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[Music] it's been a few days since since my enlightenment experience that I released a video on that caused a little bit of a stir so I want to talk about that and I want to explain a little bit of what was involved there what was learned there because there's there's actually quite a bit to say about this so first of all people have been asking me and speculating about was this a trip was this psychedelically induced and the answer is that I take psychedelics so yes in this case I did take psychedelics now this requires quite a bit of explanation though because this can be a big source of confusion for people it can feel like olio so you let me down you tricked us because you made it look as though this was a real enlightenment but really it was just a psychedelic trip yeah I've had those two and then they just go away and so it was just a fake in light of fake enlightenment so let me address this point and there's actually a lot in this point that needs to be addressed where to begin I'm trying to be more authentic from my experiences so I'll circle back to this question about psychedelics in a second let me just tell you what happened after that experience mm-hmm kind of wind it down mm-hmm so what you have to understand is that an awakening experience includes both knowing or understanding which stays with you and it includes an emotional component and it includes like a state component and this is not just true of psychedelic trips this is true of all awakening experiences and these awakening experiences have a broad range of quality and also depth and different things can be made aware to you in these different awakening experiences so you can awaked awaken to different things you see so if you're meditating on a meditation retreat let's say for 10 days straight and then you have an awakening experience I've had that before without any psychedelics you have that what happens well again you get some sort of emotional state that comes along with it you get an in-the-moment penetration into the truth or some facet of the truth it's usually just a facet not the whole thing but a facet of it and then you get an understanding of like oh okay now I understand the bigger picture of what the truth is and how it fits in with my life and how it fits in with reality and all of that you see and then what happens is that that moment goes away of course you're not constantly on that high for the rest of your life this is where people really get confused is they assume that all you're just gonna be on this high now forever if it's a true enlightenment that's almost never how it works almost never how it works there's different kinds of awakenings you can have for example you can have an awakening into some facet of the truth but it's such a short glimpse it's like two seconds long or a minute long and you're not quite sure what you're really seeing like you're seeing the truth but you're not sure what it really is because it's just like a such a small facet of the larger thing that you don't come away with a lot of understanding so that that awakening experience sort of passes let's say it lasts for an hour - then it passes and then you're just kind of like well damn that that was really weird that was very profound I'm not sure what the hell that was and I'm not sure why it went away or where it is now and I've had that before as well and that can happen both on psychedelic trips awakenings and it can also happen on non psychedelic awakenings you know what you would call legit awakenings like if you're in a Zen temple or something meditating so it's important to keep that in mind you see in a sense the most important part of an awakening is not the state that you try to keep but it's the the knowledge or the understanding that you carry away with you and then how you apply that in your life and also how much it transforms your relationship to everyday mundane life because yeah you can do yoga you could have a Kundalini awakening you can you can open your heart chakra or you can open your your third eye the sixth shock or you can open the crown chakra or the seventh chakra you know you can open all these chakras you can have all sorts of interesting mystical experiences of infinite love or of oneness with other people or just of directly experiencing the absolute as I've done many times and as what happened in in my experience that you saw there in this video so so yeah you could have you could have all these but the question is what do you carry away at the end of the day and the reason that I decided to post this rather provocative video was because for me this was different than ordinary psychedelic trips I've taken quite a few psychedelic trips on various substances at this point and many of them are very profound you know like five Meo DMT very profound I've had profound trips on other substances beyond five Meo so by know me five of the most profound substance I found many substances can be equally profound if not even more profound but on this on this occasion what happened for me was and this is the only reason I recorded it because I wouldn't record a standard trip and I have it in the past because in this case there was something different that was happening in this case everything for me was coming together in in a remarkable way so it's like many facets that I had previously become conscious of both through my self inquiry through my meditation through my retreats through my beep asana practice through my yoga practice and through my psychedelic trips all of that was sort of coming together all these different facets of the absolute we're coming together the infinity aspect of it the aspect of no self the aspect of infinite love the aspect of Nandu ership having no free will the aspect of like completely surrendering to it so all of these aspects came together and also just this this very clear understanding not just like a high but actual understanding of how all these facets fit together and what they really mean and that's the point at which I grab the camera and that's the beginning of that episode is when I realized what was happening to me and that this was something that I felt I wanted to share with people in a very genuine way and I knew that I would get flack for it and I knew that it was a kind of a risky and a ballsy sort of thing to do and I was a little uncomfortable with releasing the video and I'm a little uncomfortable with some of the reactions that have come you know people speculating about all sorts of things because see this is dangerous territory because my reputation is on the line as a teacher and of course I that people look up to me I know that people project a lot of stuff on to me they project their expectations in their hopes and their own personal journey in life and in self-actualization and with spirituality they sort of project that on to me and and you know that it can't be avoided it can't be able you do that with every teacher this is it this is not something particular to me this happens with every single teacher so take a look at any teacher throughout history or any of the modern teachers you know Eckhart Tolle a Rupert Spiro or Mooji or anybody else and you see people projecting their ideas onto these people that's the whole trouble with gurus you see because a guru is someone that you traditionally surrender yourself to and you trust this guru will deliver you to enlightenment or to the promised land to Nirvana whatever you want to call it and personally I'm very much against this guru idea and this guru concept which is why I don't have any one particular teacher that I follow or overly praised because I think that there's a real deep danger with holding a person as a guru because then you you develop this attitude that they're somehow above you or that they're somehow superhuman and that all the sudden they're perfectly moral they can't have any sexual problems they can't have any neuroses anymore they can't have any addictions they have to be perfect in in their manner right to fit that ideal of like the totally fully enlightened Buddha or Jesus figure who is so perfect that his farts don't stink and this becomes a real big trap a real big trap so I know that I'm running the risk of kind of playing into that and instead what I want is I just want to be completely open and completely authentic about what happened in this situation and the reason I want to do this because I think there's very valuable lessons here if you can get over your own projections and expectations so you have to be very careful with expectations here and actually this gives us a great opportunity to talk about something I wanted to talk about for a long time which is the nuances and complexities of enlightenment and I've alluded to this in