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This is the problem with turning enlightenment into some binary thing. There is no such thing as "enlightenment" as a monolith. No two people have the same degree and kind of consciousness. Rather than thinking of enlightenment as a monolithic state, open your mind to the possibility that there are thousands of different states from which one can be awake. So the chances that any two people have the same degree and kind of awakening is tiny. Which is why all these nonduality debates keep happening. People assume enlightenment is a monolithic singular thing but it obviously is not if you bother to research it in some depth. There are many degrees and even different kinds of ego-death. You can have an ego-death so deep that you won't even be able to know your own first name. Yet most awake people can still recall their first name. That doesn't mean they aren't awake. It just means there are different kinds and degrees and states. To reduce and dismiss this vast diversity of awakening is very problematic and leads to much confusion and misunderstanding. It is a parallel problem to thinking that Christianity is the one true best religion because it happens to be the one you're familiar with. But there are many other religions which are equally valid, if not more so. But you have to be able to step outside your little self-constructed bubble in order to see it. People who speak of awakening/enlightenment as a singular thing have clearly not experienced anywhere near the range of consciousness that is possible. The chief characteristic of consciousness is its enormous diversity. Consciousness is infinitely diverse, beyond anything the default human mind-state can imagine. And even beyond what most enlightened humans can imagine. Just because you'd had some awakenings does not mean you understand how deep and diverse consciousness can be. No mater how awake you think you are, I guarantee you are underestimating what consciousness is capable of.

Leo mentioned that there is a RationalWiki article about him. I found this passage in that article: I think the RationalWiki article fails to grasp Leo's fundamental point which as I interpret it is that subjective experience is more fundamental than objective reality. Why? Because objective reality is appearances in consciousness! And it can be directly verified in one's own experience without the need for theoretical models which themselves by the way also are appearances in consciousness. Interestingly, I didn't find any RationalWiki article about nonduality but one article about transpersonal psychology: I don't know enough about transpersonal psychology to evaluate that article but it's interesting that it claims that transpersonal psychology says that a disconnection from God/energy/transcendent/soul has left everyone sick. Very good! There is truth to that, not in an absolute sense since the personal stage of development is necessary and actually healthy but in contrast to the transpersonal stage it's valid to call the personal stage sick.

No it isn't. It's still all one consciousness. Light is not turned into two substances by increase or decrease of intensity. If you want to be a stickler and insist on pure, absolute, unmitigated nonduality, then you can become the Godhead itself, which is just formless infinite consciousness which increases in intensity forever without end. But at this point your human life will be gone, as will the entire material universe.

