Azrael

@Happiness, when I'm experiencing what you ware writing, I go for some Matt Khan videos. Basically, there comes a time when you get bored of your own fear. I had these cycles you write about so deep and intense (because my unconscious seems to be filled with a lot of unresolved shit) that at some point I completely gave up trying to get rid of them. It just wasn't possible. I just accepted them fully as me (this really just happened to me at some point). Then, the most amazing things followed.

I know this problem a bit myself. I am and always was a very long good sleeper. But when I started the meditation journey I encountered phases in which I'd dream very, very visual and intense dreams and it feels like they fill my whole 8 hours of sleep. So in these times I lay in bed at the end of the day, sometimes scared out of my mind to fall asleep because I know what comes. I have such a phase right now (in which I dream a lot) because I started using HoloSync a week ago and this probably triggers these dreams. However, after having this come up now the 3-4th time in 1.5 years I just do this: I close my eyes, say to myself (my unconscious) may you dream and process whatever you want to. Rip me into pieces, there is nothing I can do. And then I self-hypnotize myself (I often do that out of fun before I sleep). Basically I go to every part of my body and say: "My eyes are relaxed, my nose is relaxed ..." until my whole body is relaxed. Most of the time, when I'm really tired I'll fall asleep in that process or shortly after. So, I know it's kind of hard to embrace your fear. But this is one of the solutions here. Also picture this: Every time you wake up you feel pretty good not being in this world for a few hours. Get this feeling in your body while laying in bed trying to fall asleep and relax into it. Hope that helps

No, it's more like this: Awareness is the underlying screen, the no-thing out of everything arises and to everything goes. You might say it is the flip-side of the coin of reality. The one side is the dualistic world, with all it's symptoms like trees, people, animals and the other side is awareness, a no-thing that is underlying all of that. Both are in the most fundamental sense the same, but expressing themselves in the most polarized (and in this way different) way. Now, you as your body are like a receiver of consciousness (actually neuroscience is awakening to this fact as well - they long thought that your head makes consciousness and now begin to see that it receives it). So, you can train your head to receive more awareness, it's like zooming out of a very narrow detail with your camera until you see a whole other picture. That's why all the enlightenment gurus tell you that you are everything and no-thing. Everything (as the world you can see, touch and smell), no-thing as the awareness that is underlying all of that like a screen you might say). And you'll awaken to that if you zoomed out your receiving head enough, because at some point it's just perfectly obvious. Cheers

Most of their programs are personal development programs. The whole process of becoming clear is comparable with detoxifying your unconscious from all the shit it took up over the years + they teach you a lot of more things like "how to learn", "how to be confident", ... . I got a friend who is a scientologist and told me about it. They have a lot of parallels to other self development programs and even enlightenment work. So in the end chose what works for you best. I go with Zen Buddhism, good books, videos and that stuff. I don't need such a closed system like Scientology. But some folks may like that. Cheers

Hahaha, well worded. @FeelFree, I'd like you to see both parts of "there is no free will". On the one hand there is no separate you that makes decisions (although it feels like it). It's more like you and your environment are a network that interacts with itself. The environment acts and so you react. You act and so does the environment react. On the other hand there is no determinism either. Even science will tell you that. We still have a kind of newtonian world-view that describes every happening as a result of prior actions. Science has long found out that if you go deep enough into matter, you cannot really predict how it's structured. It's more wavy, spontaneous and thereby unpredictable then most scientists would probably love to have it. Now, if there is no free will and no determinism on the most fundamental level, what's left? What is left is a spontaneous happening that is self-aware. This self-awareness arises every few moments and then goes off. And so another comes. Make a quick experiment with yourself here: Sit down and ask yourself: "Where do my decisions come from?" Wait and watch your thoughts. You'll soon see that the most decisions come up as hiccups and you have no control. Now, there are ones that we think we control. When there is the feeling of self while a decision comes up, we think that it's me that decided that. But is it really? Look again, it's more like an intermingled bunch of feelings and thoughts that makes up the me and a decision that comes up like a hiccup. If you really begin to get this you'll soon see that every experience you have is a mystical one. Because the universe just decided you to do this and that. And it's never-ending fascinating where these decisions come from, where they go to and how the universe seems to do this manifestation in certain patterns. It's pretty intelligent if you look closely. Anyway, hope that helps.

