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Lol, nice way to characterize me. I disagree with it of course, but whatever, enjoy yourself. What's your motivation here? Do you really want to understand me or are you entrenched in your own view and see mine in an adversarial light? Quantum Superposition is within and among and on top of, all at the same time. Personally, I can feel the shifts when my brain moves to send activation to my thoughts to start narrating and when the energy shifts elsewhere. I literally feel the subtle ways my magnetic lattice or whatever inside my head bends. I can feel which part activates when I'm thinking about numbers for instance versus thoughts of my wife. It's not about creation or arising but a different pattern of movement coinciding with different levels of activation across my body. I feel energy or fields or the shift of magnetism on top of my normal senses at all times, so my experiences and content of information will probably be different from yours. The thing is when I shift into that pocket of nothingness that you feel to be absolute, it's not an empty void for me. I feel those energy fields all throughout it, and feel at its edges all that is containing and being restrained around it as well. But who cares right? If you have no reference for it yourself and a predisposition to believe in something that conflicts with what I'm saying then these words mean nothing to you.

@Salaam I don't see your disagreement as a degradation, but your constant labeling of other opinions as ignorant, and not on your level of development. Those are just blind assumption you make about people you don't even know, and you are doint it just because they have a different view. If you label Nothingness a paradigm, your "cognitive development" is also just that. You don't even know what the nothingness "paradigm" has to offer or how the actual nothingness feels, yet you are comparing it to your paradigm and saying that it is a higher developed one. What makes you think that the things I talk about are not things I experienced for myself? Again a blind assumption to validate your own viewpoint. That's the exact same thing that Leo for example is saying about Enlightenment too. See? Yours isn't the one and only true approach.

Well, remember ignorance isn't a "yes or no" binary thing. There are degrees and areas, levels and layers. Ignorance is a very deep topic. Agreement is not the fulcrum upon which ignorance is being decided upon here. But, capability and how that capability expresses is (at least on my side of this discussion). It's interesting that you see my disagreement as a degradation. I guess you could call it that, but that's a little extreme in my opinion. It's more so an invalidation and rejection, due to the fact that I have a better view and grasp on reality, again according to my experience and awareness of the world around me and within me, compared to your absolute nothingness paradigm. Yea, you could say the same exact thing to me, in fact you are and have been since your initial reaction to becoming aware of my words. You can say and choose to believe whatever you want, but that won't change the fact that most of the things I've talked about and experienced and capabilities I've gained, you have yet to experience and manifest for yourself. Most people haven't and most people won't, because it's fucking hard and requires at least a decade of dedication constantly exposing yourself to the edges of all that nature has awaiting us. A couple years of hourly meditation and some visits to a retreat are not up to par. Will that rub people the wrong way? Maybe, but maybe that just means they need to work on their humbleness more. Once you balance and anchor into both confidence and being humble, you don't fall that often into either superiority or inferiority when you become aware of others differences in relation to yours. It's that swing to the extremes that people bitch about when it comes to ego. Eh, at least I tell you why I'm rejecting it and provide counter-points of what I think are better ways and myriads of examples all across the universe that show that reality is moving in harmony with my chosen paradigm. Man, I fucking love the universe. Just feeling it move through me is like breathing in ecstasy right now. I wish more people could feel the fields permeating the universe at all times. Y'all are missing out

@Salaam What makes you think that I have not faced my own ignorace? Is it because I am not agreeing with you? So everybody who is not agreeing with you hasn't faced their ignorance, is "arrogant", and is twisting things to make them feel better? You assume other opinions are merely "internalized beliefs" and they are triggered from your perspective. Have you considered that all this maybe is not the case? That you are projecting your own mentality onto others? Why the need to degrade other opinions? See, I could say the exact same thing to you. You haven't yet realized absolute nothingness and the background in which all of your cognitive dynamics are arising, and therefore I don't trust in the conclusions you have come to. All of what you have said plays in the relative realm of experience, you haven't yet touched that in which all this plays.

