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Hi, maybe I'm not the first to have the idea but its worth a try. I wanted to start a thread where we share our enlightenment experiences with each other in order to learn and just for curiosity sake My experiences listed by chronological order: 1. I was sitting under a tree at the back of my mothers house. The tree had red leaves. It happened gradually: A weird feeling creeped up. A feeling that deep down I truly know who I am and am just putting on a mask. We are all players in a grand game and our personalities are nothing but masks. 2. I was peeling potatoes and an insight hit me: "sometimes in life the most important thing to do is to peel potatoes". It meant to me that happiness is to be found not in a future which is yet to come, but in the moment. 3.During one of my psychotic episodes I pressed my arms against each other and asked myself: 'How is it that my hand dose not go through?' I thought of physics and of the electromagnetic forces in between them but still this did not satisfy an answer. Then in what seemed like a blink of an eye I got it: Things are the way they are because it is the most perfect way.. And that is why my hand dose not go through the other hand. 4.I went to a spring near where I live. It was morning and the atmosphere was so nice. I sat with my guitar and then I knew that in about 3 seconds I'm about to have a huge insight. This is the biggest of my awakenings yet and what I realize was that god exists(only later have I come to recognize god as my true self). The exact words which went through my mind where: Who else? 5.The Nothingness awakening: It was very simple, a spiritual guide came to me(I have imagined him it helped me a lot) and just stated: you know what that is? It actually is just nothing. I know it sounds silly but that got me to realize what Nothingness is. Here I want to add that the "No self" was not an awakening but rather a gradual dissipation for me so I do not list that here. 6. My final awakening cannot be put into words as I myself cannot make sense of it yet. When (and if) I can ill be happy to share it Have an awesome weekend and enjoy life! Daniel.

Date: October 10th 2022 Dose: 4.5g Mazatapec Intention: What is Actuality? Taken at 5:50 pm 12 minutes in Feeling a come-up. 14 minutes Kicking in, yawning, tired, etc. Getting into that shroom head space Eventually my contemplation of "What is actuality?" just dove into me asking "What are you, God?" To me, this was the same question as asking what is actuality. Insights and Musings You can't explain it. You either are conscious of it or you're not. When your hand is not in your consciousness, it it literally exists as nothingness. Void. Parts of your body that you do not see or feel literally do not exist. And then when you look at it then it spontaneously gets imagined into existence. God has the power to do that. And God damn. God damn. God is one fucking asshole, he had me fooled. The ultimate Illusionist. I have become conscious that I live in a mind. Post Trip Report Definitely Some mind-blowing insights into the nature of reality. Super duper fun to see god's power where he can just make things appear and vanish. Turn a corner and the room you were just is is gone.

The beautiful aspect of dualities is they create a sense of movement, progression, and experience. They may only be imagination, but even for God they serve a purpose. Imagine being formless, changeless, and timeless. God is not bored, but neither is it excited. It is light and love, but without creation, how is this light and love manifested? It is all God, dreaming the cosmos into existence and collapsing it into nothingness, in an infinite divine cycle. Science supports the expansion and contraction of the cosmos, but mystics realized it millennia ago. Take the numbers below as symbolic, and realize the deeper meaning of the insight: The Day of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas and the Night of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas. When the day of Brahma dawns, forms are brought forth from the Unmanifest; when the night of Brahma comes, these forms merge in the Formless again. This multitude of beings is created and destroyed again and again in the succeeding days and nights of Brahma. But beyond this formless state there is another, unmanifested reality, which is eternal and is not dissolved when the cosmos is destroyed. - Bhagavad Gita 8:17-20

You can't awake of that because otherwise you would be in control at all times, and its not possible when consciousness=nothingness

Consciousness is the building block of the reality that doesnt really exist, the reality is you, you're creating your reality on the go out of nothing. Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Both. Which came first? Nothingness or consciousness? It's both. You're just experiencing an illusion of something, behind the scenes there is really nothing. In the world of dualities we think nothing is actually non existence but it doesnt work like that

You both are wrong, "nothingness" and "You are Consciousness" are both the same at the highest level. I made a paint. Consciousness = nothingness , that is why there is no one in control ever and never will be.

