FirstglimpseOMG

@Emre The whole Holographic Universe thing is astounding. It explains a lot though. I find that getting to an understanding of the science often crystalizes a spiritual or non-dual idea that was eluding me or seemed contradictive. I can possibly offer a tip that may help you recognize the beauty and majesty of no-self. Experiential, not intellectual, in this case. As I've had more and more of the gentle, beautiful, loving, clear teachings of many modern masters go into me, I have often managed to just quit being all human and egoic and stressed and bothered and anxious for long enough for my ego to just take a hike for a minute or two. I have directly experienced the welling up of pure, powerful, undeniable joy and love, from nowhere, for no reason other than I got out of it's way. For that few moments it's like someone broke the cap off of the love fire hydrant and out it poured. It's accumulatively transformative as you manage this more and more often, I imagine. Now, it's happened a number of times recently and I've never felt anything that strong, and recognized what it was before, so it's sort of a lovely, overwhelming wall of joy-tears and heart-bursting REcognition of the luminous, loving, self-aware, non-dimensional creator that 'I AM'. If you manage to lighten off of the drama and contraction long enough, and just spark the flow of beauty and love that you are, the shining of Source is really an explosion of bliss. At just BEing. BUT! As I managed a little more attention to the tears of joy and the heart welling up and the explosion of love and all the good, pure, pristine stuff, I also noticed something of a mourning, breath-hitching sadness. Incredible! Amongst all that bursting of joy, my sense of self cried a little for it's massive and sudden diminishment. There is a bit of a lossy, lonely undertone to that love-bomb, and it seems just to be my ego saying 'Holy shit, I have been Kingggg for the longest time and now... WTF?" Keep the faith man, you ARE all of life. I don't know what or who else you may have been studying or following, but you can try this Rupert Spira video and see how it resonates...

Alright. ..nice response Echoes.. I guess if you can respond in a thoughtful, caring way I can drop the egoic smarminess and sarcasm. I get full of myself sometimes and forget I am peace and love. I apologize for the lack of contribution to the thread, along with my defensive and reactive attitude.

Wow, super-human and nuclear? Here I've been trying to understand and wrestle down my big ol' ego and you're already past that. Awesome.

Ah. And is that state not preferable to all the effort that goes into determining where synapses are firing in your 'brain' while you suffer along with the rest of us unenlightened fools? (...and silly gurus) Just curious.

@Callum A Hiya. Well, I had become intensely interested and crazy-curious about the nature of myself and reality about a rear ago, then 9 months ago almost to the day I began watching the second of Leo Gura's Enlightenment videos, the one after the introduction video I think... and he just killed me! In the midst of the video, Leo was in mid-sentence and I had a flash of recognition, of the one-ness of the original consciousness. I flashed for a half second that I was only conscious VIA the one something that was everything. Not an intellectual understanding after deep pondering, not a finite-mind-made concept that seemed to make good sense, not really even an 'Aha' moment, but a direct, direct flash of REcognition that there was only an individual 'me' in my own mind, and that we are really, and I mean REALLY, all ONE. It was experiential, only for a split-second, but before my mind kicked right in with an image to try and match what I had just experienced, I friggin' SAW God at the same instant that I knew THAT was what I was!! And everybody else was!! Then I cried and cried, then I concepted and concepted, then I just went back to sleep. And here we are lol. @Dodoster Hey bud, I picked up a few sayings that are pretty cool as well. Useful tools during the day to use when you remember to remember to try and bask in Empty Awareness itself. "You are not from here." "You are not a human being, you are just watching one." One might be a Michael A Singer quote, & the other ...I can't remember who might have said it.

@Salaam Your thoughts occur within something (absolute no-thingness lol). Let's just keep it simpler, rather than allowing masturbative, endless introspection and comparison to make your ego feel the need to defend itself. What is it that you imagine your thought-forms occur within? You appear to be completely caught up in consensus reality and naive realism. This is not a put-down or a slight.

