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@Shin I read in a book (probably "Neti-Neti Meditation") 3 stages: 1. Duality 2. Non-Duality 3. Nothingness

I for one am not entirely sure if I have seen the Ox or not. Took ayahuasca and it took me into a surreal journey into the realms of the abstract, great love, a mystical experience through and through. Took mushrooms and it showed me dream-like visions similar to ayahuasca, I felt immense love and respect, and overwhelming divinity inside me. Took LSD and it showed me how reality, time and perception can bend and stretch into unfathomable proportions. Then took 5-Meo-DMT... and my experience was black nothingness, as if I ceased to exist for some minutes and I was reduced to blank awareness. No emotions tho, I did not panicked nor did I felt any joy, it just happened. I came out of it feeling underwhelmed to be honest, but it was nonetheless a very interesting experience.

Shinzen Young explains: The first 5 pictures are the enlighment journey. Picture 7 , arriving home , is the final stage. However, the last three come after. Substance, Form , Purpose are pictures 8,9, 10. Substance : nothingness. Form : everything. Purpose: spreading the consciousness through act of love and giving from bottom of society. That's only my interpretation and limited understanding. Correction.

Happyness and enlightenment are not necessarily connected. Happyness is just an emotion. An experience. Enlightenment is not an emotion or experience. It's just a boundless freedom or nothingness where there's no suffering. There're ways to generate happyness very fast. Like kundalini, kriya or some tao techneques can get you into brain orgasms very much but it's not enlightenment. It's not freedom. It's just an emotion. It depends what kind of practices you do. Being happy is not a big achievement actually. It's the most basic thing.

A total disidentification is hard to achieve in pratice. Most people who have some kind of awakening will not fully realize the extent of the Nothingness. A realization of no-self is not the end of the game. There is yet deeper. I have no idea about Teal Swan speficially, I'm just speaking more broadly. I think many paranormally inclined folks have a hard time fully transcending the subtle paranornal realm. But in the end, it is all still form. Just a subtle version of the gross material realm. There is the gross material realm, the subtle realm, and then finally what is called casual nondual. At the very end all identification of any kind is erased. But how many people will actaulize that? Not many. It is definitely possible to realize that you were never even born. By that point, what is there to identify with? Your ultimate nature is pure emptiness. But of course it's still great to do stuff like introspection a out your personality, or to integrate shadow aspects, etc. Psychological work is still very useful for everyday life even though it is not your true ultimate nature.

I don't know. I feel I understand this logcally very easy, without any awakenings. 1 is something. It exists. It's tangable, it's physcial. You can hold it your hands. 0 also exists. But you can't hold it in your hands. It's nothingness. But it exists. It's a thing but not a physical thing. Like space. Space is also non physical but without space nothing would be possible.

The something that you are seeing right now, which is the world we're living in, isn't permanent. For example, no one stays in this world forever. So, we pass away one day and become "nothingness." But then, during our lifetime, some of us have this "awakening." That's when we see ourselves as "nothingness" becoming "somethingness" when we embody back into our ego (body) via singularity. And, we gain wisdom from that.

@non_nothing why? in case if i'd be scared when facing the Truth? But there will be no fears left when you had surrendered yourself completely to the Truth. Whatever that may be, It's a journey into the unknown btw, might as well give yourself completely to the infinite intelligence, than to be attached to impermanent/groundless 'thing'. Because whenever i had this mindset, it's more effortless, the answers will comes at me through everything else without me having to work hard to find it. From my experience, it will be effortless. What is the possible danger that you talk about? Do you mean the 'attachment' aspect of it? Or the God = Everything part of it? Or the nothingness?

@Leo Gura I'm not quite there, but getting there. My ego/mind has been very disgruntled with all of the shifts I have taken lately, and that has left me with a mindset that has been pretty bleak overall. The rest is very liberating. I continue to struggle with letting go when I know I will be left with nothing. I get a further glimpse of the true nature of things, and then I find a way to trick myself back into identification with that which I know I am not. It's like my mind does not want me to be free of the idea that I am the ego, and now I face a scary wall of nothingness that offers no reason to surpass it. I am told it is worth pursuing, but I have yet to fully understand why.