See if a person actually makes deep progress with awareness and internalization, they experience that there are many layers of consciousness and sub-conscious automation that require particular flow states which also have to do with different types of brain waves and chemical cascades within our body that need their time of activation and expression. When I sleep, those are the processes working and I have trance states that occur as I transition from those layers so the depth of my awareness and ability to observe doesn't disrupt or collapse their process. I can actually have half of my brain awake and the other asleep much like seals do as I transition, which protects the flow and activation of other parts of my brain as they come on line. So, no I don't arise out of nothing when I wake up in the morning. Why? Because I've expanded my awareness and sensitivity to deep layers of my sub-conscious, while still being delicate enough to not disrupt their integrity and coherency. This allows me to feel all the other things going on, that other people without this connection to deeper layers won't have access to. I get it, this absolute stillness/nothingness is a belief you're highly invested in and attached to. But again, based on my years of experience and success you're basing that belief on a level of cognitive development that is not reliable for making absolute conclusions. If you can't see that or don't want to see that, can't admit and humble yourself to the further development needed then...

Actually no, You are assuming what I'm doing is imagining theoretical constructs, when in reality I am honing my observational skills and capabilities with years of dedicated training that allows me to have a deeper and more nuanced direct experience. The observations science have made are a supplement to my direct experience, not a replacement. It's a corroborator just like my direct observation of nature and how it mirrors the movements inside me is a corroborator and reference. People are so dunning kruger with direct experience and too ignorant to realize how much more our bodily processes need to develop and evolve. In essence what I am telling you people is you THINK/BELIEVE these things about absolute nothingness because you are jumping to conclusions about the direct experience of reality before properly developing the multitude of capabilities humanity depends on for interacting and communicating with life via direct experience. "How can you discover a potential change if you're not aware of it or sensitive to it? How far can potential take you if you can't trust it? How well can you internalize a group of sensitivities if they're not coherent and able to create a story to build upon? What good is the story if it's rapport's are off, if it's chemistry is adversarial and in conflict? How far can you take a story if it can't flow and dance? How can you share it if you can't simplify it? What good is simplification if it get's so simple it becomes one-dimensional and it's connections collapse? How can you even build any story, or create any change of length, if you are not resilient enough to handle the pressures of it's development? If you haven't given yourself the authority to choose to do so?" Each of the above points to a specific capability we employ during direct experience. If they are not developed, not connected and synergized our experience of direct reality will be limited and flawed. We will fall prey to delusion, over-certainty, superiority, tunnel-vision, and derail our growth. We have to train them physically via life and it's resistance, much like weight training. Not just from sitting in some safe little space on a cushion for an hour and asking ourselves a couple of questions. Life demands way more then that for evolution.

@MochaSlap Only nothingness can be infinite; somethingness is bound to be finite. Only out of nothingness is an infinite expanse of life, existence, possible - not out of somethingness. It is not empty, it is overfull. Things have disappeared... and what has remained is inexpressible. We try to express it as blissfulness, as ecstasy, as eternal joy, but these are just faraway echoes of the real thing. God is not somebody: He is nobody or, more correctly, nobodiness. God is not something: he is nothing or, even more correctly, no-thingness. Never for a single moment think that nothingness is a negative state, an absence, no. Nothingness is simply no-thingness. Things disappear, only the ultimate substance remains. Forms disappear, only the formless remains. Consciousness is a quality of your mind, but it is not your total mind. Your mind can be both conscious and unconscious, but when you transcend your mind, there is no unconsciousness and no corresponding consciousness. There is awareness. Awareness means that the total mind has become aware. Now the old mind is not there, but there is the quality of being conscious. Awareness has become the totality; the mind itself is now part of the awareness. We cannot say that the mind is aware; we can only meaningfully say that the mind is conscious. Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind, that awareness becomes possible. Consciousness is a quality of the mind, awareness is the transcendence; it is going beyond the mind. Mind, as such, is the medium of duality, so consciousness can never transcend duality. It is always conscious of something, and there is always someone who is conscious.

