Search the Community

We can either accumulate knowledge by means of time which only continues as a movement of time. Or there can be a cessation of time all together. Time “any movement of self” cannot move to the timeless. Time must end. If time does not end, nothingness is a product of time, therefore is not nothingness.

Unless there is a cessation of thought in time one is speaking of nothingness as an idea “product of thought” To read and accumulate concepts, theories, and so on is the movement of thought imitating and identifying with some-THING. And only thought identifies and imitates. As long as thought is in movement one is bound by time, and nothingness is timeless. One cannot go beyond where one hasn’t yet began. Get rid of all traditional ideas, concepts, and theories about nothingness. As any description “of thought” is never what is actually described “what is”

@Leo Gura Funny, I just watched a video of sadhguru explaining the third eye, and he said that there are million different ways on how to move your energies to the third eye, or Ajna chakra, but to move your energies to the crown chakra, there are no ways at all. Only if you have your third eye open (so to speak), and after that jump into nothingness, your crown chakra opens. Well, again, different guru's use different rhetoric. I guess we just have to try these things ourselves and see what happens. I'll start doing the pranayama practice with my internal gaze between my eyebrows.

It’s important to understand that unless time/thought ends all talk of nothingness is a product of imagination. This has to do with my original post here about experience.

No i am understanding it, you are saying the blind man only understands the picture doesn't exist because someone tells him about the picture and he has a concept of him not being able to see it (existing). Or if someone loses all their senses except for the mind then they will only know that something doesn't exist because they have a memory or concept of having these senses before they had lost it, right? Why does nothingness = existence When non-existence = a concept. when nothingness and non-existence are practically the same thing in dictionary terms. Doesn't nothingness basically mean there's nothing there! it doesn't exist?! Why isn't it a paradox in both cases?

No, what I am trying to communicate to you is that Nothingness is existence. Nothingness is NOT non-existence. This is a very important point: Nothingness exists! You're still not realizing that non-existence is a concept, which is occurs within existence.

if you dont like it then fair enough you don't need to come telling me this guy is a salad guy and how i need to find a better teaching. Not sure why you felt the need to share that. Clearly you're here to socialise seeing as leo is not your teacher and "some guy who runs this website" and dont like complicated reads? what you dont like your friends on facebook or something? I listen to Leo as a teacher, and I listen to many others sources, doesn't mean i agree with him on everything, for example I disagree with him on this, to me nothingness is identical to non-existence, the absence of everything, if nothingness is an existent thing then you would be able to prove it, it wouldn't be this intangible, invisible, inconceivable thing which is basically describing non-existence, nothingness is beyond everything.

