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This is an awesome thread Zane. I have been wanting the same thing more and more on my journey; a circle of creative, awakened, like-minded individuals (with a real "community" vibe). I have also found some niche events/activities that allow me to meet people on a similar frequency.... even though I am somewhat bold and eccentric, I am also quite introverted...so the new connections I've been making are often limited to the initial meeting...unless I make the effort to connect online, or see them in person again soon...or the universe intervenes with another synchronistic chance encounter... I know what it's like to be eccentric; I may not come off as creepy, but I do inadvertently offend &/or annoy people with my honesty (because I often see more than people want to outwardly show, and speak boisterously with no filter). I have a large circle of friends, but I've been connected with them for decades (pre-brain-injury)...and most have no interest in personal evolution, even if they are rad and creative. Recently, I thought it was just a neurosis, that I felt uncomfortable connecting with mainstream less-creative types; now I understand that although that is also true, I simply do not resonate with non-eccentrics in the same way. How do you interact with your new friends ....to the extent of establishing a whole new circle? I suppose this would mean spending more time with all of them, plus trying to connect them with the other new friends in the hopes that they would also bond?...What do you suggest? Is it better to just find an already formed circle that you'd fit into? Also, I love my current friends, dysfunctions and all, how would one transition circles (while keeping some ties to the old friends)?

When you are dying, it is not only fear that makes you unconscious; you already have too much unconsciousness – fear only takes away the thin layer of consciousness and you are drowned in your own unconsciousness. In meditation, when you are witnessing, you are by and by, without your knowing it, dispelling unconsciousness. You are becoming more and more conscious and a moment comes when your whole being is full of consciousness. This is witnessing. So when death comes, you witness death. When life was there, you witnessed life. Meditation is a kind of metaphysical dying. Through our becoming familiar with that inner passage, we can relax when it extends into our physical dying. In meditating as in dying we close our eyes (generally); we drop the effort to control and instead relax. In doing that we are leave the outer world for the interior one. We leave the world of ‘the other’ for a state of aloneness. Our identity as a body, a persona – created by the various positions we may have held, the relationships we are in, by what we have achieved and so on – becomes irrelevant when we move into our inner world. So meditating provides a natural and a simple way to consciously ‘die before you die’ – to rehearse dying. And of course the more familiar you are with entering meditation the easier it will become and the deeper will be the effect. The fear has reasons. The fear arises because it is always somebody else who dies. You always see death from the outside, and death is an experience of the innermost being. It is just like watching love from the outside. You may watch for years, but you will not come to know anything of what love is. You may come to know the manifestations of love, but not love itself. We know the same about death. Just the manifestations on the surface – the breathing has stopped, the heart has stopped, the man as he used to talk and walk is no more there: just a corpse is lying there instead of a living body. These are only outer symptoms. Death is the transfer of the soul from one body to another body, or in cases when a man is fully awakened, from one body to the body of the whole universe. It is a great journey, but you cannot know it from the outside. From outside, only symptoms are available; and those symptoms have made people afraid. Death happens to you involuntarily: you do not want to die but you have to die. That is why death is a sorrow, a pain, an anguish. And the pain of death is so intense that the only way to bear it is to become unconscious. A meditator can die consciously. A man who has been going deeper into meditation passes the door of death many times.

In the night you dream. While dreaming you start believing in the dream, that it is true. Your senses are reporting the dream - your eyes are seeing it, your ears are hearing it, you may be touching it. Your senses are reporting to you; that?s why you fall under the illusion that it is real. Every dream is true while you dream. You cannot rely on the senses. In the dream they deceive you. If you take a drug, LSD or something, your senses start deceiving you; you start seeing things which are not there. Even without drugs we have illusions. You are passing through a dark street, and suddenly you get scared - a snake is there. You start running, and later on you come to know that there was no snake, just a rope was Lying there. But when you felt that there was a snake, there was a snake. Your eyes were reporting that the snake is there and you behaved accordingly-you escaped from the place. Senses cannot be believed. The inner experience is immediate, Once you are rooted in that inner experience then many things will start happening to you. It will not be possible to understand them right now. One is rooted in his center, in his inner being, one has come to feel it as a direct experience, then senses cannot deceive him. He is awakened.

