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Understanding IS the ultimate Bliss. If you were to become totally omniscient you would also realize Absolute Love, and Yourself as God. Only awakening proper will do here and I would second @Michael Jackson here and leverage all the tools available to you for awakening. This will allow you to awaken to no self, Infinity, Love. You said you did but if you did you would have died and thus you would no longer have any questions about death. The pbysical body is imagined along with pnysical death. When you directly realize the self is an illusion it dies and you brcome God. There never was physical death. Death is a concept just as the small self is a concept. There can only be the falling away of concepts because all is Mind.

This is a big question, but the one biggest thing that I'd say helped (then again there are many), is look into the outlook of stocism. Get comfortable with imperfection and not quite the way you'd like. Embrace a little soreness, backache, fatigue, disapointment. Get comfortable or at least understanding/more relaxed about that neighbor or dog that keeps barking outside. Once you see that the neighbor and the dog barkin outside are not different than the sounds/feelings/thoughts of "ego" supposedly inside your head/body, you may see it that its possible to relax if its there, or at-least appears to be there. Also let go of expectations and beliefs that something else should be happening like bliss or non-ending comfort. This is just a distraction, a longing that in the end you may find is just creating a discomfort, which funny enough is the opposite of the very comfort your wanting.

For siloed consciousness (i.e. you as a human), physical pain happens whenever you push closer to the boundary of self. Pain lets you know where those boundaries are. For example, in the movie The Truman Show, Truman's emotional pain massively increased the closer he got to escaping the dome. A hand held over a flame for long enough will be maximally painful because pretty quickly it will no longer be a hand, and eventually it will burn away into nothing at all. Physical pain is only troubling to the individual, and only as long as the individual believes itself to be there. From a higher consciousness, physical pain is on the same ontological level as a chair, a table, an oak tree, or a cloud passing in the sky. It is possible to observe pain from the outside, and react to it as you might react to a cloud passing in the sky. It is within everyone's grasp to experience this phenomenon directly with strong-determination-sitting meditation (SDS). Actually, SDS can completely recalibrate your sense of what it means to suffer by enormously increasing your emotional and physical pain tolerance. In so doing, if kept up, then eventually (and inevitably) it leads to total bliss, total love, total compassion. Suicide is pointless. You'll just find yourself somewhere else, and you'll have to deal with all of this again (and again, and again). No fear, enlightenment eventually comes to everyone. EDIT: Just realised this thread goes back to 2018...

Contemplation with a journal will generate more insights than you can integrate. Watch out for the trap of getting frustrated because you can't integrate what you realized. Begin with the topics Leo offered in the video to start training your introspection muscle. Then go more into the direction of identity, perception and choice. When you contemplate rather than thinking about things, meditate on a question. Focus on your awareness. Focus on the tranquil water. Something will arise from the depths of your awareness and give form to a sentence. You feel the form and know immediately what thoughts describe that. You know the validity of these thoughts by looking at your direct experience. Do that and you will download stuff you never knew. Watch out for the trap of believing to be brilliant because you are generating these insights. No, you are only a transistor for the insights. Rather than getting frustrated because of cutting it dead in one moment and being lost again, better just stay in the present and focus on what you do. You do to come to the breath every time when you are noticing a thought. Only that. There are no judgemental thoughts of past meditation needed. Funny enough, letting go of these judgemental thoughts will skyrocket your practice. It's like a self-steering ship. The difference between expanded and contracted times in meditation is there for you to know what you don't want. Expansion and contraction are, like unity and division, always oscillating. That's a feature of limitation. Just stay at it. Only when you look back at notes of how your meditation went from months ago, then you'll be able to see the improved quality of your practice. How are you bringing your meditation into every day life? Do you notice that you can better choose the reality you want to experience? You'll see the extent of these questions when you are in an expanded state of consciousness, like in shamanic breathing or on psychedelics. The questions then hit more home and you see the impact of them more clearly. It's like dropping a stone into water while sober and only noticing that it's gone. Then you can also do the same on psychedelics and see the extent of it. The ripple effects of the stone are quite literally the ripples and waves of the water. In an expanded state you'll see the ripple effect of these questions more clearly because you have access to more holistic perception. Use expanded states like a telescope: You want to spot a planet and use a telescope for it. After looking through it, you can take a step back and find the planet with your eyes because you know where to look. You know where to focus on in meditation & self-inquiry. That's also the case for contemplation. Notice that you get frustrated when you believe the thought "I am not improving". It is entirely optional to get an emotion because of a thought. When you notice that you don't feel good & suffer because of the thought, then just cut it dead like in meditation. The fact is that "I am improving" is more so the case because you came here to ask In general, expand your requisite variety. Get more different experiences of spiritual practices. And don't only limit yourself to shamanic breathing or psychedelics. Explore and notice what works for you. Perhaps yoga is your bliss, who knows. All the best.

Trip that started with people and material reality disintegrating like holograms and hearing "none of this is real" led me to looking back at the world from Gods perspective and realizing the "truth" is extremely lonely when you realize you are the only real thing in the universe. Went from beyond bliss for 95% of my journey and my desire for the truth kept me going until I reached the end. The aloneness was more real than anything I've ever felt. Even though I knew the characters in the dream were not real I didn't want to hurt them by not coming back. Very similar to the girl in the dream from Infinity Chamber. When I finally started coming back in and out of material reality I realized that the ego was simply a protection mechanism to make this life more real and meaningful. It’s like an anti-virus program meant for a positive purpose but can also get a little out of control. Has anyone else experienced similar insights?

I have accessed my core before...without even meditation and was filled with a ridiculous amount of bliss and unconditional love. What I discovered is what the spiritual teachers teach is true...we are literally bliss and unconditional love and we block it from ourselves. We can access it at anytime and the kicker is....you don't have to meditate or use any drug to access it. You literally can just choose to experience it....AND YOU WILL.

LSD+MDMA+Nitrous produced a stillness and bliss in me so profound it was almost too much to handle

Actual deep God realization/awakening on extremely high dose psychedelics. Feels like a full body orgasm, except it can go ten thousand times stronger than a normal orgasm (I am not exaggerating when I say ten thousand - You become unable to do anything due to the sheer amount of ecstacy). Actually it can feel infinitely euphoric. Feels like the most profound peace, relief, euphoria, love, happiness, bliss, ecstacy, healing, and everything positive at the same time at maximum level. All other experiences pale in comparison to it. If you would scale happiness, all everyday life would be from 0 to 100, this would range from millions to billions. There is just no comparison with anything. Opiates like heroin don't produce anything even resembling true euphoria.