@winterknight I've been reading this giant thread for a couple of days now and I have 2 questions for you, I apologize in advance if they have already been answered, since I didn't read the entire thread. 1) I've been practicing self-inquiry after my Kriya Yoga practice and I just wanted some support to know if I'm getting a glimpse of the Truth yet or not, if I'm doing it right or not. I haven't done self-inquiry as you suggest yet - I'll be trying it in the following days. What I have been mostly doing is perceiving thoughts, emotions, sensations and etc, and asking myself "who's aware of this thought/emotion/sensation?", my mind usually answers "me" and I just go meta and stay aware that something is aware of the answer "me" or of the thought/emotion/sensation. What normally happens is that I try to abide in this place - and I notice that I am aware that I'm trying to abide in this place - there's always something prior to what I'm perceiving. I think I have experienced nothingness for very short periods of time, that which cannot be described, even though it's completely paradoxical to write this haha. But what always happens is that I'm quickly back being aware of another object - my breath for instance. And then I ask myself again "who's aware of this breath?"(intuitevely sometimes or in the form of a thought) and the process begins again. As is mentoned, I feel like "I" get to this point where my awareness is in this nothingness, but just for a few seconds or so. Am I delusional here or maybe I'm touching the right thing? Does this seems to be a good way of doing self-inquiry and that I should just keep on going in this path, and with time I'll be able to stay more and more in this "place" or would you suggest me to take a different route? 2)This one is just a question that poped in my mind: can you know with 100% certainty if another human being has realized the Truth by being in their presence? Hehe just out of curiosity! Thanks for your time! =]

Evil doesn't exist existentially. So, all morality is inherently relativistic on the existential level. Reality, on the absolute level, is empty of both good and evil. All things are perfect, as they are manifestations of an all-loving and perfect creator, regardless of how natural the tendency of human beings to label something evil is. So, good and evil come down to human interpretations and labels of events and realities that are beyond the human concept of good and evil or the human mind's ability to conceptualize in general. An example would be that a murderer is someone that people would label evil because they cause pain and suffering for their own reason without regard for the pain and suffering they cause. So, on the relative level of practical human functioning, they cause a lot of problems for people. But the murderer, on the absolute level, is empty of evil as it is part of the grand play that God creates from itself and for itself. So, the murderer is just another indistinguishable aspect of the field of consciousness which is divine and perfect as it is God. Just as in a painting of a murderer murdering someone, on the existential level all it is paint on a canvas. There is nothing evil about the paint that is used to paint the murderer in the painting relative to the paint used to create the victim or the background. It is only the human ability to conceptualize of an interpretation of the painting that makes us supply a meaning for it. It's an illusion painted by its creator and all of the creation is inseparable from the rest of the creation. And like the painting, on the existential level, all is an illusion. However, on the level of duality, there is such a thing as healthy and unhealthy. There is also such a thing as functional and dysfunctional. There is also such a thing as building up and breaking down. And there is such a thing as something that's constructive versus being destructive. There at also actions that produce pain and suffering and actions that don't produce pain and suffering. And human beings will often categorize this dichotomy by labeling it good and evil.... and may think there is even an existential reality to those labels, when they really only exist as practical labels. So, these dichotomies are all relative truths within the field of duality. But on the level of the non-dual, there is no dichotomies including the dichotomy of good and evil... there is only one which is also nothingness. For example, there is nothing inherently and existentially invalid about eating a diet consisting of only donuts. But objectively speaking, if your goal is health, then an all-donut diet is not conducive to the goal of health. But there is nothing existentially more valid about being healthy relative to being unhealthy. God loves both the healthy and unhealthy unconditionally and abhors nothing and no one. That said, on the human practical level, it is a mostly universal human preference to desire health and not desire illness. But God has no such prejudice. It loves all regardless of how beneficial or detrimental it is to human beings or other sentient beings in general. So, if we label something practically "evil" as being influenced by the destructive drive, then the practical term has the most efficacy in describing a situation that is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and focus toward creating suffering and breaking down. Evil is something that goes against harmonious human functioning. And on the practical human level we recognize that these practically "evil" situations cause us or others suffering, then it makes sense to avoid participating in and perpetuating these patterns. This is especially true if we realize the inherent oneness of reality and how others' pain is our own pain. But within the field of duality, there is a destructive drive and a constructive drive that can be noticed as phenomenological realities. They are there, and they can be observed as the fodder of the internal landscape. And they influence human thought and action. But there is nothing inherently good or evil about those two drives, as they too are just part of God's perfect creation and God loves them both. God doesn't abhor the destructive drive... it created it. And so, counterintuitively, the drives of both good and evil are empty of good and evil on the existential level just like everything else is.

