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@Blackhawk Sure. All beliefs are concepts. You seem to be looking for intellectual conviction. Don't try to climb an imaginary mountain. Unfortunately, no matter what others tell you, self-verification through direct experience is essential here. Don't expect to be "sold" to nonduality through a logical and mental validation process. If it isn't possible, then what is all this fuss about? Seemingly sincere individuals throughout history have pointed out the possibility of grasping your true nature beyond belief and doubt. To be fair, most charlatans do indeed hold nonduality as just a cute or revolutionary idea, but there have been a few who have actually "awakened", see Gotama Buddha. Consider it an invitation for personal exploration, not for believing stuff -- which is antithetical to the real work. Lastly, I'm afraid you might be looking for things to justify a negative cosmology (worldview) that you're holding. Drop that. That could cause unnecessary suffering. A positive relationship to life is far more enlivening, intelligent and healthier. What do you wanna know? Contemplate that deeply until you become directly conscious of its nature. Check out Ramana Maharshi's self-inquiry and, perhaps, study his example.

I copy paste this without edit. I had no idea prior to this what "nonduality" was, and had no religious inclination whatsoever. This is exactly as I recorded it and attempted to interpret it without the aid of ANY knowledge gleamed from researching nondual tradition. I found such tradition via searching "monism" after the fact. This was vaped n,n-DMT on the peak of 500ug of acid. --- BLAST OFF It was on my second inhale of DMT using my Mighty vape that it hit the fan. I closed my eyes and experienced a complete out of body trip to heaven with visuals... full color visuals, intricate and detailed. To walk through from the beginning, first of all imagine you are a Matryoshka doll (those Russian doll things). The innermost doll. Well what happened was, my human vessel which was this innermost doll was left down below and I was launched/sucked away from myself and upwards. And as I kept going up it was like outer shells of dolls were shattering as I broke into higher and higher realms of reality. Like going from the smallest doll in the set to the biggest all-encompassing doll. Rather than a tunnel of light going towards heaven, it was more like I was being sucked up from my human self into heaven - I was watching my lower-level-consciousness-selves as I was propelled higher and higher up. The visuals were very vivid and intense, but difficult to explain... It was like I had a collar around my vessel (whatever was being launched up into these planes of reality), and the patterning was on this collar, like perhaps yellow vibrant squares for example (but these weren't just random shapes on the back of my eyelids, these were like, fully lucid visions of an alternate dimension) - and I was being sucked upwards through the middle into higher realms of reality and I'd go up through these layers of visions higher and higher. Until I reached the ultimate reality. I reached heaven. It was not heaven in the sense that it felt blissful or anything. That's the thing, it didn't feel anything, it just WAS. But it was heaven in the sense of being the ultimate reality. When every layer is peeled off that's what's left. I was in heaven. I have visited heaven. I saw spacetime itself form shape: Outside the boundaries of what I was seeing was void - colorless nonexistence. I had wondered what possible layer deeper I could have possibly gone except by dying; but then I realized that dying would not do it - because non-existence does not exist, and it's not possible for anything that exists to NOT exist... "I" or "you" may """die""" (quote unquote) but we will never get to not exist, we will *ALWAYS* exist... I can see where people get ideas about reincarnation... A tree can sprout many leaves - we are the tree... We as in "you" or "I" might THINK we're the leaf, but that's just an illusion, a subsection of the whole which is the tree that we ACTUALLY are. We are all existence, anything that has existed cannot ever NOT exist because non-existence does not exist. WE are existence. WE are spacetime. WE are eternal. WE are all there ever was and all there ever will be; always "were" and always "will be". The alpha and omega. We are unstoppable because we are existence itself. WE are EVERYTHING. ... I also did speak to a divine being or something of that nature but my recollection of that is incredibly scant. I think between my visions through heaven I opened my eyes and spoke to the deity and asked what it wants me to do (I think?) and if it wants me to bring back the experience and tell other people, something along those lines. I don't remember the specifics but definitely something along those lines happened... I saw a large female deity's face across my ceiling briefly, I recall. But the "divine being" did not feel more powerful than me, us, you, WE... That was part of the thing - that everything was one and the same, everything in existence was one. Nothing exists but existence itself. Whatever this presence was, was simply a manifestation of a part of US that was helping facilitate my journey... I in fact felt like I had gone even further *beyond* the realm where this presence existed. Using the tree sprouting leaves analogy, perhaps these presences are like the branches. One step above us "leaves" but a step below the ultimate reality of the tree. I feel like I reached and reunited with the tree. I consider this to be a legitimate religious experience, along the lines of Buddhist/Monistic belief (I never had any religious belief prior to psychedelic use). This was not getting "high" this was literally a religious experience, a deeply earth-shattering spiritual/religious experience. --- Everything that I write since, and everything I have searched for and researched, is due to this trip. Which I now cannot recall experientially aside from perhaps a miniscule memory of visuals, which is also just a vague fascimile. I have never reached that state of being ever again, albeit other trips after were still "enlightening" when not just random alien rave scenes or panic attacks. I never came back from that trip... I've been trying to make sense of it since.

