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I've recently realized that the reason that I've felt as though I already have some understanding of what enlightenment is like because I underwent depersonalization/derealization back in high school when I tried weed and began smoking regularly. According to Shinzen Young, DP/DR is like the evil twin of enlightenment. Based on the other perspectives I've seen on DP/DR, the experience is incredibly dark. It's some weird sort of "half-realized" state where the ego doesn't entirely surrender itself and the person begins to see the flimsiness of reality and the movie-like qualities of life. My own experience of it nearly destroyed my life, although I didn't know what was happening to me at the time. This makes me wonder whether guys like Jed Mckenna or Steven Norquist whose interpretation on enlightenment is much darker than guys like Echart Tolle are "wrong" in their interpretation of nonduality or if their's different forms of truth-realization or if all these people just have a mental illness. It's all quite confusing.

The next level vision is becoming a Sage. You should be always asking how can you get the most out of life! Ask yourself “what is the best life possible for a human being?” This answer is available to everyone of us but no one taught us. The greatest human beings on earth were not entrepreneurs, celebrities, athletes, political leaders, CEOs, engineers, nor academics, nor self-help teachers; THEY WERE SAGES AND MYSTICS. Great for us is who is getting the most juice out of life, not the status and money and stupid stuff. What does it mean to be a sage? They are people like Buddha, Christ, Heraclitus, Socrates, Marcos Aurelius, Confucius, Rumi, Yogananda, Ghandi, Ramana Maharshi, The Dalai Lama, Osho, Sadhguru, Ken Wilber, Peter Ralston and so on. It is not a matter of success or achievement; it is a quality of self-mastery (not a meditation master but a TRUE MASTER OF BEING HUMAN, A MASTER OF UNDERSTADING REALITY AND LIFE). These people can really enjoy life as it is. Key qualities of a sage: - Commitment to Truth - Commitment to Consciousness, Goodness and Love and embodiment of them effortlessly - Turn inwards to transform themselves - This is well beyond enlightenment Vision of The Modern Sage We are taking Eastern Nonduality and we are paring that with the Ancient Greek Philosopher and a bit of artist/scientist. It is the modern Renaissance Man. He had mastered consciousness, but he has also a deep conceptual understanding of life and reality too. It is a union of the left and right brain and you don’t want to do it in a way that you are living in a cave but you use your understanding of the world to solve real world problems. YOU ARE IN THE WORLD. You are highly creative and productive. What a Sage is not He is not a smart and cold intellectual or academic who lives in theory. A sage is not an ideological crusader. How to become a Sage? The vision is more important than the how. You will figure it out in the process. If you have a strong and juicy vision, the how will solve by itself. START WORKING ON DEEPENING THIS VISION! Set your top value as Truth and Understanding (Truth for Truth’s sake). A radical turning inwards is necessary; you will need to free yourself from materialism. Also, there has to be a purification of your body, mind, emotion and habits. As you turn inwards, you will develop a strong energy body. It means that you can take emotions that are coming and you alchemize it, you convert them into love and Truth. Also what is required is massive theoretical learning. Osho read 150,000 books! Sometimes people think that they should only meditate because reading books is bullshit but this is really misguided. There is much more understanding to be had beyond enlightenment. You will need to look for the juicy knowledge. Exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness is crucial for the sage (you can do this with psychedelics, special breathing or meditation techniques and so forth). Being creative is important for a sage; listening to that muse and living that out, benefiting the world (the Life Purpose Course). You will also need to develop unconditional love and compassion for the suffering of others. Also, to become a sage you will probably want to help others raise their awareness and that will definitely merge with your Life Purpose, one way or another. Be careful because there are tons of ways that awareness can be raised. WE NEED PEOPLE TO INFUSE THESE CAREERS, FIELDS AND BUSINESSES WITH CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS. This vision is not for everybody. Objections What about Life Purpose? Don’t take becoming a sage or enlightenment as stopping you from having a life purpose. That would be failing to embrace paradox. Enlightened people are the most alive human beings on earth and purpose drive people ever! The Life Purpose teaches you how to be creative and create a career; find that! You don’t want to be enlightened and working on 7/11. You want to be enlightened and creating stuff, self-expressing! Becoming a sage is a personal purpose, don’t confuse it with career purpose. All of this is an illusion? Why work on that? Don’t get this wrong. To master yourself you need to take this enterprise really fucking seriously. You have to be after understanding, not success. Since this is a difficult goal, you will need a longer term horizon (10 years +). What is the other alternative rather than becoming sage? You have no better alternative than becoming a sage!