But... for the sake of trying to guess what is it, I think awaken is when you intellectually see there's no self, when you begin to understand and look for enlightenment, etc... when you know in your head but not in your experience all the things we talk here in the forum. In my opinion, everyone here in the forum (not 100% but all those who are seeking) are awakened, but that's the first step to enlightenment. Enlightenment is when you drop completely all believes systems.

@Orange The video explains it well. I would also like to add that when ego is no longer there to hold on to the awakened state enlightenment has occured. A.k.a ego death.

The inner world cannot be expressed literally, but symbolically -- only symbolically. Books like the Vedas, the Geeta, the Bible, the Upanishads -- they are not written by people who are asleep, they are not written as beautiful poetry or prose; they are written by people who know what truth is, who have awakened themselves to truth. Then whatsoever they write is almost like a map. You have to decipher it, you have to decode it, otherwise you will go on missing it. As we become more awakened, more we understand the hidden meaning.

The best I can describe it, it was like a stillness you get from meditating and acceptance, but there was still slight anxiety arising at times. Anyways that stillness state lasted for most of the day and I really don't know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, it just was what it was. I don't think it was an awakened state, or maybe it was and I had been expecting something more from it.

I can only guess but it sounds like an awakened state. There is calmness and a peacefulness, and you are fine with just being still. Mind can translate that into a sadness or depression. Was there a sense of detachment to everything around you?

I’m not enlightened so all I can do is conceptualize it. Someone please let me know if I’m way off base, but I believe if everyone is enlightened, they’d be detached from their identity and stories. It’s a high level of consciousness, so everyone would be aware of the dangers of judgments, hatred, ego, materialism, harming the environment on a significant scale, pursuit of power, dogma, and addictions. Sounds like a nice Utopian society, but humanity will be wiped out before we reach that level of awareness, considering the extremely low percentage of spiritually awakened people. We're on the conveyor belt to extinction, and it's a tragic reality. The end times are nigh.

This is none of the enlightened persons business. The "world" is a perfectly balanced system and karma is being facilitated fairly and justly. Sure but again, you cannot clear another persons karmic account, so it does not matter in the least what effects you have. The only reason you have an effect is because they judge you to be either positive or negative according to their own illusions, the fact is awakened people are just in harmony with life, there not special nor do they actually have those effects on others, it only seems like they do from the dualistic perspective. I dont know what this means.

It's a world wide zombie apocalypse out there of people sleep walking in a dream state of self, destroying this planet and each other. There is such a thing as detached action. Awakened people can have a very positive effect on those who are not yet awake. It takes no force, when a person shines with higher truth people recognize something special about them. When oneness is present, others naturally align themselves with that. Let it shine brother, let it shine through you!

You're trying to conceptualise something that you don't know will ever happen.. You don't know the future, it's an idea. So to become aware of ego? It's a task for now and the next few months. To forget about all else for a moment (you can become awakened quickly) and just focus on what you are doing. Conceit? Looking for things to make you something? If you can stick with the process and dis-identify then you will find a motivation that is coming from formlessness, your true nature. You shouldn't conceptualise that because that is more ego, more making spontaneous boundlessness into another "I". It's scary I know to relaize there is a void, that you have to admit you don't know who you are. But if you trust enough to enter the process you will see that it's not really a void This is where I'm at right now . I hope it rubs off on you.

Dude, the whole game here is to play that you are not god and that what happens in your life could really be bad. We are as humans a dream that the ever-present I that we arise out of is not perfect and that we are really separate. And if you don't awaken before you die, probably in the last split-second you get that. And that's beautiful. Because, you live the most real dream that there could be and you really don't know before you have awakened whether this here is real or not. So have fun!

I don't say this negatively, but I knew life on earth was meaningless before this video, and I had come to terms with it; Coming to the conclusion that, its better to come up with your own meaning for life, and create your own purpose anyway. And so I've built a purpose, and a grand reality in my 'ego' to look forward to but if everything is infinite, and ultimately nothing. then quite frankly, what is the fucking point of anything we can do in our ego NOW? Why am I(god) endlessly creating these realities to live in as egos or other different things? Have people who want enlightenment ever thought that maybe if I created these realities for myself to live in, that It could be myself entertaining myself in this form, and distracting myself from the meaninglessness of being a complete and utter void? why am I so eager to become re-awakened of the lonely, and empty truth of what I am? What do I gain from pursuing this 'enlightenment' or 'awakening' of what I actually am IF i'm already the infinite itself? And consequently then, why is it not just as valid to live into THIS reality, and forget about the higher existential truth of my ultimate being? Its not like its going anywhere? Apologies if this doesn't make sense; I'm very puzzled myself.

