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The day you realize you don't need shit, shit stops owning you. You are a slave if you want to think if your self as that. If you go deeper and realice that we are all nothing, one of nothingness, no limits, all. Then why even work....

@ground You are right, awareness has no objective qualities. You can't find it with your senses. You can only become aware that you are aware. Saying I found it sounds like it was lost like an object, like I lost my keys and I fond them on the floor. It's hard to name the event because nothing really happened. I was nothing before, but the nothing wrapped itself in thoughts and couldn't see itself outside of them properly. When the thoughts stopped I saw myself as I am and then I remembered I always was. Saying that nothingness is somethingness is also not wrong though since nothing ultimately takes the form of absolutely everything, but I haven't had the direct experience of that yet. I'm currently at the stage of disentangling emptiness and form.

@ground i think he is talking beyond that. of course the words are the limitations. but yes, i agree with you... "Antonius" cannot have found nothingness. Antonius/the ego/character can NEVER find nothingness. the real self currently identifying with Antonius would have come into contact with itself briefly

If you found Nothingness then Nothingness actually is Somethingness. Otherwise you couldn't have found it.

Yes, exactly! I like what you said there. You're talking about the natural deep force. I call it flow. This is definitely part of enlightenment (truth). Because in the real thing (truth), there is a flow. The ego (our human embodiment), upon initial thought, likes to think of this as a massive, grandiose, powerful, infinite light that flows back into the human body (ego) from the nothingness / everythingness, but in reality (truth), it's just a transformation from the nothingness from the truth's "perspective." No distance at all. No suffering when this happens. Only peace and love as a result. Anyway, we're blessed with different talents, interests, and abilities because of the flow -- go with the flow to create less suffering and peace in our world in our own ways as individuals. Our thoughts are flowing in coming from the nothingness telling us about this. Just let your unwanted thoughts flow away and be present since this creates suffering. This monk is practicing the effortless action. I like to call it meditative flow:

The moment I stopped using the mind to find it, I just became it. I was always it, but the mind distracted me with it's endless flow of thoughts and feelings that over time painted a vivid picture of a seperate person. Old memories are coming up of being that changeless self. It's so familiar and ordinary. The simplicity can trick you into thinking it's not it, but it is. You just need to be patient and it starts revealing it's peaceful qualities to you. The ego construct is still hardwired into the body-mind though and if I stop just being it forces it's way back to the forefront of experience. Leo's last self-inquiry video really hit the nail on the head here. You just need to spend time with the nothingness that you are and the construct will slowly dissolve. I wouldn't be surprised if I just woke up one day realizing I was enlightened for days without noticing because I always am that, I'm just obscured by endless thoughts. It's the self-reflective nature of thoughts that make it seem like someone is there. It's like looking in the mirror and saying "I see myself in the mirror so that must be myself". But seeing your body in the mirror is no different than seeing a dog. You're not a dog because you see a dog. You are the seeER without an instrument through which you see. Thoughts manage to identify with thoughts because thoughts can think about thoughts. Advaita teachings ring very true now. After becoming awareness itself I "remembered" that I was always it. Try looking at a childhood memory that feels peaceful. That peace that feels like it's in the background is you, but you ignored it because there were more important things you had to think about and so you went on and forgot who you are completely over time. But I never actually stopped pursuing until my mind went suddenly silent on it's own. Psychedelics helped here because they can really stomp your ego so hard it gets tired of thinking about itself. My best advice for people would be to just spend time in no-mind. The nothingness will reveal itself to you without effort of mind. It will seem insignificant at first, but as you stay with it and don't try to grasp it with your mind it will flourish.

Mi take on this is that everything has to come from nothingness. There must be a point where nothing was there, and matter manifested from that nothing... our mind can't not comprehend it, because we have an "idea" of what nothing is. Let's say that nothing is a state where there's all the possibilities for everything to manifest. It contradicts our logic. In that nothingness everything is manifested. The only thing that exist is nothing, or you can call it silence, the void. Our mind try to separate things to understand. It says, here there's a person, a tree, an animal, etc... but everything is made of the same substance. Awareness. Some people call it God, others the source, others nothingness, and so on... God has thousands of names. It is personal and impersonal at the same time... and I won't continue writing because everything I write is not even near of what reality is. God is the ultimate reality. Think of nothingness as the ultimate truth. Truth shall make you free!

The mind perspective is what made you write those descriptions about reallity. Reallity simply is, cannot be conceptualized. Otherwise is not Awakening. From a perspective of Awakening nothingness is something. But cannot be explained. As much as one has experiences with awakenings and dreams, and sacred geometry etc, they are just EGO based perspectives, the fellings, the tripping. Awakening and Reallity are beyond thought and feeling. Is not a middle perspective of yin and yan, is a full circle integrating everything in the unspoken.

