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Facets: ”I am God” No-Self Infinite Intelligence Goodness Creation Devil Nothingness Emptiness Void God-Head Fractal Absolute Infinity Infinite Power Stuff that you feel has never been talked about it Etc. States: (The many kinds of) Altered States Different types of Samadhi No-Mind Access Concentration Cessation of pain Paranormal States Psychic States Siddhis (I personally would still count this as a state)... and don’t hold back against the materialists... 3rd Eye Openings Turiya Etc. Stages/Cognition: Acclimatizing to new states and making them your default stage, what that process is like and how it relates to personal development and how one can put this into their everyday life. Stages of cognizing God post awakening.

@Shaun No. It feels like, you are in the complete black hole that you cant even see your body and stayed there billion of years. After that you forgot that you have a body that emptiness and you become one, which is emptiness again. Its just so big nothing has a place in there just you, which is endless and beginless existence. Or just close your eyes concentrate do you feel something that you cant see or touch but you feel it, it looks nothing but you feel it, multiply that feeling with billions, it completely takes over you and your concsinousness leaves this body and be ifnite emptiness(nothing is left within you). But the crazy part is when you (not this me) realize this , you understand that there is no word to explain this, because words restrick meaning of this. Its like real and unreal is exist and not exist at the same time. Like you are exist as nothing but nothingness cant be exist. I cant really describe it. Its empty but infinitly heavy and now itself. That felt like final stage, bottom or ground.

@Shaun we are just nothing, ifnite nothingness, it is not real or unreal, just nothing. Beyond the meaning of the word of nothing, it is even before the word of nothing. It has no name, but its you and you are it.

or a higher resolution? it would fit the previous image of the sightless gaze. i also have my own name for the sightless gaze...as i did that since childhood. it was something my mom and sis told me i wouldn’t even have realized i was doing it - isn’t it funny. the sightless gaze forms vision. the sightless gaze is where nothingness appears. did you stop smoking in the end?

@Nahm Not convinced it is made of love. What I'm experiencing now is not love. @Mikael89 And what can they even do? I've seriously lost all hope. I know I'm repeating myself, but I don't want this anymore. Look at it this way, we all die eventually. No avoiding that. So really it makes no difference, does it? @Jkris Can't you see how depressing what you are saying is? We don't exist. That is supposed to make existence meaningful, is it? This is not MY life is it? No enlightened master may not be suicidal. That is up to them. If they think that nothingness and not existing is liberating, then fine.

@Leo Gura I have 2 experiences which I wish to know whether they are particular to me or not: 1) I get massive massive amounts of pressure located on the 3rd eye. The pressure overwhelm's my consciousness. 2) My worldly affairs start to drop away - my stresses in life, my ideas, my opinions, my identity. My consciousness goes from being filled by my life to being filled by a massive black nothingness that has literally nothing in it. 3) My physical body starts to drop away - in that moment only the energy/prana of my body exists, but my physical form drops away. Surrendering to 2) is a bit concerning because I feel like I'm going somewhere dark and that I never will come back. I'm worried that I will develop a kundalini disease, loose my spirit or personality, or some other problem by surrendering to 2. Are my fears to be taken seriously?

IMHO the trick to spirituality is to reach that state of nothingness/no-self, but ALSO lead a full and rich life. It's a bit of a merry dance. Deny yourself to be a more fulfilled self. It's something to do with tenth Ox Herding picture and going full circle, but I'm more vague about that.

Yes. Also in the documentary, he keeps talking about the same thing. Dying. Feeling like not existing. No thoughts. Not upset. Not bored. No memories. He is DEFINITELY tapping into some aspect of nothingness/no-self. And you can see that from his equanimity, joy and happiness at his old age (making jokes and cracking up huge smiles all the time) compared to his young melancholic and driven self.

In a dream nothingness can imagine to create "I am God" topic on Actualized.org forum. ? Or find the girl Nahm suggest.