@Shin I'm finding that it's the little things we can do throughout our day that often get us closer to our core and further away from our monkey mind. So thanks for the tips on the everyday methods that move us along the path, or even keep us on it. Sure, the longer sits, meditations, contemplations & concentrations can reveal deep insight and larger-picture thinking, but I find to go past intellectual to experiential can also be achieved, to different degrees, in all those moments we remember to remember during our day. Once we understand 'what', it's pretty awesome to start understanding and practicing the 'how'. @Dodoster I'm often contemplating and working on just this. I seem to progress a little on the intellectual side, and a little on the empirical evidence side, whenever I remember to remember. Fun huh? How much simplicity can we use to unpack and become aware of what we are (and ALL that we are and are not)? How much wisdom can we pack into one sentence. Okay, maybe not wisdom, but for sure the careful and wondrous contemplations we post begin and fuel the processes that leads to wisdom. Thanks, cool. I tend to think (think.. *sigh*) that there might not need to be an 'either' in your first sentence. I'm imagining that we are everything AND nothing. By always having been nothing (no-THING), I am actually everything that appears in the no-THINGness and... well, no 'and'... I'm just everything! ...and I made it all. Just by 'BEing' and intent. And there's only me. I made me and I made you, in order to begin to 'know' the I that I AM. I knew nothing, only myself. I 'knew', or was aware of, no-THING. But was aware that I was aware. That makes 'me' awareness itself. Nothing. Nothingness. I don't seem to remember if I, Infinity, created all of everything and everyone in order to become less than infinite in order to know myself by a conscious attempt, or if I inadvertently sprang all of the YOUniverse and Nature into creation just by fluke because I am so awesome just by default? Oh, hang on, that may be ego creeping in there now. Sooo... to make a nice short response into a convoluted mess, & then back into a of well-thought out ponderence on the essential nature of our life in a few sentences like you did; I think we may be NO-THING, and by virtue of that, EVERYTHING. I guess when that realization makes it harder and harder to be pissed off at our asshole neighbour, or the dummy standing on your foot on the bus, or some sleeping dipstick that thought being President might be fun... we're on our way. I'll shut up for a bit, lol... didn't mean to hijack your cool thoughtful thread...

Meditation is the way to find yourself, but you shouldn't be opposed to noise or other opinions. Everyone loves a circlejerk, but if you have the truth of silence / stillness/ your true self, nobody can say anything that will bother you. SO those characters in your life, the haters, the noise makers, the doubters- they offer you the opportunity to see meditation, your true self in the midst of experience. No, you cannot control others and they will never 100% do as your Ego wants so it can be happy and at peace. They are showing you there is deeper to go. If you can only find peace when doing a formal meditation, you have not found the silence behind the noise, or the nothingness behind and within everything! Also, haters gonna hate and fate is gonna fate

Can you find fault in this logic? I know logic is not the experience but it can be helpful I think on the path to it. If the I is not located anywhere, then it is either is nothing or everything(infinity). Since the I feels like something, then it is not nothing, so the only possibility is that I am the no-thing that is God/infinity and not Death(absolute nothing). But since infinity is made out of nothing, I essentially am nothingness, but the nothingness is aware of itself, which makes it infinity/God. Where is nothing located? Everywhere

Mind doesnt need to know anything, what You need to do is sense the presence of nothingness with Your (Nothingness') Awareness, which is the same as awareness becoming aware of itself. That's tricky, at least for me, but my practise is clearer now with this understanding (ok maybe its good for the mind to know something hehe :D). So Nothingness becomes aware of nothingness, but this is the realm of nonduality, so to answer your question awareness, nothingness, God, presence all are one no-thing that is you, consciousness, absolute infinity. It's tricky (impossible for the mind to become aware of true nothingness) so thats why disidentification with mind/Ego is needed, so you can increase the faculty needed to sense that nothingness - that faculty is awareness! Only awareness can sense awareness (nothigness); only infinity is big enough to hold within its sight infinity; Only nothingness is small enough to see nothingness; Only you can discover your true self! I am not enlightened, but this is my understanding so far.

So just to confirm one more time. The theory here is that every single micro thing that happens in the universe is on Automatic? It sounds logical for my ego and to contemplate it, I'm guessing it's a matter of experiencing whatever 'nothingness' is to see for oneself. But isn't that 'I' that I think is willing myself into things and choosing what to pay attention to just an illusion and there's no real 'I' controlling it, even though it feels real? Or am I real, and I am the thing controlling it?