So awareness & feeling do not come and go. Thought, comes and goes. Now we are in the light of awareness, so to speak. Now let’s look at this for more relief...patience & humility still being the key.... Awareness of “living”, that distinction, requires the ability to compare “living” to “not living”. Awareness is not aware of “not living”, or of “living”. Awareness is aware of the thoughts - ‘living’, and ‘not living’. That is what is meant by duality. This or that, this and that. Again, awareness is aware of the thoughts - “this”, “that”, “living”, “not living”. “What if” implies a future scenario. But that what if, is nothing to be concerned about. That what if, is not possible. There can not, and will not come a day, where a realization occurs that are, or are not, “living”, or “not living”. This is self evident, as you are aware, right now, of the thoughts - “living” or “not living”. There is, in your direct experience, no awareness of living or not living, only of the thoughts - “living”, “not living”. Philosophically speaking, to mistake my thought about something, for the actuality, is not really ‘living’ this life at all. To realize what is being shared here, is to realize one does not need to believe thoughts. Once the dualistic nature of thoughts is realized, it actually becomes challenging to continue to believes them - especially when they don’t feel good. Thoughts have always appeared & disappeared, and thoughts will continue to appear & disappear. What appears and disappears - is magic, and unexplainable. Explanation, is really, just more thoughts. The concern “what if I’m not really living”, is revealed to not be a concern at all. You felt concern, you expressed & inquired, because something didn’t feel quite right about the thought. Believing the thoughts, is the matrix, the prison of the mind, and indeed does not feel quite right. Concern was felt... ‘what if I’m not living’ was a thought. What didn’t feel quite right was the thought about yourself - not the content. You are beyond, transcendent of, thought. This is self evident, as again, “you” is a thought, the real you - is the awareness of that thought. And you, awareness, do not come and go. What does not come and go, does not really live and die. “Live” & “die”, are thoughts, eternal awareness is aware of. These thoughts come and go, appear and disappear. In the matrix / prison of the mind, the believing of the thoughts... “nothing matters” is indeed concerning. But ‘nothing, or better said, ‘no thing’, is awareness. “Nothing matters” can be taken as a thought, and the feeling response is ‘not good’, if you will. The feeling is responding to the misunderstanding. What is misunderstood, is that ‘nothing matters’, in the way you’re interpreting it, is just a thought. As in, “then life won’t matter, life would be pointless & meaningless - because nothing in life would matter”. That is what does not feel good. The misunderstanding is what does not feel good. So what to do about misunderstanding, which does not feel good? Understanding, of course. Which feels wonderful & liberating. And you are in luck when it comes to misunderstanding & understanding, as other people have already figured reality out. For you, there is only to choose to spend some time on it, to understand and realize. Nonduality teachers, gurus, presenters, whatever you’d like to call them, understand & have realized, what quantum physicists have proved over a hundred years ago. ‘No thing’, awareness... in quantum mechanics jargon, you might call “superposition” - that which is infinite emptiness & fullness, infinite potential, formless & limitless - Awareness - and therefore can appear as anything. ‘It’ does this, this appearing, by vibrating. This is referred to as M theory, or string theory. This vibrating can only be referred to in theory, because no thing vibrates and appears as the very thoughts, and therefore the very theories....about....that which appears as all ‘things’ by vibrating. You can experience much liberation, many great feeling epiphanies, in understanding these things, just by spending time on YouTube. Patience & humility are key. As great as it feels - even understanding reaches it’s natural ceiling, because understanding is essentially, thought. It’s still appearance, but it is the understanding that thought, and therefore understanding - is appearance. By the time this ceiling of understanding is reached, so much misunderstanding has been seen through and shedded, that you are mostly out of the matrix. Then, if interested, there is the ‘going and seeing for yourself’, so to speak. Experiencing that which is prior to experience itself. That which is prior to thought & understanding. That which is prior to the vibration of itself, prior to it’s appearance. This is the matrix. Reactionary living. You are becoming aware of this. You are ‘waking up’. This is good. You are realizing why people let go, listen to feeling, meditate, do yoga, express how they feel, seek more understanding, take psychedelics, go on retreats, etc. You might say that all of these are doing more about the situation of misunderstanding, than just thinking and settling for thoughts that don’t feel good. This is thinking, and thinking won’t be resolved by more thinking. Instead, recognize the limit, the futility of thinking. Tomatoes are chosen or not, because of feeling, sensation. Not thoughts. If you think you love tomatoes because of how they look, but they taste terrible, you won’t eat them. Taste buds change. Every thing is really vibration, which appears to be a ‘thing’. To ‘move on’ from thinking...abide in feeling. This means if a thought doesn’t feel good to you, you will swiftly and effortlessly let it go. In truth, thought appears and disappears already anyways. So it is so effortless in fact, that you don’t even have to let it go. Without your continued focus - it’s gone. Magic. And another thought appears. A better feeling, more insightful thought. There is no limit or bottom to this good feelingness. It takes time, there is momentum, there is letting go of thoughts of misunderstanding....but there is orgasmic thoughts. Imagine sitting quietly, and genuinely preferring not to have sex, because it would actually feel slightly less amazing, than the peace, bliss, and appearing thoughts. You don’t hate Jim Newman. You just want to let all misunderstanding go, to be in the state he is in. Patience. Humility. Listen more to what he is saying. Listen less to any thoughts of judgement of him. Tastes change. You might profoundly love him one day. That might be just such a blissful thought. If the separation of others doesn’t exist - then only ‘connection’ exists. For example, I am a dad, and I have a son. There is connection between us, there is a bond if you will, between us. See what that connection is, see what that bond is made of, prior to, and beyond, just the appearance.