Chapter 269 Life is such a mystery Work, relationships, friendships, philosophy and spirituality are such an intimate part of life and really there cannot be a textbook formula to apply to these things and they will work out. These things will happen naturally. The problem is we get molded. We do the work that is available instead of what we want to do. We engage in a relationship which is perceived as desirable rather than having a spontaneous connection. We follow a philosophy like a pattern. I guess that's where we all go wrong. Life has to take its course naturally. And every point of the matrix you have to be prepared for it. That's pretty much what it is. I believe in a lot of the stoic concepts. I believe that life is a struggle and a lesson in heroism. Whatever you are is only as long as you live. But what you do will last forever. Life is very uncertain. Life is an uncertain reality. Therefore there cannot be a specific rule or textbook as a manual for life. The only thing that is certain about life is its uncertainty. Life is a mystery and it had to be like that because it's spiritual. It's not materialistic. The Bible is true. You have to live a godly existence. The rewards of a material existence are nothing. But the rewards of eternity are beautiful. Life is natural. Technology cannot change this or bend this. Technology cannot change universal principles. So what are we to do. The only thing that you can do as an observer of life, is to absorb the experience and cope with it and fight with it and as a stoic be brave and conquer suffering and achieve despite the challenges and be prepared to face everything that life throws. That's the stoic way of living. The only thing you have for certain is a very short period of time, today and tomorrow and you have to prepare yourself to brace the next day. That's the only manual. Look for a higher reward, a spiritual reward and not for a material reward and never think that you missed out on something. All that is a matter of perception, all that material success is very much an illusion. It's not true. Whatever you think you missed out on was nothing to begin with. Spirituality and eternity are connected and intertwined. When you truly experience spirituality, you are on a different plane where you experience beauty and love and peace and a calm and serenity and peaceful joy and acceptance. This is a highly subjective experience, and to reach there you have to be really devoted to your quest. But all the devotion is worth it. This is how my spiritual experience was I felt like I was a child playing in a playground with other kids and there was not a care in the world about anything at all. It felt so free, free from everything. (*freedom) The next thing I felt was being with someone that was deeply caring and very warm and very friendly. It was like pure love. Pure pure love. It was pure selfless love. Like an angel loving you. Like a mother who loves you. It felt like the beginning of life. There was complete non judgementalism. There was no judgment whatsoever. It was like I can just be myself. Nobody to tell me anything. No expectations of achieving something. It felt peaceful and it felt like being surrounded by all love. There was so much empathy and laughter. There was happiness. There was no place for negativity or hate. It felt like an unusual mysterious form of peace where everything came to a standstill. Like the peace that you have in a graveyard. Like nothingness. Like nothing matters. Felt like I'm an observing ocean that is observing everything around with muteness. Just simply looking.. And at the same time it felt a very strong sense of self love. Like an another identity of my own loving myself. Like a mirror image of me loving myself. It felt like a river of love. Very comforting. It was like me comforting myself. Me telling myself to be at peace. It felt like the energy of love. God is the energy of love. It felt like selfless love. It was like water, always flowing. Flowing from one point to another, never still. When it was still it was like ocean, just observing. When it was flowing it was energizing and uplifting and motivating.. It was self - healing. It was self - comforting. (Water is the knowledge and the cup is the Mind) (. (Bruce Lee already explains this a bit in the full quote: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” - Bruce Lee There are different takes on what he could have meant, depending on what the question was that led him to this statement, but if we assume he talks about life, then what he means is this: Water is formless, therefore it can adapt to every form. You, however, are often way too rigid. When a situation arises that you do not think you can handle, fear overtakes you and you degenerate into a state of helplessness. You are not adapting to your circumstances, are not dealing with the situation, and instead complain about it, and even blaming it. When the teacup situation arises you yell at it if you do not fit in right away, and blame the surroundings for shaping you into a shape that does not fit. You do not adapt. You let your past control who you are and are staying rigid in your form, which means you only fit into certain situations and crack at others. When water crashes against an object, it disperses and forms again, but when a box, for example, crashes against an object it shatters into pieces. Currently, you are like that box, trying to force yourself to adjust to different situations, shattering to pieces, breaking your own spirit, if you can’t. What Bruce Lee meant with his quote “Be like water my friend” is that you should not hold your own image so tightly. You are not your past, you are not the object people shaped you to be; you are simply water that has temporarily taken on that form. You can be successful no matter your start, can be anything you like to be and adjust to any and every situation if you just adjust and deal with things the way they come instead of wishing they were different. Stop trying to make the teacup adjust to you and adjust to the teacup instead. Problems arise all the time in life, and you can try to keep your rigid shape, smashing into the problems until one of you breaks, or you can be like water and slip through the cracks. ) It's a self healing force that is invincible because of love. It is constant, ever flowing like a fountain, it is silent like an ocean. It is the strongest form of self love. God is the embodiment of love. The spirit of love. God is a self healing force that causes your spirit or energy to be in equilibrium. That means your inner spirit becomes like water. Ever flowing, never impacted, never destroyed. When water crashes against an object, it disperses and forms again, but when a box, for example, crashes against an object it shatters into pieces. Nothing impacts water or destroys it. It remains the same. Your inner spirit forever stays the same because of the self healing force of love from God. It becomes like water. Nothing impacts. It laughs at the world. The water remains constant. No obstruction affects it or breaks it. Your inner spirit like water stays calm through everything and tides over anything. It is back up again, fully recovered even from setbacks and depression or suffering or obstacles. Imagine like your spirit is like a battery and you need a charger and God is that charger that keeps the battery up always. No enemy or obstruction can hurt the spirit. The spirit remains that way, remains like water forever. It remains stable and young and ever flowing and never drained or never down or defeated. This world is a nemesis. God is the friend. This world is a time capsule of the interaction between spirit and reality. But to take its onslaught, the spirit has to be strong and God gives that self healing strength for the spirit to recover from all the jolts of the world. The spirit continues strong into eternity. The spirit keeps self healing every time and from time to time with the energy of God. When the spirit becomes like water, then this life becomes pointless and everything starts to look pointless and unnecessary and of not much significance. Because both good or desirable or bad do not impact the spirit. It all looks irrelevant. The spirit just observes it and the spirit continues to flow. Imagine a fountain that never stops despite the disasters. It is eternally flowing impacted by nothing. Whats the point of this The spirit getting drained is really a form of sickness. It affects the body. It stresses you out. It is in constant state of suffering and agitation. Imagine using a phone with the lowest battery charge, it's really tough, The goal for the spirit is to stay stoic throughout the situations and interactions of the world. So getting drained is losing hope and not reaching the fullest potential of one's intentions. But a strong spirit moves on and achieves what the mind wanted. The soul continues on its path of purpose of creating goodness in the world and spreading light with an enormously strong spirit. Spiritual strength is a mysterious strength. It's like you are too exhausted on the bed and you feel like you just can't get up because you are so tired that you might almost faint. Yet if your spirit is strong, even in those circumstances, you will be able to get up despite the tiredness. The spirit will give you the willpower and the energy. Thus the spirit will show its power in the most impossible and insurmountable or difficult situations and circumstances where all hope is lost and where everything seems impossible. The spirit will give the energy to rise up again and to survive and tide over those extremely difficult circumstances. There are many in the world where people have survived and showed remarkable feats in surviving very difficult circumstances. It's their strong spirit at work. Scientifically their bodies under those circumstances should have shown massive damage and degradation and even a scant possibility of survival. However when examined they show miraculously or baffling level of recovery and no effect at all or very little impact and their survival and escape looks very astonishing like almost unachievable by a human. Yet they make it or made it. That's because of their power of the spirit. Their spirit like water remains unfazed, undefeated and this ever flowing spirit gives tremendous amount of strength to the body. A drained spirit cannot do this. I don't believe that this spirit creates miracles. But what I feel is that this spirit gives the strength and the ability to deal effectively with the interactions and situations of the world that are encapsulated into a phenomenon called life. Such a power the devil can never have. It's only God that gives it to the one that deserves. When you have a spiritual experience with God, your spirit becomes like water, strong, resilient, invincible,calm, matured, stable, flowing, motivating. And when you are deprived from such a spiritual experience, your spirit is empty, drained, it becomes like the wind, lacking strength and takes any direction in which it is made to go. When your spirit becomes like water, everything begins to look petty and you become a different person. You become strong and tough and resilient and things of the early nature do not matter anymore. Here we have a few definitions to better understand this concept . Life being like a time capsule of events and conditions. Earth as the earthly world of illusions and material rewards Water, representing the resilient nature of a fulfilled spirit Wind, representing the weak spirit Sky, representing eternity and the eternal guiding spirit of God and its rewards and glory of peace, joy, love and happiness. You have to be not like a wall or unemotional but like an absorbing sponge to feel the love of the eternal spirit or God. If everyone just focused on their own spirituality and the spirituality of their nearest kin, the problems of the world would end. We focus too much on the world and too little on ourselves. The world is an anomaly created out of the algorithm of many different positive as well as negative factors arising out of human perception and their clashing in reality. The Swan manual, tarot cards, the spirit exercise, contemplation exercises, parts of mind exercises, review contemplation, brail exercise.

