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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about my enlightenment experience so I just came back from a 10-day silent meditation retreat and I had a really interesting experience at the end of the retreat and that's on top of all the cool insights that I got that I'm excited to share with you in the upcoming videos but what I got here is I got what I think I'm going to call my second in lineman experience so I did have one before this which was about a year and a half ago when I first began this journey towards enlightenment but the problem with the first experience that I had it's it's hard for me to even understand what was happening then because back then I didn't have the concepts and framework that I have now to understand what the hell is going on in these experiences this is actually a common phenomenon for example for people who do mushrooms or psychedelics is that they have this kind of consciousness expanding experience but then they lose it and they don't retain any of it and they can't even make sense of it and it just seems like this all is just you know just a cool emotional state that I was in for a while but it's actually not that and the problem is that you don't have the intellectual framework that's necessary to really make sense of it so the first experience I had was kind of murky and it was hard to distinguish it from a hallucination and my eyes were kind of closed I was very sleepy and yeah um I won't talk about that but this second experience this was something remarkable that I've never experienced before in my life and here I was completely awake completely alert eyes open no hallucinations and it was a really extraordinary thing and what I want to do is I think it would be valuable not to just tell you about this experience as in all I had awakening experience but to tell you about this experience as a step-by-step process for how I generated the experience because the experience was created this is something you do through work this is not something you just happen to stumble upon and if you're following my other enlightenment videos and you're using that looking process that I talked about if you're using sort of self inquiry process or if you meditate then you'll see some very important points here because I'm going to take you through every step after my experience actually sat down and I made sure to write down every step a lot of details so that I could track everything that was happening in my mind to create this experience so that I could recreate it later and actually what happened is that I'm mom I was able to just yesterday almost recreate it so I'm really confident now that um there's a lot learned and breaking down the process and I think it's going to help you with your self inquiry so let me tell you a little experience let me set it up for you so what was happening is that I was at a retreat and this was like a church ground where we had little cabins and stuff and then there was like a chapel but there weren't any church activities going on we were just kind of using that complex and anyway it's most folks were meditating off together in some hall but I didn't want to do that I was just meditating by myself and this was in Virginia and I don't know if you ever been to Virginia I haven't it's my first time there and it's really an amazing beautiful natural scene because what they've got now here in the summer is um the weather's very humid just like super super humid and in fact we had rain storm clouds for most of the week and on this day it was raining and very cloudy and I was sitting there by the chapel so the chapel's is cool little modern design Church and it um it was on this rolling green hill and the entire estate was just these giant rolling green hills with dense like ancient forests and huge trees and birds and insects flying around it's just like a very natural ideal exceed so perfect for meditation which is why I wanted to sit out there and this this Chapel it was set up on this platform that was kind of hanging over this rolling green hill and I was sitting right on the edge of this platform there's like a little balcony area out there in a wooden bench so I was sitting on that bench cross-legged with like a blanket over me and I was just looking at the rain and the rolling green hills and all the birds flying around at the clouds and the giant green forest far off into the distance and this was evening time the Sun was kind of setting but it was so cloudy you can really see it and I was sitting under a roof kind of you know a roof area so that rain wasn't dripping down on me so it was really the perfect setting and I'm sitting here and what I'm doing is I'm practicing this technique called do-nothing which is a new technique that is practicing and I'll talk about that technique in detail in other videos but what I'll say about it here is that the do-nothing technique is a very interesting technique where you literally just sit and you don't try to do anything at all and in fact anytime your awareness tries to go somewhere you try to control your awareness you just completely detach and let it go seems simple but actually I need it simple but it can be a little tricky to do it right so does require some practice and explanation which I won't really go into here but anyways I just do the do nothing technique and usually when you start doing the do-nothing technique and you sit there your mind just kind of wanders around and it's really indistinguishable from your ordinary monkey mind that you have when you're not meditating so I was getting that I was thinking about all sorts of things left and