God doesn't exist. There is nothingness, which is as you would expect, without limit, beginning, end, etc. It can't be created and it can't be destroyed, because it is nothing... Within it, there is limit, a consequence of its very own unlimited nature (meaning infinite potential, etc, as it naturally follows for several reasons), and this limit appears in the shape of forms. Your hand is one of those. So am I. So is Leo. So are you. So is your emotion. So is your thought. So is the wall. So is your phone. ANY THING is a limited finite appearance taking place within it. Some "things" (important to note) are not perceived and hence never appear as form. As an example, I don't think anything perceives subatomic particles in a qualitative way. These are still things, manifestations of nothing. This is important because many people think nonduality means that when you can't perceive something it doesn't exist, which is false. Like if you put a kettle on boil and leave the room it would never boil. These are misconceptions. It's about what things ARE in substance. The apparent thing ("consciousness") with which you observe everything is not a thing, but actual nothingness. Literal, pure, sheer, nothing. If you remove all objects of "your" awareness (for ease of understanding I phrase it that way), you the character cease to be. Your hand is not God. Your hand is a form out of nothingness. It is made of nothing (substances do not exist). Pure nothingness = creation itself. It can't help but create within itself because it is without limit. It has no choice: Wanting to create or not is itself an appearance (thought, desire) made of nothing and hence already a manifestation of it.

For those who are not familiar with the Dall-e 2 project, it's an AI system that creates Art based on a description in natural language , Just for an example "a bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art" will generate you this picture: link: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ I wasn't able to get the full version of the Dall-e 2 (don't think its available for the public) however, there is a demo called DALL·E mini : https://huggingface.co/spaces/flax-community/dalle-mini It isn't as impressive as the main version, but it can still be interesting to do some experiments on it: I tried to use words such as nonduality, consciousness, love, truth, nothingness, oneness, reality, unity, no self, nihilism, illusion, strange loop, paradox etc. (If you try to write "God" it will show you pictures of Jesus lol) and I got some very beautiful results: You can also share your results here if you want

Are there any Muslim friends here, I wanna have a chat about how Islam and nonduality are related.

