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I would like to share my story, which consists of three awakening experiences so far. I do not intend to keep a journal and I would like to invite discussion and ask for directions. Due to nature of my self-inquiry I am not committed to any spiritual tradition and know basics of very few ones, but I'm open to suggestions to what pursue next. This thread will contain three posts, as I would like to go in depth on each one and they may not be digestible in a one go. Currently, I'm intuitively feeling that a fourth awakening is coming and I think that remembering details of my previous ones will help it come along. For now, let's talk about my first awakening that happened 3 years ago, and some background. I was always smart. First, as a kid that did as little as possible to not get in trouble with parents and play videogames for the rest of the time. Then, as a teenager that would get hooked up on science and computing, pursuing career in mechanical engineering. I was raised in a reasonably wealthy family and by the time I was finishing my master's degree I had everything most people have by the time they are in their mid-40. A house, a car, a cat, and a reasonably well-paid job thanks to my family. And, of course - feeling absolutely crushed by life's miseries, barely holding it all together. I was having something of a year-off in which I was supposed to write my thesis, but instead of doing that I decided to check out philosophy. I was always admiring authorities in science, and philosophy was like its big daddy so of course I would get interested in that. Being a youtube junkie that I still am, I found The School of life channel and ran a crash course in art and philosophy. What got me really fascinated was existential philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. He was advertised as the most obscure philosopher that talks about the most mundane things, and boy, how did I love riddles. My first awakening had two stages. First stage was while reading about existentialism as a whole on Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy, and the second one was while reading Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time". Facts that I injected were not important in my awakening by themselves, but the process of opening myself to possibility. Transcending the point of view I had at the time. What is important is that I did not really try to grasp the logic this philosophy provides, but to accept it as it was given to me, and try to view "the real world" through its lens. A logical/rational person like me could do that only because I trusted that those philosophers were wiser than me and I was trying to connect with feelings I knew I had inside. I was trying to prove to myself that I am a human being, and not a robot which I saw as a root cause of unhappiness in my life. In the first stage, while reading broadly about existentialism, it induced severe feelings of loneliness, sadness and compassion towards other human beings. I remember looking at people focused on their business and feeling sorry for them for being "lost" in their "roles". I suddenly started cherishing simple things, like sunshine, or the wind. Breathing. At the same time, I started to doubt my material paradigm as I believed that I cannot simply be summed up as a story. I started seriously thinking about death, and having walks to the cemetery every few days to contemplate it. When I saw that something was going on with this existentialism thing, I finally decided to wrestle with Heidegger and thought to myself: "Damn, I read tensor calculus for fun, how hard can this whole "Being and Time" be?". Well, the book gave me a good fight and then knocked my Ego out for two weeks. The mainstream advice for anyone interested in the book is that you don't try to read it unless you have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. I was too determined to care at that point, so I read it in two languages to account for mistranslations, while watching Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on youtube. It took me several months to get through one third of the book, when my first awakening happened. It was a gradual process in which I saw how I construct reality. The book highlights the method of self-inquiry called Phenomenology that is used to map the inner territory of a being called Dasein. The being is defined as one that asks the question "What is being?", which is what the book tries to answer. I have been doing that out of pure curiosity for months, each day, every free minute until it hit me: "None of this is real, everything is me". It was a very nauseating feeling, very strange and profoundly beautiful. In everything I saw, I saw how I was in it. Everything was a reflection of myself - a book wouldn't be a book without me. I saw how "I" was constructed out of a "book", and the "book" was constructed out of "I". How "I" was dispersed in everything I saw, felt, smelled and touched. It was absolutely fascinating. Until, of course I understood that I can take ownership of the construction and I started to deconstruct what "I" didn't like. Funnily enough it was things I was the most proud of, like how I was attached to my house, but felt miserable for not earning it. How I loved my car, but felt fear of losing it. To disassociate from my body that I thought was too fat and didn't like. It felt so freeing that I cried. I got so carried away with this deconstruction that at one point I realized that once I knew how to do it, there was no coming back. I could not forget how to and I was in total control of everything. I could go all the way down into nothingness. And then it hit me: "A human is literally nothing and it is terrifying". "We run away from it and shove things into this bottomless pit without realizing it cannot be filled." "This is the misery of the human condition.". After days of fear, nausea, crying, laughter, ecstasy and love - the remnants of "I" decided that we cannot live this way. That this is too unsustainable and we have to close the pit. So it happened. In the midst of things, I reached out to my parents for help. First, they tried to fix me physically, when that showed not to be the problem - they sent me to therapy. Very pragmatic people, but hey - good call. I stayed with the therapist till this day and I'm very glad. What happened next is that I lost 16 kg over the next few years, changed my job to a better one, met my soon-to-be wife and graduated school at the top of my class. Ego at its best, trying to keep the pit closed. Overall: great ride - 10/10, would ride again So, what technically happened? What I learned a few years later is that I probably did a very intense Neti-Neti inquiry while being totally clueless. Ended up, probably, in the dark night of the soul and let the Ego take the wheel again to leave it. It grew back strong, but I knew that I could open the pit someday, which I did in the second awakening. I will report on it soon.