What implies to you fully accept yourself? why you are not enlightened righ now?, put yourself in that place, feel that. It's the same place from which you reject all the world and all the life around you. You just have an nosy mind, accustomed to help it flow, projecting reasons in the past and in the future, let it flow without help, turn your mind to one side just a instant, and it will stop by itself for the moment. do nothing, let your mind stop alone, without help, and then the state of being will manifest itself. whether you know it or not this state of conciousness is light, this text Light is the most mysterious thing in the universe, for many reasons. You may not have felt it like that, but the first thing about light is that light is the purest energy. Physics says that everything material is not really matter, only energy is real. Matter is dead; matter exists no more. It never existed except in our conceptions. Matter appears to be, but it is not. Only light is - or energy, or electricity. The deeper we penetrate into matter, the less material is found. At the very deepest there is no matter, and matter itself becomes nonmaterial. But light remains, or energy. Light is the purest energy. Light is not matter, and wherever we feel that matter is, it is only light condensed. So matter means light condensed. This is the first mystery about light, because it is the substratum of all existence. So in a new way, the oldest concept of religions - that in the beginning God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light - becomes very significant, because existence in its purity is light. So if existence begins, it has to begin with light. Another thing: light can exist without life, but life cannot exist without light. So life also becomes secondary. Matter simply disappears, it is not. It is only condensed light. Then light can exist without life. Life is not a necessity for light to exist, but life cannot exist without light. So life becomes secondary and light becomes primary. In this context, one thing more: just as light can exist without life but life cannot exist without light, just the same, life can exist without love but love cannot exist without life. So these three l’s have to be remembered - light, life, love. Light is the substratum, the ground, and love is the peak. Life is only an opportunity for light to reach love. Life is just a passage. So if you are only alive, you are just in the passage. You have not reached anywhere, unless you reach love. Light is the potentiality, love is the actuality, and life is only a passage. So when it is said that God is love, this is the love that is meant. Unless you become love you are just in between, you have not reached the end. Light is the beginning, love is the end, and life is just a passage.So remember this: light can exist without life. Matter is just an appearance, a “condensity,” an intensity of light, and life is a manifestation. That which is hidden in light is manifested. Life is not an appearance: life is a manifestation. Matter is just light condensed. So when light remains light and becomes condensed, it is matter. When light evolves, manifests its potentiality, it becomes life. If it simply remains life, then death is the end. If it evolves more, then it becomes love - and love is deathless. You may call it God, you may call it anything. These are basic points. If you remember them, then we can proceed into the sutra. Third: in this whole world everything is relative except light. Only light has a constant velocity. That’s why physics takes light as the measurement of time. Everything is relative; only light is, in a certain way, absolute. Light travels with a constant velocity; nothing else is constant. So only light is absolute. There is no change: the velocity is absolute, the speed is absolute. So light becomes a mystery. It is not relative to anything, and everything else is relative to light. So nothing can travel with more speed than light, because if anything takes the speed just equivalent to light it will turn into light. If we can throw a stone with the speed of light, the stone will become light. Anything moving with the speed of light will become light. So nothing reaches the velocity of light, and nothing transcends the velocity of light. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Anything traveling with that speed will become light. That’s why scientists say we cannot travel with the speed of light, because anything - we, or aircraft, rockets - anything traveling with that speed will become light itself. Fourth: light travels without any vehicle; everything else can travel only with a vehicle. Only light travels without vehicles. That is mysterious. And also, light travels without any medium. Everything else has to travel through a medium. A fish can travel in water, a man can travel in air, but light travels in nothing, in nothingness. In the beginning of this century, physicists just imagined something like ether. They imagined something must be there, otherwise how can light travel? So that was a basic question: light comes to the earth from the sun or from some star, it travels, so there must be some medium through which it travels. So just because nothing can travel without a medium, in the beginning of this century scientists hypothetically