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This brings up a question I have that I’d love a more in depth answer on, even though you’ve touched on it in some of your videos on your blog: there’s a lot of different things people can awaken to... Unconditional divine love Infinite intelligence The “mind of God” Ones true nature What existence/life is Nothingness The collapse of the real vs unreal and how life is a dream What the mind is What is another Obviously can keep probably keep going on. My question is more along the lines of... what determines one’s degree of depth of these different facets of enlightenment? As that doesn’t seem to be something I hear a lot of teachers talk about but I remember you’ve talked about on your vlogs on your blog, particularly on your 30 day meditation challenge, how when you’re taking those daily rounds of 5-MeO that you can’t see how a human being can possibly awaken to facets that deep. There seems to be depths of awakening of even particular facets. For example someone can awaken to No-Self on a shallow level and someone can awaken to No-Self in a radically deeper way. Would love to get your take on this matter as I don’t hear it talked about that much

It seems like the mind can look around, see lots of things and imagine One enormous inter-connected Everything. It seems you would consider this a half-step, because there is still the image of lots of inter-connected thing. And the Everything itself could be imagined as a thing. Yet, it is possible for perception to go further? I can look around my room and see One inter-connected Everything. I've touched upon a level in which the inter-connected dissolves and there is simply One. Yet as you said this still suggests a One that is a thing. So, what would be "seen" at the next level? All those things, or the One Everything just doesn't disappear and the brain goes blind. If a dog chased me, my brain could recognize the entity. Is it closer to Truth to say the brain still perceives "things", yet there is an underlying "seeing" of Nothingness?

Entry 367 | The Crash Hello journal. It's good to see you again. I'm sorry for neglecting you. Lots of things have happened since we last spoke and I'm here to tell you about them now. My monkey mind has been desperately trying to take over my attempts to apply this self-actualisation work. It even went so far as to sway me into having a car crash that could have been fatal. I'll never forget it: how this world, which has felt concrete and stable in its design throughout my life, suddenly vanished without a trace. Any sense of "me" or "my life" was erased in an instant. All that was left was nothingness. When I came around, I realised just how easy it was for this existence to be remoulded like clay. It felt like waking up to a new existence with no clue what just happened. The accident taught me just how important it is to follow the path of self-actualisation. It's not something that you can just try for a year or two just because you heard somewhere that it's good for you. It's not something that you can just casually abandon once you have committed your life to it. True and proper self-actualisation is something that can save your life. This is now a few weeks after the crash and still I notice resistance hidden within me. Resistance to want to work hard and learn hard. Resistance to strive for something better. Always resistance. But one thing I can't resist is how it felt to (in a manner of speaking) "see God." It terrifies me, the ego. Fortunately, it wasn't death but there was no conscious way of telling the difference. But as terrifying as it is to contemplate that everything about who we are and how we live is utterly meaningless, there must also be some positive lesson equally powerful to counterbalance the neutrality of unconsciousness. A personal way of looking at it might bring up the question "why am I still alive?" And although it would be nice to think that God believes that there's still work to be done on my part in this world, neutrality would suggest that this would be just an interpretation. The truth is right here and right now. The truth is in the existence of these words. The truth is beautiful. And so, may this journey of life continue with detachment from outcome and peace of mind knowing that the place we will all reach in the end is forgivingly neutral. Pick of the day:

Yes this is the absolute in the relative of human form. If something is absolute, it is not non-dual as it is something opposed to nothing. If I referred to nothingness, I meant no-thingness. Which is literally no-thing, but also not nothing. It is relative and therefore unlabeable as it is no-thing. If truth arises, no truth or belief arises. Truth is only truth opposed to no truth or belief. As knowledge is only knowledge opposed to no knowledge. It is just a creation of the self trying to label something, by labeling it. The self is very stubborn and tries to hold onto things by trying to label something to identify to. To have a sense of grip, an illusion to be in control of your consciousness as being something out there as a source. You can identify with a so-called truth or knowledge. This truth or knowledge only exist in the mind. This mind is open for everything. I can put any truth in it, but it will only be my truth. I can put any knowledge in it, but it would only be my knowledge. Absolute in the relativity of my mind. The truth is in my mind and the belief is outside my mind. The knowledge is in my mind and no knowledge is outside my mind. My mind can verify things, therefore claim a truth, outside my mind there is no verification, therefore no truth or belief.