We are looking for the ultimate truth or explanation to life. To understand ultimate truth we need to explore our ideas of what we think reality is. To explore reality we must first release any pre-conceived notions. Be aware that when you transition into the next dimension or degree of consciousness it's very radical. When people say it's like waking up from the dream, it's true however the ego (you) will not be able to understand this. To give a mental image of what the transition is like, imagine a character inside a video game. If this character lived his entire life as the video game character he is never going to understand what he looks like from the gamer's perspective. That is exactly what is happening in your life, as you move through each day, you're on this human auto-pilot. To turn off auto-pilot is very scary idea because even your own thoughts are connected to the human auto-pilot. That is what we are talking about when we say awakening. It's that ability to see from the gamer's perspective, seeing the graphics on the screen of a television from inside the television as the video-game character. The paradox however is that when you awaken and can see from a gamer's perspective that everything is just like a video-game, it will still appear from your first person perspective. A lot of people call it seeing Nothingness, but I feel as though calling it seeing the graphics of the video-game works best for me. You are so inside the game that you take the graphicness for granted and it appears static and material. Exercise 1. Imagine how this video game character is inside the game and has no idea he's being controlled by the gamer. 2. Imagine that he becomes aware of the gamer's perspective of the screen and he is able to realize he's made out of the screen's pixels. 3. Realize now that you are in the same situation, you are just like the video game character who is trying to see how he's part of the game, not separate from other pixels from a first person perspective.

