- Overview of Uspensky's Theory: In this section of his lecture, Leo Gura explores the philosophy of Peter Uspensky, emphasizing the staggering significance of awareness, a factor that is often underestimated. He introduces Uspensky's concept of humanity being machine-like and the importance of recognizing this aspect. This description suggests that humans function within the boundaries of perceived control and willpower, which in reality is an illusion.
- The Influence of Uspensky: Gura also reflects on his own experience of reading Uspensky's book, "The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution", and how even after years of personal development work and an enlightenment experience, he still finds himself confronted with the realization of his unconscious state.
- Existence of Awareness Catch-22: Gura highlights the challenging aspects of understanding awareness, with a primary issue being the 'catch-22' where one's lack of awareness ceases to be acknowledged due to the unawareness of their unawareness. This creates a blind spot in perception and a mistaken perception of a higher state of awareness than reality.
- Awareness Realization: Expanding on the elusive nature of awareness, Gura proposes that understanding awareness and possessing awareness are distinct conditions. His intention is to demonstrate the reality of this state and the grand illusion of self-consciousness.
- Importance of Awareness in Personal Growth: Linking awareness to personal growth, Gura underlines that whether it is in business, relationships or emotions, all enduring advancements implicate an increased level of awareness. He enforces how integral understanding the lack of one's awareness is, and aims to convince his listeners of their potential to harness more of it.
- The Constraints in Discussing Awareness: Gura argues that discussing awareness presents several challenges, largely due to its intangible and deceptive nature, further exacerbated by societal dismissiveness of the term due to its association with new age ideas. He articulates the impossible task of teaching or buying awareness, insisting that it must be self-developed.
- Lack of Control and the Illusion of Self: Importantly, Gura introduces the idea of humans being asleep and that the perception of control over their lives is a convenient illusion. We are machines, influenced by external factors, not exerting control over them. Assumptions of self-consciousness and sympathy in day-to-day life create blind spots that hinder our true understanding of awareness. These perspectives form part of Uspensky's theory and provide valuable insight into Gura's discourse on awareness.
- Misconception of Self-Control and Awareness: Man commonly believes he has control over his life, a will, and self-consciousness, creating a resistance to admitting a lack thereof. This lack of realization prevents individuals from investing efforts to enhance awareness, as they believe they already possess it. This false belief hinders the initiation of the journey to improve self-awareness and consciousness.
- Experiencing Higher States of Consciousness: The state of consciousness one can achieve is beyond common imagination. Higher states of consciousness substantially differ from our normal state, providing an overwhelming and astonishing experience.
- Uspensky's Definition of Psychology: Uspensky offers a divergent definition of psychology which includes the study of man's possible evolution, the study of one's machine-like nature, and the study of lying. His definition opposes common beliefs of psychology as a study of dysfunctions, diseases, or mental disorders. He highlights the focus on the extremes of human potential, such as the development of awareness and consciousness.
- Self-Observation Test: Demonstrating self-consciousness practically, a test is proposed. The task is to observe the second hand of a watch move for a full minute while maintaining self-consciousness. Often, minds wander unintentionally during this period, indicating the lack of true self-consciousness and high potential for further development.
- Need for Self-Observation: Self-Observation is essential to personal growth and has to be performed individually despite its emotional difficulty. This heavy lifting cannot be substituted with easy alternatives like drugs or the guidance of spiritual teachers. External influence can only trigger momentary awareness.
- Hinderances in Personal Development: There are multiple identified hinderances to the development of awareness: lying, imagination, excessive talking, negative emotions, and distractions. These are the main features of our mechanical illness that restrict growth in self-awareness.
- Lethargy towards self-development: Many people are not willing to invest the time and effort to self-develop as they believe they already possess the qualities they're after.
- Mechanical actions vs. increased awareness: Individuals often engage in unconscious mechanical actions like lying, fantasizing, incessant talking, indulging in negative emotions, and constant criticism. These actions reduce consciousness and prevent self-awareness development.
- Fear of silence and social distractions: People are often uncomfortable with silence and instead distract themselves with constant talking, criticisms, and judgments. Life itself, with its many roles and aspects, can serve as a distraction from developing self-awareness.
- Impact of self-awareness realization: Realizing these patterns in one's life is shocking and may seem daunting, but is essential to initiate the process of self-development.
- Man as a machine: Man unconsciously behaves as a machine, with every action and emotion being triggered by external influences. This realization is crucial for self-development.
- Critical reflections on free will: The idea of free will and control is simply an illusion created by the ego. People believe they have control over their thoughts, actions, and lives when in reality, life and its events are running them.
- Uncontrollable nature of thoughts: Leo Gura emphasizes our inability to control our thoughts, illustrating how challenging it can be to stop thoughts even for a few seconds. He presents the idea that thoughts simply appear and we are essentially a thought that appears and vanishes.