right but then after a while all that stuff kind of exhausted itself and my mind started getting more and more and more focused focusing it and as I was doing that then I started just kind of naturally as part of the do-nothing technique my mind sort of gravitating towards this notion that I learned called exploring spaciousness spaciousness is an interesting concept which again I can't really cover in too much detail here but basically what was happening was that I was sitting there and I was looking at the trees far off into the distance and then what I kind of realized had this little mini insight I had multiple mini insights to ultimately get to my experience the mini insight was that when I'm looking at the tree that actually there's nothing behind the tree and there's nothing in front of the tree now this takes a little explanation because if I just say that in normal speak common parlance then we say well I mean they're you know behind the first tree there's the second tree in the fifth tree and a tenth tree and a hundred tree they may be behind that there's a road behind that there's a hill behind that there's a a building or something like that right and in front of the tree well there's empty air there's a bird flying and there's and then there's me like it all points back to me and I'm here at the very front and at the very end is like the vacuum of space now what's interesting is that that's all a conceptualization that's not actually what's going on with your phenomenal sensory visual field in your visual field like if you're looking at me right now maybe you can get a taste of this you're seeing my face you're seeing the background now the question is what's behind that what you're seeing give you a hint it's not pixels on a computer screen it's not a desk it's not a wall it's not your car it's nothingness literally nothing this is behind it now if you get a little taste of that you could take it the opposite direction what is in front of me so now you would normally think that well in front of Leo's face these pixels on the computer screen are is what empty air uh there's not really empty but it's there's air here and then there's some space some distance and then there's what there's you you are sitting there like a camera taking all this in but can you get a taste that actually that's not accurate that there's like nothing here nothing that nothing there I kind of look working from your perspective so if we're looking from your perspective then there's nothing there behind behind your eyes there's nothing in front of Leo right now these colors that you're seeing there's nothing in front of that so it's like your sensory field has this weird spaciousness this is what they call spacious is going on is one aspect of spaciousness is that there's like a like a almost like a flatness to white whatever you're looking at there's nothing behind it and there's nothing in front of it now it's cool to philosophize about that and just kind of think that all that's kind of interesting but when you actually sit there and you meditate and you concentrate and you get a real hit on that with your awareness and there's like traction you get traction with your awareness it's not just an idea then it's like whoa whoa that's [ __ ] eerie that's exactly what happened to me is that I started to see this tree and I got this hit that [ __ ] I'm not looking at the tree it's just a tree there's not anything here in front of the tree which normally we assume is I'm here so that expanded my mind a little bit my mind started to focus in more then what I did is I use another technique that I learned a while ago it's called the well I don't know if there's a name for it but basically what I did is I just took my finger and I literally try to draw a line from the tree so I stretched my finger out like this into the distance to where the tree was like a mile or two away and then I try to trace it back to what is what is here what's in front of the tree and if you do that very carefully and you're very conscious and focused which we'll notice is that there's actually no point at which the finger touches you it's it's weird it's freaky so I did that and that reinforced this sense of like whoa insight then what I did is I focused my gaze and my vision downward at the balcony floor which was had a stone so I moved it much closer to me give me a bit of a different feel and I was looking at the stones and I actually started to just kind of blank out and not really focus on the stones and I started to get this my awareness shifting inside the sensations in my body and so I just became mindful of all the sensations in my body maybe you can do that for yourself right now you could just kind of like feel your hands and feel your chest and you'll stuff flowing around in there so I got a sense of that and then the inside hit me what if the bodily sensations are just like the tree and I try to in my mind go and kind of do that finger pointing method with the body sensation I try to track where are the body sensations like going to where are they coming from and where are they going to and what I discovered again is that oh [ __ ] they're not coming from anywhere and they're not going to anywhere so it's like your body sensations are surrounded by nothingness just like your visual sensational field is surrounded by nothingness but again you can't just understand this logically you need to actually get a real conscious hit on this which I got so then what I had is I had this kind of mini awareness that there is no one actually experiencing the body that it's kind of like just free-floating around and then I kind of let go of the do-nothing method