more mature view on life and able to shift paradigm easily? So, it depends what state we want the vehicle to be in when we transcend the realtive body mind? Donald Trump or Ken Wilber? The choice is ours. We can still condition ourselves to eat better, work out, condition our ego defenses in better ways. This includes interpersonal skills. Please understand that there is value judgement at 2nd tier. However it's not based on judgementalism, it's informed by the non evaluating process of "Witnessing Presence" informing the intellect. An Integrally informed mind rather than a disengaged and atrophied thinking mind, which is a trademark of many popular Western Guru. Something else to consider is 2nd tier do not subscribe to 1st tier intellectual views much in the same way you or I would not consider putting training wheels on our bycicles. Those structures are there for sure, but 2nd tier don't live embedded in those early developmental perspectives. We tolerate 1st tier because we know that disowning a 1st tier perspective would be to deny an aspect of our own being. Limbic resonance is still a part of 2nd tier life, so civility and people skills are a large part of being cognition. Treating people with respect and dignity and observing the golden rule. 2nd tier can still use any aspect of first tier structure to deal with life. The only thing missing from 2nd tier is the victim mentality and the high morality of "unhealthy green". Yellow is a lot more relaxed in its attitude, but is a very complex structure, and the conflicting emotions, thoughts and values are now being integrated and transcended for use as a tool to live in the relative domain. This is shadow integration. Shadow integration is the end of the antagonistic play of opposites. A celebration of self and other, a place of wholeness and integration. I hope this further clarifies things for you. Mal

@MarkusR Well, it makes your life a hell of a lot more enjoyable and more conscious. I believe working to better ourselves as human beings is part of a psychological evolution, just look at how we live now compared to 2000 years ago! It takes patience, persistence, and strong awareness to really feel the more deeper aspects of self actualization, i.e enlightenment work. An average person cannot jump straight to the top of the mountain. Small steps at a time. The more you begin to realize how these informations are subtlety affecting your life, you become more flexible and quite impressed about this. Leo's work is derived from hundreds and hundreds of different people he has studied upon that he has felt that were most "practical" and straight to the point with massive gains of personal transformation. He does pick and choose, however, it doesn't mean you can't pick and choose whatever you want to spend time on. It has all comes from his personal experience and he has noticed that it worked, and just willing to share. It will probably work for you too if you have an open mind. Leo's content has some cookie cutter videos towards the beginning of his journey, however, as one gets higher towards the Self-Actualization pyramid by Maslow, Leo's content then becomes quite interesting and worth while. Of course, after you watch a self help video and turn your computer off, it's you that makes all the choices from there on out. You can choose whether to implement these ideas or not. Remember, the reason why Leo does what he does is because he wants a positive impact on the world, and that this is all for your better on your own journey. Once you get deeper into consciousness work you will come to the realization that there is no "you" and was never a "you" in making any choices in "your" life. Real freedom comes from this place my friend.

What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

@Displayname You are re-thinking your original direction. Do you feel like it's not working for you but your working for it? Myself as a home builder , I gotta say go with the affordable housing. Maybe that's just me because that was always my personal passion. Creating and designing safe and affordable homes that a family can live in. It's wonderful and fulfilling to see that transformation happen before your eyes. When the job is finished and you drive away the last time knowing that a family will spend many happy days together in this home. No regrets here. And housing is changing drasticly too, tiny houses, earth housing, portable housing, container housing, even a house that has a greenhouse built around it.

