Search the Community

@r0ckyreed Ime, using psychedelics as an escape, shortcut or developing dependency can be problematic at a personal level. For example, when I first started using psychedelics, it was like they elevated me to higher states of consciousness and gave me super powers. This wasn’t simply a subjective experience. I had been on a 100% substance-free spiritual journey for 20+ years. People at my sangha had no idea I started using psychedelics - within months, high level practitioners and monks were asking me :”Wow, what happened to you?” Your practice has taken off”. I literally made many years of spiritual progress in weeks - and not by my standards - by the standards of high level teachers and monks. The dynamics completely changed. It was like I had become fluent in the language and was at the same level they were. You seem to suggest that psychedelics are mystical, yet not the “real thing” in terms of sober constructs of enlightenment. That has not been my experience at all. And again, not simply by my subjective constructs of enlightenment - by the enlightenment constructs of life-long spiritual practitioners that teach at spiritual centers and lead spiritual retreats. Reducing psychedelics as simply mystical experiences is similar to those that call psychedelics “altered states of consciousness” or “illusions” - and not the “real” thing. There is some truth to this, yet it’s also contracted. It’s along the lines of Ram Dass’s perspective. The high level practitioners and teachers at my spiritual sangha were telling me that “I got it”. As I spoke about transcendence, ego, nonduality - they nodded their heads “yes”. Yet a funny thing happened when I told them psychedelics helped reveal these insights. All of a sudden, I no longer “got it”. All of a sudden, I was speaking about psychedelic-induced illusions that weren’t true enlightenment. All of a sudden, they stopped nodding their heads “yes” when I spoke and started shaking their heads “no” when I spoke.

What does nonduality point to, in relation to the word consciousness?

Desire is an important part of the personal stage. From a nonduality perspective it's recognized that desire is redundant. For desire to work there has to be a separate ego wanting something outside of itself. In noduality there is no separation so for the Self to want something it can only want the Self, because there is only one reality. In this way, desire becomes redundant. And that's a useful observation because otherwise there can be confusion about whether to accept desire or try to remove desire. At the transpersonal stage the illusion of the separate ego has been recognized. And therefore also the false duality of desire becomes apparent.

This thread is a blessing to me after having done Ibogaine and Bufo Alvarious combo treatment about 18 months ago. The DP DR when I got home was so terrifying that I immediately and gratefully returned to all the drugs I sought entheogen experiences to free myself from. After doing the Ibogaine/Bufo I found that smoking pot was now the MOST intense experience I had ever had - and it still is. It was meditation that finally led me back to some semblance of sanity - that, and abstinence from what I call 'Fools Gold' drugs like stimulants (anything from coffee to kratom, adderall, cocaine and alcohol). Entheogens saved my life for sure - by dissolving it. My 'blue pill' problems became paddy cake childs play compared to losing my sense of 'I'. Things definitely got worse before they got better but I never could have found Samadhi on my own. An addicts ego function is incredibly complex. With the brilliant teachings of Joe Dispenza's scientific approach along with Deepak Chopra's multidisciplinary education and some other contributors to the Youtube station called Science and Nonduality (SAND) I am slowly proceeding through my dark tunnel by a thin lead line of what I can only call some sort of 'faith'. In what, I still have no idea but I've found that the surest and most immediate rescue from DP DR is calling upon my own SELF (even though I don't know where or what that sense of self is). It's the only thing I trust and it comforts me without fail when I sincerely call upon it. Now, I only rarely use entheogenic substances with very deep respect and regard for set and setting, and with a healthy sense of resistance - the way you might simultaneously look forward to and dread an intense psychotherapy session that digs deep into your trauma . In a way, these chemicals are 'Gods' to me and they are jealous and demanding ones. I believe their lessons are self limiting and if you don't respond to their revelations and suggestions (they absolutely WILL answer your questions) they will treat you with as much disregard as you do them - In short, don't play with them like a game unless you want to be made into one. The key is finding the eye of the storm in every situation while holding the tension of the opposites, equally experiencing the agony and the ecstasy at the same time. You can't use your intellect to do this and moving in and out of it is the balanced nature of being a manifested 'vector' of consciousness. We are some fractal form of the particle/wave function on a grand scale. Being and not being at the same time is where I find acceptance and surrender and most precious to me - the state of senseless wonder. If what you are experiencing can be described you can be certain that it isn't real. Let that be ok.