@Beyond Words Nonduality means everything is infinitely interrelated. It's not like consciousness is one thing, reality is another thing, meditation is a third thing, and enlightenment is a fourth thing. IT'S ALL ONE INFINITE THING! The distinctions you make between things constitute reality. And all these distinctions are arbitrary. It's like you're partitioning an infinite-sized hard drive. How many partitions does an infinite-sized hard drive have? And of course scientific method is a part of S. Otherwise it couldn't exist S includes everything possible.

Thoughts: Something has changed. I got the feeling few days ago, now it is not so strong but I can still relate to it. I do not know what. Something is wrong with me, with the self. Not in bad manner. Strange. I flinch when I get deeper in SDS or self-inquiry, something or nothing is there. It seems to me that when I actually become mindfull for longer time I am actually alive. Imagine what life was like when we were very small kids, when we knew only few words. Everything was knew. We did not even knew how to move with our bodies well. Every sight, every sounds, every small was new. Now, everything is sorted. I can put everything I see in a box, name it, thats why time runs so quickly. Mindfulness... Would you ever send somebody to eternal torture? Even somebody who did something bad in your eyes? I would not, I would not send even Hitler to eternal torture, even if he was 100x worse. Why? I think that lot of people underestimate the longness of eternity. Take afterlife that Christians promise for example. Lets say that you consider physical one where you can do stuff. What are you going to do? Well you have eternity so you can just do nothing for the first billion of years, nothing wasted. Then you can meet with all people that are in heaven, that is around 100 billion people right now, you can learn all languages, you can try everything you ever wanted, you can find new things, explore and so on. What do you do then? Well you have just finished, it took you few quintillions of years because you do it really mindfully and try to enjoy every piece of afterlife. You are nowhere close to eternity, the afterlife did not even started in a sense. What do you do then? You can do everything but you will ALWAYS end up with some end (yes you could start to learn Pi digits). What then? This is why I think death has a meaning and afterlife is completely pointless, you will be happy? And what? Afterlife without the option to end it, I think I would hate that. Which gets me to the point I wanted to make, how can anybody wish to send someone to hell = eternal torture? It did actually happened to me.. the thing is that human can not get close to imagining eternity and why I would never wish to send even Hitler in hell, that is worse than well, everything else. (Considering the usual moral code I use during my day). (What nonduality says is way different then physical type of afterlife)

@Leo Gura So... S = {Consciousness, Reality, Non-Duality, Meditation, Self-Inquiry} Where S is Enlightenment Scientific method ∉ S Set theory, category theory and its relationship with nonduality and the Absolute Infinite set sound awesome. Thank you Leo!

@Beyond Words Set theory & category theory. Did you know that Georg Cantor (father of set theory) discovered the Absolute Infinite set? He called it God. And he was right That's as close to God as you're likely to get conceptually. Shinzen Young told me category theory (basically a more generalized and expanded set theory) pairs very nicely with nonduality. You seem like a passionate fellow, so my advice to you regarding life purpose is to aim to craft a very customized purpose that sits at the intersection of at least 2 if not 3 or 4 sciences/fields. Then you'll be in an awesome position. Crave out your niche. Your niche probably hasn't been invented yet. YOU invent it! But it will take time. So don't be too insistent on knowing your exact niche right now. For you it's gonna be a multi-year-long process of doing research, study, and experimentation, as you hone in more and more on your niche. Rather than asking us, or trying to figure this out theoretically, instead, you'll want to follow the breadcrumb trail of your greatest passion. What are the top 3 things you love to study the most? What top 3 fields excite you the most? Figure that out, and then study the shit out of all them. And then your intuition will tell you where to go from there, and you will invent a niche for yourself. This is sorta like passion mixology

@Lisaya Nonduality means there's nothing in control.

School/college has all the wrong focus. No attention paid to what really matters: practical psychology, nonduality, self-mastery, holistic understanding, love, consciousness.

