Gnosis

You don't reconcile "endless suffering". You reconcile and heal what arises. That's all.

I remember a few years back, I started having this experience of audible thoughts suddenly being enjoyable to have. After that point, I never bothered to try to get rid of "inner monologue" again. Even when all the spontaneous increases in consciousness started happening that were accompanied by thoughtlessness. What's strange is the way the spiritually seeking crowd looks at thoughtlessness as if it's some solid measure or inevitable threshold you pass through. Which it isn't, and has never been. Thoughtlessness leads to thought leads to thoughtlessness. That's the Nature of the waking state. If you think Nature has to change, you don't understand Enlightenment. In other words, In other words,

“Whenever itߴs early twilight, I watch ߴtil a star breaks through Funny, itߴs not a star I See Itߴs always You. Whenever I roam through roses, And lately I often do Funny, itߴs not a rose I Touch Itߴs always You. If a breeze, caresses me Itߴs really you strolling by If I hear, a melody Itߴs merely the way you sigh. Wherever You are youߴre near me You dare me to be untrue Funny, each time I fall in Love Itߴs always You.” — Frank Sinatra (ߵItߴs Always Youߴ, Written by Johnny Burke)

Only Selflessness knows Selflessness.

The language of the subconscious is essentially the same as the language of mind. This is very simple to interpret: the dream was unpleasant for you because the subconscious here expressed the fear of others not believing in you or your words. In this case, the dream was unpleasant for you because the subconscious here expressed the fear of not being seen by others. It is important to also note here, that your subconscious mind currently believes that you are no longer friends with the friend who apparently left you. Understand that this is not objective. You should go talk to that friend and discover that you're still friends, and your subconscious mind will shift this belief. The dreams have nothing to do with the girl that seems to be the focus. The "popular girl" dream character that your conscious mind correlates to the girl that you know indirectly is a symbol your subconscious mind uses symbolically as a placeholder, so to speak. It can be anyone. From direct experience, the majority of the time, dream characters that appear in dreams are not correlated with "an individual from real life" during the dream state itself. In essence, the dream characters only start feeling like some particular person you know, once your conscious mind begins to recall the dream from memory in the morning upon waking. Best wishes.

If I've never seen it in the first place. Surely, there's nothing to unsee!

@Johnny5 That was truly a reply I didn't expect!

<3

Anyone can claim to know the Absolute.

That is precisely the case. Yes, it can feel like that experientially. At the same time, it is not "conventional knowing". In the sense that, even when it is not known, it is still Known. In other words, it is not rooted in the conditional. You could say it has no root. It's always Immediate; it requires no reflection on the part of the mind.

Your statement holds truth, yet it's clear Leo's statement has gone over your head and you haven't understood what is meant by, ... Otherwise there's no one to be Enlightened! ... I have no intention the join the argument apart from this one interjection, because it's a rather important and very subtle insight of the journey. I've decided to take most of the text out of my post. Plain explication robs the reader of the experience and subtlety of insight. Hint: Relativity How deeply do you understand your own words when you say that God has no opposites, or that ego is part of the design? Do you really think those statements run contrary to Leo's? I'll leave the rest to the Silence.

The term ego backlash is a bastardization of a naturally occurring self-rearising. It just so happens that at lower stages of cognitive development this naturally occurring self-rearising, when it inevitably occurs can be dastardly. You may come to find one day that, rearising elements of self or identification not to be anything negative at a certain level of development. Funnily enough, at some stages of development you're practically dysfunctional without a self-rearising occurring. Or in some stages of development, you need its natural occurrence to find motivation. That said, your description of "a few good days" and suddenly "bad and insecure again" points to something other than what I've been describing. If I'm not mistaken, your psyche is trying to hold-together and reconcile two seemingly contradictory perspectives. One that you call "awake" and the other you call "in ego". This is a naturally occurring and expected stage of development and integration, and it will come together. (Note my deliberate use of the word psyche, because you are not necessarily thinking this in your conscious mind. Actually, this could all be happening while in your conscious mind, your perspective is that "Everything is God".) Development is a deep and non-linear subject. It is this way because development by definition is necessarily relative. Your story was very enjoyable to read. It must have taken a lot of courage to move to another country on your own.

@ElvisN What if you stopped taking LSD for a solid few months or a year and only made your efforts without it? It might work for you. The ego dissolves quickest when we do things differently. Maybe the experience of LSD having little to no effect on you is an insight in itself. What you are you trying to have an effect on? What was it about your initial experience on LSD that broke through? How can you be sure that whatever it was, isn't here right now?

The Christian tradition is, convoluted, very layered, and gravely misunderstood. If you venture deep enough, you'll not only realize the countless layers of misinterpretation upon misinterpretation within the symbol set, you'll even find various cultural, religious and historical fabrications and cover-ups of tremendous significance. I'm purposely being vague here, because some of things I can potentially say will offend anyone raised in a Western household. That's how grave the distortion is. All that said, if you're interested in reading non-canonical Christian texts of contemplative significance, I would recommend reading the Gnostic gospels discovered in Nag Hammadi.

