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There can be seeking energy to remove thoughts and enter what a mind thinks emptiness should look like. If a mind is very busy, there just isn't any space, it's like trying to meditate in a rock concert. I found it really helpful to relax my mind any way possible - yoga, listening to nonduality, running for 20min. etc. Once the mind is relaxed, thoughts will likely float by. See if you can be an observer to them and just let them go. We aren't bothered by an occasional bird chirp floating by, why be bothered by an occasional thought floating by? Trying to repress thoughts just makes it worse. For me, the imagery that "thoughts arise from the emptiness" was a key to progress. It is beautiful imagery and I think someone can go really far with that image. Eventually, there was awareness that thoughts and emptiness are one. That formless is form. I'm currently embodying this realization and it's taken a lot of work. IME, if the "thoughts arise from emptiness" resonates with you go for it. It is a huge step toward the Truth. With that imagery, one can sit in the emptiness and allow thoughts to arise and dissolve. This can do wonders to dissolve attachment and identification to thoughts. An exploration of the emptiness from which everything arises can lead to so many flavors of mystical experiences and insights. There can be words, images and intuition, but it isn't analysis or traditional thinking. For example, if I inquire "What is thought?" and start thinking "Well, a thought arises in the mind. A thought is associated with neurons. There are neurotransmitters that stimulate thoughts. . . " Leo did a great video on self inquiry which helped me a lot.

I'd like to write a psychological thriller called "Escape From Nonduality". (spoiler alert: there is no escape).

“Are my beliefs stage-orange hogwash, or in line with non duality?” “Im looking for the opinion of someone who is advanced in non dualism and spirituality and has the authority to judge this.” Beliefs aren’t ‘in’, and questions for others don’t arise ‘in’, nonduality. You are quite literally God. The rest of the post is basically ideologies. (Lovely ones though) SD’s is descriptive, not actuality, non-dually speaking. Observation is not ‘in’ nonduality. Values without yes, within, no. There’s no self & society anymore, only Being. And of course, all of that is ‘in’ nonduality.

Logic is within nonduality (as is everything). From a Tier1 perspective, nonduality appears to be beyond logic.

This sounds like some Ayn Rand Orange-level stuff with some Green sprinkled in. From a logical perspective, it is not even in the same ballpark as nonduality.

Awesome...Being! I’d say yes, you are on the right track. Since nonduality, no dreams, so in hindsight they appear to be attempts to autobalance upon ‘waking’, mostly to do with identity (s) at play.

@zambize Awesome & thanks. Also, my post was about Nonduality & words, is like psychedelics & words. How can a person who’s experienced finite understand infinitude. “Oneness” doesn’t really communicate Infinite, and “infinite” can never communicate the you of nonduality. Sounds like you are doing well on the path man. Godspeed??❤️

@Dan Arnautu What did you mean then, “You can go sit in a cave otherwise and forget all about them“ ? Seems like you might mean - ‘you can go sit in nonduality, this is about duality’. But duality isn’t resolved in duality. Are the colors of SD’s not the back and forth of self realization, then recontextualization relatively with others (society), self, others, self, others, etc (duality (knowing society) / nonduality (knowing self)? If assessment is kept to only relative, it could literally go round and round forever, or stay at the first step.

@Nahm You totally missed the point of the question, and totally the point of today's video. We know the assessment is relative, we know the models are conceptual constructions that collapse in nonduality. Yet the concepts are still useful in the relative domain. You can go sit in a cave otherwise and forget all about them. But for those of us who are trying to understand the dynamics of the ego and the collective, these are useful. Don't throw the raft until you get to the other side... so they say. Much love though.

@FoxFoxFox I agree but I don’t know if i would consider this enlightenment. Because simply understanding the illusions of our experience doesn’t get you enlightened. For example i do understand the nature of reality to a quite good degree but i would in no way consider myself enlightened because there are still some sticking points where i am stuck and are perventing me to fully embody nonduality. Enlightenment in my opinion is a complete transformation of your self and your experience.

@zambize There exist some things which cannot be gotten at with words. So how do you go about talking about such things to people who have not experienced them? Here we are. If we didn't call it nonduality what would be call it? How would we let you know this thing exists? Maybe we should call it "chicken" from now on and see if that solves the problem. There is no way to get around the fact that incommunicable things exist. You can try for a million years and you will never solve this problem. Because an unspeakable thing cannot be spoken, by definition.