Yes I do get what your saying and glad you shared it, since I was trying to expand my understanding of Buddhist thought and realization. That said, I dont necessarily think its the ultimate or final understanding. Hell dont even want to say that since it may be impossible to make such a claim. But I think what Seratoninlove is pointing to and perhaps others as well (I agree with them) is there is a recognition that is not relative, that is understood and realized (and yes within the human form), that is termed nothingness/infinity/god/nondual in Hinduism I believe and other practices which isn't clear you actually understand or have seen, perhaps since your awaking is just enough and you no longer need/want to seek more (your questions have been answered, your awake and happy, and that is fine), but none the less doesn't mean you've seen and understood everything. Then again you later made a comment that alluded to the nothingness that you leave unlabeled is the same as what Seratonin/others/me are talking about, and "maybe" it is, but if you don't understand or see that this nothingness/infinity/nondualness is the source and ground of it all, is in everything and is You and I and is not relative, is and always was the source, then no its not the same. It really may not be that important honestly since the understanding doesn't create happiness and freedom necessarily, its just more knowledge and Truth. So if your happy and understand reality to the degree your happy with and can help others, do so, just keep an open mind there is always more, and in this case, there is this piece of Truth you haven't understood, which again, doesn't mean you need/have to.

Love is THE answer. But not the love we think we know. And yes, self-love is super important. It is not loving your ego, it is loving yourself when you see who/what "you" really are. It is being the love that IS everything which you are. I see myself and many other individuals transform immensely from this insight and its practical results. It is a question of nuance, but love is what is intrinsic in truth. As soon as you see that, your heart will open up. I'm not here to argue with you. I'm interested to hear why you think it is not an answer to anything? What else is the answer to suffering, anger, sadness, fear? Is it nothingness? Is it more suffering? I'm meaning that very practically as in the OP's question.

@Matt8800 I am not speak about the word... You obviously cannot understand Nothingness but chanting that word. The Hare Krishna mantra is like the 5 second rule.. it activates the front part of the brain and increases will power. Bhakti is what is needed... Not chanting Hare Krishna only

Sorry to hear that you were indoctrinated... I was an atheist before I watched Leo's videos. I agree with everything that Leo says.. I am just adding the word Krishna not as a person... I mean to say Krishna=Truth=God=Nothingness=Consciousness

Hey Winterknight... I just had this interesting experience. I have had trouble sleeping since our last communication. So I googled a technique that instructed me to find the source of "I" as before, or lack thereof. And to breathe darkness into my Self to begin meditation before trying to go to sleep. So I started to breathe in darkness and began to black out every cell in the body until it was completely gone, then I blacked out the mind, then ultimately the entire field of awareness. After a while, "I" was left in a black void of darkness. And the realizations of what I experienced, and then repeated as the process developed went as follows: - Just be, there is no time and no form (repeated from the start, maybe 100 times total) - I am perfect nothingness (realized a bit later, repeated maybe 80 times) - I am a presence, aware of myself (realized a bit later again, repeated maybe 50 times) - I am God (realized a fair bit later, repeated only 5 - 10 times) This left me somewhat in shock. This exercise took me somewhere I did not expect to go. Is there anything to this? Could this be God Consciousness? I wish I could tell you more, but I didn't experience much in the moment. I just repeated it all a few more times to see if some profound experience would develop from there. But it didn't. Then I figured I needed to let you know to get your thoughts.

You are totally correct. In other words; from the human consciousness they see that everything is of dependent arising, including consciousness. If there is no perceived reality, there is no consciousness, and the other way around. However, there seems to be a reality (the universe) outside of consciousness as the sun sets in the west when we go to sleep and rises in the east when we wake up. But when we look closely at this reality, we see that a flower is dependent upon everything that surrounds the flower, so anything is relative and dependent upon everything that constitutes it and surrounds it. Just as a toilet is dependent upon matter, gravity, space and time. Exactly, the nothingness is non-grasping beause it is relative, there is no essence, so also the human consciousness is relative and the question. Your interpretation is spot on. Yes! Not the actual recognition of the absolute in the relative. But don't say silly, this could make them seem dumb. Buddhists prefer the term ignorant. Addendum: one of the deeper causes of this experience they have, could be, that they are too heavily focused on dissolving the self, instead of looking what is around the self. But this is just a guess..

I'll have to keep looking into the different views of Buddhism schools, but the one your sharing and the one I read about (yogacara) seem to stop at the notion that enlightenment is waking up to the realization that there is just ones human consciousness/congition, and nothing independent of that one can realize or see outside of that, along with the world exists outside of this and is not dependent on human mind/consciousness to be there. One could say they've mastered the path of understanding cognition, maybe? Correct me if I"m wrong at any point. Buddhism stops at a place of nothinness that is termed, non-questioning/grasping and from here its understood that when a question is asked (such as what created all this or created the possibility for all this), it is seen as arising within human consciousness and as you say inherently dependent on the natural nothingness that it arose from. This then leads to, the idea or experience of knowing a Brahnma type realization is said to be a silly idea since it would be a arising question that is answered within this space of nothingness and would thus be boiled down to Buddhist enlightened mind as a idea of something that arose and not the actual recognition of Absolute, but a interpretation of a question and an experience that manifested from it?