assumed that there must be some x - they named it ether - through which light travels. But now they have found that there is no medium. The whole universe is just a vast space, and light travels in nothingness. That means even nothingness cannot destroy it, even emptiness cannot affect it. That means even nonbeing cannot affect light’s being. And it can travel without any medium, without any vehicle. That means the energy is not derived from somewhere else. Light itself is the energy. If you have some derived energy, then you will have to travel through mediums, through vehicles; you cannot go yourself. Light goes by itself.Fifth: light is neither being pushed nor being pulled. It simply travels. If I throw a stone, then there is a push. I put my energy in the stone, and the stone will only go to the limit, to the extent, up to where it can be forced by my energy. When my energy fails or is exhausted, the stone will fall down. The stone is not traveling with its own energy. The energy has been given to it, it is foreign. Everything in the world has foreign energy in it - except light. Everything moving is moving with some energy derived from somewhere else. A tree is growing, but the energy has been derived. A flower is flowering, but the energy has been derived. You are breathing and living, but the energy is derived. You have no energy of your own. Nothing has, except light. In this reference, the saying of Mohammed in the Koran becomes very significant. He says, “God is light,” and he means there that only God is his own source of energy. Everything else is just derived. So we really live a borrowed life. It is borrowed from many, many sources. That’s why our lives are conditional. If one source just refuses to give us energy, we are dead. Light lives with its own energy - unborrowed, self-originating. It is neither pushed nor pulled, and it moves. That’s the most mysterious thing possible. It is a miracle. Sixth: if only light has its own energy and everything else lives with borrowed energy, certainly it must be that everywhere, ultimately, the energy is borrowed from light - because if everything lives with borrowed energy except light, then ultimately light is the donor. Wherever you get your energy, ultimately the source must be light. You are eating food and you are getting energy, but the food itself gets it through light, through sunrays, so you are not getting it from food. Food does not have its own energy source; food is deriving it from somewhere else. The food is doing only an in-between work, the work of a medium. Because you cannot absorb light directly, trees are absorbing it, and then they transform it in such a way, they compose it in such a way that you can take that energy directly. So they work as mediums - then light becomes the only source of energy. So if everything drops in the universe, light will not be affected. If everything just goes off, if the whole universe is dead, light will not be affected. The universe will still be filled with light. But if light goes off, then everything will die. Nothing can exist. This basicness of light is not only basic for science, it is basic for religion also. So now the second part: if you penetrate matter you stumble upon light. If you penetrate life you again stumble upon light. So religious mystics have always said, “We experience light, we realize light - the light within, the flame within.” All the mystics have talked this way, and it is not only symbolic. Only in this century has it become possible to say that it is not only symbolic. If matter dissolves into light, comes out of light, why not life itself? When a mystic goes deep - he is going deep in life - he stumbles upon light. This going deep in oneself means going more and more to the original source of light.So the outer light is not the only light. You have inner light also, because you cannot exist without it. It is the base. To be means to be grounded in light; there is no other being. So when you go in you are bound to come to and to realize a dimension, a realm, of light - inner light. This inner light and your life make just two layers. Your life is the outermost layer; light is a deeper layer. Your life will end in death. Unless you realize the inner light you cannot know the deathless, because your life is just a phenomenon; it is not the base. It is just a phenomenon, a wave - a wave on the ocean of light. It will go! If you can penetrate through it to the deeper realm of light you will know that which is immortal, which cannot die - because only light cannot die, only light is immortal. Everything will have to die because everything lives on derived life, borrowed life. Only light has its own life. Everything else has life borrowed from somewhere else. So one has to return it, one has to give it back. So unless you realize the inner light you will not know that which is beyond death; in a sense it is beyond death and beyond life also - only then does it become immortal. That which is born will have to die; that which is alive will be dead. So only that can be beyond death which is beyond life itself. Light is beyond life and beyond death. Whenever mystics have been talking about light they always talk about deathlessness, because the moment you enter the inner light, the source of life, you enter deathlessness.