because this was all pretty much do nothing and then I did is I kind of took a little bit of conscious control and I started doing the self inquiry method and the self inquiry is also what I call the looking process um this is what I talked about in how to become enlightened video if you watch that one basically it's asking yourself the question Who am I Who am I or who's the perceiver who's preceding all this stuff who's aware so I started asking myself that question Who am I and at first I noticed that I was just asking the question asking the question and I wasn't really actually generating an honest tangible answer so that's one real problem with the technique is when you're just asking question but not generating tangible honest answers then you tend to get stuck but you know I've been um I've been doing the self inquiry thing for about a year and a half now so I've made a lot of mistakes and I've gotten stuck a lot of times before so now I'm a little bit more aware about those pitfalls so I'm conscious enough now to see that Oh actually need to generate an honest answer because the problem is that when we ask who are you would you ask that question of yourself what happens at your mind gets very vague and it says like oh well you know I'm back there I'm certainly back there you know I'm this I'm I'm my body or I'm my mind or I'm the thoughts or it comes up with something but usually until you start doing this self inquiry you don't even have anything tangible that it comes up with the mind just kind of just vaguely senses that oh I'm back there somewhere but where exactly are you what aspect of your experience are you are you even an aspect of your experience right now that's something you're gonna have to look into for a good long while before you can even start to just get your mind to generate some honest answers now notice here that an honest answer isn't a correct answer so I knew that when I was forcing myself to generate this honest answer that it would be the wrong answer because I already know logically that I'm not my body or the mind or the thoughts or a perceiver or even a physical entity I already know all this logically but notice here the reason I'm going through all these steps is that logic counts for nothing here you need to actually get conscious traction and this conscious traction is what I'm kind of showing you how to get right so you kind of ask yourself these questions and just kind of kind of like focus in and focus in and focus in and try to get it sometimes you're lucky and you get a little mini insight sometimes nothing happens in fact usually nothing happens or you just become very frustrated or you get some logical answer if you get a logical answer you have to throw that out and go for the traction don't be satisfied with just the logical answer so I'm forcing my mind to generate this answer and the answer that I come up with is that I am this sense of body and mind and fall and the one perceiving it all so I'm just kind of like amalgamation and that to me in the moment felt like a very honest answer I really try to force myself to actually pin that down and I pinned it down and as soon as I did that I sat with that answer for a few seconds but then my mindfulness a my awareness now is high enough because I've practiced this long enough that I could see that actually that's not who I really believe I am who I really believe I am is the one perceiving this body and this mind and these sensations I'm like a point back there somewhere right like it's kind of like you know the lens of a camera I'm that lens of the camera back there but then what I also noticed is that that's that's what that's part of my thought stream I'm a lens back there I'm a point back there somewhere on which everything is converging what is that that's a thought am i a thought is that what I am no I'm the perceiver of the thought but who's that who's the perceiver of the thought and when I got there my mind expanded again another mini insight and this one was new to me I've never had this one before but I got a very tangible conscious sense that I quote unquote I this thing I call I leo is just a belief and that this this thing that I think I am which is this body these sensations these feelings you know the feelings in my mouth the feelings in my mind all this stuff that feels so solid and real and cohesive that in a sense what that is is that's an arbitrary designation that has been made by um not even myself I actually traced it back in my mind I started wondering like Oh what if it's like society and what if that's like my parents and everybody around me who just kept pointing at me and saying hey this is you leo you and I just kind of bought into it and accepted it because I didn't know any better and I traced it back all the way to like my earliest childhood memories and then I get that I got this conscious sense this my mind opening up and saying oh [ __ ] what if this identification that I have with this phenomenon happening right here is just a rather arbitrary partition of the whole it's like you know you take a large pizza and you cut out one little slice and you say that's it I'm that slice but what if that was an arbitrary slice what if you were like the whole thing before it was sliced up so I saw that actually the social conditioning was there inside me and I really saw the social conditioning and what I did is that debt just kind of like expanded my mind even further and also it focused it in even more so by this point I'm sitting there and it's a really intense meditation so I'm like I'm really focused my mind is buzzing it's vibrating inside that's how it feels said like that um and then