the past but I really want to address it more directly here because I've been personally studying this a lot for myself and I think I've gotten a lot a lot more understanding about this over over the years I deliberately held off from talking about the different stages of enlightenment that exist and the different degrees of awakening that there are because it's a it's one of the trickiest subject matters that I think that there exists for human beings epistemic Lee speaking it's a real can of worms it's real dangerous territory and the reason that is is because people tend to naively assume that enlightenment is just a simple on/off switch like a black and white state shift that is psycho up you either enlightened or you're not and maybe then they they get a little bit more nuanced and then they say well yeah you can have a little glimpse of it but either the glimpse sticks or a doesn't if it doesn't stick it's not real enlightenment if it does stick then you're fully really enlightened but this is way too simplistic of a conceptual understanding of how enlightened works it just does not work this way and if you think about it it would be rather silly to expect this very complicated machine that you have here in your in your skull the brain with its billions of neurons and all the different modules in the brain and your psyche all the software in the brain and how all that is working in halt all that is interlinked and you think that what just by flipping a switch that entire psyche is going to get transformed in one instant and that all those neurons are gonna rewire themselves no that's not how it's going to work and this notion that enlightenment is just the truth and you just you glimpse the truth you now see the truth you know the truth and now the truth is permeated throughout your whole life and it informs everything you do and it transforms all your neuroses it transforms your entire thinking process it transforms your sexual proclivities and and it transforms your your food addictions in and what other kind of addictions the Internet addiction and other kind of stuff like that all in one fell swoop that's way too convenient it just doesn't work that way that's that's just a caricature of enlightenment in reality and this is what very few spiritual teachers talk about is that it's a lot more messy than that people have awakenings of various degrees they glimpse different facets of the truth there's different degrees of clarity to what you're going to glimpse there's also degrees of how long your glimpsing it you could glimpse it for a few seconds you can glimpse it for a few minutes you can glimpse it for a few days for a few weeks I've read examples and I've researched this topic a lot because I'm very careful about not deluding myself here and making sure that I guide people properly as well not to delude them as well because what you don't want is you don't want to reach some sort of places that say okay that's it I'm fully done my journey is over I'm as developed as I can be I know the full truth and that's it and that's the end and now I'm gonna rest on my laurels and now I'm gonna just like act as though I'm as good as as anyone can ever be see that's that's the whole thing we're trying to avoid I've read examples of people who have had awakening experiences and have been in a perpetual state of of like bliss and rapture and this just like constant non-dual you know state and they were there for a couple of years and then they dropped out of it so that stuff could happen so in reality this entire field is much more complicated and there are many depths here and of course I haven't a vagator all the depths so it's difficult for me to talk about this stuff with total authority because I don't feel like I've gone through all the stages but then again be very careful here because you might say oh well leo so then I don't need to listen to you I'll just go listen to somebody else well you see but be very careful whoever else you go and listen to you still have to take this point into consideration because how do you know the depth of their attainment how do you know what facets of the truth they have glimpsed and which ones they haven't and how deeply did they glimpse them how clear are they on them and then also how well do they embody that in their own life personally not just in their videos you see because it's easy to shoot a video it's another thing how you actually embody it when nobody's looking at you these are very different things generally speaking what I've discovered through all my research is that if you're talking about full complete utter enlightenment where you have glimpsed all the facets of the truth from different angles and all together at the same time and you've integrated all of them and you embody them let's say significantly within your own personal life and you've had it rewire your entire mind your entire psyche and your entire emotional system that's what I would call mastery of this field mastery of non-duality if you set that kind of expectation for what the word enlightenment means to see the word enlightenment different people use it in different ways and they never tell you what they mean by the word enlightenment some people will mean utter complete mastery moral perfection we'll see if you're using it in that sense and very very few people meet that criteria including many what you would consider masterful teachers they still fail to meet that criteria there would be probably only a handful of people in the whole world that would meet that criteria and then of course so that might be the most like the most strongest most difficult to satisfy criteria for enlightenment or you could have much looser criteria and just say well enlightenment is just like an awakening experience and it comes it goes and then how much of it you retain that varies too so that might be the most like loosey-goosey definition of enlightenment and then there's a whole spectrum in between so generally when I say an enlightenment experience that's what I'm talking about I'm talking about you becoming conscious of some facet of the absolute truth different facets there's not a particular facet but there's different facets and there's different depths and then you know you could have a shallow enlightenment experience or a deep in Limon experience it could be a temporary one or it could be one that that sticks but still see even the notion of its sticks you have to question that as well because some people say all well yeah leo so if it doesn't stick it's not real but but see this assumes that sticking is again a simple binary thing like it's stuck or it hasn't stuck but if you just do the research into the literature and you look at people who have these kinds of experiences and you look at famous teachers and such you see that it's not that simple either it's not just that it's sticks or doesn't stick there's degrees of how much it sticks how much it transforms you because what you really mean by its sticks is that now it's like permeating your entire life and they have different words for this in different traditions like for example in in Hindu traditions in Advaita Vedanta for example they have a term called sahaja Samadhi and that might be the term you would use for someone who is just so deeply enlightened that it's like they're in a perpetual state of it's like they're on a psychedelic 24/7 it's like everything is Nandu all the time they're literally walking through the world completely conscious that the entire thing is just an illusion and this consciousness stays with them no matter what they're doing you know it could be a it could be running away from from a lion from a hungry lion chasing them and they would supposedly still have this this degree of consciousness so is that what I have certainly not I don't make any you know I don't I don't make any pretenses about that certainly not if you want to reach something like that if that's what you consider enlightenment then well you're looking at 20 30 40 years of of this journey of many many awakenings of various degrees and just kind of blasting your mind with these awakenings and just completely rewiring your entire psyche everything such that you're in this like perpetual high all the time you know and then there's like lower versions of it as well there's different levels of Samadhi that people talk about from different traditions you know in Zen they have kensho they have Satori different levels of tensho and Satori so at every every tradition has their own way that they slice and dice and see that's what's tricky about this is that it does depend on how you slice and dice it in your own expectations in your own definitions and most teachers when they talk about these words like enlightenment or awakening or self-realization first