Crap. Okay, so intellectually I know what I am now, but forget so often that it's just silly. Life is more and more awesome and magnificent as I explore myself little by little, getting to know myself as God little by little.... *sigh*

I do know I'm God now. No-one or nothing created me. I create every experience. Every experience (all form) is contained within me. (Absolute, formless infinity) I am more and more self-aware within the dream of form I create, as well as revelling in just being. I even love the insane ego as it has strengthened itself and complicated the dream. (It's still all experience and existence.) Ego is a side-effect of still being asleep within the dream and unaware as a finite mind that there is no need to still suffer within the dream after initially being conditioned to suffer by other 'sleepers', other finite minds that cannot understand or grasp that they are only me. ...not yet awakened. Not lucid within the dream. Oh, and Jimi Hendrix didn't 'die', I just needed guitar lessons.

I used to get a kind of mini panic attack like that when I realized during mid-life that there was no tomorrow. "I'll start eating better tomorrow, there's cheesecake in the fridge today." "I'll quit smoking tomorrow, I've got half a pack left & it's been a shitty day." "I'll start living fully and following my passions tomorrow, today I just need to smoke a joint & unwind." So, when I realized, kind of over and over again, in mid-life, that there was no tomorrow, just more todays.. well, like you mentioned, the thoughts that arose out of nowhere that I had pissed away much of my life, that I was living very lamely... not fun. We need this shit though, it wakes us up. Mid-life crises or moments of lucidity when you realize most of the shit you are doing is fairly stupid, low-consiousness, automated distraction can be panicky and depressing. Those moments of realization are real for you, and it's hard to mask them or call them anything else, once you're more aware. It's not someone else's ego telling you to shape up, it's your own higher self going "What in the fuck have I been doing and why can't I stop!" I think the scary thing isn't the realization that you may be living a lame life, it's the ego going "Aw for cryin' out loud, you had to mess with it didn't ya? Couldn't be happy with just being happy for moments at a time before you crash back into suffering could ya? Fine, be that way, but now you have to do the work that you've known about for some time, good luck with that, I don't want anything to do with it!"

I love Tolle, Spira, Mooji, Gura, and lately Bashar and Benthino Massaro have been making me crazy. (er) Sahdguru makes awesome sense of things too I find.

I think the whole point IS to shake you up. Plodding along forever, without even knowing how asleep you were puts you into that 99.9999% of sheeple that will suffer endlessly and needlessly because they don't know any better. You wouldn't rather be there I imagine, despite the rude awakening. Leo got to me too with those vids, but it was... awesome. I had a pretty unmistakeable non-dual experience before mind kicked in, in the middle of Spiritual Enlightenment part 2, or whatever that title was. I can't imagine going back. I sure wouldn't want so much as one day more totally asleep at the wheel of life.

If when in the midst of dreaming I become aware that I'm dreaming, and make conscious changes to the dream, including testing physical sensations to see what they feel like and how they are perceived, and then my consciousness immediately determines that there is no experiential difference between that particular sensation or group of sensations and the same sensations in 'real' waking life.. ...??? ..in my dream, me (the subject experiencing any forms or phenomena) has no brain, no body, nothing physical, no organs, no sense perceivers, ...nothing! In my dreams, it seems to be nothing but pure consciousness, having experiences. Now, I'm as confused and struggling, reaching, speculating and grinding my gears as much as the next layman in all this non-duality newness, immersed in a new world of possibilities and insights, and I really only know that I don't exactly know very much when it comes to reality and my true nature... but this isn't really even speculation or confusion, it's my empirical experience that during the few times my consciousness has become lucid while asleep, my experience of physicality and reality matches, and is indiscernable from, waking 'reality'. If I reverse-engineer that experience, backing it up one level in a thought experiment; Does THIS waking consciousness, usually considered by the masses to be the mind-body even need a body, or brain for consciousness? Wait a minute, what if the world (universe, everything) was ENTIRELY contained within consciousness and the consciousness was NOT contained within the brain. That opens up a lot of questions. Awesome.