I keep hearing all these words and I get confused. Could somebody define all these for me? And link them all up together and how they relate to each other, growth, the world, life, and everything else? Is consciousness the same as awareness? Is consciousness actually nothingness? The Truth is you are nothing and everything they say. Some teachers say you are empty awareness, some say you are nothing, are they the same? They call it God and absolute infinity and all kinds of shit. Can somebody just explain all these words and the concepts and ideas behind them? I would like a big picture understanding of how these all link up together. Thanks

"Wisdom is knowing I am nothing" ~ nisargadatta maharaj ~ If you haven't had the nothingness of your true nature come to the forefront of experience yet that's okay. Finding out what your not is a good Place to start. And that's were Leo's self enquiry video will come in handy. Because he literally Goes through all aspects of the phenomenal world and shows you that you can't be any of these. They all come & go. Thoughts can be tricky because when there is belief in them they feel like you. Especially the conceptual image of you, when turning your head, talking ect. But I can tell you from direct experience, when your mind is still & empty and there are no thoughts or images of you, you don't disappear! ( or do you? Wink wink ) Meaning without thoughts you still are. Emotions can be very powerful and overwhelming at times and you can get real caught up in identifying with your emotions. Anger, sadness, hopelessness ect. But again all emotions fluctuate within awareness. The one thing you can't separate yourself from is awareness. Try not to be aware right now! See you can't awareness is stick to you like glue. I will leave you with a great quote. "Love says I am everything Wisdom says I am nothing Between the two my life flows"

