Hugo Ferraro

I have still not mastered english, so I´m sorry for the "bad writing". Before Sleeping Last night, I´ve spent hours and hours on a antropology research I´m doing to college, which made me exhausted and think it would be better to sleep right after I´ve finished it. With that, I skipped my "nightly" meditation and contemplative stretching, and, as usual, talked to my girlfriend, said good night and jumped right onto bed, quickly falling asleep. Dream I dreamt I was at home with my girlfriend. We were just chilling out in the front of my house. Suddenly, the phone rings... It already had a misterious feeling in the air before I could pick it up, but it got stronger when I answered and a kind of a spooky short 8bit melody played on it´s speaker mode, so my girlfriend heard it... My body was tense already... We looked at each other and she seemed to have understood the significance of that, she said: "They´re coming". Somehow, after she said that, I understood too. It was a signal of some people coming over our house to murder us. So, quickly, I started madly acting, but I don´t know why the fuck my reaction was to turn out the lights of the house. Maybe it was to pretend there´s no one home, maybe to hide and seek with the murderer(s), I really don´t know. It made perfect sense at the moment. While I was turning the lights out, my girlfriend went to catch our cat in the front door and got a few feet out of our house, so I lost sight of her. Still, while turning the lights out like a mad man, I heard a car rapidly parking at our front door, so I looked over from where I was standing and I´ve had a glance of a man getting out of the car vigourously, and holding a gun... I went to catch a knife, praying the he wouldn´t make my girlfriend a target, since she was out of the house, and they were, supposedely, focusing on who´s in the house. Then... while catching a knife , two shots were fired outside. Quickly, and without a proper reaction, I closed myself in the closest room, and I was certain: my girlfriend was dead. My world crashed...The person I love most, and that loved me the most, in my whole life, was dead, probably viscerally lying on the street, like an insignificant object. Her sweet body transfigurated... adulterated by a fucking stranger... My existence was gradually, and fastly, getting dettached of any meaning, while I knew my time was briefly coming too. I looked at my own existence in the now, knowing that the enjoyment of the existence of her love and her touch would never be materialized again in it. It was forever finished, like a bad joke. Indignant, I considered another life, where I could see her again, a "reincarnation" of awareness, occasionally experiencing another "Hugo"(my name), which has identical destiny - to meet her again. It couldn´t be it. This couldn´t be what the universe has causally conspired. But, sadly, it was. All this emotional process happened in an instant. I was groundless. Confronting awareness and existence as a dead being. Nothing mattered anymore. After some seconds, I just wanted to die, so I kind of skipped the dream timeline to the moment I´d die in it. Waking up I was still immersed in the dream emotion when I woke up, but I was alert like I´ve never been before, looking at the ceiling, still confronting existence. I felt I was dead, although the experience was still happening. It was like I was there, but, at the same time, I was not. No thoughts at all were coming up, and I´ve never experienced such stillness of mind, which, honestly, was kind of scary. I thought I´ve acessed mental stillness before, but, after experiencing this, NO. This was certainly the only and first time I´ve had real mental stillness. My body was effortlessly static. All I could do was to "confront" existence, and not even that, since I wasn´t doing anything, it was happening effortlessly. I could still feel the limits of my body and skin, but they no longer seemed to be the real limits, like it always would be. It was like I was in a much bigger, although empty, experience, and the borders of my body was a fraction of its "length". In another way, the body borders was not the end road of the spacial awareness, it was kind of a midway. I can´t seem to explain it any better. Tears drop out of my eyes. My heart was madly fast, as I was astonished with what was now. In a few moments, my mind started to manifest again, and I interpreted the experience as, maybe, enlightenment happening, or some degree of it. So I tryied to focus even more, consciously, looking at it as a opportunity to awakening. Sadly, the experience was vanished in a few minutes. And I was left with a huge fear emotion in my body, although there was no specific object of fear, it was just fear. I don´t know what that was, but if it was some facet of enlightenment, it was not liberating. It was, in some degree, scary. Empty empty. Maybe the huge negative emotions of the dream distorted the experience, I don´t know. What I know is, I can recall the scene, but I can´t recall the experience, forcefully. When I try, it kinda feels like "I can get into it" again, but it won´t. Thank you for taking your time to read it. What do you guys think of it?

Ohhh... that fucking barking dog... lol Wow, that interaction between breath and candle is so intelligent, I will definetely try it out. Really loved the idea. But, what practice(s) did you do to cultivate that gaps between thoughts?

Hello, people. So... I´ve been doing mindfullness meditation, contemplative meditation and mindfullness stretching for a while, but not consistently, except for stretching, which I do every day for the last few months. But I was not satisfied with the awareness and focus that this types of meditation was cultivating. So I researched a bit about concentration: I´ve watched Leo´s video("Concentration x Meditation") and I´ve been reading this book "A Million Thoughts", which indicates that the most "powerful" meditation is the Concentrative Meditation. This meditation consist that you focus singularly on a perception, and the book I just mentioned enfasizes the essentiality of that tradicional cross-legged/erect spine posture, and man... That posture its so hard to maintain while you´re trying to concentrate on a third thing. Firstly because there is, right away, pain in my backs and legs to mantain it. Also, I need to keep some alertness effort to keep steadiness of my body. However, that´s not really the real problem. Maintaining its hard, but I can get through it. The real problem, though, is that I can´t really fucking concentrate. I´ve been using a metronome as object of focus. But even when I´m at the most high level of focus to it´s repetitive sound, I feel like I´m half concentrated. Somehow, my concentration won´t connect fully to the raw perception that is there. It´s like a hugely slippery concentration, always. Getting eventually connected to the metronome, then, almost in an instant, falling back to my mind activity. And that´s the resume of my concentrative meditation: a full time effort to concentrate on the metronome, but, somehow, failing. So, I feel frustrated, because I can´t see how this tiny eventual moments of "real" focus on my meditations will lead to any progress. Can you, guys, give me any tips? Thankss for reading