From what I am figuring out there is no causality in the universe. I reserve the right to be totally wrong, it's taken me 50 years to even realize there was this stuff to figure out The no free will thing has had me contemplating here and there for months and months. I'm leaning toward the sub-conscious mind being the automaton, informed further, consciously and sub-consciously as we gather experience. We'd be in trouble if we had to consiously beat our heart, digest our food, renew our cells, make our diaphragm move in order to breathe, etc, etc, etc. I think the brain might have been manifested as basically a computer. I wonder if free will is just what we do with accumulated memory. I imagine that linear time is just a human construct, just a way of putting one image in front of another, or after, depending on how you view 'your' construct. So, for our individuated consciousnesses, I imagine that we are free to do what we want, with what we have. I imagine 'intent' was what existence IS, originally, and that we may furthur utilize the whole intent thing further, by default. I'm so not sure, but is 'intent' not 'LIFE'? Originally from Source, continued within our individuated consiousnesses as an ability to live life. Life itself. No intent, no life. If there is life, intent is the origin and the life itself. Leo has said that if I don't exist, intent goes out the window with the illusion, but I struggle with this. Intent is the origin of life I imagine, and intent is the only way we can have a rich experience of life, I'm thinking. I suppose I could exist, do absolutely nothing on purpose, choose not to live life really at all, and experience very little.. kind of counter-intuitive for there to even BE life and not live it more fully though, don't you think? Even if I opt out of existence as much as possible (in my wee brain I mean), has my individuated consiousness not made a choice, forcluding free will? Is forcluding a word? As far as my neato ego can figure it, something has intent. Whether it the ethereal intent of infinity-divinity doing the intending, or if the tools 'I' have been given by just the fact that I exist, allow 'me' to choose to go left or right. Get outa bed that day or sleep in. Have the apple pie or the pecan pie. Chat up the cutie cashier or just pay for your stuff and wish that you did. I just don't see existence devoid of intent. I think they may be inseparable. I don't really know much of anything for sure.

Wow, sometimes I read a thread here and wonder how was I lucky enough to have found all the teachers, all the teachings, and all the ways our 'awakening' unfolds in a place like this. This, makes the internet bill so worth it lol! I can't even add to this... it just added a whole lot to me somehow. THANK YOU.

@Shin I'm finding that it's the little things we can do throughout our day that often get us closer to our core and further away from our monkey mind. So thanks for the tips on the everyday methods that move us along the path, or even keep us on it. Sure, the longer sits, meditations, contemplations & concentrations can reveal deep insight and larger-picture thinking, but I find to go past intellectual to experiential can also be achieved, to different degrees, in all those moments we remember to remember during our day. Once we understand 'what', it's pretty awesome to start understanding and practicing the 'how'. @Dodoster I'm often contemplating and working on just this. I seem to progress a little on the intellectual side, and a little on the empirical evidence side, whenever I remember to remember. Fun huh? How much simplicity can we use to unpack and become aware of what we are (and ALL that we are and are not)? How much wisdom can we pack into one sentence. Okay, maybe not wisdom, but for sure the careful and wondrous contemplations we post begin and fuel the processes that leads to wisdom. Thanks, cool. I tend to think (think.. *sigh*) that there might not need to be an 'either' in your first sentence. I'm imagining that we are everything AND nothing. By always having been nothing (no-THING), I am actually everything that appears in the no-THINGness and... well, no 'and'... I'm just everything! ...and I made it all. Just by 'BEing' and intent. And there's only me. I made me and I made you, in order to begin to 'know' the I that I AM. I knew nothing, only myself. I 'knew', or was aware of, no-THING. But was aware that I was aware. That makes 'me' awareness itself. Nothing. Nothingness. I don't seem to remember if I, Infinity, created all of everything and everyone in order to become less than infinite in order to know myself by a conscious attempt, or if I inadvertently sprang all of the YOUniverse and Nature into creation just by fluke because I am so awesome just by default? Oh, hang on, that may be ego creeping in there now. Sooo... to make a nice short response into a convoluted mess, & then back into a of well-thought out ponderence on the essential nature of our life in a few sentences like you did; I think we may be NO-THING, and by virtue of that, EVERYTHING. I guess when that realization makes it harder and harder to be pissed off at our asshole neighbour, or the dummy standing on your foot on the bus, or some sleeping dipstick that thought being President might be fun... we're on our way. I'll shut up for a bit, lol... didn't mean to hijack your cool thoughtful thread...