Mary had a little lamb (masculine) Whose fleece was white as snow (feminine) Woman, the everchanging life force aka motion. Men who are dead in the depth of nothingness. Rhythm is an art of variation, stopping and continuing. Could it be that the masculine is like the stable rhythm that ends and the Feminine is the unstable rhythm that continues?

Yo im getting back on topic. I had lsd experience where there was a gap bettween me and floor, there was additional layer. I was confused since i was expecting oneness and that was wierd. I contemplated about non duality and is life is a dream and i had some really shaky ego experiences. Weeks after going through contemplation leo put out a video and i was high on cannabis and could easy go with what he says. Then I "realized" that the gap was nothingness. Still no sure if its true experience but Im open towards deeper experience of it. It can be easy to trick yourslef into believing that but the only thing you can do is open yourself to a possibility that it can be true.

Hahhahaha! But don't touch my nothingness bro, im serious.

To start off I must say that I am not enlightened anymore and therefore extremely prone to misconceptions and mind traps when talking about this subject. Background: I was always a very skeptical person throughout my life. Have been an atheist for my entire life and was also extremely deep into physics but also loved philosophy. With that said, for someone who has never experienced any sort of awakening before all this meditation and spiritual growth all seems like new-age hippies bull. I had not studied this concept before and even watching Leo I would avoid any spiritual video because they seemed so far off. How it happened: I have a very special connection with music, I play the piano and the guitar and have meditated (without realizing what I was doing) pretty much my entire life. I have had visual hallucinations before, euphoria and bliss using only music, no drugs or anything. So this particular time I was listening to my favorite song and was doing this extremely profound and deep meditation with it (again without even realizing it's meditation) when I just caught myself not existing anymore, I was so into the music that I had literally forgot about my own existence, I had killed myself without knowing. I open my eyes, looking at a white board and was extremely confused. Then it hit me as an spontaneous insight: "The self, what a preposterous concept" Still confused a bit, repeated it to myself once more and it was at that exact moment that I had awoken. What happens next the lower self cannot explain or understand, but I'll do my best to share as much as humanly possible on this strange subject. I was everything in that room, literally, physically speaking. The floor, the dust, even the sounds. I didn't exist at all. I was nothingness, also literally. It was a moment of infinite bliss, a pleasure that is beyond any sensation a human can experience. Take all the good feelings in humanity's entire existence and it would still not even be close to this feeling. Awareness is everything that exists. Not as in consciousness, as that concept is too deeply enlaced with brains and human minds, but literally awareness. It is all that exists. It's funny because on a day to day life whenever we try to think of "god" and such metaphysical, airy ideas, we always approach it with flawed concepts like time or physical presence/influence or even with science that strives for perfection and evidence cannot find awareness for it is not a physical phenomena. My awakening experience was very profound, but was far from complete. I saw some facets of the truth but not all of them: -I grasped what reality is, I became aware of awareness (which I guess is a must for any awakening experience) -I understood nothingness -I felt infinite "love" in lack of a better word- -I did not understood the infinite self part. I knew I was everything that existed but I couldn't see it infinitely, I did not see it as finite either, couldn't really grasp infinity no matter how much I tried -I knew it. I simply understood life. -I was confused about other people existing, I knew for a fact I was literally them, but shouldn't have I become omniscient of their feelings and lives? Very confusing -I was in paradise, so when I came back I got a bit depressed I wasn't there anymore -I laughed so much thinking back to all my humanly problems or anyone's problems really. Even though I have no idea why (since I don't see the truth anymore) I still remember many insights and not a single problem exists. The devil exists though, and Leo understood this very well, it is you, who reads this that creates all the issues in the world. (I can't grasp this truth, it sounds super bs writing this but I believe my enlightened self's memories and notes) -Also ultimate certainty of what I saw. Some people are afraid of illusions and traps or scared that once they see the truth they won't know it it's just another trap. It's impossible to have this experience and not understand it's legitimacy. If you think you had an awakening and had the slightest of hesitation then your ego is creating a very sophisticated trap. There are so many things to write. This changed my life and it's so strange because I don't even believe in life or death anymore. I'm sharing this, and also asking for help attaining this experience again. I feel cursed with the ego now that I have been in paradise and I'm desperate to see reality again. Thanks for reading, remember to be open-minded and kind, I'll be sure to answer any questions presented here.