Modern folks tend to re-invent the wheel a lot in ignorance when it comes to psychology or spirituality. It's ironic because psychology and spirituality have been fully understood by humans since over 5000 years ago. It's very simple and it's virtually unanimous. The core problem is simple: ego The core solution is also simple: realize that ego is an illusion God is what remains when ego is realized to be an illusion. There cannot be true freedom until this is realized. God is not a set of patterns or universal laws. God is not logic. God is indiscriminate and unbounded, whereas patterns and laws and logic are limitations, facets of Absolute Infinity. This technique they share may be helpful on a practical level, but remember, there are much deeper and more profound things to discover. If we're gonna boil down reality to one thing, it should be CONSCIOUSNESS, not logic. What this video is doing is sorta making a weak version of spirituality palatable to rational-minded people who normally dismiss spirituality and religion because of its packaging. But actually these people do not understand the deep core of all religious and mystical traditions and how practical and therapeutic it is. Modern culture needs things packaged in "logic" in order for people to swallow it. Which is actually a big part of the problem because logic is a tool of the ego. The problem with trying to rationalize nonduality/reality is that it will always ultimately fail, because rationalization is conceptual in nature, and reality is beyond concepts. What would really help people watching this video is to let go of their need for logic, concepts, thinking, rationality, science, and evolution. Now that would be a really counter-intuitive move, and lead to an amazing transformation!

Yes, nihilism is a good counter-point. Several problems may arise however: 1) Confusing nihilism with reality or the nondual point of view. Giving people the wrong impression and leading them to think that nonduality is a philosophical position. 2) Have you actually thought through the radical implications of nihilism? Really think it through. Try to actually embody it. 3) Many people are turned off by it, so it's not good from the perspective of marketing.

From the Orange stage, paranormal phenomena cannot exist. Orange is ego-driven, and paranormal phenomena are very subtle. So the ego cannot discern them, because it dismisses them as irrational, impossible, and "pseudo-scientific", and also paranormal phenomena are very difficult to employ towards materialistic needs or desires like money or sex, in the way that stage Orange envisions (although some rotten mystics still manage to do it). So you're not likely to use psychic powers to win the lottery. The reason Sadhguru -- or any other masterful teacher of nonduality -- do not openly discuss or encourage paranormal development -- is because they know that it can be a path of delusion and distraction. It's like shiny object the ego likes to chase and try to abuse. Also, people who have paranormal abilities do not go around talking about it with random strangers because they would just be dismissed as New Age kooks. But if you think back into your own life, you can actually probably remember meeting a person who told you something paranormal, but you dismissed it as naivete on their part. Well, you might have to re-examine that judgment. Maybe it was right under your nose the whole time, but you ignored it. I've personally met multiple highly conscious/spiritually developed people who have paranormal abilities. But they consider it totally normal. And they're very grounded and rational people. Peter Ralston, for example, used psychic abilities to help him in this martial arts to win the full-contact championship in Asia in the 70's. People got killed in those tournaments sometimes, Bloodsport-style. He told me he could "know" the intent of his attacker prior to the attacker himself knowing it! How can you lose if you know every move a second in advance? Well... he never lost, from what I hear You do not wanna mess with him! Some of his opponents would refuse to even enter the ring after watching him warming up! Lol He doesn't mention it much because he knows its a distraction for your ego. Now you want psychic powers to abuse. But it doesn't really work that way. Almost every highly advanced enlightened person I've met has reported some kind of paranormal abilities or phenomena to me. Not that I explicit try to drag it out of them. Usually it's pretty subtle stuff. And it just gets mentioned as casual aside. As in, "Oh, yeah... by the way, I can heal people." What?!!! In the Eastern traditions, Sorcerer Yogis are quite a common path. Some people devote their entire lives to it. In the West, we have various schools and long-running traditions of occultism. It all makes a hell of a lot of sense if you just study and research broadly enough, practice meditation, and have an enlightenment experience or two. Reality is not a classical Newtonian physical system. It's a mystical, infinite, conscious singularity that defies all logic. But don't believe me. Go discover for yourself what's true.