@Leo Gura It took Byron Katie one evening to turn from a suicidle depressed woman to an enlightened person who was basking in nothingness and love. That experience stayed with her 33 years as of now. Sure she did three years of integration work, but her initial experience was permanent. Could the brain rewire itself that quickly? Plus, from (1), your points are true, but it’s just so rare to find relatives enlightened at the same time. 90% of those gifted teachers do not have enlightened relatives. Doesn’t that say something about the correlation between enlightened teachers having gifted genes.

There is still a you, otherwise you wouldn't suffer and put a negative meaning on nothingness/no-self.

Bit of a quandry I find myself in lately. There's no me. No identity. Nothing I could possibly do excites me. Going through all permutations of possibilities, there's no happiness because there is no me. I can't believe I wanted this. Desired this. There's no "everything is one". I don't feel oneness. I feel the opposite. Nothingness. I AM is NOTHING. Therefore nothing can make me happy. I thought it would make me happy. There is no me to be happy. I'm lost. Don't wish this for yourself. I feel lost / lonely because there is no I but there is no "I am everything". I am stuck in the middle. I really want to end my physical life. Physical life is just suffering. Everything is suffering.

How I treat others is an reflection of how I treat myself. I don't need to develop the skills to live life authentically because I already have it all inside of me now as my authentic self. The thing that holds me back is me attacking myself (which manifests as symptoms of low self worth, nervousness, anxiety, anger, sadness, regret, and unhelpful behaviour). If I become aware of an attack thought towards an outside source, there will be a corresponding attack inward on the same trait. Become aware of the quality of the trait being attacked and consciously make peace with it. Dislike of myself manifests in an obsession with external approval from others. The approval seeking self is the symptom, the attacking of myself is the root cause. Beware of blindly accepting the needy self expression - don't accept it as self, look to the deeper cause and work with that. (There is a notable shift in energy as a write this- my experience expanded, I became more present, I feel lighter, my breathing has slowed down, there is an increase in personal power, increase in contentment, less seeking, less avoidance, less turmoil- inner stillness and less emotion). I have tried to cease thoughts before but it never worked. This method seems to stop the thoughts much better so that I can enter Samadhi experience. I have just done a quick pranayama breath and opened myself upto the present moment. Deep peace, no emotion, no thought, just panoramic presence of sitting in this park on this warm spring afternoon with the sun gently warming my back. No shame, but still inhibited. Low self worth, fear, anxiety, emotional labour is not my true identity. When I say identity I mean my true nature. Fear and contraction is not my true nature. I wonder if states of bliss and peace heal and rejuvenate the body and mind? It feels as if I need a well earned break from my mind attacking me 24/7 The sadness came back. But this time I noticed that I am already present to this. That I don't need to create a watcher, that the watcher is always present and that any knowing of the watcher can only be the thought of the watcher in my mind. As thought recognizes the ever present watcher the feeling becomes more raw, more physical, more pronounced. I thought is not the watcher. I thought appears in front of the watcher and tries to identify as the watcher. But it can never identify as the watcher. The watcher is always free of what is seen. Forever free. What is the nature of the watcher? Thought is attending to investigate the nature of the ever present watcher. Ever present Untouched Still Permanent Vast Open Unlimited Unbound Unwavering Awake The light Unshakable Untouchable Unmanifest Free Absolute Reliable Consistent Unperturbed and unpreturbable Innocent Stillness itself (non conceptual stillness) Infinate depth There is a sense of peace and freedom and a shifting of the sadness as mind talks about the ever present watcher. Heart feels open, raw, sensitive, raw pain unprocessed. Body is mega relaxed but alert, sensisitive, like a big cat eyeing up it's prey. Alert but still. The watcher is manifest in the body now, permeating the body with nothingness. 3 more pranayama breaths and I'm at the end of today's journal - what I'm witnessing is indescribable.