From what I understand of the video, @Leo Gura is basically saying that idealism (the belief that all of reality is fundamentally a form of experience/consciousness) is true, because reality is groundless. What kind of leap is that to make? So we agree that reality is grounded in nothing, where anything is possible. Then why is it suddenly such an obvious thing that physical reality is an illusion and that brains do not generate consciousness? If literally ANYTHING is possible within this nothingness, why is a physical reality — where dead things eventually merge to become what we call awareness or consciousness — suddenly not possible in this context? Leo uses unfalsifiable inductive reasoning of the kind you see solipsists use ("you can't view the brain outside the brain") to claim that human consciousness is not generated by the brain, and that's just not sufficient to constitute a logical conclusion. You only have to refer to the "Russell's Teapot" thought experiment to prove how unfalsifiable claims are insufficient by themselves. Even if we grant Leo's assertion that what we call "our universe" is physics within consciousness and not the other way around, we now run into some problems: What happens after death? After all, the idea of death as the end of experience only makes sense in a physical context; if consciousness is generated by the brain. If we were to take seriously this extreme skepticism to what our "minds" tell us, we would have to go through life completely agnostic about what happens after death. Suddenly reincarnation seems plausible — if reality is a groundless "dream machine" that just churns out one groundless experience after another, as Leo also claims. A terrifying scenario, indeed. I have always found comfort in the fact that I know my existence is finite. Becoming an idealist completely shatters this notion. Is this what Leo is suggesting, or have I missed something? Believe it or not, there's an even bigger problem with dismissing all of physical reality as an illusion grounded in experience: Suddenly, everything can fall apart any minute. Why doesn't it? What reason do we have to be shocked if a UFO comes landing or the moon suddenly develops a face that talks? I imagine that the response would be: Because it would all be a dream and it wouldn't matter outside that context. But what about those "dreams" in reality that never end? Dreams featuring infinite lives of suffering? Surely the existence of such "dreams" is unacceptable? I know that my moment-to-moment suffering — whether in a dream or in waking life — is undesirable and would be unacceptable if it were to last for an infinity. This is the reality Leo seems to believe in, and I find it to be not only an amazing leap of logic for an otherwise smart individual, but also a deplorable demonstration of apathy that he seems completely fine with this. He's effectively dismissing all forms of suffering, no matter how gruesome or everlasting, when he admits to believe this suffering actually exists.

I may as well ask this question here rather than create my own thread since it is of a similar nature to Joseph Maynor's question: If the dream allegory is to be used, then everything is to be seen as illusion arising within 'nothingness'. That is, things lack substance and innate existence to them. Why then, do people who claim to be in this 'state' speak to other people as if they're independent minds, whilst appearing to ignore their assertion that 'people' are nothing but paper-thin fleeting illusions? Please explain this to me.

It's all "you." Everything (from the nothingness)...Each spark is probably not a star but a universe that appeared. Going into an ego...embodiment with love.

That tells me that you don’t know your true nature. If you explore more one day you will wake up and realise that what you said is not true... see for yourself... the Truth is nothing exists and you are existence of this nothingness... that’s the closest I can get to articulating

@Patang thank you again! but how do I know that? We assume here that there is nothing behind me as in that "I" am an illusion and the next level is nothingness, like in: nothingness > I (i.e. that there is nothing between the illusion of "I" and nothingness) But how do I know that the relation is not: something so much greater than me that I cannot even imagine it > mind/electric current/neurons > nothingness > me (i.e. that nothingness is rendered in the mind, which then is another subset of something so complex that I cannot even imagine it) Imagine you are a cell in some body: You live in your world (=some body part) and do what you want / have to do (implying for this example that cells act consciously) => the cell might not be aware that it is just a tiny part of the superset (=the body in which it lives), which is again a tiny part of the next superset it resides in (=e.g. the ecosystem<planet<galaxy<galaxy cluster<...<nothingness) and so on, yet the cell lives in the body and imagines that there is nothing behind its existence on the micro level, but here that assumption would be false, as there in fact is something behind its existence (=the body in which it resides). In this example, the cell would do what it does without even imagining that it is just a part of a body, which is a part of the ecosystem and so on. => How do I know that the ultimate superset of my life is not electric current (or something else that is not consciousness)? For example when I meditate, I hear a very subtle background noise / rustling like probably everybody does in a quiet place => this sounds similar to a radio that is not tuned in correctly or the white noise that old TVs produce when no channel is tuned in = electric noise or electric current respectively. So when I sit in quiet meditation and do nothing, sometimes this noise comes to my attention and the way that it reminds me of electricity also makes me wonder if I am not just electricity and this might e.g. be the subtle noise of "me" being constantly created and re-created and maintained or in other words of my being.