This ultimate nonduality is the untarnishable unity of the world as Brahman and Brahman as transcendent to the world, but you're claim of a Brahman (completely)/abstractedly transcendent to the world where there is no world due to the world as creation being anterior is not something we can ever access, because we in our current and future states are tied to "the world" of form. Since the world cannot be prior or anterior to anything, since any time necessitates the world, the world is eternally itself without having been created except through self-existence. That means all we have access to are mystical states of God unrealized becoming realized, the Infinity, the Nothingness, the Everything, that rests within every objective or subjective aspect of reality. It is a truth that we are progressing. Your "criticism" of that truth misunderstands it. The model does not worship matter or vitality; it recognizes them as lower holons. "They are more fundamental but less significant." Ultimately, everything is nondual as per the law of Spirit, but the logic, the procession, of reality follows a holarchical pattern of raw, dead, inconscient matter forming into more complex vitality, primitive life that is built into more complex life, until finally there is the yet more complex noospheric mind. This is matter to life to mind to soul to nondual realization of Spirit. Or, in terms of Vernadsky or Teilhard de Chardin, the physiospheric components making up the biosphere, which arises the noosphere, which itself is transcended and included in the greater and more complex patterns that are emerging. This is a truth that is ineluctable. No appeal to the authority of Eastern mystics falsely prophesizing about a cyclical decay can stop this; there are no cycles, and history does not truly repeat itself because everything is novel. It is obvious that once life arose, there was no going back. The same applies to the mind, and to what comes after. And the idea this is not leading to something specifically more complex and truer is preposterousness and an idiocy that stains the mind. There were Western mystics like Plotinus which could just as easily serve as an authority like the Eastern "seers" of back in history, but authority says nothing on this except that which can be proven by self-revealing truth. There is no decay; that simply is not the pattern here. Any "chaos" you see is temporary, or even something so complex it does not appear to be order. Nietzsche's strength was tearing down Christianity and placing the concept of an Overhuman in its place, but this is not good enough; it does not realize a truth or the Truth. It is untenable because it lacks basis in reality. As "ideals" of progress, North America is Spiral Dynamics "Orange" whereas India, as beautiful and mystically exploring as it is/was, was "Purple". We have more access to further progressed patterns and may observe them; they could not. The same way our systems can only intimate or warn about or dream about what's to come beyond us through thought and feeling and intelligence. That's because by the Wilberian terminology, people that worship matter are Descenders, whereas ascetics than only worship disincarnated Spirit are Ascenders. Those that integrate both are superior, in truth.

True. I don't really care. But sometimes I have to interact with Blues, and I have to talk about something. When they ask why I'm not religious, and I want to have a productive/interesting social interaction, of course I'm gonna talk about nonduality and shit.. What else? This is the only way in which I can meaningfully contribute to the topic, and display a side of my personality. If I, instead, just nodded and agreed with everything they said, it would paint a completely incorrect picture of my personality, and the social encounter would go down as a complete failure and waste of time. This is good. Definitely. But they make up like 90% of humanity, so finding a way to convince them is more worthwhile anyone else. Yes???? Why is everyone so scared???? (@Leo Gura another video idea/request) That's the long approach, and requires them to be able to engage with you at an intellectual level. ?? I'm still thinking that, with complete omniscience, you should be able to figure out a combination of words which will get Blues to think. And if that's true, then it's possible for us to figure it out, with enough time. E.g. What's the first best thing to ask? It could be something like "how did something come from nothing?" or "how did the big bang come from nothing?". Something like this could be the best first step, as it's a broad/universal, profound, yet simple question. And from there you could explain how everything else naturally came about. If they managed to understand this, then their beliefs about God may seem unnecessary, and as not really contributing to solving any problems. But that's just an example. I'm wondering if there is a "best" set of questions, with a "best" order to ask them in, with the "best" language to use, etc., as if there is, then it would be worth conducting a proper study, possibly with thousands of participants, and figuring out the most impactful set of questions/ideas to give to a Blue.

The omnipresence of God, the omniscience of God, and the omnipotence too are well established in standard Christian dogma and can be used to prove nonduality. Because God is everywhere, he must exist as the world, the world being his incarnation. In this way, the world is not separate from God except by the ignorance, illusions, spells, and lies of Satan. The omniscience of God means God must know everything about everywhere, including what it is like exactly to be that everything. This means that God must experience everything, even observing all human lives as a cosmic unseen Witness in the background, as the clear space behind your eyes. The omniscience of God is the consciousness of God. The omnipotence is the ability to create Everything and the world from Nothing.

There isn't a real someone to be fully present or somewhere else.....it's nonduality already! ❤

But again, what exactly does he mean by this? If we're using common nonduality terminology, realizing The Self is what a lot of the best known spiritual teachers already aim for or have taught. e.g. Ramana Maharshi: But you're saying that's something beyond enlightenment, which means it's something else. But in order to know if Leo knows what he is talking about, one has to gauge if he is even at the consciousness level of these teachers. If he is, he should explain what his experience of "I" is like, if there is any. It would take a few seconds. If he isn't, then he is just saying things that are confusing or nonsensical using terminology that other teachers have used in his own idiosyncratic context. (In order to be "beyond enlightenment" -- whatever that means -- one must in the very least be AT enlightenment, no?) If he is talking about integrating the psyche post-enlightenment, then he should specify (I've already described that as the work to be done after the most subtle ego strand is gone.)