Being in fear but not in suffering, hating others without hurting anyone, creating through destruction, being attached to your body with no pain yet be fully alive just like children or teens can be, being attached to your thoughts without them hurting you or anything, I don't want to go too far because it's ban'able but yeah I think because so many spiritualists either seem to rely on drugs or rely on old traditions they have never understood creativity, they're using the term imagination as actually unmagination which is cool but of course they are scared of real imagination which creativity is because they could create new horrors, I believe one part of the endgame of this reality is to truly incorporate this, aka real love through real contradiction and real paradox, I'm childish so I'm just expressing my disappointment at how love is used to actually mean escape through transformation of evil(which is one good way) rather than the type of creativity I'm pointing at which would actually fully embody it, so tldr suffering without suffering and if you want real madness suffering through bliss(don't go there), pain is pain so you don't need to go there.

Okay. So here are the best practices/teachings/teachers i've come across in my past few years of being seriously into spirituality and psychology etc. I'll give a brief description of each, and then if any of these peak your interest I can explain more, or send you links and you can ask any questions you have about it. Basically, the logic behind all these practices is our normal way of being in the world and how we feel and operate is sub optimal. Most people are way more unhappy then they realize, but they are able to repress it with video games, food, porn, woman etc so they may think they are "ok" but they could be operating at way higher levels of well being if they were to pursue it. These practices and teachings are wise people's way of finding happiness and well being in the most optimal and efficient way possible. Although some of the things i'll recommend are stand alone products like books, I really recommend finding a good mentor/teacher because it makes a huge difference. I've done it both ways where I was just doing my own thing, and I've done it where I had a bunch of mentors, and it's clear that mentors will sky rocket your practice. 1. A course in miracles (Book) This book has two portions. There's a wisdom portion that you can just read for a few minutes per day if you want, and it's designed to get you into a better feeling mood and give you a little blessing essentially. And there's a workbook which consists of 365 exercises to be done once per day, although you can skip days but it recommends you just do 1 per day max. The exercises are really good because it's designed to slow and systemtically retrain how you percieve the world. All of us see the world through our own distorted lenses, we don't actually see reality as it is clearly. Imagine a really a hot girl who always says how ugly she is, everyone knows shes hot but she genuinely beliefs she's ugly because of her own fauly thoughts and judgments/feelings etc that she has about herself and the world. That's just one example, but you can apply to that virtually everyone to some degree or another. This book is designed to address that fault perception, and the end result is more mental peace and clarity because you no longer suffer your own distortions and judgments. 2. Koharalan (Mentor) 3 months of coaching for about 3 grand. This is the best mentor i've ever come across, and i've spent like 50 grand over the past 3 years on therapists/coaches/gurus etc. He has a spiritual approach, and he's the guy who taught me pc clenches so you will learn exercises like that, but he also talks specifically about anxeity on his channel and I bet if you asked him he could provide a lot of great insight and help with your anxiety. You can book a single session first and see if he resonates and you like what he's saying and then go from there. I got an immediate benefit the first call I ever did with him, so 1 call could be really helpful even. His program takes you through a series of exercises and concepts that are designed to slowly develop your inner strengh and masculinity. You work on bringing energy into the body and that also correlates with aspects of our life. The lower spine/groin energy relates to sexuality, the energy in our stomachs (where anxeity is) relates to feelings of confidence/self worth/value etc, and feelings in the heart relate to how feel about other people and our relationships. 3. Sadhguru's Isha Kriya. This one you have to go to a center in America or Europe, where you spend like 4 days at a retreat and they give you a specific yoga practice. The practice is incredibly powerful, although I haven't done it yet, I have a good friend I trust who swears by this and said it's one of the best things you can do to improve yourself. The guy who designed this yoga system made it so enhance people's mental functioning in the world, and it also brings greater bliss and mental ease through practice. It's really good because the practices are simple, it's not like gym yoga where you are doing downard dog and shit like that, it's simple breathing exercises that are very specific and scientific to get max benefit in as little time as possible. I think you will only have to do it about 5-20 minutes per day, and if you are consistent you will be guaranteed results. My friend said when he was doing this kriya yoga a lot, he could dominate league in perfect flow while having full conversations with his friends. That's how much mental balance you can get from this kind of stuff. The downside is you have to go to a center to get the practice, there is something about receiving the teaching from a guru and in the context of the center that his it's own power, and I was skeptical about this too I used to ask my friend why can't he just show me, but I think if you do it the right way and go to the center then you will get max benefit. 4. Sahaja Yoga This is a simple yoga practice where you chant a mantra for 15 minutes, and then you sit in meditation for 15-60 minutes and surrener your will and basically let a higher intelligence come up with whatever pracitce you need in the moment. I know it sounds woo woo, but this one is really powerful. Basically, if you think about it, there is a higher intelligence within our own bodies that governs our lives. None of us control our blood flow, our digestion, etc. It's all done by a natural intellgience of the body. The idea behind this practice is that most of us don't know what is the best thing to do for ourselves in the moment. Each one of us is unqie and so there is no one size fits all for practice. But if you can learn to surrender and allow god/higher power etc/ to come up with whatever practice you need in the moment, it can be incredibly powerful. Let me know if you have any questions I wrote this for a friend, but i may as well share this here too

@Javfly33 Well, this whole thing is not black and white as we tried to point out. But okay, if we want to simplify things, you have two options. Either you keep living your ordinary life in society, you go to work, you socialize, etc. You'll have addictions, you'll struggle with everyday life, and you'll experience suffering on a daily basis. You'll feel like this whole life is just a drag. Like what the 98% of humanity is doing. Or you can go to a monastery, meditate several hours a day, thus you don't have to worry about external things like stimulation, food, sex, relationships. Do that for several years or even decades and then maybe you'll have to chance to bliss out for days on end just by sitting. The choice is yours. If you want to do the two at the same time, you'll have to bite the bullet and try to find a balance.

Go Tell that to Sadghuru. Which can bliss itself the fuck out by himself. He wont have to Tell itself the BS story of "Yeah I am God But Also lets not confuse the relative and Absolute ok? So let me go Chase some sex like any other human". Bro, stop kidding yourself. If you are not Conscious of God/Love NOW, then you are dont get the benefits NOW. If you cant put yourself minimally into a non dual/completedness state right now, then yes, of course you Will have all of those rationalizations as to why "you need to burn karma" or "first handle survival needs" ? which btw its all Parroted by Leo. Nobody in forum actually thinks by itself lately damn. You guys keep thinking you can take the Absolute as a memory and rip off the benefits like Its an actuality. But in reality, it doesnt work like that. Just read What i told the Guy above. You are literally parroting the same BS as everybody else.

To know everything. Abandonment. 1. Insecure 2. Because real love is worth fearing losing Love. I still want to experience it all after knowing it all. all 4 combined. Bliss. Chaos. Chaos. Love. Most difficult.