of all they just use these words the way that they grew up using these words oftentimes they don't tell you what their definitions are and then of course different teachers use different definitions for precisely the same words so some people might use the word enlightenment and awakening and so realization interchangeably to mean the exact same thing without making any finer distinctions and other teachers will say no no no I make finer distinctions net I use the word enlightenment for this thing here and I use the word awakening for this slightly different version of enlightenment and I use the word self-realization for like something like sahaja Samadhi and most students because this is such a complicated topic most students they come in very kind of simply simple minded language they just assume Oh enlighten is just an Enlightenment and then they just sort of buy these different words and then they get confused or they they come in and they're only coming in from one tradition or one school so like they are only coming in from Zen or they're only coming in from Buddhism or they're only coming in from yoga or advisor and they don't want to really study the broader field you don't want to study other schools and so what happens and this is a big danger that I see is that people just develop a rather limited and narrow understanding of of what this entire field is in reality this field is much more complicated than it seems so what has happened to me over the last couple of days after this experience well of course the peak has come down you even saw in the video towards the end of the video already I wasn't really in any kind of peak State it was just quite normal but of course that continued to wind down and it was interesting for me to see what would remain what would I keep from the experience because sometimes you have these experiences and you don't keep very much at all you lose all of it which can be pretty depressing and sad in this case it's interesting it was such a it was such a deep experience that I felt like a lot of the understanding that I got there um I still have with me right now so for example if I just stopped teaching for a second and if I just stand here I can focus my mind on what I am and my mind focuses in on sort of the nothingness of empty space and I can focus in on that and I'm I I know that I'm not the body I know that I'm not this voice I also as I'm looking at my physical surroundings there's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that I'm standing inside of a physical universe this is clearly not a physical universe and I know that without a shadow of a doubt that this is consciousness I'm standing inside of consciousness and that this entire thing is my self it's just that see when you come down from the psychedelic what happens in the psychedelic your consciousness is very fluid and it's kind of wavy like this so it's easy to see that the whole thing is consciousness when it's waving like this for you but then as it congeals your mind doesn't know how to connect that experience or that knowing of the waviness of of all a physical reality it doesn't understand how to how to ground that in mundane experience like what then is mundane experience usually we think of it as the physical world the universe but see for me there's no physical world or physical universe really it's a con that's just a concept there's no physical brain within which psychedelics are acting there's no physical brain within which these perceptions are getting rendered at least to me these are these are silly ideas that I can no longer subscribe to I've subscribed to them in the past but you know the more conscious I become the less I'm able to subscribe to them but still you you can still get sucked into it like for example over the last few days I've been especially careful to be very mindful with everything that I'm doing because one thing that this experience really taught me is that everything is in the present moment everything that I need all the lessons I need are right here I don't need a trip to go somewhere to have an experience of the absolute this is the absolute I'm inside the absolute I just need to slow my mind down to connect with it and of course I still have a lot of habits old habits that are running inside of me that I've been very mindful of over the last couple of days where it's like you know if I'm gonna go cook some dinner usually I you know I'm very efficient I go quickly cook dinner right I'm not really watching what I'm doing I'm just grabbing pans and oil and this and that and cooking stuff up and it is very quick and I'm I'm doing it mindlessly and here over the last couple days I've been doing it very slowly and very mindfully such that I'm able to be conscious of the fact that that frying pan is the absolute that oil is the absolute that knife is the absolute this hand which is reaching for the knife is me reaching for myself taking myself cutting an onion or something the onion that I'm cutting is also myself I'm cutting myself and if I'm like cutting an apple I'm putting a piece of apple into my mouth I'm being conscious of the fact that I'm I'm eating myself literally literally so that was new to me and that's something I've taken away and that's something that I'm still maintaining Eve is even as I'm speaking right now of course my entire mind and psyche didn't get completely rewired and that was challenging so after you come down from one of these Peaks of course usually your old mind kicks in and this is gonna be true regardless of whether you took a psychedelic or not your mind is gonna kick back in and it's usually gonna have the old loops that it had those grooves that you've conditioned your mind with those are mostly still going to be there so you'll notice your addictions coming up like for example I was very conscious over the last few days noticing my internet addictions coming up and I was very mindful of that and very careful about that and noticing my addictions to distract myself with with stimulation other types of things with thoughts I like to think a lot I'm very conceptual so I've been very mindful of how conceptual I am and I've been noticing my mind trying to conceptualize my experiences I've been trying to to kind of let that go and trying to enter a more about no mind state and I have noticed that my ability to do that has increased but you know some of those old addictions are still there and that requires work and I've also been noticing my habitual emotional reactions that I have both negative and positive ones I've been noticing those as well and of course many of those are still there and that's gonna require a lot of work so if you're under the illusion that having even a very deep and profound enlightenment experience while you're meditating or self inquiring that that will change all of your emotional reactions and turn you in some kind of into some kind of Jesus like Saint in in one day you're gonna be in a really in for a rude awakening because that most likely is not going to happen whatever kind of awakening experiences you have they will require integration work and lots of follow-up work for the full embodiment because the absolute is really independent of your mind but your mind still has a lot of momentum behind it it has a whole lifetime of all the habitual stuff that you do so if you smoke if you drink if you jerk off if you are addicted to sex if you're addicted to the Internet if you're addicted to food and you eat bad junk food chances are even if you have a very deep enlightenment even without psychedelics you're still gonna have those if you want to get rid of those you're gonna have to work very deliberately very mindfully to get rid of those of course your awakening experience will help you a lot with that and now sort of what I've been experienced the last couple of days is that I've been using that experience to help me reorganize my entire life to be more mindful and more conscious and that's been very productive I've been actually quite amazed at how productive that's been and I want to continue to do that over the next few weeks as I'm still integrating this now let me get back to this point about psychedelics I've been open and honest with you guys from the very beginning since about a year and a half ago that my intention with psychedelics was not just to to do one or two trips and just have some fun the way people do psychedelics no see what I'm doing is I am a researcher and I'm a guinea pig I like to test new ground that's sort of like I feel like what I was born for is to blaze new trails I don't like doing stuff that other people have already done because I find it pointless if someone has already written a book I don't want to rewrite the same book if someone has already shot one kind of video