The defining characteristic of a sage is his ability to get at the core of nature and reality. They do this by contemplation. The most important question that a sage can ask is “What is it?”. You replace the “it” with the object you want to inquire about. So, what is contemplation? From the dictionary, it is defined by “a state of mystical awareness”, “an act of considering with attention” or “the act of thinking deeply about something”. It is openly pondering a question that you are interested in with focus and without bias with the goal of inquiring into the nature of that thing. How do you contemplate” Sit down, set aside some time and select one question you are really curious about, define what that question is and sit there, openly pondering it from ground zero. Maintain that question steadily for at least 5 or 10 minutes straight. Be careful about your monkey mind. What could you contemplate about: 1. What is society? 2. What is life? 3. What is color? 4. What is sound? 5. What is love? 6. What is happiness? 7. What is anger? 8. What is desire? 9. What is suffering? 10. What is hatred? 11. What are emotions? 12. What is ignorance? 13. What is fear? 14. What is death? 15. What is meditation? 16. What is mind? 17. What is disagreement? 18. What is pain? 19. What is success? 20. What is failure? 21. What is a thought? 22. What is experience? 23. What is the number 0? 24. What am I? 25. What is duality? 26. What is non-duality? 27. What is Truth? 28. What is non-existence? 29. What is consciousness? 30. What is awareness? 31. What is God? 32. What is reality? 33. What is knowledge? 34. What is logic? 35. What is language? 36. What is science? 37. What is maths? 38. What is culture? 39. What is the devil? 40. What is government? 41. What is art? 42. What is free will? 43. What is selfishness? 44. What is karma? 45. What is creativity? 46. What is evolution? 47. What is relationship? 48. What is leadership? 49. What is power? 50. What is goodness? 51. What is evil? 52. What is philosophy? 53. What is spirituality? 54. What is personal development? 55. What is business? 56. What is the subconscious mind? 57. What is a guru? 58. What is masculinity? 59. What is fame? 60. What is sex? 61. What is birth? 62. What is the ego? 63. What is honesty? 64. What is communication? 65. What is objectivity? 66. What is wisdom? 67. What is rationality? 68. What is religion? 69. What are beliefs? 70. What is humor? 71. What is attraction? 72. What is purpose? 73. What is meaning? 74. What is life purpose? 75. What is understanding? 76. What is space? 77. What is time? 78. What is the past? 79. What is the future? 80. What is matter? 81. What is energy? 82. What is motivation? 83. What is writing/architecture/entertainment? 84. What is technology? 85. What is a computer? 86. What is economics? 87. What is pickup? 88. What is education? 89. What is good cuisine? 90. What is fun in a video game? 91. What is a good story telling? 92. What is drama? 93. What is intimacy? 94. What is neurosis? 95. What is health? 96. What is disease? 97. What is materialism? 98. What is another? 99. What is history? 100. What is a distinction? 101. What is learning? 102. What is dogma? 103. What is organization? 104. What is systems thinking? 105. What is design? 106. What is management? 107. What is lying? 108. What is a symbol? 109. What is psychology? 110. What is insight? 111. What is depression? 112. What is mysticism? 113. What is an object? 114. What is strategy? 115. What is enlightenment? 116. What is compassion? 117. What is a model? 118. What is value? 119. What is money? 120. What is stress? 121. What is mastery? 122. What is illusion? 123. What is a Zen devil? 124. What is a problem? 125. What is hurt? 126. What is nothingness? 127. What is infinity? 128. What is paradox? 129. What is work? 130. What is discipline? 131. What is freedom? 132. What is courage? 133. What is passion? 134. What is skepticism? 135. What is atheism? 136. What is prayer? 137. What is open-mindedness? 138. What is terrorism? 139. What is intuition? 140. What is beauty? 141. What is surprise? 142. What is information? In every domain of life, at every level, you can keep asking what all of it is. You can contemplate question about your life purpose and career, your particular medium, the wordings of your life purpose, your area of mastery. If you want to be successful in any domain, you need to understand the essence of what you are doing, the tools and distinctions you are using. There are different questions that you can ask that will make you see the subject in slightly different angles. - What is it? - And what is that? - What is its true nature? - You are going to come up with examples and you will need to discover the commonalities between them - How did it come into being? (probably need to read some history) - Why did it come into being? - What elements does it have? - What is its purpose? - What is its substance? - What is its significance and why it is important? - Examples are good to get into the essence of the matter - Keep asking and asking and going deeper into the nature There are some nuances: · Contemplation vs Meditation: When you meditate, you don’t have any goal or objective, you are just freeing your mind. Contemplation is an intellectual activity. When you become good, your contemplation is going to become a sort of meditation because your focus is really strong. · Contemplation vs Self Inquiry: Self inquiry is a very specific form of contemplation about the nature of who you are. · Contemplation vs Concentration: When you concentrate, you do it on something that doesn’t have an intellectual question behind it. · Notice that contemplation can be between a personal and an existential spectrum. o What do I want out of my life? o What do I want out of my relationship? o What is my deepest passion in life? o What is my life purpose? · You can have insights at the level of thought and the level of being: Some answers will go past the intellect and mind. You can breakthrough on the being level with: o What another is? o What love is? o What God is? o Etc. Most of existential questions are going to start with the intellectual level but with time you will get into the existential level. · Don’t confuse contemplation with thinking. You can go beyond thinking · Don’t confuse contemplation with speculating and theorizing about stuff. In contemplation, it is key to be open-minded, aware and honest with yourself. Be careful with your ego because it will distort your train of thought. · There are many levels of understanding of different subjects, so don’t get too hung up with your current answers. The answers that will come up in the first hundred hours of contemplation will be probably wrong or incomplete at best. Ignorance is the source of every problem! If you think you know what you will find, you are a fool. You cannot know the answer of something that you are going to research. That is the point of research! Your quality of your life is directly proportional to how clear you are in what the truth is in a particular situation and how aligned you are with it. You are not going to contemplate effectively if you are addicted to porn, or play videogames, and you eat garbage food and work 60 hours a week. You need to create a contemplative life.

Don't know about God, but my version of God which is no thing aka Nothingness - exists, but that's paradoxical in itself. Also knowing it intellectually doesnt help me I am the proof tho, cause im nothing and seem to exist too in my own experience lol.

one thing i find hard to understand is, teachers will tell you, you are emptiness nothingness, the perceiver that cant be perceived. but if it cant be perceived, how are they aware of it, and how are they able to tell you about it.