Yes, this is a very important part of the process for most people. Having a glimpse of awakening can seem to make it all the harder to face these feelings, ironically, because they feel so shitty in contrast to the bliss of spiritual liberation, and there can be a temptation to try to hold onto spiritual truths as a way to avoid having to face these feelings within ourselves. After a while, though, it becomes apparent that this doesn't work and that these feelings have to be faced in order to be truly liberated. But do you have the stomach for it? I think this is what Jesus meant when he said, 'For many are called, but few are chosen'.

I think I can add some valuable insight here for a few reasons. Firstly, I have been working with mentally ill people (mostly schizophrenics) for 7 years now, so I know a lot about the ways they behave from first-hand experience. Secondly, I have experienced both nondual states (using psychedelics) and total insanity using deliriants like Daturah and Diphenhydramine (don't take these, please! Both of these substances I have only tried once out of curiosity and had I known exactly what awaits I wouldn't have taken them at all. They are extremely toxic to your body and offer no value whatsoever for your personal or spiritual growth, and you are putting yourself in serious danger). First, let's talk about schizophrenia. The first thing you have to realize is that schizophrenics SUFFER immensely from their condition. There is this sort of romanticised notion in some New Age circles that schizophrenics are merely misunderstood, that you shouldn't treat them with medication, and that we should just let them be or even learn from them, because they are in a way "wiser" than we are or "know" things that normal people don't. Let's be frank, this is total horseshit. Only a person who has never had any personal experience with schizophrenics would say that. These people are suffering tremendously and even with antipsychotic medication, they are barely able to function like a "normal" person. There are many different forms of schizophrenia, and every individual case is different, but there are certain patterns. Paranoia is a huge one - one of my clients believed there were snipers aiming at him constantly, he was afraid the people at the grocery store might kill him, etc. Another one had episodes where she believed that poison gas was coming out of her shower, that she was being raped by strangers all the time, and she regularly believed me to be her mother, father, brother, child, romantic partner from twenty lives ago, and so forth. She also thought people on the radio were conspiring to murder her. She regularly broke down in tears weeping, because she couldn't take all this suffering anymore. If you didn't even give these people antipsychotic meditation, you would condemn them to a life of even more extreme suffering, and they would wreak total havoc within their communities. Sapolsky's lecture on schizophrenia is very enlightening as well, by the way - for example, he talks about the case of a schizophrenic woman in a neolithic tribal society that he got to know during a research trip. That woman was not revered as some wise old shaman or something. The people in her tribe had absolutely no tolerance for that woman's antics and had no clue how to deal with her erratic behaviour. One of my clients was particularly interesting. When he had his psychotic episodes, he described them as "seeing shapes/figures" and "non-existence". When these episodes occured, he was terrified to death, and the only thing that would help him was his emergency medication. With this one, I am not entirely sure what to make of it, but my guess is that what he described as "non-existence" had more to do with depersonalization/derealization than awakening. Now let me share some of my experiences on Daturah/DPH vs. those on psychedelics. They couldn't be any more different. I imagine what mentally ill people like schizophrenics go through is a lot more similar to what you experience on deliriants than what you experience on classic psychedelics. On these deliriants, I experienced full-on hallucinations: Having conversations with people who weren't really there, thinking I was in a totally different place from where I actually was, trying to grab water glasses and only realizing when my hand moved right through them that they weren't actually there, hearing a cacophony of both familiar and unfamiliar voices, both male and female, seeing spiders crawling along the walls everywhere and actually FEELING their touch when they crawled over my body, seeing dark figures (a man dressed in black wearing a hat, the shadows on the wall turning into swordsmen dueling each other, for example), thinking I was smoking a cigarette which wasn't really there, etc. All combined with a terrible feeling of dread and paranoia, extremely painful RLS and the all-around feeling of being poisoned. It's like being thrown into a real-life horror movie. Never again will I expose myself to this. The only positive I can take away from these experiences is that I feel like I can relate better to my schizophrenic clients. Psychedelics, needless to say, are completely different. The hallucinations are beautiful, mandalas everywhere, eyes looking back at you, waves of love and pleasure rolling through the body, letting go of the ego and effortlessly melting into the ocean of being, total bliss and ecstasy, profound realizations and new perspectives, and so on. It's not even remotely the same. Therefore, my best guess is that what is called "depersonalization/derealization" in psychiatry has very little if anything at all to do with awakening, but that they are very different phenomena. Your question is a very good one though and one I have contemplated myself for some time. Hope this helps in clearing up some confusion.

I mean, we already know that death is imaginary. That’s not even a question. The question is just what dimension of consciousness are you going to enter into when your entire identity as Someone here dissolves. The model I’m entertaining lately is that when your physical body “dies”, your ego completely dissolves back into the Infinite where you spend an eternity in perfect Love and wholeness. This is what the Hindus call “The Pralaya” which is the state you enter into after physical death: Peace, uninvolvement, pure bliss. I think this is the Light that people experience in near death experiences. And I think in a weird, strange-loopy non-linear way, we could say that “eventually“ after spending an eternity in your perfect wholeness, you “decide“ to incarnate again or dream up another story. And that this is a cycle that you as God are doing to sort of pass eternal time with adventure. You could say that you’re playing an eternal game of hide and seek with yourself. You get lost in your imaginings thinking that you’re a separate entity going on all these escapades, until you eventually find out it was all just a game you made up, and then you can just have a good laugh. And then you do it all over again. I don’t take this model super seriously though. Because this makes it sound like it’s some linear cycle where you dream up one life after another in a sequence, but when you enter into the light of eternity, there is no linearity there. You completely drop out of linearity, so the idea that you enter a new life “after” death is non-sensical. So I don’t believe there is a model that can really accurately describe what is actually going on here. The model can only be taken metaphorically.

I'm currently practising the "Letting go" technique which I learned about in the book by David R. Hawkins: Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender The technique is extremely simple but quite difficult to do in practice when it comes to more difficult emotions like depression. I can see the potential in using this technique. All the emotions that I feel throughout the day, no matter how difficult, can become stepping stones towards full awakening and bliss. I can turn this into a game, and challenge myself to let go of as many emotions as possible, even the positive ones. There are a few concerns though... How do I know that I am practising this technique properly? Is it really as simple as feeling into an emotion? Why does my mind try to make it into something more complicated than it really is? Even if my intention is to let go, I feel like there is a part of me that is resisting and trying to manipulate and control the present moment, using this technique. There seems to be a very subtle distinction between trying to let go and simply just letting go. How do I reconcile this? If I fully let go and surrender to the now, what does this mean for my career, relationships, family, the food that I eat and how I spend my time? I worry that if I surrender, I won't be able to perform to commit to anything or achieve any success because I have simply let go of wanting to do these things.