I mean becoming conscious of Truth/God. Yes, and this is a complex and multi-dimensional thing. There is a LOT of subtle self-obsessed crap even after your first awakening. But also, realization is not just about becoming aware that you are nothing. It's also becoming aware that you are everything, and then realizing how God works through everything. So there are a lot of gems to be mined here. Actualized.org is a full-spectrum teaching. We are not merely interested in realizing nothingness here. We are interested in all dimensions of life and how they intersect with that Nothingness. That Nothingness turns out to be identical to every domain of life. How do you structure your life and society as a whole to align with your realization of Nothingness? How do you help elevate and awaken the whole world in an effective and non-pathological manner? These are the types of issues we're interested in here. We are interested in understanding what everything is and how everything interconnects. Which is a much broader scope than most spiritual teachings.

@winterknight 1. how does it relate to the present? isn't enlightment about that ? (being NOW) why past is still important 2. how does it relate to the ego/personality and concept of no-self , from my understading there in nothingness at the core, pure emptiness, so why does past ego/personality still matter - if it needs to be dissolved

Right, so this is my last post. I'm getting off here. I don't think it's healthy and I can't bear the word salad any longer. Too many questions that can't be answered. 1. If pure higher consciousness/God consciousness, is the 'natural state', why aren't we already there? Also, why can't we stay there? 2. Why do we have to take mushrooms/LSD/DMT to achieve this state of consciousness? LSD, I believe, is a man made concoction. Hmm. 3. Meditation. Hmmm. Better than sitting around doing nothing, I suppose. Why do we have to sit still for hours on end, in an excruciating position, to achieve this selflessness? Makes zero sense. 4. A lot of people here believe in the power of psychics, contacting souls etc. Hang about. That's a duality for a start. 5. Crystals. I don't see it. I just don't. YouTube Derren Brown and dream catcher. 6. Spiritual healing. Again, Derren Brown. Netflix "Miracles". 7. Free will. Not convinced we have it. So why do we all sit about telling each other to do different things, like we have a choice. If everything is perfect, then why bother telling anyone anything? 8. A lot of people talk here about self improvement. But if there is no you, who is to improve? Isn't everything perfect already? 9. Everything isn't perfect. Great amounts of suffering the world. It's shit. 10. In a universe of infinite possibilities, why can't it be that the universe is just how we see it? Why isn't duality an option? 11. In a universe of infinite intelligence, why create an ego? 12. Why bother with the human experiment? If everything is consciousness, why? 13. If the universe loves itself, and is whole, why does it have to experience itself? 14. People are always talking about their life goals. "I want to be a musician, I need to work on marketing for my big release". Seems a bit egoic right?? Why nt just enjoy the abundance of the now? 15. Many on here have families. If your children get chopped to bits this afternoon, is that all light and love? Why did you bother having children? 16. Why bother with relationships? With, ultimately, yourself? 17. NDEs. All point to Jesus. 18. Cherry picking bits of religions you like. Making it fit. Doesn't work. 19. Who/what created consciousness. Oh nothing, because it isnt a thing etc. Okay. 20. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. Yawn. 21. It's all about love but Mr. Gura doesn't care about people anymore. Wow. He's done a lot of drugs though, so. If he came out tomorrow, said he had a trip and claimed he met Jesus, and Jesus was the truth, you'd all believe him and change your views. Incredible. 22. Too many people on here are massaging their spiritual egos. One/two worded replies to everything. Oh I am so enlightened. Riiiiiiight. 23. As we say in Yorkshire, England, Al si thi! (I'll see you). YouTube Yorkshire speak if you like. It's great. This isn't for me. I don't know how anyone can live happily in a state of nothingness. Makes zero sense. The world is colourless. I'm outta here. I don't know what life is going to bring. I don't want to be here anymore, and if we are all being truthful, there are many others like me here. I've been signed off work for 4 weeks. I've got 4 weeks to basically do whatever the hell I want. I tried to end my life once, I'll probably try again. But I'm going to have some fun first. All I ever wanted to do was help OTHER people. NOT MYSELF. SI THI.

