In the age we live in, is it possible to maintain a high state of consciousness ?

[johnlocke18]

@Leo Gura Also I kind of agree on mindless jobs making it easier to ascended, but you’ve never worked one so how would you have the slightest clue what you’re talking about? Working at a mindless factory was way more stressful than school and my career out of school which is mostly intellectual. You were a video game designer and your parents paid for your school, that’s all you’ve ever done before this so why are you saying less intellectual jobs are easy when you’ve never had to work one? I’ve been through both and mindless jobs while being poor are way harder, you’ve never been through adversity so stop preaching about it. That’s why Joe rogan doesn’t respect you so stop being butthurt back at him. 

[Javfly33]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

At one point, you need to let go of that. You can't spend most of your day being bummed out about it, because then it will never happen. 

And stop blaming modern society. Your opportunity to become highly conscious is 100x greater than 100 years ago.

Well yeah in just asking man. I'm not saying is not possible ?

[The Mystical Man]

Social intelligence is very important. Great spiritual teachers are great not because they're enlightened. You admire them because they have amazing social skills. Look at how Sadhguru and Adyashanti deal with people. That kind of social skill doesn't come from enlightenment. 

[Proserpina]

Socialisation is great, when self compassion is applied.  A lot of socialisation does lower consciousness and of course you have to take responsibility for that but not without self compassion and gentleness. Forcing yourself to awaken doesn’t help.

 When I was at my ‘wokest’ I had great social skills and people were attracted to me.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Proserpina

[Tyler Robinson]

8 minutes ago, Proserpina said:

Socialisation is great, when self compassion is applied.  A lot of socialisation does lower consciousness and of course you have to take responsibility for that but not without self compassion and gentleness. Forcing yourself to awaken doesn’t help.

 When I was at my ‘wokest’ I had great social skills and people were attracted to me.

Baby you're already awaken.. Please rise and walk. 

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Tyler Robinson said:

You are acting as though people aren't poor these days. 

I'm saying society was poorer 100 years ago as a whole.

Regardless, if you're serious about spiritual practice, you should generally avoid entertaining thoughts that externalize responsibility ("x, y and z is not my fault, it's society's fault"). If it's a part of your life and you can't change it, it's not making your life harder. It is life.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Tyler Robinson]

3 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Regardless, if you're serious about spiritual practice, you should generally avoid entertaining thoughts that externalize responsibility ("x, y and z is not my fault"), like the idea that emails and phone calls are making your life harder. Those things are life.

Sir, I'll incorporate this advice. Thank you. Noted. (owned me haha). 

You almost gave me a beating on my head, but it was good. 

Edited September 5, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Viking]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Funny enough it is easier to ascend high with a mindless job than a highly intelligent and creative one.

You could ascend pretty high as a janitor. Because you got nothing to think about or stress about and no one to talk to.

It's socializing what really kills you. Socialization in like cancer for intelligence and consciousness. If you want to be intelligent, stop socializing. The more you socialize the dumber you will get, until you turn into Joe Rogan.

personally i found the more socialization i had the more opportunity for growth and self reflection i got because people find the bullshit in you much better than you can yourself

also people expose you to stuff outside of your bubble, especially people who are different than you are

one way to grow is to do it alone but another way which is more practical in my eyes is doing it through other people as external catalysts

for me at my level of consciousness lack of socialization is what kept me from growing and stuck in a rut

[The Mystical Man]

I recommend "The Surrender Experiment" by Michael Singer. Michael tried to get away from society to meditate, but life kept bringing him people and opportunities. Eventually, he learned to trust life, and then he ended up building a billion dollar company. 

I like that book because it dismantles false ideas that people have about what surrender is and what it looks like. For example, when life hands you an idea for a heptalogy, are you surrendered enough to write that book series for seventeen years? 

Edited September 5, 2022 by The Mystical Man

[Javfly33]

16 hours ago, Consilience said:

This depends on how intense your daily formally practice is, how often you're going on meditation retreats, and it depends on keeping up a technique 24/7. For me, the most effective forms of life practice are Shinzen's see hear feel or self inquiry. Lately self inquiry has had a lot of momentum in life as I'm going about my business. 