@Callum A Thanks for taking the time to share. I'm getting there man, it just seems so incremental amidst old, hard-dying paradigms. I wouldn't have it any other way though - unconsciousness sucks harder than I ever realized!!

Hmmm, felt funny mis-quoting the master. On page 218 of 'A New Earth', Eckhart Tolle says; "There is something within you that has an affinity with space; that is why you can become aware of it. Aware of it? That's not totally true either because how can you become aware of space if there is nothing there to be aware of? The answer is both simple and profound. When you are aware of space, you are not really aware of anything, except awareness itself - the inner space of consciousness. Through you, the universe is becoming aware of itself!"

... When Eckhart Tolle says "'We' are helping the universe slowly become aware of itself"... Holy crap.

@Kloof I've had some experiences in the last year that I'm still sorting out. It is very strange to have other massive 'realizations' as well, along the way here. Even stranger to have thought you'd figured something out after some big epiphany, only to learn months later that - no, I was wrong, that thing can't be right now that I know THIS thing. The 'one original source' thing is my way of saying God, or Source, or the Unity Field or whatever. My limited understanding at this point all points to 'God' or Infinity being all there really is (as nothingness, empty, non-dimensional, non-localized, self-aware, nothingness, that subsequently contains everything).. and it seems to me that that everyTHING, all the content of awareness, is only occuring within awareness, as perception manifested by our finite minds. Infinity cannot know anything finite, but it is self aware. In order for there to be a 'world' (universe), it must be perceived, and only a finite entity can know finite 'objects'... sooo.. infinity must sort of fall asleep and forget itself as boundless infinite self-aware loving nothingness, and dream up our finite minds in order to know anything but itself. So none of it is what you thought it was, ...Aaand, you're not what you thought you were. It's scary and silly-fucked when you start to put it all together. 'You' don't exist. We're dream-states, doing our own evoking of reality, through all our "individuated" consciousnesses... so that the ONE original Source, or God, can have a chance to begin to 'know' something other than itself. When we, as individuated, finite minds start to wake up to that fact (become lucid, within this very convincing dream), it is "God" (empty self-aware no-THINGness), somehow beginning to become more and more lucid that it has created a 'reality' of diverse and separate object within the original dream. I'm surmising that consensus reality, the whole 'self-consistency' thang Leo speaks of is self-consistent only because the original Source is ONE. Utimately there is only ONE. We are all ONE. WTF eh? (I'm pretty new, so please forgive me if this is a horribly messed up, misrepresentation of 'reality', or existence.)

@brovakhiin Hiya. I'm not sure of anything really. I'm intensely curious though, and over the last year I've been paying attention to my mind & body more than ever, and have noticed that joy, exhiliaration, love, enthusiasm, bewilderment, wonder, contentment, peacefulness, compassion (all that good positive stuff that makes life "So Freakin' Awesome") seems to arise without thought, without the mind having much of anything to do with those blissful feelings. I've been watching, and have also noticed that anger, frustration, resentment, jealousy, irritation, lack of patience or anxiety, any feelings of lack, etc., etc., have been pretty much 'thought up'. The more you watch, it seems the more transparent your 'personality' becomes. The way Ekhart puts it, the ego cannot exist under the light of awareness. Anyway, if you manage to embrace the more 'being' than 'doing' thang for a while (I've always been lazy, so this comes naturally), you may notice that when love and joy and peace and happiness arise, your mind had very little to do with it. The essence of what we are can seem to spill through us into the world if we just get the frig outa the way and let it. @Loreena Nicely said and nicely quoted, makes sense, thanks. I suppose something like humour can be helpful or hurtful, depending on intent.