On my own journey I had these kind of "little mystical experiences" a lot in the beginning. When you start meditation and really push for it, sometimes it happens. Then you resolutely try to re-create it because it seemed so big and great. That's totally fine, investigate a little into it, you'll probably have a few more along the journey. If you really wanna have cool mystical experiences and become enlightened, start daily meditation. This is not the answer to enlightenment, but if I compare the way I perceive the world right now in comparison to a little more then a year ago when I started meditating ... I couldn't even find common ground at all. So yeah, this definitely helps to get deeper realizations. Also see that enlightenment is not an experience. Although you had some kind of non-dual little mystical experience (and that's totally cool to have) - you are enlightened right now. You just play a very nuanced game that you are not. The whole journey is to see that and then be like ... ahh fuck, totally missed that. Anyway, keep it up! Sounds good.

Cheers to you, that definitely was a kind of mystical, meditative experience, maybe even going into the direction of samadhi experiences. Use this to contrast you normal reality and find what is ever-present in both experiences. Because what you experienced here isn't enlightenment, it's part of it, as is your normal everyday experience. Enlightenment is not an experience. But as I said cheers to you, mystical experiences are always great to have

You basically set some techniques in place that will rise your awareness like meditation (I recommend strong determination sits + Do Nothing) self-inquiry (Who are you? What are you?) analyzing how you think and what influence it has and where it comes from analyzing your emotions and automatic reactions The first two points are a formal practice one can do e.g. once per day. I choose to do meditation because it works best for me. Self-inquiry is great as well. The last two points are kind of a theme you can use to go through your day. Whenever you have time apply these to really get a sense of how you function. You wanna get a good picture of it. When you do this for some time and awareness builds you can do/foster the following points to integrate your realizations find and create flow states in your day, do less and live more relaxed interfere less with yourself and just let yourself function intuitively connect to your sense experiences and reality integrate deeper and deeper I think this is at least a point to start this journey. Every journey is unique and follows different ways. But maybe this can help to orientate you

This is a very nuanced topic and for the normal mind hard to understand, but what I mean is this: As a beginner you are rooted in your sense of self and this is an illusion. At first it can be very useful to practice a lot (e.g. meditation, self-inquiry, analyzing your whole thinking apparatus) to build awareness and see that this false sense of self really is an illusion. Get to the stage at which this not just a belief Leo put in your mind with his videos but you experienced it yourself. You can do that through practice. At this point you are not enlightened yet. You had a few glimpses and you are in a very fucked up situation. You know that your sense of self is an illusion, however you are still rooted in it. At this point I think a lot of people fail. They just try to get on with their practice, do it even harder and just try to get in there. Won't happen for a lot, I'd guess. At some point you just see that it doesn't make any difference how much you meditate and try to get this thing because every effort gets you away from it. At that point you try to not do anything anymore. This is still a very nuanced effort to get it. You just shifted your strategy. You maybe still meditate and do your stuff but with another mindset, the mindset of "I just surrender to it". This is good, and a phase you'll probably need to go through. After some time however, you even see that this doesn't bring you any further. And when this happens there is something inside of you that authentically gives up. Maybe you purged through so much pain and suffering that you just can't take it anymore (that happened to me), maybe you sincerely give up... and then you will awaken yourself. But this is nothing you can do on purpose. It happens by itself. And you have to trust it. Did you have to go through a lot of phases to get there, yeah maybe. Some might need that, others maybe not. But in the end it's like you train yourself to become a good car driver. In the beginning you learned all the techniques and sucked at it. Then you tried to just let it flow and drive like all the good drivers you know but you were still insecure... and at some point you drive while having an in-depth discussion with a friend while smoking a cigarette and reaching for a water bottle and then it hits you... You got in. You are a good driver now, but this last step from mediocre to good were not your conscious decision. We might call it experience, but it's more nuanced then that. And this is analogous how you'll awaken. At some point you think you know everything there is to know, you've learned all the techniques and tried to surrender to it like the Zen masters, but you are still phony. Then you'll awaken and see there were nothing you could do. To sum it up .. practice makes you enlightenment-prone. But just enlightenment will enlighten you. And there is nothing you can do. So maybe it'll take twenty years of heavy practice or maybe it takes 2 years of some practice. Maybe it takes none. And then the thing happens.

Depends on how long you need to see that any kind of action you take or do not take has nothing to do with you getting enlightened. I needed a good year to see that my meditation efforts have nothing to do with me getting enlightened. That doesn't mean that meditation is useless or you should stop, it makes you at some point very aware of this and that's important. You need to reach a stage at which you really see there is nothing you can do, nothing you cannot do and then shortly after the thing will happen. At least I had my biggest breakthroughs and realizations in that context. Might take year, might take 20 years. Don't ask such foolish questions.