the most important thing is to understand what stops me from ending my life right now? when food, reproduction, love, heaven, fear, death, god, growth, nirvana and whatever else will eventually be exhausted what exactly makes me not to escape from this infinite cycle? when there is no more fear, death, me, you, god, no-god, nothingness, everything, love, humans. when nothing matters, and when you have zero fear and zero care for being alive. what that thing that makes me to doubt killing myself? I think to understand that is beyond knowing absolute truth (but maybe not) and beyond anything my best guess is that you have to commit urself towards fully infinite circle to understand how absolute created itself to realize how you created this infinite myth, this story with no beginning, no end to realize how you became god and created yourself it will take you infinite rebirths thats not some nirvana. not some truth. thats all relative comparing to understanding of how absolute, which never happened never begun, came to be. but u got to be Jedi and die infinite amounts of time thats you evolving from homo sapiens to homo conscious to homo immortalis and beyond, beyond over years that Earth still have thats you evolving your dna and your spirit. and whole humanity reincarnating over and over again. thats you surviving death of universe from heat. you saving humanity and moving to new planet, and to new planet and to new universe. its you eventually finding heavens, becoming absolute, achieving happy end and seeing how you eventually created this mythological universe and came back as a person in this very moment again. life and survival are one coin. when there's no more life, death, fear, love, you, body, soul, mind. what makes you to continue survival?

Nothing! I am just confused by how people describe enlightenment and what it entails. Sometimes it feels like enlightenment means giving up the ego completely, but I see the ego an integral part of non-duality to begin with. Otherwise, I completely agree with enjoying with what is doing. Good question! That is what I am trying to figure out. I would love a description of what absolute means. I can tell you what I have experienced via psilocybin mushrooms: My experiences are quite similar to Leo's enlightenment video that was just released. 1. I have experienced oneness 2. the temporary quality of feeling, sensations, and thoughts. 3. There being no other, because everything comes from within. "It's all me" 3. Deep peace and quietness of the mind as well as stillness that permeates my being. 4. Complete presence in every single moment. 5. Deep understanding and love for myself and others. 6. Loss of control, being awareness itself, not the body. However, my last trip (approximately 3 weeks ago) left me quite lost as I was very aware of illusory nature of my mind-body in comparison to absolute truth and I had trouble pinpointing or grasping deep Truth. I felt that I become conscious of nothingness, the invisible-conscious quality that a lot of people talk about. It's everywhere but nowhere and invisible but not because it was presence. but I did not know what to make of it, what to say about it, how to conceptualize it, as I felt anytime I had a thought about it, I had already lost touch with it. My last trip really exposed the illusory nature of my ego and taught me how important it is to have a empty mind to see what I guess people call the Absolute. The great thing about tripping is that I am very aware of how to get back into this state of mind because the psychedelics forces me to go through it, so I am aware of what it is to have a clear mind. If anybody has any guidance/evaluation regarding this experience and the topic of enlightenment, let me know!

1. If nothing exists, why should I care? This is only a definition of society about existence. 2. Does everything literally exist within the nothingness — from heaven to hell and everything in between? Yes 3. Is there any escape from consciousness/experience if it becomes too miserable? Master Air (green) and Earth (red) and everything will make sense.

The problem with referring to enlightenment as binary is reflected in so many “I’m enlightened now” posts. One can mistake the void, the nothingness, the meaninglessness, the visceral oneness, the “seeing” of relativity, the revealing of the illusion, etc, for “it”. The danger with this binary message is they go no further, because these experiences liberate from the material paradigm, and sure seem to be the pinnacle, never having actually experienced the absolute, the only self, the being, the love that all is. Then, sure, it is binary. But that verbiage is not worth the trouble it gives one on the path. And still, there are no ends nor beginnings, so all is an end and a beginning.

