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Here is an easy way to make materialism look bad. Most materialist posit that Consciousness is the result of physical matter, more accurately a specific configuration of matter present in what we call the functioning brain. If the materialist doesn't deny consciousness altogether, which would be absurd in the first place, he will have a hard time to argue away this small, overlooked fact about his or her worldview. If we assume that a brain is unique in that it can give rise to consciousness, we basically have to admit the following. The universe started out as purely physical entity, nothing within it was akin to experience and consciousness. All that existed were physical motions, which over the span of billions of years gave rise to a lonely planet earth, which in all unlikelihood gave rise to physical motions so specific, so unique, that it would somehow give rise to a completely new substance unseen in the entirety of the universe. A substance unlike anything that has every existed before, a substance so foreign it cannot be even called substance. Consciousness was born, experience was born, because the wavefunction of the universe decided that this specific configuration was to give birth to that which might have never existed at all, and that which never existed anywhere else. This is so absurd, it's as if you were playing with your marbel set and then suddenly, just at the specific alignment of your marbels in the perfect and impossibly lucky way, a unicorn would emerge infront of you from nothingness. Not an usual unicorn that is, rather an interdimensional unicorn made from a substance existing nowhere else in the universe. A substance that is unlike anything the universe has ever held inside it. This is the current paradigm of western civilization, and everyone accepts it as if it was pure rationality, as if it was undeniable truth. As if any alternative was completely absurd and unthinkable. You live in a world in which the most sophisticated scientists believe in this absurdity. They think the universe is dead, void of consciousness, and that only matter ordained by the great, unconscious chaos of the universe to be worthy of giving rise to consciousness does so. It's interesting how the self-evident can be render to be obvious falsehood if you step aside and shift your perspective. The Truth is revealed not in one perspective, but rather in noticing that which remains between all perspectives. No Perspective is that which is contained within all perspectives. This is why shifting perspective is one of the most important tools to come to see truth. Not because the new perspective shows you what is true, but because the new perspectives shows you what has been so clearly falsehood. You shift your consciousness not to gain new knowledge, to see a deeper reality, but rather, so that that which you thought to be reality falls away, any only that which is True remains.

Watch Tony Robbins and jim Newman lol he will get sick of it. it’s great to humble yourself with the wisdom of nothingness/emptiness/darkness/void. But nothing to understand is only a half truth, because of you understand there is nothing to understand paradoxically you’re still understanding something. I haven’t had many mystical experiences or enlightenment/awakenings but I feel wise enough to say it’s easy to get stuck in the extremes of I’m god and love and everything and the highs or the lows of I’m nothing/ nothing matters/ no point/ don’t exist just got to constantly remind yourself that both are true and neither are true

A few questions keeping in mind I only ordered your book list today so some of the books may answer them... Have you read the "Journey of Souls" books and if you have do you have an opinion on life between lives and reincarnation in general? In my opinion they are the book on reincarnation that most resonated with me. How do animals fit into the picture? Do they have souls? It would seem they can't really achieve enlightenment because they lack egos, only having basic instincts. What about alien civilizations? Multiple dimensions? In theory if another species achieve sentience say Dolphins they would be facing many of these same existential questions? Or alien civilizations? If true enlightenment is nothingness, why pursue it? Why not just do whatever we want? It seems like most humans just try to chase pleasure and avoid pain, so being obsessed with feeling states. Isn't pursuing enlightenment more of the same? By that I mean chasing certain feelings or feeling states. What do you think of the text of "revelations of an insider?" This one should only take you 60 minutes to read. http://goo.gl/cl1Jjz Thanks!