I basically haven't. It just came at some point. If you follow your journey you'll naturally come to certain situations that will transcend the way you see things and operate. I had these kind of experiences before temporarily but at some point they just stayed and became the new bottom of experiencing the world. And from there on they'll get transcended at some later point with some even more nuanced ones. For me it was a very big shift when I actually started to integrate my shadow / lower-self in terms of that I connected to it, welcomed it and re-integrated with it. A lot of people try to kill that with meditation or the way they think and this will just bring you even more far away. You'll come at some point at which you just see that the very idea of controlling yourself is one of the automatic responses that keep you away from living very relaxed in the present moment. You really wanna connect with the flow and sharpen your intuition and take this as a reference point for operating in the world. Meditation will over time get you the awareness you need to distinguish between certain phenomenon. Self-inquiry will as well. Use this perspective to make peace with your deepest urges and connect fully to your subconscious. Through that the world will open it up to you just automatically. If you try to control yourself and just let good experiences arise and feel bad about all the others, you try to cut short the very mechanism that first of all creates you and also all perceptions and feelings that you encounter. Don't strangle your unconscious but get used to its power and make it yours.

@Electron picture this: Right now you are a little wave in a river, terribly involved in the game of keeping this wave going, making it big and precious and like all the other great waves that you have seen. When you get enlightened, your wave doesn't disappear because it is the nature of the river to have waves. You just see that all you ever were and all you ever will be is the river itself. Before this realization happens you'll probably even go through a lot of very, very unpleasant phases. At least this happened to me and I know some others that could confirm this. That's why you can't basically talk people into having this realization. It's basically like saying: "Here is a gun, shoot yourself in the face and after it you'll see that you are everything and your life will be great. No worries anymore." Nobody would do that. Is it that drastic? As @Leo Gura said on some level it is. It is more drastic then being abducted by aliens because you could at least fathom the idea of it. If you get enlightened you meet god in every moment you are in. You'll see how god creates you in every moment, how she makes you move when you go and how she creates the birds and trees, the ground, your feelings of it and everything in between. You see that she creates the good people and by doing that also the bad people, the big trees and the little ones. And this will bring you literally to tears. You'll see that everything that happens in your life and everything that happened until now follows an individual symphony and when you connect to that you can let go a lot of the shit that is very unlikely to happen for you and connect to the shit you are naturally drawn to. It goes on and on. When I say god or she I mean the no-thingness, the Tao, however you wanna call it. Until you are not connected to that it just doesn't come up in awareness, as soon as it does (at least for me) it seems like everything manifests as this intelligence that operates in certain patterns and symphonies. It's indescribable for the reason that if I tell you that I nowadays run around and my field of vision is completely different from the one 4 months ago; however I see the same exact things as before and I'm not hallucinating. And that is paradox. And that is true. Cheers

These are my all-time personal favorites: being absorbed in hour-long programming sessions (I'm heavily in flow if I do that) taking a walk in the evening listening to nature and being fascinated by the intelligence that creates this very beautiful moment being with a buddy of mine and cracking jokes while having a beer and smoking a cigarette listening to an Alan Watts lecture while cooking cleaning my house and being in a deep meditative flow-state doing high doses of psychedelics (these are like toys for me... so nice) helping others with the insights I had to break their mental palace connecting with a girl on a very deep level and a lot of similar stuff I don't know whether these things are high consciousness stuff or not. I feel good when I do them and these are the things I like living for.

@Emerald Wilkins, can you give your opinion on this? I know you have some / a lot of experience with astral projection.

Isn't it beautiful if you look how at some level there are thoughts arising that trigger let's say a bad emotion and shortly after that there comes a thought that one has to do something to get rid of the prior thoughts. Plus the narrator thoughts who says this has to stop is being fed with another thought and emotion of being the self suffering from this. Of course this is really unpleasant if you are just completely identified and suffer from this - I know this myself a ... frickin' lot. But when you see these two thoughts arise and can see how they play with each other ... it is on some level the highest kind of game one could play with oneself, although I see the perversion in this. I'm just fascinated. @NutellaTC, you are in total control of your emotions if you let them arise as they want. Now, this poses another question: "How can you let them arise as they want if you have the automatic reaction to stop them?" One answer is: You let this be as well. You let it be as it comes and just look at it, feel into it. In addition you can add some thoughts that say: "I'm sorry you have to feel so bad right now, I'm totally lost. You are so powerful." Sounds kinda cheesy, right? Yeah, do that. Find out for yourself what happens. You cannot prevent a thought from happening and you cannot build a fence around you that just lets good thoughts arise. You can just let them arise and be understanding with them, because something seemed to trigger them that wasn't as pure and nice as you want to live. So let this go with the negative emotion / thought and bring it to its highest form by pleasing it and helping it to integrate. If you let go completely of control ... it will come back and offer you the world.