@Shin Pain kicks in at about 30-45 mins for me until it is quite annoying at around 55-60 mins. I usually stop at 60 min as the pain becomes unbearable around the knees. However, if I am sitting on a chair, then the SDS goes more smoothly (can easily go over 60 mins), but there are less 'mystical' insights in a way when I am not sitting cross-legged on the floor. By 'mystical' insights I mean feelings of nothingness, being without a location or simply kundalini type of energy flows, sorry for the sloppy use of the term 'mystical'. I have no idea whether it is a causation, a correlation, a coincidence or whatever - just sharing my experience.

@Jack River If you want to go to the absolute level, then there is nothing / everything. Simply One. That’s great. Yet from that Nothingness is also a relative existence. That One consciousness is expressing itself relatively. And that relativity is evolving. Everything is absolutely perfect as it is in the Eternal Now and is evolving relatively. Some beings in that relative workd want to help increase the relative consciousness of that One absolute consciousness.

From where you stand that might be so, but you were not the one to ask the question so how are you to be the judge of that? The unchallenged master is no master at all. I merely asked some questions to he who claims to see all paths up the mountain. I did not expect some answer that would blow my mind, just what would seem like an honest inquiry into a very fundamental challenge of preaching the way he does. Sure it might be a distraction for those who might learn something from him, but blindly following self-proclaimed gurus and believing in apparent truths (those that make sense to the mind but not the heart) is perhaps the biggest trap there is. From where you are, he makes a lot of sense. Of course, you are a moderator of a self-inquiry forum centered around the teachings of Leo. But to tell those who are not just blindly following the advice of some enlightenment-idol on their screen, but challenging who may as well be causing more confusion rather than undoing it (not much separates truth from illusion), makes me question whether this forum is a sort of cult rather than a place of genuine exploration of Self. Of course you could argue that it is all just one big movement and it happens when it happens regardless of what is said and done, but this is a misconception about non-duality. It is like if all 'realized' no-self and the lack of free will or whatever we may call it and just were like 'oh well, nothing really matters so I have no responsibility for anything, I can do whatever I want!', the world would quickly fall apart. Just because all is one it is still two, and these two are in a sort of eternal game of hide and seek. If all these ideas are feeding the part of the one that is illusion, then in his attempt to provide guidance he is actually causing more confusion and prolonging the way back to center, stillness, nothingness.

@Emanyalpsid Have seen him before, just watching the Part 3 right now. Quite incoherent and self-contradicting description of things, mingled with a lot of assumptions which are not explained further - especially the ones about substance dualism. Also, he takes a few Ramana Maharshi quotes out of context in order to strengthen his argument, where what Ramana was trying to point out was the transcending of the I AM to nothingness Comparing Leo and this guy, the latter rings a lot more of my bullshit radars and contradicts more of what my direct experience is Since this is the only thing I have, I will probably stick with my direct experience rather than this guy's concepts. Thanks for sharing though, it is always good to have ideas challenged. The guy is not too bad, he has a point about people being lost in concepts and mentions a few good thoughts about free will. As with everything, take it with a pinch of salt - he even mentions this with his eat the grape, spit out the seeds analogy

Enlightenment to the Buddha was waking up from the dream of existence. He understood that what is perceived as separate is an illusion but what is infinite and the whole is not. The all, wholeness, infinity or nothingness (unified indifferentiable being). He also understood that all things arise from the mind as we project purpose and meaning to those concepts the self interacts with. We do this to define ourselves and orientate in the world of things and survive. Without self, identity ceases to exist and you and the whole be one, timeless, beyond time, beyond being born or dying. He understood that "we" will all return to this state as impermanence is in all things. As a result, one will see that suffering is due to attachment to the self, and this suffering will cease when the mind is empty and disidentifies. Disidentifying from the illusion, understanding that he is infinite and not confined and that he is nothing as a thing compared to everything. Human-life is suffering as we attach ourselves to many things due to what we love and pursue and suffer when we cannot attain those things. Key is to understand these attachments are something to strive for but should not makes us suffer and when they do make us suffer we should take responsibility as it is us we clings to those. Nirvana is selflessness, Samsara is ego (I must).