I'm not sure if this is simply a concept or idea I've been latching onto, but for awhile now I've been having this subtle... intuition about my direct experience. By direct experience, I mean literal existence, the "actuality" (go watch Leo's video) in which direct experience manifests. Interestingly... This shit is morphing left and right, 24/7. I mean seriously, our phenomenal field is in CONSTANT flux, in all 6 senses. And somehow the fact of this slippery field makes it feel really really empty. Not in a nihilistic way, just in a like... I can't describe it. And this feeling has really been snowballing over the past month or so without much warning. I hadn't necessarily been thinking about it until recently. If we reflect for a second on direct experience though, NOTHING about it remains consistent and yet each form it takes is perfectly distinct from every other form, giving rise to an infinite number of possibilities. So form is constantly manifesting in various ways at an infinite rate (literally infinite). Then you have to think, what is the 1 substance that reality would have to be made of in order to manifest in an infinite number of ways at an infinite rate? NOTHING! And in fact, taking this idea even further, nothingness itself is the only substance which could be infinite, at least with the ways I'm currently conceptualizing infinity. So nothing = infinity My biggest potential bias is that I'm somehow intellectualizing everything I've learned about non-duality, as multiple sources I've researched discuss this idea of "nothingness." On the other hand, something about this direct experience truly feels very "nothing" like or empty. The best way to describe it is that this "direct experience" of phenomena feels quite indirect and I'm missing something. I wish I could more effectively describe what I'm talking about. These last few meditation sessions have me really not understanding what I'm directly experiencing though. Just leaving me with a sense of... literally nothing. If anyone has insights or thoughts, I would be very interested to hear them.

Welcome to the plight of the human condition. Some may tell you that there is no meaning, no point so you should erase that meaning and point in your own life to reflect this nihilistic perspective. That this is the ultimate way of being, by non-being a nonexistence of nothingness in emptiness which is the pinnacle, the nirvana, the truth and everything else is an illusion. All they have done is taken the physical pursuits of meaning and gone to the extreme in the opposite creating meaning out of the non-physical ideology. It's more dualism mindset and that the Buddha came across in his path when he spoke of a middle way that transcends the dualism of indulgence and abstinence. This middle way is having peace and fulfillment in just being, simply being present in the moment and not in either indulging or abstaining ideologically and in practice from what life exists as. So in the fat or lean times, in gain or loss, in success or failure there is still peace because in those is not where meaning is derived.

@Beeflamb You do not hear or read between the lines He is pointing towards the moon but you're looking at the finger. Actualized is the total opposite of a cult, because that is dogma The best way to explain "Leo's" work for us is Nothingness in words, in a modern way to make it understandable It is not so complicated to be honest, and still super complicated When I read many of these posts on this forum I don't know whether I wanna laugh or cry, so many are so far away from what is really being said.

@Leo Gura Is the "Soul" eternal like absolute/nothingness etc. ?

Nothingness doesn't have to worry about these questions, does it?

@winterknight Well how to put this then. If there is doubt, then that's the mind's problem. It's just bodies talking to each other isn't it? Has this all been a movie? How does nothingness talk?

Life as spiritual is to understand the origin and to go back to it some call it awardness other call it consiousness or nothingness. but this Physical world of our is made up by our attachments and our clinging to life as we are tought it to be so it is not the true life

I discovered this cool way to do neti neti... forgive me if something like this was already posted! So you stand in the sun, arms wide to your sides or hanging comfortably, standing as balanced and comfortably as you can. Now the idea is to feel into the space that sorrounds you and goes through you. The idea is that every single perception occurs within this space. Your visual field, the things you hear, the feelings in your body, even your thoughts occur in some space usually in what seems to be the space in your head. Now try to feel into this space and as such into all these perceptions at once trying to keep a relatively calm mind. Now with conviction think to yourself "not me" since you know that you cant be anything you observe... Now genuinly ask "what am i? And boom, theres a good chance you´ll pop into your nothingness, asboluteness.

Can you be in a state of "ego loss" and experience fear at the same time? I've been reading about and trying self-inquiry, and the more I learn about it, the more it reminds me of an experience I had 10 or so years ago in the 10th grade. Back then, I was slowly giving up my Christian beliefs one at the time, and I had recently come to the conclusion that heaven and hell couldn't exist. I remember lying on my bed, and becoming very concerned with the questions, "Do I just stop existing one day? What actually am I? What does it mean that I exist in the first place?" I had no knowledge of self-inquiry at the time, but I remember being unable to pinpoint what I was, and I had an overwhelming "nothingness experience." It was like, for a moment, I lost myself. I can't remember if I was terrified during the moments of nothingness or if the terror came afterwards, but if they weren't simultaneous, they were very close together. In the week that followed, just lying in my bed and thinking, "What is the "I" that will die with my body?" triggered these terrifying "no-self" experiences. I had several before I started to block the thoughts that triggered them, and haven't had one of these experiences since. What was that? It's hard to believe that I could have accidentally had any sort of enlightenment experience as a barely spiritual 10th grader. Experiencing nothingness is different than experiencing enlightenment, right? If you're truly in a state of ego loss, do you have emotions like fear?

