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Ignorance is bliss, that's how I view it.

@Truth Addict I don’t need to put my mastery to the test. I allow life to do that. Life will bring me all the trouble. And so far, it hasn’t brought much. Remember, I’m not 100% done yet. But I’m very close to there. I would say a few months more until I’m completely done. The way I measure my emotional mastery is through (1) how blissful I’m feeling. Usually the more emotional work I do, the more intense this bliss gets. And (2) how often I get triggered internally with any negative emotions. That rarely happens nowadays.

Mastery as you call it is not not being triggered in a state of bliss. It’s about the eradication of even the capacity to fear and crave. This is described in detail in Buddhism. Upon awakening and sometimes for a good while after, months to years. You can be in a high state where nothing triggers you and your mind is “blank”. This is merely due to the high of awakening. I’ve had it, my teachers have had it. It most definitely doesn’t mean you have attained “mastery”. Adyashanti, Craig Holliday and some other teachers talk about dropping from the high of awakening as well. Be prepared for it. It will surely happen. One more thing “close to mastery” or “almost no issues” are self judgements that come from a limited perspective. I have thought that for years. Lacking a deeper reference point most on the path are clueless in regards to how deep it goes.

Many people here think that it’s not possible to attain emotional mastery without a decade of meditation. Well, I’m a living proof against that. I started spiritual work less than two years ago, and after doing a lot of inquiry, I’m very close to emotional mastery. These days, I struggle to find anything that can trigger me in any minor way. I’m living in a constant uninterrupted state of bliss, and my mind is usually just blank. I’m not identified with anything really. Even the question who am I doesn’t make that much sense to me, because it assumes that you exist. Anyway, I just wanted to provide some encouragement to my fellow meditators. You can reach there a lot sooner that you think. Focus on purging your shadow issues and ego more than just trying to ‘get an awakening.’ That’s one thing that I’ve never aimed for. Yet as I purged my shadow and ego, I found that awakenings just came to me suddenly. For example, the day when I disidentified from this body, was when I was going to bed at night, and as I pulled my duvet, out of nowhere my identification to the body just disappeared. Other awakenings also happened at random times e.g. emptiness, love, infinity, god, no time, no space, no world, infinite intelligence and so forth. But I never aimed to get any of them. I just focused on purging my ego. Another thing I recommend is to meditate several times a day. For the past year, I did inquiry 40 mins per session, and I did three sessions a day. Basically, morning, afternoon and night time. That way, inquiry was on my mind basically 24/7. I was living it. Good luck! If I did it, then definitely you can too!

Yesterday, my whole body was so relaxed and light. The feeling was something bordering between extreme bliss and pain. It felt as if I was looking straight at the sun, unable to look away from its blinding divinity.

Depression is as much a coach as bliss.

@Nahm sounds like you are describing the collapse of the perceiver into pure being..ultimate bliss and mystical shift into formlessness...ego death.

Stop wishing what's happening not to happen. If I'd wanted to do it in private I would have done it in private. Are we not allowed to be free now...? Who is going to stop God doing what God does? Is anyone being murdered here, is there a crime being committed? You know what I find so really weird and disturbing ..is that Leo can say things like when your child is brutally murdered, you can still remain in a state of bliss and happiness. He can say shocking things like that and yet no one bans him from Youtube for saying that, but then Leo thinks it's quite alright to ban people from his forum for saying what they say...but he is allowed to say what the fuck he wants because he likes to play God...how fucking weird and retarted is that. Do you not see how the human ego is so totally fucked up...and crazy...but then it's all ok, to be totally fucking crazy because well ...it's all just God So really, you should just remain calm and blissful and happy happy clappy happy when i have my meltdowns ok...stop resisting what's not happening. Why are you bothered?