Nono, I mixed up my post before editing correctly When I talked about Adyashanti, he talked about different types of awakenings. You could experience infinite (heart) but no nothingness (mind) (or vice versa). The way he phrased it was that you could be enlightened from the mind for a long time (so you only see that reality has no substance and you are it), then you open your heart and experience infinity too (divine love and deep connection with everything you interact). It corroborate with what Rali from Naked Reality said in multiple videos. @Shanmugam Doesn't answer my question though

@MarkusSweden Because 5-MeO is the Grand Pappy of psychedelics. It shows you the most holistic picture, the most complete, the most nondual. The pure Godhead. It is so mindblowing it blows everything else out of the way. Yes, to your ego-mind "Nothingness" doesn't sound cool or flashy. But that's only because you have no idea yet what Nothingness really is. It's the opposite of what you think. If you think seeing aliens is cool, wait till you see Absolute Infinity.

Just my opinion, these are all concepts to me as I'm not enlightened and have no authority to present this as truth. Disclaimer over! According to buddhism, once you attain nirvana there is no more reincarnation or karma. So you are actually correct, that is a contradiction, because reincarnation is the form we take, once you realize you aren't the form, it isn't that there is no reason to incarnate, you just aren't that, you aren't the form, the form appears to you, but is not you. Once you realize who you are, if "you" (ego) goes away, and there the true you stays, you know who you are, eternal, limitless, timeless. The cycle of birth and death is over, karma is over, if you realize you are what everything arises too, it's over. I believe form is the conduit for realizing you aren't that. How could nothingness know itself without form? Formlessness needs the form to realize itself, and form needs formlessness to exist. No thing can exist, can stand on it's own, without the space for it to exist in. Tolle has called it space consciousness, or just being more aware of space (formlessness) instead of just form. This is why buddhism uses the phrase "emptiness" a lot and they say the true nature of reality is indeed emptiness. When I started on a path a while back this was morbidly depressing, but I was totally missing the point. You can t have one without the other.

So one master today told me that sometimes he experiences sudden samadhis which are something like and probably is mahasamadhis, that feels like he is just out of body somewhere, but then he comes backs after several minutes or hours. It’s not final mahasamdhi, but no different from that, only diff is that it continues for several minutes or hours and might come suddenly without signals. so probably that can explain it. I think what Sadhguru meant by difficulty of staying in the body is that enlightened person might sometimes experience sudden hits of mahasamadhi that are not up to him. This is not final leaving but feels just like that. It’s like body is becoming left, but that process stops once you able to come back. That’s actually one reason (that master’s theory) why many of enlightened gurus like Ramana, Osho, and Krishnamurti and many others died from cancer and other long-term deceases. During that samadhis your body starts slowly dying (that’s also what that master’s body seem to feel like after he comes back from samadhi). So initial awakenings and realisations can actually have very healthy effect on body and mind, they can even cure cancer and there are such cases. Coz these are quite natural states for living organism. But that permanently infinite enlightenment which great gurus had might actually kick your health in the butt because your body simply isn’t prepared for that kind of stuff, see even Sadhguru who is trained yogi struggled with that. You probably need to be very prepared physically. Although it might not be the case for everyone, I dunno. Interesting thing is that I don’t think that Osho, Sadhguru and defo that master of mine and many other great teachers had the final enlightenment which Buddha talked about. They all certainly had some big big unbounded oneness and nothingness enlightenment, but it’s probably wasn’t the final one coz Buddha said (or at least Buddhism says) that his teachers had this unbounded infinite space and consciousness and yet it wasn’t the final thing. So what can that imply is that mahasamadhi probably can be possible long prior the final final enlightenment. And maybe not. But that master of mine certainly isn’t in Buddhahood, yet his stage is already quite a burden for his body’s health because of this sudden strikes, although it’s not a problem for him, his energy or his happiness coz he clearly sees that he isn’t the body. However, after the initial awakenings, where he saw that he isn’t his self-image, his lung cancer has been cured without treatment (that’s no joke). When thought and emotion isn’t fixated on the place of decease, organism have capacity to cure itself, you just don’t need to interrupt it with your ego. But again this seems to not be enough when you are unbounded oneness, that’s something brain and body can’t understand, I guess from this misunderstanding sudden unexpected mahasamadhi can happen.

What about the infinite hell you just stated exists within the nothingness? It is an infinite experience of suffering for which there is no room to transcend experience.