@tomasCZ Hi Tom, Fortunately for us the transpersonal psychology field have presented a few models (in slightly varying degrees) from a collection of different schools of research who claim to have discovered that even though the "Ground of Being" is an ever-present condition, permanent access to this reality requires from us a complete cognitive transition of transcendence followed by a subsequent re-inclusion of several specific "stages" of human development. To give you a flavour of what these stages are, one such model "Spiral Dynamics" successfully presents a detailed outline of what it looks like to have healthily navigated one's way to the very top rung of ego development - "construct aware / unitive self stage" This self-actualization path is a development and transformation of our conscious and unconscious language structure and meaning making. Once a certain degree of ego-development has been achieved, the next step for the mature self-actualizer is the shift into a permanent state of transpersonal awareness - which has now become a structure because of stability of this realization. Of course, being an integrated path the good news is that one still has access to their ego, but the difference is now the "self" has been developed as far as we currently can take it - and of course, because the ego is now directly understood to be a construct, it can be developed even further as new structures emerge via a process of continual integration of the intellect giving form and concept to spiritual truth. This heralds in the possibility of a transformational shift for humanity as a whole as spiritual truth will have a platform to express itself and integrate itself into conventional life. A truly "Integrally Informed" situation. The reason you were unable to permanently reside in the "state" you experienced is because there is still work to do on the path to becoming aware of how your language structure (ego) creates your experience. I recommend you get into the work of Beck & Cowan's Spiral Dynamics model here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204687.Spiral_Dynamics I'll be posting on this forum soon (for anybody who is interested) detailed information based on the research findings on the cognitive processes, behaviours and values of each stage from the perspective of the individual self-actualized person, including the last personal stage. I'm currently in the process of obtaining more information about the 3rd tier transpersonal / spiritual structure. -Mal

Hello my name is Gianna, Glad to have come across the forum. I came across Leo's videos maybe a month ago. I usually do not like to post in forums on the internet but I feel compelled to write a little about myself and something I am looking to work on. I like hearing others perspectives. I have been into personal transformation my whole life but I didn't really realize. But I've actually went intense in personal transformation for the last 5-6 years unraveling a lot of things. Something like this is def a long term process. From my perspective agility is key in personal transformation and you can unravel things for years and still have more to work on and unravel. Many beginnings and ends along the way. Synchronicities are something I am starting to process in life but it takes your perspective in life to a whole other angle that's kinda weird. Something I need to work on is getting better at interacting with others and maybe joining. The more I do the personal transformation work I find myself less likely wanting to interact with others or the hard part is the way I used to interact with others is changing and I'm going through some integration, growth and transitions at this time. It def can get scary. Authenticity is the theme I enjoy. Okay that's all I'll write for now. THanks Leo, I enjoy your videos and passion.

@Huz88 "Thoughts are virtually silenced" but they are still there in the form of awareness. Awareness is also thought. There is nothing to attain spirtually except the thought that there is nothing to attain Buddha himself is quoted as saying something like this (guess he is quoted as saying something like"he gained nothing from enlightenment" but i dont want to google it now). You can change thoughts and thats all you can do. Everything is as real as you think it is and as important as you think it is. Enlightenment, i dont know what that is but the way i think it someone who thinks he is as special and important as anything in the unverse is someone who is in tune with his existence. About strong sitting meditation i stumbled upon a youtube video of a budhist monk who is a monk since he was 12 or something, meditating all the time duiring his teen years in Sri Lanka. In his early 20s he went to USA and he talked about getting furious on the bus because the bus was full and nobody gave him the seat and in Sri Lanka people stand up for the monks. He said he got so mad he told other monk he wouldnt stay in USA. Took him time to calm down and tame his ego. What i want to show you with the previous example is that you can try to do whatever people tell you should do in terms of meditation but until you understand how useless it all is for thought transformation, it will do more harm than good. The way i think it you are better off thinking about what is meditation and what is thought in its various forms than trying to shut down thought just because of what others think. Write a prisoner with solitary confinement experience about strong sitting meditation and see what he will tell you. Many guys in prison locked up 23 hours a day meditate a lot and get into yoga but they dont become spiritual gurus because of it, or experience permanent bliss because of it. They can think they are out and free through meditation but only for a while. Only the ones who go crazy (crazy meaning unable to function and survive efficiently) will claim they are elightened, special, in perpetual bliss tec etc. I think about how insignificant everything and everyone on earth was before they existed and how insignificant everything and everyone will be after this planet is gone. This thought has always helped me put everything in perspective. Im not special and i will never be. Nobody is. Show me someone who doesnt need to breath to keep the heart pumping and i show you someone unique, special, who has something no mamal in the universe has. Show me someone who claims he never lied or lies and i show you a liar. Here is a video of the monk who told the bus story. One of his videos, i dont know if its the bus one.

The revenant was certainly very interesting as well. Aside from the bloody things, there was certainly a spiritual message in there. According to Eckhart Tolle it is a good movie when the charachter goes trough a transformation. The ending was quite a pity with the revenge part, better he had forgiven. Loved the movie.