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I am going to try integrating the torus shape in some way in a meditation. Perhaps moving chi in a toroidal shape and will report if I find anything interesting there. PS: Wow I am watching this documentary right now with an open mouth. This really shows some deep stuff here, this man was pretty "woke". At minute 30:00 you can see that this is no ordinary "scientist", this man talks about how consciousness is not a product of matter, but is there prior to it. Check this out, highly recommend 36:25 Woah, self inquiry described by a physician and brain researcher! It's like watching a nonduality documentary that is not using any nonduality terminology. Very good.

@Someone here I get what you're saying. And you're right, nonduality means everything is One including all questions and all answers. Yet the gurus continue to teach, and aspirants continue to learn. All of that is part of the One too.

@Someone here, thank you for sharing your thoughts. And sorry for all of the questions, but not really since I didn't choose to ask them I see reincarnation as a story too. But in a broader sense, what are your thoughts on our role in the awakening process? Aspirants practice the paths of yoga to receive enlightenment, but is all of that misguided and unnecessary? Krishna approves the paths of karma yoga and raja yoga. I understand the nonduality of uitimate reality, but "we" are in a world of time and space. If it's all an illusion, why go through the motions of realizing enlightenment? Agree with killing the snake for protection, but many criminals are punished beyond the point of protecting society from them. Are these punishments unjust since the criminals weren't responsible for their crimes? Even following an egoic act, why apologize? If we can't control whether or not the ego is at the helm, aren't we guiltless?

One week til the first single is released. It's really no big deal, my promotion efforts have fallen flat so far, so it will not be heard by more than a few people. Which is fine, but it's funny how this whole process has wreaked havoc in the psyche. It's facing one of my biggest fears, which is to become visible. To (seemingly) be seen by others. I try telling myself that there are no others, and I am not this body, but it doesn't work. It's clear that the understanding of nonduality is merely intellectual at this point, and the body/mind feels separate. Which is why there is so much anxiety and fear. There is the fear of failure, rejection, even the fear of success. Ever since I was a child, I've always had the need to hide. It started of course within the family, and it grew from there. I wanted to escape, to run away, to never be seen or talked about again. It was visceral, and a mild version of that old pattern has been coming back lately. Thank God it's a mild version, because I remember it being hell when I was younger. So, in that sense, much progress has been achieved, now that I think of it. Still, I feel that this whole project, aside from being about making music, is about facing those fears. It's as if the so-called higher self wants me to see through the illusion of such fears, to face these inner demons and grow stronger because of it. But it really hasn't been easy, it's a tug of war inside the mind between the part that wants to keep going and the part that is scared like a little kid and wants to just give up and hide from the world forever. In order to do that, the mind draws me in towards addictions, and it generates thoughts like "I'm no good", "I have nothing new to say to people", "I can't help anyone", "There is no value whatsoever in what I do or in anything, for that matter". These thoughts are sneaky as fuck, sometimes they are seen through and sometimes they are believed. So I guess the only way to move forward is to be patient. It's more emotionally draining that I had thought it would be. So, baby steps.

The Advaita Vedanta describes my experience: "Advaita Vedānta literally, 'non-duality') is a school of Hindu philosophy, and is a classic system of spiritual realization in Indian tradition. The term Advaita refers to the idea that Brahman alone is ultimately real, the phenomenal transient world is an illusory appearance (Maya) of Brahman, and the true self, Atman, is not different from Brahman." The Atman within each Being is one with Brahman. Everything else is an illusion. Every word, label, and name is a belief, a construct, a fabrication in the world of form. "Nonduality" is only a pointer. Language is not the thing it tries to describe. Ultimate reality has no language; it simply is. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

You are not awake so you don't understand what you are talking about. Nonduality is not a belief.

Yeah don't oversimplify. That's from the ultimate perspective. In the relative perspective you and me are humans on Earth and there are girls ? and there are guys. Evolve out of this nondual nazi attitude. It's not what nonduality is about. I am the same as you sometimes, but we have to be able to see the relative and appreciate it. The illusion is borrowing reality from the ultimate, but while borrowing that reality it is also true. Dont throw the Yang to your Ying.

To make it really simple, the transpersonal stage is the recognition that manifested reality is a single unbroken appearance (nonduality) and then the actualization of that recognition. When the crystallized ego remains, then there may be a recognition but not yet an actualization of nonduality. The actualization involves the breaking down of the separations experienced at the personal stage of development.