Very interested in how you manage to handle this. Instagram is generally a low-conscious platform. It sort of belies your true goal. Your audience on Instagram will consist mostly of deceived individuals, belief system devotees, wannabe seekers. The problem is, you can teach very little over a social media platform. 1:1 meetings have their spell, but spirituality itself cannot be taught; the basics can, the language can, but how feels the wetness of water cannot. On one hand, your ultimate goal is to teach deep spirituality to serious seekers. On the other hand, you are picking between entrepreneurs and yoga practitioners, none of which are serious seekers. The prophecy self-fulfills: When one becomes a serious seeker, honestly, very few gurus are deemed valuable, and even less on social media. Do you honestly think a serious seeker would spend their time on these networks? Probably not. Here's the catch 101. The more serious you are about spirituality, the less teachers you require. This undermines the whole matter of teaching 'deep spirituality' to serious seekers, for the serious ones are not really in need of assistance anymore (there are definitely exceptions in this approach). To avoid misconception, my definition of 'a serious seeker' is someone who has a serious first-hand grasp of nonduality & has no trouble exploring the rabbit hole on their own. I do not view blind guru worshipers & content consumers as serious seekers. When you are serious about pursuing truth, it becomes your beacon. You recognize the importance of it. A valiant purpose. Just do not expect them to be serious seekers in that case. Their excuses & complexes will be perceived in their eyes as 'still more serious and important to hold onto'.

In practice humans must be drawing maps to survive. You can stop drawing maps if you enter a state of total nonduality and not-knowing. Being = Absolute Truth No. Like I told you, paradox is necessary here. It is not a mistake. Absolute Truth != relative truth Absolute Truth = relative truth Both are the case, depending on perspective. The glass is both half-full and half-empty at the same time.

You're welcome but yeah, that one came from someone else too. I think maybe a Sia song, I dunno. I owe my original understanding of nonduality to a tree. Oh wait. Giving credit or blame to nouns. Right. Don't do that.

People gravitate towards teachers who emanate what they want. In our society we worship emotional equanimity and mistake focus and equanimity for enlightenment. Focus and being scatter brained are not what they seem, when you go deep into nonduality. They are opposites only to the mind, going beyond the mind does not mean having a focused mind. It is not transcending mind. It means going backwards and through mind, including mind. The reason you see more male teachers and more successful teachers are male is because people misunderstand and project what they want from enlightenment onto it. There are also a lot of reasons that women are programmed to want to help and do their work for free without seeking any recognition. A master is not a master until you see him as such. "Master" is a projection of the mind, also coincidently, has strong connotations of being male. Ah, duality is a bitch. Or master. Whatever.

Haha! They will certainly not be openminded to nonduality or mysticism or the things I teach. You have been spoiled rotten here. University will feel like prison compared to Actualized.org With that said, if you must go to university, you'll certainly be happier studying psychology and philosophy vs economics. And a psychology degree can be useful if you want to be a therapist or something like that in the future. You can learn valuable things within academic psychology. But your mind will not be jailbroken there, nor will you find the Truth there.

Nonduality teachings are very valuable in terms of transpersonal development. The idea that the ego is a separate entity is what needs to be transcended. Nonduality teacher Paul Hedderman learned the phrase "You can't use the Buddha to seek the Buddha". That's a pretty clever pointer because if we are the Buddha in our nondual nature and at the same time are spiritual seekers seeking Buddhahood, that's a contradiction. Here is Paul's most recent video:

Is akasha the same as consciousness? No, akasha is the content in consciousness. But isn't that duality? My idea is that it's a trinity with 1) the unmanifested, 2) consciousness and 3) the manifested. Almost like the Holy Trinity in Christianity. And in Christianity the Holy Trinity is one unit, nonduality! When the trinity comes together it produces time. And the "when" is now, there is only now. Is akasha space? Yes! And space is not empty but is made of vacuum energy which in turn is the substance of all material things.

This thread is a careful dance between solipsism, madness and non-duality. Here god argues with it's different parts over whether anything exists and what we should do about it. Do you really think universal consciousness is limited to one being? Oh what a waste of potential. And to the thread author, everything exists as experience and experiencer(duality of imagination) Collapse the whole thing and you get consciousness, self aware and alone. But it's behind all appearances,form and time. We are all literally one mind, each of it's parts separated by thought and imagination alone. The complicated nature of this can lead to explanations such as reality is magic etc. Well yes it is, how come imagination feels so real. Anyway the point of nonduality is to spread love and kindness, here using the cerebral drives people to madness, ideas like solipsism etc. I say it once i say it again if this was the truth, why would spirituality be so wide spread? Spiritual teachers like Leo, should be warning people against it. Oooh be careful don't want solipsim to bite your ass! Its silly really, this is what happens when you try to imagine your ego is god. We all exist as thoughts within god's mind. How is that for a twist? Or multiple personalities of it, or masks, but everyone is made from the same stuff consciousness. So fundamentally you are all life. This should be good news, celebrated, not this madness.

