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@SQAAD If it brings you existential terror then it's best not to think about the implications of Oneness. Because there is no way to sugar coat the implications. If you are one with everything, then you do, and always will experience all that can possibly be experienced in the universe. This includes experiences of being tortured, having your family murdered, getting the rarest diseases that cause never ending pain, all the while being delusional and taking all that tragedy seriously, etc. Majority of the lifeforms in the universe spend their lives suffering. You can work on becoming awakened on your current form, but that's an egotistical way to go about this. Awakening is not a solution, because as soon as your form dies, your experience continuous through some other form that most likely won't be as lucky as the current form through which you are experiencing right now. All of the awakening would need to happen all over again, if you are lucky enough to even encounter such material that push you towards taking this path in your next form. The people on this forum represent at best maybe 1% of the living forms understanding of the universe, majority of the time you will be experiencing through someone even more delusional, someone who believes in primitive religions, e.g. christianity, islam, etc. Universe goes through never endless experiencing of delusional forms who go through unimaginable suffering, while few escape the suffering through awakenings, only temporarily as when their form dies they have to start from 0 again. In that sense universe could be thought of as a kind of hell. So be grateful about your current situation and try not to think about what happens after death, because it's 90% likely it will be something much worse than the current form through which you experience, you are more likely to be born in a third world country and in conditions that are not as nice as the ones you have now.

Care to share some credible sources on the reincarnation research? Because I can't find any. How can research prove reincarnation? Haven't we evolved to believe in superficial things like higher power and free will and so on. Isn't this just a common pattern of delusions in a range of human populations. A mechanism to reduce suffering from the fear of death.

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@Nahm @PopoyeSailor I'm not saying that's the state you will enter after death. I'm saying that after death, your subjective, immediate being in the world, constituted of phenomenal experiences, qualia, cognition, perception, memory, and so on will cease to exist. So if it were the case that there is reincarnation, the structures which contain all this information about the previously lived experience don't come along, so there is no way to tell that you have reincarnated. So it's a story that people tell themselves, something they'd like to be true, but when you look at it more deeply, it's just as delusional as anything else that we humans have come up with in our minds. Why is it that two people who have identical mystical experience, yet after the experience one interprets it as if it has something to do with reincarnation, and for the other person it doesn't even occur to link this experience with reincarnation. The difference is that the former has been exposed to the eastern philosophy and concepts of reincarnation, and the latter has experienced it through the western framework.

Sorry but this is not helpful at all, if anything it makes me even more confused. What you're saying might make sense to you but for me your writing is very unclear. You're probably talking about some specific state of a direct experience, like under psychedelics or in deep meditation. I've had ego-death before on psychedelics and I understand (experientially) what it's like to be in a state of no-self, without dichotomising, just being pure awareness. But nothing in that experience indicated at reincarnation, there weren't even any thoughts, there was no conception of reincarnation that could have even entered my mind during that experience. I could have only rationalised that the experience had something to do with reincarnation after coming out of that state, I would call that self-delusion, because I would have interpreted my experience against an idea that I had read or learned from somewhere, this thought wouldn't even enter the mind without prior exposure. So the idea that direct experience can say something about reincarnation makes no sense to me. When you're telling me to look for validity of reincarnation through direct experience, you're already setting me up for a certain kind of interpretation of this experience.

How can one experience this other without dying and losing their memory? What is your definition of reincarnation exactly, is it the standard definition: "Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious belief that the non-physical essence of a living being starts a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death."? Based on this definition there would be no way for you to know that you've experienced reincarnation, there is no memory carried over into your next life.

What you're saying doesn't make much sense. Reincarnation is not something that exists in the direct experience, unless you are just redefining words ant not explaining them.

I understand that direct experience is the only thing we know is real, whether it's a delusion or not, direct experience by definition is true. This doesn't explain how you were able to experience reincarnation. It's an idea that requires you to think about concepts like the past/future, death/birth, etc. How can you say that you can only trust direct experience while simultaneously believing stuff like reincarnation?