The biggest issue is this separation between practice and life. They have to merge and even more, the duality ultimately needs to collapse. (The spiritual bypassing version of this collapse is Neo Advaita) But when you talk to masters, unanimously they'll agree, practice must be maintained at all waking moments. 

So how much awakeness? In my experience, a lot more than I thought possible 1, 2, and certainly 3 years ago. Year by year the depth of the practice still amazes me, in both deep states of meditation and in life. Yet, the required work is, admittedly, enormous, however, so utterly worth it. 

Thanks man. I´m now working with Sadghuru. Following 3 daily sadhanas and its providing very very good results. I have to say again, once the practice its over in 1-2 hours I am completely "back to baseline" (ego state). This inability of retaining the state its what I am concerned about. Although I can see one still benefits from other good things from the practice, and elevated sense of energy and sensibility, which is also nice.

[axiom]

5 hours ago, Someone here said:

Imagine you're in the top 1% of enlightenment.

That means you're going to want to be in a community of or friends with similar people but there just aren't many. 

Enlightenment is an all or nothing thing really. The sense of needing to change one’s experience or have a better experience tends to disappear entirely.

[Razard86]

7 hours ago, Nilsi said:

 but it doesnt hurt to look at the bright side sometimes.

You never cease to surprise me....so cool you make life interesting. Just the other day you were preaching the "BEWARE, BEWARE, message. You cannot tell me its nots interesting how you are the bright side this time around. That is soo coool man. 

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, johnlocke18 said:

why are you saying less intellectual jobs are easy when you’ve never had to work one?

I didn't say they were easy. I said they are less mentally stressful.

Manual labor is extremely difficult and I believe people who do it should get paid a lot more. But this has nothing to do with the issue of this thread.

Highly creative jobs and jobs with high responsibility tax the mind so much that it's basically impossible to awaken. That's why no CEO or scientist is awake.

Edited September 6, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Hello from Russia]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

I didn't say they were easy. I said they are less mentally stressful.

Manual labor is extremely difficult and I believe people who do it should get paid a lot more. But this has nothing to do with the issue of this thread.

Highly creative jobs and jobs with high responsibility tax the mind so much that it's basically impossible to awaken. That's why no CEO or scientist is awake.

Damn, manual labour is so enjoyable sometimes though.

Especially when you've been heavily masturbating mentally for some time, screwing with an electrical screwdriver is such a pure joy, almost a mystical experience 

You just screw in and out and it's ecstatic

Edited September 6, 2022 by Hello from Russia

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, Hello from Russia said:

Damn, manual labour is so enjoyable sometimes though.

Especially when you've been heavily masturbating mentally for some time, screwing with an electrical screwdriver is such a pure joy, almost a mystical experience 

You just screw in and out and it's ecstatic

It's enjoyable precisely because it isn't mentally stressful. You don't have to think, and thinking is hard work.

Edited September 6, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Hello from Russia]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

It's enjoyable precisely because it isn't mentally stressful. You don't have to think, and thinking is hard work.

Yeah, but then you also meditate on how a screw hits the wood, and damn it feels so good. Almost like a sexual act and it is one, in a sense

[SOUL]

I kind of compare it to having a mystical experience through a substance or a meditative state then after the substance or state wears off it appears as if this 'awakening' went away with it. This is a dynamic of our awareness and the content of awareness.

While the induced mystical experience is happening it has our full attention so it's prominence and impact is amplified in our awareness. In everyday life the roles that we fill to navigate the world requires attention to actually fulfill the roles.

Now, as we fill the role in every day life after we have had an awakening experience this role usually has strong identity association that will entice us to believe we are that role. When that happens it can limit our conscious experience to a state before awakening.

It is a skill that we exercise to be able to keep the awareness of that mystical experience while simultaneously fulfilling the roles of every day life. The skill is in being present fully in the role while being present fully in awakened awareness.