The most extreme nonduality teachers say that there is nobody and nothing is happening. At first that can sound super nihilistic and even crazy. But I think there is truth to it! Consider nonduality. Change is duality. Reality as a whole cannot turn into something else, because that would be what is turning into what is not. I believe that's why for example Brahman is changeless and in the Bible it says: "I the Lord do not change." Also, there cannot be someone plus the rest of reality, so there is nobody. But surely there is something. To say that there is nothing seems false. It could be that what the extreme nonduality teachings are saying is that there is no-thing happening, so it's not the usual sense of nothing like a void or something like that. Leo has said that it's not the usual nothing he means when he says that reality is nothing. So his explanation of nothing is the same as in the extreme nonduality teachings I think. One way of looking at the transpersonal stage is that it's a realization of nonduality plus the dissolving of the crystallized ego. And as I have mentioned before there can also be a realization of nonduality with the crystallized ego still remaining. At least that's possible in theory, and that would explain the claim that there can be spiritual enlightenment at different stages of personal development.

@Shmurda see 99% of people are not conscious of god..so I highly suspect that OP is from the 1%..So this teaching will just be ego using nonduality to reinforce itself. If you in God consciousness.. God =God. If you in ordinary state of consciousness.. Sin =sin. You can't be In a state where sin =God. That is a duality.

Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo said in this video that spiritual teachings can seem to say different things but that in reality they are ingenious ways of untying the same knot. That's a good point. He gave an example of one perspective where a tree has grown from a seed through a process of time, and from another perspective the tree appears instantly in the now from nothing, and both perspectives are two sides of the same coin. I even think that the example of the tree can be explained by saying that the past is real yet all the past is only information in the now. So both perspectives are correct. In another video Roger has mentioned that even within one teaching there can be levels where at first one thing is said, and then at a later stage another thing is said, seemingly contradicting the first claim! I have experienced levels of understanding even on my own, and have gone from doing practices such as mindfulness to more and more recognizing that my doing is itself a part of the crystallized ego. And my current approach is to focus more on understanding what the crystallized ego is instead of trying to change it which is just more of ego activity.

The law of attraction fits in seamlessly with nonduality and meditation. Gotta be honest though, the first time I heard about it my reaction was "oh... fuck". The "present moment" seemed a much kinder introduction.

Well what if I told you Im not clinging to a perspective. Im talking in clear nonduality. Perspective comes in duality. That in which the perspective appears is the Absolute. And That Absolute is formless. And the form within it is imaginary. Illusory content. Real packaging. When you merge Real packaging and Illusory content you get: the appearance of Real Content - Because the real merges with the unreal content making it appear real. It's not a perspective, it's basically What Is. If you can see how clear it is. It's so simple. No awakening of the person is needed, because as you say the person is/was/always will be content and not That within which content appears.... Soooooo You are NOT waking up after all. The No-you (no self) is awake, in other words, you are not awake. There is YOU and then there is the APPEARANCE OF YOU WITHIN YOU. Its the appearance here talking to the appearance there. It's Dodo talking to "Someone here". Don't be ridiculous thinking its emptiness talking with emptiness. It's content talking with content about content and through content. The Real, no-self has no need to talk with itself. The No-self is already perfect and needs no change. Needs not to express any truth. It is the Truth within which all relative lies and truths exist. And those relative ones is Me and You. That's why you are able to even have an account on this forum. The Awareness does not have hands and it is not able to have a forum account. That's only something an illusion/something relative can have. Trust me, Awareness/God LOVES the human experience. Why else would there be so many of us.

Don't be allergic to words like Should. Also you are saying Im imagining this and at the same time telling me there is no mind here to be imagining. Bro you are confused. Let that go and ommmm. Read some Bhagavad Gita, do some Brahmacharya. We need more wisdom. I've had the cocky attitude you present. It's easy when we get identified with the Noself to speak as Noself. But we must remember that we are speaking as a dream character not as the Noself beyond the dream who is imagining all this. The difference between you right now that I'm speaking with and the real you (God) is the same vast difference as the dream character at night and you ( God) But when i am talking to the character there on the other side of the monitor I am not talking to the one dreaming this, it's a character talking to a character. You are not God as the character so let it go. Be human and marinate in the Noself but stop claiming awakening. It's getting ridiculous! The ego is very sneaky. Now you tell me that im imagining the ego, that there is no ego to be tricky, but the me that is imagining is either the Ego (so you're wrong that it doesn't exist) or its God imagining (so if its God why are you against God's will?) Yes I am saying there are two yous. One is formless but real, the other is with form and illusory. These two selves dance in harmonY. Both are complementing each other perfectly. Perfect nonduality with no confusion. Don't throw your inner child with the bathwater.