@Razard86 So basically, after a few hours of feeling a bit of a headache and masterbating a few times on LSD, I started to relax into the sensations of my body. It felt good to just focus on my breathe, and then I remember repeating a meditation pointer to myself, "Look for the one who is looking", and it brought my attention to just pure knowing of consciousness. This started it's own energetic process, and I started to feel this tension in my head start to dissolve and unwind, and then ultimately I felt these knots in my head like pop and dissolve. At one point it felt like someone was pulling my brain apart from the inside, like fingers were prying in it, and finally I heard these knots pop in my head when I breathed into them. I could hear like poof, poof, and then i felt this weird substance flow throughout my body. After this I finally got up out of my bed and I felt better than I ever felt before. I could feel myself as translucent rather than solid, and I could feel bliss coursing through me, I could feel tubes in the space where my head was, and it was like I could feel bliss coursing through me from these tubes. I had never felt like that, and this was trip was a few years ago, and even though I've had some other good psych experiences and learned a lot, I have never reached that same level of bliss and divinity before. My bad I misread your message. The one specifically about league of legends came after this one, but I consider it a lesser trip. Basically, on psychs you enhance your ability to feel and empathize with things around you, like I feel stuff on psychidelics that I did not even know was possible, but I also feel stuff that I rememebr feeling in childhood, birth etc. When I was playing league of legends it came at the end of an LSD trip where I was able to expand my capacity to feel, and so I was much more interconnected with reality. The league of legends game is not something seperate from myself as this conscious presence of experience, but normally there are blocks to our ability to feel into this interconnectedness. While playing I was in touch with feelings and I shed sufficient blocks in my psyche, so rather than just feeling sensations of the body like normal, my capacity to feel expanded out to the game to where I could feel a perfect sensational connection to what I was seeing in the game

Hey guys, I'm at a really low point in my life. I'm 20 years old, currently living in Germany and all I want is to move to Australia. I just came back after spending a year in this beautiful country on a working holday visa, met amazing people, made friends and fell in love with an amazing girl. Being forced to leave this country, my friends and my girl was extremely tough and I still cry about it a lot. Now I'm in this grey winter of Germany and I hate my life. I feel miserable and hopeless. I hate living here. The easiest option for me to immigrate to Australia would be studying engineering there and applying for permanent residency through the skilled migration program as they are in need of engineers. At least I would get a chance, as long as they still need them when I graduate and I pass all the tests and requirements. I would have to borrow the money from my dad, which would be a huge investment and risk. Because what if I don't make it, or I won't get my permanent residency? Now that I'm looking at the fees for international students my plan of going this way about my immigration doesn't seem to work and my dream seems to be destroyed. It would be extremely expensive, just so I can study something I don't like, to get a CHANCE (which is not certain) to get permanent residency. I'm not interested in engineering, neither am I in studying at all. I would just do it to get permanent residency. What I actually want is build online businesses, travel the world, live in different countries and be as independent as possible. I want to spent a lot of time in Australia with my friends, but also travel the world and one day settle down there. Now, what I also could do is say fuck studying in Australia, that's too much of a risk and I don't want to study engineering. I will build an online business now, go all in, put in really hard work doing what I want to do, to the point where I can get tourist visas (3-12 months) to live in Australia temporary, and one day settle down by marrying. Another thing I could do is build a business there or invest in businesses to get permanent residency, but you need to be extremely successful (really really successful). The question is - should I do that? Should I go this way? Will I make it? Will I be happy? Why is life so complicated? I'm very confused, miserable and depressed. This is such a huge decision for my life and I just don't know what to choose. I'm having sleepless nights over it. Option A: Study Engineering in Australia which I don't like, get into huge depth with my dad and only get a chance to move there Option B: Go all out in building online businesses, learning, thinking big, spenting time there on a tourist visa (hope that's possible) and one day in the far future move there by either marrying (which I don't want as well) or building an incredibly successful business or investing 7 figures successfully into businesses (extremely hard and out of my reality so far). I know that if I take option B that would create huge leverage on me and I will have to evolve so much to reach it and option A would be the safer way, but I don't like studying engineering and I hate having the risk of it all being a huge waste of time and money if I don't get a PR. In the end, I want to create an extraordinary life anyways, so why not choose the path that's harder but forces me to grow more? Sorry for the long post. I would love to hear your opinion on this.