@Barna Mindfulness meditation throughout the day, which you eventually come to accept as 'just being'. I do about 30 min -1 hour of 'drifting' meditation (no thought, which evolves at some point into a sort of floating in an nothingness feeling) at some point during the day and a small session before sleeping, though usually nowadays this wakes me up so much I have too much energy to sleep then... I naturally want to once I close my eyes so not sure how to change this. Eventually I drift off, usually by doing visualization mediation of calming oceans. Walking meditation is simply amazing, feeling every fiber of your body in unity and it's expression.. so I do that as well on way to work and after.. I mean it's just a part of my whole day, eyes open eyes closed.. I don't even think of it as 'meditation' perse really, I'm just being in with some variation.. very quiet mind... sometimes at lunch if I have time.. I do some self-inquiry then I let my mind wander, but as time has gone on much fewer thoughts seem to pop up as I fully integrated or resolved them into myself. Lately I started bit more.. it varies through week on week. I don't plan it much anymore, just go with the flow, hope that answers your question. - granted Modafinil or Waklert are so much easier and much less work, just remember everything has a cost. Not as dramatic the side effects of Limitless and overall compared to things like cocaine, or whatever it's so much more positive. But you will simply outgrow it at some point, I don't regret using them though! It opened my mind to how you can just flip a switch and boom you're there, fully there with nothing in between, it led me down the path to meditation eventually (that and my natural curiosity''what else is positive' what can be achieved naturally etc').

@VioletFlame I think it depends on the context. In Tier2, the self has been mostly transcended. A Tier2 being sees the bigger picture that this illusory self is within something much more expansive. There isn’t a strong identification to beliefs and perspectives. Someone at Tier2 is not attached to being identified as “I am Yellow”. They are comfortable with the notion that there are Yellow/Turquoise level concepts and experiences that arise, yet no “me” to take ownership. Yet, when communicating with people at Blue/Orange level development, Tier2 concepts and language are misunderstood. It can cause confusion, frustration and even conflict in the person. A Tier2 being is very good at going with the flow of relativity and can “meet a person where they are at”. If a Blue/Orange person asked what my experience of being a Yellow level thinker at my job is like - I would speak as if I identify as Yellow. And then, if Turqoise beings were conversing about the relative nature of Yellow which takes form as formless nothingness, identification with Yellow is dissolved. I think the key is whether they are conscious that they are identifying with a stage for ease of conversation and can let go of identification when appropriate. Or, is the person attached to the identification and can’t let go. That type of egoic attachment is a delusional trap. And it gets sneakier as one evolves up the spiral. I’ve had to face it many times. Each time I entered a new stage, there was some sense of egoic attachment with identifying with that stage.

I m far away from englitment but I had a weird experience. So 3 weeks ago I had the following experiences. I felt like I was awerness itself an awerness is nothingness, its like a "negative space" where you experience everything in your life. Awerness it's like a invisible bubble that it's around you it's the only thing that it's constant in your life. Right now in my head it's like this. The body is a pc and awerness it's a program when you look at the pc you can't see the program running on components but the program it's there. What do you think guys? Is this an insight or just dissociation?