@Shaun You are love. All is love. Trust this. Live this. Be this. You say you can’t find love, but if everything is love, where is there to go? What is there to seek? You already are perfect, so how can you be otherwise? That wouldn’t be possible because that would imply there is separation, there is you, and then God. How do you find God when you are surrounded by God, birthed by God, and are God looking around at God believing it to be other than God even though his cannot be? This universal Truth means that you can totally relax. You already are the bliss that you seek. The world arises as bliss, within bliss, as a manifestation of bliss, remaining as bliss. What a wonderful realization to have. Yes, it is that direct, stop believing the illusion that you are this person living in a world when you can believe the Truth that Love is the only thing that exists, and has ever existed. The mind will doubt the Truth at first, “how can this be?”, yet know that regardless of whether your mind believes it or not, this is the Truth of your existence. You are this, no matter what happens. Make sure you embrace this oneness as you live your daily life, and that especially, your spiritual practice carries this Truth. During my meditations I have experinced in myself that without this trust that I am love (or any other word that represents God to you) in this moment, even if I say “I am Love” I am still saying, “I’m not worthy of love” on a deeper level. Thus we start at the deepest level of our reality (the foundations of which the ego is built upon) which is what we hold as our deepest truth, and if you hold the Truth that you have already arrived, that everywhere you look is love, then you will feel it, and you will awaken. The deepest Truth we hold in our beings will become our reality, and it is that Truth which determines if we are living from love and wholeness or the ego. Every moment then becomes an opportunity for you to practice feeling that everything is perfect. You have always been doing this subconsciously but instead your deepest Truth has been something along the lines of, “I Am other than love, I am alone in this universe”. This is an illusion. The universe is one with you always. Indeed this is how powerful our minds are, to place fog and mirrors over our true infinite nature. You will have to face all of the illusions you’ve had about yourself and the world along the way. All of the emotions and patterns of thoughts. And it will be hard at times, but with perservarance you will succeed. Namaste!

I was in Amsterdam 2 days ago and ingested 57g magic truffles of the strongest kind. I want to tell about the peak where I became aware of God. It began by time slowing down including my senses. After some time, my senses and breath were completely slowed down and shortly after I became directly aware of myself as God. God opened my eyes and looked right through them, literally my visual field became fully bright. I felt the power and love. I was in complete shock and bliss at the same time. I began crying out of sheer joy for about 3 min. Then I felt the urge to go out. When I got out, everything was new and bright, like a another world. I walked down the street with no sense of self. This is the most difficult part to explain. Simply put, I was just walking but had no sense of me. I was all the people walking as myself, as God. It was One reality, with no me in it. Just One. The world changed in front of my eyes and I saw clearly for the first time. I was none other than God walking and what I witnessed was that all this world is God. I felt it, became it, saw it. Most importantly, everything around me became it and was it. One. Just One. That was the peak in a nutshell. Realizations - There is only God. This has touched me forever. - Negativity from the past and current issues was poured out of me and I realized that I need to be happy and positive. The shrooms really helped me with this. I felt a connection to my self and I realized that I need to be happy. - I love all of you with all my heart. Love is all we want and need. - I realized that I do not want to escape from the world but that I need it. Duality is a beautiful thing, the world is a beautiful thing.

That's all you have to remember..to remember here now that in your next incarnation you will not remember anything of your old stale life and that your new life will be all fresh and waiting for you to discover and fulfill your natural curiosity. In the life you have now..what you don't know cannot hurt you. Knowledge is the suffering, it's knowing you exist...because when you don't exist, there is no suffering. Human Babies and animals don't suffer because they have no knowledge of themselves existing, they are existence but they have no sense of self to whom suffering arises. It is only when knowledge is born does the poison that is knowledge enter the ignorance and innocence of existence being. You can have the bliss of ignorance and innocence now while in life, you don't have to wait until you die to end suffering. The end of knowledge is the end of suffering. Advaita Vedanta is the end of knowledge. And that's all suffering is, but ultimately there is no you that ever suffered, the real you has never suffered...it takes a shift in conscious thinking to see that. As for Nonduality.. it is not for the faint of heart, it can make you feel lost, disassociated with life and other people, suicidal, and depressed, because it blows away the very foundation of your very existence the way you believed it to be, it's not for everyone. The brave will have the courage to jump into the abyss and embrace it with both arms, but for others, that thought will be terrifying, while it's a blessed relief for some ... if it's causing the feeling of hopelessness and despair, best leave it well alone and get back to ordinary living...and to remember you live only once as your unique never to be repeated character, so it's like what are you going to do with that one chance you have to dance your unique dance in this incarnation? it's your call. Make it miserable or happy...it's your conscious choice in every moment.