Brahman is the Truth. This is what those spiritual journeyers, monks, and ascetics say when they leave this world and go to some other-world. Nietzsche would call these ones the Afterworldsmen or the Preachers of Death or the weak fettered victims of slave morality, patheticness, and illness of their fragile bodies and minds of this world so that they must flee on to another. Brahman is One. This is what the enlightened say when they achieve understanding of the Truth that they sought and stumbled upon. Brahman is the world. This is what they see and say when they realize that, due to Brahman's nonduality, Brahman and the physical world are indistinguishable, forming a bridge between life and what is beyond even life and at the same time refuting Nietzsche's attack on journeys into higher Spirit beyond this world (because beyond this world is not necessarily a dissociation from this world).

Spiritual enlightenment checklist (embodied): Full understanding of religion, science, and nonduality. Full recognition of the truth in the baseline state. Minimum suffering. Maximum peace of mind. Maximum mental health and stability regardless of circumstances. Maximum functionality within the human realm.

Indeed! My understanding is that there is no difference between the substratum and appearances. They are one. That's nonduality for me. The ego exists relative to ego consciousness. No self is true relative to enlightenment consciousness. No self is false relative to ego consciousness. Based on my understanding, when someone is in ego consciousness, then Brahman or God literally doesn't exist (relative to that state). That's what it means that Truth is what is, that every state is Absolute. Suffering is not inherent to the ego. The ego is perfectly happy if it gets everything it wants. Suffering only happens if the ego doesn't get what it wants. Which happens as a result of Infinity's/God's unbiased nature. In my opinion, it's not the ego's but God's 'fault' that suffering exists. If there were only a biased God (biased towards happiness). Then only happiness would exist and all egos were happy. That means biasedness can create only happiness without suffering. But an unbiased God inevitably has to create biased egos who don't experience what they want and thus suffer. Suffering is therefore a inevitable consequence of God's unbiased nature, imo. The more unbiased you are, the more you perpetuate suffering. Yes, you only know the present state. That means I disagree with Advaita Vedanta then. In my opinion "pure" consciousness as in absolutely formless doesn't exist. There is always some form. Therefore there is no difference between formful and formless, because it's just gradiations. Or more accurately, complete formlessness doesn't exist. It's all formfullness, and it has different gradiations. And consciousness/existence is this formfulness. As long as there is consciousness there is form. Because consciousness is form. Existence = form = consciousness Complete formlessness would be unconsciousness and nonexistence, therefore it doesn't exist.

@Shambhu Seems like we are just having different opinions. I don't see enlightenment or Brahman consciousness as more funtamental or real than ego consciousness. Non-existence non-exists. Existence exists. Everything that can exist exists. Existence is consciousness. So a pure formless state of consciousness or Brahman consciousness or any such high states, are just as much a natural consequence of Infinity/existence as an ego state is. Because existence is consciousness. And consciousness includes every possible state, the formless Brahman just as much as the formful ego state. Relative to Brahman, the ego state is illusory. Relative to the ego state Brahman is illusory. Reality is Absolutely relative. Relative to Brahman consciousness, the ego is a hallucination. Relative to ego consciousness, Brahman is a hallucination. All of these above statements are equally true. When you come full circle, enlightenment is not more special than ego consciousness. Rather than saying form appered out of formlessness you could just as well say that formlessness appeared out of form. None of these two is more fundamental. Form did not appear out of formlessness, it is just here, as a consequence of Existence/Consciousness, just like the Brahman state. Existence is not one certain state, rather it is ANY state, or the sum of all possible states. My concept of Absolute Infinity contains infinitely many finite and infinite parts/consciousnesses. Because I conceptualize Absolute Infinity as Existence. And Existence is unlimited, therefore it contains all possible things/consciousnesses/bubbles. The consequence of that is that there have to be infinitely many finite and infinite bubbles/consciousnesses. States don't appear to something prior to themselves. States appear to themselves. Indeed. Relative to the current state, the previous state doesn't exist anymore. A state is fundamentally just consciousness. But from a more dualistic perspective, a state is made of consciousness and appearances within consciousness. But nonduality collapses that distinction.

