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I became directly conscious of one aspect of God. I had the realization before that God is peace, which I have talked about earlier, but yesterday I experienced directly another facet of God. It is something that can be described by many names: absolute existence, ultimate power, ultimate magnificence, ultimate glory, and might. All of these aspects became directly clear in my mind recently, not merely as philosophical concepts or ideas that I had intellectually understood, but as something I had directly experienced and glimpsed for myself. Previously, I had glimpsed the peace of God through meditation. it was a glimpse of a profound peace that seemed to transcend the usual fluctuations of the mind and the changing circumstances of life. Through meditation I recognized that peace is not merely something the mind experiences under favorable conditions like chilling on the beach drinking grape juice…but rather it is something much more fundamental to reality itself. It is literally inside my being . Like literally inside my physical body .I had come to understand God as peace through this experience, although I knew that my understanding was still incomplete. Yesterday, however, I experienced something different through a “religious experience “I glimpsed another dimension of the divine. I experienced ecstasy, glory, absoluteness, magnificence, and overwhelming power. It was as though another aspect of God had become directly apparent to my consciousness. Whereas my previous glimpse had been primarily associated with peace, this experience revealed something that could be described as the absolute greatness and majesty of existence itself. And this has a terrifying flavor to it rather than peaceful or quiet. It is also GOOD. It is so good that it is terrifying. It is so good You want to run away from it because of how good it is lol . These two experiences have made me realize that God cannot be reduced to a single attribute or description. We may call God peace, but peace might be only one aspect of the divine reality. We may also speak of God as absolute existence, infinite power, ultimate glory, magnificence, or the very ground of being. And actually god is all names . But some of them hit closer . The important distinction for me is that I am no longer considering these ideas exclusively at the level of intellectual understanding. I have had glimpses of what I interpret as different aspects of God through direct experience. Although these glimpses were brief and my understanding remains incomplete, they have had a profound effect on my conviction regarding the existence of God. I am beginning to understand that there is a significant difference between believing in God because of philosophical reasoning and knowing God through direct experience. This brings me to the question of atheism and the limits of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. I do not think that atheists can be convinced of the existence of God by philosophical arguments alone, such as the intelligent design argument, the fine tuning argument, or the ontological argument. These arguments do provide rational grounds for believing in God, and I believe they point toward the existence of a divine reality. However, philosophical arguments and direct experience operate at different levels. An argument can lead someone to consider the possibility that God exists, but it cannot necessarily produce the direct realization of God in that person’s consciousness. Someone can study arguments for God’s existence, understand their logical structure, and even acknowledge that they have considerable philosophical force without undergoing any corresponding spiritual transformation. A person may understand the concept of peace without ever experiencing profound inner peace. Similarly, someone may understand the arguments for the existence of God without ever having a direct experience of what they interpret as the divine. When you have glimpsed God directly, however, the question takes on a completely different significance. God is no longer a philosophical proposition to be debated. The question becomes grounded in something that you have personally experienced. I say that I know with 100% certainty that God exists, I am referring to the conviction that arose from these experiences. Before these glimpses, I could think about God, contemplate philosophical arguments, and explore different religious and spiritual traditions. But after experiencing what I interpret as the peace, ecstasy, glory, absoluteness, and magnificence of God, my conviction became much more immediate and personal. I am not claiming that I have completely understood God or that I have attained the highest possible spiritual realization. In fact, I would say the opposite: what I have experienced so far has been only a glimpse. I have touched something that seems profoundly significant, but I have not yet fully understood its nature, its implications . But the threshold I passed is I am no longer approaching the question of God solely through speculation or philosophical argument. I now have personal experiences that I can contemplate, investigate, and attempt to understand more deeply. My task is to refine my understanding, and discover more . The next major challenge for me is to reconcile these experiences of God with Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta teaches that ultimate reality is Brahman, the nondual absolute, and that the deepest truth of the individual self, the Atman, is not separate from Brahman. The apparent separation between the individual self and ultimate reality or the self of all of existence is ultimately overcomed through The realization of nonduality . It reveals that reality is not fundamentally divided into two independent existences: a separate individual self on one side and an ultimate reality on the other…Yet my experiences have also presented God to me as peace, glory, absolute existence, ultimate power, and magnificence. I want to understand Does the divine appear to consciousness through different aspects, while its ultimate nature remains beyond all descriptions? Can the personal God and the impersonal absolute be understood as different ways of approaching the same ultimate reality? And if so, how precisely does Advaita Vedanta explain this relationship? Above all, I want to understand how these glimpses of God fit into the larger question of existence and consciousness. Is the peace of God inseparable from the glory of God? Is the personal experience of divine magnificence ultimately reconciled with the nondual realization of Brahman? And can the direct experience of God lead to a deeper understanding of the truth that Advaita Vedanta attempts to express? These are the questions I want to pursue from this point onward.