If I laugh at a movie or joke or a just plain funny real-life situation, is it my higher self that is amused? If I laugh at an old lady with groceries wiping out on the sidewalk ice is it my little ego that is amused? Can you split an emotion into different facets like that? Is humour an emotion? If I'm understanding that joy and love and peace and contentment and wonder and enthusiasm are all 'devine by default', and hate and loathing and jealousy and irritation and anger and frustration are pretty much all man-made (mind-made?) crap, then where along the spectrum does amusement, a sense of humour, lie? ..& once again, does it depend what you're laughing about? And for that matter, who is funny? Who is being funny when one's mind is terrifically amused at something hilarious that it came up with all by itself? I'm feeling that healthy, not-nasty laughter and a tendency towards being easily amused or amusing falls on the higher self end of experience and creation. (I think..) What do you think, or do you ponder this?

Nice. I'm looking at growing a bunch of magic mushrooms. I don't usually run across them.. just luck here and there. I kind of want a stash, so I can plan some trips rather than luck into the 'shroom world only here and there. I was thinking, I should have saved a hit of LSD for every one I took when I was a teenager, I'd have a nice stash of quality chemicals haa. I wonder if blotter acid keeps it's potency for 35 years. I plan to order some AL-LAD and some 1p-LSD in the near future. I'm very interesred in mastering the whole PFtek thing for growing mushrooms though. 5meo for me too, sometime down the line. I want to spend a few months preparing for that blast of ego-death though, holee.

@nightrider1435 Congratulations on your first shroom experience! Also, thanks for sharing. Tripping along alone, in my personally chosen set and setting has allowed me to experience everything without trying to relate to someone else's trip. Or their reactions, positive or negative.. sounds like you are feeling that too now. I do have a few suggestions ( I know you didn't ask, I'm just like that sometimes). Bathe or shower not long before your trip. If you neglect this little aspect in enhanced states you'll quickly notice every place on your body that even has a chance of itching, ever. It can get distracting, noticing stuff you usually don't notice, a little preparation helps you not notice and be distracted by trivial dermal disturbances. If you ingest on an empty or near empty stomach, maybe a few pre-made smoothies in the fridge is a good idea for mid-trip. Also, it can be fun to trip for hours on end, not even thinking about food, and then on like, the 7th hour, remember that you prepared awesome snacks for the 'famishy' comedown. If you tend to become artistically inspired during your altered states, it helps to have stuff pre-set-up. Draw, paint, sculpt, 'real'-world or digitally? Have your gear ready to play with if inspiration hits. Play a musical instrument, or create and record music 'real'-world or digitally? Have your gear ready to go in case you suddenly seem brilliantly creative. Turn off the damn phone. Also, if you haven't experienced your favourite music while tripping, don't neglect this. Headphones if possible, and good quality sound devices of course. Yeah I know, we're supposed to be growing ourselves and having insights, not leisurely partying away to tunes. However, the level of different understanding and perceiving your favourite music can be very, very moving. It's a shift you'll never forget. I feel pretty spiritual when I'm crying tears of ecstacy and joy because the sound is so... deep. I feel my connection to everything like crazy when music actually comes alive like that. I hear God and get to be God in a positive feedback loop that defies description. And lastly, if you set an intent, or intentions before a trip.. MDMA, acid, 'shrooms, etc, please never forget to 'abide as awareness' whenever you remember to. Sitting in a comfy room, tripping balls and loving it? When you aren't distracted by all the astoundingly cool shit that you are experiencing.. stop, look around, get out of your intellect or usual mind and simply - BE. Recognize that you are awareness. Not that you are aware, but that you are awareness. Everything, everything within awareness is you. Your body, your mind, the space around you and any object within that space, your sense perceptions, everything, EVERYTHING, is you, and from you. Get a feel for that when all enhanced and you'll be closer to, and more easily able to be 'abiding as awareness' in your moment by moment day. Abiding as awareness is my favourite way of entering the present moment fully, and while it lasts, it's friggin' powerful. Oh, and sex is so ridiculously awesome during comedown.. (yes during comedown, it's too weird trying to kiss a face that's sort of melting, let alone the sea monster hiding under the cotton!)

