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@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".

First recognize that the so-called external world is actually inside your own head. This establishes the fact that everything is consciousness. Now, you're asking whether something can exist outside of consciousness, and that requires that we unpack the idea of non-duality. Imagine the universe and see if you can imagine there being an edge to the universe, a limit that keeps it from extending for forever. If the universe has an edge, is the edge a part of the universe? More importantly, if the universe is supposedly limited, it has to be limited by something else than itself, and that is what the edge is for. But then think about this very carefully: for something to be limited, there must be something else that limits it. The edge limits the universe, and therefore the universe is limited. But what limits the edge? Surely, something else must also limit the edge, or else that edge is just limitless. Hmm... isn't this a problem? Well, can't we just add another edge outside that edge? Well, not really, because that edge must also have another edge limiting it and so on etc.. Now we've run into the problem of infinite regression, and that is actually not a "problem" but instead an inherent quality of the universe. The universe is actually unlimited, infinite, and necessarily so, because if the universe is everything that can exist, then what can limit it other than itself? Now if consciousness is everything that exists, what can limit consciousness other than itself? And what can consciousness be other than unlimited, infinite, absolute, primary, prior to anything and everything? That is the truth of nonduality. Every limit, every distinction, every "two" is necessarily "one". Now, if everything is made out of consciousness, what is that edge of the universe made out of? The edge is an imaginary limit: Tada!

@Red-White-Light Give this a shot, Just stop thinking, you’re way too in your head, way too closed to suggestion, this whole post just seems like an excuse to complain rather than finding an actual solution. A good dose of humility and surrender is what u need my friend. The guide from Leo I linked above will help with that. Nonduality is void of all conceptual framings and ideas, it’s a purely intuitive primal “knowing” at the core of one’s very essence. Everything about your mindset screams over-intellectualisation and close-mindedness, none of such qualities is going to help you but only forever leave you separated from this understanding. I don’t wanna come off as a dick but it’s the truth, a certain kind of attitude is required for this understanding. If you want to understand nonduality in the same fashion as learning mathematics then fucking forget about it.

If reality is an automatic process, then why is it so difficult to notice that experientially? The ordinary everyday experience in ego consciousness is that we are separate doers and thinkers who need to make things happen, by volition and personal effort. What has been pointed out in spirituality (and maybe even in philosophy and psychology etc) is that reality as oneness cannot experience relationships with others without seemingly dividing itself into separate entities. And the primary role of the ego is to be a vehicle for oneness separating itself into individual beings. And for evolution to reach the level of experience where a human being can develop an ego and experience relationships with others is a huge process. So the sense of individual doership is enormous in the ego. But if time is only now as I propose, then reality appears instantly! So there is no actual past stretching back from the now. Then how to explain the vast history of the universe and the process of evolution leading up to present human life? A Course in Miracles says: My explanation of time is that reality manifests instantly in the now. And as ACIM says in the first section, time is set already. Time started now and goes on forever. And in the next section ACIM says that there is a plan that does not change and that the script is written. According to my interpretation that plan is the Word of God. And I interpret "from a point at which it ended" as infinity! Consciousness as infinity is observing God's plan unfolding. What needs to happen for us to experientially experience nonduality is that from our ego state we integrate back into oneness, not as undifferentiated oneness, but as individuals integrated as oneness. And in my view, evolution is exponential, meaning accelerating faster and faster, so what took billions of years of evolution in the past can be done within a few years today, and even faster than that. ACIM explains it as:

@James123 Not entirely impossible. MAPS is doing more and more research and this will lead to entheogen acceptance. In a past time there was acceptance but not 5-meo popularity and mckennia who wasnt going for nonduality. When the tabboo gets lesser and lesser, who knows what will happen!

Thanks I like your explanation of concepts and boundaries. Regarding "non-thing" isn't it a paradox? You can't have a non-thing because anything you name would be a thing? Wouldn't that make "thing" nondual? Sounds interesting and I'm willing to try to explore it. I just recently became stage orange and very materialist minded so struggle to understand nonduality, but open to new things.