Which is why I don't understand your problem with radical nonduality. On the one hand you say the self is this real structure. On the other hand you say the self is surrendered when opening to God. Are we not basically saying the same thing, ie no self is the doorway.

Radical nonduality is not a big deal. It's just the immediacy of what's always already the case. The cool thing I'm discovering now, is that instead of trying to feel through heavy feelings, simply to make a subtle shift in focus, and notice how this immediacy is already receiving it all with love.

Dude. I am well aware of the ineffable nature of God. Moreso than you understand. Just because I use words well does not mean I think my words encapsulate it. You are trying to make this about words and lack of understanding the Absolute. But that's not what this is about. You are the one here who is lacking direct consciousness of the Absolute. It is completely obvious to me what the Absolute is. But then there's much more Awakening beyond that. Again, getting the Absolute is easy. I don't speak about enlightenment because there is something higher. Buddhism and nonduality are not enough to understand God. You frame this issue as psychedelics granting inferrior understanding of the Absolute, but you are mistaken in that. They grant higher understanding than any human tradition you are copying. You are not going to understand the Absolute better through Buddhism than through 5-MeO-DMT. Not gonna happen.

Most of the original radical nonduality speakers (Tony Parsons, Jim Newman, Tim Cliss etc) will say: there is no you, mind is illusion etc, and then they just leave it at that. This brick wall approach is helpful for some, but I can see that many people are just left frustrated. (I have literally seen some of the online meetings getting zoom bombed lol.) Emerson has found a way to practically demonstrate that mind is illusion. (See minute 6 to around minute 11 as an example) Language is the veil that is lifted in seeing through the illusion of the sense of a separate me. I like to call this radical nonduality 2.0 not because the original message has changed. It's simply an evolution in the way that it is being transmitted. (The revolutionary thing about this, is that Emerson has found a way to make nonduality accessible for people who have literally no spiritual background.)

There is no such thing as an absolute perspective. All perspectives are by definition relative. You can describe nonduality/formlessness/timelessness and call that description the "absolute perspective", but that so-called absolute perspective is still going to be relative. And it is no more logical or illogical than the opposite perspective (which focusses on duality/form/time).

Agreed. I don't think anyone is advocating stepping in front of a bus. (I think this might be many people's misunderstanding with regards to radical nonduality. It is somehow viewed as being in denial of life. And yet it actually leads to a more intense experience of life. The no self thing is just a doorway in my opinion. Less filters, less resistance etc.) You could also be violently hit over the head during a dream (virtual reality) at night, and when you wake up and realize it was just a dream it's as if it never actually happened. Similarly, from the perspective of "that which has no opposite because it is all that there is" nothing has happened.

A nonduality teacher can never teach another person what’s being spoken. They’ll have nothing to give you. There’s no teacher, only speaking, only the message, only the listening and only the hearing of the message. Only when the message is heard with absolute clarity is the message listened to, heard. People either hear the message or they don’t, no other person can be your listening or hearing. Only you. From the moment pure clarity is heard…there’s no more teacher or student, or message. There’s just you and you alone.

I don't think I ever said this reality is an illusion and there is another reality that is more real. "Right now is the reality" Yes I think we still have miscommunication with the separate self thing. (certain aspects have fallen away here) I like this video by Leo, radical nonduality basically says the same. All there is is This/God, remove all backstories.

Well said. 😎 The thing is, only 1 out of 5 million people ever fully grasp the concept of nonduality. So it’s perfectly normal for the remaining people who don’t grasp its meaning to fully reject it, even fight to the death to defend their defencelessness. That’s why most people choose to stay asleep, it’s more comfortable and familiar.