I agree. But I´ve recognize a trap I was almost falling into. There´s limits on how much Enlightenment understanding is effective to be aware of these same understandings in your reality. I´ve understood some concepts like No Self, for example, which is quite an advance concept to trully visualize. But, even though I can visualize it, I can´t make this notion/visualization "merge" with my actuality/awareness. Always when I try to "merge" it, I find myself, at some point, in the middle of a war between the ego and the awareness. The awareness points toward the realization of No Self, while the Ego gets excited about it and start seeking it too. However, the ego is always manifesting in a distractive nature, especially in these situations of strong self inquiry: Awareness feels like it´s starting to get a glimpse of No Self, so the Ego tries to see it through, then, awareness is no more. It´s frustrating, because it really feels like this notion it´s almost being acessed by awareness. That´s why I should make some foundational changes in my persuit toward truth. I need to understand and review why are the Ego getting attached to the idea of enlightenment. Maybe is simply curiosity. Maybe the ego are deluded with enlightenment. Not understanding that it must die for No Self to be realized by awareness.

I´ll keep all of that in mind. Thank you for the suggestions

Thank you. Maybe I´m deluded by the ego and trying to simulate a full Enlightenment in the mind. I really appreciate all of the feedback. I´m really commited to accepting truth, as it is happening.

Thank you very much, I realized I was getting a little bit lost in this understanding temptation, really.

Thank you so much for the advice. I´ve realized it´s importance. I gotta work some deep self-inquiry. Took you 4 months to become conscious of No Self? I loved this bank analogy.

I cannot acess what you´re saying, yet maybe. But that´s a direction I´ll keep in mind. Thank you

Thank you for your kind comment . There´s any move you suggest I could make in the path for Enlightenment?

But happening isn´t a aspect of consciousness? Everything I described manifested within what I can perceive. Can you tell me more, please? I didn´t understand what you mean, maybe.

Greetings. I´ll be really glad if we could discuss this topic and maybe bring light to each other´s existence I´m, in a sense, new to the Non-dual paradigm. Until not so long ago, maybe a year and a half, I was a hardcore atheist, skeptic and materialist person. That type of new-age atheist that would spend a whole day watching Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins evoking the "wisdom" of Rationality to dismantle "non-sense" beliefs, like Cristianity. Well, I´ve been "cooking" self actualization in my life for three years now. Looking retrospectively, my work was never too deep, since it was limited to only some insights of psychology and simple changes of behaviour of the body to it´s egoic material life (money and sex). Of course, by watching Actualized.org, during this years, I´ve worked, without even noticing, some good spiritual concepts. Also, I developed a strong connection with Leo´s language. I´m so familiar with his way of explaining things and watching him, that I developed a deep undertanding and respect for his words. Like a respectful teacher, even while I´ve mantained myself skeptic and kept thinking for myself. Finally, with the help of weed(And my psychology resist to give this information, since it has this stigma to weed), I´ve developed a openmindness hability of taking what he was/is saying as true, then I go to apply it to my reality, embodying it, and checking it´s "truthness". Either way, I struggled. I couldn´t understand, or even imagine, the magnitude of what was/is happening to me, right before my eyes: The clear paradox of existence, the monstruosity of reality as a actual substance, and not as a imaginary thing or a dumb material stage, the depth of Consciousness and the transcendental nature of thoughts and emotions, which seems to me now as a "permeating everything" phenomena. It was such a profound experience to discover all of this: I was high and watching one of his videos, when suddenly... I got it. All of reality was clear. The mind was no more for a brief period of time, and I could see what became obvious. It was a life changing experience. And this happened to me while I was high, in front of a computer and watching this bald talking head kkkkk(k=laughing in my country), and not on a temple, meditating in a super "adequate" position. You may say it was faith, indeed: Everybody has the power of applying faith in what information another body is offering, without getting into the neurosis of thinking that reality will be lost to his perspective/paradigm and drown into "senseless madness". You can always comeback, with the Ego Homeostasis System, to what I consider, at that determined point, as being the highest lucidity point You´ve ever had, which is obviously dynamical; is always changing. I learn, then I understand, then I apply, then I check it´s lucidity, and if it feels higher, I, carefully, try to radically interpret the world from that perspective/paradigm in my daily life, mantaining myself as mindfull as I can. That has been my way of growing consciousness for the last few weeks/months, since I´ve had this "awakening" not so long ago. I must add the information that my body is not trained to meditate, and that´s one of the "cons" of this method, since you can become addicted to learning spirituality and you won´t be able to develop the hability of discovering things and expand your consciousness without having a pre-determined direction in your mind. That is, you can become dependent of a Guru. However, now I understand meditation, yoga, etc. What is their direction and I can train it with much more effectiveness. Please, if you identifyied your own progress towards awakening in the mechanism that I exposed, tell me your story. And even if you hasn´t identifyied with anything, please, give me your feedback. I´m a open being, whatever you tell me, I´ll read and try to understand with my whole effort. Thank you for reading this text