I used to research these topics a bit and it seems to me that the common opinion is that astral projection is a consciously induced lucid dream - so for that matter it would be all in your head. There are other opinions on that as well. SWIM aka PsychedSubstance discussed this topic in one of his videos. That's very interesting. I guess you'll have to wait for more research here. And I also guess they will research these topics in the not so distant future a lot more when I look how much it is done with meditation, psychedelic drugs and related topics.

Great answer, @jjer94. When I opened up to my intuition it would be the same exact way as you described. At first, weeks and months of horror and even more fear and anxiety then before ... because I had to get rid of the last illusions that were used to keep this ship called Arik on the water. Then at some point as I wrote before intuition came and blasted this ship away, killed it, and surprisingly there were nobody on the ship in the first place who could've died from letting the ship sink. So I instantly became the ocean. Here are some specifics on what changed when I really connected back with my intuition: my neurosis dropped 80% - in just one day ... that is pretty heavy if you experience that - and the 20% that is left I figured isn't as neurotic as I think but more needed in this modern world, like check if you have your keys on you when you leave the house but don't check everything 20 times, make sure you have everything and all is fine - this drove me nuts thought dropped 30-40% (I'm still a monkey mind) and access to memory came for it - this is huge as well, because ... I know it sounds crazy but I can actually talk to my subconscious and just figure out a solution what we want to do - I have no fights or anxieties at all any more, but if something is not right I just talk with myself and figure out a solution - but it needed this access to it - sometimes I play with it and ask shit like: "Will I get this girl xyz?" and it says yes and no - then if I ask it well do you think I get it .. it gives me an intuitive answer that is pretty fucking good - this is as I said huge I forgot to be really sad, like I still can be disappointed and also sad or fucked up to a degree, but it is just not sticking with me any longer, because there is no resistance to hold it any more - just a few days ago I failed an exam in university for the first time and I really expected to be fucked up because of that .. and I just wasn't, I felt good as always and I could even see how this gives me a pause, a chance and the potential to have another great experience in the future - this came completely intuitive and automatic - nuts as well I let her do her thing and even encourage her to be mischievous and bad - I'll probably post about this but one of the most amazing things is when you connect back with your own nature is that you meet god in one sense or another (god referring to how nature does its thing) and you get like intuitive notions about it - like you see how everything contains certain flows and patterns, how it plays with itself, how the deepest horrors and nicest moments are like a deep ass symphony, it is so alive and intelligent that I am just amazed and you can get in pretty close contact with its flow and experience some weird ass shit I could go on and on and on. I'm like a little kiddie right now, amazed by the new world he is put in. But if I had to sum it up, when you connect with your intuition you lose every self correction notion, you see the bad things as the tales of a symphony that are the mothers of the mountains representing the highs, you get chilled while having an orchestra of feelings inside of you and you meet god literally. And you can truly and honestly feel that you were never born and can never die because your sense of ownership widened to everything there is. And you know that even though you as the person are this little face of her and you will vanish, you are the big thing and it shall create all kind of new games that are you - all around the cosmos and in every dimension and this is pure beauty if you ask me. Cheers,

You can have them for 249 dollars, my friend + a lot of other groupie information (posters and stickers - I'm fucking around, sorry).

I think about that a lot myself. I sit in a very formal zazen posture on a Japanese cushion with some formal Zen clothes (uhh yeah I got some merchandise over the last year ) in the Burmese posture. After sitting like this for over a year and not moving at all it got kind of comfortable but it is really dependent on how I feel on the inside. Like when I am mixed up and shit I'll have some urges here and there to reposition myself - what I don't do most of the time - and if I'm really in flow it feels like I'm melting with the floor. Basically you wanna take a good posture - I can really recommend the zazen one - that keeps you straight and relaxed at the same time, so you stay wide awake and don't harm your body and the rest really comes and goes as it wants. You'll develop however a "don't give a shitness" - - over the time whether you have some pains or not. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, relax. That's totally normal. You'll see a lot of psychedelic side effects with meditation if you go on. Now, it's a little scary and you think it's huge. Some time later you try to chase these experiences - because they seem so mystical - and some time after this you'll have so crazy experiences w/o even looking out for them any more. At least the visual ones. The Zen people call this Makyo. I had and still have extreme open / closed eye hallucinations, from stuff just blurring out, looking like a dream to being completely locked in my unconscious re-living past memories. It's crazy sometimes, you can learn some from it but you won't find what you are looking for in it. After having - I don't know - like dozens over dozens of such experiences it seems to me that this is connected to the mind purging shit out of your unconscious. Just an intuition from me. Every time I had big leaps in my practice shortly before or after I had intense experiences that are like the one you described. But yeah, it's normal. You do everything right. Just keep on, it'll lose its scariness and turn into a well known guest after some time.

