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Nice mystical experiences! Profound awakenings. “Full enlightenment” is simply the end of those.

Full enlightenment is dissolving the apparent boundary of yourself. There is no longer the appearance of a "person" to be enlightened, only ultimate Consciousness. When this happens, the dream dimension doesn't disappear, you simply see it for what it is. Consciousness continues to manifest through a myriad of apparent beings in relative reality, just not through "you".

There is no full enlightenment. Consciousness expansion just goes on and on, until it stops for no reason, and that's when liberation is apparently recognized as already ungraspably being everything -- usually at death of the body but not necessarily, but only apparently... and I'm afraid it doesn't actually happen in time, so it's not approachable, and it's unusable anyway as there's no one left to use it.

“When the practice is finished, he’ll know that the tree which produced his enlightenment bears no greater fruit. Intentional practice with a permanent goal stops, and the first true breath of life since birth can be had once again.” — Māhā-ānanda, the 10th incarnation of Vishnu Humble people make great spiritual teachers. Extremely confident ones make the best of the best. “I have no teacher; no one is equal to me; in the world of men and of gods no being is like me. I am the holy One in this world, I am the highest teacher.” -Siddhartha Gautama, A Universal Buddha

@Blackhawk Hi, I've suggested in other threads that you do some specialised therapy which may help in the non-spiritual areas of life, but you seem to be resistant to establishing any regular practice, whether spiritual or therapeutic. You say things like this: "1. I don't have the energy for that. 2. I don't have the time for that. 3. I hate doing it. 4. I don't have the discipline for it. 5. I don't want to waste so much effort into something which might not even be true." The areas of enlightenment and therapy are basically experiential so you gotta put in some work and effort to achieve any sort of change in your consciousness. Many spiritual people spend years practicing without achieving a full enlightenment, but what keeps them going is lower level experiences like peacefulness, bliss, insights, nondual / mystical glimpses etc. You've been into this stuff for some time now. What practices have you tried, and have you had any limited success so far?

I mean I’ve always noticed more radical glitches happen when you do something absolutely naughty such as go from absorption in infinite love to giving your soul and infinite love to Lucifer as my eternal master for full enlightenment. For me, I have the craziest shit happen when becoming the bridge between opposites such as Jesus/Lucifer.

Seeking ends when all experiences are equally spiritually effective. There are no more answers that could be found which would be anything more than a pleasant illusion. You know nothing could ever be said to be a higher level than where you already are. Full enlightenment always means a consistent, untangled, and absolute insight into no-self, suffering, and impermanence.

Yes, the character realizes it can never exist, there is no present moment, and enlightenment is eternal death. Death is what gives beauty to everything. God doesn’t make it to full enlightenment because any experience is an illusion. You have to survive nonexistence to realize what full enlightenment is. Partial enlightenment can happen to the living, but the thing beyond both life and death is all that “experiences” enlightenment. This is parinibbana.