Relative to a high state of consciousness, there are no differences between anyhing. For example there is no difference between physical (A) and non-physical (B) . Relative to a high state of consciousness, they are one. People say that seperate consciousnesses contradict Oneness. Well, if the difference between one consciousness bubble and another consciousness bubble as well as the difference between oneness and duality is imaginary (and doesn't exist), then Oneness still applies. In that regard Oneness and nonduality would include seperateness and duality.

I know ultimately nothing = something but nonetheless pure absence does appear different than thingness/experience/the myriad of stuff we can see, feel, and hear etc Isn’t it simpler and easier for THIS to stay as blackness/no experience/zero? Why the charade of “separate” body-minds, living and dying, etc etc Is something better than nothing? What if there was just blackness and no experience ever? Would the truth of nonduality remain? Deep down I grasp the “answers” but recently I fell into a bit of a funk. That clarity has been clouded again.

There is no "real" awakening that is not hallucinated. Everything is hallucinatory. We just say it is hallucinated when the means are chemical. Holding awakening through psychedelics as lesser than an awakening through other means seems to me be extremely dualistic, since due to nonduality there should be no reason why chemical (material) means would be less valid than some meditation techniques, since matter is mind anyways.

The key that you are just necessarily missing until you've awakened beyond nonduality: reality isn't in a certain way. As in the actual structure of reality is constantly shuffling; there is no solid background reality. Impermanent; transient, but absolutely so... and that's the stillness. The singular frame of reality (all of them, though there really is no continuity) is gone as it appears, since the stillness of a phenomenon is simultaneous with its dissolution -- in a way this is how the illusion of time is so robust. At the highest levels of insight, it's beyond-beyond (infinitely fundamental/subtle) the usual insights that are bound by consciousness itself. You don't understand this insight in the usual sense, because the reality more fundamental than context and even consciousness is revealed. You don't know it, it's beyond knowing, because there is only that. It might seem like consciousness can't not be fundamental, or that when I say beyond (more fundamental than) consciousness, what I really mean is some kind of ultimate consciousness... No... I really do mean literally more fundamental than consciousness. Absolute being unbound by the trio/tripod of time-subject-object.