When your mind says: "Hey, this is really boring, let's stop meditating" - stop to meditate. When your mind says: "Hey, let's stop doing this boring homework and play some video games" - stop doing your boring homework and play some video games. When your mind stops making proposals you say: "Hey mind, let's meditate and make some homework after that if this feels good for you" - your mind will hold no opposition. If your mind ever holds a sincere opposition to something you do, stop. If you do something that goes a little bit beyond your strength of will, your mind will tell you this but let you do it w/o much resistance. Stop fucking with your brain, it knows exactly when to do what and how. You don't. You'll laugh at me - but somebody else will see beauty in this.

You can basically look up how the Zen monks sit in zazen. That is by far one of the best sitting techniques I've found so far. They place their tongue in a special way so that saliva doesn't come up.

You are on a good track with this. How this meditation should happen is basically ... that you sit down for some time. The rest comes on the way. This disturbs most western minds because it seems like a waste of time if you just sit down ... not doing anything. Not even repeating a mantra to calm your mind. Not even trying to stop thinking, not even trying to stop the stopping of thinking. Just sitting. We get pissed if we have to do something so stupid. Now, what you experienced there was the first taste of where this meditation can bring you. You said that your awareness and attention synced up. It probably felt like a flow experience, like you don't have to push things any more in some direction because they push themselves and you are part of it. Kinda feels a little weightless, prickling inside, right? This is actually how things are at every moment in your life. Completely synced. Just that at some point you started to play a very nuanced game with yourself that goes like this: "If some condition is not satisfied I will contract myself because I have seen that others do that in this situation and it seems appropriate." We do this from early childhood on and it gets worse with time. Until you are this push-button system that is stressed out all the time because one of the 30 conditions or so isn't satisfied ... or you spend your whole life trying to satisfy these 30 conditions. (I'd say that's a pretty good sum up of most western people. Would even be cool if they knew what they were doing and the conditions they try to chase are authentic .. but it's more like a result of all the social conditioning.) So yeah ... to come back to the point - - the Do Nothing meditation unhooks you from this this piece by piece ... so that you'll find yourself one day sitting in a train, listening to a baby crying while everybody is pissed and you hear god's voice talking to you (god referring to the course of nature or how you wanna call it). And last but not least, don't try to chase this (I know that you will and have to see for yourself that you can't) but just sit. Let come what comes and at some point you'll get up and this game is over and you feel like you cheated yourself for I don't know maybe 10-20 years of your life by really trying to convince yourself that this game is real. Well, it isn't. Cheers, ...

Hey, interesting question. I encountered a similar situation when I started out. Basically I wasn't confident enough to tell my friends and family that I meditate, contemplate reality, ask certain questions and all that jazz. And looking back on that time, that was really okay. I practised for I think 2-3 months and then slowly told my mom and dad that I was meditating. But not much more. Then some other people and now I am at the point at which everyone knows how invested I am in this kind of work. But it is helpful not to run through the streets yelling: "You people don't exist. It's all a game in your head." You don't wanna do that. When I talk with somebody about philosophical or reality-related matters I calibrate my views at first to the level they are on. Then I'll talk to them and slowly .. very slowly play certain cards that'll let their model of reality crash ... or let's say melt down. Why do I do that? Am I just a crazy motherfucker? ... Probably, I don't know. No, but seriously: If you had some realizations you can help people a lot with their problems when you take on their perspective and widen it. If you start doing that people will respect you a lot for that because if you hear wise things and they are in a format that you can understand with current awareness of the topic .. then this is huge. Also, if your friends and family really think it is stupid what you do ... you maybe at least wanna look for some better friends. When I told my best friends and buddies I was shocked how open they are to this and also that most of them knew a lot about these topics (... I hang around with some dudes that are into psychedelics where this kind of talk is not so uncommon). For the rest, as I said: Let them in slowly and help them with it. Don't crush on them. Doesn't help you and won't help them. Cheers

Beautifully dude, beautifully worded.