Weak pointers on nonduality.

@Sahil Pandit Gotchu. Honestly if you want, I've got a bunch of other stuff I don't post because it's not as well organized and linear, you can PM me your email and I can just share em with you on Google Drive (docx) Avoiding Dysfunction Relationships_ Red Flags.docx (docx) Derrida, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism & Nonduality.docx (docx) How to Become Enlightened - Step by Step.docx (docx) Leo's Nootrpoics.docx (docx) Mindfulness Meditation.docx (docx) Shamanic Breathing Technique.docx (docx) What Women Want in a Man.docx (dox) 65 Core Principles of Living the Good Life.docx (docx.)The Grand Model of Psychological Evolution.docx (docx) 10 Important Things You Don't Know You Want.docx

I'm trying to improve my teaching skills on "meeting people with where they are at". At times it seems creating a model that assumes rationality can be a helpful teaching tool. In the SD model: imagine an Orange-level person with attachment / identification that they are a "rational thinker" - they see everything outside of their rational framework as being irrational. If we allow that and call the Blue Stage "irrational", Orange "rational" and Yellow "post-rational", it can introduce to them a level of thinking/being beyond their delusional sense of rationalism. Once they open up and explore this possibility, they may get direct experience with a "post-rational" being (flow states, intuition, a glimpse of nonduality). This could loosen their attachment / identification to rational thinking. Then with more exploration, these three categories collapse. Or, do you think it's more effective to "cut straight to the chase" with an Orange level "rationalist"?

This is the part I don’t get. On what? And I know there can’t really be a set answer to that which is what’s driving me up the wall. The only thing I really wanted to master - running - I don’t really care that much about anymore. I don’t care about racing, competing, coaching other runners just to become more successful athletes (which is all the athletes I would coach would want anyways). My passion I care about and love to learn about now is nonduality and all the things that go along with it (psychology, psychedelics, reality, happiness, wisdom, philosophy, etc.) but I don’t want to be just another one of those guys that copies Leo or do the whole YouTube self help game. I don’t really know what I specifically want to master and I don’t feel like I can because I don’t have the money. It’s like that video: Where the changes you intuit you need to make require such a RADICAL realignment and you have no idea how and even what it will be. Its hard to have hope in anything when you don’t know what you want to have hope in. My life has no direction and I don’t know what direction I want it to really have because I don’t know who I am in terms of my passions, motivations, etc. anymore. I wake up everyday now and it’s almost the worst part of my day because I wake up knowing there’s nothing for anymore. I’m always touched whenever I read say The Hero’s Journey by Campbell and listen to: because it’s like “YES! THATS EXACTLY WHAT MY LIFE IS SUPPOSED TO BE & WHAT I WANT IT TO BE! RIGHT THERE!” In yet, when the video ends, I look in the mirror and I’m reminded of just how depressed I am and feel like I can’t because it feels like I don’t have the psychological resources and even psychological cognition. I can barely read a book without my concentration going all over the place and getting distracted by everything. Realizing how poor I am with money, how I have no skills to earn enough to just to go on my adventure and then come back. I’m trying so hard emotionally to try and have some sort of positive outlook and hope and try to put that into coming up with some sort of vision but I can’t. I try so hard to let go of negative thoughts in the life purpose course but when it comes to the exercise there’s just like this screaming voice of “I DONT KNOW!” In yet, when I try to calm down the only thing I feel is the voice or feeling pressing in my head about how I need to do something.

@winterknight Is it necessary to sink mind into Self through the 'who am I' ? Or by following the I-thought to its soruce? Gary Weber in his book suggests trying out different questions and finding the one that works for you. “Who am I?”, “Where am I?”, “When am I?”, “What is doing this asana?”, “What hears?”, “What feels these sensations?”, etc 'Who am i' often has a strong intellectual component for me and it distracts away from the work I am doing and i find myself looking at nonduality videos in no time. Sometimes what seems to work for me is going to the '(non)experience of being aware of being aware', as Rupert Spira puts it. Or as i mentioned earlier, 'what is constant in the background' and 'what is this Now' also work sometimes. These questions do not follow the I-thought as such so i wonder whether the I-though remains in the background and sinking of the mind is a mere illusion.