It really doesn't take a genius to realize that nonexistence counteracts itself. By that definition you are right consciousness is reflecting on something being absent. You can call it somethingness in nothingness. That's exactly like saying Existence within non-existence. It's all the same shit for me. What is real? because in that state everything is real and unreal. Even saying "I am" or saying "this is existence" in that deep state breaks the state itself. There is absolute no self reflection and no confirmation. http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/nonexistent synonyms. Anyway just my experience, it really paid off for me to question existence itself.

I understand my friend. Ask yourself, If you wouldn’t have ever read any book and accumulated any cultural and traditional knowledge where would you be? Can one know emptiness, nothingness? I’m not calling anyone out. I’m simply suggesting exploring yourself without anothers point of view. Not to depend on any second hand content. This is reasonable is it not? It’s only in self understanding and reflection that one is unbound by the movement of time. No authority being personal or collective leads to actual emptiness. Do you see what I mean by emptying conditioned consciousness? To end all conditioned movement and content of the self. Which means the cessation of the psychological accumulation of self and its conditioned responses. To be religiously attentive to the movement of thought. And in that not carry over past experience “knowledge” and psychological memory of the i and it’s conditioned responses to the dynamic movement of the now.

Second hand knowledge my friend. Emptiness is not about accumulation. When you speak of awareness you are referring to things you have read that have been passed down through the stream of thought. The “You” is then bound by experience. This is has nothing to do with nothingness/emptiness. It’s to die to the old, to the self/thought/experience, actually. Not to accumulate a bunch of conceptualizations that thought/self/experience has put together and grasps/clings to. Emtpy, don’t add and perpetuate the conditioned consciousness. Unless you want to of course?

*note* I'm really asking Leo here and hope he has the time to answer. I'm not looking for every Joe blo's opinion from their beliefs. I'm not interested in opinions. If you really think you can answer these questions, from actual experience, and not coming from a place of feeding your Ego's importance, then yes please, I'd love to hear your wisdom. In the video, you talk abut it taking the will to give up literally everything, including the will to live, to become Enlightened / Awake. You have to 100% commit and surrender to dying. Not 99%, but 100% giving up your life totally and completely. The will to pull the trigger, but 1000 times worse, as your killing yourself over years or decades. Watching everything in your life, everything you love, all slowly die off piece by piece. Sounds like the worst misery. But, you're saying this is the only way to actually wake up. The Only way out of the suffering. The only way to ever actually feel true love for anything. But here's the problem I have. I've already died. I've stopped breathing, turned grey, lips blue, and felt the numbness and darkness envelope me. Felt my life fade away into nothingness. I got to the very very edge of forever death. And in that moment, on that edge, I said 'No, no I will not go now! I will fight with my very last bit of will to not go over that edge. I had more will than I ever have in my life to stay alive. And I did. I met death and lived. But in this video, you say the only way I can become Enlightened, to become Awake, to ever stop all the suffering, to actually experience real Love, is to go to that exact same space on the edge and say "I surrender to death". I...I, do not think I can do that. Knowing what it felt like to die, I don't think I can willfully do that to myself. Now here's my real fear, knowing that I can't willfully kill myself, I might spend the rest of my life knowing that this is the only thing there is to do with my life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not sex, not women, not pleasure, not purpose, not companionship, not even love, or even the basic joy of being alive, absolutely nothing is going to satisfy me or bring me any kind of real happiness. Only being Awake / Enlightened / Truth / being God, will I ever experience peace. Knowing that this is possible, and never trying, will drive me mad. Always knowing its there and possible, but I'm too chicken to try, the rest of my life will be fucked. If I try and fail for decades, wasting my life, my life is fucked. If I can't summon the will to actually kill myself (which I know I can't do), then the rest of my life is fucked. I won't be able to forget this, or let it go of this, if I know that there is a chance that all the suffering can actually go away. I just don't know what to do, if I can't do what you're saying I have to do in this video. Sorry for all the reading to do, I tried to make this as succinct as possible. And thank you for any answers or insights.

@Etagnwo Most of your points are valid, besides some putting words in my mouth, and the moot points about Bentinho's personality. Additionally, trinfinityacademy.com is entirely free. I will take back "highest levels of enlightenment"... clearly you and @Anna1 have reached this ending and can be 100% certain there is no more to understand or realize.... was there a finish line? Also, awareness does have qualities -- it is aware, ever present, etc. It seems to my intuition that there would be "something" truly indescribable, beyond all concepts, unable to be spoken about. Perhaps a "Nothingness" or "Infinity", which transcends Awareness itself and sources it. Idk, could be wrong but it makes more sense to me that Ultimate Reality is "Pure Nothingness". Or maybe Ultimate Reality is awareness itself... lucky us! What do you make of deep sleep, or anesthesia. Are you still you during these times? Is there awareness? (Legitimately asking what you think). I do hope we can both agree that one (sorry not one, but awareness) can reach a ... "state" ... of Pure Consciousness, in which it just is, and is not aware of anything in particular. And all thoughts, sensory perceptions, sense of time, etc are gone and awareness is resting at its source.... It's often called The Void. What are your opinions of this?