Yeah we're not just blowing smoke about Nonduality on this forum. Consciousness is the substance of all the universe. It's all one. One infinite mind dreaming up different worlds and characters to which to experience it through. So aliens are consciousness, you are consciousness, all of humanity is consciousness. So if this world blew up, it would be no more significant than you waking up from a dream and the dream characters ending. Consciousness is eternal.

The idea of one's body being the whole world is actually consistent with many spiritual nonduality teachings. One common claim is that the whole world is an appearance in consciousness. And if so, is there really a difference other than as an appearance between our physical human body and the outside world? No, there isn't! It may just be that in the personal stage we are so heavily conditioned to experience our physical body as a separate object that we hardly can think of it being in any other way. Even spiritual teachings make a distinction between the body and the external world which is almost as divisive as in the ego stage. And as outrageous as it may sound, that could simply be a consequence of our world still being very "young" and in an early stage of development.

@Philipp Yes, I've studied a bit of structuralism and post-structuralism. I even have a great video about it: https://www.actualized.org/articles/derrida-deconstruction-postmodernism-nonduality But I never bothered to seriously understand Lacan. It's just way too arcane and impractical in my opinion. There are better things to spend your time studying. And I do not buy into the Oedipal Complex. In the history of Western intellectual tradition, I think it's one of the dumbest and most overrated ideas. It won't help you improve your life.

1. If we are all part of ONE consciousness, how are we able to have the visceral experience of being separate (I'm trying to figure out what the process that enables this to happen might look like)? 2. What is the thread that connects our small selves to the rest of the one consciousness (there MUST be a thread connecting our small selves to the rest of the whole if it is all truly ONE, but what is/are that/those thread(s))? 3. What's your best guess for what happens after death? 4. Is there any more detail you can shed on what the most original/pure form of consciousness is like (if there is such a thing)? 5. How is it that consciousness/existence came to be? It's so hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that it has just always existed. At the same time, I can't think of a better alternative (ie consciousness/existing arising from unconsciousness/nonexistence, infinite regress, etc)? On some level, I get that I'm trying to use my dual mind/reality to try to understand nonduality and how that's fundamentally flawed, but I also have a strong intuition that more can be grasped/understood on this point. 6. How do we know that there's nothing else outside of 'god consciousness'? That the nondual/infinite god consciousness isn't just secretly nested inside of an even greater consciousness/reality? 7. Do you think there is a POV of consciousness that is the godhead POV (ie can see/experience everything at once), or is it just all fragmented? 8. How does god consciousness, in its purely nondual/infinite form, create the first duality? How does it even move/act to do that if there is no subject/object to begin with! What allows it to morph itself from nondual into dual? 9. What are some of the hard limits of the human mind (sober)? 10. Is there any more detail you can shed on what 'nothing' is? I know you've said that you mean 'formlessness' rather than actual non-existence, but I'm curious if there's some way that 'nothing' could truly mean 'non-existence.' I think it's worth probing deeper here (even though I know you disagree). 11. Do you think that everything ultimately is good, or at least neutral? I worry a lot about unbearable suffering for an infinite timeline. 12. How can people identify and overcome their greatest fears (it's often very hard to even identify root fears in the first place, because they hide)? 13. Does god consciousness even have free will (maybe not, because having free will might require subject/object, and god consciousness seems to be a nondual being)? 14. Bonus: Why do you think my mind is obsessed with all of these questions? Congrats on hitting 1M!

Hey guys, so these last two psilocybin trips I had start to unwire my brain rather rapidly and unexpected. I'm very thankful for this, as this is a great gift, but it feels like my brain is working overtime, without me controlling it. The combination of The Work by Byron Katie, Kriya Yoga & the two trips nuked my brain. Everyday I become more conscious of aspects of my being & personality. The subconscious gets flushed, awareness seems to rise a little bit and dualities start collapsing more and more. Not yet in an existential, "life-threatening" manner, but teeny-weeny mindblows. I now understand, that the psilocybin trip didn't only teach me how to meditate, but what nondual meditation is. Now this nondual breakdown doesn't happen at crazy depths (rather superficial or shallow even), but it happens without me consciously cracking them open. They just come. And I think that's partly because of The Work, because this rewires your brain and how you think subconsciously. Here are the dualities, which broke down to a higher perspective, one meta-level above, to nonduality. Most of them were delivered by the subconscious: Effortlessness vs. Effort Authenticity vs. Inauthenticity Comfortzone vs. Non-Comfortzone Security vs. Insecurity Truth vs. Falsehood (remember, shallow understanding!) Within reality vs. Without reality Being vs. Not-Being I'm pretty sure, if I'd inquire further in a conscious manner, way more dualities would break down. Now that I write this, I think for now I can at least slow down this process. But a few hours ago, I couldn't concentrate on anything other than that. I tried reading a book, but I only saw polarities which would break down. I kinda can't unsee it. Because of this, I couldn't really read the book and my focus was off, because my brain was/is rearranging itself. It's really tiring. So I fled to sleep and after that, I could read my book again. I just worked out and ate something and feel better now. I'm by no means against this process, but it's physically quite taxing. I don't know whether I'm fooling myself here or not, I'm just trying to describe what's happening as precisely as possible. Is a hurting brain to be expected, when it is rewiring itself? One thing is for sure, I won't actively inquire this deeper, at least not for the coming time, as this will only deepen the brain exhaustion. Even writing this feels a little taxing right now. What I will do though is to surrender. Any advice?