@Echoes I agree. It's like killing a bear maybe. It doesn't seem as formidable after, and a lot of dudes feel the need to hang it's head on the wall and make a rug so they can retell the story. The everything though. I don't think there are words or even thoughts for it. @Salaam all pretty easy to gree with. It's more fun though, if you would make some outrageous claims or something. Thank you. There's no nothingness. Simply be definition alone.

@Salaam Why imaginative? It is the direct opposite. You are the one imagining various theoretical constructs and conditions. Where do thoughts arise in your actual experience? Out of what? But what is the "place" in which heat, bone, sinew, brain and every other thing can exist/arise? Can it be another thing? And in which does this thing then exist? Nothingness is the absolute ground for every-thing.

Salaam. This is great! Thanks for sharing! How do you personally maximize your potential? "Nothingness" is just a concept, a symbol. We can say things arise from nothingness but it's just a simplification of what really is. What is really going on is beyond words. We can only approximate that with more investigation. Maybe we could do that in this thread? So... One one hand, thoughts arise from shifts in contrast between our interconnections and the shifting is the primary property of empty space (see: void fluctuation effects). On the other hand, when we say thoughts arise from empytiness/nothingness we may actually mean the same thing - void fluctuation effects. Any thoughts? (or fluctuations?)

With all due respect, Leo and anyone who is ascribing to his assertion in that post is the one taking the purely imaginative or delusional approach. If your "actual" nothingness has heat in it, it is not absolute nothingness, if it is still permeated by fields of potentiality like the universe is at all levels that is not absolute nothingness. If your absolute nothingness is being contained by matter in the form of bone, sinew, and brain matter it is not "absolute" nothingness. How about you move your mind out of the binary paradigm of beginning and endings and rise into quantum cognition? With superposition you are both 1 and 0 at the same time and can "birth" one or the other and from that one or the other "birth" another superimposed status. Humans all too often make the mistake of projecting their own limitations on the universe, but the universe doesn't give a shit and keeps on being dynamic with access to potentiality preserved. There aren't beginning or endings, there is instead recombination with different layers of complexity and synergy while still maintaining access to both poles of simplicity beyond our current evolution of cognition and levels of complexity that humans have not yet developed the cognition to contain. Every time a person falls into the paradigm of beginning or endings, they are taking an isolative view of reality which does not consider it's preceding combination. And that holds doubly true for absolute beginnings or endings which are a violation of the uncertainty principle. I'd like an evolving dialogue where people put the time and effort into expanding themselves in ways that are in harmony and synergy with real life with practical application. Where people critically think and explore rather than blindly follow the establishment of a given place. I'd like to see people work with tension and differentiating between how a change feels and how it shifts us. Gaining traction with those shifts, slowing and stabilizing them so their awareness can gain perspective and clarity around the nuance that occurs within it. I'd like to see people gain a greater ability with depth, to understand how things balance and counter-balance and how that motion affects the formation of a person's reality at the time. I'd like to see a lot of things actually. What do you want? Do you want to maximize your potential or do you want to remain in your comfort zone? Maybe try and feel the tension there, note down whether your initial reaction to that question was attractive or repulsive and then play the experience back in your mind slowly, including in your investigation the type of narratives playing in your mind. Investigating the other options you might have chosen had you not immediately snapped to either of those charges. Notice how much choice and potential we leave on the table and miss with our snap judgements and reflexive conclusions about a thing.

@Salaam I followed that thread, but as Leo already said, you confuse the scientific idea of nothingness with "actual" nothingness. You take a symbolic, indirect approach to something that is beyond all this. Whatever causes your thoughts may previously had, they are all born in nothing. Where else?

@Nahm I think the Ego doesn't like nothingness at all. It's rather afraid of it

Everything is everything. We're all where we are. I think the ego likes the 'nothingness' because it holds it as an achievement relative to others. At the same time it is a marker in a somewhat typical order of growth & inquiry revelations. The everything is everything.

Ultimately thoughts arise from nothingness. As this whole universe arose from nothingness. If you want to connect thoughts to a kind of causality between energetical and bodily shifts or events, you have to point to the beginning of the causal "event". But every beginning point of the causality chain is arbitrary and can be retraced back to the big bang which arose from nothingness. (If we belief that this big bang theory is true). Ultimately every moment arises and disappears in nothingness