My understanding is because non-existance by its very nature and definition means that "it doesnt exist" it applies to itself as "non-existence", leaving only the possible thing "existance" to remain. But the emptiness is full of non-existent and existent information, that's what I meant. Everything that is not within your awareness is non-existent to you. If i showed a beautiful picture to a blind man, does it exist for him or not? Non-existence could also be used as a word for emptiness, no self, nothingness. it's just another label or word like the rest of them. The true self reveals itself when all sensory and mind activity has stopped yet there is an intense focus in the present moment or existence. Anyway my biggest breakthrough was focusing on existence and non-existence at the same time, as in trying to verify what existence is, if its real, and i was intensely focusing on that point and suddenly I felt my whole body dissolve away and my mind activity stopped and I was overcome with powerful energy. Words can't express it, it was the first time i felt something like that and it was a big deal for me because i don't do any drugs or substances so I am always as sober as heck and reality always feels as real as real can get (very grounded) so its extremely hard to enter these blissful states and noself states for me. But it feels good to get glimpses of what is potentially there. By the way I watched your lastest blog video and pretty much agreeing with everything you say, its almost the same as my own experience, I forgot to mention before my body dissolved away I was getting intense energy of death approaching almost like a panic attack and I actually remember I was surrendering to die and letting go of all the precious things to me, it wasn't like I was mentally letting go but more like i was dying, entering oblivion and leaving all these things behind, fortunately I don't have much to give up, makes it easier to surrender lol.

There is no such thing as non-existence, only existence. Non-existence is a concept existing in your mind. Consciousness, existence, and Nothingness are all the same thing, but this "Nothingness" is not non-existence, it is existence. Existence is, and it is empty. Then it can get filled with all kinds of forms, one of which is the concept of non-existence. Existence has no opposite. It only feels like it does because the ego-mind creates a conceptual "should", telling itself, "But why doesn't X exist?" But that is existence! "Non-existence" exists within existence.

Until this becomes actual Then emptiness/nothingness is not. Until consciousness is empty of its conditioned movement/the center, then any talk of nothingness/emptiness is coming from the field of things/thought.

It didn't go so well with me when I said pretty much the same thing on here lol. Leo, its sort of a tricky question to put into words and kind of pointless, but would like to hear your opinion on it to expand on perspectives. Would you say existence and non-existence is the same thing? That this is the nothingness and we are in it. That consciousness and nothingness is the same, to put it into words consciousness arises from nothingness. The mind structured and organize the unreal to seem real. Tried to make sense, and in return created a powerful illusion. I was lucky enough to have two very powerful experiences of noself this month, I was really trying to focus and feel into what existence and non-existence is, and the body ceased to exist, it just melted away everything melted away but it didn't feel like sleep, it felt like a very powerful energy that i labelled as "pure consciousness", I saw this as to be truth, the face that I was before before my biological body was born. At the time it didn't feel like an experience but seeing as I am talking about the past now i must refer to it as an experience, actually it was more like a cease of everything, a cease of experience, yet so much aliveness and energy. My goal now is to integrate this to more day to day activity, because its so easy to fall back into identifying with the ego. It's so hard to be on point all the time.

When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child; how brilliant the colors were; what a jewel the sun was; what marvel the stars; how incredibly alive the trees were... And to love again and again, and have people to whom we are deeply attached go to sleep and never wake up... and the laughter echoes only in one's mind... but then the echo goes... the memory, the traces are all gone. All your efforts, all your acheivements, all your attainments turning into dust, nothingness... what is the feeling? what happens to you? The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, it makes you feel that life is, after all, important, that there is someone who cares. It has meaning, it has sense, and you are valuable in the eyes of the father. But after a while it got embarrassing, the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded idea... why does anybody believe that? So you become an atheist, and then you feel terrible after that because you got rid of God... but that means you got rid of yourself, you're just nothing but a machine... And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too... (a machine in the system)... So if you think that that's the way things are, you feel hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a neurological trap into which you somehow got caught... trapped... You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it... that's it... So if you're a smart kid you commit suicide. Now I want to propose another idea all together... The real you, is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real you, the real deep down you, is the whole universe. You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it's a bridge. But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as "Self" and "Other", but it's all one. What you call the "External world" is as much YOU as your own body. Most people think that when they open they're eyes and look around that what they are seeing is outside... it seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes. We haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center. When you look for your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you wont be able to find it. The only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look hard enough, to find out that it isn't there. It isn't there at all, there isn't a separate you. There are, in physical reality, no such things as separate events. People can't be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge".