what happens is a really remarkable thing which is I get a real genuine on a sense that I don't know who I am now this sounds simple you might think like well you know Leo I can just sit there and kind of get a sense that I don't know who I am I can just kind of like you know consider different theories like well what if I'm in the matrix or what if I'm a computer simulation or what if I'm something else that's not what I mean here what I mean here is I got a room honest real [ __ ] honest sense of like [ __ ] I'm walking around thinking I'm this phenomenon happening here but I can see how that's arbitrary like I can actually see that now how that could be arbitrary and what I did that that expand my mind even further and it got me asking in my mind the question of like who the [ __ ] am I I don't know I really don't know and this is a difficult state to get to this state of true not knowing and it turns out to be very critical for um doing this work because you actually you cannot progress forward most of the time in self inquiry because your mind thinks it knows who you already are it's kind of like that slot is already occupied you know your cup is already full I believe in Zen they tell you that if your cup is already full you got to empty your cup first before they can before a Zen master can not can train it right fill it with more knowledge or new insights you can't fill a cup that's already full so that's the problem that's going on there so you actually need to empty your cup and that's what happened here is that my cup truly got emptied umm don't underestimate how difficult this is to actually do in practice with your consciousness to get that traction to actually empty your cup but that happened to me and and then what happens is that it started to seem plausible to me actually that I could be something that's not physical and also not human just I became a possibility alright I was open to it the mind was very open and then what happened is that I looked back out at the trees look at the trees again from the stones on the ground and I started wondering who am I really like a real sense of wonder and what the minds are doing and at this point I'm on total autopilot pretty much like I'm not even meditating it's like the meditation is doing me as they say like I'm just totally focused lasered in uhm like you probably can't imagine unless you've done a lot of meditating so I'm really focusing and I'm wondering who could I really be and then you know ideas start popping up in my mind like well maybe I could be that thing or this thing or that or some idea I had but you know as that's happening I'm tracking the thoughts stream and I'm seeing that the thought stream is not me because I've got mindfulness now over the thought stream and I've kind of gone meta and I can see the thoughts but I can see that the thoughts have no truth or substance to them they're just you know they're just sounds in the head or in the mind or images in the mind so I'm seeing that and then what I get is I get the answer that pops up what if I'm omnipresent and as soon as that pop up pops up I have a really big insight and this is where the enlightenment Dawn's because what happens is an amazing thing I actually then get a sense it doesn't just become a thought so the thought what if I'm omnipresent it goes I see the fact that it's a thought I let that go but then actually I get that the real conscious traction that I could be omnipresent and then what happens is that I kind of become omnipresent and what do I mean by omnipresent the best way to explain it is you know our standard model is that who you think you are is like a camera moving through the world right the camera turns and looks around well imagine an alternative model for how reality is structured imagine you're not a camera anymore but what you are is you are you are space itself imaginative space was designed to such a way that it was instantly conscious and aware of whatever particle was occupying space so you would not be the particles you would be the space and you would be distributed evenly everywhere through space not just centered at a point the way a camera is right so imagine a three-dimensional camera not a camera that looks out like this in a cone but a camera that just looks out in 360 degrees and this camera is positioned everywhere and anywhere kind of freaky so um so that's what I got is I got a sense of that right and what happens is that this this just is this moment of like complete silence complete peace washes over me my mind is still super laser focused my brain is just buzzing it's just buzzing with tension um my awareness is just kind of like expanding and zooming out and what happens is that that flash lightning-bolt kind of hit to the to the head and then what happens is that the best way I can describe it is that my my visual field it balances out and equalizes so your typical visual field it's what I call unbalanced in the sense that we put all the emphasis and priority here everything is coming here right to the camera everything is converging on the lens well what I got a sense of is like Adi convergence right everything just kind of stood in its place exactly where it is as though the camera went from a a cone shape to a 360-degree sphere and I kind of just became everything in my awareness I became the trees I became the clouds the ground and everything and everything just started to stand very still just like and there was this figure-ground reversal as this happened right as the camera cone transitioned into a sphere there was this figure-ground reversal and I don't know it's just felt like ah this balancing out it felt like finally