It's not eliminating or reducing the ego, is understanding what it is and reacting in the correct way, not being controlled by the ego. When you are unconscious you think you have control over your ego, but that's not real. The ego is controlling you by making you "think" that you are the body, the mind, whatever... What we have to do is explained well in Zen teachings, here I copy something from the book "Instant Zen" " One of the peculiarities of Zen Buddhism is the idea that awakening can take place instantaneously. Zen training, from this point o f view, does not mean learning doctrines, rituals, and postures, but preparing the (ego) mind to accept this awakening and integrate it constructively with daily life in the world." So, the idea is to get awakened so the mind accepts that and the ego-mind integrate it to the new consciousness. The ego doesn't disappear, it is understood from a wider and wiser perspective.

Haha I've reread my answer and I realized that there was no point to write it. It's a fun thing to attempt to rationalize, but it is an ineffable thing to explain. You will not understand it by reading explanations, even from those who are truly awakened, and it's pointless to seek definitions to explain it because nothingness is a very abstract thing. It's like attempting to recreate the feeling one has in a new country they visited for another person. It simply won't work until they have been there and experienced it for themselves.

@Matthew Lamot "At this point everything stops and there is a subtle shift in awareness in which the foreground becomes the background, and the background the foreground" - from 'What is Advaita Vedanta'. This describes the shift I had a few months ago (before this forum even existed and before I was familiar with any teaching at all). It just happened one day and it's permanent. I never claimed to be enlightened, though... perhaps just awakened Thank you for the James Swartz/ Neo Advaita link. Will read it shortly.

Natasha, another thing you are misinformed on is that your "other sources" are not even accurate either. This is what I did not make clear to you personally in this thread. The surface "ideas" are correct, even in Neo Advaita is in harmony with what the Vedas say. But they are not teachings, and just because a person themselves could be enlightened (even awakened) does not mean that they have a teaching or are qualified to teach. Most of the questions i see on here can be dealt with in one session with a Vedanta teacher, and be out of the way immediately. What you are not getting is there are crucial aspects of the teaching that need to be realized before a student can move on. So the path of knowledge is unpacked in a sequence, and the realized teacher administers correct practices for the student at the correct times. Its not just one big free for all and memorize a video or two. Thats not how it works. Emphasis in the theraputic side is also a misconception. In the path of knowledge, if followed correctly the student realizes enlightenment and that is a permanent thing. There is no going back into ego or its "shadow". Shadow is a therapy thing, there is no therapy for the Self, once realized completely that is it. What you are being taught, not only here, but in the whole spiritual community is just nonsesne, because when you understand Vedanta you will see its completely opposite. So this is why I do not understand where you think that what is being taught today is the path that leads to enlightenment, this just puzzles the fuck out of me quite frankly, because its obvious when you read the material, that what you know is nothing to do with enlightenment, at all! So, have a third read, and also read what Swartz has to say about Neo Advaita, because when you understand what this Neo Adavita is, you will just drop all association with it. http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/james_swartz/neoAdvaita.htm And to be honest, anybody who leaves 2 sentence messages on the forum, and expects people to believe it is just fucking stupid in my opinion, no mature person looks at a one line piece of advice and makes something of it. Where are your links? Where is your critical thinking? Where is your credibility beyond some person talking on youtube about one thing that can and is taken out of context? This is not a spiritual path, its just entertainment. Swartz mentions a guy who was in Samadhi for 4 years, he thought he was enlightened! But he came out of it and none of his programming had changed. So what makes you think your experiences translate to enlightenment? These methods being taught do nothing more than relax the body. In light of the truth about what enlightenment is and how it is brought about, none of your ideas even make logical sense.

