TheAvatarState

My words are not predicated upon, nor seek to gain, your agreement or disagreement. Take from it what you will.

@Mikael89 your mental masturbation about the absolute is silly. You are the one putting artificial limits on it. You are correct in that it doesn’t need anything. The entirety of Maya is pointless and not needed. However, we needed to evolve brains in order to have this current experience within the illusion. Do you understand? Without the illusion of a brain there cannot be an illusion of self or physicality, and reality as you know it would cease to exist.

What I'm saying is that if you honestly investigated the issue with your direct experience, you would find otherwise. The direct experience you point at doesn't tell you anything outside of your field of view, and in both cases, this observation of your immediate experience would appear flat. Research scenarios in which you can use direct experience to see a difference between the flat vs. round earth. All I'm saying is that this investigation could be worthwhile... You use GPS, no? You are part of a GLOBAL community? You rely on dozens of technogies based on the relative fact the earth is round. You travel? You wanna know how shit works? This is where it starts... Make an honest investigation of your reality. I'm making a case for you to dive into experience and out of concepts, but you seem insistent on building walls around yourself. See how you're just cutting yourself off from direct experience. Now, you can't investigate everything, so if you're fine at leaving it at "I don't know," that's perfectly OK. I'm not talking down at you, not forcing you to do anything. I'm just perceiving you as someone who'd LIKE to know about this issue, but is convinced that there is no way. All I'm saying is that there IS a way if you're interested.

The Absolute needed brains to play in the illusion of 3-D space. This entire illusion of materialism has certain rules to maintain the intelligent design of the illusion. If brains didn't exist, then we wouldn't be living life as we live it. Really think about this. Think of the brain as the "master distinction/perception" from which you can alter any other perception. Do you see the need for such a tool? A tool grounded in PHYSICALITY that can alter our consciousness directly? The brain is the bridge or interface between the physical illusion and the spiritual. Watch Leo's video "What is Love- advanced spiritual explanation."

@Cepzeu my point still stands. You're playing the part of the false skeptic, because you can't admit to yourself that you don't know enough about the problem to know if it's even possible to arrive at a satisfactory, relative conclusion yet. You used concepts within your mind to assume that an answer couldn't be found, thus cutting you off from direct experience. This is quite a self-deception. Proof itself is an untenable notion because it implies absolute fact. I can't actually prove anything to you. In fact, like Godel, the only thing you can prove to yourself is that all proofs are unprovable. The fact that the earth is round is a generalized, relative fact. So what I meant by, "prove to yourself," is simply to observe that from your relative, human perspective, the earth is sensed to be round. You assume that this knowledge would be inconsequential to your life, but be open to the possibility that that's just an assumption to keep you tied up in concepts. It's way more practical than you know, but of course, the only way to KNOW is to explore this issue yourself. Don't be a false skeptic.

So your happiest times were mystical experiences? Those come and go. Ah, but what was the mystical experience pointing to? In order for the mystical to become your normal, you have to embody the Truth at whatever cost. Follow it until you die. In order to attain what you're after, you can't actually take "you " with you. There's no extra seating on this celestial train

Lick the top of your skull. I'll wait

You are absolutely right, that's a valid point. That should be your default stance on something that you know nothing about. It's important to say "I don't know" and to not become attached to any outcome. But I don't know if you know this, but it's actually possible to prove to yourself that the earth is round! Extremely easy to see, with dozens of ways to cross reference and verify. You're lost in concepts, even outsourcing your understanding of the world to "scientists." I say that if you research and do some work, you can be certain whether the earth is round or flat today. Of course, the earth is part of Maya, illusion, but wouldn't it be relatively important and practical to know the fucking shape of the rock you live on?

@Anton Rogachevski I have, and that's not the direction we should be going. There are many dangers with turning personal development into a traditional school with tests. For instance, everyone's journey is completely different, you can't account for the "HW" practice at home (meditation, self-inquiry, yoga, etc), and turning enlightenment work into "achievement" and "progress" would ultimately be counter-productive. This is a stage orange approach. I like what MindValley U is doing. That's a really progressive vision of what school at stage green/yellow might look like. But self-actualization must stay at "self," and should not be standardized. Because at the highest levels of what we're aiming for, absolutely nothing can be said about it! How can you standardize or even "diploma" a knowledge that's transrational and beyond words? You'd need a qualitatively different model altogether!

Sometimes he waits until mid-day (US time) to release it.

@George Fil well you're not going to change them, so you need to go to green/yellow events, gatherings, festivals, whatnot. It's going to take work to branch out and get a circle of friends you can be authentic around.

Couldn't have said it better myself. The brain is the tool that consciousness needed to create in order to play in the illusion with greater complexity. When you gain that higher perspective of what the brain is, you'll realize that it is just a device for love. Made with love. Purpose: Love. It has evolved to connect with itself in ever-more beautiful ways.