Right now my awareness does not include solipsism, although at one point I did have this. This was during an experience that was something I considered a psychosis at the time, and it was a bit gradual though did have a symbolic river that was crossed that showed how serious it got. It actually started out as a beautiful experience of the utmost profundity upon my arrival at a physical location I loved, and I, with the depth of the gorgeous, ancient, and fresh Atlantic ocean I was by, loved the present moment so much and accepted reality to the point where my past memories were the perfect context for my promising future I fantasized about with pure optimism as well with a good dose feeling into my then present environment. I know this is what caused the sort of shift in awareness that elevates emotions, good and negative based on "set and setting" despite that term usually applying to entheogenic rather than endogenous type mystically inclined alterations. When I departed from that holy Atlantic sanctuary which I ascribe some special psychological/soulful compatibility with me and entering some place I hated, there was dreading return to the society I deeply felt I had been free and away from in a way detached from awful strictures and routines of behavioral conformity such as school, work, government, capitalism, social norms, and so on to the infinity of the parts that make up that disgusting engine. I had a breakdown with a powerful existential crisis that eventually changed my life for the better. It was so bad. I had never really suffered before, and although now I am an advanced sufferer and with a pain tolerance like that of someone stabbed with thousands of katanas, scimitars, and knives that just keeps walking expressionlessly while incapacitating enemies, I had philosophical ruminating about the nature of reality and truth as well as nihilism, death, and all the classics like that. Intense anxiety. And dissociation. And depersonalization symptoms, which were just from me not understanding how to interpret the spontaneous no-self experience my mind was being deluged with. The most distinct "crossing point" memory here was when I woke up one morning and noticed that my socks shuffling on the wooden floor were not real, this being some realization based on how focus was drawn to the visual field with the kind of reconsideration of society's model of consciousness as an epiphenomenon or unimportant triviality when it comes to the fundamental ontology of reality one gets when consciousness changes enough to never be looked at the same way again. In my case, this was what I misinterpreted as a fading, although it was only my self that was fading like a painting in the sun that lightens its shades into less contrast. Now, of course I still have a self, but the "no-self" experience I refer to is simply a type of knowledge that your thoughts, emotions, and body are just a single phenomenal object among a system of phenomena in your consciousness with nothing that signals it out other than its own biases begging for attention. It's a contextualization of you with the not-you that is in "your" consciousness. So not-you being in "your" consciousness leads you to identify with not-you, like how a nature mystic's mind might imagine that they are nature, that they are the coursing blue waves that crash on the sand or that they actually are the process of the sun going up and down the horizon everyday in that ancient cyclical ritual of "the deities behind the scenes" like the winds that carry house-destroying storms or the wildfires that tarnish forests and turn them to black ashy wastes (nature's revenge). During this time, I doubted that other people were real. My mind speculated although did not know that I was a lonely God that created the universe, and I was terrified my world would come to an end if only I rediscovered I was God. Anything that I had experienced up until that point, like my mother or my romantic interest or school or society or the beauty of life or the memories or the future or good or evil or whatever became seemingly at risk. It was so real. Visceral. The sincere thought that you could end any moment and learn some horrible truth about reality that was so distressing God needed to suppress it was absolutely frightening. The fear of an intruder breaking in and attacking you is not as bad because that is only a relative concern. The dread of a Ukrainian child hiding in a basement is not as bad, at least in principle, because it is only a relative concern. What I am talking about is an absolute concern. An apocalyptic one. My view of the world could end, and that, in the case of the world being illusory, would also cripple the whole of reality's structure and alter it to suit this original state I feared. I understood the viewpoint of solipsism, which is the linguistic philosophical model that births after the experience, which is the "present moment" of the colors and feelings right before you as your life's phenomena being totally vivid, whereas the past and future and other people's perspectives are abstract and exist only in Nothingness. Look outside the field of vision, and what do you see? Nothing! Do you see any other people? No! Reconnection to love was important. I love life again, and even though I loved myself deep down throughout the entire experience, there was always a wide variety of hate for whatever. I am autistic, so when I look at the visualizations of some cosmic and metaphysical type of love in my mind, it remains an intellectual understanding and, even though there is definitely an amazing emotional beauty to it, I simply cannot cry about it. I can look at a flower with hummingbirds feeding on its nectar, the complexity of the billions of life climbings into the structure of the hummingbird with its dual interaction with the recipient of its beak's attack seen as evidence of some principle of love. Reality loves the humming creature, and it loves the flower. It also loves a king that oppresses his people, especially if my own emotions are irrelevant to the metaphysical love. Queens that oppress, on the other hand, show a great side of duality or of some social change . . . Change might be a flower going through its seasons like a snowy and beautifully cruel winter with cold that kills the flower's act of blooming and scares the hummingbirds down to the southern regions. However, there are also springs and summers. Other black-and-white-negating gray zones like autumn that show duality is not sufficient as an explanation but only multiplicity, arising from infinity. In our realm, this usually involves motion . . . Motion = time, or rather, all time is derivable from motion. We might be pedantic and say time is a human model based on motion, but we will not. We might be confused and think that the past and future are reducible to the present moment and are mere illusions or ignore the problem altogether by stating how their differences collapse under the hypercosmic unity of Nothingness, but we will not. In reality, the present moment is what must disintegrate into past and future! For example, when somebody says their current conscious phenomenon is comprised of visual objects they are entranced with, in the world we live in, that refers to objects of space moving through time. Motion. An apple requires motion to exist. It needs at least some existence across motion. What is an apple that has no time other than just Nothingness? If somebody bites an apple, that is movement. Nietzsche's ink-daubed quill hitting a parchment as he writes his works is movement. The sun and the moon and stars are movement. All this that is in the cosmos is motion wherein there is a relativity between different parts of time: Nietzsche's quill raised above the paper versus the moment when the black ink is seeping into the fibers of the paper is not in the present moment; they are in past moments and future moments relative to some arbitrary reference perspective which might be more vivid as imagined. A dog chasing a cat and then the cat scratching the dog does not happen in the present moment; it happens in motion. Motion can never have a single frame isolated from the passage of time because that is nonsense. A process happening only in the present moment is nonsense. A star committing supernova in a single infinitely small sliver of motion where there are no different, separate sub-events like the light flashing at differing angles is incoherent. So, this proves the existence of multiple sets of phenomena within consciousness. By this same principle, other minds can exist. Other minds are not other realities but only other thoughts, emotions, and phenomenon-based stories, of life. Animation of the universe. Surely, if reality allows motions where separate acts exist in a same overarching act, like two halves of a dance constructing a whole imagined dance, minds can have the same. If reality can create smell, sight, demons, lemurs, dirt, heavenly bliss, etc., surely it produce through special creation other things. One might say, "Yes, but it is not happening right now." But how would you know if you were only a part of "right now" which happens to be motion. All things are the same Nothingness. So two minds of the same Nothingness are not ontologically incoherent. You can imagine multiple entities every time you simulate somebody else in your head . . . Dream people and real people are imagined as different. Obviously, laws of physics are imagined to exist. Objects have properties. If all conceivable properties exist, then other people exist which correlate with the property of objects acting by the physical laws which are correlatives with how the image of my brain and the total holonic system of my phenomenal consciousness are interlinked, woven.

Because that's the only thing I found worth while to do in life .I could just simply sit around playing video games or masturbating all day .but is that my highest potential? Is that what I really want deep down in my heart ? If I could figure out reality I would be drowning in infinite bliss and understanding.

So the last six months has been quite a journey. I've experienced spiritual, emotional, creative, professional and psychological burn out. This left me physically exhausted and time for a restart. Where I entered from there was Presence. I let go of a lot of heavy stuff. Heavy patterns of destructive behaviours mainly people pleasing, perfectionism, seeking and resistance. I have become somewhat dazed and confused because my old identities no longer serve who I am or who I want to be. Meditation continues to be my guide. Yoga my path. Presence is my bliss. Destination? Unknown.

Try Transmissions. They can ramp things up. Sat Shree has free group transmissions on zoom every morning. If you live in America then the time might fit your schedule. With transmissions it is not very important to be focused and present, but to be sensitive and open. Once you made the connection with the transmission energy and it starts really working for you, then you could be in complete monkey mind and the transmission would still work, it would put you into deeper meditation and cause bliss, nondualness and peace and maybe also a peaceful mind. If you want to bruteforce strengthen your focus abilities, you could try mentally chanting something like "aware" constantly during meditation. It still requires focus, but it becomes much easier to stay focused, because it kind of prevents other thoughts and constantly reminds you of the task. The faster you repeat "aware" the easier it becomes to remain aware. You could start the session with 30 times per 10 seconds to exhaust the mind. Then 20 times for a fast pace and then 10 times for a slow pace. Once your concentration becomes better, after weeks or months, you can then lower it to 5 times per 10 seconds. And then to normal breath focus. And then to observing your thoughts.

... material reality would be less meaningful without it. There is value in both the red and blue pill. Notes taken immediately after journey... It's all a dream - But there is value in meaning and shall I say it, forgetting I created everything. There is value in playing this game. There is so much value in relationships. In loving. In Family. There's even value in overcoming obstacles. Although this is all a game I have the ability to make this game as fun, adventurous, meaningful, experiential, and epic as ever. Although you will never be able to forget experiencing everything and everything as God. The blessing and gift the experience gave you is realizing how much you miss people and relationships. Know & remember your powers. Appreciate the game & beauties of life has to offer. It would be fun to be a king but even way more fun is to be the David who became the king that overcame the obstacles. Make the player I got chose the best it can be. Give 100% effort in literally every minute of life. Today will always be known as the day I woke up to who I really am. A day where I eradicated every "self" limitation and realized how precious and valuable every min of life is. Where I realized how precious and amazing everything life has to offer. Especially relationships more than anything. It's the day I saw everything like Christ where I was able to walk both on heaven & earth "3D" at the same time. The day I chose to come back to this material world with "some" limitation over pure bliss and being completely unlimited. The day that I realized how much I missed this material life and how many things I took for granted. How many things I wasted so much energy on that didn't matter. How much I valued others free will and not wanting to control them even if I could. How much LOVE means to me. How much I LOVE people's flaws. How can I play small when I literally created the game?