Not that its that big of a deal, because if you truely are where you describe it can be pretty perfect, nothing needs to change. However in the pursuit of truth and who and what you are. The place your referring to as ultimate is only 1 vantage point of all the infinities views, it is not itself the ultimate. I dont think its possible to have a view that is simultaneously experiencing the infinity of all views from their vantage point at all times with all knowledge and all past and all destiny included. This is what I referee to as Gods view and its unreachable and unknowable. Self understanding of this I believe can free you as the "i" and into understanding i-I and letting go of pointing to a state/location/idea of god/infinity/awareness/nonduality and into a continuous recognition that God is never not the case.

I wrote this quite a while back on one of the Dharma Overground forums in response to one of the thoughtful contributors to the thread and someone recently quoted my post and left a nice comment last month. Formal meditation is a temporary expedient. Initially, its purpose is to create a habit of overarching, then subtle observation of mind at all times. There is a reason for this, but it is provisional, and I don't do that. Formal meditation is not "good", per se. Unless it is serving the purpose of consciously cultivated temporary expediency, its relevance to the self which thinks good or bad, right or wrong and before or after in terms of self and other is a significant error in which effective authentic self-refinement is obstructed. Since the initial "high" produced by the kind of "artificial meditation" practiced by some beginners habituated to identification by their "achievements" in contemplative arts wears off anyway and is essentially ineffective, for the most part, in dealing face to face with ordinary situations to any great extent, it is best to do whatever is necessary to hit the ground running, so to speak, in terms of turning the light around in order to effect seeing reality, as is, cold turkey— and wean oneself of self-reifying identity issues with practice done in private, as soon as reasonably possible. I'm not saying one shouldn't pursue "just sitting" in private meditation venues— the point is that formal meditation is a TEMPORARY expedient. The point of effective self-refinement is to see reality, as is, without any filters perpetuated by the psychological apparatus of the being that is going to die by activating the inherent potential of nonpsychological awareness. Seeing the essence of complete reality is seeing reality with the Dharma eye of nonpsychological awareness— it's your own mind right now. What is reality? Unity of absolute and relative is the working definition of reality. Nondual nature is your nature. Consequently, Nirvana and Karmic evolution are not only equal, they are identical. This is the basis of the saying "sameness within difference", though there are several aspects in terms of dealing with the conceptual device relative to the various provisional teachings within buddhism. Arriving at nonduality in terms of everyday ordinary affairs is essential to buddhist practice. Actually, it is the working definition of enlightening being. Enlightening being is the function of awareness. Awareness is your nature. Awareness, your own mind right now, is not created. Seeing reality is activating the mind without dwelling on anything. The only reason this is possible is because your own mind right now is unborn. Mind is one, undifferentiated, selfless, void of identity. It's you. People aren't just already enlightened— they're enlightened mind incarnate. I need to remind people that it's not the person …but it's not somewhere or something else either. Real 24/7 meditation practice is seeing through phenomena without denying their characteristics. Taoist alchemy calls this refining the medicines. Buddhism calls this using the sickness to cure the disease. It's not about meditation, after all. You can take all the provisional entry-level teachings and use them as applications of the real in the midst of the false in broad daylight unbeknownst to anyone. This is having the gumption to move beyond the zero-point of the intent of all provisional teachings and thereby gain entry into the inconceivable. It's about using the world to