@SoonHei Yes @Yousef Yes it is apsolutely nothing but this nothingness is alive and aware as I remember Leo saying. It's one single be-ing, one infinite singularity. There cannot be two, that is duality and separation which is an illusion. So yea, it's all One. It's all God.

@Leo Gura if you go all the way to end of illusion. then YOU is an illusion aswell. The TRUTH is an illusion. Basically everything is an illusion, nothing is real at all. its neither beautiful or unconditional love. There is no YOU either thats the TRUTH. absolute infinity, bhrama, oneness, void, nothingness , all these words are synonymous and breakdown before the TRUTH because it becomes itself. ITS just different levels of letting go along the whole way. UNTIL YOU SURRENDER EVERYTHING TO THE TRUTH. AND ONLY LIVE IN TRUTH. no life, no death , no reality. just THE TRUTH that is the one who is conscious - the highest conscious mind. (Aakash as TRUTH not truth presently)

My path of Inquiry by its nature is offensive when articulated to others. Personality is pretty much synonymous with ego. American culture in general idealizes big personalities for the most part. Realizing the nothingness of Personality is offensive to people identified with personality. Actually my path is the cafeteria model but for the most part is Fourth way Self observation and Self Remembering. Blending with Diamond Approach work. ICHING for taking clues from the Cosmos , 20 minute Centering Prayer twice a day. One thing that I'm trying to keep underneath everything is what Gurdjieff called Kundabuffer. To me it seems like it deserves that degree of significance. A formula that makes sense to me Kundalini energy = Chi = Prana + absence of discipline = motorfuel for imagination and self deception Kundalini energy / Prana + 3 centered awareness = Higher Consciousness / Objective Reason 3 Centered Awareness is Intellect and feeling working in harmony, grounded through the human body.

@Pouya vipassana is about seeing directly into impermanence. about noticing the rising and falling of phenomena from and into nothingness

Good Vid @Leo Gura ! Your true-self does not change over time or space. In fact, time or space are irrelevant to it. You can not find it, it is nowhere to be found. This is why it referred to as emptiness. It is like the sun that can not illuminate itself, or a blade that can not cut itself. Your true-self is not an object, it has no properties and this is why it referred to as nothingness. It is in which reality is manifested. Your false-self is part of the illusory Reality which changes constantly. In fact, you know your true-self intimately all your life. You had overlooked it all of those years. It is what you call the presence that is aware to all it perceives, regardless of your body or your mind. BTW: there is no you. you are an illusion 2. as 4 me? i am you...

After watching today's video, I'm worried that I'm intellectualizing the idea of awareness, emptiness, true self, etc and that I'm going to do it wrong for a decade before I realize. I'm concerned my mind is making false sensations or images of the emptiness, and I can't seem to get past the tricks of my mind. When I try to sense the emptiness inside my head, I go inside and try to see what the "perceiver" is that links at the deepest level to my senses like sight, hearing, and smell, and the general idea of being "concious". It gives me a weird feeling like there's a vacuum or negative pressure inside my head that's sucking my head and ear canals in on itself. That's a sensation so I know that definitely can't be it. When I try to sense the emptiness outside of myself, it's still just a single point of "nothingness" I'm imagining in space in front of me, as opposed so something that permeates everything. Even if I think I'm feeling pure awareness or stillness, it still seems like there's a physical sensation associated with that. How do I know for sure that I'm finding true emptiness / awareness / true self, instead of it just being my mind tricking me? Am I supposed to be able to find it? Or is this some neti neti thing where I'm supposed to struggle to find it for hundreds of hours, and then it will just suddenly click?

The entire fabric of reality is completely empty. There was never a process of nothingness going into somethingness, there was always nothing. This is nothing. This moment is not something and before this there was nothing, this is a false paradigm. This very moment is absolutely nothing. This is what nothing looks like. Also there's no one here, this is a scary feeling... there's absolutely no one here. No one is reading this, no one will reply, and no one wrote this. This just hit me hard and recontextualized my previous beliefs. Wow... knowing that no one will read this makes me wonder why those fingers in front of me are still moving and typing this?

On the topic of drugs: It is a common assumption for people that the default state of the mind is the most correct state, but is that really true? The brain at default is no different than drugs. Its all chemicals that is being used to interpret information. By this all interpretations are equally valid if you don't ride on an appeal to popularity game. All drugs give you some bigger picture of reality itself. Some people get too caught up in one aspect and forget the previous. But if you build a bigger more holistic view, you can rise up above both. Remember that science is a model of the the reality we experience. Science measures patterns but there is no guarantee reality is following the patterns we measure or that it will continue to be consistent. So using science as the holy grail of describing reality will fall short and lock you into ideology. No model can fully encompass something infinite in its fundamental form. When you talk of the universe you are creating a separation here - how much of the universe there is we do not know. Consciousness expresses itself in every way possible which results in infinity. This is simply one story inside the infinite story. But hearing this from me and believing it is all bullshit. The whole point of meditation and self inquiry in this work is for you to directly experience it. To rise above the ideological confines of being 'human' and to realize you are everything. Psychedelics help people realize this faster which would take much longer without it. LSD showed me separation is an illusory concept. Salvia showed me how illusory perception is. DXM gave me a higher understanding of nothingness. These are all experiences that go alongside the sober experience. You are always tripping. Thats the whole point of a hallucination. Everything I am saying though is just words, concepts, and imagination that do not compare to the indescribable experiences. Believing in just words and concepts is how you get modern religion. So use your skepticism to delve deeper to question deeper. We can only offer intellectual understandings to point you where to look, but you must still look beyond the concepts.