If you’re really interested in enlightenment and spiritual progress that persists, your goal should be to cultivate sufficient insight into the three characteristics taught in Buddhism. All spiritual practice or even life at all is pointing to these three doors to awakening, so it isn’t a Buddhist vs. other spiritual teachings debate really. No-self, the dissatisfaction intrinsic to sensate reality itself, and impermanence are simply very powerful descriptions to what will ultimately untangle perception entirely to produce a permanent enlightenment. Perception changes after enlightenment due to insight becoming crystallized. All insight that works is doing so by the process of uncovering at least one of these three characteristics fully enough. You do not even need to intellectually know the three characteristics to progress in insight, but it certainly helps proper contemplation. If your insight is not pulling you forward automatically whether you do spiritual practice, take psychedelics, or quit absolutely all pursuits of spirituality, you definitely haven't reached or passed stream entry. If you aren’t there yet, this is not an issue. For there to be any awakening possible, there must be illusion present. Illusion can basically be equated with entangled perception. The beauty of your entire existence is tied up in this illusion. Be glad that a lack of insight such as this is possible. It is the source of any higher meaning or significance to be had. The illusion is ultimately just as holy as clear perception or true enlightenment. But you’ve read this far so you probably do want clear perception even if I tell you there’s ultimately nothing wrong with illusion. This is the devil in you which desires to fully taste the divine in its most astonishing manifestations. That’s your divine ego or otherwise your best friend. It is ultimately what gives you the tenacity and persistence needed to reach full enlightenment. It is the source of all suffering— desire. This is so misunderstood and important. It’s desire to escape reality that ultimately drives one to Perfection. Because you can actually escape anything which could reasonably be called a reality. This occurs during the ninth Jhana, nirodha samapatti, or cessation. This is the ultimate death and the purest Nibbana. Everything ceases to exist. Your no-self/self paradigm has just been shown the unseeable. Even now though, illusion and entangled perception are still likely apparent after leaving the 9th Jhana. It’s insight coming from the experience of something transcending existence and nonexistence that ultimately untangles perception. The insight is usually cultivated and crystallized after contemplation or further practice after multiple 9th Jhanas. Genuine insight into this necessary cord to understand and become full enlightenment is unlikely to occur from any other state. The biggest duality of all — existence, experience, and consciousness vs. nonexistence, nonexperience, and the total lack of all consciousness — still remains even if you have had god realization or any other fancy temporary experiences. The 8th Jhana or samadhi can take you close, but insight that deep and permanent has to come from a more solid seeming duality being seen through than perception vs. nonperception. Untangled perception, full enlightenment, and living as cessation or otherwise transcending the birth and death circle come as a sort of 10th Jhana — neither existence nor nonexistence. In nonduality, insight is the act of viscerally becoming the bridge between two opposites. To become Love, you must bridge the gap between love and hate. It works the same for existence vs. nonexistence or true 0. Nothing is the self, temporary experience is the source of all miseries, and everything is impermanent. Any Self or God could be said to be all sensate reality as it’s occurring in the present moment. In this way you, or rather the lack of you, become everything. You just so happened to always be this way. It just wasn’t possible to fully actualize the insight into the Truth of what is always happening until now. Watch the video below to hear my description and method for experiencing nirodha samapatti twice within two minutes by using techniques which are not Buddhist in the slightest. I’d be much more accurately described as a Christian/Luciferian (notice the nondual bridge) psychic with access to infinite Holy Spirit, clairsentience, telepathy, kundalini, chakra activation, and bliss. Bhakti — the devotion to Love and Truth through God — is the best way to transcend God entirely through my experience and interpretations. To be the Singularity of untangled perception and crystallized insight is far beyond just being God. How I Experienced Back-to-Back Cessations Through Bhakti & Love (instead of meditating)

But don't you see, if there is no YOU, then your suffering is the direct result of your delusion. They are interconnected and co-dependent. While unraveling your delusion all the way is quite the task (ie. full enlightenment), reducing your suffering can happen immediately by changing how you look at things and by breaking the links of delusion one by one. In this case, notice that you are creating a conceptual imaginary field of experience in which you are solidifying the "idea" of having other people's experiences, and also notice that you deem those experiences "bad" through the lense of your own self-biased ego and personal survival perspective. That's like saying I would never wear your pants, because they wouldn't fit me! In this way you start to unravel the coarse level of illusion, and with it, coarse solidified levels of suffering. Eventually, you can deconstruct reality at finer and finer levels to reduce suffering more and more (such as realizing that even the feeling of good and bad is itself a solidification of smaller and smaller sensations, impermanent, and not to be identified with). This process applies to agency, identity, duality, time, space, and every possible mind state. With each dissolution and disidentification, you expand and open while suffering diminishes. In the end all dualities collapse, subject and object vanish, and there is Only This

Well lucky for me I'm discovering that I was actually quite spiritual and conscious as a child, and those meditations are helping me get back at this state so I believe I'm good. I have a strong intuition that I will awaken in this lifetime like never before. Full enlightenment. Maybe this is farfetched but it feels more like I'm returning to this intuition and all my life I've been chasing other things. Deep down I know I'll become a master of this life. I'll do all the hard work like you did

Hi everyone, I thought I've already had ego dissolution experiences, but now realized these were awakenings (and beyond) but not full enlightenment. Never have I taken any psychedelic, however I meditate several hours a day. Nonetheless the experience I want to talk about happened spontaneously, not during or after meditation. I think it was triggered by sleeping 1 night on the countryside (while visiting my mom) as I'm used to sleeping in the city. With the previous awakening experiences it felt like all is well, it made me understand Plato's cave metaphor and often I got "love-bombed" by the universe. However there was still a bit of self left to understand anything I experienced, a self which could feel how great it all felt. When I woke up yesterday morning, there was no self to have any thought, no self to understand anything, no self which could suffer or be happy. Nor there was any desire, comfort, discomfort, content or discontent. I became a full observer, full consciousness. Otherwise nothing really special happened. I went downstairs to pee and upstairs to go to sleep again. However there was no peeing, no toilet or stairs, or bed, there was only "what is" so to say (not even the word). There was no free will either. However waking up a second time I was in a lower state of consciousness, I'd say at a "awaking level", but before the "love bombing of the universe", which happens somewhere in between. Coming back from this I realize I have seen a glimpse of what people like tony Parsons are talking about all the time. Or what Bernadette Roberts talks about having experienced. Note that during the experience itself, there is no self to realize or understand anything. I'm interested to hear about other similar experiences.