The "Mystery"? "The nature of ultimate reality can only be understood when looking from its own viewpoint. That is to say, one’s conditioned perspective of reality must be put aside. The simplest explanation is to consider that one’s life in the world and universe has the characterization of a dream. Into this dream, each dreamer is born. To the dreamer, the world and universe have the appearance of being real. The dreamer takes himself to be real, and therefore the world and universe this person is “in” to be real. The dreamer “knows” that he has “come into” this life, therefore at some point he will “go out” of life. The dreamer “knows” that although he will die, the world and universe and fellow dreamers will persists after his death; that the dream will continue when the dreamer no longer exists. None of this is so. When the dreamer ceases to be, the dream ceases to be. The dream has never been real. The dreamer has never been real. In other words, an unreal dreamer dreams a dream that is unreal. Only if the person, the world, and universe were real would any of this be justified to have an explanation. Any explanation would entail the process of cause—and—effect, time and space (or location). Ultimate reality has no relationship to time, space or cause –and—effect. These are elements which occur only within the dream. Only within the dream is it a legitimate question to ask, “How then can life and the world and universe be?” Any answer would entail the processes of time, space and cause—and—effect. Such processes occur only within the dream itself. Therefore, any answer will be an answer within the unreal dream. The point is that all that is apparent to the dreamer is simply that: an illusory appearance. What appears to be real or actual is not the same thing as what is real or actual. What is actual, is ultimate reality. Ultimate reality can be characterized as empty; no-thing or nothingness. Ultimate reality is absent any of the qualities of the dream. Being emptiness itself, it has no need of an explanation or a justification. There are no questions which one can ask about nothing. Questions and answers are a product of the dream. Nothing is not the cause of anything or the effect of anything. Cause —and—effect is a process only within the dream. So, if we ask, “What is the cause of the unreal dream?”, the cause is the unreal dreamer. An apparent dreamer interacts in an apparent world in an apparent universe. None of what appears to be is actual. What appears as “real” within the dream is not actual, not ultimate reality. To understand ultimate reality, one must go “outside” the conditioned perspective that is within the dream. It can only be understood from the standpoint that no thing is real. Nothingness is what’s real. From the standpoint of nothingness, it is clear that not anything in our dream world, including oneself, is important. None of the activities in the world matter “outside of” the unreal dream. There is no meaning in life, in an ultimate sense. Anything which is to be taken “seriously” is within the unreal dream. Whatever you do, or anyone else does (or doesn’t do), does not matter in any real sense. This insight is the freedom which one can experience within the dream. It is justified on its own terms." -- Robert Wolfe (Ajata Project)

I don't know exactly, few minutes. Yes, all dissapear, you don't perceive nothing of the normal reality , only nothingness. but I realized that with a half dose, after the breakthrough, I could be between the void and the normal reality, shift from one to another. It isn't nice or anything but it's very interesting to see the process, how the mind create the reality. But before to do that you need a total breakthrough at least once, seems that it change your mind for ever

Yes, after realization of nothingness, you realize that your birth, body and entire universe is just a thought, which mean is your birth happens with knowing and learning (thoughts). In order to understand nothingness, look at the wall and dont name, label and think anything. Where are you, where is the enlightenment, dreamer, dream, birth ? There is nothing there, because anything you say, think, label is something. That emptiness or nothingness is you. Thats the reason why i am saying nothingness is .

Is nothing but is. after that you realize the nothingness, the mind starts again his work and you realize the something. You say that the something is nothing. But how ? The something is a dream so it's a dreamer. The nothingness is a being. If you remove all the mind , only the nothingness is still there, but the nothingness is , because you are still there, you are the nothingness. I have to go deeper because I don't understand, but the nothingness is not only nothingness

the mind is over all memory. without memory there is void. the mind is partly real, since that memory exists, be it a wave in infinite nothingness, or whatever. when you say it is not real you mean it is not permanent, but as long as the wave vibrates, it exists somehow. the question is to understand as deeply as possible what it is, to be able to relax its pressure, because the mind is that create the illusion of isolation

A thought that appears in the nothingness. Exactly like a thought that apears in your mind to you in the nothingness between 2 thoughts. How it appears? Look it, it have a shape, a movement, even it's only a thought. In the moment when it is formed from the nothingness, it became real, like the nothingness is real too. So the nothingness must be something. It's the same to say, the illusion is nothing because it comes from the nothingness, or say, the nothingness is something because the illusion came from the nothingness

Ultimately it all (dream.. Waking.. Psychedelic etc) appears within the nothingness of deep sleep. So nothingness is the most real and rock bottom of all states of being.

If you and the sun have the consistence of a thought , where is the difference, or the problem? For you and for me the sun is there burning since millions of years, and now many thoughts are being created in our mind, from the nothing. They exist until they get dissolved in the nothing, like the sun and the universe. They are like waves created in the nothingness. No one knows how or why

My current view is that the physical body is already an information avatar even at the personal stage of development. The Wolfram Physics Project, which I believe is correct, shows that reality is made of only space which in turn is a web of nothingness! So what we perceive as atoms and molecules are merely shapes of space which in turn is a web of empty points connected to each other. And my idea is that when the level of consciousness increases enough it can start to modify the physical body by restructuring the vacuum energy of space.