Wizard of OZ I think.. I just about choked on my coffee lol.

@Old Man welcome, so glad to see you here. @Shin @Kloof I had a lucid dream, maybe two years ago. Realized I was dreaming while wandering around a flooded basement. "Holy shit, I'm dreaming! ..what do do? Ahh, I'll dip my bare toe into this water, see what that's like.." So, I dip my toe into the water, and distinctly, clearly, perfectly, in high-def and what even seemed like enhanced tactile sensitivity, that was the coldest, wettest water one could ever dip a toe in. I'll never forget it. That could just as easily been a leaf crunching under my foot. So.. say this 'reality' is a consensus dream that we're not quite lucid within. Who's the dreamer? What does all this appear in? Does the fact that all our 'individuated consciousnesses' can perceive the same shit consistently in this dream possibly point to the fact that, originally, prior to our 'existence', there needed to be one dreamer. One original source of the of the contents of awareness. Awareness is IT. Consciousness is IT. You are THAT. When eternal, infinite, boundless self-aware consciousness, which is the only thing and absolutely no-Thing, in which time and space appear, (which can not directly know anyTHING but itself due to the fact that as soon as there's any object directly perceivable within it, it wouldn't be infinite and eternal), fools itself by forgetting itself and falling asleep.. that dream is our reality. When God falls asleep, we're the dream. 7 billion fully engaged and fully aware sub-dreamers with the innate power to evoke this 'reality' about 40 times a second, collectively. 'We', are the universe, slowly evolving itself and slowly waking up to the experience of 'itself'. Only our FINITE minds can directly perceive this world. But they are part of the dream. Our individuated consciousnesses are altogether an illusion, that 'WE' EVOKE! Leo speaks about naive realism, consensus reality. Reality is not physical. Our perceptions ARE reality. The perceptions THEMSELVES are reality. There is no-thing 'out there', our perceptions are absolutely ALL THERE IS, it ends there. My clear clear, totally fucking real perception that 'my' toe was seeing and feeling cold, wet water occured, 'existed' in a damn dream! Now back that up one level, drop your paradigms, REALLY open up to the world of radical open-mindedness, and start taking Leo literally when he says 'lirterally' in his video episodes on enlightenment and 'reality'. Go on over to the closed curtains in your bedroom. There's nothing behind them. Bulshit, you say - you yank them aside and 'Voila', there's that pesky real world right out there to prove reality is a real thing... 'out there'. Know how you can see only two inches of your hallway through the crack of the almost-closed bedroom door? - that's all of that hallway that actually exists. For your individuated, localized perspective, literally what you can see and sense is all there is. Perception IS reality. Another person walking down that hallway toward your bedroom? ...their perception is absolutely there reality, and for them, whether their 'conjured' brains are aware of it or not, there only exists, in 'reality', the two inches of the bedroom that they can see through that little space. How can two dreamers possibly be dreaming and evoking the same reality!!?? Where does this self consistency come from!? This is impossible! One original SOURCE is how. When Source falls asleep, in order to play hide and seek with itself, just for the experience of it, it's first snore was the fountainhead of all creation. NATURE, in other words. So... you are THAT. Me too. Cool huh? When Leo speaks of 'nothing behind the scenes' he knows that until you yank that curtain aside, there's fuck all out there. Close your eyes - all gone. We don't exist. That's why our individual importance and defensive, self-serving, protective, worried, frantic, obsessed, fearful little egos are so funny. At least this is the way it's all unfolding for me, I could easily be totally ass-backwards and even further deluded than I have any idea of. Probably a good idea to check for yourself. Damn, I gotta go to work, catch up later. Start taking Leo literally literally. If you can stomach it.