Nah.... I don't buy it. There is a Green awakening happening, and a huge backlash to that. But there is no Turquoise level awakening happening. Less than 0.1% of the world is at the Unitive stage of ego development and I don't see that number shifting significantly in our lifetimes. There will be a big Green awakening over our lifetimes though as stage Blue and Orange become increasingly morally bankrupt and outdated. The number of people actually grasping nonduality is pitifully low, and that will not change without better government infrastructure, massive education reform, serious redistribution of wealth, and some kind of serious checks on capitalism. The reality is that most of the planet is stuck in stage Blue, fighting tooth and nail to get to Orange. And it will be that way for decades to come.

No you misunderstood. I was asking if all those teachers had actually different views on of nonduality

The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don't know you're in the Dunning-Kruger club. Then again, no matter what anyone says nor realizes, they have always been enlightened. Please, don't make a nonduality war of this thread. https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/7461-nonduality-wars-not-allowed-here/

? awesome Glad to hear, thank you too. ? My crusade was in the "experience is never direct" thread, but it doesn't really explain the relativity thing. The best explanations that I know of are the buddhist "Emptiness" philosophy, and Jed McKenna's book "Theory of Everything". The buddhist philosophy is dry, boring, long-winded and contemplation-heavy, Jed's books are easy and funny. Also Buddhists generally think their philosophy is the truth, when in my view it's really just a corrective. Another bomb that destroys the universe. But I didn't realize that until after I had read Jed's ToE, chapter Agrippa's Trilemma (that's basically a no-nonsense approach to the same conclusion). Alan Watts is, among other things, an accessible introduction to emptiness and the interdependent origination of duality. David Quinn's version of causality is essentially the same thing, although he makes the same mistake as the buddhists: http://www.naturalthinker.net/dquinn/Books/Wisdom/WisdomContents.htm Greg Goode has books, articles and references about it if you really want to explore the literature and philosophy: https://greg-goode.com/topic/nonduality/ And of course my personal favorite, Jed, who skips all the extraneous mindgames and gets right down to brass tax: https://www.wisefoolpress.com/toe/ Another way of saying bottomless regression, is lack of foundation, or something from nothing. Perhaps the easiest way to get at the impossibility of strange loops (which extends to the impossibility of duality, finiteness, relativity, etc.), is to consider this image that someone else posted recently: When both hands are dependent upon eachother for their own existence, then it's a chicken/egg problem. That's bottomless regression, a.k.a. lack of foundation, a.k.a. something from nothing. And that's also at the core of buddhist emptiness and dependent origination. Neither one of those two hands in the picture could ever come into being without the other, which means that neither of them can exist at all. The key point here is that when you think about it, it's exactly the same with everything else. If you understand why those hands could never exist, then you understand why the universe could never exist. Hence the term "ground of being". When it becomes clear that being is groundless, and that this is an impossibility, you go looking for the ground, i.e. the foundation, i.e. the truth underlying all of reality without which it would be impossible. And the only possible candidate for that is consciousness.

@Member @dyslexicCnut Please go back to the topic, nonduality wars like this are not allowed here.

Everything from God-mode, becoming nonduality, to itching, to gas pain... is That. It is one, perfect, and beyond all comprehension.