@Leo Gura well he says enlightenment is really to disidentify from your mind. To be the watcher of your mind. The realization that you are not your mind is to be awakened or enlightened "Enlightenment means rising above thought" he also says: "a desire to become enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become enlightened. Become present" Lol

OK, I will list the teachings I have shared here. 1) Enlightenment is not an experience, it is not even Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Self - Realization is knowledge. Knowledge is when the entire bodymind knows truth. Most "awakened" people are only aware of a cognitive realization. This is still the ego, despite 'beliefs' of non-duality. This is the major distinction between actual Self-Realization and what is being taught by the likes of Mooji, Jed Mackenna, Tony Parsons et all. 2) Karma Yoga - The jiva (person) is not responsible for his results. The field (the environment) is responsible for his results. This teaching when understood chops off a vasanas called "worry" "manipulation" and many more, because the person is not "thinking" about the results. He is not outcome dependent. That is karma yoga. 3) Vasanas - the subconscious 4) Self inquiry - Letting the I thought rest in the Self. This means putting attention onto the screen rather than any object and holding it there. You can do this while doing normal things like work. 5) Being normal. Allowing the jiva his natural tendencies and letting the Self do the purification and dissolution of delusion by itself. The jiva cannot do anything about it's mental illness. 6) Being responsible. Even though the jiva is not real, the relative domain must be aknowledged fully until full Self-Realization. S.R. is not a rationalization, an experience, or an event and it cannot be spoken of or made into a belief like the Neo Advaita crew try to teach. 7) The critique on false teachings is a teaching itself. It is designed to blow a vasana that makes the person think all the time about obtaining extra knowlege or insight from others. 8) Desire - do not make desire the enemy. Desire, intense desire for liberation is what ultimately leads to S.R. The desire must be the "right" desire, and not the desire to get involved with the illusion, but a desire to rest as the Self. Renunciation. 9) Non-duality and duality differentiation. Duality is the jivas experience, so experience must be respected and not denied, ever. Non duality, the teaching that what you see in front of you is your own thoughts, your own consciousness. But because this goes against mundane experience we need to be even more careful of ignoring duality. The Self's POV must be contemplated on deeply using the right sources for this particular non-dual path and not be mixed with other teachings that will confuse the jiva. 10) Hunt down, get involved with a Self-Realized and fully credible teacher versed in traditional Veda because if you don't then you will buy into the strawmen that the New Age have put up against the traditions. Neo Advaita and Boomeritis Buddhism and shit like crazy wisdom teachings are all gigantic straw-men arguments and sub-traditions that are incomplete and a waste of time. You need the teachers guidance when these strawmen are put up against your path.

@Nexeternity Sweet! Great poetry too! Really enjoyed it a lot. Let me ask you about how you see this problem i'm having, if i could. The first time i experienced the self as nothing more than a conceptualizing illusion, i felt like a freaking ghost. There was suddenly no "Me" to conceptualize anything. Everything up until that moment was always experienced as being "Me" inhabiting "My" body, and conceptualizing, everything. The biggest conceptualization of all , of course, was that there existed an "I" in this body to do the conceptualizing in the first place. That was the granddaddy of all conceptualizations. I feel a little schizophrenic now because I"m not enlightened. Two worlds exist, so to speak. Mind vs. no mind. There is a morphing between the two at best. When I fall back into an unawaken state. i slip and think that there is an "I" inhabiting this body, It's like a self induced hallucination of "Me". But how to stay in that state of no-self and awakened at all times? Like right now. It's "Me" thinking these thoughts and hitting these keys. This is all a hallucination of "me" happening, but what remains to know that? I keep falling back into the hallucination that there is someone here doing this. My biggest question has always been, WHAT REMAINS? It's like there is something here that shouldn't be. What's up with that? The "I" should have turned to complete ashes and smoke. Enlightenment must be amazing! Well no, that's not right, there would be no one to be amazed when enlightened. Any suggestions that could help would be greatly appreciated. I feel like a ghost in the machine since. *You like poetry, You may be well familiar with this one by Walt Whitman "I must not be awake, for everything looks to me as it has never before. Or else, I'm awake for the first time and everything that was before was just a dream"