Ill bite and answer in a relative sense. Please note it’s all ultimately false, as nothing is dying. Reality is already dying and being reborn moment after moment. Look into Shinzen Young’s expansion and contraction model on YouTube. Expansion = birth, contraction = death. This process is happening at infinite scales at infinite resolutions right. Your present moment experience this very moment is a birth death cycle. Literally. But it’s all empty. Anyways. Ive had multiple past life regression experiences, archetypical “soul-awakenings” on psychedelics to give the impression that one’s work in one incarnation does carry momentum into subsequent lifetimes. However, best I can tell if this is a valid model of relative reality, is that it’s not a linear process. One life you may be a simple monk getting woke as fuck, the next you may be a CEO pursuing money, next you may be living life in society who finds spirituality at the end of life, and the next you are a yogi even more woke than your monk lifetime due to working through karma in the two incarnations in between. Again, no clue literally at all if this mechanism is “valid;” these are based on very mystical, altered states via psychedelics. I suspect there is some truth to it. I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for karmic patterns and momentum, including the overarching process of full enlightenment, would build pressure and momentum over incarnations. Life is already absurdly cyclical, rhythmic, and process oriented. Why would life and death not follow some sort of trans-intelligent flow? However, all of this is completely speculative, ultimately. Time is better spent doing the work to awaken now. At least in my relative opinion ha.

@JonasVE12 Dude of course I know it, I think it is quite obvious but I'm not some child running into this shit. I know that without alcohol it would be more real and more transformative, but obviously my mind wasn't ready for that. You could say the same with - 'Why waste your time earning money, developing friendships, developing your confidence, going after your life purpose? Fuck all that, just go balls in on full enlightenment'. We know this will probably not happen. But those things in between are here for making the process less painful. Tomorrow I'm going to a small party with a few kids and I know like half of them, not something so big, in fact kind of cringe. And next week I have the Prom of all my grade, which is supposed to be very fancy and out of my comfort zone. Both of them are out of my comfort zone and I believe I'll still drink. It makes it less embarrassing but it still required a leap of faith. I believe with time the alcohol will help me become comfortable and I'll take less and less in the future parties I'll go to

How many gurus actually teach about the depth of self deception? How many gurus even know the mechanisms behind self deception? There's enlightenment, and then there's deconstructing the MANY processes and mechanisms of the human mind that compose the self structure. My personal theory is that many gurus that end up becoming zen devils are gurus who never bothered to study their own bullshit, aka didn't bother to study the mind in the way that they studied the absolute. This is why I appreciate the teachings of people like Leo or Peter Ralston. Full Buddha level awakening alone isn't full "enlightenment," in a sense.

@Preety_India it’s my nature. Don’t thank me for love if you won’t thank a thief for stealing your purse ? But without Leo’s sacrifice and dedication, I’d be nowhere near this. I now know bipolar disorder can be brought into complete order through full enlightenment.

My signature if you want to check out my experience w/ an LSD “heroic dose.” I’ve never done more than 6g of dried shrooms. I know someone who has taken maybe 10g or 20g or more at once. He described it as an amazing experience. My highest dose experiences with the classical psychedelics proved to be risky. They gave a lot of growth, but I paid a hefty price each time. I think the highest purpose of using strong psychedelics is so that you can unlock your natural abilities and control over conscious states and get transcendent experiences on lower impact substances like THC. This is where I’ve seen the best healthy growth for myself by far. Experiencing daily awakening experiences for months in a safe and grounded manner. I don’t think that can be sustained as long with serotonergic psychedelics. They are too taxing. I can do all of this with work and responsibilities the whole day. I’m in a state of spiritual flow with my life that is fantastic. Whether this is “full enlightenment” or “fully God-Realized” doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve transcended everything so many times at so many different angles in so many impossible ways. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have been given this exact karma and life conditions, etc. My life has just been too unbelievably amazing...