I don't want to shoot that same kind of video so some people criticize me and say Olli oh well you're so immature and you're so lacking in your consciousness and in your mastery that why should I listen to you when I can go and just like listen to a Zen master because Leo you're talking about psychedelics you know what it's like a Daleks you know that's that's a corruption of enlightenment I want the traditional form okay so here's the deal if you want a totally traditional form of spirituality then by all means go join a Zen monastery or go find yourself a yogi guru in India or something like that you can find those types of people there around and and and just follow their path to the tea and that might work for you but don't expect me to be offering you that here that would just be redundant I'm not here to be a traditional Zen master or a traditional yogi that's not my role in this world my role is to explore this field and to use my mind to discover new things about this field that perhaps other people haven't discovered before now you might say only oh that's so arrogant of you because how how you know how deluded must you be to think that you know something better than the yogi or the Zen master well in my experience I've already found and discovered things through my sort of open-minded multi-perspective evil approach that that you're not gonna learn from any Zen master or yogi because there are pros and cons to every approach there are pros and cons to just going doing strict traditionals and practice some of the pros of it are that is it's very well tested by time and there's not gonna be a lot of surprises you kind of know what you're getting into and if you stick with it to the tee you've got a good chance of making some great progress there on the other hand there's also a lot of dangers ah you'll be shocked to discover that most people who spend 10 20 years meditating in his end monastery that they aren't enlightened I've actually been shocked to discover that Zen teachers who have been ordained to teach and have have have studied this stuff and practiced it for ten twenty years that they have not yet become conscious of some of the stuff that I've become conscious of through my own unorthodox techniques what I offer is an unorthodox way of doing personal development and spirituality my approach is sort of a smorgasbord of everything you sample a lot of stuff you experiment with yourself you don't take any one perspective too seriously you don't put your eggs all in one basket and there's pros and cons to that one of the cons of that is that you can easily just become a dabbler dabbling in a bunch of stuff not going deep into anything but there's ways to avoid that that danger you can you can both do a smorgasbord of of the entire field and you can also go deep into certain aspects and that's what I've been doing lately I've been going deep into certain things and and I've been getting some amazing results and some of the things and techniques and methods that I found and tools that I found have been really amazing and I'm excited to share those with you because I I don't see a lot of other teachers sharing them because they teach usually Orthodox methods so if you want Orthodox methods go go find those and stick with those and find then you don't need actualize that org what I offer is I offer something unorthodox and of course there's rich risks to that but then again there's risks to everything you run the risk of doing the standard Zen traditional practice and never becoming enlightened in fact Mo's n students will never become enlightened because quite frankly at least in my opinion many of the Zen techniques are not the best and most efficient techniques nor are they appropriate for everybody for certain people Zen is perfect but only for certain people how do you know if Xena is perfect for you well in truth you don't know not until you've invested a lot of time into it which is why I like to dabble and stuff sample a lot of stuff so that I can find what will resonate with me what will resonate with my personality what will resonate with my heart what will resonate with the particular neuroses and problems that I have for example a lot of people these days have a very particular set of obstacles to enlightenment that teachers from 50 years ago who are teaching today who grew up in in a different generation don't really understand for example video games television Internet addiction many teachers don't really understand the significance of this these are new developments within culture which have just come online in last 20 years which have rotted out the minds of an entire generation of young people so if you're in your 20s or 30s right now your mind has been rotted out by video games television and Internet to sense and smartphones too and Facebook and all the social media stuff to such an extent that you can't even sit down and enter access concentration on the cushion so good luck doing your traditional vikas and a retreat or some sort of Zen practice where they expect you to be able to enter access concentration in order to to achieve the results that you're trying to achieve good luck getting a 20 year old kid who's addicted to World of Warcraft or League of Legends to succeed with that technique see but your traditional Zen master he doesn't care about any of that he doesn't know any of this and even if he does know about it he's not gonna really alter his teaching because he's committed to teaching Orthodox teaching so what I just wanted to stress here is that there's a lot of nuance and a lot of complexity to this field a lot of pros and cons which should actually make total sense if you think about it from the high level because why are there so many spiritual traditions and why do so many spiritual people disagree with each other precisely because of this point because they are under estimating the depth and breadth of this field they want this field to just be simple the way there one little teaching or tradition teaches them and that's just not the case the fact is is that there are psychedelics the fact is that there are there's technology you can use for enlightenment there's a million different ways that you can trigger enlightenment have different awakening experiences and different ways work for different people and there's pros and cons to all these different ways and what I've told you from from the beginning is that with psychedelics my aim was to to research this field not just a trip for fun once or twice but to research this field because I'm always on the lookout for new methods that can that can really catalyze this process of personal development and spiritual development and I think I found some great tools there and I'm I'm just blown away personally at how effective these substances have been in my own life for not just having peak experiences but for for really transforming how I behave on a daily basis I've been blown away at how effective they are now that doesn't mean they're perfect for you that doesn't mean they're perfect for everybody that doesn't mean that my only path to enlightenment is through psychedelics I also do yoga I also do Vipassana I also do self inquiry I've done that over a thousand of hours of this stuff I do meditation I do retreats so I do a lot of stuff so my approach is sort of hybrid I mix a lot of stuff together and what I found personally in my own life is that this produces an enormous results and it gets you a level of understanding about this entire field and about yourself and about human beings about personal development in a way that you just can't get by sticking to one orthodox tradition which is not to put down any Orthodox traditions all right so I'm not trying to start some non-duality wars here I'm not trying to say that my way is better it's not better it's just a different way and you have to decide which ways you want to follow and personally I think the best way you can make an informed decision is by sampling a bunch of different things until you find something that really resonates with you can psychedelics make you permanently enlightened that's something of an open question that I'm still testing see a lot of people will say no leo that's hogwash it can't happen but when I listen to these people what I'm hearing is I'm hearing Dogma I'm not hearing them speaking from direct experience sure a lot of people have tried psychedelics once or twice a couple of times seven times whatever they've screwed around with it and they say oh no it doesn't stick it doesn't work everybody knows doesn't stick I don't buy that maybe that's true but what I see is that there's a broad range of a way that you can use psychedelics like any tool you need to know how to use the tool properly and what I've been sort of developing over