What do you think spirituality is all about? It's liberation from this kind of pain. Self-inquire. Who is experiencing this pain? That is the ultimate solution. But in addition: a) write, draw, or otherwise artistically represent your feelings in as much detail as you possibly can. do not stop till you feel like you have captured how you are feeling exactly b) try, with the above, to understand what exactly you want to do about the situation... maybe you want to take some action. try that c) as I always say, get therapy Yes, first understand your true nature through Ramana Maharshi's self-inquiry, and then you will be in the best position to understand how to help with the problem of physical pain. It turns out that physical pain cannot affect your true inner peace. The enlightened may yell and shout and scream just like anyone else when in pain, but their inner experience is different. In truth, they are untouched, because they know who they really are. The world seems terribly unjust. When you understand your true nature, you will find out that all this pain and suffering and injustice is only an appearance. Your true nature cannot be affected by it. And if you do want to help the world, there is no better way than by finding your own peace -- then your mind will be in the best position to help the world find it. There's only one layer of the matrix. Don't confuse yourself with distinctions between so-called "nothingness" and "non-duality." The question is simple: are you in a state of clear, calm, peace even with your eyes open and you go about your life? If so, then stay there, whatever you want to call it. And if you leave that, come back to it. That's it. That actually is your true nature right there. Some day you will stop leaving that -- at that moment you will understand you actually never left it and never could leave it. As above. If you feel dissatisfied in any way ("Is there still an I?") then that is not peace. Continue the "doing nothing" or else the self-inquiry till you get to that vast, spacious peace that can be maintained with open eyes. Then don't bother to leave. 1. This is a misleading question and it'll be a misleading answer, but: 20 years that I was on the path. There is no longer a path. 2. Yes, it seemed that way. 3. Another misleading question. There is no "becoming" enlightened because we are all already that. The mind stopped searching, you could say, last year, after those 20 years. 4. After months of intense self-inquiry, and before that, decades of spiritual and psychological work on myself. 5. It is not possible. 6. Aligning myself with my true desire. Ramana Maharshi's self-inquiry.

@winterknight Am I right in saying that enlightenment is about this nothingness that I don't think I've been aware of yet, rather than non-dual being? If it's true, how do I then go from non-dual being to nothingness? Do I just bask in the non-dual being until the shift just happens? Just like it happened when I went from dual to non-dual. I see this as a first and second layer of the matrix.

Since my not-punching bag is getting upset, I'll publicly admit that the limit of movement is stillness, not touch. Touch is an inner movement that is confused for stillness. The Ego's wet dream therefore is: Darkness Silence Saliva (tastelessness?) Air (smelllessness?) Stillness Nothingness (non-existence) The inner and outer spheres of the gross senses are what I call the inner and outer world. Subjective and objective. The boundary between subjective and objective is the "-lessness" : the paradox. The sense of being is, however, problematic. I can approach it in two ways: Treat it as a gross sense and claim that there are 'private' and 'public' beings. That I can agree and disagree about the existence of things with other people and treat it as the basis for experience. Observe that the very partitioning of senses into inner and outer is grounded in the sense of being. Subjective and objective worlds themselves are entities that form relationships with other senses. This way, I can see that the sense of being itself cannot be partitioned into inner and outer, because the possibility of partitioning is grounded in it. The first option creates one stable conceptual system in which there is "I" and "other". I will call this conceptual system Egoic perception. The second option creates another stable conceptual system in which there is "I=you=we". I will call this conceptual system Nondual perception.

Boom, progress. I was wondering about this question right here: and it got me curious and a little bit depressed. That is because everything that is obvious is unitary. There is nothing inner and outer about it. In fact, innerness and outerness are beings themselves so they have to somehow point back into the sense of being. This got me depressed because it ruins all of the beautiful dual symmetry of the 5-simplex. (Or maybe it doesn't? I just figured something out). Anyways, here's another clue: That thing right here is the Ego's wet dream. Paradoxes in the gross senses seem like manifestations of nothingness.

All of the senses contain paradoxes. What is the 'paradoxical experience'? Darkness Silence Saliva (?) Air (?) Touch Nothingness Isn't that basically the experience of death? The total sensory deprivation?

I wonder if nondual perception is a category? All senses seem to have singularities, which are the points between inner and outer spheres: inner sight / darkness / outer sight inner hearing / silence / outer hearing inner taste / ??? / outer taste inner smell / ??? / outer smell inner movement / touch / outer movement inner being / nothingness / outer being ??? - there seems to be no obvious word for these singularities. They are like the taste of saliva and the smell of air. I'm still having difficulty talking about the sense of being. I can only describe its short-circuits with other senses. From the point of view of short-circuits, it is the ability to recognize entities out of sensations. When the phone rings, I move in such a way that I can see the phone. Sense of being is what 'glues' the sound of ringing, motion of the head and shape of the phone into what I perceive to be the entity called phone.