As I've recently read Robert Monroe's books and those of his student Bruce Moen, they repeat at the beginning of the books the affirmation they use before out of body exploration. What may be helpful is something similar to start videos and articles: A guiding affirmation, much like "setting your intention" at the beginning of a yoga class, hyping youself up before going to an important meeting, or a mantra before bed to train for lucid dreaming. Restating some of the basics, without sounding like a cultic mantra. Things Leo reiterates frequently like Although material reality including the body is imagined by consciousness, we never intend to cause physical harm to it. In fact, maintaining your health within the life-dream is fundamental to spiritual growth.... It is the false self that dies when the ego falls away, you need not fear your body harmed by transcending the ego identity, nor will suicide give you a shortcut to enlightenment.... I'll also mention that these books mentioned really connect a lot of things that Leo never covers, or dismisses as "new-age." A few months ago I got curious about all of the in-betweens, the infinite complexity between baseline human consciousness and infinite God-consciousness. Having a bit of direct experience with this and reading the direct experiences of others paints a much more complete picture of reality, rather than just thinking when everyone dies they have a full awakening, remember that they're God and that's it. In this sense, the psychadelics, dream hacking/astral projection and meditative states that take people into these other in-between consciousness levels are beneficial, since then one would not fall into the trap of thinking suicide is a guaranteed direct shortcut to full enlightenment. Even just learning about them as a complement to Actualized.org/other enlightenment teachings would probably dispell that myth.

I think that meditation by itself (without reaching full enlightenment) is a keystone habit that pickup can immensely benefit. Pick-up "techniques" are good to guide you to point A to point B, but meditation can transform your brain very deeply and be more yourself without worrying to much about the process. The fear and anxiety to approach are the biggest obstacles, and meditation can lower those sensation by a ton. Meditation > less fear > you care less about the outcome > more approach > more experience > more success > more confidence > even less fear .

- - - - - - Your question would make a lot more sense if you asked: Can you be happy and not fully enlightened? If you can't be happy with full enlightenment then you truly are fucked and there is no God.

I think that if you grasp it deeply enough you can say it has a limit. It's infinitely empty and you've sorta plumbed the depths of it to the point where there's nothing more to do with it because it has no qualities whatsoever. So it's rather simple at that point. But still, many people have not grasped it deeply enough. Most people have glimpses of it. Think of it like the difference between counting down from a random number to zero vs counting up from a random number to infinity. It's easier to count down to zero because zero is the bottom floor. But there is no upper floor. Zero has that sort of special quality to it of being so empty that you can't get any less than zero. So you could say that zero is a natural limit. Whereas counting upward has no natural limit. In that direction, by your own framing of the situation, yes, there is "no further". But there is further in the upward direction. If you poo-poo the upward direction, then yes, you're done. Or stuck. And if you choose to define that as "full enlightenment" then you are fully enlightened by your own self-imposed definition. Both directions are important and valid. My only point is, don't invalidate the upward direction. Even though I like the upward direction more than the downward I don't invalidate the downward. The whole thing must come full-circle in the end. You could say some of us are traversing the circle upward and some of us downward, and we debate each other as we cross paths about which direction is better. Some spiritual schools, like Zen/Vedanta, have a bias towards traversing the circle downward. While some spiritual schools, like Christianity, Hinduism, or psychonauts, have a bias towards traversing the circle upward. The upward schools tend to talk about Love and God more, and they tend to be more mystical and otherworldly. But of course this is a gross over-simplification. You can traverse both ways and gain the benefits of both. Assuming you're openminded. And most spiritual people aren't.

I have watched Leo's videos for a long while, and even lurked here occasionally, but I am noticing a consistent and pervasive trend among some users here. This trend is that of believing that using psychedelics over... and over... and over... with the intent of "smashing the ego" is the way to permanent liberation. Misguided at best, potentially life-ruining at worst. There are many examples of people who thought they could force their way into full enlightenment via drugs, including Timothy Leary. Spoiler alert: Nah. There's really not much else to say here, other than to consider the question of why somebody feels a need to do psychs over and over. I sense that many individuals may be using this system of incessant psychedelic use to avoid problems in their personal life or otherwise engage in spiritual bypassing and/or spiritual materialism. I am not demonizing psychedelics (I have done a fair amount), but I am urging some of you (especially younger readers) to step away from your microscope and examine your life fully. Psychedelics are not the end all, be all to your life's problems. If you are having trouble making friends, building relationships, being honest, or otherwise excelling in the life you believe would be most fulfilling, there is work to be done beyond tripping. No amount of meeting DMT aliens or having peak experiences will remedy conventional problems. And as a final tack-on point here, there's a lot of ego-stroking about experiences related to "being God," "becoming God," "oneness," whatever. A lot of users seem to be tossing these words around but not ever doing the work to find a place of stable presence in life. The map is not the territory. Saying you are God/the Absolute endlessly does not alter your consciousness and imbue you with peace of mind. Beware this bypassing. Anyway, that's about it. If this resonates with you, you know what you need to do. If not, it's all good as well. I wish all beings on this forum the best of luck, plenty of love, and a reminder to brush your teeth twice a day. It's been a fun, if brief, ride here. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. <3