the last year is my own process for how to apply psychedelics for massive growth within personal development and also within enlightenment and I'm still testing that out and I'm not fully sure where that's gonna lead me to maybe a couple of years from now I'll come back and say you know what that was a dead end guys doesn't really work I wasted a lot of my time and energy and I found that it's just it's not worth it let's just go do traditional Zen instead maybe all come away with that conclusion in the end but so far that's not the conclusion that I'm being led towards just the opposite I'm feeling like there's a lot of potential in fact I'm I'm shocked at why nobody is talking about the potential the true potential of these substances I see that people use these substances in in very childish ways they don't get anything that sticks they don't understand what they're really experiencing they're not able to articulate it for me what I experienced when I use these substances when I use a real serious method for the application of these substances what I find is that I'm able to access levels of consciousness that I only see a handful of the most enlightened of the most enlightened of the most enlightened masters talking about and these masters have dedicated 40 years of their life to accessing these levels of consciousness I'm seeing that I can access those on a weekly basis and to me that's a that's a remarkable discovery which I wish someone told me about ten years ago it certainly would have completely revolutionized my life and so I feel like even though I run some risks talking about this stuff I feel like this is sort of like my role I stumbled upon it and therefore I need to share it with people and then how people interpret it and react to it well that's really out of my hands I have to just make sure that I'm trying to be honest and authentic about it and and to to be truthful about both the pros and the cons and the limitations and the the potential here so am i deluded well you have to judge for yourself this question of who is deluded and who isn't that's not such an easy question to answer don't be so quick to think that your Zen master isn't deluded in some fashion don't be so quick to think that you're not deluded for judging somebody else for being deluded see this is a very tricky subject the broader your research goes the more you will see how tricky this subject is and just how non-trivial it is to determine which teacher or teaching is diluted or not diluted or which one is deeper than another one so the reality here is that this stuff is very nuanced and it's tricky so the key and really the solution here is very simple if you want to boil all this down to one simple solution in a nutshell it's this don't go thinking you've got to the end of the rainbow you have some deep experience whether it's on psychedelics or not great but don't think you're done it's not that simple it's never that simple I think that even many people who follow the traditional paths to enlightenment still get stuck they don't reach the highest levels because they don't take all these points that I'm talking about into consideration so if you want a fail-safe a safety valve against delusion it's simply this pursue whatever method you're gonna pursue whatever schools you want to pursue whatever techniques you want to pursue have whatever experiences you're gonna have but at the end of the day always be open that there could be more and that's how I am ensuring that I don't delude myself it's not that I can guarantee that I will never delude myself it's that I'm always continuing my journey which means that any delusions that are here will get autocorrected over time because I'm always reading a new book listening to a new video considering a new possibility listening to a comment that tells me that maybe a maybe you're missing some element here that you didn't think of I'm thinking about that I'm always keeping myself open to feedback and to new perspectives see and I never tell myself okay I've made it now it's it that's it I'm done that was never I'm I was never under that illusion when I began actualized that org my my assumption was that I'll be continuing this journey for the rest of my life it's never going to really end and that's still sort of my expectation is that it just continues forever because the best teachers that I've interacted with that I've studied with I see them continuing to learn I see them still reading books I see them still doing their practices after 40 years I see them telling me hey keep going there's more there's more there's more so that's really it you just got to remember there's more and not to rest on your laurels that's it that's the only thing here so make sure you don't get the idea that somehow I'm resting on my laurels and that now Leo claims to be fully no I don't claim to be enlightened at all I don't claim to be fully enlightened or partially enlightened I don't want to play that game that doesn't really interest me what interests me is the profound experiences that I'm able to have how consistently I'm able to have them and how much they're able to transform my life that's what interests me and so hopefully that gives you a little bit of a context of where I was coming from with that last video and so that you can interpret it a little bit more properly it was amazing the day afterwards I felt like my understanding of personal development had doubled because everything I knew before was again recontextualized and concentrated I actually felt like in that experience I was able to sort a lot of the wheat from the chaff I was able to see like okay what are the keys to personal development the keys to enlightenment what are the keys to living the kind of life that you want to live the best kind of life possible and all of those will reveal to me so I'll be talking a lot more about them in the future I feel like I'm able to guide people much better now and I'm able to also I feel like motivate people into this journey better as well because I know I know exactly what you're missing I know exactly what you really want in your life and why you're not getting it and a lot of this was revealed to me in a very deep way over the last couple of days I've been integrating and thinking about this awakening experience that I had a big component of this that's lacking in everybody's life is authenticity this was really revealed to me in a powerful way I felt like I broke through this inauthenticity barrier and that's one of the reasons I felt like I needed to publish also that video is because that's helping me work through my own inauthenticity that's something I faced my own life a lot is I felt very inauthentic for most of my life I've acted very and authentically lying to myself manipulating in subtle ways because in the back of my mind I'm always afraid of what people think of me and how people judge me and how I look you know am i doing the right things am I gonna get ostracized and all this and one of the things I learned from this experience is that what you really want in your life is you want a hundred percent authenticity if you want to boil all person development down to that you can that's a good way to look at it move towards a hundred percent authenticity whatever that means and then you have to go face all the fears and challenges that come along with becoming a hundred percent authentic in all your relationships with all your communications with all your thoughts that requires a complete a completely different orientation to life than you've had before because generally our orientation is one of protecting ourselves defending our ego which is what creates a lot of inauthenticity but the reason I say you what you really want is 107 authenticity is because it feels so good people say what's the point of life what's the point of personal the point is to feel good feel good about I feel how amazing this is every last couple of mornings that I've been waking up I was just like opening my eyes are a little groggy I get through the rockiness but then it's like it's amazing I'm inside of a living miracle and my job is to be conscious of that every single moment as much as I can of course there's a lot of obstacles to that there's work there's relationship there's emotional problems all this sort of stuff your past neuroses and bad habits so authenticity something I'll be talking more about in the future and showing you how you can move towards 100% authenticity as I also try to do that and demonstrate that in my own life another key element that I became aware of is the significance of fear overcoming fear as a core pillar of of all personal development overcoming fear facing your fears head-on and using your heart the power of love to break through all your fears and that's a