It should be clarified, enlightenment doesn't end suffering. Buddha said enlightenment ended suffering, but what he should've said is resting in the Absolute ends suffering. Which is to say resting in the Absolute Void, which you can achieve through meditation/Samadhi, will end suffering, but only while you're there. In the Void is nothingness, all sense of self is gone. But if you sat in this state indefinitely, you would die if you weren't hooked up to medical equipment. You come back from that eventually and suffering will be waiting for you when you get back. When Buddha came back from the Void he came back to suffering, he said enlightenment ended suffering to encourage people down the Path, which would certainly reduce their suffering and improve their quality of life. He was deceitful, but for the Higher Good of humanity.

I don't know about regular DMT. I only tried a tiny bit (1 gram) of mushroom, and that's all my experience with other psychedelics. As far as 5-MeO goes. I really don't know what this substance is or how it works fundamentally. It does miracles that's for sure, but what it is existentially I can't answer. My best "scientific" speculation would be that it is a neurotransmitter that is activated during peak experiences, such as childbirth or death, to help the body/mind cope with the process. It disables the part of your brain that is responsible for your sense of self. You experience Ego death, which is real death because the Ego is who you are. When the Ego is dead, you melt into nothingness, which cannot be described or spoken about.

@Shin I am actually experiencing this zero control but it leaves me with questions shin. If we ultimately have no control, what's the point? I feel (today) as if I have stripped away another huge layer of the self. I think 'I'm' making my way slowly towards nothingness. I genuinely thought killing the self wasn't going to induce this much fear but oh my god was I wrong. Completely and utterly underestimated this... COMPLETELY.

just want to clarify and understand... when it is said there is no "I", I get there is no questioning entity with it's own awareness/sentience inside of my body or anywhere else in the manifest universe. but whatever is there, is beyond I... it is the only thing which exists and it does have sentience/intelligence . it's the reality as a whole, with awareness and alive presence everywhere, without bound / exception. correct? the "your" in the above line... that is what I am... but that is not this body/mind/thought or the thing asking this question. sure, nothingness is its/mine nature but it is still okay to know/feel that there remains "something" which is nothing but is still "something" but in an unconventional way

I have a very complicated mind, one that loves to analyze the intricacies and nuances but that is just ego looking to justify itself through it's machinations. This doesn't change that awakening is simple, being present in the moment is simple, not attaching to the self identity is simple. The simplicity of this is not enough to satisfy the ego's craving for relevance and to justify it because it in fact empties the ego of it's importance. So it invents a myriad of complexities to keep us from being present and from severing attachment to it's content. The complexity is involved with the techniques and methods of the 'path', all of the things that people will do to occupy the mind with tasks they associate with their 'spirituality' and 'consciousness work'. So they spend countless hours discussing these things with others, in writing and reading about them, so that they can indulge the ego's desire to traffic in self styled 'wisdom'. People become infatuated with the complexities of their path and it distracts from the simple nature of just being present. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, it undoubtedly can be very difficult to be present and stay present in a hyperactive and challenging world. This nonsense, pardon me but it is nonsense, about explaining the unexplainable is simply the ego projecting onto a blank screen what it believes is there. 'Nothingness' and 'emptiness' has no form, no characteristics or any definitions so to be talking about 'it's this' and 'no, it's that' is just the ego attempting to polish that blank screen into a mirror so it can gaze at it's own reflection. Liberating one from suffering is not mutually exclusive from finding a purpose in life. Although liberation is a very fine purpose in life itself and without it every other purpose leaves craving more and continues to cause suffering. So even though we may have a complex array of variables that relate to our particular life circumstances in getting what we need to survive it would be a mistake to conflate these two into one in the same. Chopping wood and carrying water is the same act that gets the same result but the fulfillment and peace in liberation is incalculable. It has been said that these techniques and methods are merely scaffolding to build our 'temple' of our path and isn't actually what we are working on. The problem with this metaphor is that it implies we still have a need for the scaffolding for as long as we continue on the temple path. I say we aren't building the temple but dismantling it, we ae tearing down the scaffolding as we tear down the temple so that neither of them remain. We aren't writing the book of our spiritual path, we are erasing it and burning the pages. The ego cannot see the wisdom in that.