everything was balanced and then my awareness just popped and I got this real tangible sense of omnipresence like I was everywhere so imagine you know what they say about God God is supposed to be omnipresent well that's what you get here everything becomes very very still all the frustration and tension in my body that was there as I was meditating I was probably meditating for 30 minutes at this point you know there's aches and pains and weird things going on when you're sitting cross-legged but all that tension just went away all the frustration all the mental noise went away and just peace ah and absolute bliss washes over me just a blanket of happiness it's like the bliss of being perfectly awake perfectly clear minded is this childlike happiness where you're just savoring the joy of existence itself because you have become existence itself and you need nothing more and everything is perfect in the moment and I got my first real true sense of what they call the absolute now speakers like Eckhart Tolle they talk about uh being in the present moment you probably heard that phrase a lot gets used a lot these days being in the present moment the power of now that kind of stuff well this is what they're talking about the problem is that most people 99.9% people have no idea what being in the present moment actually means when a Zen master or a yogi or Eckhart Tolle tell you about the absolute now the absolute now is just like is amazing it's like a heavenly heavenly sense of presence it's not just this normal sense of oh I got to be here now and not be thinking about some [ __ ] that's going to be happening to me tomorrow no the absolute now is like [ __ ] um it's like you feel like you're God looking at in on himself that's what the absolute now feels like um it's it's it's remarkable words really don't do it justice and you're not going to be able to think your way to this state you have to actually get that conscious traction get there um and the other thing that I really remember that was very vivid for me in fact the most remarkable thing about this experience was that I became totally lucid I like this word lucid it's like I could sense and be aware of everything in my in my field of awareness like every leaf on the tree all the trees in the forest all the grass all the birds all the sounds all the thoughts everything in fact when I say that I became silent everything became silent I don't mean that my thoughts became silent in fact what was really remarkable for me is that the thoughts were coming out very asked it was like a machine gun just like a series of bullets like this thoughts upon thoughts right thinking about this whole experience so thoughts like holy [ __ ] look what's going on oh my god this you know all these thoughts are coming up but what's very fascinating is that the thought stream and me we got separated so to speak so the thoughts were kind of just like being themselves and seeing themselves and I was no longer identified with them and I was very very conscious of what a thought is in this moment and this to me was one of the biggest insights that I got because if you're doing the self inquiry work like I have for the last year and a half one of the real tricky questions you're going to have to answer for yourself is what is a thought really it's a lot trickier to answer that um I think um and here I got a real look at every thought as it was arising and dying off and the next one was coming up just like the stream of thoughts and also gaps between thoughts and I was kind of looking at them and I wasn't stuck inside them anymore and I was perfectly conscious of what each thought was and what that is is that the thought just is itself the phenomenon of having a thought is the entire substance of the thought that's a huge insight right there that's a huge hint for you if you're doing this work if you can latch on to that that the phenomenon of the thought is all that a thought actually is and nothing more there's nothing else behind it that there has no meaning to it inherently other than it's phenomenal nature that's huge because what does that allow you to do that allows you finally to pull yourself out of the content of the thought and see it as just an audible or a visual phenomenon that's happening to you in the present moment takes all the meaning strips all the meaning and significance out of the content of thought so that happened to me and it also felt like my my awareness I didn't feel like I was totally like gone I still felt like a sense of self um and my thoughts were still talking about myself as I was sitting there but what happened is you know that point that I said that I thought that I was I was kind of like sitting you know we usually think of ourselves as being behind the eyes like eyes and nose back there inside the head um that's right now where you think that you live that point kind of moved and it kind of like hovered about a foot above and a foot behind my head so it's almost like I was kind of like looking at the whole scene while at the same time being kind of omnipresent and my thought stream was kind of like going this way um they're interesting in my mind I just kind of represent the thought stream is going this way doesn't actually mean that's how thought stream goes um it's kind of I'm a little bit of a metaphor there but that was my moment and I I was able to see reality for what it really is I was able to kind of like be reality and I sat there for a good 20 30 minutes in this state just with a huge smile on my face just complete happiness and bliss it was like heaven right um it was the the like the the highest joy and this another insight that I took