The difference is actually simple, what is your reason for liberation... do you have a passion and love for it to find the highest truth possible or have you suffered and you want to die as fast as possible in bliss its quite simple, both options are available to you, its up to you which one you wish to choose both result in the same thing, the end of your conceptual self. I conclude they're different degrees of GOD, because what this shows is nothing is not the highest degree of god, it is only half the puzzle. like i said before: don't shot the messenger, shoot the king to finish the battle if you want to know my option: its simple really, i'm pretty lazy even though i would love to know how reality works, and by this i mean be consciously aware of how reality works at all moments, not airy fairy with saying nothingness imagines. my answer is simple a code i live by, LOL ... "live fast, die young" and i have no intentions to deviate from it. I'm simply telling you that what leo says is viable from my experience.

Transcript: So there’s a frequent fear among spiritual seekers about “if I relax the mind, or if I engage in deep self-inquiry and turn all my attention inward towards the Source which is aware of all the thoughts and actions, who’s going to do all the things that need to get done? Who’s going to figure things out? Who is going to decide what the best course of action is? Who is going to take all the decisions, make all the moves that need to be made for survival or for happiness or for anything?” Because you might think to yourself, as so many seekers do, all the spiritual seeking is great and all, but I still need to get out there and do things. And who’s going to do those things? Where is that doing going to come from? Where is that decision-making going to come from? But there’s a great and extraordinary paradox which is at the heart of spiritual truth, which is that all doing, even right now, even when you think you are in control of your actions, even when you think that you are taking important decisions, all of it, all of it is happening essentially by magic. It is all happening from the indescribable source. All of it is being generated from there. There is simply a misconception that we have that “I am doing it.” That it requires my effort. And what’s paradoxical is that when the magic goes through this misconception, it produces less interesting results, really. When the mind on the other hand is able to relax, when it is able to let go, to surrender, as a result in some sense of some form of inquiry, of some sort of looking within, when that happens, when there is that total relaxation, where one doesn’t lift a mental finger, and there is complete effortlessness… You know, there’s a beautiful phrase in one of the ancient Hindu scriptures, it’s called the Ashtavakra Gita. It’s a dialogue between the wise man Ashtavakra and the king Janaka about enlightenment. And Ashtavakra says, the one for whom even blinking is a bother. Someone that, you know, you might say, lazy in a sense — that relaxed actually, it’s not laziness. That person is happy and nobody else. So at that level of relaxation, that level of utter, total delight in just being, what happens is, strangely enough, that creation happens. It doesn’t necessarily happen in the way that you expect it to, and it doesn’t happen on the timetable that you expect it to. But when the expectation and that timetable are relaxed, when that anxiety is gone, when there is total relaxation, something emerges. When it emerges, how it emerges, what it does, no one can say, but the creative urge manifests almost without your noticing it. Faster than you can see it, when your attention is directed elsewhere, something happens. And that’s the great mystery and magic of the mind that is quiet and centered in its own nature, that is utterly relaxed, that one is simultaneously in a position of pure transcendental bliss regardless of what happens, regardless even of negative emotions, that there is nevertheless a transcendental bliss that flows through it, and that simultaneously when and only when one is enjoying this transcendental bliss is a space opened for something magical to do its thing unburdened by the usual set of expectations that would cabin it. So try this. You’ll find it out to be true, only I will say try it with this one caveat, which is that you can’t keep watching it. You can only notice it in retrospect. It’s like the idea of the watched pot never boils. Or someone who’s trying to go to sleep can never go to sleep. You must relax the mind and utterly let go of expectation, and then you may find, looking back, that things happened that you couldn’t possibly have expected, that you didn’t put any effort into. I don’t mean the world necessarily responding in some magical way, although that might happen, but that creativity came out of your own bodily and mental instruments in a way that you could not possibly have anticipated and that was in a sense, a strange sense, effortless.

