Osaid

It is very important not to get your awakenings or insights confused with enlightenment or absolute truth, because those experiences are temporary and partial. All awakenings can essentially be seen as "makyo" as it is called in Zen. They are just glimpses. Don't hold on to them. They are just something to speculate about.

Maybe your "God-realization" is false or partial? Maybe you're just imagining that you should be able to manipulate things because it is "your consciousness." How did you reach that conclusion again?

Is your inability to find purpose or meaning related to everything being "BS"?

Why do you want a teacher anyways? Seems like you got it figured out already. Are you trying to figure out a way to get back to "metaphysical love"?

Right. If the ego is active during or after the experience, it will have to come up with an identity to explain it: "I am everything therefore I am made of love which means I must love myself" or some kind of logic along those lines. You cannot have a thought which says "I am a piece of shit" during the emotion of love, because it is impossible to have that identity while feeling love.

It is not a state or experience in the future, or some elusive boogeyman. It is just exactly your current experience. You are always infinite, but humans have the capacity to think that they are not infinite. There is nothing finite aside from your thoughts about experience. Realizing that you cannot think about yourself is realizing yourself as infinite.

Limitations are quite literally imagined by you. They are created by your intellect. Recognizing this brings you to what is "infinite", meaning you realize that your experience has no boundaries or limitations or distinctions. It is what you find when you stop comparing and inferring things. That is all it means.

🎯

This is a great point. You can have metaphysical ideas or experiences which feel very grand, loving, amazing, epic, etc. But that doesn't mean they point to something absolute. There are many delusional ideas about reality which can make you feel loving and peaceful.

Non sequitur. Consciousness has nothing to do with being reborn an infinite amount of times, that is impossible to directly experience and it is a relative scenario. You are conflating things. You are anthropomorphizing consciousness by adding some intention to it, as if it has some job to reincarnate people. You don't even know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, let alone what happens after death. Your experience says nothing of it, so live from that experience.

What's the alternative scenario? What does it look like if existence is impossible?

Do you think anyone there is enlightened or on the level of Ralston? I doubt any enlightened teacher would use that to guide people towards enlightenment, unless they are talking about what their current experience of reality is like. However, that is trivial for someone who is seeking it, because those are just ideas being put in your mind about what your experience should be like. They are always going tell you to meditate in silence or go do self-inquiry or some such thing, not "go think about love." If you tell someone to go think about love they are going to come back with an entire romance novel planned out in their head. It is fine to be guided somewhere helpful. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're being guided towards enlightenment. Could the idea of love cause you to question yourself at a deeper level? Maybe. But it is just an idea. It should be treated as fuel for contemplation. There are many who get enlightened without being taught such things.

"Love" happens at the end, it is irrelevant for reaching enlightenment because you only have ideas of it prior. Thinking about love is not going to get you to enlightenment faster than self-inquiry. It is ultimately a distraction that your mind will spin ideas from when mentioned prior to enlightenment. You are already overly fixated on it. Right. "I want you to teach me how to be enlightened but make sure that your teaching is loving enough first." If you want someone to talk to you about love, Leo has hour long videos about that which will satisfy you. If you want to become aware of it, go for enlightenment. Awareness has no such talking.

New year no me

If you add a bit of butter to your oil, makes it less sticky for some reason. Anecdotal observation from me. Aside from that, literally just make sure your oil is hot before you put anything in it. Really that simple.

Right, but it is odd for someone to change ideologies so often like it's a new pair of clothes. Never seen it before. An ideological chameleon. It's like they don't even take their own ideas seriously. But at the same time I don't think they are trolling. They're not transcending ideologies, they are just changing it a lot.

Bro adopts a new ideology every other week

I would say there is no difference between my realization and VeganAwake's realization, both are enlightenment, but the way he teaches it is by pointing to no-self a lot. I barely even mention "no-self" when I try to teach other people about it because I feel like most people already have ideas about what "no-self" means which are incorrect. There are many different ways to point people to it though. No-self is one way of describing it. I have no idea about the other two, can't say if they got it or not. Galyna's recent thread seemed to be on point but it was also very poetic which made it hard to interpret. I don't remember anything concrete about Moksha.