Good description of the how truly hard it is to face the void. really, it shouldn't be since there is nothing bad in the void, nor good. it is to realize that under the thin surface of appearance, there is an infinite ocean of nothingness. It is terrifying because you disappear diluted in that infinity and there is not the slightest thing to hold on to. there is no opinion about that nothingness, no fear, only lack of all life. the self, as soon as it returns, is horrified and wants to get out of there immediately. This is why whoever wants to access that state while sober has to educate himself with years of intensive meditation. a psychedelic can get you there in a moment. you just need courage to face it many times. there is a point to understand. there is something in the void, the consciousness of the void. then you see that the void is one more creation, exactly the same as watching a sunset, or the awareness of yourself as an individual. and there is also resistance. really, you are perceiving the emptiness, and resisting it, even though it seems that there is no you. as soon as you completely abandon yourself, the revelation takes place. the revelation more than a revelation is the total rupture of the limits that you impose on yourself. your perceiving the emptiness is limitation. you have to merge with it and encompass the infinite, then the void is revealed as absolute power, absolute love, intelligence and total freedom of the inexplicable: god. you. the obvious, what always was. how did you forget this? then all your energy channels stop forming curves, bends, paths, and become straight beams that reach infinity. all your energy is released.

For me, the consciousness IS the nothingness. Conciousness is literally nothing.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing A true history of the Universe: Once upon a time there was nothing. The end. "Everything is nothing, with a twist." ~Kurt Vonnegut When contemplating reality it's important to get traction with the question. How is it possible that anything exists at all? Why do I have hands and not claws? Feel that sense of wonder and mystery. Stay open minded and bask in not-knowing. Mind quickly wants to supply backstory with hearsay (i.e. evolution, big bang, god, etc.) Start from scratch and work with present direct experience. Wouldn't it just be simpler to have nothing? Why is there all this somethingness going on? But how do you know how to distinguish between something and nothing? What if the difference between something and nothing was actually something you're projecting onto reality? What if reality itself didn't know the difference between something and nothing? And what if "somethingness" is actually more energy efficient than absolute blank nothing? What would keep absolute nothing from spontaneously spawning into something? There is nothing holding Reality back from being any particular way. Nothing is precisely what exists. This is nothing! Your entire life and the entire physical universe never even happened. It's nothing, it's no when, and it's no how. Ta-da! A perfect symmetry. Any "particular way" would be an asymmetry and a bias. It's all ways possible superimposed into each other into an Infinite Singularity = Infinity = Nothing Zero = Infinity The universe is nothing. Has always been nothing. And will always be nothing. Then distinction is made in our minds. Who told you what nothing is and what something is? Undo the assumption and freshly look at this present moment until it becomes clear that it's all nothing. The mistake is trying to look elsewhere for nothingness. Your hands are nothing. Notice how the mind has tricked you into believing something isn't nothing. Actual Nothing: Has colors, Talks and hears, Is a bird chirping, Is pain in your leg, Is a toothache, Is your partner rejecting you, Is your parents abusing you when you were a child Is what you see on TV Is every book Become directly conscious of this and notice the shift. Consciousness = Nothing Unlimited Consciousness can't just be purely formless, that'd be a negation of form, an asymmetry. The Universe is a Singularity of formlessness and form all superimposed into each other at once. (which includes this present moment) It seems like it's something, like it came from somewhere, happening somewhen during sometime some place in space somehow through some method. All of this is an illusion. This present moment and the entire universe and all of reality is nothing, nowhen, nowhere, and nohow. Reality can only exist precisely because it's perfectly symmetrical such that it cancels itself out, thereby tying up every loose end. It's Singular, it's One, it can have no boundary. A perfect Unity, a perfect symmetry. This is the most energy efficient state and the only way that anything could exist at all, if it's part of this unified supersymmetry where everything perfectly cancels itself out. = none of it even exists. Absolute Fulness includes and encompassess the emptiness within it. Because how can something be truly Full if it excludes the empty? This now is completely empty. A full glass has an empty glass within it. Cut out doors and windows for the house. The holes make it useful. Therefore, the value comes from what is there, But the use comes from what is not there. ~ Tao Te Ching, 11 Human mind is very biased towards survival, towards form, to the exclusion of formlessness. All material benefit is of the formed variety: money, sex, power, pleasure = forms What good is formlessness to you? What can you do with it? Why should we care about formlessness? Now you're stuck in the domain of form and only understand half of reality. And really, formlessness is hiding right underneath the form. The empty glass is in the full glass. This explains everything about the nature of reality. These questions are not purely philosophical impractical unanswerable questions. Verify everything in direct experience. What about Consciousness, God, Love, Truth? Nothing = Consciousness = Truth = Love = God = You It usually takes multiple awakenings to equate all those terms together. Then all of reality feels like a hologram, with this hollow quality to it. Upon awakening to everything as being nothing, every "material thing" gets recontextualized into Spirit or Mind, hence the word spirituality. This present moment is happening inside my own Mind. (walls, roof, house, floor, earth) But since Mind is Infinite, there's no alternative from Mind, imagination = reality. It's often assumed that these are all useless questions, beware, because it's absolutely possible and essential to finding happiness and peace in life. It's a big relief to realize that Life and reality are Nothing. It comes with surrender and acceptance paving the way to Love and a great life. This isn't a nihilistic thing, it's Joy and bliss. Surrendering chasing pleasures of the material realm goes full circle upon discovering the higher/divine/sublime pleasures of the spiritual realm, which are purely Nothing = bliss. Make this a living reality by realizing it. This takes work.