I would like to share something written by my guru's guru, Yogeshwar Muni. Many knew him as Charles Berner, the originator of the Enlightenment Intensive retreat, but what not everyone knows is that he went on to be an accomplished yogi. After having many peak experiences to only face a dead end, his guru, Swami Kripalu, gave him the key to achieving God realization. This is a rare path, and I would like to share an introduction to that here. Chapter 1 Introduction to Natural Yoga In the Western world it is not considered very important to be guided by the heart. We would all like to be more able to love and be loved, but we have learned to trust our heads. We have been educated, not only in our educational system, but also in our society as a whole to use our heads. It has brought us a certain degree of material success, but it has not succeeded in giving us the happiness, the peace, the consciousness, and the love that we all want. The teaching of Natural Yoga is the way of natural union with God. From my spiritual teacher Master Kripalvananda, I learned a method of opening my heart, a method of surrender. This is not to say that knowledge is a bad thing, because it is not. But it is not enough; nor is just opening your heart. We are so much more advanced in our heads than in our hearts. What we need is to learn to open the heart and surrender. But surrender to what? In Natural Yoga one surrenders only to the Truth. Another name for the Truth is God. God is the Absolute; the Absolute is Perfection; and Perfection is Truth. Natural Yoga is about knowing God not just intellectually, but consciously and directly; it is about surrender to God. It is necessary to re-release the energy captured by the closed heart. The heart, in turn, has been captured by the mind; and the mind controls it. It is not possible to figure out how to re-release or to liberate the life energy that has been entrapped. The more you use your will to make it happen, the more life energy gets captured. But when the heart is re-opened, the mind loses its grip on the previously captured energy, and life begins to flow again. If you surrender to anything and everything, your life becomes a complete waste. Your desires run wild and you run into incredible difficulties. In Natural Yoga, by surrendering to God, by surrendering to the Truth, the suppressed energy is released and transformed. Then liberation is achieved. Once you surrender the body, feelings and mind to God, the purification process begins. But the ego resists it. It says, “Oh, no, you don’t. This surrender business is not for me!” If you have a lot of toxins in your body, there will be a strong reaction. If you are sickly, overweight, use drugs, smoke cigarettes, or drink coffee or alcohol, the body will react very strongly and make it very difficult for you to continue surrendering. If you sincerely want to do Natural Meditation, you need to work through these difficulties and prepare for the process of full surrender, of completely giving over your body, feelings and mind to God. Then as you continue to surrender, your mind begins to purify spontaneously. There are four ways to awaken or liberate the life energy. One of them is by physical exercise; another is by understanding the Truth; the third is through devotion; and the fourth is through the transmission of divine energy form teacher to student. If you do a lot of exercise, stop using drugs and eat a pure diet, your body will become purer. And when it purifies, the life energy will be liberated. My life energy was liberated by understanding the Truth. I had a realization of the Truth of life. As a result, the life energy in my body went “whoooosh.” I rolled all over the floor and acted crazy. I didn’t know what to do with it! I tried to figure out what it was all about. For years I tried to find out what to do with it and how to handle it. I did not succeed until I met Master Kripalvananda, affectionately called Kripalu. He is the only one I ever met who really knew what to do with the vital energy. He was a great yogi from the great tradition of Natural Yoga. Something led me to his feet. He had the knowledge, method, and power to transform the life energy; and he could teach and transmit it to others. And finally, if you devote yourself to whatever is divine to you and open your heart and serve it, through great love, your life energy will be liberated In Natural Yoga, the life energy is awakened through the transmission of divine energy from teacher to student. The transference is a gift of life energy from the teacher to the student. The great advantage of transmission of divine energy from teacher to student is that you know what is happening; you how it has come about; and you know you have someone to guide you. Once the divine energy is transferred, the rest happens spontaneously and automatically as you continue to surrender. 1. You begin to treat people better, not because you are forcing yourself, but just because you want to. 2. The body performs purifying actions, moving spontaneously into yoga postures whether you have ever heard of them or not. The postures occur in the exact way necessary for your body to purify. 3. The life energy becomes restrained and elevated. 4. The attention withdraws from the senses. 5. You go into deep concentration. 6. You go into spontaneous meditation. 7. You go into equanimity or union with God. This does not happen in two or three seconds; it takes a while. It may take days, weeks, months or years; but it happens according to the grace of God and Truth, according to the wisdom of the divine energy that guides you. The process of Natural Yoga proceeds according to your degree of surrender, the previous work that you have done in this life and others, and the wisdom of your spiritual teacher. Divine union is the ultimate outcome of Natural Yoga. Your own true, divine nature comes into union with God or Truth. Natural Yoga brings not only bliss, but also consciousness, Truth, health and happiness. It brings natural humility and saintly behavior. Impurities are transformed into Divine Love for others. Eventually a complete and permanent transformation of one’s human nature takes place. This is a long-term project; yet it is the promise of Natural Yoga. Chapter 2 Surrender The key to Natural Yoga is surrender. By surrendering in meditation you achieve union with God or Truth. There are many names and ways of thinking about the Ultimate. Choose the way that has meaning for you, then surrender and go into union with it. Natural Yoga is natural union, a union that happens naturally without the use of willful direction or guidance. Natural Meditation means following the natural path, the path that is automatic and spontaneous. But this can only come through surrender. This is why surrender is the key. Without surrender, the will is involved. When the will is involved, nothing happens naturally. There are a lot of advantages to meditating naturally. You might say that surrender is “letting it be.” Letting things be the way they are, is a form of surrender. The dictionary defines surrender as the opposite of victory; surrender is yielding or giving in. It implies being forced to give in, to give in against your will. In Natural Yoga surrender means giving in by your own choice and letting the will of something other than you have its way. In Natural Yoga, you not only surrender, but you also surrender to the Truth; you surrender to Perfection; you surrender to the Absolute; you surrender to the Ultimate. You surrender to the cosmic finality. Call it whatever you like. You don’t just surrender. You surrender to an Ultimate. You have the choice to surrender or not. In Natural Yoga you choose to give in to the Divine. This is the key principle of Natural Yoga. You don’t need to know anything else. Everything else supports this key principle. So you need to understand it well. It is not easy to surrender, but it is the key to spiritual growth. If you surrender to the Divine, then automatically and spontaneously, you are on the path to the Truth, to the feet of the Lord, to Divine Love, without having to plan, to know, to force or to concern yourself in any way. The difficulty is that when you choose to surrender, there is a reaction. Therefore, you can only surrender to a certain degree. If you could surrender to the Truth totally, all at once, you would experience the Truth