refine the self; using conditions to arrive at essential nature. This cannot be accomplished by quiet sitting alone. That's because, reality is already Mind— your mind, right now. Perhaps you are not ready to hear this. Reality is relative to your mind in terms of the degree of one's clarified enlightening potential. As long as your mind is habituated to the view of its separate nature, you will not see essence in everyday affairs. After a long process of self-refinement carried out correctly and effectively in everyday ordiary situations, the self-reifying mental habits that perpetuate the illusion of the separate self-identity as ultimately existent will die off, bit by bit, and that much of your primordial potential will be activted as the selfless function of awareness. Actually using this is selfless adaption; activating the subtle operation of spiritual transformations in the midst of worldly situations. Nonduality realized all the time is seeing the physical, psychological, psychic, emotional, causal matrix of karmic evolution (Creation) as void of self— because that's what it is (no different than you, that is, void of self). Going along with this, just as it is, knowing it as utter illusion— how could you possibly bring yourself to act on behalf of situations arising from this insane chaos, good, bad or indifferent? Acceptance of conditions is "going along— not denying characteristics". Not acting on conditions is "seeing through phenomena". The sense of nonattachment to outcomes aids in adapting to the inevitable where unavoidable— the ups and downs look just like reality: therefore "perfection is easy for those with no preferences." Soon enough, you may come to the working strategy that this entire malestrom of karmic momentum is just your perception of it. Otherwise, it just doesn't make ANY sense …to leave it up to the world, and fortunately, you don't have to. YOU take total responsibility for your sensory perception and mental postures. It doesn't require doing— just meeting and accepting conditions for what they are— illusion. If you can come to the temporary working realization that phenomena is what reality looks like without having the slightest shred of belief it its ultimate nature, then it might be possible to endeavor to work at adapting to conditions as they present themselves out of a sense of inevitability without clinging to good or bad outcomes. It's not a thing. There is no moral implication in terms of selflessness— it's impersonal. That's mind. This is actually an entry to the buddha's teaching of Suchness and thus carrying out the activation of enlightening potential and partaking of the Great Vehicle of Tathagatas. This is penetrating reality, in fact. Right in front of your nose is this nondual reality 24/7. As such, it is so whether you are aware of it or not. In terms of the point of meditation in the first place, and the fact of reality, it is Mind alone. The lesser vehicle of personal liberation is a temporary expedient as well …why is this? It's another lie to trick you into the path, that's all. That Suchness is reality is nominally due to the fact that it is neither absolute nor conditional. Both Nirvana and Creation are the same illusion. One is your mind before creation and the other is after. Clinging to one or the other is delusion. Neither absolute stillness nor karmic momentum is the essence of reality unified, present and naturally so, without ever entering creation, which is your nature already. Even those who experience sudden enlightenment must learn to realize this truth by APPLYING it in the midst of situations seamlessly according to its potential. You can begin to see this if you can dismiss your dependent relationships on circumstantial interpretations. Reality doesn't look any different than delusion when your relationships to circumstances are not dependent on outcomes, good or bad. Perpetual unity with reality is just subtly activated nonpsychological awareness of the essential underlying nature of impersonal circumstantial process as your own potential void of attributabilty in terms of an absolute personal identity. When you act based on karmic dependence, you change inherent selfless enlightening potential into karmic debt. Ouch! ed note: add to the 2nd line, 3rd paragraph; add "of" in first line of 15th paragraph