Me? I don't really have any desire or amusement from slapping someone. I used to have a punching bag though and it was a good stress reliever and a way to let out explosive energy. Appreciate the kind words, I'm just recycling information that reality/the universe has given me, they all came from somewhere else, someone else, and it's forever changing experiences. The only things I am sure of as a constant never changing exprience is the silence/emptiness/nothingness that is not changing. I remember a quote somewhere maybe it was here on this forum: a man asked a blind man "what is it like to be blind? is it dark/black? The blind man replied "What is it like to not see from the back of your head?" what would the world look like if we had echolocation

He's still at it. This entire thread: Robert "your opinion is wrong, your logic is wrong, nothingness is not real, your experiences are invalid, go meditate more to be at my level". & "I know it all, my opinion is the best, my logic is truth, I know everything you know nothing, listen to me, STUPIDS!" & "stop putting words in my mouth!!!" Trolling with a sprinkle of saltiness. You win man, you are right! PS. i dont even know what we are debating about, all i remember is robert just disagreeing and ridiculing others whilst quoting them.

Fair point, although i wonder if there are some sentient beings which a car indeed could NOT hurt. (For example, for all we know some extraterrestrial life could be so alien to us that we can't even interact with them, including with cars. Or maybe the Earth herself has some kind of subjective experience... Although im sure she would dislike cars smh global warming). "Objective" to me actually means what is the nature of something regardless of any life form / subjective perspective of it. This almost necessitates that there is no objectivity. What does a car look like ovjectively, despite any subjective take on it? Pure nothingness, black hole singularity etc. Tbf the question doesn't make sense... to look like something requires subjectivity. You would think "well mass energy charge and other fundamental qualities etc of an object (like the ability to run humans over) ARE objectively intrinsic qualities of those objects"... which makes perfect sense from our human intuition... however modern physics is strongly supporting that things have no intrinsic qualities on their own independent of the observation of them. There aren't even any "things" independent of our experience of them. For example, the photon that was not in a location / in every location / transcended "location" that was suddenly in spot A when observed... There wasn't actually a photon doing any of that, only the appearance of a photon (and the appearance of a scientist looking for the photon...) Similarly for a car running @Faceless over and killing him. Not to act like it's nbd.... The pain would appear to be real as would the grief it caused to all of us actualizers who enjoy reading his far out posts!

Eyeballs and black holes.... nothingness / singularity.

Holy crap! That's so much stuff to try and learn to live in nothingness. But like they say, nothing worth achieving is easy

Well that’s true in the sense that the description is never the described. TRUTH CAN NOT BE COMMUNICATED IN ITSELF. I LITERALY MEAN THIS IMMEASURABLE NOTHINGNESS IS NOT REMEBERED BECAUSE THERE WAS NO EXPERIENCER THERE TO RECOGNIZE AND RECORD A WORLD OF THINGS. WHEN THIS HAPPENES I DONT RECAL THIS “HAPPENING” THERE IS JUST A COMING TO. ITS QUITE STRANGE INDEED.

Nothingness is real, it is the only constant in my being I'm sorry you haven't seen it, "Where is that moon that never rises or sets, where is that soul that is neither with nor without us, Don't say it is here or there, all creation is "that" but for the eyes that can see." "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there." Rumi “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”