Not at all, not being condescending, not my thing. I just notice that over and over you seem to imply that radical nonduality etc is somehow in denial of reality. Quite the opposite is true. When the sense of a separate me falls away rapidly, life actually feels more intense, in the sense that emotions are experienced more raw, ie less resistance, like a baby crying freely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hjQaDn2GVk&t=7s @Mellowmarsh The part that stood out for me was when she said: "I just don't have a life anymore." ie there's just Life. Now wonder it's called radical nonduality

Do you guys ever wonder if you're agreeing with Leo because Leo's right or because Leo said it? I have this problem sometimes. It's not because I don't introspect to see if I'm believing or actually conscious of something. Rather, it's because Leo is so right about pretty much everything that I end up wondering if my mind was subconsciously influenced by actualized.org content to adopt the same conclusions. Or alternatively, it could be because reality is what it is and anyone can reach the same conclusions if they do truth seeking correctly. Some things Leo is right about: Oneness, nonduality The limits of science and the myth of science Identifying rationalism Academic philosophy being bullshit Ideology, Conformity, the social matrix God existing, and what God is Solipsism (nonduality has to solipsistic, in case you didn't catch on) Cognitive and ego development The ego and self-deception The weird thing is that as I do this work, I arrive at many of the same conclusions as Leo. Of course I already had heard about them, but my understanding becomes much deeper. The only issue is that I could be deceiving myself by using actualized.org as a sort of paradigm and then falling for confirmation bias. I think the only solution to this is more introspection, removing beliefs, and contemplation. But it's still not easy. It's important to be aware of the drawbacks of actualized.org. The content is really good, insanely good, inhumanly good. But the cost is that you're exposed to the most profound insights before actually doing the work that is needed to get there, and as a result you have the potential to reach higher peaks of consciousness but also to get bogged down in a very advanced form of a paradigm.

Rebrand it as radical non-nonduality, and I'll gladly sign up.

@Wilhelm44 Have you ever heard of Suzanne Chang? She’s got a super radical nonduality vibe to her videos. I like listening to her views on nonduality.

I think thats the poetry guy 🙂 Im talking about Emerson nonduality channel on youtube. See the video in the OP (watch from minute 6 to around minute 11 to get an idea of how he works with people. Loads of one on one sessions on his channel. It's like radical nonduality 'coaching', for lack of a better word.)

@Carl-Richard lets say a normie was curious about this nonduality stuff, which inquiry questions would you use to let them see through the illusion of the sense of a separate me ?

Thanks, you too, took some time for integration😊 found something interesting in the mean time, (see post in spirituality section titled "radical nonduality 2.0) Blessings to you, i wanna say sister, but that would make you sound like a nun😄

No worries. And no, I am definitely not trying to parrot or appease Leo in any manner. I've raised points against Leo on many of his opinions, topics, and blog posts in this forum whenever I've disagreed with him, and I continue to do so. I've been both correct and wrong. My last goal is not to think in this forum, haha. One of the main reasons I'm here is to expand my understanding. I'm just debating, and these topics aren't necessarily the least tricky, which is why I like having discussions about them. - I'll try to be a bit clearer, but basically, there is no "compartmentalization" from God's POV. This is tricky to imagine because you're mostly using your human POV, which has clear distinctions between imaginary vs. real. You need to distinguish things that are more real, meaning things that have a sensory impact on you, from fleeting, inconsistent thoughts. But from God's POV, if God must experience evil, aka "have evil within itself," to fully be itself, then God would have to somehow experience it. However, evil doesn't really exist in this realm because it's all just one mind. There is no "other." Again, that's the point I was making about nonduality. Nondual literally means no Other, no otherness. So... how would it do that? What would be the fundamental "mechanic" of God even being able to experience Evil? So the only way for God to experience "evil" would be to somehow "lower it's conciosuness/delude" itself or "forget" that it is God for some temporarily finite period of time so that it can experience it. I don't know if you've ever seen that image of the universe holding a mask. I'll put it here. God needs to create some kind of "frame" or "limit" around its consciousness to even perceive evil. That frame is you, and everything else is a limited being within it. If you had no frame, bias, or point of view, there would be no separate things to perceive, only God God God God God, all of it, without distinction. That is why awakening sometimes involves your vision having transparency, pure whiteness, pure darkness (blackout); the collapse of all distinctions. There is no separate observer imposing boundaries on experience. Even scientifically, if we stripped away categories, reality could be reduced to particles and fields interacting. Atom interacting with atom, field interacting with field, over and over again. You’d basically see the brown/universe thing around everywhere (just referring to the image/graph). In order for God to even experience some sort of “pain,” it would need to fool itself, put on a “mask,” figuratively speaking, AKA impose a “fake limitation/frame” onto itself to see a temporary "fake" separation between itself and the other. It would then temporarily delude itself into thinking that it is not itself interacting with itself, but that it is some other actual "OTHER REAL" entity that is actually harming and hurting it. And since God, “as it says, so it is,” has no mind/reality distinction, when God creates this “illusion,” it is not separate from reality. And that “middle experience” of a mask is what we essentially call human life/ego. It's not necessarily "creating" evil. It's more like God limiting its own consciousness and compressing it into a human experience where concepts like evil, suffering, and harm can even exist. Otherwise, God would simply experience everything as one whole, without a separate "other" to experience those things happening to. Hence, it can't even conceptualize or see "Evil". - From God’s POV, it’s kind of like planting a prank on yourself or planning a surprise for yourself. How could you ever fool yourself? You can’t. The only way you could is if you somehow temporarily forgot, in which case it would become a genuine surprise or deception. How can God experience anything that requires “otherness”? It can’t. It never actually can with its full consciousness, because “otherness” isn’t real or true. So the only way it can do it is by “lowering its consciousness,” forgetting, fooling itself. That’s why evil is often called “low-consciousness behavior.”