Yeah... This guy sure is doing a great job of NOT understanding nonduality. 1) Evil is a thought. It doesn't exist in the external world. Nothing is ever evil except in so far as it threatens a particular human ego. This is not a opinion, this is reality. And it's obvious to anyone with sufficient consciousness. Evil can only exist relative to an ego. 2) Solipsism is not nonduality. The guy in the video is committing the classic naive mistake of conflating nonduality with an ideology. It's not an ideology and never can be. To read a book about nonduality does not create any true knowing. 3) He claims that for solipsism (nonduality) there is no objective truth. This is false. There is ONLY Absolute Truth, which is Absolute Infinity. It's not merely subjective. It's utterly universal. So universal the human mind cannot even fathom it. 4) It is a fact that nothing can truly be known. We don't actually know what anything is. Everything is unknown. The mind only spins stories about it. 5) Evil stems from judgments and the kind of mindset this guy espouses. He doesn't understand unconditional love, nor does it seem he's ever experienced it because that requires high degrees of awareness which he doesn't seem to have. 6) This guy is ideological. 7) The woman was just being polite (and compassionate) with him not to flare up his obvious ego. 8) To a naive ego, nonduality appear egotistical, but actually the opposite is true. When I claim I am God, that's actually a very humble position. But the ego likes to attack that as arrogant. It's sad to see modern skeptics executing skepticism so poorly. He would be better off applying his own skepticism to himself. True skepticism means: suspension of all belief or judgment about truth, because it cannot be reliably ascertained through the mind. A real skeptic would be skeptical of judgments of evil. After all, how would he know a thing was truly evil? By what method? Moral judgments are the least agreed upon. 30 mg of 5-meo up his nose would solve his whole problem Nonduality can only be found directly through experience, not theorizing.

This thread is being locked. Here's why: No. There will be no spiritual warfare here. It's juvenile and unproductive. I have no interest in engaging in it, nor do I have any interest in moderating such debates. I have no problem with anyone who wants to constructively discuss nonduality, but not for purposes of debate or self-promotion. You can do that somewhere else. Please keep in mind that the ultimate form of nonduality doesn't nitpick and fight with duality or other methods of nonduality, but comfortably includes all and understands the diversity and challenges of any teaching that tries to get across something so challenging, nuanced, and ethereal. I encourage anyone who is a student of nonduality and really cares about truth, to not make this about anyone or anything but yourself. Turn inward and explore your own behaviors, your own consciousness, your own projections, your own ego. A huge trap in this work is making it about personalities, sects, philosophy, rivalry, taking sides, questioning other's motives, name-dropping, etc. Resist that urge and seek to understand the full picture of what's going on. I don't exclude myself from this advice. Stay open and do not make this journey ideological. There are MANY valid and diverse forms of nondual practice and theory. No one form is suitable for all people.

@Travis @Feeble Dave Hey guys. Correct, no real prior experience with any psychedelics. The only significant experience I have had before was drugs was weed (2-3 years regular smoking)... obviously this did in no way prepare me for this. Like I mention in my initial post, I am in this purely to supplement my meditation practice; I had never considered psychedelics a genuine aid to this practice (always associated psychedelics with hallucinations etc). Leo'a video changed this for me; as I started looking into it this was the first time I learned about the "void" etc. in literature... this was a bit of an "aha" moment for me... I actually had experienced this state in meditation in January 2016 (discussed in original post). For me personally, my strict meditation practice as well as contemplative nonduality reading was my only preparation. At this point in my practice, I know what it is to let go... all those reservations you have in your head about the drug are just that. I think if you were ready, you'd have a gut feel - if that makes sense. Having experienced the boundaries of my body fade in meditation, and my awareness expand, gave me a lot of confidence when reading the trip reports... i can't say I've experimented with higher doses yet (and probably won't be for a few weeks), nor can I say I've optimised my snorting technique (Leo's post above), but still what I experienced on 12mg was similar (as predicted) to that which I had experienced in meditation. One worry I did have though was that I'd slip into an unconscious where maybe I'd start shouting or screaming or something ridiculous like you read in the bad trip reports. To mitigate this worry, I did this in an empty detached house, in the middle of the night (I feel calmest around the ). In lieu of an experienced trip sitter, I did this alone. My advice; be patient - don't rush into doing it. Find somewhere where you can feel cosy, comfortable, warm, safe and secure. Put your mind to rest as best you can. Get an accurate set of mg scales. Start with a very small dose 1-2mg. Then 5mg. Then 10mg. Don't jump straight into the heavy weights just in case!! Once it's snorted be ready to say "fuck it, I've done it, let's go with whatever happens". Let whatever you experience happen. Have a sick bucket ready just in case... . Prepare, but at the same time don't stress yourself out about it. If you start off at the shallow end and go into this with some maturity, I'm sure you will be OK. A good and consistent meditation practice and donduality contemplative work is your best long-term prep in my opinion. In regard to the heart question, this simply wasn't a worry of mine, although maybe it should have been... I am very active (ran 10 half marathons this year), and follow a vegan diet... rapid heart beat in exercise is something I'm very used to... my diet also gives me confidence in my heart health. In my experience with the substance, the fast heart beat was noticeable, but nothing on what you might experience say running a steep gradient uphill... although if you're not used to it, i can see why this might freak some people out a lot - particularly if you're in a unusual "trip" state so to speak. I imagine that might feel most unnerving! Hope this helps, like I said before, I'm not an experienced psychonaut by any means... but I would consider myself psychologically stable & mature.