really powerful technique of which I'm gonna be experimenting more with right now in my life and I'll be sharing ways for how you can do that for yourself in the future and we'll be talking a lot more about fear we'll be talking a lot more about the power of the heart and the power of love and what what love really is we'll talk about that I was also made aware of the power of radical honesty how powerful honesty can be as a technique for personal development we're very rarely honest with other people and also with our own selves you're not even honest with yourself it's hard for you to even look at the truth because the truth disturbs you so much it irritates you emotionally it makes you uncomfortable that's because that's something that needs to be cultivated self honesty needs to be cultivated in a radical way where every single day you open yourself up a little bit more to the truth too painful bitter stinging truths and you let those sting you they sting your ego you see the only thing being stung by the truth is your ego which is that which is inauthentic within you so let it sting you and slowly kill that ego every single day and that's something that was a huge lesson for me from this experience because for a long time I sort of thought about this enlightenment journey as having these big awakening experiences and it is about that that's very important but also what was shown to me here is that when you have this big awakening experience then you bring it back down to your mundane level and reality and you notice that there is no difference at all between the two and that actually all these opportunities are being presented to you every single day every single hour in your life you're being presented with little opportunities for either killing off your ego suffocating it or aggrandizing it and expanding it and this is where this this very important principle comes to mind of authentic suffering there's two types of suffering there's authentic suffering and inauthentic suffering inauthentic suffering is what most people do because they're trying to avoid authentic suffering so think of it this way imagine a diagram where we have one point over here one point over here in a straight line going from point A to point B point a is your birth point B is your death the entire point of life is to go from A to B and there's a straight line going from A to B and that line is you going straight towards truth death is truth I'm not talking about your physical death of your body I'm talking about the death of the self the shortest distance between being born as a self and dying as a self is truth that's the only thing that stands in the way but do most people take that shortest route of course not what do they do they take a very circuitous spirally route like this see because they can't stand the truth it burns them too much so what they do instead is they come up with all sorts of excuses for how not to suffer through the the legitimate suffering of of opening yourself up more to truth that's legitimate authentic suffering they find other ways to suffer like they go have sex indiscriminately they go drink booze they go you know they start chasing money they they have kids even though they don't really want them but they have kids anyways because you know they're having sex too much and they're eating bad food so it's and they're suffering through all that and then they wonder why does my life suck so much why am I so depressed well it's because you're not taking the straight direct path to truth you're taking this long circuitous route and you're just trying to stall out the clock until what until your physical death comes so that when your physical death comes you have no more time to be conscious your last moments will be your death the death of the self and your physical death for most people are going to be the exact same point and that turns out to be a terrible way to live it's gonna be a terrible way to go out instead what you want is you want to move this point up closer so that you die the self dies long before the body dies then what happens is that you live for the rest of your life 30 40 50 years you can live being conscious of infinity everywhere of the miracle of life and then your life is a miracle it's a living miracle it's amazing you're happy no matter what it's amazing but to do that you need to stop this this circling around you know eating buckets of ice cream and and watching porn on the internet and doing all this sorts of stuff which is a distraction and go head-on into legitimate suffering legitimate suffering is the suffering that you encounter when you face the truth in whatever way and you can face the truth a little bit each day in your life just face the truth with your relationship face the truth with your own physical body how you feel about it face the truth about your financial situation face the truth about all the stuff you've been procrastinating on see most people are procrastinating so much in their life why is that because of this dynamic because procrastination is not wanting to face some legitimate suffering and so we invent distractions and that's where addictions come from this is huge right here I hope you're taking mental notes another key element that I was really made aware of from this awakening experience is the importance of no mind working towards a state of no-mind shutting off all your thoughts as you're cooking as you're showering as you're sitting and relaxing even as you're watching television you suppress your thoughts your monkey chatter you suppress it suppress it suppress it until you're getting into this state of no-mind that's challenging to do that's basically what meditation is for but I was really made aware of the importance of no mind because ultimately you want to get to a state where you're in no mind for most of the day and if you think that enlightenment alone will make that happen very unlikely very unlikely you have to work separately additionally to your enlightenment experiences to get to this no mind requires putting a lot of emphasis on minute by minute mindfulness practice which is something I really am starting to appreciate more and more I understand why the Buddhists stress mindfulness so much even more so a lot of times than having a big mind-blowing awakening experience they stress mindfulness it seems very simple and boring and it is until you have one of these huge awakening experiences and then you realize oh this is the absolute if I'm not mindful of the absolute right here then what the hell am i doing I'm looking for it somewhere else when it's right here another big thing that happened for me personally during this awakening experience is that I had a real powerful vision for how I want to live my life and that is devoting myself to selfless living I want to live selflessly that is the best kind of life that's possible to live and so contrary to what a lot of people say for me the more awakening experiences I have the more my passion increases for selfless living the more my passion increases for for sharing these teachings with the world that's just me I don't know how it is for you maybe for you you're gonna become a nihilist and you're not gonna want to do anything you lose all your passions that's possible but personally I think that if your passion is grounded in your heart to begin with that passion will not get extinguished by these awakenings it'll actually get strengthened but if your passion is grounded in ego then those certainly will tend to get extinguished extinguished but that's actually what you want that's what you call spiritual purification that's where your deepest growth comes from your your passions need to transition from being egoic hello passions to being deep divine passions passions that are much larger than yourself that involve the entire universe not just your little self your little family your little group of friends or your little company or something like that so what you're gonna see over the next year is hopefully I'm gonna be able to follow through on this vision and you should start to see me embodying more of this living a selfless sort of lifestyle that's what I'll be working on nandu ership was another huge facet that was revealed to me what you need to become more conscious of is the fact that you're not actually in control of anything in this life every single word coming out of your mouth every single single thought you're having is completely inevitable and couldn't be otherwise I am NOT in control of what I'm saying here to you this is being fueled by a higher source and what I need to do is just purify myself of my own personal [ __ ] my own personal lies and deceptions so that I can be a better vehicle for this divine force working through me I'm conscious right now that God is