Yes, but only everything that actually exists. Marlon Brando is not actually The Godfather. It's just Marlon Brando. There's no duality there, only Brando exists. Godfather is just Brando pretending. That doesn't validate the existence of The Godfather one iota, and it's not a duality or distinction that needs "collapsing" or reconciling one way or another. There never was a godfather, it was always just Marlon Brando pretending. Godfather is pure fabrication. The movie on a videotape is just videotape. There is no movie other than the videotape. No duality, no need to reconcile them. The videotape exists, the movie doesn't, except as a facade of the videotape. The movie is pure fabrication, can't possibly exist in its own right, and is thereby proof of the videotape even if nobody in the movie ever "experienced" the video tape. Nonduality refers to the videotape, not the movie. At most you could say that the movie is an expression of the videotape, and as such included in the nondual nature of the videotape. If appearance is anything, it's consciousness pretending. Sort of. Form is formless pretending. They are not identical in truth, one is a facade of the other, and only the other exists so no need to reconcile them. Relativity is the absolute pretending. Still no duality, still no actual relativity. It was always just the absolute pretending. Sort of. The absolute never actually does anything, it just imagines to be doing everything. Still no duality, still no need to reconcile. Only the absolute exists, relativity never did. Reality is not a strange loop, it only appears as a strange loop. Strange loop is the facade. Infinite regression is not the same as actual infinity. The former can't exist, the latter must exist. A strange loop is infinite regression. Relativity is infinite regression. Two hands drawing eachother is infinite regression. Escher's stairs are infinite regression. Duality is infinite regression. Infinite regression is not absolute, it is impossible. Infinity is absolute and necessary. Come on it's not that difficult... ?

Oh yeah I get this. In experience the I that unifies all forms of experience is not experienced as a space, I am just using the word for lack of a better one. Definitely I don't mean a physical space when i say this word. But yes there is one reality. It's definitely not dual. Waking dream, just as dream at night, only appears to be there, while it's only dreamlike /hallucinatory/nonexistory which makes it of the same substance as that nothingness that we start with! Just as a dream It only appears to be real while the dream state is happening. Amazing ?? nothing came out of nothing after all Maybe my flavour of nonduality is a bit different, and probably more escapist if I have to be honest. I say this because from what I heard you say the world is real and there is no self type of nonduality, but I say the self is real and there is no world... Which is probably the same thing in the end somehow ... ? lol

This "space" isn't space. It's nowhere and nothing. YES! But it's not a space. It is nowhere. Nowhere is the perciever/subject. But notice, this now creates a new duality: nowhere (space) vs the stuff in it. So this is not yet full nonduality. For full nonduality you must realize that all the form is itself identical to the "space" in which it occurs. If you are distinguishing space from its contents, that is still duality. In the final awakening you must realizing that absolute indifference between form and formlessness. If you distinguish the "space" from the ego, that is a duality. No-self = True Self When everything collapses into ONE, there are no more parts. Your mind is trying to grasp at parts but Unity cannot have any. That's why this is so confusing for you. You are trying to grasp Infinity using the mind but that cannot ever work because the mind itself is entangled with the question. There cannot even be 1) a mind, and 2) a thing which the mind grasps. Since that is still duality. Things ARE mind! The chair is not happening in the mind. The chair IS mind. The end.

I think I will ask Stephen Wolfram or look at their scientific papers about if their model explains consciousness. Their model is an abstract graph, a no-thing one might say, so it's already compatible with consciousness. One simple solution is to say that the graph is an appearance of consciousness. And that consciousness is the entire graph observing the manifestation of itself. That's nonduality! And consciousness is then infinite while the manifested world is always finite.

I read that Ashtavakra Gita is a very ancient text of Advaita Vedanta which is a nonduality philosophy. Here is one quote from that text: At first it appears that this verse describes how we are not the body. And then it gets tricky because, wait a minute, if the self is separate from the body, isn't that duality? Then the interpretation can go even one step further and examine, what is the body? And then it's recognized that the body is a concept! And concepts are empty. There is no body as a separate object. In this way there are (at least) three possible levels of interpreting that quote: 1) Consciousness is separate from the body and the text is correct, 2) Consciousness and the physical world including the body are one (nonduality) and the text is incorrect, and 3) there is no body as a separate object and therefore the self is distinct from that notion and the text is correct.

Words are concepts. And concepts are labels which by themselves are empty. And even when concepts describe objects, those objects are themselves empty. There are no actual separate objects. For example the word 'apple' applied to a particular apple existing in physical reality, that apple is not a separate object. Nonduality teacher Ramesh Balsekar used to say that what anyone has said at any time, whatever any guru has said at any time, is a concept.