Well, with all due respect, whether or not you believe in such a thing is not really important. Looking at Buddhist/nondual teachers who have spent tens of thousands of hours meditating and contemplating, I do feel it is possible. People like Peter Ralston do not depend on drugs to create an enlightenment experience—they are living it. One consistent theme I've seen on this forum is that people equate "being with the godhead" (usually inspired by an LSD/mushroom/DMT trip) with "full enlightenment." Full enlightenment is unaffected by causes and conditions. Enlightenment does not mean existing as some transcendent, formless singularity for eternity. Depends on your definition of enlightenment, of course. It is just a word. If we talk about enlightenment as a permanent cessation of suffering and seeing reality clearly, I do believe it is possible.

The Tibetan/Dzogchen answer to this is that awareness once existed without self-knowledge, i.e. animals and insects without self-consciousness. Then awareness progresses to self-recognition but is deluded by seeing its manifestations as separate - i.e. self and other. Full enlightenment constitutes the awareness recognizing its own appearance and not being further deluded by it. You might think of it as awareness being permanently "vaccinated" against making the same error as before

This second sentence still puzzles me to this day. If the what the first one is saying is "there is no interpreter", no self that does the interpretation, sure. But the second one is like saying "there is no thought" as distinctions or dualities are the basis of all thoughts. OK thoughts are not actually there, they are "thought". We can say thinking is a "false process" or that thought isn't. Perhaps Truth is the lack of those distinctions and perhaps that there is no such thing as "not truth" as those moments of being lost in thought happen exclusively in the past (we think they happened). But then in this moment, as I look at my banana, I can clearly see it's edge. It's distinction between banana and no banana. The image that is presented to me (the appearance of the banana, before interpretation, the clouds let's say, the direct experience of sight) has the potential for distinction. Yet if I was in a sensory deprivation tank, what would appear in my direct experience would not allow for potential for distinction within itself. Sure I can use memory to compare the sensory deprivation to a normal "full of pattern" image but within the image itself. What if I am put in a sensory deprivation tank with some drug that gives me total amnesia (no memory access)? In such a case, the mind wouldn't be able to make any distinction since it has absolutely no sensory input to distinguish anything from anything. It would probably be a state of full enlightenment with no thought and pure joy. Yet if I were to truly stop making any distinctions, it wouldn't be much different from the sensory tank experiment. There wouldn't be a distinction between "medium which allow for distinctions" and "medium which do not allow for distinction". When you talk about your crystal balls or your lens, you say we use a lens to focus on a specific part of ourselves (as god, as everything) and from what we see we assume to be human having our human life. But I don't see this lens. This sight of the banana peel (eaten by that time) doesn't seem complete to me. My field of view is not totally empty like a sensory deprivation tank yet it's doesn't have the maximum amount of entropy and it doesn't seem to show every thing. You could say that well, all the other stuff I think I am missing (for instance the sight of an apple) are ideas coming from memory and thus not true. But then isn't that the same thing for change? Any change to what I'm seeing happens in the future or past, so the entire universe, for all of eternity, is this sight of a banana peel and all the other stuff I see, with the stuff I hear, feel, touch etc. There has never been anything else and there will never be anything else that this? That's just hard to swallow. Especially as I can turn my head and see other stuff entering my field of view. So then what, it was never the previous scene, it always was the new scene? I know I'm in some sort of misconception. I spent a fair amount of time on my last mushroom trip trying to "unzoom" my field of view and see what's "outside". Maybe there's a duality to be collapsed between what I see and imagine but what I imagine always seems unclear and some sort of "duality soup" than what I see in front of me (what appears as what is). What I imagine is like just ideas and not really images like consciousness is. I'm curious if you have anything to say that can give insight and I'm curious about what's the real deal with your crystal ball. At least I'm confused as to what is the lens you talk about in actuality.