@Tom T what could you possibly gain in a cave that you couldn't gain sitting at home in comfort? You'll also find that the more you "need" enlightenment, the more you attach meaning to it, and therefore block yourself from being. I know it's counter-intuitive, but you honestly should have expected that by watching Leo's videos. Any "need" you feel for another state of being is egoic and counter-productive. Let's say you don't become enlightened in a few years, then go live in a cave. After 10 years, you become enlightened. Now what?? Life is all peachy now? Your realization at the moment of enlightenment would be that you just spent 10 years learning to live by not living, and that you could have done this just as effectively while living your old life. I'd suggest that you learn what enlightenment actually is before you get the bright idea to chase it. You'll be surprised to learn that enlightenment is not like any other goal you've had, or like any you could imagine...

@Ampresus get the free app on your phone called "WHM Wim Hof Method." All the info you need is free. It is not dangerous to do this when you're young, on the contrary, it's the healthiest thing you could do! He is extremely conscious.

Notice how you're putting up straw men for me based on your negative interpretations of spiritual truths. Yes, helping people is the highest calling. I never said not to enjoy life! That's among the top purposes of life! You're basically in a forum of people who practice seeing the beauty in life, who are more conscious of it than most. You let "negative" events rule you, that's the only reason you've been feeling the way you have. Obviously! The world didn't change, only your perspective of it. Nothing happened TO you, you read a book which gave you a different perspective, then got depressed. All of that suffering was self-inflicted. I mean, who else did it TO you? God? Chance? Fate? Being mad at those things is pretty self-defeating and neurotic, don't you think? Zoom out a little...

Thanks for sharing @Shin! Another big one is thinking you know anything at all. Thinking you've arrived. Thinking there's nowhere else to go with your spirituality.

It's hard to see people as unconscious until you zoom way out and become conscious yourself. Perhaps you need to reevaluate how unconsciously you are perceiving the term "unconscious." You relate it to "zombies," you use it as a label with negative connotation, but you don't actually understand what we mean by this term or how to apply it properly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being unconscious (probably 95% of people are), it is just an accurate description for their mind state. Of course they FEEL conscious and aware of everything they're doing, but that wouldn't hold up to even 30 seconds of questioning. It's a façade. The terms good, honest, moral, "strive to do the right thing," and "enjoy their lives" are all gross generalizations of highly complicated and relative lives. You use these terms like they are absolute, like they mean something... You're really doing yourself a disservice by having these rose tinted glasses. If you really think your old life was that fantastic, then you were greatly fooled.

Nonduality is knowledge that occurs when you die. You can read about it all you want, but you'll never obtain this knowledge through concepts. Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of theory is extremely helpful. Enlightenment is being. Free from ego, free from psychological time, etc. Also your death. There are many levels to awakening and nondual understanding, so don't think of these as binary on/off light switches. Nonduality and enlightenment are two aspects (and not the only 2) of the same coin of consciousness. Your question about how many times is completely relative and dependent on factors way outside one's control. I'd posit that there's no fundamental difference between nonduality and enlightenment; they only point to your relative experience of the Absolute, which itself is not absolute... you are usually only conscious of one or two aspects of the absolute at a time, in varying levels or intensities. So just because you had a nondual, mystical experience but it wasn't full-blown enlightenment doesn't mean you were removed from enlightenment, or that these are somehow separate. All it means is that you weren't ready to become conscious of that aspect yet.

@Sagatarius lol Good luck!

@now is forever so gypsies? What do you mean by this?

@Pernani how can you figure out what you want to do and how you want to live without being conscious? If you're unconscious and make these big decisions, then later become conscious, you're going to find your new life incompatible with your old one. Make sense?

@Pernani what does age have to do with it? What isn't practical about meditation? I'll say again, the only mistake you can make is to live an unconscious and uninformed life.

@Serotoninluv ikr? And like all the best black mirror episodes, it's something that will actually happen to some extent. Our entire physiology (and past and future) is hackable like a computer database. Akashic records and such. The hacking tools are just not recognized or widely believed to exist yet... That'll change though, for better and worse

You have identified a problem that only you can fix. You're getting in your own way. Get off the forum for now and help yourself!

@Serotoninluv yeah exactly. No matter which way you slice it, it doesn't actually matter if the removal service is legit or not. The witch artificially created the scenario in which she presented her paid service as the only option. If you have an existing, concrete problem and someone offers you a paid service to fix it, that's business. If you intervene into someone's life and tell them of a problem they have that they never knew existed and couldn't verify, then you offer a paid service to fix it, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, that's manipulative and predatory. Assuming the witch's senses are legitimate, that leaves the witch with a lot of responsibility and a great burden. It's obvious the witch doesn't have the maturity to handle this power yet, so that's why you should steer clear. A healer with a pure heart would never intervene like that, never manipulate, and never advertise, for they know the implications.