The more we exercise that skill the more fully we can fulfill the roles of every day life while we have awakened presence. The highs of the mystical experience is stretching awareness but the lows we exhibit are more indication of our consciousness.

So, sure, every day life with the socialization and the struggle for survival can distract us from being presence...if we allow it. On the other hand we can go through every day life with the fulfillment of being presence letting that be expressed in everything we encounter.

Just something to consider.

 

Edited September 6, 2022 by SOUL

[Eph75]

@Javfly33

Regardless of being a janitor or something else more "demanding", including socializing, it's still the tricks the mind plays on us that is the real obstacle, and we will make up whatever suffering we can, regardless of what category we find us placing ourselves in. That's actually part of the problem itself, the need to categorize and compare, ending up with a desire to escape what is, to experience something more simple, and less demanding.

Just like childhood trauma - we don't have to have gone through physical, mental or sexual abuse [etc] to be traumatized. We can have had an objectively decent upbringing, but still find those aspects that end up being our trauma, which consumes us inside out. There's little doubt that the sexually abused kid is objectively worse off than the spoilt kid that got everything but didn't get enough or the right kind of closeness and a sense of feeling loved. Both will suffer through their own personal hell, possibly equally subjectively mentally deteriorating. If our minds don't have problems that consumes us, it will invent them, and we will amplify them beyond recognition.

Same goes for simpler and more complex times. We live in complex, high pace times, but we shouldn't let that become the excuse for not being able to transcend our current selves and minds, so that we develop and have a more resilient mind ever emerging in that process, rising from the ashes of our former selves. 

Be it high pace circumstances, or circumstances shaped by survival needs (actual survival), again, we design our personal hells meticulously well, to perfection. 

Being caught up in the high pace life that we're finding ourselves in, with a pace and demands on productivity that is continuously cranked up as desires and requirements for higher earnings indeed is a problematic factor, makes the journey lined with challenges that needs to be handled, internally but also addressed externally as we're making up a lot of the external pressures that we perceive, and they change when addressed constructively with others around us, relieving that made up part or percieved pressure, allowing for more room and balance to bring being into that doing, while still meeting whatever productivity requirements. 

We can choose what we do. That choice require us to challenge our own definition of success and how we're influenced and driven by the world around us, into design that perfect personal hell of ours. 

Carry water, chop wood. It's the perspective that changes, and how we relate and make sense of what's going on around us, not the doing itself, which is the distraction that ensures us staying inside the suffering of undesired being. 

Meditation escapes the pressures and experiences a moment of more-so equanimity, but only for those miments, it's not fixing anything in absolute terms, it just amplifies our ability to more constructively charge the challenges presented through the entanglement with the world around us, that we find ourselves part of, and being able to do so increasingly well without creating a desire to escape in that process - i.e. doing without attachment to the outcomes, where being and doing can find balance.

It takes time to embody the concept of being, and there is no clean cut in that process, but over time the shadow of a former self dissipates and as does the thought patterns of old. The mind does what it does, and will still throw us curve-balls, and the disidentification with our thoughts - thoughts don't define who we are - stands center stage of being. 

It is the path. There's no destination. 

Edited September 6, 2022 by Eph75

[Nilsi]

6 hours ago, Razard86 said:

You never cease to surprise me....so cool you make life interesting. Just the other day you were preaching the "BEWARE, BEWARE, message. You cannot tell me its nots interesting how you are the bright side this time around. That is soo coool man. 

A lot of shit is getting better and a lot is getting worse. I'm just naturally inclined toward solving problems and puzzles and so I tend to focus on the negative and what could potentially be done about it. I'm trying to focus more on the good things though, and I'm aware that I tend to neglect them, which makes me seem cynical and also hurts my own well being. But yeah, I appreciate your enthusiasm bro

[knakoo]

On 05/09/2022 at 4:31 PM, Leo Gura said:

There is nothing like intimate relationships to distract you from waking up.

Intimate relationships can be very useful to show us our blind spots and attachements. It acts as a mirror. In other words you get emotionally triggered and it's an opportunity to release stuff.

I am sure you have read "The way of the superior man". David Deida explains this well in his book