Imagine you're reading a novel which is endless. You may say as you finish reading one book, the author publishes the next chapter in the series and so on... Imagine you have got an infinite capacity to read without taking any breaks, so this allows you to read these books non-stop to the end of time. Now, you start reading this book and it is written from a self referential point of view of the main character of book. You continue reading it book after another... So much so that you crossed a point of inflection where in you now believe (100%) that you are the main character of the story you're reading. Emotionally, mentally, full on end. Almost like we often get lost in the movies we watch and they can make us feel real and deep emotions like crying, horror, laughter. So you're connected in this book and the character in that way, except this is 100% and all the way thru (you have been reading the book for years now without stopping a second) The character of the book which you take that to be... Can he (that character) ever know who you are? That character is nothing but words on pages... You bring life into the character by reading it and in this case having forgotten you're the reader and not the character being read about and known by you. This is what your life is like. You do not have a mind. You are the seer-er of a mind And in your case, you are the see-er of your character's/ego's mind. This person who thinks using the I-thoughts does not exist. It is simply energy seen and known by you. As words are read and known by the reader of a book As such, infinte unbounded energy is known/felt by God And since God is the very container of this energy and he exists as nothingness himself, then this implies the energy and the knower of it are one! And you are that knower! In infinte minds. You are empty space. And empty space exists everywhere. 99% of matter is empty space... And it is truly 99.999999% which in mathematics is equal to 100% empty. Thus, the substance of Everything is emptiness. And you are that emptiness which also is not separate from the Everything it contains.

Yes true, but what is the difference between yoga and meditation. Meditation, by definition, reshapes your brain aswell. Is yoga like an advanced technique while meditation is a kindergarten technique? If on the other hand yoga is more powerful than zazen, and at the same time its not an advanced version of meditation, then why do people still use zen? I also acknowledge that some brains get more effects from zen compared to kriya yoga because everyone is different, but as a general understanding, what is the difference between them? Except for the fact that your brain only changes while under that drug. After the drug wears off you're back to normal. Hence why yoga and meditation are still essential, more essential than psychedelics. This is a very popular paradigm in the personal development sector: neuroplasticity and the like, I don't see how that paradigm makes sense in the case of increasing consciousness though. When in awakening experiences, its hard to take the existence of a brain seriously. This doesn't make much sense to me. Like its also designed to get you in touch with different chakras so that you can utilize them effectively to understand the universe, but apart from that yes maybe it doubles your brain. How about we look at it this way: What flavour of insights do you get from self inquiry compared to kriya yoga? Do you get more understanding of NOTHINGNESS in self inquiry, but more awareness of LOVE when doing yoga? What do you feel when doing kriya compared to self inquiry? More energetic less energetic, what do your awakening experiences feel like on kriya vs self inquiry/buddhist meditation? This is valuable not just for me but for everyone here, because we all need different experiences depending on where we are in our spiritual journey. Some of us need more nothingness while others need more love. Different techniques render different facets.

When a everything revelation happens you will have no doubt what it’s pointing to. Hahaha. You can get very intellectual after but the embodied directness of that moment is such that all is oneself experientially. Not a belief. No confusion about it. Remember before your recognition of nothingness. Prior it may of seemed impossible unfathomable, or just a fantasy. Then boom void/nothing/undefinable yet happening. Same thing here boom, everything, historical laughter probably. Your point 2. Is interesting. I’d have to ponder that one some more.