empty or full is the same. when you say that you experienced nothingness, it means that there was conciousness of nothingness. So, there was "something". nothingness is just another experience, the same as writing now. What is common to everything is the conciousness of what is. without that there is no existence, but the fact is that there is, and since there is, there always was and will be, since its limits would be the non-existence that does not exist. therefore, it has no limits. that is why reality is identified with consciousness. what escapes me is how consciousness creates the content. that is, if it creates, it is not just awareness, it is something else. So the right word would be infinite mind, not conciousness

You become conscious of it. It becomes much easier to become aware of this aspect of reality if you can enter a complete state of nothingness. This is one of those things where it's hard to comprehend without experiencing a certain state. It is a paradox, and it exists. You can't imagine it, because nothingness is infinite, and your imagination is finite. It's like trying to imagine what having no eyesight is like, it's just absent. There is the experience of it being absent. You don't see black, you don't see any colors, it's just completely gone. That's what pure nothingness is like, but extend that absence to all of your senses. Then, you just exist there. You are actually experiencing nothingness to a certain degree right now. For example, you can't see anything behind your head. That "not seeing" isn't something that doesn't exist, it is actually a form of perception which is being contrasted to what you can see in front of you. A recontextualization has to take place here to understand this. The only reason you can see in front of you is because you can't see behind you. They both equally exist together and they both define each other.

Do you remember our conversation 2 years ago about this topic? I remember that you had this experiences with high doses of LSD. I had had similar with 5 meo Now I can give you the answer. the absolute void is the necessary condition for the revelation to take place. It may or may not occur. you have to return to the void, again and again, until you can bear it. it's certainly awful. absolutely empty. absolute death. If you haven't lived it, you don't know what I'm talking about. there is no you, there is nothing. only consciousness of nothing. This is a meditative state that is extremely difficult to achieve without psychedelics since your self will fill that void with whatever. if the psychedelic forces this, it is normal for you to find it horrible. Well then, in absolute nothingness, revelation takes place. the void "opens". it manifests itself as infinity, and infinity is an unfathomable well of existence, the singularity of infinite glory, the unthinkable. that is what you are looking for, what you really are. enlightenment, since you were in the dark, and now there is light. before and after. look for the void, it is the key