Full bliss? Lol You expect an enlightened master to always be bubbly for you? You will be disappointed. Enlightenment is not limited to any one emotional state. Most enlightened masters look so ordinary and normal that you would never know they were enlightened, like a cat sitting on a windowsill. It does not need to satisfy any of your expectations. It's just sitting and being.

I doubt his enlightenment because of the lack of embodiment. If bliss is not pouring out of his face, what good is this enlightenment thing anyways?

@Maya_0 What movie and what form? Source Will manifest Whatever, Source beleive he is. That is survival in nutshell. Yes it is unsattisfactory because no matter what you Will lose that Game even if you love it the most. But..... Hey notice me. ?️? There is no place for lies and self deceptions while you are Truth all the time. Truth is pure bliss.

Is good, now embrace that suffering and love death. Do it 100% mind wise. Contemplate death even, then let ir go. You are on the right path, you thought that this awakening shit is easy? Is yet to come, trauma speaking. But after bliss will arise, accept the constant falling feeling you have in your body right now, relax and listen to breath.

@Key Elements It has nothing to do with bliss. Be careful judging a thing you haven't experienced.

@Leo Gura you could bliss all you want, Leo, like you're doing here: That's you're choice. But..yours is taking place in the comfort of your own home. And, that's it??? Nothing else. There's nothing more? Hmm..ok... how many times do you want to do this? 13+ times? Oh well, it's your choice. However, there's more to this. The 10 Ox Herding Pics isn't just pointing at Riding the Ox Backwards.

You're supposed to live this life well and apply Riding the Ox Backwards. What the heck is this life for? Definitely, not just to remain in bliss. That's one-sided.

@WHO IS So that everything can exist. You have to drop that dualistic notion of good and bad. All is good. What are you afraid of, sickness, old age, death of body? Can you realize that even your dead body will support New life New creation New existance? It is all you but you are blinded by your egoic mind who thinks it is all about me me me. Which is ok too it is all Love. What existance is, is pure absolute bliss for all forms.But I let you, you discover this for yourself.

@Aakash Well you can change things ofcourse you do. Love of God is uncoditional. Problem is that humans abuse it so much it became norm. But humans are also God. Do Whatever you Feel need to do from your heart. Me personally, I do not have any desire to change or impact society or other human beings. Reality is perfect no need for "me" to change manipulate anything. I am done, really had it enough. Honestly I started this work Just to discover is there a God and what is the Truth about all of this. Really not after bliss chasing or pleasant emotions. Have done my work. Think I deserve rest and life in peace and harmony with nature not with society and devils. Time to clear the stage.

what is it about women solidarity that fascinates me so much. recent christopher street day also reminded me again why i include everyone who wants to be a beautiful woman into it. when i‘m with a bunch of my friends, there are no leaders we all are equal. no one would act up against this rule because it breaks an unspoken law. @mandyjw funny how what is truely part of your past/family history is really very much part of my dream shadow. did you ever do ethnological research into the magic and rites of your ancestors? i mean realistically not what’s in fashion at the moment. the “stay” i interpreted it as the call to stay a women warrior at heart - we all have not only a princess or a mary magdalene inside but also a native warrior. when i posted it i got aware of the beauty of femininity and solidarity, the first time i got aware that i’m a beautiful person because i felt so much love from women solidarity. i felt it before but only got aware of it this intensely then, it was pure bliss. one beautiful person who reminded me of that was zweistein, as a stranger in an internet forum, but also the gay friends i have and all the longterm beautiful women friends i have. all the ladybugs (this time it’s really a metaphor including all ladybugs)