For the record, I think it's totally valid to look for objective markers on enlightenment like you're trying to do. It may or may not even be possible to see it on a brain scan. Some people theorize it can be detected in the default mode network in the brain. My claim is that any enlightened person will be able to vouch for the symptoms I mentioned, although they might describe it a bit differently. It actually takes a lot of effort to figure out and verbalize what actually happens to you post-enlightenment, so that is also an extra complication.

Forget oneness. That is just an idea for you. It means nothing. Just figure out what you are. What is your experience of yourself? That seems reasonable for the most part. A lot of unpleasant emotions after enlightenment is literally just me assimilating other people's pain or self-image, because I still don't want to hurt people obviously, and my words and actions can hurt them. But it is also possible to overdo that if you ruminate on their pain incessantly, for example. You can't imagine their pain, but you can help them with it. It does not help them to imagine their pain, what helps them is what actually exists and what you can actually do about it. Focusing on that is the greatest help you can give them.

That is because it is fundamentally subtractive in nature. It is realizing what you aren't, which leaves you at what you actually are. You can't point to it because it is a removal of belief/imagination. It is not a thing, it is like trying to describe negative space. A lack of something can exist in all states, which is why enlightenment is also in all states, and that is also exactly why it is not a state/experience.

It happens at once. It's a single realization. There might be psychological baggage or trauma stored up in your body that releases itself afterwards, but all of that happens only after the initial realization and it naturally calibrates itself. You basically have to learn what life and emotions really are again. I think if it does happen, the best way to verify is just to look at your perception of time, do you still feel that you are afflicted by time? Examining your relationship with boredom/angst is good too: Do you feel that there is something outside of your experience which is "better" than your current experience? There is a lot of insight and experiences that can come before it, which you could call "awakenings" or "kensho" or "enlightenment experiences", which can be helpful and useful. They are like breadcrumbs which give a glimpse of enlightenment. They are part of the process. But it all essentially leads to a single permanent recontextualization or realization.

It would be impossible for them to feel insulted because there is no self-image. They literally cannot think about themselves anymore because they realize it was impossible to do in the first place. There is no social anxiety or anxiety of any kind, all unpleasant emotions are entirely situational, they have nothing to do with a person or object. Energy levels become better as well. Sleep quality increases. Incessant thought-creation takes up a lot of energy. It is impossible to have nightmares, your dreams become very vanilla. You are enlightened in the dream state as well, there is no feeling of anxiety or impending doom as you would have in a nightmare. Your sleep also becomes very deep. Dreams only happen when you are entering into sleep or exiting out of sleep. Your perception of time also completely vanishes. There is no feeling of time, aside from telling yourself a number or word like "9:30 AM" or "Thursday." You also don't feel boredom anymore, not in the conventional sense at least. There is absolutely no experience of "I can't believe im stuck in this experience." That type of boredom does not happen, but there can be a desire to change experience. All emotions essentially get recontextualized to be purely situational. The emotion is a reaction to something you are currently experiencing, which does not include self-image. Experientially, for me, it was like my experience, or mind, became much more "lighter" or clearer or lucid. Kind of like some slight brain fog lifted that I never noticed before. Just for example, when I go in public, it just feels like my experience is so smooth and free, whereas before I was constantly being attacked by other people's perceptions and thoughts (which were actually just my own). I have heard accounts of other enlightened people saying that they felt something in their brain "deactivate." This is accompanied by an immediate experiential recontextualization in experience, which is what you could say enlightenment is. And it is permanent. You don't unlearn it because it is not something you learn, it is the result of unlearning something. It is subtractive in nature. You don't integrate it because it is experiential, in the same way that you don't need to integrate looking at the color red. You just experience red, you don't integrate it. You just experience enlightenment, you don't integrate it.

Good chat

You can see that Leo is delusional, which is miles ahead than most here. I am also very intellectual. Self-inquiry is great for those types.