I experienced the void and the great nothingness it represented. It was an annihilating experience. There was a feeling of loneliness which was unimaginable. That is what it is like if there is no creation - the most utterly dismal sense of being alone. Also stillness. Life however, is not still and, therefore, there is life. That is why there is creation for there to be more than nothingness. Ii also dawned on me that we too create life for ourselves. It is not the material things but the love and relationships we create that give our life meaning. That is all there is and that is our way to create a life of joy.. While these relationships exist, we can escape the void and being alone. So, there are individual souls each creating life in myriad forms. Through creation, God fills the void.

If it was nothing it wouldn't exist, nothingness is a better pointer imo.

From my experience what I am is god. And what god exists as in my direct experience is Nothingness. Why call direct experience Consciousness and not Direct experience?

@UnbornTao Hi and thank you for the answer. I don't just feel good I feel like I have become the truth myself instead of knowing it. I know that the closest I can be to realizing what the nothingness of god is is simply not to use the mind. I feel like there is no difference between the unenlightened state and the enlightened state all that has changed is that now its pure experience without a 'me'. Of course I don't know all there is to know its impossible ill rather say i'm in a state of complete not knowing. I did not transform completely I am just as i was before my insights : i still smoke i still enjoy the company of good friends I think that after enlightenment there needs to happen a period of hard work on your character and habits. I wont say I mastered life yet but i am damn good at enjoying it right now. And instead of mastering mind I've escaped it. @axiom What you wrote is so damn good it resonated with me so much It is definitely a play of hide and seek Found ya!

I hear you. Life can be hell even before awakening, but that is nothing compared to feeling flooded with the love and glory of God, only to be cast out of the holy presence like Lucifer. Especially when you didn't do anything wrong!?! After falling what seems like forever through the void, God catches you again, and this time there is an even deeper awe. The resonance with your ultimate nature is at a higher frequency. You realize that the psyche has become thinner than it was before, from the grinding darkness of the void, and the light of God shines through more brightly still. The banishment turns out to be an act of divine love, and what you needed all along. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend "Dark Night of the Soul", especially the translation and commentary by Mirabai Starr: This is a path of annihilation of the ego. But we must first be brought home to ourselves before we can bear to see our nothingness before God…It is less for those who are struggling to find themselves than it is for the ones who have a clear sense of self and are ready to purify it… This is a path for those who use their suffering as a tool for transformation. In the dark night of each soul, we are simultaneously annihilated and immeasurably strengthened.

@Leo Gura How would you know this my friend I don't know wether you already realized this, but what consciousness / God essentially is is pure nothingness. Literally nothing.

We will have to explore this more over time. In my understanding they are One and the Same. I've had total cessation, down to what I would say you refer to as "Pure Consciousness" The infinite potential, void, infinity, Nothingness, the "Back drop of all things"... But, I have in my understanding unified that to even the room I am in. When I look at my hand... I see it as pure consciousness. That's what it's "Made of" because all there is is a dream. In a dream, there is not idea of a "sense perception" because you don't consider it to be a physical world like day to day life. It's the same thing. All is myself, all is made of pure consciousness. There is no absolute sense organs or physical world... so for me personally, there is no sense perceptions... Just, consciousness.

That's a good direction thank you! Currently I'm playing with a kitten all day Yes all I want to do now is help others on that path if they will need it. But the way I see it there is no rush. There is infinite time for the one to awaken to itself and its not a game of who gets there faster or who helps more sentient beings get their attainment. It feels like there is nothing to talk about so I have no idea what I can teach. I want to share that the method that worked the best for me is just sitting on a couch with no goal in mind meditation and self inquiry where a natural occurrence which was a result of my curiosity. Is it a must or can the next realizations be reached through "traditional" means? And Leo I absolutely loved your description of the "No needle " my realization about Nothingness was absolutely like that Thank you and have a nice day. Daniel.