looking through my eyes that's what it is that's what your entire visual field is your visual field is God looking through your eyes and every little motion you make it a little scratch you make on your face all of that is God working through you it's just a question of are you conscious of it are you surrendering yourself to nandu ership or are you struggling and fighting see what you really want is you want your life to be effortless isn't that true you want it to be completely as effortless as possible how do you do that start practicing it the way that you get effortless is by relinquishing do ership this illusion that you really have a choice about things you don't of course you could practice it a little bit every day in your life that's good but then you also need to have the big awaking experiences to realize that all [ __ ] yeah you're this isn't just a practice this is like absolute truth there's no self to be doing any doer ship the universe is acting of its own accord through itself without anybody in control the more you start to notice that that's the ultimate place that you want to be living from life is so much easier when you're not tricking yourself into thinking that it's all you know all the pressures on you to be in control of everything the fact is you don't have control but you're afraid to give up control that's the egos whole agenda is to to maintain this grip and control over your life because it tells itself that hey if we don't if we don't keep this control then everything is gonna fly apart and everything the shit's gonna hit the fan that's not true but it's a very very powerful fear and by no means have I overcome that fear that's something I'm gonna be working on on a daily basis another thing that was made aware to me is the importance of slowing down my life people these days including myself live such fast paced lives why is that because they're unconscious it's a sea it's a it's a self feeding feedback loop you live a fast-paced life because you're unconscious to begin with but then the fast pace at which you live your life makes you even more unconscious it deepens your unconsciousness which makes you think that all the problem with my life is that I'm not accomplishing enough I'm not doing enough fast enough so you live an even faster paced life and see it becomes a vicious circle the counterintuitive move is to simplify your life minimize your life and to really slow down over the last few days I've been slowing myself down in a sense doing less work but what I've actually been achieving is is more work and more satisfaction from my work because when I slow myself down able to get into the into the flow and into the zone whereas when I'm doing everything quickly I'm just doing it to get to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing and I'm not really appreciating any of it such that really I'm just living with one foot in the grave as they say because I'm always like living in the future now right now I'm not able to appreciate what's right there so I've been slowing down my life and I have to be very mindful not to speed it back up because part of the problem with passion having all this passion which I'm filled with passion these days more and more but I had to be careful because if I become so passion I start doing all this stuff then I get disconnected with the truth and with my authentic self so I have to just kind of like put the brakes on very consciously and the last thing that I'll mention here as far as insights that I got is I got a lot of insight into why people fail with enlightenment what their obstacles are like it just becomes crystal clear to me why people are not able to reach these degrees of consciousness and I'm not just talking about people who take psychedelics I'm talking about people who are hardcore meditators who've been meditating for 10 20 30 years or doing self inquiry for 20 years and still haven't become conscious of some of the things that I've become conscious of for example I understand why and I'll be talking more about that in the future but one very big obstacle is you actually think that there is such a thing as a physical world a physical universe and you think that in it is something other than physical death very few enlightenment teachers tell you just balls-to-the-wall flat-out that enlightenment is your physical death you will physically die in this process that's what all spirituality is about your physical death you're slowly moving towards your physical death and if you make any kind of distinction between ego death and physical death you ain't gonna experience the deepest levels of enlightenment you ain't because at the deepest levels of enlightenment there is no world there is no universe there is no reality there are no other people and there is no you and you're [ __ ] dead and if that scares you good it should if that gives you trepidation about whether this path is for you good you need to face that trepidation that's the thing you got to work through so that you open yourself up to the the peak nosov awakening that can happen a lot of people take psychedelics but they don't experience the kinds of things that I experienced on psychedelics and people take huge doses of psychedelics way more than I take and I don't see them experiencing the same things that I am experiencing on very small doses why is that that's because they still have all these concepts in the back of their mind of their being a brain of their being a physical universe of their being physical people of their being such things as time and space and all this sort of stuff so yeah when you have that as your context and then you take a psychedelic then what do you get you just get a cool hallucination it's nifty it's fun it's weird it blows your mind for a couple hours then you come back down and everything is back to normal because the context hasn't changed of anything you didn't break down the things that the psychedelic was supposed to you to break down so this is just a tip of the iceberg of all the stuff that I learned I don't have time to go into all that I'll be sharing more of those insights with you in in future episodes I'll be sprinkling them in throughout in general I feel like my entire understanding of personal development and enlightenment as as these two fields has has really deepened and I'm really excited about that I'm really happy that I have this deeper understanding because now I feel like I can I can teach better I can guide people better more directly to what they're really after rather than just kind of like leading them around in circles so what's next for me well in a sense not much has changed I'm still continuing with with creating videos every week I'm still continuing with actualized or I'm still passionate about it partially in my own life I'm gonna be adopting and working hard every day to implement these different key pillars that I that I mentioned here I'm gonna be working really hard on my own authenticity I can already feel that in this episode I'm being way more authentic than I was ever able to be in in Prior episodes because that was a real breakthrough moment that I had on on that video it wasn't it wasn't acting it wasn't me being overly dramatic something really shifted in me more so than just having a trip I've had regular trips that wasn't a regular trip and and the fact that I filmed it in the process of filming it and putting my own ass on the line something additional shifted in me generally what I noticed is that the more I'm able to share with people all these ideas the more I open myself up to the truth and to living the kind of lifestyle that I want to live this this selfless lifestyle for me I don't this is not true for everybody you know some people just want to get enlightened and that's it and they don't want to teacher share with other Seth that's totally cool but for me personally I know deep down inside that for me my own awakening is deeply connected to my life purpose and to sharing in the contribution that I have in the world these two things are very integrally linked for me so it feels like almost as though God is not letting me just go pursue my own enlightenment by myself in a sense that would be simple I could just go sit in the woods for a few months and you know just work completely on myself no cameras no nothing that would be in a sense easier but what I'm feeling is like my mind is not letting me do that what it's what it's like it's what it's telling me is like you got to share and bring other people along with you while you're doing it and as you're sharing that's when everything is going to open up within me for my own personal awakening so the two will come together not separately at least for me that's how it feels I might be wrong about that but that's kind of like