1. If nothing exists, why should I care? 2. Does everything literally exist within the nothingness — from heaven to hell and everything in between? 3. Is there any escape from consciousness/experience if it becomes too miserable?

In fact, they go together like two halves of a whole, although western civilation is indoctrinated as science being the totality. This is an incorrect assumption, ONLY in the respect that it causes suffering. The science we are thereby educated is only one half: the science of the "observed" or the "third person." Our civilization is missing the other half, the science of the "observer" or the "first person" which is foremost and utmost in the epicenter of truth, the one reality, and the only authority for the truth. Douglas Harding, who I'm channeling here, I'm a huge fan of, and he refers to these subjects as Science 1 (observer) and Science 3 (observed). The two seem so contrasting, but if you really look hard at the evidence of both worlds, they truly confirm one another, they cooperate and verify an immense amount of confusion. First bold statement: The earth is flat. But.... It is also a sphere. Because it all depends on the position of the observer. Einstein's genius shines as relativity can help tie in both what we see and what is seen. The first person perspective, the only one true nature of reality, in this place, and this position, from my point of view, sees the world as a flat plane, that can roll up into hills, mountains, bounding streams and lakes and rivers, deep canyons, and eventually terminating at a vast ocean which eventually resolves into nothingness. Even if I managed to walk in a straight line, and ended up in the same place I did before, I might have a hard time convincing myself of roundness, because my experience would still be of flatness. It is only science 3 that would confirm that from some great distance, the flatness of the earth is now seen to be in fact not flat at all. Now I never have, but I imagine if I took a rocket and burst straight out of the sky and looked back over my shoulder I'd see what resembled a sphere, and further still a pale blue dot, and even further still a tiny blip of light, and eventually nothing at all. It's incredible to see that indeed science is not an enemy of spirituality, but rather a part of the sum total. The issue in today's society is that science is seen as the totality of reality. For example, I see the sun move in the sky, and I wouldn't be wrong for seeing it. From the observer, it indeed moves. From the observed, it is indeed stationary. Neither is right or wrong, it's all a question of what perspective you take. It's only when either party takes the side of righteousness that we run into problems. If someone insists the world is flat, and only flat, they'd be only be looking at half the picture, and it's the same for the opposite. Science 1 AND Science 3 together, and only together, not apart, have a sane perspective. The two are actually one whole. So, in my opinion, both are valid perspectives, one might have a more practical application when it comes to manifestation, but we can no longer ignore the first person as just a fluke or passerby, it's really ground zero for reality. You could argue, and might be correct, in saying that it is the only reality possible. I would start with the assumption that you have a head and face, if you're really honest with yourself you might find you have no face, no head, no eyes at all, but a seemingly clear, colorless, empty capacity for the entire world to appear in. After all, the idea that the world is stuck inside a skull is just insane, but that seems to be the belief of society at large.

@jpablos16 “Nothingness” is the same as “Allness”. Everything or nothing are just subjective names for the “Oneness”. PS: Se nota que eres hispanoparlante .

@Thanatos13 The space of nothingness has no self, no fear, no suffering, no frustration, no despair, no power, no control. From it surfaces alive-ness, which then disappears back into the emptiness. No-thing and every-thing. Fresh snow suddenly appeared here. Off to go cross country skiing with a dear friend. . .

Point is, you realize it is nothing. When turning inward and becoming aware of your unconscious reactions to the different sensations and experience it as itself rather than for you (as the surviving entity you think you are). To become pure awareness without seeing the world from a survival perspective, or through the lens of concepts. Problem is that there is really no word or concept that ultimately describes what consciousness or awareness actually is, just because they are not it. Maybe there is nothingness without awareness or consciousness... but not now. Now is now, even if there was nothing, there would still be now. But now is not you, or me... let me try this: one could say that consciousness is absolutely nothing. Who said that consciousness is something? Only we, humans did. What if it's the basement for everything, being it "nothing" or "something". We tend to assume that consciousness is something that is added on top of nothing, without thinking that maybe it is the basis for everything, including nothing; that consciousness is more fundamental than "nothing at all", itself. Like I said, awareness can't be eliminated, because it is just now. That's what it comes down to; now. Take it away, and it would still be now. Now can't be eliminated.

This tells me that you might not have the precise idea what Enlightenment is. You don’t eliminate any of those you mentioned. On the contrary you become one with everything and realise that all of these you mentioned are made out of you - the pure awareness. Why do you make this assumption? Why can’t there be nothingness without awareness or consciousness? Try not to take anything for granted when exploring for the Truth.