Gnosis

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.

@Keyhole You're welcome. Merry Christmas!

Who knows, maybe I am an unholy piece of shit. Time to find out, right?

What you're describing does not sound strange at all from a developmental perspective. For you, if deep down there is the sense of total; utter okay-ness and peace, despite anything that is happening on the relative level, such as emotions and so on, then that is genuine realization of Truth. Since you're describing what you're experiencing as a 'Dark Night of the Soul', I assume you already know this on some level. If this is Not your experience, you can ignore everything I will say next. You will recognize some time in the future that, That 'sense' of total and utter okay-ness IS the Absolute; it's actually not a "sense" or "feeling" - it's direct Consciousness, and if that's not what it seems like right now, it will become that in time. It's possible that you will also recognize that the developmental reason for all the emotional arisings which occured, is transformation. That having had genuine realization of Truth, there is actually Space for emotional transformation, which is why it all took place. Enjoy all the emotions while they're still turbulent. Savor and bask in the negative thoughts and depression - you just might miss it. I personally envy you having a good material life as you're going through this. When I went through this stage of development, I felt like I had absolutely no one, and objectively, I really didn't have anyone either.

This is not easy to address. Essentially what is needed here is actually cognitive development, which will happen naturally; from my experience, in parallel with Awakening. Something Leo talks about is the different facets of Awakening. My view is even more esoteric and nuanced so I can't explain it here, but judging from what you've written, your experiences were most likely "flavored", for lack of a better term, in the "reality is illusory" direction. It may be helpful to become conscious of other facets, and your understanding will naturally mature in parallel. Especially seemingly opposing facets, such as, "all formed appearances are the face of God". Since, ultimately in the end, nothing is contradictory, your understanding becomes transcendent, non-conceptual; it's not relative, it's groundless, or it grounds itself; it can easily apply itself to any appearance and yet as itself remains completely untouched. And lastly, it may be helpful to consider that actual realization of the Absolute is not any particular experience at all; by definition it cannot be an experience.

“Youߴre much too much, and just too very very To ever be, in the Websterߴs Dictionary And so Iߴm borrowing a love song from the birds To tell you that youߴre marvelous, Too marvelous for words.” — ߵToo Marvelous for Wordsߴ, Written by Johnny Mercer

As someone who has contemplated this question on many occasions, my suggestion for you is to change your approach to this question. You cannot answer this question through logical deduction. If you were to recognize the Absolute in this moment, the question itself would become irrelevant. In that realization, one of the things you may recognize is that your "subjective experience" IS the "subjective experience" of "other people", therefore it makes no sense to even ask the question in the first place. In other words, to ask the question in the first place, implies not having seen the Truth clearly enough (I'm sounding a bit like Leo here). Unfortunately, that's the only answer I've ever found to this question - namely, that the question itself is poorly constructed (I find that this result comes up quite often).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)#/media/File:Hasegawa_Tohaku_-_Pine_Trees_(Shōrin-zu_byōbu)_-_left_hand_screen.jpg "Po, I think it's time I told you something I should have told you a long time ago. The secret ingredient of my secret ingredient soup. The secret ingredient is... Nothing." - Ping

To be sincere, this discussion is complete already. Thanks Leo.

The insight is as follows. It may be necessary to understand that relatively, the most accurate verbal description (of Truth), does not necessarily provide the most helpful experience, the clearest transmission, nor is the most accurate description necessarily the most elegant verbal expression (of Truth). In a way, it is a subtle criticism of Leo's (and some other's work) on non-duality, which does have it's own flavor and tends to be, from my experience both humorous and brutal at the same time.

Topic closed.

That reminds me of something Ramana Maharshi said.