I'll say what others here have spared you. Your image is visually nice to look at, simple, and easy to understand, but it is arbitrary. All insights communicated countless times by countless beings, arranged in an arbitrary manner. That is not Enlightenment, nor how it works. If you want to study the structure of awakening, I suggest reading into Spiral Dynamics to understand some important facets of cognitive development, then reading into the Ten Ox model of Zen. I have subsequent less well-known and more niche recommendations that have the potential to really bring it together. Although I don't want to overwhelm you with reading and offer advice that isn't heeded. And it goes without saying, but the map is not the territory. Lastly, be open minded, not everything written about existing models or general insight is necessarily right. More often than not, it only appears to be right or true from a certain level of consciousness. That's how it works in the relative domain. Best wishes.

That is so good.

What is fervently wishing? It just so happens that beliefs we hold about our future selves are usually entirely illusory, especially when it comes to spirituality. I also used to entertain a lot of fanciful ideas about where I would be and experiences I would have pursing spirituality - It's escapism. As far as I can tell, almost none of those things happened. Even now, I still hold newer, more sophisticated fanciful ideas. If Self-Realization is your deepest yearning, you simply need to penetrate deeper and deeper into the essence of Reality. You need to be persistent. That doesn't mean you need to sit down for 6 hours a day. Meditation isn't done on a cushion. A cushion is done on Meditation. You're done on Meditation. If there is persistence, qualitative shifts will occur in your direct experience and understanding of Truth; eventually when it becomes deep enough, there won't be anything more to maintain. At this stage, you'll actually actively avoid anything vaguely conceptual or non-direct. When that is the case, you're close. Self-Realization is a modest goal.

It's one the most practical choices you can make. Just commit to it, don't worry about what activities will fill your time. If you're committing to anything seriously enough, your mind will naturally justify that commitment. You simply having the thought of wanting to quit is already evidence that you are aware of plenty of reasons to do so. To quit anything at all, from video games to hard drugs, what you really need is commitment; not more reasons.

Certainly, "Levels of Consciousness" Cannot be communicated in this format if we're referring to highly rarefied states. However, as for "aspects of Awakening", I'll state that from personal experience, there are a great number of bodies of profound mystical knowledge, which spiritual teachers simply do not or rarely teach or speak of to their students. The domain of Consciousness is Vast. Usually, you derive it yourself, after genuine Awakening. In most cases, this is because the primary concern of a spiritual teacher is trying to get his/her students to Awaken in the first place. And some of these more subtle and highly complex, and often structural areas relating to Consciousness, do not directly contribute to that cause. I believe Leo does not expect in any way, for other spiritual teachers to communicate these areas. Although from personal experience, I was rather surprised on numerous occasions to hear spiritual teachers state word-for-word something I had derived independently and not told anyone. "Advanced" is a highly relative notion. Do you measure a teaching by how effective it is in Awakening beings? Do you measure a teaching by how far it comes from along the path? Assuming that a teaching is coming from way further along the path than the one receiving the teaching, can that one even receive the teaching to begin with? Of course also, to make a more obvious and mundane point, I would assume that Leo as a content creator wants to save the best for last, and he does like to tease.

@mandyjw Thank you. That was beautifully written.

Both luckily and unluckily, we're very persistent animals. Seeing through ignorance is just the beginning of the beginning. Even seeing Truth is only the significantly shorter half of the journey; there's still so much more I can only intuit and personally have no direct experience with. Objectively speaking, probably nowhere near as long as one can be lost in ignorance. But I can say that at least the feeling experience is a sense that I've only just began. Seeing through ignorance seems hard, until it's no longer possible for you to Not see through ignorance.

I would like add a deeper dimension to my answer as it could still be easily misunderstood - both the terms "subjective experience" and "other people" are entirely misleading terms. It should be understood that there are no "other beings" as it is conceived; that is, the "other beings" your mind is conceiving of (and appropriating sense perceptions to those conceptions), have no existence. Without the conception of "other beings", any Being/s/Non-Being/s is Being/s/Non-Being/s. There is no "subjective experience" and such a thing is not possible; that is, there is non-differentiated Happening which cannot be attributed to a subject. As such, to ask the question of whether "other beings" have a "subjective experience", is to ask if an imaginary object has an imaginary experience. In other words, if you are imagining there are "other beings", there they are as your imagination. If you are imagining also that those same imagined beings have their own experience of some kind, there it is as your imagination. The question is essentially asking if a virtual partition of sense perception has a "subjective experience" of its own. The mind appropriates the sense perceptions into an imaginary separate identity and is self-deluded into believing that the question is concerning an actual separate independently existing identity, to avoid seeing that the question is concerning a non-separate sense perception, because such a question is then absurd. If you are asking, but really, do other beings have this experience, then you are still not understanding the issue. If there are any Being/s/Non-Being/s (and I/You know there are Being/s/Non-Being/s because we/I/You are Being/s/Non-Being/S), then Being/s/Non-Being/s is non-differentiated Happening, which is identical to Being/s/Non-Being/s. Obviously, this cannot be symbolized in language. In fact, the mind cannot touch Truth. The most that the mind can do is secure its own defeat.