Can you please explain the pointer of non-duality then. What does it point to if not to the non-existence of dualities in the universe. The way I understand it is this definition from wikipedia: In spirituality, nondualism, also called non-duality, means "not two" or "one undivided without a second". Nondualism primarily refers to a mature state of consciousness, in which the dichotomy of I-other is "transcended", and awareness is described as "centerless" and "without dichotomies I understand that the universe is as it is without the ideas and labels. But that doesn't mean we don't have the mental tools to learn about the universe through repeated observations and make predictions. Like the concept of limits in calculus, we can make better and better theories about the universe that get closer to the ground truth of the universe, but never completely reach the ground truth. Why do you completely dismiss all emergent properties of the universe, such as the mind and its ability to learn about its situation in reality? I get it... everything we know about the universe is mental constructs/objects. But there is no good reason to dismiss everything that our mind creates, this kind of anti-intellectual reasoning leads nowhere, the extent to which direct experience is valued over all else seems almost dogmatic here. The very idea of reincarnation requires belief. Please explain how you are directly experiencing reincarnation. Also, how can you be so sure that even without beliefs and any labels your direct experience is correct? Direct experience is equally deceptive. The reality that you experience is a result of your brain creating internal models which use predictions. Your direct experience is never ground truth but the best attempt at predicting what is.

Ahh I messed up the formatting of this post ^ I hope this is readable

If it is not possible to understand or directly experience this phenomenon, then why even make up that concept? First of all, what is your definition of non-duality. Because the way I understand it is that a non-dualistic state is where the experience is centerless, there is no distinctions between anything, and everything, including thoughts, and actions/movements feel as seamless and spontaneous as heartbeats, a state without any dichotomies, complete oneness. I'm pretty sure I've experienced this on psychedelics and also able to understand it. The idea of evolution can be observed and confirmed with 100% consistency anywhere you look. Sure it's a made up idea by the human mind to estimate the ground truth of reality as closely as possible, but that doesn't mean it cant be one of the fundamental processes that takes place in the universe. What's wrong with the idea of the universe becoming aware of its own processes through human forms? Are we not "directly" observing the process of evolution whenever we look for it? Again whats the point of making up this concept and probing it or even having a channel on this forum dedicated for enlightenment topics, if every single idea is just a delusion and only thing that matters is direct experience, why not just have one big page that responds to every question or idea with "its just a thought" How is it possible to directly experience reincarnation, have you directly experienced reincarnation? Seems like self-delusion. It's a story that you have adopted from reading eastern philosophy. There is no way to verify the claim of re-birth So is the universe completely limited in understanding itself in absolutely every way? Is it not the fact of existence that the universe is right now experiencing itself through me. How can you say there is nothing to get around when I (universe) in fact am trying to get around something

I don't think something is wrong. I'm not saying suffering is wrong, as I said it's necessary for evolution towards other states. Why would there be evolution happening in the first place if there isn't a drive towards certain more desirable states? Explain the reason for the existence of evolution. Clearly the universe "desires" to become more conscious of itself, to experience itself more fully.

I understand the non-dualisitic view, that we have evolved to think in dualities, thoughts and concepts are just mental constructs, fundamentally there is no difference between the self and the other. So how does it make sense to talk about things like reincarnation, isn't this just self-delusion, a story we tell ourselves. But you can't get around the fact that thoughts, labels, concepts are an emergent property that inevitably rise in more complex life systems, so there will always be suffering stemming from that. You can keep saying that these are illusions, but that doesn't mean we can't reason or make meaningful predictions about the state of our universe.

@Nahm @allislove @Leo Gura Any thoughts/feedback on the things I wrote on my latest post on this thread? I've been wrestling with the idea of suffering for a while and I feel like I'm not making much more progress on that issue, the evolutionary process of the universe towards a more desirable state makes more and more sense to me and it's hard for me to see it any other way. I disagree with the idea that everything that the universe experiences is desirable, but rather that it's a necessary byproduct of evolution, which we can eventually overcome as the universe converges towards greater and greater self-love. Does any of what I write make sense to you?