Recently, I started to get a glimpse of how profound Quantum Mechanics is. I've heard about the famous Double Slit Experiment when I was in high school. I even did some basic calculations of the interference pattern in my college physics class. Yet, it never occurred to anybody just how counter-intuitive, profound, and outright bizarre that experiment is. Brief description Imagine you have a loaded gun pointed at a wall with two slit openings. Behind it is another one, where every bullet entry can be clearly seen. The first wall acts as a sieve for all the bullets fired at the second wall. Common sense suggests that only the bullets fired at a specific angle will go through. After hundreds of rounds fired from different angles, you should expect two lines on the second wall. Those lines are a projection of the two primary slits. After a good number of rounds, the emerging pattern was very counter-intuitive. The marks suggested that a bullet was not following a straight path. There were bullet holes found in spots that were physically un-reachable without curving the bullet direction. The marks appeared in an Interference pattern, which is a phenomenon of waves. It can be observed at a beach when ocean waves encounter rocks. Still, bullets - electrons, are not waves, they are real physical particles. Your body and everything around us is made out of them... or so it seems. This result was basically the stuff of science fiction. It suggested that when a bullet was shot, it immediately transformed into a soup of all possible positions. It collapsed back into a bullet again when it reached the second wall. And then it got even weirder... When scientists put a measuring device that catches the bullet's exact position. They stopped transforming into a wave and acted just as regular physical entities! There was no Interference pattern, and the results were predictable. When they removed the measuring devices, the pattern appeared again. So what the hell is going on? The conclusion was that the act of observation collapses this wave of infinite possibilities into a single point of outcome. Yet when you are not looking, it all exists as a primordial singularity, infinite potential or a probability function. Although this function (Bell curve distribution) favors certain outcomes, there is never a 0% chance for any outcome. This result caused credible scientists to consider that we truly live in a simulation. We are in a game engine that and only renders things we actually need to see. Like a game character uncovering dark areas on the map, except that dark areas are non-existent prior to discovery. I'd like to hear your conclusion. Here is mine: Aside from quotes like "when you are not looking at the moon, it isn't there". What this seems to suggest is that consciousness is not separate from the "outside" events. In fact, there are is no external reality. Everything exists as nothingness, void, and infinite potential until consciousness is introduced. That stoplight awareness gives rise to the 10,000 things we see around us. Like an old movie projector with a tape running through it. The tape images become visible only through the light of the projector. The present moment manifests itself only because of awareness. There is no outside reality to present experiences. We are the raw experience that collapses the emptiness and manifests reality every single moment.

I'm more concerned with this universe in particular and the inside of it. The outside is straight up impossible to know anything about. Imagining non-existence is most likely impossible for the following reasons: Imagining images in your mind is a survival mechanism. It allows for you to see future threats and such. It was not intended on allowing humans and other biological organisms to grasp concepts like infinity or nothingness. No one knows all of the details about how it works but that is the holy grail.

If you havent had any mystical experiences and psychedelics are not on your radar, I would suggest deepening your meditation and broadening your skills. That will definitely produce mystical experiences. It sounds like you have already made some great progress but maybe have stalled. Wisdom Wide and Deep is a book that is basically the ancient Buddhist Vissuddhimagga for the Western mind that is complete with the most advanced meditation techniques. Deepen your Jhana (concentration meditation) absorbtions and you will enter new realms. After mastering the Jhanas, it sets the foundation for extremely profound and transformative Vipassana insights. The insights will show you nothingness, emptiness, impermanence, etc. Spend the next decade mastering that book and it will lead to enlightenment. I like studying Buddhism for the techniques and Advaita Vedanta for evolution of the Atman and heart. Without the development of the heart, spiritual development seems dry with something important missing. To me, the evolution of the heart results in bringing love and beauty to others and being an instrument that the universe/Brahman/God can use for their evolution. Untangle your attachments Accept your aversions Surrender Once you have purified yourself to a certain point and surrendered, you will find the universe/God moving through you.