away from this is that the highest joy is just being perfectly lucid in the present moment when you're completely awake completely aware you feel complete there's nothing more you need you don't need anything else to be happy you are you are completely full it's like you're full of yourself so to speak but in a very different way than we normally say and so I sat there and then what started happening is I started wondering of course you know well is this it is this enlightenment have I made it I sure hope I do I sure hope I did and so I started wondering that but also I had the intuitive sense that this isn't it I started to suspect this is just a peak experience um it's certainly felt like a huge breakthrough but I started to suspect like man this is going to probably pass from earthing I know about enlightenment this is probably going to pass it's not going to be permanent and I started kind of worrying about that I really want it to be real really wanted to be permanent so I just kind of sat with and just see where I was going to take me as I was sitting there for the next 30 to 60 minutes just kind of basking in that lucidity uh the Sun was now setting the clouds had parted the rain had stopped everything looks green and wet and beautiful it seemed like the colors were extra bright and vivid and like you had God rays you know those God rays that you see in the pictures shining through the clouds it's just like this beautiful almost perfect like I couldn't have engineered this scene better it was just amazing there was even a deer that ran through the through the meadow a bit later like an hour later while I was still sitting there um so it was really like the perfect moment but after about 90 minutes the effect did wear off um I lost that sense of touch with omnipresence kind of moved back into the the cone shape of your typical camera not that 360 view um but you know I still had that good buzz that good feeling of calm and peace and I felt like I had some insights that I took away from this experience what I did later that night is I actually went and reported it to the Zen master leading the retreat he has like 40 years of experience um here so he knows what's going on so I explained this experience to him and he he laughs I mean he says oh I know what you're talking about what you got there is you got a glimpse of a few hairs of the oxes tail a glimpse of a few hairs of the oxes tail now what does that mean that's actually uh there's a there's this ancient zen metaphor that they use for enlightenment and they actually have this diagram with ten pictures they're called the Ox herding pictures and this represents your path towards complete enlightenment and there's many stages ten of them so the first stage is that you're just kind of it's a guy walking around in a field completely unaware this is your typical person who has no knowledge of enlightenment then the next picture is the man is walking through and he looks at the sand or at the mud and he sees some footprints and he gets curious by the footprints that's him learning about enlightenment then the next picture is he's tracking the footprints through the forest looking for the mystical ox so that's when you're really on track with this line lighted process that's kind of where I am right now or what happened for last year and a half the next picture is the one that this guy referred to which is a picture of the Ox going around a corner behind a tree and all that the man sees as he's looking up from the footprints is he sees the hair like the Ox is tail sticking out from behind the tree so he catches a glimpse of the tail and then after that there's no further stages where you actually catch the Ox you sit on top of the Ox you ride the Ox home and etc um I'm not going to explain all that here actually going to shoot a whole video on that so don't worry I'll shoot one in the future about all the ten ox pictures but the point here is that what he told me is I didn't even see the tail all I saw was a few hairs on the tail um and I said to him oh man so you mean I only saw the tail and he says no he didn't see the tail you saw a few hairs on the tail and he kind of smiled at me and laughed um and in my mind I'm thinking like man I thought I got the whole tail or I got the lakhs he's like no you just hair and so in my mind was kind of bummed out in something in like oh [ __ ] and I thought I got more of it but then also it was great news because that means that [ __ ] if I saw that little and it was such a powerful experience how [ __ ] powerful must the real thing be when you're actually riding that ox home what the [ __ ] could that be like incredible incredible it it staggers the imagination makes me kind of emotional just thinking about it so yeah so that was my experience now even though the experience has passed and I'm not in that state anymore the biggest takeaway that I think I left with it was like a residue that's still left in my mind I got a real look at what thoughts are that was really big the other thing that happened for me is I of course I just kind of got a proof of concept that these techniques actually work that there is some cool [ __ ] experience out there that you've never had before in your life and it's left my mind like permanently expanded not enlightened but permanently expanded in fact right now I'm standing here with you and I'm I'm shooting this video but right now my mind is like it's a little zoomed out and I can feel like I'm I'm half meditating right now as I'm standing here talking to you which has never happened to me before when I'm shooting a video um which is so which is really [ __ ] cool and and also yesterday a