and you would have complete union with the Truth. Some people refuse to surrender at all. They say, “I’m using my will and that’s it. I’m not surrendering at all!” A few have surrendered totally. We call them God. Most of us are in between with some degree of surrender. When you have a reaction to surrender, don’t stop surrendering. Simply surrender more. Even if you don’t want to, go ahead and do it anyway. Perhaps you pull back your surrender to some degree. But if you do surrender, a little bit of purification takes place. Not only do concerns go away, but also the body and the mind purify to some degree. So when you surrender that much again, the reaction is not so strong. And as you continue, your capacity to surrender grows deeper and deeper because the reactions are less. It would take a lifetime to sort out the best way to have a supremely happy life, achieve complete liberation, attain absolute freedom, and reach total union with God. By the time I found Natural Yoga, my life had been spent trying to work this out. I had assembled about fifty different, quite excellent methods of dealing with the body and mind, like massage, Polarity Therapy, Rolfing, Feldenkreis, Hatha Yoga, breath restraint, good diet, Gestalt Therapy, Mind Clearing, Emotional Trauma Release, praying to God, and many others. I was trying to design an assessment method to test every person who came to our spiritual growth center and then direct them to the techniques they needed. I had an elaborate plan worked out with a marvelous testing system so that each person’s plan could be adjusted to just the combination they needed and varied as their needs changed. I was excited by all of this and was beginning to make some sense out of it even though it was a fairly complex subject. Then one day I met my beloved spiritual teacher, Kripalu. He taught me Natural Meditation. With Natural Yoga all you have to do is surrender to God. And the perfect thing happens to you at just the right time with the correct intensity to do exactly what is necessary for you whether it be in your mind, your body or your feelings. It brings about the exact degree of purification you need. And then the process continues naturally without any need to ask questions or make plans! What a relief! What a Godsend! Unfortunately not everyone can surrender to God. First of all, many have not found God. Others have no absolute anywhere in their life. It’s difficult for them to find anything to surrender to. Secondly, many are so impure and toxified that if they do surrender even a little bit, their ego can’t stand it. They clamp their will down with all their might. These people must find Truth, through some other method, through Enlightenment Intensives, for example. They need techniques to remove their mental and communicative obstacles. Once their minds become purer as a result of techniques such as the Enlightenment Intensive, then surrender is possible for them. For those who are ready, for those who have prepared themselves, the path of Natural Yoga is open. Natural Yoga is an option if they so choose! Many have had deep experiences of God, Truth or Divine Love. But these experiences fade with time. All willful techniques are limited because you can only know God in a surrendered state. As soon as the will is re-activated by arising desire, the deep experience lost. Many people are sincerely driven time and time again into the realm of peak experiences only to fall back again when desire arises. Some have sought experiences using drugs, only to crash again. Taking drugs is certainly willful; and you cannot willfully maintain union. Only in the state of surrender to the Truth can the Ultimate goal be continually experienced. It’s a gradual process. Where willful techniques leave off, surrender begins. This is not to say that willful techniques have no value. They do! It is necessary for almost everyone to participate in them to get themselves to the place where they can surrender meaningfully to the Truth. To do Natural Yoga, one must be able to surrender and let the will another be done. It is God who is the doer in Natural Yoga. In Natural Yoga you release the body from willful acts. You allow the life energy in the body to do what it wants instead of willfully trying to do something. If your body gets tired, let it fall over or just collapse on the floor. Once the body rests for awhile, it wants to move again. Whereas ordinary meditation uses the will, in Natural Yoga you let the life energy, guided by the divine, move the body in whatever way it sees fit. Do not try to concentrate your mind or attention on any particular thing. In willful meditation you concentrate on one subject or willfully try to maintain a state of openness. In the case of Natural Yoga, you let the attention go wherever it wants. It might go onto anything. You surrender the control of your attention to the divine and letting it do what it wants. The divine directs the energy that guides the attention. It will go where it needs to go in order for you to make the most rapid progress in your meditation. Meditation may not always be what you want; and often, it is not. Sometimes it is boring. Sometimes it does seemingly pointless things like the grocery list. But that is what needs to be done. The energy is trying to release your attention from the “grocery list” so it can go on to other things. You say, “Oh, I shouldn’t be thinking about the grocery list; so I’m not going to think about it. I should be thinking about God.” You are using your will. It is all very well to think about God; but if you are using your will to direct your attention, then you are defeating the method of natural union with God. If you surrender your attention to God, the life energy in the body and mind will be guided appropriately. In meditation you go through what you need to go through. No one has to tell you anything. God is the only therapist. If you have God or the Truth as your therapist, you can not do better. The only fee God wants is surrender to Him. You can say Her if you prefer. The Goddess is Truth. Truth is the way things actually are no matter what perspective you take. You just let meditation happen whatever way it wants. Let His will be done, not yours. Surrender, then, is to choose to let God, the Truth, or whatever you want to call it, guide your body, feelings, and mind, your thoughts and attention. You will be lead you through the most fascinating, exciting, sometimes boring and even terrifying journey to to union with the Truth. By surrendering to the life energy, the body can naturally go through what it needs to go through in Natural Yoga. It does not become tired. The mind goes through what it needs to go through so it does not become stuck or frustrated trying to control the attention. And the feelings can flow when they are ready; when they are not ready, nothing happens. So just let it be. One can do many hours of Natural Yoga over long periods of months and years. The serious aspirant can devote his or her whole life to this activity. Four to eight hours a day spent in meditation is not unusual for a serious practitioner of Natural Yoga. Generally, the energy in meditation moves a lot at first, then slows down to nothing and the aspirant goes into yogic sleep. You may think that you should be alert and busy. Your will tells you, “I think I should be awake, active and busy.” And there is God’s will. Sleep is coming on naturally. If you have truly surrendered, you let sleep come. If a hand wants to move, let it move. Whatever happens let it happen! There is only one condition, surrender your body, mind and feelings to the Truth,. If you have done that, there is no error. Whatever occurs, including sleep or anything else, happens properly and automatically. Why doesn’t everybody do Natural Yoga? It’s so easy! I mentioned the obstacle of reaction. Many people are attached to the ego; that is, their ego wants to be in charge. It wants to be the doer and wants to cause things to happen. “If I do this, then I want that result. And I want the fruits of my actions.” Following the ego is the ordinary Western way of proceeding. It is also the Oriental way of proceeding to some extent. When you willfully act, God responds to a degree, if you have acted ethically. You can get bound to the ego and get stuck in the role of the doer. You are the one who is doing it, rather than surrendering. Following