I've been watching these videos for a couple of years now, and still cannot believe how lucky I am to find actualized.org just through a random chance. I don't even want to imagine what my life would be, if I never found out about Leo and his videos. I feel that I am such a privileged person to have access (through Leo and his advices, books that he suggests, etc.) to the best and most profound wisdom humanity has ever, ever gathered. It feels like if you were so lucky to be abducted by aliens and to be shown and taught other advanced worlds, advanced concepts, advanced purposes, advanced knowledge, principles, attitudes, goals, to be shown consciousness and being itself. With these videos, if we follow advices and do the work, we have the chance to actually be the most progressive humans ever lived. It's like a real chance to advance from homo sapiens to the next stage of human evolution. Not just become a better person and have a better life, but to actually become something more advanced than just a normal modern human - be an awakened being. Or, at very least, grow to a very pshychologically healthy and mature, truly wise person, which may be still considered as other kind of human comparing to normal people. Right now, during this life period, it becomes possible.

In Leo's video "The Amazing Power Of Psychedelics - Leo Does Magic Psilocybin Mushrooms!" Leo discussed the importance of doing self-development work to get the most out of psychedelics. I've been doing self-development work for 2 years. Is that enough? I tried LSD 2 years ago before doing any self-development work. My trip "awakened" me and I've been spending almost all of my time on self-development work ever since. Would it be worth taking more now, or should I develop for a couple more years?

@MalAbout Personality disorder I found that Suzanne Segal had a similar experience that was diagnosed as depersonalization disorder. I think that the girl you've mentioned really had a strong "no self experience", but that doesn't happen because she read something or because someone told her about that. There's thousands of people who watch videos on youtube and nothing happens to them. That's clearly her consciousness getting awakened on her, but if she's not really prepared she can think that shes going crazy, I tell you that because it happened to me too. Now I see clearly what happened, and I know that even at that moment I needed the therapists, they were really confused about what happened... and let me tell you that I am still taking pills and now I feel much better than my own therapist. I know I won't need those pills never anymore, because nothing in my mind is real, nothing in my mind affects me the way it used too. So my mind can go fucking crazy and people will see me outside like a normal person, because I am focused on my "being-ness" I don't pay attention to thoughts when they go crazy, the monkey mind as we call it. Check this link, this is what happened to Suzanne Segal, it's interesting. I don't think Leo has nothing to do with the problems of other persons, he can't create anything or make anyone believe this or that. Same thing about anything said or written on this forums. Everything is what it "is". Nothing wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Segal I'll post some fragments here because I think it can cast some light about this: "One day in 1982, while boarding a bus in Paris, the 27-year-old Segal experienced a sudden shift in her consciousness. She described the experience in her book, Collisions With the Infinite: "I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called 'me' was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. 'I' was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes." Segal described this first period of her experience as "witnessing", since she was aware of herself but also critically detached from it. This was tremendously unpleasant for her, full of anxiety and fear: The moment the eyes opened the next morning, the mind exploded in worry. Is this insanity? Psychosis? Schizophrenia? Is this what people call a nervous breakdown? Depression? What happened? And would it ever stop? ...The mind was in agony as it tried valiantly to make sense of something it could never comprehend, and the body responded to the anguish of the mind by locking itself into survival mode, adrenaline pumping, senses fine-tuned, finding and responding to the threat of annihilation in every moment."

Think about it... what Buddhism says that the root of the problem is, the root of the problem is that we see ourselves as separated beings. You "think" you are a separated being so you act in that way. If you are not the others, of course you will doubt if having empathy is the right way to go. Think about all the common things on the different religions or philosophies. All of them talk about "transcending the self". When you transcend the self you will see that you and your neighbor are the same. Do you think you won't have empathy for someone who is also you? When you are doing something "wrong" to other, you do it to yourself. I am not "conscious" or awakened, but I can see a commonality on religious, spiritual stuff and I think it make sense. That's the only way you can "love your neighbor as yourself", otherwise is pretty difficult. We are what we think we are. That's something Buddha said too. And I don't say it like because they are awakened beings we have to follow them blindly, there's something behind that idea of separated self that transcends all and love all without conditions, and that can shine through you too. It was always you but you (and me) let it be obscured by thoughts about being separated selves isolated from the universe and from other human beings. We are all one.