When I "enter" this space during the day there is a sense of background awareness. Sort of like an observer, but not like person observer. So, perhaps an "observer + object" mindset (in which all thoughts / feelings / actions are also "objects"). Yet, it's a different essence than my full-on nondual glimpses. It seems there needs to be some sense of duality to operate in the world. To deal with coworkers, realize my pen is used to write, language etc. Is this a sense of "enlightened duality"? Or perhaps the final frontier is collapse of the distinction between duality and nonduality.

After a full nondual blown out with 5meo and then going for aya is pretty gnarly. Pretty much any psychedelic, after 5meo, will thoroughly result in nonduality, and with Aya, lasting longer and deeper than let's say mushrooms, it'll take you under deep! Interestingly, no visuals or shapes with my previous aya experiences, just pure white light and collapsing of all duality just like with the 5meo...

Also the whole idea of the "true self" and the "false self" seems like another duality, under non-duality isn't the false self also the true self (or at least within it?)

It's so hard to popularize/intuitively grasp theoretical physics without the mathematics, and conversely get an intuitive picture out of the mathematics, I simply love @graded24's answers. Quantum mechanics in and on itself does not prove any mystical truths. Yet for most people, it is a radically different description of reality from what they know (and it takes a few years of doing it to accept it as a good description and develop 'quantum intuitions' for how little objects behave). The biggest paradigm shift they've ever had. Having these paradigm shifts is really useful to see how models are just models. Some of the weird stuff some interpretations of QM said has like surface resemblance with some of the weird stuff spiritual teachers say. People who don't understand QM than adopt these resemblances - which are analogies at best - and use it as "proof". It drives scientists nuts. But QM taken very seriously does have some mind-twisting/paradoxical implications. So do other fields of study - Leo has talked about Cantor's set theory, the deconstruction of language etc. Leo did quite a good job explaining the paradoxes in his video on QM (I think it was the second one of the series). Unfortunately I can't repeat the argument in short. It had to do with the division between the "measured object" and the "measurement device" being artificial (which is of course understood by good scientists, but by the average student it's not thought all the way through and accepted as yet another reasonable assumption). It's a really interesting question what "real understanding" is. Notice that in science the assumptions that go into constructing your model often are what tells you about 'reality'. Much more then the results. Take the example of a falling ball (or an apple, if you will). Newton will describe gravity as an attractive force proportional to the masses of the objects. But what is a force? No physicist can tell you what a force is. It's what makes objects move. It's how we describe reality, with objects and forces. Does the concept of a gravitational force lead to more understanding? Yes, probably, because in your mind you now connect the motion of planets with the falling of apples. But is there a force really? General relativity does away with forces completely. There is no need for them in the mathematics. The motion is explained via the properties of 'spacetime'. You visualize your spacetime as this bending rubber band or whatever, and now having a visual image you feel like you have an understanding. You've replaced your idea of objects and forces by an idea of objects in a curved spacetime. But is the curved spacetime real? Did you just understand reality better, or did you just make a cool description? I'd say what is real is the motion of the object. (If that.) Physics is full of purely abstract concepts that are taken as real. Forces. Curved spacetimes. Energy. The wave function. Fields. Several different ways to look at the same phenomena which are all powerful - competing paradigms. Yes. But I think studying physics is also helpful in really grasping how these models are just models. Because you are forced to change paradigms - as explained above. Most of my classmates from theoretical physics won't be pure materialists, not in the same way your average person is. I'm not saying they will be spiritual and understand nonduality, I'm not saying they will accept consciousness as primary (I still don't O:)). But the idea that the symbol is not the thing, that descriptions are just that, will come naturally. I'm sure it has been attempted. I have at least one friend who dropped mathematics and accepted the spiritual after diving deep into some philosophy of science (full of set theory) written by a local mathematician. Anyway, that too was just a pointer. If what Leo says about the non-dual experience is true, then it means being all of reality. You can't have a model which is as good as reality, otherwise it would be reality. More importantly, you can't ever have a label which accurately conveys the being behind it. So. I haven't had nondual glimpses, but it makes sense to me intellectually that those would be beyond the scope of mathematics.

I had a similar thought. Mine is that if you want to become enlightened, there is a way more efficient way to make that happen than years of meditation. To be concrete: suicide. So, if someone wants to be enlightened to end suffering; you can end suffering right now by killing the ego. If someone wants to be enlightened to find truth; you can kill what's preventing you from finding truth by killing the ego. Leo often says that the point of life is to awake; to die before death. I never understood why he believes that. Seems inconsistent. If you want to awake to the absolute truth, there are way more efficient ways than meditation or psychedelics. I get why one would want to become enlightened, but claiming that survival of the body while absence of ego is the number one priority of life does not make sense to me. At least I haven't heard or experienced anything convincing to back up that claim. Long story short; if enlightenment is the most important thing for you, there is nothing preventing you from killing your ego permanently at any moment. And as you say; enlightenment will happen one day anyway. There seems no reason to awake before you die, other than that it is something you want to do. Me: Not an expert on nonduality and never had an experience I would count as such. Just someone who tries to make sense of what he hears.

@Leo Gura do you think a person can care about enlightenment even if they don't have some of the basic shit figured out. I want to be more interested in nonduality but my mind just keeps dragging me towards life purpose and financial independence and I just can't open my mind to this topic enough...just yet. Is there such thing as doing LP and raising one's level of consciousness at the same time or would they be clashing with each other?

@now is forever I'm not talking about any specific people here. I am mentioning a common trend here. Nonduality is it's own game. It has it's own working system and ultimately verifying that final result. I just don't get why people bring in a 'scientific' paradigm into it and declare that only when Nonduality fits the scientific paradigm, then and only then I'll acknowledge it or take it seriously. If you can't do that, then that means you're spreading some hoax. Basically, if you don't play my game in my playground, then your play is bullshit, no matter what/how you're playing. Can you conflate the knowledge of poetry, history, art etc. into objective scientific paradigm? Can you say that repeat World War I, then and only then I'll acknowledge it. Does this mean, the study of history is a hoax/woo woo? This again boils down to the core of epistemology, how can we really know anything for sure? What is the TRUTH?