Regarding loneliness: this can be a common pitfall. If I were you, I would make sure to read up on some good litterature on nonduality, to make sure I don't fall into the common pifalls: nihilism etc. Here is a link that addresses the problem of utter loneliness: https://books.google.no/books?id=DBpDDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT131&lpg=PT131&dq=solipsism+and+the+question+of+others+after+awareness&source=bl&ots=2yln5gPsMf&sig=MhOJ2Iao0F6HRKMonpO8Gddpw70&hl=no&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCqIzd1u7PAhXLCCwKHd7RD_AQ6AEIJjAB#v=onepage&q=solipsism%20and%20the%20question%20of%20others%20after%20awareness&f=false

@jse There's no contradiction really. Most people will never become enlightened through 5-meo because they do not combine it properly with study and practice of nonduality. Like I said in the 5-meo video, a few trips on 5-meo will NOT make you enlightened. I have yet to meet a traditional non-dual teacher who has tried heavy doses of 5-meo. So the fact is, they do not know what 5-meo is capable of. Nor do you, unless you've tried it. So keep your mind open. Also, 5-meo should not be confused with psychedelics at large. It's a totally different beast. Lumping 5-meo together with "psychedelics" is like lumping together NASA's Saturn V rocket with toy rockets for kids you find in hobby shops. One is capable of breaking out of Earth's gravity consistently, the other is not. When I said that psychedelics will not produce enlightenment, that is generally true for most people. And my top concern was that people listening not get deluded off their self-inquiry paths. It's very hard to talk about all this stuff with you guys because almost no matter what I say, it will get abused by one group of people or another. Those who hate psychedelics will abuse it. Those who love psychedelics will abuse it. Because that's the hallmark of low quality consciousness. It doesn't listen with nuance. It seems very difficult for people do the following 2 things in combination: Self-inquiry High doses of 5-meo Instead what people wanna do is take sides and pick ideological fights. But I guarantee that if you did both, consistently, your life would transform in unimaginable ways very quickly.

@Key Elements I just don't see what spiral dynamics has to do with afterlife. Spiral dynamics is about THIS life. So is nonduality. It's about the NOW. Speculating about the afterlife isn't very practical or wise. You are still speaking from a position of duality. "There was blackness... I was pulled through a black hole... etc". That's all duality. That's all phenomena. This is the trap of spiritualism and powerful mystical experiences, they tend to create some sort of Cosmic Other, and then fantasies about it. What I would say it that if you delved deeper into exploring the NOW, deconstructing the ego and all phenomenal experience, you would stop talking about afterlives and all questions would be answered in a way that you cannot presently imagine. And this would seem far superior to you than all the speculations and illusions you subscribed to before.

@Key Elements Once you become conscious that everything is nondual, you can have all the phenomena and lives and deaths you want, and it doesn't matter because it's all you. You don't think of yourself as a body or soul or mind at that point. All of that is seen as illusion. Every single phenomena is seen through. You have to first experience that consciousness is Absolutely Infinite. Then you'll understand. Until then, you will not, and you will get attached to various phenomena, whether it be this life or a past life or some idea you have of a future life. These kinds of considerations only make sense in a dualistic model, which is utterly false. If Coral stage means anything, it should resemble something like the realization and embodiment of complete nonduality. Which means the end of all questioning and speculating about past or future lives. Nonduality is the ultimate end of the road. EVERYTHING BECOMES YOU! The completeness is TOTAL! ABSOLUTELY INFINITE! The significance of this realization cannot be overstated. Not only did you have past lives, and future lives, you LITERALLY ARE absolutely EVERYTHING that ever existed or could possibly exist, all of it SIMULTANEOUSLY. From every bacteria and virus to all the dinosaurs in history, to every creature and non-creature that will ever be born or imagined in all the fiction novels written by all the humans and non-humans until the heat-death of this universe, and all the universes that could ever exist. EVERYTHING IS YOU! And nothing is you. What else is there to know? It's everything you could have possibly wanted. It's infinity!

irrelevance implies that there is relevance. true emptiness (nonduality) doesn't imply either. it is your ego that is projecting this negative feeling of meaninglessness. meaninglessness only has value when there is the underlying assumption that other meaningful things also exist. if you take away the whole conceptual paradigm, life becomes very free.