May I salute you all with this unbelievable Stanislav Grof's experience of facing the Absolute... Let us all have a glimpse of It... The beginning of the experience was very sudden and dramatic. I was hit by a thunderbolt of immense power that instantly shattered and dissolved my everyday reality. I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared as if by magic. In the past, whenever I had taken a high-dose of psychedelics, I liked to lie down and make myself comfortable. This time, any such concerns were irrelevant because I lost awareness of my body, as well as of the environment. After the session, I was told that after taking a couple of drags, I sat there for several minutes like a sculpture, holding the pipe near my mouth. Cristina and Paul had to take the pipe from my hand and put my body in a reclining position on the couch. In all my previous sessions, I had always maintained basic orientation. I knew who I was, where I was, and why I was having unusual experiences. This time all this dissolved in a matter of seconds. The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts, and my life disappeared as if by magic. Stan Grof … California … United States … planet Earth … these concepts faintly echoed for a few moments like dreamlike images on the far periphery of my consciousness and then faded away altogether. I tried hard to remember myself of all the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense. In all my previous psychedelic sessions there always had been some rich specific content. The experiences related to my present lifetime – the story of my childhood, infancy, birth, and embryonal life – or to various themes from the transpersonal domain – my past life experiences, images from human history, archetypal visions of deities or demons, or visits to various mythological domains. This time, none of these dimensions seemed to exist, let alone manifest. My only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all of existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute. It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive - all that and much more. I had no concept, no categories for what I was witnessing. I could not maintain a sense of separate existence in the face of such a force. My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. In retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol, appears at the moment of our death. It bore some resemblance to what I encountered in my first LSD session, but it was much more over whelming and completely extinguished any sense of my separate identity. My encounter with the Absolute lasted approximately 20 minutes of clock time, as measured by external observers. As far as I was concerned, during the entire duration of my experience, time ceased to exist and lost any meaning whatsoever. After what seemed like an eternity, concrete dreamlike images and concepts began to form in my experiential field. I started intuiting fleeting images of a cosmos with galaxies, stars, and planets, Later, I gradually visualized a solar system, and within it the Earth, with large continents. Initially, these images were very distant and unreal, but as the experience continued, I started to feel that these realities might actually have objective existence. Gradually, this crystallized further into the images of the United States and California. The last to emerge was the sense of my everyday identity and the awareness of my present life. At first, the contact with the ordinary reality was extremely faint. I recognized where I was and what the circumstances were. But I was sure that I had taken a dose that was excessive and that I was actually dying. For some time, I believed I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state between my present life and my birth in the next incarnation, as it is described in the Tibetan texts. As I was regaining more solid contact with reality, I reached a point where I knew that I was coming down from a psychedelic session and that I would survive this experiment. I was lying there, still experiencing myself as dying, but now without the sense that my present life was threatened. My dying seemed to be related to scenes from my previous incarnations. I found myself in many dramatic situations happening in different parts of the world throughout the centuries, all of them dangerous and painful. Various groups of muscles in my body were twitching and shaking, as my body was hurting and dying in these different contexts. However, as my karmic history played out in my body, I was in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from all these dramas, which persisted even after all the specific content disappeared from my experience. - Stanislav Grof, "When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Reality." (2006)

My view is that enlightenment is mostly understood wrong in this forums. You wont become a magician or god (in meaning of almighty, creates instant when he wishes etc) or whatever pure infinite absolute peace. I may be wrong with the last one, some claims it, but enlightenment is in my words, put basically a realization that all the years of belief of you, is not existing. Last sentence is enough, to make one to get the realization, further is brain masturbation but we all like it right, so here it goes: You have been deceiving yourself all along with goals, how succesfull or even the opposite how depressed you are etc. You even deceive yourself to become enlightened. Thats another trick. Put basically, mostly the word referred as ego is correct in this scope by others. Ego is what you have believed to be as you. The story you built in your post also falls into this. It what you believe is your thought and questioning system. Why do you even concern with that? You as character. You as your thoughts beliefs and goals. They are an illusion. Basic but the simplicity is what makes it hard to understand it. People on this forum wants to achieve that bliss state. It is not wrong. Noone wants opposite, we all want at basic level security comfort, to be happy etc. But enlightenment wont give you that, an enlightenment perceived in this manner wont give you that. Becasue there is none. So what to do? Id recommend putting yourself in some stoic mindset to create discomfort to your ego, and pursue spirituality and exercises on daily basis i.e. self inquiry, fasting also helps