few days after the retreat was over I was able to meditate and the meditation I'm able to do now my daily meditation it's so much more powerful it feels like meditation on steroids it's like cheating I can meditate for fifty minutes and it feels like five minutes and I was almost able to recreate that entire experience again yesterday I was so close so I'm feeling like I'm kind of like really at the blank now and it feels like that that experience that I had a few days ago at the retreat um that even though it didn't make me permanently lighten it just like it did jostle some things around and it's like it's so much easier now I feel like I'm so mindful I was walking around yesterday doing stuff running errands and I felt like I was meditating while I was running errands without even trying to meditate I'm feeling that right now as I'm speaking it's incredible it's really cool feeling but not even a fraction of what enlightenment would actually be like so that's my experience hopefully this motivates you a little bit to pursue some of this stuff yourself hopefully it kind of convinces you that there's something real out there for you that this is not just philosophy um you know the real reason for this video here I didn't want to just talk about some awakening experience that I had like some people do I wanted to take you step-by-step through the process that I used in the moment to get me there in fact after this experience was over I actually sat down on my computer and rode every step out of my thinking process because I wanted to make sure that I actually got it down correctly and I didn't miss anything I think I'm pretty accurate at this point and so basically what you have here is you have a little example of how to do proper self inquiry right so if you're doing self inquiry at home or you're following my other enlightenment videos then this thing here will show you maybe some of the pitfalls that you're making maybe go back and re-watch this again go through every step and actually maybe take some notes and take a look at where are you going through this process but then getting lost in your thoughts dream or not being seeing thoughts for what they really are or maybe you're not at all going through this kind of process right maybe you're just thinking about stuff logically or philosophically and of course that doesn't work you need to be getting that conscious traction which I was a stressing a lot at each step um the other reason I wanted to talk about this is because you know sometimes people criticize me and say well Leo if you're not enlightened how come you're shooting these videos and talking about enlightenment as though you are enlightened what if you're wrong or whatever I hear you that's a perhaps a valid concern but also you got to realize that I am walking this path and that in fact this is how I want it to be I could have held off to shoot videos about enlightenment for a couple of years until after I did become enlightened but I felt like that would be weaker and that would actually not be as persuasive because when you can see a person who's just an ordinary normal person who's not a yogi or a Zen master or [ __ ] Eckhart Tolle when you can see a normal person start from Ground Zero and kind of work his way up and through the process and then you can actually see the results of that process actually materialize on film that has a very different psychological effect on you just in terms of persuading and convincing you of pursuing enlightenment then if you just go to some yogi and he just tells you all these you know lofty high consciousness ideas which you know nothing of what to do with all so as I'm going through this process I'm seeing all the obstacles right I'm trying to report all these obstacles because I can easily see that if I become enlightened and then I spent 20 years deepening my enlightenment and then I teach you 20 years later yes I'll know very much about enlightenment at that point much more so than I do now except the problem is that I will have forgotten this whole journey to large extent and what I'll be teaching you is some very advanced [ __ ] that's going to be complete disconnect from your practical life and you're going to be unmoved by it which is exactly why Zen masters and Yogi's are so ineffective um it's also why even someone like a heart tolay I think it's ineffective because in a sense like he's not actually these people are not actually taking through through the process right you got to see the nasty gritty bits of this process like your face in the mud you doubting yourself you taking that leap of faith because you don't know what the [ __ ] you're gonna find out there with enlightenment you think I don't doubt myself you think on this journey of a year and a half while I'm running a business and doing all this other stuff in my life and I'm so [ __ ] busy that um it never occurs to me like oh [ __ ] what if all stupid and pointless and wrong you don't think that thought crosses my mind in the same way that does yours it does right I want to show you that I'm working through that doubt and you're gonna have to work through that doubt - just because I'm enlightened I could be enlightened like the Buddha won't help you with your doubts your doubts will still all be there you have to go through this entire process you're not going to know what you're gonna find out there even if I tell you it won't help you won't help you my linemen won't help you really at all um maybe I'll convince a little bit more but that's about it um and also you know one thing I want to do more with with my videos you know sometimes I come off a little cocky as though I'm here and I'm