The Vampire's Code You know how in the movies, vampires cannot enter into your house without first being invited inside? Be like a vampire when it comes to discussing nonduality. Avoid talking about this stuff with friends and family unless they specifically ask you about it. There are lots of sleepwalkers out there that are simply not ready to hear this stuff. It may cause them to lash out in a somnambulistic rage, or in a perverted way, make the "principles" of nonduality somehow fit in their own egoic belief system(s). If you do preach nonduality to friends and family, you may want to dig below the surface and experientially grasp why you do it. If you're honest, you may find that you yourself have twisted these teachings into your own belief system, and this is your new way of defining yourself as a separate self. There's nothing wrong with that, if that's the case. Just become aware of it. If you have the urge to talk about nonduality, that's what this forum is for. Practice the vampire's code starting today, and save yourself a lot of trouble.

It's the exact same perspective. This perspective is called nonduality/enlightenment. What's really life-changing to actually experience enlightenment, not to believe in it or to think about it. Actual enlightenment will totally blow your socks off. So work towards it. You cannot do what Tolle talks about without actually experiencing enlightenment.

@Silvester I've been reading Murakami for years, after starting meditation, I realized how he touches on solitude, meditation, self-inquiry/ meaninglessness of senses / nonduality in nearly every book he wrote. It's like he was instilling these subconsciously! But before realizing that I really enjoyed his novels too. So novels can both entertain you and help you break the boundaries, and achieve a higher state of consciousness. So if you like writing, don't stop! What you go through will find its way into your work for sure!

Study nonduality and study Islam. Have an enlightenment experience or two. It's obvious. The Sufi's have a great description of Enlightenment/Nothingness: fana al fana (the passing away of the passing away.) In the case of the Bible, it was written by followers who were clearly never enlightenment. Jesus did not write the Bible. The Bible is also contaminated by many political agendas. But even so, you can still find many references to enlightenment in the Bible if you understand what enlightenment is. Spiritual books are not written for modern scientific materialist rationalist minds. Your rationalist mindset is in many ways a modern disease. Modern humans have lost the ability to interpret symbols and metaphors, which is what all spiritual teachings are. They are not meant to be scientific because you CANNOT scientifically model Truth or God or any other deep spiritual insights. Be careful about imposing your own modern-era mindsets and biases onto cultures and peoples of 2000 years ago. They were in many ways far more advanced that we are. They were much more open to direct consciousness, whereas our heads are filled with "scientific" beliefs and models, none of which are absolutely true, and leave the mind closed to direct consciousness. Just because YOU want the Bible to say, "THIS IS ENLIGHTENMENT" doesn't mean it should. If a painting of Jesus with a halo around his head isn't glaringly obvious to you, then you really have a lot of research to do. The laws are actually not cruel but merciful, relative to the time of human history we are talking about. In those days, you could get you head chopped off on a whim. Religion actually established humane rules by which to structure civilization. Of course, in 2016, some of those laws look outdated.

Thank you. But why do people talk of "enlightenment experiences" and "nondual experiences?" Like how in your psychedelics video, you talked about how you could actually feel the nonduality. Is there a difference between enlightenment itself, and an enlightenment experience?

Oh, well, yeah. Of course you could. Look at Scientology Of course every religion is dogmatic and limited. It's a partial, incomplete understanding of nonduality. You gotta understand that 2000 years ago, given the state of humanity back then, this was a huge advance. Islam was a very peaceful and civilizing force back in the Middle East of 2000 years ago, when neighboring tribes were raping and pillaging each other left and right with no sense of decency, worshiping dozens of various deities. Today of course, it's very outdated, and there are MUCH better techniques and conceptual frameworks available for reaching enlightenment (God).