Over the last year I've spent a huge amount of time researching nonduality, and everything I have gathered seems to necessitate a rather unfavorable outlook on life. My general estimation of the ultimate structure of reality is that we as human beings are experiencing a small portion of absolute infinity that is being manifested through a metaphysical infinite mind. The apparent reason why this metaphysical mind subjects itself to the unpleasant lives we live is because at a metaphysical level there is no difference between pain and pleasure, and any manifestation of anything at all is the result of a metaphysical embrace of consciousness, or what's referred to as "love" in spiritual circles. From an uninformed perspective this honestly seems like a horrible travesty. Basically what I've gathered is that the metaphysical mind is delusional, and believes itself to be immune from suffering because all pleasure and pain is supposedly an illusion. The only problem is that this illusion is so convincing that it may as be real. I imagine myself "waking up" from this reality to a metaphysical one, once this life has concluded, and saying to my true self, "what a great experience, now for a harder one". It seems that the true metaphysical self could not possibly be receptive to the actual suffering that it is subjecting itself to since it perceives suffering as illusory. I worry that the entirety of life as we know it is merely a poorly calculated manifestation of metaphysical willpower that has trapped itself into a system of cycling through rebirths that it mistakenly believes to be positive. When I hear talk about life being a "love simulator" it makes me think, "so this metaphysical mind is just training itself how to endure worse and worse situations, and it has mistakenly convinced itself that this process of horrific masochism is love?". I'm hoping that a more experienced perspective can provide a more positive interpretation of this reality, because from my perspective, this seems like an absurd way to design reality. It's so absurd it has me doubting whether or not my life is a computer simulation, and all this spirituality bullshit is just a mean trick being played on the person being simulated. Unfortunately I have watched Leo's video "Why Reality Cannot Be A Computer Simulation" 3 times and this was not able to sufficiently eliminate that possibility.

Teachings that say that "you are not the doer" might be useful at some point in spiritual development, but really it's an ego trap. It's like saying "don't think about a pink elephant." It fortifies the idea of being a separate doer. A better and the correct approach is to say: "you are the doer" and then go on explaining what the doer is. In nonduality the doer is the totality. And our past memories need to be seen from a true perspective which is that the "me" as a doer in personal memories in reality is the totality as the doer. Everything is the totality as a doer.

? Thank you, yes that's the intention. In my opinion it's generally more helpful to unravel "wrong knowing" than to "explain how it is" (except insofar as such explanations may help someone do their own unraveling). Not only is "explaining how it is" rather impossible, but it's also prone to becoming just another belief system. Explanations need a frame of reference, and generally speaking ones existing frame of reference tends to only get in the way. Because that's where the obstacles reside. And that's why straight-up explanations are often misunderstood, or not understood at all. So to me "the path" is always subtractive, hence Via Negativa, Neti Neti, etc. Even if that's ultimately just another device. No one ever needs to wake up, but everyone could always do with fewer obstacles. Development clarity and insight are automatic in the absence of obstacles, they are a natural consequence of being alive in the absence of unnatural barriers. Just like you don't need to pull on grass to make it grow. So addressing obstacles is usually the crux of what I try to do, for myself as well as anyone I talk to about this. To quote Jed McKenna, the only construction required is that which facilitates demolition. Or at least, that's one way of framing the approach. Until everything turns out to have always been nondual... ? Therefore reality can't exist in the way that it seems to exist, yes. Foundationlessness would be another equivalence of duality, relativity, finiteness, etc. In short, strange-loopy. But that is part of the illusion, in truth the foundation that's always been hidden in plain sight is consciousness. In other words when you go looking for the foundation of reality, the only possible candidate turns out to be consciousness. And to go one further, it's not even a foundation because there is nothing else apart from consciousness. Which is why all duality can only ever be apparent, not true. Nonduality appearing as duality without actually being duality. Hence illusory. Consciousness pretending to be not consciousness. Some people like to say that nonduality is so flippin' nondual that it includes duality. I think that's a misleading word game, although it may help against overly exclusionary tendencies, so sure fine why not. "Real" is subject to interpretation or redefinition. It's often said that reality is both real and unreal. Personally I'm not a big fan of those kinds of word games, I don't see the value in them except perhaps as cute little tests of comprehension. Tests of your ability to do "nondual thinking", I suppose. And also because it's equally false to stick to one side. Real and unreal is just another duality/mental category. Mental categories are false in the sense that they purport to refer to something pre-existing outside of itself, when they actually don't. So basically they are lies, albeit useful lies. They are how you create past, future, other, and indeed self. They are like a thin layer of narrative draped over an underlying structure, like a secondary layer of apparent duality. Together with the fuel of emotional energy, they form the "gestalts" that make your reality (including especially yourself) seem convincingly solid and objective, and differentiated. That emotional energy is what's refered to as attachment, and where the real work of disillusionment is done. The result being undifferentiated (nondual) consciousness. Even though of course differentiation is also illusory and consciousness has actually always been nondual.