like Moses passing down the Ten Commandments to you of personal development and that's really not my intention the reason I take that cocky strident attitude sometimes is because I like it when someone talks direct to me and they don't waffle around and [ __ ] around so I do kind of take that direct approach with my style to personal development and the delivery method but also I want to show you like the fact that I'm working through this stuff constantly I don't have anything set in stone even the non enlightenment stuff that I share with you that stuff I'm always learning and thinking about sometimes these are fresh insights that I've just had the day before and now I'm sharing them with you and they're not even fully baked yet sometimes when I'm speaking in the middle of the video I have a new insight and I share with you right here and I haven't even thought it all through yet um to me this is kind of like raw personal development right um I don't really want to pretty it up and you know like package it too much um I want to be kind of raw the way that you would do it if you were doing it so I want to give you a little more that behind-the-scenes look at how this stuff works not with just enlightenment um but with any aspect of your life that you want to improve relationships business career whatever right um I really think that that's one aspect of personal develop that it's been missing um from prior teachers not to say that they haven't done great work um so hopefully you get a little bit of taste of that here right I'm walking the path if you're walking the path good if you have doubts good if your doubts about me good you don't need to believe in me there's nothing about me to believe I'm sharing ideas with you the whole intention of this channel and actualize that or use that I'm sharing some ideas with you um I don't provide any evidence really I don't provide you studies I don't give you double-blind studies and you know peer-reviewed journal articles or any scientific stuff what I do is I come up here and say hey here's some [ __ ] that I found useful in my life why don't you take this idea open your mind up use it try it out and see if it works well for in if it does keep going and if it doesn't then throw it away and try something else right so even though I might come off all cocky and a little bit like hey this is the only way to do it that's not actually what I mean um there are many ways to do it you gotta experiment around with this stuff and this stuff is a dirty business right there's a lot of struggle here it's not easy a lot of struggle goes into this developing yourself is going to be the hardest thing you do in your life and the last thing I'll mention is that um I had a lot of other important insights and lessons from this retreat that I'm going to be sharing with you over the next few months as I release more videos there's gonna be at least eight more videos on different insights that I had they're going to be very helpful for increasing your ability to be mindful for increasing how you meditate and improving that for helping you with moving towards enlightenment and not getting stuck in all the different traps that exist alright so you have something to look forward to I'm Leo I'm signing off please leave me your comments down below please click the like button share this video with a friend and come check out actualize org right here I've got a free newsletter there I'm releasing new videos on a weekly basis like I said there's also my life purpose course which I recently released will show you how to find your life purpose and we'll show you how to develop your dream career if you're interested in that sort of thing check that out which other resources there so go ahead and check it out it's all free or most of it is and I'm excited to continue going deeper with you what I'm starting to notice more and more is that um to live the kind of life you want you have to learn the psychological laws that are governing your life success and fulfillment these things are governed by psychological laws just like the physical world is governed by physical laws right and if you don't understand physics you're not going to be able to fly to the moon and if you don't understand your own psychology then you're not going to be able to create the kind of life that you want and your life is going to be miserable and annoying and frustrating and much much less than it could be on the other hand if you do master these psychological principles then the level of profundity how profound your life will be will be stratus it'll be so it'll be so huge that um there's nothing I could even say right now that would convey the concept to you it is outside of your imagination how profound your life could be if you seriously start applying these principles over the weeks and months and years you'll start to see huge results and you know I've been shooting these videos for what is it a year and a half two years something like that I'm starting to see more and more comments from people that are following actualised at Oregon using all this content the people that actually use this content apply it I'm starting to get feedback like through email and through YouTube comments and stuff that um they're seeing results and I'm really happy that they're seeing those results um because um that shows me that there's people out there who actually applying it right and that could be you if you want that could be you could be seeing those results takes work take some patience but have to have that vision of what you're shooting for and I hope you're shooting for an extraordinary life all right sign up and I'll see you soon you