cetus

@Viking What you describe sounds like your common hypnogogic nap. A trance state that opens the gates to parallel realities.

@Empty I'm sure it will be interesting. I think the hardest for Leo will be conveying what happened into words and for the rest of us to be empty and open enough to hear what was said beyond the "words". It's gonna get interesting. A completely new paradigm for some.

@Faceless I watched this the other day and thought maybe you would find it of interest.

@Vladimir Search HPPD. .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder

@Bryan Lettner Good question. Don't believe so because potential arises from an infinite source. An empty ground state pregnant with all possibilities. Manifestation could be anything happening within infinite realms or realities that we can't even think of. This reality we experience is just a minute sliver of infinite possibilities of manifestation. What is most important here is direct experiance of the ground state itself. Than you see that it doesn't matter if something has manifested into form or not because it exists as potential. The ground state (Tao) is both empty and complete.

@Jarrad The age old question. Why am I here?

@blazed I just read this and it sounds a lot like what you experience. By Andrew Z. Cohen 180 One of the many miraculous functions of meditation is that it is a portal to a different dimension. When you go deeply into the meditative state, your awareness detaches itself from the thought-stream. Then your identification with emotion, memory, time and body begins to fall away. You become aware of something very mysterious. Imagine that you had been fast asleep in a small dark chamber and then you suddenly awakened to find yourself floating in the infinite depth of a vast, peaceful ocean. You literally become aware of a new dimension, when moments before you had experienced yourself as being trapped, a prisoner of your body, mind and emotions. When you awaken to this new dimension, all sense of confinement disappears. You feel that you have access to the whole universe and also to that which the universe exists within. You’re aware of body, mind, time, and space, but there’s another dimension that extends in all directions, unlimited by any of it. Meditation is the portal to this dimension, a door to the realization of limitlessness. Why is this experience significant? Because the infinite context you awaken to is not just a quiet place inside your own head. It’s a deeper dimension of reality itself. Life, death and everything in between, reality as a whole — the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, all that ever was and ever could be — is made up of both the manifest and the unmanifest. But most of the time, all we are aware of is the manifest dimension, the domain of time and space and becoming. Meditation will give you the direct, conscious experience of the unmanifest dimension, which is the ground of being itself. The “ground of being” is empty. It is an objectless, timeless, spaceless, thoughtless void. But everything that exists has come from this no-place, including you and me. Paradoxically, while empty, this no-place is pregnant with infinite, unborn potential. It is the ground we all emerge from, the womb of the entire universe. When something came from nothing, 14 billion years ago, the nothing didn’t disappear. That unmanifest, unborn dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is arising in every moment. And meditation allows you to know this ground within your own experience. Even in the awareness of the body and the movement of thought, beneath it all, in the state of meditation, you become conscious of a current of stillness that is the echo and the reflection of the ground of being. There is a great mystery there. In the infinite depth of that emptiness, there arises a knowing, a pure knowing itself that seems to answer all our questions and relieve us of all our existential doubts. Whenever we journey far enough beyond the conditioned mind — beyond thought, beyond form, beyond time — we will always discover this same mystery. That is why we meditate, so we can awaken to the instantaneously liberating nature of the ground of being. The more profound is our experience of the ground of being, the more we begin to emanate that mysterious knowing which is enlightened consciousness itself.

@blazed Ever surrender while having that blissful experience? I did to see how deep it could get and I completely vanished. Not even the witnessing of pure consciousness remained. I don't know what that is even called. Cessation maybe?

@Enquirer Either you've been listening to the wrong people or your listening in the wrong way. When enlightenment happens there is no one who becomes enlightened. Consciousness awakens, not somebody. Goals of achieving no-self is illusion and just more bolstering self. LIsten to what Adyashanti has to say here @17:00 about no-self. Give it just 5 minutes. It's really good stuff!

@MarkusR If I could step back in time I would show this Video to myself and say 'this is enlightenment in a nutshell'. "There is no one to awaken. What is really happening is reality is awakening into reality. Consciousness is awakening into consciousness." Than I'd tell myself to take the time to sit til the mind becomes so empty there is no longer anyone there. Not even the realization "there is no one there" remains. Sit in nature long enough with a still mind and enlightenment is guaranteed to happen. Just not to you. But it does happen.

For whatever it's worth just thinking about dark night bought on a bit of an ego death/dark night experience for me. It's all good. I feel quite humbled now. Calm and peaceful. I contemplated the gates picture and it always gets the ego by the throat. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. At that point all that can be done is to humble oneself. To surrender and pass through the gates completely naked. I recall Leo saying from time to time "I love fucking with my ego".

@astrokeen

Here's a picture I shot titled "Dark night of the soul"

@astrokeen I was talking to a friend the other day about shrooms. He said he tried them once many years ago and didn't like it at all. He walked into his house and everything around him look depressing. The things he owned that surrounded him and the way he lived all seemed like meaningless shit to him. So he said he never did shrooms again because of the way it made him feel. I didn't say anything but was thinking to myself, "maybe you seen truth for the first time".

@John Iverson What good is that doing you? Read the bk and decide for yourself.

@John Iverson Gerald G. Jampolsky MD. He wrote a very inspiring book called 'Love is Letting Go of Fear'

@Harikrishnan Don't forget to wear your 3rd eye glasses when sun gazing!

@Ether Nice!

Had to find an image to go with that.

@Alex Busch That's what happens when you take the "I" out of the picture for a moment and cease looking through the filtered lens of Alex. Than consciousness is fully conscious. Awareness is fully aware. The universe is watching itself and fully awake.

@moon777light Both views are invalid. Leo never existed.

@Crystalous@TylerJ Leo is like an astronaut of inner space on a mission to a black hole. He's probably passing through Van Allen belt by now. Time no longer exists for him as all points of reference are long gone in deep space. The planet Earth is a distant memory that seems like a long gone dream. As he looks out his window he sees infinite space with countless galaxies in all directions. He sees clouds of gases forming into particles than into matter as galaxies, suns, planets and Leo's. He reaches his final destination. The black hole. The singularity. Whatever crosses the event horizon never comes back. He is absorbed into the black hole never to return! Hehe -No, Leo isn't physically traveling to a black hole and getting spaghettified. But close. His body is staying here on hold for his return. But something of Leo won't be coming back.

@tsuki When you look at a cup to examine it, you are not aware that it is the emptiness that makes the cup a cup. A cup can be destroyed so it no longer exists. But the emptiness that made the cup will always remain.

You know we make this sound a lot like rocket science or something but we all experienced this as children. Remember those special moments when reality was complete within itself. No yesterday. No tomorrow. No false image of self doing the looking. As @blazed said 'pure consciousness'. Much easier for innocent children to access. No partition of mind to get in the way.

@robdl Yes it is a balance of the two. Let me put it this way. There is no one meditating. Meditation is just happening. No doer!