what it feels like and so I'm going with it because that feels that feels legitimate to me so what's next for me is I actually have two solo meditation retreats already planned and booked for the next couple of months I'm actually doing two retreats in Hawaii they're gonna be an eight day long retreat and like a ten day long retreat one is coming in February another one is coming in April I'm really excited about these two I will take a camera with me and I will record those just like I did with my Arizona solo retreat which is quite a while it goes like eight eight or nine months ago so I'm really excited about that I actually will be doing a lot of solar retreats this year I plan to do probably at least four of them and cool location so I've got two locations in Hawaii I've got cabins booked in the middle of the rainforest it's gonna be pretty awesome I mean there all by myself so I'm excited to show to show that setting and to show myself really working hard on these retreats I feel like I have a lot of material to work on there and then later in the year I will probably do two more solo retreats in cool places maybe in Costa Rica maybe in in the Seattle area I'm trying to pick locations with a lot of beautiful nature and trees and rainforests and pine forest stuff like that so um it's really nice and beautiful so we'll see how that turns out I'm getting prepared for these trips so stay tuned for those and regular videos of course will still be coming out and what you'll generally see over the next year is you're gonna see a big transformation coming for me I can feel it you should start to see me becoming more authentic you should start to see me becoming more conscious there will be many more awakening experiences happening this year I anticipate dozens of them because I have found methods for creating awakening experience very consistently and very deep and profound ways so you'll be seeing that and and we'll see I also have some plans on maybe doing a tour and meeting people more face-to-face because one of the things that I was shown actually in my previous awakening experience which I didn't film I didn't tell anybody about it silently in that one I also had a vision and in that vision it showed me that really I need to to test myself more in front of people it's one thing to deliver these teachings in front of a camera I've gotten pretty good at that and pretty comfortable with that and the next level for me is interacting more with people face to face and I feel like that's kind of like where all this is pushing me towards so this year in 2018 I will probably do at least one or two or maybe more depending on how it goes I've actualized that org videos with actual people in the audience and then I'll record those maybe post them on YouTube and I'll probably start with the west coast of the United States and and then we'll see where that goes from there so exciting stuff is happening I'm really just a guinea pig I want to be upfront that I'm I'm not a master I'm a student and I'm always growing and learning and the whole point of actualized org and the reason I started releasing that video is because I keep getting this calling from the universe to make myself more authentic make my videos more authentic put myself out there on the line so I have nothing to hide purify myself document what the real journey of this work looks like not just the theory of it but how it actually looks for a human being to be going through this and that of course means making mistakes sometimes getting deluded sometimes getting overly excited about something sometimes you know going down a wrong road guess what that's gonna happen to you too it probably already has so I'm not here pretending like I'm perfect I just want to document the journey for me what really excites me is imagine if you took someone like the Buddha before he became the Buddha before he even left his palace you know he would he was a total noob and he didn't even know about meditation take him then when he was addicted to food and to sex and all this stuff give him a camera and then record him going through his whole seven-year journey or however long it took him to get to his enlightenment and then record even after his enlightenment record what's happening with him that's real that's something that's that's more valuable than just having scriptures because scriptures are idealized they don't tell you all the dirty details all the delusions all the dead ends all the problems all the all the all the warts and all that happens throughout this process this this spiritual process this the self-actualization process there really wanted the same thing it's all about facing your own inner demons facing your own neuroses and finding individualized solutions to conquer that for every human being it's going to be unique that's why I don't really resonate with these schools or traditions these Orthodox Zen or yoga or Hindu or vine or whatever type of tradition or Christianity because that assumes that you're like a cookie cutter human being that assumes that every human being has the same problems the same inner demons to overcome not at all see you need techniques and methods and teachings which go directly to your inner demons to your own problems and limitations which are unique to you because you know what when you were a child you were abused in your unique particular way you were bullied you were ridiculed you were sexually abused you were you know beaten with a with a with a stick or you were laughed at in school or you know who knows what happened to you which has made you defensive you have erected all this armor against the world not allowing yourself to feel to be authentic to express yourself not allowing yourself to connect to your heart to be vulnerable and put yourself out on the line and what this whole journey is about is about breaking down all that armor all your personal fears but your Zen master doesn't know what those are your yogi and your guru doesn't know what those are all that they can give you is they can give you a sort of standardized mainstreamed method and you can go try to apply that method and maybe it'll work for you but chances are actually it won't it won't be a good fit because that yogi or that guru or that Zen master he had a different set of problems he had a different personality type he had a different brain type he grew up in a different era in a different generation so he doesn't face your problems you know a man faces very different problems on this path than a woman which is not to say that that we're totally separate and it's not to say that you can't learn something as a woman from a man teacher or as a man from a woman teacher you certainly can it's just that you know there are there are important differences there the feminine version of this path is gonna be different than the masculine version of this path the introverted version is gonna be different from the extroverted version of this path people who are really into love and emotions very emotional intuitive people your path is gonna be very different from cold hard rational people and I'm just excited about the whole thing I'm excited about exploring the whole field so that no matter who comes to me I can say oh you're this type of person and you have to assign a problem okay then this technique will be the best for you go give it a shot it's like oh you're a different type or you're a woman and you've got a sexual history of sexual abuse and you've got and you're very emotional and you're very intuitive and you're very love oriented okay so you need a different this Zen technique is not gonna work for you need this other technique go try this technique here that'll probably work for you so I hope you see where I'm coming from now all right that's it I'm out of here please click the like button for me and come check out actualize that org as usual my website I got my blog I got a forum where you can get help and emotional support for this journey the life purpose course don't think the life purpose course becomes irrelevant with enlightenment just the opposite just the opposite you're in Lima is gonna be a lot easier when you get your life purpose into shape when you're working a dead-end job in a career that makes enlightenment so much harder so much harder because it's not authentic life purpose is all about how do you create an authentic career if your career is really authentic then enlightenment will not butt heads with your career but if you're like a lawyer or some you know sleazy politician or something good luck pursuing enlightenment while at the same time you're using this inauthentic career to fund your entire life probably ain't gonna go so well and the Booklist make sure you check that as well alrighty I'm out of here stay with me for more you