Because Truth is EVERYTHING, including non-abidance and disunity. Sure, but I'm not hung up on it like some folks are. I don't discount nonduality just because it lasts 5 minutes. 5 minutes of nonduality is just as true and valid as 50 years of it. Because actually it's Eternal.

I don’t think there is really such a thing as a Mormon nondualist. By identifying with a certain belief system and religion already embodies duality. Nonduality is about transcending religion to see it as parts of a whole. This is one of the problems with Hindus and Buddhists that I see. A true Buddhist does not identify as a Buddhist because any attachment leads to suffering. All identities, beliefs, ideologies, politics, and religion are imagination inside the Dream of Life. Any worldview is duality. Notice this.

@Nahm if we’re throwing psychedelics out of the equation (which I don’t think we should), the fastest way would be meditation for most people although it was a manic episode from my bipolar disorder paired with psychedelics, intense spiritual study, meditation, associating with spiritual people, etc. for me. Every discipline followed to its end ends in nondualism, but ultimately nondualism is far too simplistic of a concept. There are dualities, but at the same time nonduality is true.

@BipolarGrowth how do you get on with other Mormons when you talk to them about nonduality? If you do mention it that is, or do you keep it secret? (The secret at the source of all religion!)

This is a theory until you experience it for yourself. But my current level of understanding is: No 'body and mind' as separate things. There is body-mind as a single thing, but appear as two when we're in a dualistic state. Therefore, when I glimpse nonduality, the awareness and contents (thoughts, feelings, sense perceptions etc) are one with the awareness. That is, reality is self-aware, panpsychism if you like. "can i notice awareness ?" Try. Can you create a layer of awareness, above awareness, looking at it as an object? If that's what you mean. The ego thinks it is separate and capable of this, but I've never managed it. I end up like a dog chasing its own tail

@Marinador No actually, not at all. ? Nonduality means not two, as in the subject & objects, or possessor and possession. Existence = awareness. That’s all that is. No one has it. Some claim they do, apparently.

yup, Quran do it too perfectly, it is impossible that muhammad wrote it himself. It succeeded very well into introducing religion into stage purple/red tribes. It had the vision of creating a religious movement and creating a religious country and it succeeded in doing that. But still, don't expect it to explain higher stages. Nonduality is non existent in Quran. Quran doesn't teach free thinking and open-mindedness, it is basically an indoctrination, which is consistent with stage blue values. Was Muhammad enlightened? I don't know honestly. Yet still you can take some scriptures from Quran and explain them in a nondual manner.

Continuous experience. When you’re saying happiest and most fulfilled, you are referring to feeling. Feeling has never, and will never ‘be’ anywhere. Feeling is not a separate object, an ‘it’, that a you, could ‘get’. In your direct experience, feeling = now, always. Feeling has never been in a past or future. You are looking for what yo in fact can never actually be without. There is absolutely nothing you can do about how you feel. It doesn’t matter what perspectives you choose or what happens in life, it doesn’t matter if you have a life purpose, or pursue or become, enlightened. There is literally nothing you can do about how you feel. If you want to, you can make a dreamboard, discover synchronicity, and nonduality, and also create what you want to experience. But it really doesn’t matter if you do or not.