the ego can only take you so far. But most people are not ready to give up the role of “doership.” They are not ready to go on to Natural Yoga. God is the doer of all things. Imagine a slave master who has many slaves and who wants to build himself a nice house. He sits up on his dais and says, “Slave, you come over here and you carry these stones. And you slaves there, you pile them up. And you mix the mortar. And you design it. Come on, jump!” And they start jumping and carrying stones and they build the palace. When the palace is finished, the slave master invites his neighbor over. And he says, “Look! See the palace I built! See what I did!” The slave master is the ego and the slaves are God. God is the doer of all things that appear in the form of nature. God in the form of nature does all things. The ego sits back and says, “Look what I’m doing! See what I did!” The ego thinks it is the doer. But the ego does not create anything; it does nothing! The body is part of nature; the mind, feelings and thoughts are part of nature. The entire physical universe is part of nature. All that happens is done by God working in and through nature. Surrender releases the divine energy that makes everything work. The divine energy is what guides your body, mind and feelings in Natural Yoga. If you are strongly identified with doership, surrender will not occur. But you can give up the ego and say, “God, I surrender to you.” It would be like the slave master saying, “Slave, I surrender to you. I realize that you have been doing the work anyway and I’ve just been taking credit for it.” It is not just a matter of stopping what you were doing; it is a matter of realizing that you never were and are not the doer. God in the form of nature does all things. The act of surrender is simply the gradual realization of the Truth. As long as you are attached to the fruits of action, you are held in a trap. You hold on to the idea that you are the doer. “I did it. I worked all day. I want my pay.” So if you are attached to the fruits, you are automatically the doer. But it is not true. The fruits do not belong to you. They are all God’s. You are not the doer. God does it all. So what are you? You are the one who either surrenders to that fact, or resists it. You are the one who can make the choice. You can either surrender to the natural way which brings about union with Truth or you can fight it, saying, “No! No! No! I’m going to do it the way I want!” Sometimes people feel that if they decide to stop doing something, nothing will happen. They think that not doing anything is surrender. This is not true. They think, “I won’t think any thought; I won’t move a finger; I won’t breathe.” There is a very simple way to test this. “ Well since I’m the breather, I’ll stop breathing.” But it is not you who starts breathing again because it was not you who was breathing in the first place. God in the form of nature is causing the body to breathe, not you. And in the same way, nature causes the brain to think, the hunger to come, the sexual urge to arise. All these things happen by the will of nature. Thus it is the ego that stops people from doing Natural Meditation. Everyone has an ego. However, if you can just yield some of your doership, some of your attachment to the fruits of action, then you can open the door to Natural Yoga. Natural Yoga liberates you from both pleasure and pain. You protest, “Wait a minute, don’t you take my pleasure away! I’ll put up with some pain as long as I get some pleasure.” By surrendering to the Truth, you gradually get over the suffering of pain and the enjoyment of pleasure. In life, pain is the payment, pleasure is the reward. It is the fruit. Getting caught in this endless cycle of pain and pleasure is ordinary human life. An individual who wants liberation seeks to transcend this cycle. A practitioner of Natural Yoga, instead of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, seeks only union with Truth, perfect awareness of the way things really are. He or she becomes more and more detached. Both pleasure and pain become the same. A sincere meditator seeks pure consciousness of the way it is. The ‘way it is’ is often called ‘That’ in yogic scripture. Pure consciousness of ‘That’ is bliss. Pure consciousness of the “way it is” (‘that’) may be called direct knowledge. When you have direct knowledge of ‘That’ which is true, you are in bliss. This is union with God. A liberated individual having transcended pleasure and pain comes to know God directly. If someone just talks to you about Truth, it tends to be dry. If someone just talks about God, you may feel belittled. But when you are the one that ends up knowing the Truth directly, you are in the state of bliss. Bliss is not the same as pleasure. Bliss is pure consciousness of Truth. The state you are in when you go into union is bliss. Bliss is not the titillation of a nerve ending; that is pleasure. If that nerve is not titillated, then it is painful. “Oh I feel so lonesome and left out. I feel depressed and hurt.” This happens because the nerve fiber did not get its electrical stimulus. But if you have pure consciousness of God or Truth, it is bliss. It is union with God. How do you to reach bliss? By the realizing that you are not the doer. By surrendering to the Truth. This leads to pure consciousness of the Truth and you have bliss. I speak not from theory, but from experience that this is the case. Surrender even in the early stages of the process of union with God, leads to bliss and to God. By the grace of my spiritual teacher it has happened to me. I can say that direct knowledge of Truth is God, beyond doubt, beyond certainty. There are many schools of thought, many religions and teachers who teach surrender to God in the form of the divine energy. The Christians on the day of the Pentecost were invested with the Holy Spirit which is the same thing as divine energy. They spoke in tongues and rolled on the floor, called out to God, cried, and laughed with joy. The purification had begun. The Holy Spirit had descended upon them. Chi is another name for the divine energy. Tai Chi tries directs this energy. The name is ‘Orgone’ to the Reichians. They permit the energy to flow and to surrender to it. These are all steps in the right direction. They are all excellent techniques. In Natural Mediation, we deal with the same energy. In yogic tradition, the guru gives Shaktipat initiation awakening the divine energy in his or her students. My spiritual teacher has provided us with a broad perspective of the spiritual growth process based on his experience in Natural Yoga. He practiced ten hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year for over thirty years. His life was Natural Yoga. He understood and practiced Natural Yoga in the context of ancient scripture. He was taught by his teacher, Lord Lakulisha, who achieved divine body through Natural Yoga. Natural Yoga has a history of thousands of years of sincere meditators experimenting, going up blind alleys, finding the way and then staying on course. They continued until they achieved the highest state of union with God, the development of the divine body, and the fulfillment of life. There are many names for this meditation. When I was in India, Swami Kripalvananda called me back into his room and wrote something his chalkboard in Hindi. I had to ask the translator to come back. Kripalu wrote, “The name of this yoga is love.” I did not know what he meant at the time. Now I have a good idea. Love and surrender are the same. One’s most outstanding quality is love. And God is love. So when you surrender to God, to Perfection, to Truth, you love Him so He can love you. This is what leads to union. Without love none of it is possible. Love does not mean surrendering to people’s personalities, weaknesses, inabilities, failures, or impurities. You surrender to the Divine, the Divine that is everywhere and in everything. You should not surrender to imperfections, disease, insanity and false knowledge. Surrender only to the Divine Truth which is in the heart of everyone. This is the act of love. Kripalu told me that for thousands of years, it has been the custom in India when greeting or parting to say, “Victory to God!” Jai Bhagawan If you like to read the remaining parts of his small book, you can find it here: http://www.naturalmeditation.net/Design/nmdocument.html