@Adamq8great report! That question could be the ego mixed with the god conciousness? I do that question like ego, conciousness exist, but why? How? It's like one dimension and are more? What the hell is the conciousness? Why there is a nothingness that is ?

We need to develop a healthy, functioning ego before we can transcend it. So there are two different usages for 'self love' . One is honest and innocent in a sense and the other is narcissistic and self important, full of vanity and pride. We need the self importance of a healthy self esteem and only then go about purifying the self importance out of it until we experience the nothingness of the false personality in us that is full of mechanical associations and reactivity. This usually marks the beginning of the experience of being or as Jesus said " having our being". I'm speaking from personal experience here also. I went into some of these harsher exercises while still being a somewhat unstable character years ago. Sometimes I'm still uncertain about the gains I've made. I can say without a doubt that I'm not as negative or violent as I used to be which definitely has resulted in an actual felt sense of being more stable compared with the past. For those who may have been following along. I felt the need to express this to save my last few entries from appearing too harsh or self contradictory. Nicoll refers to self love with a negative connotation,,,, Its tough when life is experienced as an ongoing depression or an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes the harsher methods in small doses can do some good. If you can genuinely pull off making fun of your own self pity while in that condition, it's amazing the state changes one can rapidly go through. But in dealing with others who are in a fragile condition, heart felt empathy should be the rule but definitely not pity. That's another thing I appreciated about Castenada's languaging. Divine Love he refers to as "the place of no pity". And usually a state of anger lies between depression and vibrancy. So if you witness a family member getting rather harsh with another, don't be too quick to condemn them. Their intuitive actions may have a genius quality in pushing the right keys in order to get another family member out of a funk. It seems to be an awful fine line though,,,, I don't know how true it is but I once heard a story about the Cosmic trickster Carlos Castenada. One of his girlfriends called him out concerning his own self importance and by some quirky rule within his group, she had authority to give him a particular practice. It turned out that he worked incognito, as a dishwasher, in some greasy spoon cafe, somewhere in the U.S. southwest for three solid years in order to help him overcome his own self importance.

If you have a ego death you ll realize that it's no time, that the mind is creating the time. It's not like a time that never ends, it's a moment that is stopped, without begining or end because it's not moving. Same time you will realize that there is nothing, that the mind is creating all the reality. How could be that? I don't know. For me was really unpleasant, trauma, but right now my mind crash and I realized that I am, when I was the void, the nothingness, I was. The void is void but "is" . It's no concept for that.

In a moment I realized of a thing. There is the void, there is nothingness, there isn't time. But I am.

True in a way but not in other. You as individual exist in the same way that a thought exist. In the same moment that a thought appears in the nothingness, it exist. Call it illusion, or as you want, but until it dissolves, it is something. Not nothing.

5 minute highlights video which shows Bashar's deep understanding of reality. Reminded me of Leo's video on nothingness. Very good for contemplation.

I don't accept this as a teaching because some enlightened guy said it. I became directly conscious of it. I'm conscious of the absolute truth. and it's nothing. Nothing is without distinctions. It has no inherent distinctions. If you imagine it as love and peace.. It is. If you imagine it as misery and evil.. It is. But ultimately it is just nothing.. Other than what you imagine it is. Actually there aren't any inherent goodness or evil in anything. It's all in your head. The absolute is nothing. Nothing can appear as anything. It appeared to Jesus as love. It appeared to buddha as silent formlessness. It appeared to Mohammed as an ultimate dominant force with infinite power. It appeared to Krishna as all formed things. That's the manifesting aspect. The Godhead.. The ultimate reality in it's purest actual eternal unchanging beingness is just pure nothingness.

What matters: "The word “nothingness” means “nonexistence, emptiness”; the dictionary adds “death.” “Emptiness” means “concerning nothing; meaningless.” “Void” means “without effect”. The enlightened teachers tell us that nothingness is the final or ultimate reality. Not final in the sense our lives are final, but ultimate in the sense of fundamental, or real; beyond which nothing more can be said. There being not two things which are real or fundamental, nothingness is what is not unreal—as are all other things. All that we take to be existent is not “nothingness”. When one genuinely comes to recognize the truth of this description, it is as good as acknowledging that one is dead, or not “living”: non-existent. Yes, there are the appearances; but the comprehension is that they are not the reality. The reality is that appearances are meaningless. When one perceives that he is nonexistent, or “dead” to all but appearances, what can be a trouble? Can any apparent situation really matter? Even if it were to seem to matter, is this not simply just an appearance? To one who is aware of this, it is clear that nothing really matters!" -- Robert Wolfe https://ajatasunyata.com/

Yeah yeah, well said. All is happening right now, right now for ever in the perpetual no time. But in the no time and the nothingness the illusion is happening!