Now you’re gettin somewhere. How is nonduality a paradigm? Where / what is the “psychological domain”? How is “the psychological domain” not a paradigm, and not an appearance? If there are just appearances, there’s no remaining question regarding authenticity. If one is in the materialist paradigm, identified as the body mind, there is suffering and therefore there are questions regarding authenticity.

First Class: Notes So in this entry, I'm going to be jotting down my notes I took in class. I'm going to meditate on this and then post my reactions later on because there is just so much to soak up. It's isn't so much in the sense there is a lot of content but so much in the sense that the few things I heard takes some time to really sink in to the psyche. "Your consciousness is located in your reality and it creates your reality." consciousness is not limited to your brain-> your reality is within your consciousness thought is a form of consciousness itself What are the distinctions of subjective and objective reality? we like to see the external as something out there and separate from us but what if your external world and internal world are one and the same? our external experiences have impacted out internal sense of self My additional thoughts: our internal sense of self shapes out perspective of external experiences and how we interact with those experiences therefore our internal selves become our external reality. (law of attraction, psychology etc.) Who you are flows into your external reality "Of course it is happening inside your head but why on earth should that mean it's not real?"- Dumbledore "There is a deep part of us we aren't aware of even though it is part of awareness itself." What is God?: God is consciousness Idealism: everything is made of consciousness idea is also preset in many Eastern traditions west: we all live in out own worlds, out own reality cognitive psych: out brain chemistry makes our reality-> what is that made of-> materialism says atom and molecules don't have consciousness-> then what makes the mind? We can't quantify it but we know its real -> We can't make sense of reality through materialism-> examine thoughts and feelings-> "I think, therefore, I am" (Descartes) Problem with Materialism/ "Hard Problem" east: there is one consciousness that flows through all of us, making a consistent reality avoids the "hard problem" I also thought of nonduality William James: father of psych, professor at Harvard, brother of Henry James, gave first psych class, American philosopher stream of consciousness Our experiences and lives have continuity. It's like a stream There was no time where we broke off and stopped being ourselves (gradual changes, flowing changes, again think of a stream) introspection as a tool to observe consciousness-> Meditation "we are always present but the present is always changing" We are always changing the present is all there is (reminds me of the notion of how both the past and future are imaginary) Distinction between knower and the known If you're your experiences, then who is the one experiencing? How do you know the knower? without the knower we don't know anything without consciousness, we don't know anything if the knower is consciousness itself "Consciousness is the purest form of the knower. The knower is the purest form of consciousness" it is not an it: once you put a label to it, it becomes something outside of you > very self evident, but also very elusive Ok so I'm done for today. I'm going to be right back and have an existential crisis lol

I feel suffering instead of feeling the Holy Spirit. Jesus ran around filled with the Holy Spirit. We too should be running around with the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? A Course in Miracles defines it as: My own definition is that the Holy Spirit is the increase of complexity that is going on all the time in the present moment. I mentioned previously about the Holy Spirit being the same as dharma. Now I found another candidate: the Holy Spirit is the same as shakti! How can we connect with the Holy Spirit? We are already connected! The Holy Spirit is the whole force of the manifestation of the Word of God, which creates everything. It's "just" the ego that seemingly blocks the access. What I have been able to practice is to observe my own ego. My intent at the moment is to continue to observe my ego and see if the Holy Spirit can start flowing within me. (Actually the ego too is the result of the Holy Spirit in nonduality but the ego is a false belief system.)

A Course in Miracles seldom uses the term consciousness, but it does use the word mind a lot. ACIM expert David Hoffmeister said that Jesus is getting tougher and tougher in His teachings. And ultimately Jesus says that we are not body, mind and spirit. We are mind, Jesus says. Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo has also mentioned that ACIM gets more advanced in later lessons. That's accurate! To say body, mind and spirit, that's duality. And my definition of mind includes everything we experience in consciousness, so with that definition the body is a part of the mind, just as ACIM says. The only difference then is that I make a distinction between consciousness as the state of being aware and mind as the content experienced in consciousness. ACIM seems to include consciousness in the concept of mind, which is a more nondual description than I use (or at least have used).