Okay, the Truth is what is. Synonymously, the Truth is the present moment, whatever the content is. So what? What is so special about this? What is so spiritual about it? And how does it match with God, Nothingness etc..? I'm a pretty decent human being, and I care about the Truth. I understand that 'subject-object' duality is just an assumption and it must collapse, I don't suffer anymore (90% of the time), I enjoy life more, I go out in nature A LOT! I care a little about the dream character, and I don't really have much desires. I enjoy being alone. I still have some addictions, but they're working their selves out, and I believe they're going to end soon. Insight: addiction is just a way (better put: natural mechanism) of maintaining survival. I could get angry or sad rarely and it ends so fast. I'm comfortable with ego backlashes as I notice them happening every now and then. I don't view the so-called 'bad emotions' as bad anymore. Rather, I find them necessary. I'm an introvert, and I'm comfortable with that. And I could indulge myself into low consciousness talks if I felt like it, which is a cool new feature I discovered recently, I became a pretty laid-back guy recently. I mean, yes, the magic of life, I glimpse it. The sight and hearing and all that, how's it possible?! Amazing! Wonderful! I still have some doubts about death and the afterlife. Zero mystical experiences so far, and psychedelics are not on my radar. I feel like there's a lot more for me to learn, and I don't feel fully satisfied with my metaphysics yet. But I know I'm on the right path. You and other enlightenment people talk about 'nothingness, void, emptiness, etc..' which is something I can't relate to yet. What is your advice ? What should I do? Is it only time that I need? I believe you guys can read between the lines and know exactly what I need to hear. Because you always did! Love you all ? And thanks in advance.

@SOUL ok, I can dig that. You're saying that in a non-dual sense awareness is just another piece of the puzzle? It's no different from a thought or anything else. Rupert Spira says thought is a modulation of awareness so I can see how this makes sense. Then the true Self....this is different from awareness right? The heart on the right as Ramana Maharshi called it. @Anton Rogachevski It's easy to objectify awareness in this game isn't it? Can I ask you, is awareness the same as the true self? Or just another aspect of duality? Some people imply that everything is made up of awareness and others imply that there's something beyond that, some kind of primal nothingness. I'm gonna be tripping for the first time in a few days so I might have some answers then, but fancied a bit more jibber jabber in the meantime

Why do you see depth and wisdom of saying reality is nothingness?

of course. yes. those are indeeed thoughts. and that question you asked is also a thought. i really liked how @Serotoninluv put it above also, saw this comment below on youtube under Leo's video. It's a nice sum up. You - as the true nature of 'you'/self - are the 'awareness' behind all thoughts. You are the awareness that hear the birds sing and see the green leaves of a tree. This 'awareness', that you truly are, is not an object, not a thought, not a thing, not a concept, not an emotion, not a feeling, not an experience, not a form of energy, not a program... it is absolutely nothing. You can call it nothingness, you can call it whatever you want. It is zero, 0, nothing, however, at the same time, you, as this awareness, is actually the only "thing" that truly exist; it's eternal, universal, you are in other words the fabric and structure of existence it self, or to put it in yet another words: you are the whole Universe. Everytime you have a thought, you have the option to just be completely aware of the thought and do NOTHING about it; you're only noticing it. The other option (the opposite option) is to align your self with the thought, that is to not become aware of it, but instead to dive into it and let it affect you and give meaning to you (in other words: more thinking). The act of thinking "oh I must stop thinking this" is not being completely aware of the thought, but rather the oppsite: diving into the thought and giving it meaning. To be completely aware of thoughts takes practice. Most people, including me to a large degree, are very, very unaware and so, so caught up in the game of playing the person they think they are. Meditating is about being completely aware of thoughts and doing nothing about them, but instead just being completely aware of them. At some point you get so good at being aware of the thoughts and not diving into them, that the mind stops 'creating' thoughts (because it's tired of you not caring about them), and you will eventually instead align with the true nature of yourself, that is: nothingness, and you will at that point experience complete ego death, which will knock your socks off, as Leo says.

@Rilles infinitely far. Infinitely up, infinitely down. What do you think quarks are made of? Are they impenetrable building blocks of all matter? That's as far as they go? How does it not make any sense to not zoom further? And up into the cosmos? A literal infinite universe. If what scientists say is true, and there was a big bang and it's been expanding for 14 billion years, then that's not infinite, is it? It's still trapped in the illusion of spacetime. What happens if you go beyond the "bubble" that scientists seem to believe in? Infinite nothingness? Or a quark in another universe?

@winterknight By that ('one') you are referring to the false I, correct? But isn't the idea that the Self is our real nature? Doesn't that paradoxically conclude that we are in fact the doer and the actor? Admittedly, it is not difficult to see how all thoughts and intentions sprout out of nothingness spontaneously - since a thought does not need to be preceded by another thought to occur, they simply appear out of nowhere. So when you say that one should have this recognition, is there a practical method to demonstrate this quickly?