That loa is a belief, that there are other people who do or don’t “believe it”, and then that it is something that could be learned & used...are reactionary thoughts. If those are breathed through & not acted upon, it can begin to be seen that loa is no more and no less what has been the case for you all along. It is descriptive of how reality is functionally appearing. What is referred to as ‘experience’ is one whole, which appears via....nothingness...vibration...particles...one whole experience (extremely condensed version). The “person” is just vibration, and is of the experience, not separate of it. ‘They’re’ a ‘condition maker’, ‘in the middle’ of an unconditional reality, which what you really are is appearing as (The One vibrating & illuminating being the one whole experience). The first step to seeing this is already the case, is noticing your vibration (state of mind / outlook / attitude / intention / how you feel generally) is indicative of what’s happening (literally, what you are creating) in your life. It’s seemless. If that’s too big of a paradigm leap, study quantum mechanics. The initial challenge of realizing loa, is one’s own karma, and that there are not multiple beings / people. (Can’t attract for another...which is really clear throughout this thread.)

You haven't broke it. You can stop and live in the collective consciousness illusion, you will break it if you keep tripping. You can see some people on this forum, realized they were nothing and became depressed, kept experiencing nothingness from the ego etc. They truly broke the game lol. But breaking the game doesn't make you happy. It makes you feel empty. It is your call after all. I personally quit all that stuff i had seen enough after 30 trips. I answered many questions, but my biggest one was if there is life after death... Little did i know lol ;D

Furthermore: The "eternally complete consciousness," a. k. a. God/Goddess/Self is the Infinite One proclaimed by mystics from every tradition. Direct knowing of the One Consciousness dissolves the self who would be the "knower." There is no one standing apart from the One to bear it witness when awakening occurs. Rather, the individual self is understood to be an illusion of a separate identity. All duality ceases to have meaning; there is no opposition or division anywhere. In the deepest sense, no one can awaken to this truth. Becoming Self-Realized is the experience of knowing there never was and never will be anyone to become enlightened, and that nothing but Consciousness IT-Self is eternally real. Mystics throughout the ages have struggled to convey this apparently logic-defying Reality which seems to be saying that nobody is there when satori/samadhi occurs. But that is just it -- there is no body, there is only the One Eternal Self, the true Self who we all are. In this highest sense, we do not each have a distinct and separate Atman/Self. Rather, we are individuations, creative expressions of a Single Being. Throughout my life this knowledge has followed me as a reminder that nothing in this world is entirely as it seems, particularly not my own ego-self. The few people I've personally met who awakened to the "you don't exist, nothing is real, nobody you love is real" Source/Self have been mentally and emotionally eviscerated by the experience. Yet for me, while still in the egoless God/Self state, there was also a spontaneous shift into the joy that Nancy later discovered was the second half of the equation. So I didn't spend years working through "issues" to get to that completion. My joy came during the experience of God/Self's ecstatic love for all creation -- even while acutely aware that all creation is maya, dreamstuff, nothingness. So I came "back" from it both reverberating with love and shattered by the knowledge of God/Self's solitary predicament. Reconciling God/Self knowledge with just about any other facet of existence was a humongous challenge. For a very long time, although I continued to function normally on the surface, I was in a twilight world where nothing, including myself, seemed to have any substance. I pretended not to know what I knew, and I was ever in search of an illumined soul who might somehow help me bear the weight of my secret knowledge. There was always an element of absurdity in the attempt to find someone who understood. I was ever aware that "I" in the encapsulated form of a human El Collie was a hollow shell, a clever pretense that Consciousness used to deliberately disguise itself. I knew why the disguise was necessary, while at the same time, I knew there was nothing which could be hidden and no one to hide from. I had the acute sense that I was a transparent vessel through which God plaintively sought relief from being God. I found myself filled with tender envy for those who believed in a God who was "other" -- a deity they could adore from a distance, sweetly enfolded in a relationship of child to Father or lover to Beloved. The God that had exposed IT-Self to me could neither be approached nor escaped from. Trying to come to terms with my lasting sense that nothing was real, I went on a rampage of reading all the religious and occult literature of every sect and creed I could find in hopes that I might come across some piece of wisdom that would rescue me from the immensity of what I knew. I found what I had experienced being described over and over again, couched in myriad symbols and semantics. The God I experienced had not set up the universe as a labyrinthine game of solitaire, the sole purpose of which was to find the way back to the starting point and win. The game, if one would call it that, is infinite, and both poles are necessary: self as individual and Self as Cosmic Source; world as Self-creation and world as everlasting mystery; yin and yang in eternal embrace. "One has to live in the two extremes; like the snake, up and down, right and left," wrote Jung. "One cannot take the road of life without taking both sides of it because one side alone would lead to a standstill; if one wants to live one must endure the opposites because the way is two-fold." (from The Visions Seminar) I had no idea at the time of my realization that so many others throughout history had experienced this same awakening. Even if I had known, the last thing I wanted or needed to do after my enlightenment was to proclaim myself any kind of advanced soul. This would have been in contradiction to the realization itself, since it had been made wholly clear to me that at the ultimate level, there was no one in existence but the One, and that even God-asleep-to-God in so many "dream" forms of multiplicity was by divine design. There was no one else for me to attempt to awaken. "On seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so," Alan Watts aptly put it. "In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek." (from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) Years after I had this experience I came across a Hassidic Jewish teaching that God needs man as much as man needs God, and this is definitely true. God needs creation as much as creation needs God, just as all of us need each other. We were created to be a loving universal family and to be beloved children of God forever. Yet the paradox is that although we have been "created" as eternal souls, we have never left the mind of God and in that sense we don't really exist, we're just God-thoughts. In some of the Eastern religions, they don't speak of God (or Goddess), but of "Self" because there is a level where there isn't anything to be drawn into the Light, there is just One mind dreaming the universe. "The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window," said Aziz Nasafi. "According to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world." This single "spirit" is the Self/Source addressed by the Katha Upanishad: "Smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest, this Self forever dwells within the hearts of all." The same spirit/Self/God is, as Joan Borysenko writes (in The Fire in the Soul), "present in all things, all experiences." http://web.archive.org/web/20130606091318/http://www.elcollie.com/st/god.html

