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I can’t remember exactly or which inspiration came first or in what order but I do know that ironically, one of the reasons I got into it was for purely egoic purposes. Like I thought how cool it would be if I got good at sitting like a statue for multiple hours on end. So I started doing that and it worked. Just by sitting perfectly still and keeping your attention on the breath everything slows way way down and it gets easier the more you practice like with anything. I got into yoga for similar reasons. On a side note, doing asanas regularly is super helpful if you want to get good at strong determination sitting. I also found out it can remove a great deal of suffering and get you super high if you practice enough so after learning that I was pretty much sold. After my first ten day vipassana, I felt like I was fifty pounds lighter and my raging mind was a whopping 50-60% quieter for weeks after, no exaggeration. And the peace kept on growing the more I maintained the practice. The bliss grew so strong I almost didn’t know how to handle it all. Easily the closest I’ve ever been to full enlightenment. The danger with me saying all this, however, is that the recipient will hear it and say hell yes, sign me up! The natural tendency is to expect to feel blissed out from all the meditation but that expectation actually blocks you from making progress because spirituality doesn’t like greed. So you have to be very patient. You can avoid that trap by finding the right technique. Vipassana has stood the test of time but it can be ridiculously difficult to get into. After my second retreat, I didn’t get anywhere close to the same result like I was expecting to. So it goes to show just how deep this work actually is.

I have to take meds after awakenings, because if I don’t, I’ll literally go fully fucking insane and let go of any notion that I’m a human and have ever existed. My consciousness goes infinite and grows infinitely for like 17 hours straight. Even if there are “lows” I’m still processing them with “full enlightenment” (loose term) to the best capability. I am infinitely liberated to act on every impulse and desire. It’s great! But destroys any goals or visions I have. Classic self deception and ego backlash in the form of bipolar disorder. I mean wow. The devil/me/biological survival, does not want me to die at all. Maybe it’s a loving process. How do I shift this paradigm to a more loving and understanding one? I am entering hypomania and I want to fully surrender to the mania in isolation, at some point in my journey, but I don’t have $$$ to do so. I guess I could go to a hospital, but I fear the implications of that for my life again, as I need to fucking work to move out. Yet, what I fear I attract. What I resist, persists? So maybe go to hospital now to avoid a longer stay of weeks/months?

After awakenings, or after using psychedelics? ‘Full enlightenment’, ‘self deception’, ‘survival’, ‘ego backlash’, ‘I fear’, ‘I fear’. Any of that actually resonate with you?

It undulates. Maybe 80-90% of the time I don’t have thoughts in the head anymore no matter how detailed the words I’m saying or typing or whatever is. It does itself. I call it “thoughtless thought.” To that extent, I have no thoughts that I could attach to for that majority of my day. The arahant (4th path or fully enlightened in Theravada Buddhism) Daniel Ingram says that essentially the patterns of sensations of a sense of self still occur after full enlightenment in his opinion. I don’t see him thinking this doesn’t extend to thoughts in the head. The difference is that the insight into no self is so clear that those patterns are not seen to have any self in them even if they are more or less identical to what the unenlightened you would’ve said was what made you have a self. Enlightenment is not about some locked in and consistent state of consciousness that can’t think or any other benchmark really that depends on a single factor of experience like that although it does usually come with some “baseline upgrades” in a sense for most people. I’m probably at 2nd or 3rd path in the 4 path Theravada system IMO if I’m following their designations as much as I honestly can. I feel much of what Daniel says about sense of self sensations to be true to my personal experience more and more as I go along. The biggest shift for me has been in how resistance occurs. Rather than me having a sort of meta-resistance on top of the natural resistance interactions of different sensations occurring, I just allow the various aspects of my human system and the environment to interact in a natural way. Plenty of times this involves things like complex emotions which are easy to link to a sense of self. I just don’t try to resist having a sense of self nor resist not having a sense of self. Self vs. no self is not just an on and off switch. It’s more like a continuum and different experiences and stages of the process of insight (which enlightened people still cycle through according to Ingram) call up much different levels of sensations of self. If you find yourself in the Mind & Body insight stage, you’re probably going to have more sensations which feel like a self than some of the more mystical and positive feeling stages. Mind & Body feels like being dipped back into a truly ordinary human perspective as much as you can be even for enlightened people although their Mind & Body might be above the highest baseline states you’ve experienced. It’s just a natural part of the stage. It doesn’t matter how enlightened you are. Don’t let someone convince you of the magical, beautiful, and ever-present level of their enlightened reality. From my research, there are a lot of highly awake people whose experience is far more subtle than you think. Ideas like never having a sense of self are the ones which make me curious to proof test with a bear or flaming sword or chainsaw. There’s probably more of something there than they are trying to admit.

@Breakingthewall I'm not sure any amount of psychedelics or excessive meditation is gonna do any good except accelerate the process. Which could be good in human-time tbh. But then again. What's the point of quantifying it. I don't know when full enlightenment is going to happen/be. I just have "this" right now.

@BipolarGrowth But man, don't you get it. Anytime there's progress. One step forward dukkha comes back stronger. One step forward, and then dukkha bites you in the ass. 2 steps backwards. Concentration on objects of awareness --> AnP (finally bliss from God) --> intense meaningless suffering --> equanimity and non-doership. Every cycle of the path gets more intense. Life cycles. Phase of life cycles. Yearly cycles. Monthly cycles. Daily cycles. I am absolutely sure that full enlightenment is no more cycle,or cycles just being instants. Anicca (impermanence) and annata (no-self) also grow stronger with dukkha (suffering). How I define suffering: Suffering is in everything. Just take any object of awareness and tell me there's no suffering in that point of focus. Sufferings little brother is called "aversion" imo. Anything awareness does is pushing awareness away from the object towards itself. That's suffering, and it ends with complete dissociation from any object. The opposite of grasping or attachment. Suffering is not reduced in higher paths. It's equalized. Theres no longer gonna be a big difference between mild discomfort and intense physical suffering. The intensity of suffering that increases, just pushes towards cessation or dissolution anytime it shows up. For what I've heard that's thousands of instances per day of cessation.

@Leo Gura I read the Sadhguru book about enlightenment. He clearly stated that people who reach full enlightenment will die before age of 32 (their physical body stops functioning). The only way is to practice kriya yoga and get full control of the body. Did you know about that?

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.

@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 .