This looked like a great share opportunity ❤ "I’ve found it interesting to notice and get curious about the undercurrent of restlessness or dissatisfaction that shows up sometimes in my experience and I suspect in that of most other human beings as well. We may find that this is sometimes quite strong and overt, and at other times, it is a very subtle, barely detectible undercurrent—a slight tension in the bodymind that is perhaps almost always there to some subtle degree, even in moments of pleasure. It often manifests as the attempt to manipulate, control, change or understand experience. It might show up for some as an effort to identify as awareness and not as a bodymind, or as an effort to be mindful (to “be here now”) all the time. It might be the sense that something needs to happen, shift, clarify, drop away or be found. It might be a feeling that we can’t stand being here in this mind or this body or this situation. It emerges from a sense of separation—a sense of fundamental lack, of not being okay, of something missing or something frightening or threatening. Nisargadatta described consciousness as an itching rash that comes upon us. Consciousness seemingly divides up the indivisible wholeness and freezes formlessness into apparently separate forms, giving rise to the sense of being an encapsulated separate self and the inevitable feelings of dissatisfaction, lack and endless seeking that follow from that. Buddha called it suffering, the delusion of being a persisting, separate somebody, driven by fear and desire. Adi Da, a controversial America guru (about whom I have very mixed feelings), often posed the question, “What are you always doing?” He was pointing to what he called the self-contraction. And he said, "Your suffering is your own activity. It is something that you are doing moment to moment....You will continue to pursue every kind of means until you realize that all you are doing is pinching yourself. When you realize that, you just take your hand away. There is nothing complicated about it. But previous to that, it is an immensely complicated problem.” He also said, “The self is just like this clenched fist. Relax the fist and there is nothing inside... We are never at any moment in the dilemma we fear ourselves to be." We often think so-called spiritual awakening is about getting something or finding the Truth. But it’s more about seeing the false as false, seeing through unnecessary mental activities, noticing and relaxing that metaphorical clenched fist in the bodymind. And we can’t actually “do” relaxing—that would be a contradiction in terms. In the seeing (i.e., awaring) of the tension, there is a natural relaxing that happens by itself—the storylines begin to lose their believability and their grip loosens. The clenched fist opens. It isn’t a willful efforting—it’s a relaxing, a letting go, an opening, a surrendering. It happens spontaneously. And it rarely, if ever, happens once and for all. It’s always about right now. And sometimes, relaxing doesn’t happen. And then, it may be possible to notice that even the contraction or the tension is never really a problem—it is simply an impersonal energetic movement of this aliveness, a momentary dance that presence is doing. Taking it personally, giving it meaning, viewing it as “The Obstruction Standing Between Me and My Awakening” and then trying really hard to get rid of it, is all only a new meta form of the very problem it is trying to cure—a problem about the problem. This efforting to get rid of effort, or trying to stop trying, is a common unintended side effect of otherwise potentially helpful pointers and practices such as recognizing ourselves as boundless awareness or impersonal presence, or “being here now,” or even attending talks by someone like Tony Parsons in which we are told that there is nothing to do and no one to do it. All of these things, when slightly misunderstood, can inadvertently feed into the very problem they are designed to expose or undermine. The medicine that we need to cure a physical illness often has unintended but unavoidable side effects. For example, radiation treatments successfully and blessedly dissolved a cancerous tumor in this body that would have killed me, but it also caused some secondary collateral damage that continues to unfold (as they knew it would, and as I was told about in advance, and which was a price I was willing to pay). In a similar way, spiritual practices and pointers can also have unintended collateral side effects or potential pitfalls. They can inadvertently reinforce the sense that “this isn’t it,” that “something needs to happen,” that there is someone here who needs to do something to finally be okay or complete or happy or enlightened. They can reinforce a dualistic sense of success and failure, okay and not-okay, a striving for future results, an endless evaluating of how we are doing, comparing ourselves to others, and believing that the speaker at the front of the room or the author of the book has something the rest of us don’t. As with the radiation that cured my cancer, this doesn’t mean these pointers and practices are terrible and should not be used. It seems to be part of the journey from Here to Here that we inevitably stumble into various misunderstandings and their associated pitfalls (or unintended side effects), and then eventually (with luck), we wake up from them—or we don’t, and that, too, is simply how this dance is dancing. Often different teachings serve as antidotes to the unintended pitfalls of other teachings. Thus, in my own journey, Toni Packer helped to dissolve some of the pitfalls inadvertently induced by Zen; radical nonduality helped to dissolve some of the pitfalls inadvertently induced by Toni’s approach; various Buddhist teachers and more encounters with Toni helped to dissolve some of the pitfalls induced by radical nonduality; and so on and on. In one moment we need mindfulness meditation, in another moment we need Rupert Spira or Gangaji or Adyashanti, in another moment we need Karl Renz or Jim Newman or Peter Brown, and in another moment we need Robert Saltzman or Shiv Sengupta. It’s not about one being right and the other being wrong. It’s about pulling the most recent rug we’re standing on out from under us again and again and waking us up to THIS, right here, right now. The mind is infinitely skilled at turning rug-pulling and rug-less-ness into an imaginary new apparently solid rug upon which we can stand. Thus, waking up is not once-and-for-all, but always NOW. So, you may find it interesting to give open nonjudgmental attention to the persistent sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction—feeling it in the body, that subtle or not so subtle tension, agitation or unease, and also seeing the thoughts and storylines that generate and sustain this unease. Not trying to fix or undo it or get rid of it, because that’s just more of the same efforting, but simply being aware of the whole thing—not thinking of it as a problem, but SEEING it as the neutral and only-possible expression of reality at this moment. This can be an interesting exploration, and if it invites you, I suggest approaching it lightly, with curiosity and interest, not in a goal or result oriented way. Allow it to do you, rather than you trying to do it—which is actually always how it is. And remember, we are never really in the dilemma we imagine ourselves being in. The whole story of being lost, bound, incomplete, etc. is all imagination. There is no separate, independent, persisting person to be any particular way for more than a nanosecond. There is ONLY flow and nothing IN the flow. And paradoxically, the ever-changing flow never departs from the immovable instantaneous timeless immediacy of HERE-NOW." - Joan Tollifson