It's an amazing technique. I do this on shamanic breathing. Give Beige a try. It loops to absolute nonduality.

Wait a minute! What if the nonduality teachers are WRONG? The idea of nonduality seems correct to me, but the claim that the individual doesn't get liberated or enlightened might be a false perspective. Because consider integral transcend and include. Then the individual self gets included even in spiritual enlightenment. And I got an insight of how it might work. Just like how we can take a conscious breath it's I propose possible to from a liberated state to consciously take an individual perspective. And when doing so there is an individual self. Not as a separate entity but still as an experienced process. So I will experiment with consciously shifting perspectives. And this I think is possible even with reality being deterministic. If I choose to take a conscious breath for example that's a different experience than when my breathing goes on subconsciously. And that difference is still there even in a deterministic scenario.

This is not for anyone advanced but perhaps for those who are confused a bit about what this awareness "thing" is and where it resides. In any case I think this contemplation brings a certain clarity and helps with self inquiry. To be honest, they do say that having a beginner's mindset is very important, so perhaps this is for everyone. We all know we are humans in time, with different stories and whatnot.. With past and future. A materialist might say this. I agree from one perspective that is the case. But ok now, that's not interesting, let's go into another dimension now, rather than the horizontal dimension of time. Lets go further and deeper into this moment right now, the vertical dimension, to see what we actually are at this moment and not what we are in the story of time. Here, now, we can see that there are different sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, sounds, sights, etc etc... All subjective objects of experience. All of those different objects have something in common, right? They might be completely different - sound and thought, sight and touch.. But they are all happening to you, correct? All happening in the field of your awareness, otherwise you wouldn't know about them, So the common thing in all objects of experience is you. You are that unifying thing. What could this be? Inquiring into that self which unifies all objects of experience now is what true self inquiry is. If you are doing self inquiry, but at the same time look at yourself as the human in time, your self inquiry will yield wrong results, since all stories and all time are just another one of those subjective objects that appear to you (as the unifying awareness) Now. Not sure this makes sense to others but I see in this a lot of clarity and I was able to get my friend who is fanatical about time and very egoic to see for the first time that I am not talking just crap when I speak about the true self, but there is really something interesting there to investigate. It was a real breakthrough, so it might help someone else who is stuck also. Ps: I noticed that acknowledging his worldview is correct in one perspective helped for him to be open to entertain something else. Perhaps this thread can also be about how best to share and present nonduality to people who are worshipping duality and wouldn't even hear it.

Richard Dawkins said in this video that he doesn't believe in free will. But he also said that he believes that things are determined by antecedent events. Antecedent means happened before, so that means cause and effect from past to future. Dawkins didn't say that he believes that all things are caused by antecedent events, but if that is what he meant then I think that's incorrect! And even the sense of free will may be a hint of causation not only from the past but also from the future. From a nondual perspective causation is a result of all of reality as a wholeness. And also, in nonduality there is no separate "me" being able to have free will and Leo also mentioned that in one of his videos.

It looks like the elites want the society to be confronted. Divide and conquer. right vs left zoomers vs boomers antifa vs patriots blacks vs whites democrats vs republicans I see it daily in twitter (the most cancerous social media ever), but also in news depending of the political trend of the newspaper or Tv. Whenever I see an unfair new or certain politician saying crazy things I get angry and this ruins my day. And the worst is the fake news created by each side to create more hate. It's easy to fall into their trap when the ego gets attached to an ideology and creates an identity from this. Even spiritual people like Leo I've seen falling into hatred towards Trump. Today pondering the situation I realized it's better for emotional wellbeing to ignore the news. I have my own moral principles and this will make me join one side If I fall in the confrontation trap. From a meta perspective it's a cognitive dissonance to understand nonduality and fall into the division traps whenever we are "off guard".