You don't need to identify with nothing, you just drop all your identification little by little, and in the end nothingness is all that remains

she seems to contradict herself when she says that she's experienced the world as hyper physical and then as pure nothingness. Perhaps that experience of "hyper physical" is what Leo is referring to when he says "infinity" but on a grander scale. It could also be she just needs to try some psychedelics. I personally seem to get or am familiar with nearly everything Leo has mentioned.

@Joseph Maynor YES!! My experience is much more similar to hers than Leo's Having said that: 1. She says that everything and nothing is a stepping stone and she derives that reason from her experience as just 'nothing' and no 'everything'. My experience is the same as hers, I experience literally nothing and I have no idea what Leo means by 'everything' or I've never experienced 'everything' before. Yet I have a feeling that this is an interpretative difference rather than experiential difference, and not because Leo is less advanced than her. Leo might be trying to say everything as in form rather than formless, but I'm not sure. 2. Totally agree with her when she says awakening has nothing to do with changing facts. In my awakening experiences, facts do not change only your perspective of it. Yet at the same time, what DOES change facts(like the physical world being made up) is actually not consciousness work but philosophy work: reading philosophy, intellectual contemplation, etc.. I think Leo mixes consciousness work up with intellectual work, hence he thinks that awakening experiences cause you to loose sense of physical reality or any other relative facts. relative facts only change when you do a lot of intellectual contemplation work, or in other words, authentic western science. 3. Totally agree with her with the lower self and higher self. She said Leo thinks there is a higher self, but in her experience she has only experienced nothingness. I experience the exact same. When I experience no ego, I don't get an experience of being god. I just get an experience that I do not exist. Like whether I'm god, or a self, or a lamp or an alien is totally irrelevant. The whole trying to identify yourself as something game drops away, and hence I do not experience myself as 'God' Reality is just existing the way it is, there is no identification at all. So yeah don't get at all what Leo means by we are 'God' 4. Again agree with her with the distinctions. But again, I think that's because she doesn't do much intellectual contemplation.

Imagine trying to understand the concept of "nothingness" and not really getting it. I might have a glimpse in which it sorta felt like "nothing". I may start trying to give meaning to the experience.: Was there really "nothing"? Was there awareness? If I remember the experience, how can it nothing? I may read up on what "nothing" actually means. What was the essence of this nothingness? Was this nothing the same as emptiness? I may go and ask my teacher about it. I've found teachers can be very helpful. The key is to be in touch with my intuition. When I am trying to make sense of direct experience or a teacher is trying to help me make sense of it - what does that intuition tell me? I never trusted that intuition. There is a deep sense of knowing. Teachers were super helpful because they could often see when I got into egoic traps and started trying to figure things out in my head. Yet I became dependent on teachers and wasn't learning from my own direct experience. There comes a time when direct experience is queen. The most powerful teacher. Yet other people and teachers are still very helpful. I've found retreats and meditation groups to be helpful. Very helpful. One thing to remember is that insights and awakenings always occur here and Now. They never occur in the timeline. Always Now. Whether you are at a retreat, home, traveling, driving etc. the insights that appear, appear Now. There will always be insights. The mind creates this idea that certain insights will happen in the future, yet they can only happen Now. If you have some deep insights at the retreat, they happen Now. . . This was one of the biggest mental blocks for me. You already "got it". You just noticed a psychological dynamic within you that your mind-body desires to find techniques that will allow you to have insights. That is an insight!! You also realized that you are experiencing an psychological dynamic in which you believe you have an internal "lock" and your mind-body desires a key to that lock! That is an insight!! How amazing. . . I also had that same desire. For me, I noticed a voice that said "You aren't listening". That was an insight. I then started getting curious about where that voice came from and what I'm not listening to. Perhaps that is similar to your internal "lock". That is a big realization to become aware of that "lock" and be aware of the desire to discover the key to unlock it. You sound curious and genuine. You mention you secretly think about this key (with guilty pleasure). I sense a genuine, innocent curiosity and a bit of playfulness. Might one say there is a bit of a fantasy about what that retreat may bring? Some anticipation? What are these feelings and experiences like? How do they move around the mind and body. These are all insights and they are all within you. . . This is it, baby!! You can observe this occuring in your own direct experience right now. Nothing is needed. Just curiosity and observation. . . . Perhaps the key to that lock may arise and guess what?. . . New stuff will arise. Perhaps new locks and new keys. It never ends and everything always occurs in the Now. This is it. The journey is the destination