Recently I’ve been experiencing a breakthrough regarding Time and its implication. I am not in a state of clarity all the time but rather is pushed into it when suffering occurs. !!!!For starters, human language is incapable to relay the feeling or inner perception. But I will try as hard as I can. Please do not be too hard on me, I will be using words like "me", "I", "yours", "mine". Nothing here is mine or yours and it is shocking. Shortly after becoming “nothingness” in my direct experience on September 12th, I fell into the conceptual abyss of time. It became clear to me that if nothing has happened but only appeared as it has, there is only a present moment, time is not real. You carry this body in the 3D space (it is also an illusion, btw), it’s moving but on the background of “your” awareness, there is always stillness. It literally feels like I hit the wall and the motion of time in my thoughts has come to an end. The only representation my mind can create is this: ------>| Where the vector (------>) is thought about “my personal history” aka identity and its past and the wall ( | ) is this present moment. For the ego it is terrifying. Quite frankly I am not sure how to process this. This realization creates anxiety, the desire to hold still and do nothing. It disrupts my ability to plan ahead, dream, hope, and make any kind predictions. When thinking about the future it becomes blank/nothing. As of right now, I have this perception of the body in the 3D space and my thoughts. I am disoriented because my ego used to identify itself with a future/past when making any plans and creating hopes. It is scary because when nitpicking a thought there is no ego really, just a present moment that catches these thoughts’ frequencies (including the thought about “me”) as radio waves. I don’t believe in the thought story anymore. It is shocking. Because I clearly see how this illusion, call it ego, creates a time continuum and a personal story to function normally, to survive. When ego cannot cling to the time, it’s slowly dying, there is no story for it to hold on. Any thought that arises about the future is rejected automatically because I see that it is just a thought and the so-called future will never happen the way thoughts present it. Now…try to really grasp it and see what will happen. You'll be in panic. I’m experiencing this horrific fear. Of what? Of ambiguity and uncertainly, for the major part because I am very confused about this experience. The best word to describe my mental state would be confusion or disorientation. Also, the feeling that I am going slightly insane. However, this present moment is THE ONLY SAFE PLACE to be to avoid the suffering that is caused by the thought about the illusory future. This is my only escape. Appearance, call it "reality", is a quicksand of thoughts that create ego and time. There is only appearance, nothing really happens, and impossible by default. I do not claim anything here, just sharing. I am still confused and can not wrap my mind around it.