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Thanks for the post and for sharing! I did similar inner child work years ago that was very helpful to awakening to my deeper seeded beliefs, patterns, feelings and emotions. It was a stepping stone, amongst many, to help me awaken to the idea that we “create our own Reality”, and that this current reality that we share is an independent reality within a collective reality that we co-create together with our thoughts, ideas, imagination, beliefs, feelings and emotions. Having said that, once I started to become aware of these deep seeded beliefs, patterns, feelings and emotions, “I” started to become more conscious of a much deeper awareness. I started questioning; Who and what is an “inner child”? where did I get these thoughts, ideas and beliefs of an inner child? I see you, Who is seeing who? Where did I get the thoughts, ideas and belief that there is someone see someone? I love you, Who is loving who? Where does this love come from? what is love on a human level? Nonduality level? Etc. And I am here with you… Who is the “I” that is here with you? Who is the you? I am here with you, because I love you, I am here, where is here? Who are you? Why is there a “because”? And in being with you, I finally see you fully. Are you being with you in form, formlessness, duality, nonduality, spirit, consciousness, awareness etc? What is being? What is “With”? I finally see you fully. What is finally? Why only now? What is fully? Just sharing a few thoughts! There are no right or wrong answers. You can only find them within! Truth is always expanding! Awareness is limitless and always expanding! God’s consciousness is always expanding! There is no end! Enjoy your current limited, but expanding conscious journey!

Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo and other spiritual teachers have said that anger can arise as a biological reaction even in the enlightened state. Then how can I claim that anger is a sign of the personal stage of development and that the transpersonal stage is free from anger? Because as I discovered and mentioned earlier there is a difference between spiritual enlightenment and the transpersonal stage. As Ken Wilber has pointed out, there can be spiritual enlightenment at different levels of personal development. So when anger arises and a biological reaction, then that's because the person is at the personal stage of development, even when enlightened. At the transpersonal stage anger is only an additional expression, not something fundamental to the stage. So expressions of anger can appear even at the transpersonal stage, not as an instinctual biological reaction since there is harmony but as reactions to particular situations for impersonal reasons.

Of course, it depends on where you choose to go on your aya-retreat. Not every retreat is filled with "a bunch of tourists". Some are filled with likeminded people. I believe there is a lot to learn from the experience of taking psychedelics with a group - and the group you end up with, will of course not be random but perfectly assembled by the universe... The people in your group will all be potential teachers of yours and this alone can be a very profound experience. When I first came to the center for my aya-trip I was very judgemental about everyone and thought they were just a bunch of lazy hippies/stupid/did not know what it was all about... Haha... And then I met Aya.. and the next day (the retreat was 4 days with 2 ceremonies) I realized that this group had come together not at all by accident, I learned so much from everyone and the experience taught me a lot about nonduality but also how we as separate beings need to meet each other and gaze at ourselves through each other's eyes. The experience of going on a trip as a group was very different from tripping alone. One way is not better than another, but I guess it can be helpful to experiment with both. It was for me at least.

Another insight I got is what nonduality teacher Roger Castillo recommended which is to do whatever we feel like in each moment. This can be put in the context of personal developmental stages! At the personal stage there is the belief in being a separate doer. Roger says that there isn't any separate doer. And that's consistent with the transpersonal stage. And to do whatever we feel like can from the personal perspective easily be interpreted as impulsive and reckless action. That's a pre-trans fallacy. Because conflict is a result of the belief in being a separate entity. And in the transpersonal stage that belief is transcended so to do what one feels like then becomes harmonious action. AND, another very interesting observation is that doing what we feel like doing that is NOT choice, unless there is confusion. When there is confusion the mind starts to think and compare several options, so the direct action is lost, the flow is lost, the feelings are distrusted and we become trapped in the personal stage. And it's necessary at the personal stage to think and compare different choices, because otherwise it's a regression into the impulsive ego stage which is an even lower stage of development. That's the pre-conceptual stage. The trans-conceptual stage is doing what we feel like without confusion and without conflict.

I have used several spiritual sources for getting a grasp of what the transpersonal stage is. There are also atheistic explanations possible. I believe that the Wolfram Physics Project has a more correct interpretation of quantum mechanics without the need for randomness or confusion about collapsing states and uncertainty. However there is also this traditional mainstream observation made by physicist Hugh Everett: So even from an ordinary scientific perspective reality can be seen as a single wave function. That's nonduality! And if we think of reality as a single ongoing "collapse" of the universal wave function, then that also explains time. We are the universal wave function in an ongoing collapse that happened now. The single collapse of the universal wave function is perhaps not mainstream science, I haven't looked into it, but that's precisely a representation of the transpersonal stage since there isn't the universal wave function plus a separate ego. There is only the universal wave function.

You are Jesus. Jesus is I am. The shrooms have failed you this time padawan try again. No one is better or worse than you. That's nonduality 101

The personal stage has a lack of Self-Love. For example hardly anyone is satisfied with his or her physical body. And I came to think of how that's necessary! Because if we had beautiful physical bodies then there is a grave risk of remaining stuck at the personal stage of development. One idea I have is that our physical bodies will become beautiful when we are at the transpersonal stage. I know that this is a very radical idea that hardly any spiritual teacher talks about except perhaps a few New Age gurus who most people think of as woo woo. The physical body is I believe only an appearance in consciousness so it's the level of mind that determines the state of the body. Going to the gym, diets, plastic surgery and so on are actually then from the bigger picture delusional methods of improving the body. The mind makes it real, so for example eating too much food will likely make most people fat for example. So it's not something that can be changed by wishful thinking. With the mind as the true cause, and actually Mind being the true cause which is nonduality, it means that even the personal mind being a cause is a false perspective. So we can't enter the transpersonal stage by personal effort on the level of the separate self. Instead the effort has to be to allow the separate self to dissolve! Otherwise the crystallized ego blocks the development of a fluid ego, which is necessary for truly actualizing Self-Love. What I mean by Self-Love is the universal self recognizing its own infinite capacity for intelligence, evolution, creation, beauty etc. I think that is at least similar to how Leo explains Self-Love in this video:

And that's a common dogma of nonduality. A lightning bolt is no less true than anything else, and it only lasts less than a second. Fast things are no less true than long things -- since all things are eternal regardless of how long they last. If you ever get hit by a lightning bolt, that will be the strongest dose of truth you ever get

As are we all. LOL! Nonduality 101 does.... (talking about "true", no idea what "valid" means)

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.

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.