Reality began with the realization: I am. long has passed since then and many wars were fought. And nothing changed. New experience is coming, Old memories are forever stored in the endless past. I am, yet i don't have the faintest clue to who or what am I. Every experience of me is not me, i am the one having it. So The I that i am can never become the object of my consciousness. What's the closest description of me that i can give to you? 1. I am nothing 2. I wear a mask called "Daniel" This is how i feel myself to be. Nothing wrong with the second point it is the play i choose deliberately. And why dose anything exist at all? Because experience is the only means through which i can know myself. But because i am infinite(about that in the coming words) there is no end to knowing myself. I am infinite because I am the only one who exists in my own reality. No one or nothing besides me exists to limit me to be a certain way ,that is why i am which ever way I want to. It will help to illustrate it with a question: What dose reality exist in? And the answer to this question is: Nothingness. And this is you! What's the largest thing in reality? You. What is the smallest object in reality? A point. Now to clarify what do I mean by "a point": An object with zero volume. And what is an object with Zero volume? Nothing! Both you and a point are "made" of the same thing. It reminds me of the concept of a "strange loop" mentioned in GEB. Reality loops from smallest to biggest and from biggest to smallest. In this way there is no middle to this structure, each "layer" of magnification is just as much the middle as any other. And to us the most important layer is life. After that, there is biology. After biology comes chemistry. And after chemistry comes Physics. The layer we reside in is not biological nor is it chemical and even it is not physical. We live in our own world which I will call: Life. Chapter 2 - Life. In our layer of reality there are no atoms or dancing molecules. There is geometry , form , pattern , psychology . May be the atoms live their own lives in their little world minding their own business. This means that the most beneficial to us would be to study this layer first, before setting our gaze upon smaller worlds. Notice that we can study what is smaller than us, we cant study what is bigger- it will be like electrons trying to study humans. What can I tell you about life: It gets easier with time. We seem to learn how to navigate in it better as we grow, but is there a limit? Yes. Our death limits our development to some finite amount. See how much progress humanity made since we started standing on the shoulders of our predecessors. Now how can we maximize our development through life? Each experience can teach us something new if we pay enough attention. One girl can make the same progress in a day as another in a year. So to expend we can raise our consciousness. One more thing we can do is learn from others. Like a child that learns from his mother we can learn so much just by accepting the aid of the experience of our fellow beings. Now how did the concept of "The play" came about? Because of my first awakening experience: I sat under a red leafed tree in the garden at the back of my mother's house and it dawned on me: We are all playing a game here, nothing serious and deep down, NO like REALLY deep down you know who you are and you are just kidding yourself. Since then I had the idea of "The play" as being the reality we live in. Chapter 3 - The play "The play is the way, The Island the Philosophy" This i wrote in a notebook long ago not knowing where it would lead me. Just wanted to add that here. Now what is The play? We all play it... We get up and its on. The true meaning of this word combination is that there is nothing serious going on. This is all to be enjoyed and taken lightly. And not as it may seem that there is something artificial because of the connotation of a game or a show in a theater. Knowing its a play dose not mean you don't have to survive somehow. There are rules to this play of ours and the consequences of not following them can be death. But note there is no written crypt to this play, its up to us to make it what it is. Each one adds his own unique part to The play and makes it that much more interesting. There are villain's of course but what is a good play without any villain's ? Maybe they are soulless monsters , if you ask me there is only pity to be felt here. And there are more important roles of course. I have a feeling that reality wont end until each ones voice has been heard

Who is the one that experiences cessation? Who experiences Nothingness? "I" has many names:)

Cessation is what enlightenment / waking up "actually means". Cessation = Liberation. It does not scare you to death, it's not nothingness, it's not "higher or lower than" etc. Cessation is not a thing.