Look for one who has an understanding of spirituality/nonduality/meditation. And you really want to test a therapist, ask the therapist if you're God and observe their reaction. Ask them: What is love? What is God? What is truth? What is consciousness? What is reality? What is science? What is therapy? What is happiness? What is suffering? What is mind? What is ego? What is healing? And observe their responses. This will tell you everything about them.

I noticed that my conscious suffering method is very similar to Leo's explanation of going from Derrida's deconstruction all the way into nonduality. So I will experiment with making the method more ambitious and still keep it simple. The crystallized ego has a rigid and inflexible structure that needs to be broken down (deconstructed) all the way down to nonduality. I will make the conscious suffering method cover the whole personal stage which means the physical, emotional and also mental level. And it's an experiment, so my attempt might fail but even then I will have learned something.

Yes! Just like Emptiness = Form. It has been said that mind/unreality happens within reality. But it’s just as accurate to say that reality happens within mind/unreality, since if there is no thought there is nothing. That is the very essence of liberation, emptiness, and nonduality.

I had heard the term deconstructionalism before but hadn't looked into it. And maybe that was probably good, haha, because it's really complicated to read Derrida's writings about it. Leo made the seemingly complicated very clear. My interpretation is that deconstructionalism says that all words form an entangled web without any foundation. So for example, the word "iPhone" has meaning in relation to all other words in the total web of words. This means that the word iPhone isn't only a definite thing, a label. It's also an evolving interconnected web of relationships. But how to use deconstructionalism is practice? Leo mentioned that Derrida's work can be taken one step further and then it leads to: nonduality! Not only words can be deconstructed, but the whole of reality can. And I came to think of a very practical application of deconstruction, namely money. The first observation is that society is a "separate" thing struggling against nature and disorder. From a nonduality and fully deconstructive perspective that's a false duality. And money is a part of society, both as the word "money" and also as actual money. But what is actual money? The truth is that money connects with everything else. And since society is a false duality and money being a huge part of it, money exist in us not only as thoughts but also as tensions in the body. What we think of as "my money" isn't as separate as one might first believe. Our personal money is a part of the immense struggle of our entire society against perceived disorder. So we literally hold money as a part of society's struggle in us as tensions. This makes the theoretical knowledge about deconstruction useful and it can be used for improving one's practice of dissolving tensions within oneself by deconstructing money. To make it simpler, tensions in the body can be recognized as being connected to our thoughts about money. Here the ultimate deconstruction is that order and disorder are the same nondual reality. In short, the struggle we have with money is fake! And this makes "the love of money is the root of all evil" clearly explained. Love of money is simply us (as a part of society) clinging onto money as if it was separate from for example a pile of dirt. It isn't! What appears as disorder and mess is as ordered as money is.

... But you have to do them In order to be able to grasp nonduality experientially one needs to turn the attention of the mind Inwards. The nature of the mind is to seek outside and by not doing anything it will continue to do so. By saying that there's nothing to be done some teachers are lying, in a way, or are speaking to someone who already has their mind introverted. Self inquiry and Do nothing are such example of a spiritual practice (Sadhana) - there is a lot written on this forum about them, not going to repeat what is probably already common knowledge for members here. But those are not really a doing, the very practice is to go away from the doing and into the being/subject that holds the doing. They are used to go deeper into the heart of experience NOW rather than go outwards into mind concepts and perceived substances and experiences of this world. But if you don't do the practice, the mind will be naturally inclined, due to conditioning, to look in the wrong direction. Truth is there, but if you are looking in the other direction, you won't be able to recognize it. /peace

Yes, but I am not in a state of infinite consciousness / God-consciousness. It's not a distraction as long as one is aware of the ultimate nonduality of things.