- Illusion of control: Gura discusses the societal notion of having control, which he refers to as an illusion. He identifies that we feel as though we're controlling our actions and thoughts but in truth, they occur automatically, without our conscious control.
- Man as a machine: Man is compared to a programmed machine, lacking control over thoughts, reactions, and behaviors. To improve, one has to recognize and understand this machine-like aspect of oneself.
- Importance of surrendering control: Leo explains the significance of acknowledging the lack of control over one's thoughts, labeling this acknowledgment as a key to quieting the 'monkey mind' and reducing anxiety.
- Need for self-study: For growth and development, it's important that individuals undertake a self-study, identifying and removing obstacles to consciousness like lies, judgments, distractions, criticisms, and negative emotions.
- Misconception of having qualities already: Individuals often believe they possess qualities like freewill, consciousness, and control, which hampers personal growth according to Uspensky's teachings. For true development, individuals need to acknowledge their current reality, accept they lack these qualities, and work on gaining them.
- Increased Awareness: Leo Gura discusses the journey of increasing individual awareness, which requires exploring the mind and openness to concepts like meditation and enlightenment. This begins a true study of self, representing a significant turning point in personal growth.
- Lack of Consciousness: Gura underlines the difficulty in accepting that we are not fully conscious, explaining that people momentarily become conscious when directly confronted about it, but soon revert to an unconscious state. He likens this to being in a dream-like state and suggests that a higher level of consciousness is possible.
- Self Consciousness and Intuition: Leo advises that reaching a higher level of consciousness begins with an intuition and requires self-investigation and observation. Although this may take years, it opens up a world of potential improvements to life.
- Work Required for Self-Consciousness: Acquiring self-consciousness requires hard work and the realization that we do not already possess it. This is challenging as after gaining some awareness, individuals often revert to being unconscious, undermining the journey towards full consciousness.
- The Ubiquity of Lying: Gura delves into the concept of lying as a form of reality distortion, which he considers a major hindrance to personal development. He refers to lying as mostly self-deception, characterized by manipulation, half-truths, and control mechanisms. People's failure to be genuine, including pretending to know truths about unknowable things, complicates the study of psychology.
- Understanding Lies and Self-Deception: Leo Gura discusses how lies fundamentally come from unawareness. He points out that these lies are often dismissed as harmless normalities. To truly increase awareness, one must tackle the obstacle of lying. For this, he refers to a previous episode.
- Self-Observation and Understanding the Machine-Like Self: Leo emphasizes the importance of understanding oneself as a machine and stresses that no one else can do this for us. We need to study our own machine-like structures, functions and the conditions governing their work.
- The Struggle of Objective Self-Observation: Leo highlights the challenge of self-observation due to internal biases. He notes that even highly educated beings such as scientists and religious individuals can lack self-awareness despite their external achievements.
- The Role of Academic Studies in Self-Awareness: He argues that academic studies mostly focus on external human behaviors and often ignore subjectivity. He further states that modern science seems to deny the existence of subjectivity or ignore it, especially when studying the human mind.
- Significance of Personal Experience in Gaining Awareness: Leo emphasizes that personal experiences and internal work are crucial to gaining awareness. He believes the ability to observe oneself objectively is difficult yet crucial in the path towards self-awareness.
- A Guided Exercise to Improve Awareness: Leo guides the listener to a short awareness exercise, asking them to close their eyes and direct their attention to various sensations such as their breath, the self-image of their face and the temperature of their body. He mentions that these mental images are mere fantasies created by the mind.
- Awareness Exercise: In his lecture, Leo Gura guides listeners through an exercise to observe their own awareness. This involves closing their eyes, following Gura's instructions, and focusing on different body sensations, such as the feel of their clothes on their body or the temperature of their body. Gura emphasizes that many of these sensations were likely unnoticed until the exercise directed attention to them, underlining the theme of unawareness. He likens awareness to sand slipping through fingers and challenges listeners to acknowledge their sleep-like state. Gura stresses that this is just the beginning of understanding awareness and promises to delve deeper on the topic in future episodes.
- Understanding Awareness, a Long Process: Gura clarifies that while understanding the concept and recognizing personal unawareness is an important step, comprehending awareness requires more significant efforts and could take 5-10 years of serious work. However, he assures listeners that this effort will transform their entire life and bring positive changes. Regular self-awakening is crucial to this process, as people often tend to fall back into their unaware states. This lecture is part of a series where Gura shares methods and techniques for increasing awareness.
- Call to continued engagement: Towards the end of the lecture, Gura emphasizes the need for listeners to take action for the information to transform their lives. He encourages listeners to sign up for a newsletter for regular reminders and updates to stay awake and connected with the continuing discussions on awareness and consciousness. Gura sums up his commitment to improving his own awareness and helping others do the same via his platform, Actualized.org.