I'll try my best to explain this. God is, by definition, God. If God were something else, then God wouldn't be God. The definition of God, as you will realize through contemplation, awakening, etc., is that God is fundamentally all, or that which has no "other." There is nothing outside of itself. It is all-encompassing. So God isn't merely a "creator"; God is everything. It is everythingness. If you agree with this definition, then you can follow the logic from there. For God to be all, to be everything, it is in a bind that is self-defined: it has to contain both the finite and the infinite. It has to be capable of containing both limitation and unlimitedness, and it has to create limitations without bias. Why? Because if God were limited by any bias, then God would be limited by that very bias. For example, if I define a set as the set of all prime numbers, then I have to include all prime numbers. If I leave one out, then it is no longer the set of all prime numbers. It would be the set of all prime numbers except 7. So everything has to exist without any fundamental bias. If God were biased toward creating a world without evil, then God would not be everything, because God would be limited by the exclusion of evil. If God is the set of all that exists, and you remove something because "that cannot be God," then God suddenly isn't God anymore. It becomes something that does not include that thing. You could therefore say that the only thing that "limits" God is the fact that God has to be itself, or everything. In other words, God cannot be biased toward one part of existence over another, because then it would cease to be everything. It has to take in everything and be everything. That's the first reason. The second reason is that the notions of good and evil, as well as pain and suffering, are extremely tricky. You could technically argue that you commit "sadism" every time you kill an insect, every time you choose not to help a homeless person, or even when you put your own body through pain by forcing your muscles to grow stronger. Evil and suffering exist as long as you agree to the rules of existing as a finite self. Every single moment of your life, you could theoretically end your life and exit this particular bind, but you don't want to because you want to continue living. As long as you are attached to existence, form attachments, and want things to be a specific way, you will inevitably experience some degree of pain and suffering. Take the classic example of a gazelle being chased by a lion. Both animals simply want to survive and feed their families. Who does God give the bias to? What should the animals be fed on? Are you going to commit "genocide" against the grass and nature too? How do you decide what gets eaten alive and what doesn't? If you're a game developer, I'm sure you can understand this yourself. It's incredibly difficult to satisfy everyone's preferences. Every time you reject a feature request from a player, for example, you could argue that you have caused some degree of disappointment or pain for that player. And this problem continues at every level: whenever one thing is given preference over another, something is necessarily excluded or denied. Bias is fundamental to all of this. Bias is also what separates duality from nonduality. Why should one thing be one way and not another? Why prefer this over that? How do I define what is evil for me and what is evil for you? What is good, and what is evil? Who gets to decide that? The moment you prefer one thing over another, you introduce a distinction. You are saying that this should be one way rather than that way. In that sense, preference itself creates a form of duality. As long as you're attached to being alive and to existing in a particular way, you'll experience pain and suffering whenever reality doesn't conform to that way. Who says you're entitled to comfortable weather all the time? Why can't nature suddenly become extremely cold and bring another ice age? Is that evil being done to you? From another perspective, you're imposing your preferences onto nature by expecting it to behave the way you want. From a nondual perspective, there is no fundamental basis for preferring one part of reality over another, because there is no ultimately separate "other" to stand in contrast to it. TLDR; Pain, suffering, evil, and sadism exist because God is, by definition, everything. For God to be God, it must encompass both the infinite and the finite. Once you enter the finite realm, pain, suffering, and "evil" exist depending on the perspective of the observer. It is "evil" to paint over a beautiful masterpiece, but it can also be good because it creates space for a new masterpiece. It is "evil" to die from cancer or disease, but from another perspective, the body and its cells fought to survive for as long as they could, and harmful genetic traits may not be passed on. It may seem "evil" that God doesn't simply give you a harem of beautiful women who exist solely to please you, but from the perspective of those women, it is good that they are not reduced to objects existing only for someone else's desires. It is "evil" to age and lose your energy and vitality, but it can also be good because you eventually return nutrients to nature and make room for new, novel lives to emerge. The moment you accept the finite world, you accept these issues, because a finite thing is defined by certain conditions it needs to thrive, be happy, and exist. If you could genuinely be happy with anything, you wouldn't be bound by those conditions. In that sense, you wouldn't be defined as finite, but as infinite. If you were completely fine with losing a leg, you wouldn't be defined by the normal human attachment to having an intact body. People will call you an "abnormal human" just for that. Evil, suffering, and sadism exist precisely because you are not a bot. Because if God were biased in any way, then as the creator, God would have to behave according to that specific bias, imposing an even greater limitation on you than the limitations we already experience.