Edit: Some people seem to be talking about cessation in a lot of ways other than what the original post is talking about. Here’s a description of it from Daniel Ingram which clarifies and captures what this term means: “Fruition (phala in Pali) is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no awareness, no background, no foreground, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. “Reality” stops cold and then reappears. Thus, this is impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the rational mind and the universe. In “external time” (if we were observing the meditator) this stage typically lasts only an instant (though the question of “duration” will be addressed below). It is like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in the unfindable gap, exactly like what happens when someone edits out a frame or sequence of frames of a movie. It is not that you see a blank screen for a while where they edited the frames out, instead that part of the movie is just not there.“ I will say that I’ve experienced both although Leo will certainly claim that I haven’t accessed God Realization before as he says this with essentially everyone. Regardless, cessation was far more important to my spiritual development personally. The instant before my first cessation was by far the highest state I had ever experienced up to that point, but cessation was what made the difference. There is something truly transformative about seeing experience and everything and anything you’ve ever known disappear. It can give particularly solid insight into the fact that there really isn’t a self or even Self that lasts and can be accurately identified with. Experiencing myself as God was transformative in that moment and maybe some transformation power and momentum lingered for a bit, but it is essentially just a peak experience (albeit an incredibly amazing one that CANNOT be imagined before it happens). Cessation on the other hand was the spark that started a chain reaction which caused deeper and deeper AUTOMATIC insight into experience. My baseline modes of perception were forever changed and enhanced after that event. The first cessation is in some people’s interpretations seen as stream entry described in Buddhism which is essentially you entering the stream to be carried by the current toward full awakening no matter what you do. I think it’s certainly possible that cessation did so much for me and was seen as such a high thing at the time partially because I had already built a foundation with God Realization and other insights. Maybe if I had experienced cessation first and had God Realization afterward, I would interpret God Realization as higher due to that event first occurring upon a greater spiritual foundation. There is also no one true God Realization or cessation. How either of these or practically any other spiritual insight and experience occur relies a lot on how far you’ve gone in your previous history of practice. Insight is something which builds upon itself to further and further degrees. I will also clarify that, in my opinion, the sixth jhana is not God Realization proper. It has some of the elements of God Realization there, but it is not quite as full and miraculous based on my experience and interpretations. Sixth jhana is a direct feeling while in a formless state that You extend to and contain everything in an infinite distance spanning in every direction. It’s pretty similar, but it’s not quite the same as the feeling that You are unquestionably God. I guess the point of all of this is to say that BOTH of these realizations are integral for maximum spiritual progress and that they can be incredibly complimentary and can build into even greater personalized realizations and states that you’ll be able to discuss with practically no one once you’re at that point. My subjective ranking of peak states and insights has things beyond both God Realization and cessation, but it’s important to remember that you can’t judge one person’s awakening against another’s with any validity. You can only judge states you have experienced against others you also have experienced, and even then it’s likely that your rankings of one thing as better than another is going to be a bit inaccurate as you can’t truly hold the two or more realizations in their fullness directly next to each other to compare them.

I've been reading some buddhist teachers talking about Nirodha-samāpatti. They describe it as a complete cessation of all consciousness. Like blipping out of existence. Daniel Ingram states: ''It is not that nirodha samapatti is necessary, but it is a good and useful thing to be able to attain. In fact, I have not yet spoken with anyone who had attained it who didn’t consider it the absolute King Daddy of meditation attainments other than arahantship, as the depth of its afterglow never fails to impress and amaze'' i have also heard people like Frank yang and others on this forum state that it is a higher level to God realisation (which is actually only the 6th Jhana). My current intuition is that God realisation and infinite love are the highest awakenings but cessation both interests me and kind of scares me. Absolute infinity vs absolute nothingness Is there anyone that has experienced both cessation and God realization? And if so which one is the higher one?