Ajata Project Nothingness: "Underneath the condition when you are awake and aware, and beneath the condition when you are in bed at night and dreaming, there is the deep-sleep condition. Here, there are no thoughts, there is no “you”, no mind, no relationships, no other, nor world, or universe. There is merely a condition of empty presence, no-thing-ness. Everything, every form, event, etc., is superimposed on this empty presence, by the mind in the waking or dreaming state. But the organism, the body, continues to exist despite these daily reoccurrence of emptiness. This condition in which there is no mind, no thoughts, no forms, and no you, is the “ground” state, your natural state. This empty presence is the condition of the organism before its birth (and its conditioning and the arising of the I-thought), and will be its condition once again upon the death of the form of “your life”. In other words, an organism appears to arise within empty presence, matures, and recedes again into empty presence (similar to the way an electron arises and recedes in the quantum field). The organism knew nothing of existence or nonexistence before birth, and will know nothing after death: “You” will not know that you— or anything else— ever had “existed”. Recognizing the fleeting temporality of “existence” – and that existence will be completely non-existent, in due course— it becomes clear that not anything that you do, think, feel or say has any lasting significance or meaning. (This is the message of the Bhagavad Gita.) All that appears, to the organism, to be done is merely a momentary expression of the field of ever-present beingness—utterly lacking in lasting reality. This is why it is said, in the nondual writings, that “nothing really matters”. It is also why it is said that (as a book about Papaji is titled) “nothing ever happened.” All that we learn in advaita is intending to point our attention to nothingness. (And not its “existence” or “nonexistence”, since where there is nothing, neither of these are applicable.) In other words, the intention of advaita, or nonduality, is to direct us to ajata. And, I would say, a thorough understanding of the former is necessary in order to comprehend the latter. When we come to recognize that, in truth, there is nothing from the start, we understand what is meant when it is said that all that we perceive is simply a dream, an illusion— seemingly superimposed on ever-lasting empty presence. Now, is this information simply an interesting “analysis”, or does this have practical value? Someone recently sent me a book by the Dalai Lama, and I’ll extract a few quotes. All phenomena are empty. Emptiness pervades not only your individual ego or sense of self, but the whole of reality…That emptiness of mind is its ultimate nature, or mode of being. To realize that, is to pierce and see through the deception of ignorance…freedom from ignorance (is called) nirvana… Realizing emptiness is directly related to our quest to purify our mind of afflictive emotions like hatred, anger, and desire…We project onto things a state of “existence”, and a mode of being which is simply not there…. This understanding of emptiness..is one of the principal factors of the true path….For such an insight cuts right through the illusion created by the mis- apprehension of grasping things and events as existing… We realize the emptiness of all phenomena, not just the mind and body of the individual. In my favorite story about Ramana Maharshi, a man came into the room where Ramana held satsang, said he’d written a biography of Ramana and asked permission to read it. Ramana smile and nodded, and the man read his manuscript. It was full of inaccuracies and error: he said that Ramana was married and had children, that he’d been a Socialist before his enlightenment, and on and on. When he finished reading, Ramana smiled and nodded, and the man picked up his manuscript and left. One of Ramana’s disciples cried out, “Master, did you hear what he read? Is any of that real?!” Ramana waved his hand as if taking in the universe, and asked: “Is any of this real?” -- Ajata Project Robert Wolfe

@Someone here what exists "outside" of your consciousness is you, not the human ego. So of course you are a conscious being since everything is consciousness, you're just interacting with different aspects of yourself (similar to when you're dreaming about interacting with other people). But there's no "you" and "others", or "you" and "reality" such as two layers of reality. It's a singular mind split into infinite thought forms, so your existence is stretching to infinity (yes, you this finite questioning mind) to explore the manifested Self. Thinking that you're limited by something external (such as "me" and "other people") limits your absolute perspective. The inside/outside is one field of consciousness, not two layers, basically what nonduality is trying to teach.

Now I have another proposal for modifying the hardcore nonduality teachings who say that things are only apparently happening. The true perspective in my opinion is to say that things have apparently happened in the past. But what is happening now IS happening, not apparently happening. How do I know that I'm not deluding myself? What if there is an actual past separate from the now? My answer to that is that my model is consistent with my actual direct experience. The mainstream view of a past separate from the now is not.

Another simple spiritual teaching is the extreme form of nonduality that people like Tony Parsons and Jim Newman talk about. They even say that nothing is happening. Maybe they mean that no-thing is happening which I would agree with, but it's unclear what they mean. And instead of saying that something is happening they say that something apparently is happening. In my opinion that ironically makes their teaching more complicated than it needs to be. It's more direct to say that no-thing is happening. So there is something happening! It's just that this something is not a thing like some material stuff. The word 'apparently' then becomes redundant.

“Bud” ? There really are no individuals my man. It’s actual. There is no ‘he’ which has a clearer understanding than ‘you’, and ‘you’ are not the individual ‘knower’ of who among ‘other individuals’ has a clearer understanding. There is likewise, not actually an individual, which believes itself to be a reliable source. You - are saying that, and that you are, and that there isn’t that ‘you’, is totally between you and your source, so to speak. Nor is there anyone else’s beliefs at play here - literally just your own. That is textbook projection - telling someone else what they believe. lol. Come on man. This is fundamental deconstruction. The agreeing & being a moderator verbiage only reveals your own perspectives about that subject - you are saying that. There is no & no one understanding nonduality my man, it means not-two (as you know, just a point of relevance to what you said - about ‘me’). “You are not a reliable course in these areas whether you believe you are or not” - again, come on dude. You can’t see that’s all what you are saying? All projection? There isn’t actually an individual ‘here’ ‘stuck in a belief system’, that is the whole ‘thing’ you’re missing! Nonduality! ? ”It takes someone to be completely selfless...” that there is not a ‘separate self’ ‘in the body’ is actual. This nonduality ‘stuff’ is actual! “Someone that is not awake should not be attempting to guide individuals on this section of the forum period” I mean, really?! You might be having an ‘off day’ or something, but come on. Are you even reading what you’re writing? I wish you only the best. If we were sitting together, I’d be the first to open a beer for ya and tell you I love ya, and appreciate all you do. You also can feel free to make whatever accusations about me you desire to, and I hope it is some form of relief.