Yes. If Lordfall's point is simply that, from a relative perspective, there is a lot of pain and suffering, then yes, absolutely. You'd be foolish to ever deny that. However, when you start using terms like God, nonduality, ultimate, foundational value, etc., you are usually implying a more absolute, nondual frame. This is why people corrected your post. From this frame, there are no fundamentally separate minds or "others" upon whom God can be sadistic. There is only God being God, one reality, one mind.

To think in just one mind without subdivisions is insane lol, that's like saying you wrote this post or I wrote your comment. > It is one mind. That's the entire point of Leo's Actualized.org. It's most likely that you simply haven't had these experiences, whether through psychedelics, meditation, sobriety, introspection, or other means. Which is totally ok; that's why we are in this forum to help each other At the highest level of awakening, you experience the collapse of the separation between Self and Other. The Self becomes all, and the "Other" is also recognized as the Self. I'm not trying to make this unnecessarily difficult. Yes, from our ordinary human perspective, the world is filled with beauty and horror, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering, creation and destruction, compassion and cruelty, and countless other apparent opposites. But once you start talking about God, nonduality, or the highest perspective and "values", your definitions have to change accordingly. Concepts such as sadism and masochism depend on there being an "other" toward whom an action is directed. From the highest nondual perspective, that distinction no longer exists. All apparent dualities collapse into one because there is no separate "other" outside of the One. That's literally what nonduality means (it is in the word itself - not DUAL, not TWO): there is no fundamental second thing, no separate Other, no independent contrast. There is only One. When we apply dualistic human definitions to the highest nondual context without first redefining the context, we are imposing distinctions that the nondual framework itself has already dissolved.

Nonduality means your excluded middle will collapse. Excluded middle assumes that category A is inherently different from B. But all categories are duality.

I’m trying to understand an experience I had that I interpreted as a possible awakening or mystical opening, but unlike the peaceful or blissful awakening experiences I often hear about, mine eventually became extremely frightening. I had been studying spirituality, nonduality, and consciousness for around five years, so I had a substantial theoretical background before this happened. I was already familiar with ideas like ego death, surrender, the illusion of separation, and the possibility that consciousness is fundamental. Then I went through a period where reality started feeling radically different. Perception became extremely vivid and unusual. Ordinary things could look strange or almost unreal, and I experienced an intense sense of love and unity. I also became deeply focused on another person, whom I experienced as the Beloved or as somehow representing Reality itself. At one point, it felt as though I was getting extraordinarily close to something fundamental. The usual sense of separation seemed to be dissolving. But then fear became overwhelming. I began to feel almost like prey being hunted, as though something was coming after me. It felt almost like I was approaching a point where the self itself would disappear. Instead of surrendering, I retreated. In the metaphor I've been using since then, it felt like a moth approaching a flame: the moth is drawn toward the flame, but eventually realizes that getting too close may mean its own destruction, so it flies away. Why do some awakening experiences seem profoundly peaceful while others become terrifying?

All that matters is he is here. So let's get him some pussy. Hell. With all that nonduality talk he probably needs it.