You're correct, nonduality is not the end of the awakening process -- though it does have finality since separate identity is seen-through irreversibly. When enlightenment happens there's no one else who is unawake, so it's hard to talk about this, but anyway... Examples of not just fully enlightened, but also those who have abided here in this way long enough to be effective as a teacher: Bernadette Roberts, Rob Burbea, Jed McKenna (pseudonym; likely born Peder Sweeney) Currently accessible: Angelo Dilullo MD (Simply Always Awake), Adyashanti And plenty of Zen teachers. And I don't know if Leo has been awake long enough and in such a way for him to effectively do one-on-one guidance for liberation -- I certainly can't yet. I think it probably takes like 10 years but that's basically just a slightly educated guess. That's just off the top of my head, not wanting to make a mistake somehow by listing more. There are certainly many more -- especially for nonduality, but enlightenment on the other hand is really uncommon in relation... So to speak... But again when enlightenment happens it's obvious that truly, no one is really unenlightened anyway. And your intuition is correct, that there are no enlightened "people." Any one who relates to another one is not the enlightened one, but an after-image of the underlying enlightened truth -- the clothes (ego-suit) that the unbound-by-ego enlightened one wears. Something that I imagine very easily gets mistaken for enlightenment, but is actually not even nondual recognition, is a sort of state that can be brought about with self inquiry, concentration + insight practice, even psychedelics sometimes... Many, including Adyashanti, call it Witnessing. Or "The Witness." Akilesh (Sifting to the Truth; perhaps enlightened but has definitely at the very least reached nonduality) calls it the spacious mind. Rob Burbea called it the vastness of awareness. It's kind of like you're God looking in at experience rather than out (though it's not really describable so definitely don't take that literally; it's kind of a figure-ground-reversal), and seeking and self and objects are replaced with pure consciousness without conceptual activity; pure subjectivity. This is an incredibly blissful state, but it's not nondualty, and certainly isn't enlightenment... though it's very easily going to be virtually synonymous with what's called initial kensho... and as long as you don't think you've personally attained enlightenment, you'll definitely at least realize that enlightenment is real (truth exists). When the consciousness and the world disappears (often, but not necessarily, after spending a lot of time in this Witnessing state), that's nonduality -- identity is seen through; self falls away in a sense. When the perceptual filters responsible for constructing a self, themselves (the filters/layers of contracted energetic illusion) fall away though, via an ongoing automatic curiosity-desire-inquiry... that is associated with enlightenment.

@Leo Gura Just as a small nitpick, what Angelo can talk about, directly on the scene, is utterly beyond nonduality. I recognize it essentially as what you might term something like absolute impersonal solipsism. If you don’t see that, you pretty much just haven’t seen enough of his stuff. It’s definitely not set apart from God either it just has no need to be called as such.

You need a radical alteration of your state of consciousness. Intention isn't good enough. Mediation isn't good enough. Self-inquiry isn't good enough. Only a change in state is enough. Through a radical shift in state of consciousness. Because your state runs everything and you are contemplating and intending from within a certain limited state which will never be good enough. You can't break out of your state through sober contemplation alone. Nor even mediation. No! I am telling you that all of that is child's games compared to God-realization. You do not understand what God is, nor do any of the teachers you've been following. They are not God-realized. You will not understand this until you realize what God is. It's way beyond nonduality or any Buddhist bullshit. There is no way for me to explain it to you. You just have to awaken deeper. I am talking about the fact that you are imagining every spiritual thing. You are even imagining nonduality and all those nondual teachers and teachings. You are even hallucinating right now that you've ever meditated. Your meditation itself is a just a dream. God-realization is not transcendence of the present. It is full, 1000% presence. But you don't have that now. What you have is some weak-sauce neo-advaita idea of presence and God. Nobody is teaching what I am teaching. It's not all the same. And there is no way I can prove that to you. But I have awoken to levels that nobody teaches or talks about. You will never reach it via meditation. Never. You can fully master Buddhism and you will still not reach it. I have reached complete omniscience. And it has nothing to do with suffering or liberation. And it's the only thing you will ever want if you ever reach it. How can I possibly claim and know such things? You will never understand until you reach what I have reached. It cannot be communicated. It requires infinite bandwidth to get it.