I've had a dream of dying. I've had a dream of an enlightenment experience. I've had a dream of giant multi-colored tigers, running to me, one of them snatching me, and running away with me clenched in it's jaws. All of these, were extremely believable while I was having the dreams, and in some cases very vivid as well. And then I woke up. What I've learned is that consciousness can give you a simulated experience of anything you subconsciously believe. I didn't have these dreams all in the same night, I'm not even sure if I can handle that. On some level, I even think that my meta-belief of believing that consciousness will give you a simulated experience of what you believe has contributed to these obscure dreams where I indeed am being given a simulated experience of those things. My question is, how deep does the rabbit hole go? And where does it end. Perhaps I've just re-framed my subconscious mind so much now that I'll now regularly dream about obscure domains in consciousness. Also, I was wondering if anyone has had a similar dream with the last dream I mentioned. Something about it makes me think that others might've had the same dream. The multi-colored tigers behaved more like conscious beings than typical dream entities. Their appearance and behavior was unexpected to say the least, and not coherent with the current dream scene at all.

@Neo That's quite incredible, I reckon if we had more experiences like that we'd be certain they occurred.

The getting snatched by a tiger actually triggered lucidity. But by the time I was lucid enough the dream scene had shifted to a different location, and the tigers weren't there anymore.

Indeed. I'm very open to the possibility of conscious entities traversing dreams. Though, almost anything that will annoy or trigger you during hynogogia or REM is going to correspond to something unresolved in the subconscious. So that possibility is slim. Not to say impossible, but the possibility of a unpleasant hynogogic or REM experience being some kind of psychic attack is slim.

@Soulbass Was a pleasure reading that, thanks you.

Thoth built the Great Pyramid. He build the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1 day, and before all other pyramids in Egypt. Those lesser pyramids were built in awe of the original one that Thoth built. Aha! Of course, it was Thoth all along. Who else could it be?

Meditation, is the most versatile activity consciousness can engage in. One can even say, that it is the only activity that consciousness engages in.

The mis-understanding here is the duality of how we try to explain "ego death". This may confuse you more, but you cannot get rid of the ego, because it "doesn't exist", it is only a part of your experience and therefore inseparable from the experience. You can however miraculously it may seem, cease to identify with it and along with all that implies. Though, you will always wear a mask, and that will be your "ego".

I don't think it matters too much as to how you make sense of it. Teachings and stories are just that, teachings and stories. By magic I presume you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhi. If there was one point Hindu literature couldn't stress enough, it was that Siddhi are ultimately distractions.

In my view, the Buddhist and/or Hindu belief of Rebirth and/or Reincarnation is more of a perspective than a religious belief. As a matter of fact, it does not change anything in actuality. The teaching of reincarnation can be interpreted in a whole range of ways, and you'll see that none of these affect the practice in a direct way, though all of these are debate-bly valid and in-valid. Let me elaborate by giving a few different perspectives on the teaching of past-lives, as the teaching does not have to be interpreted in a literal sense (though it can be). Past-lives can be interpreted as just another cyclical metaphor (that you see in so many different cultures around the world). For instance, you in each moment or perhaps you in each day. As you "die" when you go to sleep and are "born" again when you awake. Or you may interpret past-lives in a literal sense, in that the experience that you identify yourself with (some call it the I AM experience) is "dying" and being "reborn" again as your body dies (the common literal interpretation of past-lives). Or you may interpret past-lives in another literal way with a little more flavor, for instance some would say that other people, animals and things are equally your past-lives, and that is no more and no less valid that any of the previous interpretations. Or even to take that interpretation further added with a little modern physics (the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics), we can interpret past-lives as perhaps "you" in other parallel universes, or even every particle in existence across all parallel universes. So there you go, that's a bunch of different ways to interpret the teaching of past-lives. But in fact, none of these are actually relevant to you and your path. To say "you only live once" would be just another perspective of viewing the same "phenomenon" (for lack of a better word), that is the I AM experience. Because "you" as who you believe you are and this particular experience, is only occurring now. And in that sense, "you" only live once. Which is why, regardless of your belief or disbelief in the teaching of past-lives, the matter of the fact remains unchanged. In my opinion, the teaching of past-lives is more of a motivation to pursue Enlightenment than an excuse to excuse it. I hope this helped.