I'm trying to get you to consider that it isn't BS. Have you considered that during the time you tried all the workshops and classic meditation that you just didn't get far enough to actually start to really get it? To get there requires a really really deep digging into super subtle stuff. You need to get really freaking good at sensing your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. This is super hard, but it can be done. The result is seeing reality as it really IS right now, which has nothing to do with a state and everything to do with what is actually true. I'm talking about NONDUALITY, and you're talking about transcendent states. To truly realize nonduality, radical no-self is foundational and has to be because it's the fundamental illusory split between subject and object. This is not "no-mind", but literally the collapse of all dualities and all identities, leading to absolute ineffable groundless paradox and non-description, and it only ever is this here eternally now. When you go chasing transcendence, you miss the whole boat because you miss that the deepest truth isn't a state or about any kind of content. This is the truth that brings peace and love and happiness. The very seeking that drives you to desire understanding with psychedelics IS separation from real understanding, from Being. I just see your mind constructing this frame in which there is this "high realization", a Leo that should embody it, and a noble drive for understanding. Break this construction and free fall backwards. Radically accept absolutely everything, even your own resistance and craving, and do this until it melts. Accept every dark emotion and thought. Accept the deep powerful NO that reverberates through your being when you try to let go. And keep going. It is so obvious you are not free, and I wish you would stop being stubborn here because it's just ego, and it misleads people who are using you as their primary resource.

That's maybe what they'd say, but I wasn't coming from there. ( In a sense, enlightenment is further than nonduality, because while nonduality reveals there's just energy and no identity (and the seeker was the sought), there's a further deepening that reveals how that energy is still sort of a reflection of what can be revealed when the leftover perceptual filters strip away -- call it whatever; it's the infinite and infinitely efficient, beyond understanding, more logical than logic... And the way I see it, this is what Leo describes as being conscious of how you're imagining the entire reality as God. ) I understand @Consilience and what he said totally resonates. Basically what I meant is, while yes the jhanas and meditation/mindfulness are certainly valuable if not indispensable on the path (I probably was being misleading by not including the fact that it couldn't be any other way), there is an orthogonal or "backwards step" (happened with self inquiry + spiritual autolysis but not until I had done it for quite some time) that I was somehow able to avoid even while exploring jhanas with pretty good technique and even with lots of bliss in every day life. And that backwards step can open up glimpses into what's really going on, which is so intimate that it can be constantly overlooked even in the midst of very advanced practice. Maybe it isn't generally that way for everyone's path -- I can see that. I did not mean for it to come across that those practices were useless -- they were in fact crucial. In the grand scheme, there probably wasn't a single month where I wasn't "further along" by the end of the month relative to the beginning, even though in a sense there was something missing. But at least for me (again my practice could've had a subtle flaw so to speak, and actually, in a sense, in fact it did) it was possible to get really good at concentration and even mindfulness... all the while not taking what I now see to be a key step that I was somehow missing up until the point it began: Directly attending to the thought space (rather than raw sensations, as I had intuitively assumed until then was the right way -- and in a sense it was right for the time) in a discerning way, for the purpose of investigating which (and how) thoughts/fixations pull me back into illusory view, thought, and doership. Yeah, I actually managed to avoid that for quite some time! I would add that, intuitively, I think culprits may have been that I: 1. mainly just focused on jhanas and metta... and 2. didn't consult with a teacher. My practice was sort of well rounded, but in relation to how much metta and concentration practice I did, I was only really dipping my toe in what I now recognize to be at least a few of the prime movers of practice: 1. noting, 2. inquiry, and 3. in a way, "beyond practice," a very strong desire to wake up + the constant intention to break out of filtered reality and applying that passion to investigating the thought space and seeing everything discernible as a thought / thought layer / fixation / filter that creates the sense that I'm here and I'm separate from everything... or in other words clarifying enlightenment: what it actually is; how it truly isn't just another state... There's no it and yet at the same time it's an indescribably total shift in relating to experience. The process of waking up is kind of like this: you're leaving enlightenment, then once totally out, you're instantly back in again, but for real this time... Only now, instead of a separate you looking through the senses, something else is looking... and movement is absolute stillness.

You are seriously confusing Turquoise and Spiral Dynamics with mysticism and nonduality. That's not how the model works.