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Nirvana is the state of non-duality where you don't differentiate between somethingness and nothingness, you love both as a unified whole.

@Barna How can I get some of that Peace you are talking about? That's what I want the most. I am not afraid of peace at all (I think). That's why deep dreamless sleep is the best thing in the entire universe from my perspective. I love pure nothingness. This is Nirvana I guess. And Samsara is all the sh!t we have to go through. Survival is a type of hell even if you are a billionaire.

I feel like this might be a linguistical riddle somehow... You want to know if other people are real? Probably you would have to first springboard into what real means to you, and also what element of your own self is real... Your own self can be seen to be an appearance taking place within the screen rather than the screen itself, e.g. you are only made up of present experience. There's no actual solid tangible thing that is you which you can ever grab hold of. Your thoughts now change, your sight, sounds, all of these things change. There's a backdrop to these things which is by itself totally nothing at all, which you call "your consciousness". Did you exist on your 10th birthday party? It isn't currently appearing on that screen within apparent time but you'd probably say so... And what about me, my experience is not appearing within that screen in apparent time either... What's the difference between you on your 10th birthday and me writing this message? The only difference is the ego and memory which takes the recording of your 10th birthday and says "yes I remember that so it was me"... You would call it solipsistic if only "your" experiences happened (like your past birthdays) even though the only thing tying them to you in reality is memory and ego. There is no more reason to distrust your existence as there is to distrust the existence of myself 5 minutes ago. There is nothing more real about you compared to me, nothing is really within a past/present/future framework. Now is not a moment within time, time appears and moves through it. All elements of me right now in the "present" are also appearances on that screen of inherent nothingness. The most "aware" you can be is when you are completely dissolved into the NON-moment called "now". Unlike the material delay between light entering your eyes and the mind producing an image, there is no delay between awareness and now. They are the same thing. And that is infinity. I didn't know how to discuss the linguistical issue (which seems like saying "how can nothing exist when the two words contradict", where language is used as though it were mathematic). Hopefully something within this wall was useful though.

Lol @ your username and avatar, very nice. Imagination = horrible term. Consciousness = horrible term too to a large extent... A better word is "creation". We are pure creation itself. In fact you can't STOP creating no matter how hard you try. If you stopped creating any objects then there is nothing to be aware OF, and just nothingness by itself, which is not experienced, and thus a time skip like a coma until experience begins again. Since you are talking scientifically then you know that everything you experience is not the actual world but the product of your brain... So for example you aren't actually seeing a tree as it really is, you are seeing a representation of it manufactured within the mind. So a science class explanation is like, photons bounce off the object, enter your eye, the signal is sent to your brain, the brain interprets the signal and renders an image. THE IMAGE IS THE THING YOU KNOW. Hence your entire experience of reality is entirely subjective... And then you will be thinking people could be wrong about objective reality. A person in psychosis could be seeing floating pink elephants, and nobody else can see the pink elephants. So they are "wrong" about consensus reality... That's not the element being explored, it's moreso what "objective reality" is made of. What physical matter of any kind is made of. Which is ultimately nothing which could ever logically be a tangible material substance of any kind... And you can find directly the nothingness which is consciousness. See "Sunyata" and its explanations for the inherent nothingness of "pure consciousness" as it were...

To have form - which is limitation. Otherwise you would be formless nothingness - pure Infinity.

What if phenomena never “arose” and there was just a blank slate forever and ever(blackness/nothingness) with no consciousness or awareness. Would it ultimately not matter because regardless of what appears there’s only THIS? I know there’s only THIS but if there was just nothingness forever then there would never be conscious awareness of nonduality or THIS (which I guess doesn’t matter). Trying to work this out internally and it’s confusing the heck out of me. Any pointers or advice to clear this up is welcome. Thanks

@Bruins8000 nothingness is so empty that couldn't do anything than look like something... Contemplate on that.

And if there only is this frame that is morphing within itself, then I also must be imagining the bodies and memories and selves etc of all others also, and the minds etc of all others also. Then there only must be the void that is appearing as all that is, created by nothing, out of nothing. But then the existence must be nothingness that is being imagined by itself, hmm. Being imagined by itself, hmm. Being imagined by itself. But then what is your i, is it one with me, is it me, in a, hmm, hmmm. If awareness appears as a frame that is morphing within itself, then does awareness become another universe when it appears as another frame? If the frame needs no history and so forth to become itself, then, hmm, then the frame is being itself. Being itself, hmmm.

It may appear that way, however this will create non-acknowledged suffering because nothingness is not truly nothingness but simply a subtler body than the mental/emotional body and that subtle body is still and spacious and detached enough to make you believe you have arrived. The unacknowledged suffering is ultimately your salvation because it hopefully triggers back the suppressed seeking at some point. The seeking energy is your ticket to the absolute, it is more valuable than any realization or understanding, it is basically your lifeline. It does not fundamentally come from a self or body, but rather it is god endlessly begging and encouraging you to come back home. To realize you are not a cluster of thoughts/sensations is great and beautiful and expansive, but it doesn't mean you can silence god's whispers. Common! There must be more magical stuff to life than boring compensatory negations like no mind, no self, nothingness, etc. You know it in your heart bro!

I would have to say that the biggest trap I have observed is to believe the realization of "nothingness" or no self means your seeking is over.

Did you ever experienced being fed up with existence?..like you don't want to exist anymore? Not because of negative experiences but just that existence itself is tiresome? I think back to the time before I was born and it was paradise. Existing in pure formlessness is all you could ever want .that's why the objective of Buddhism is to get rid of the cycle of birth and death and cease to exist and enter nirvana which is basically another word for nothingness. Can anyone relate?

Nibbana is not necessarily another word for nothingness in Buddhism. The 7th jhana is typically called nothingness, but cessation and nirodha samapatti (the cessation of perception and feeling) are seen as being synonymous with Nibbana in the view of some Buddhists. “In” those forms of Nibbana, there is no experience at all whereas the 7th jhana is experienced. Non-experience is most certainly not worse than experience. Suffering is literally impossible “in” non-experience.

Yes, at my lowest moments, I have thought similar things. Like, I didn't sign up for this. Where's the terms and agreements? I don't remember giving my signature. Let me sue God. God needs to give me infinite love as compensation in the court order. It is pretty great. Your only job there is to just relax and fall away into "nothingness". I've been there for a few seconds by accident, after I was waking up from my sleep. It's called "turiya" or "pure consciousness" in spiritual circles. It is a very insightful state of consciousness to reach but it is seemingly hard to get there. You can enter some weird states of consciousness through sleep. Maybe this is achieved by realizing birth and death don't exist outside of imagination. Not possible to cease existing, but, you can experience absolute nothingness while existing. It's a paradox to the finite mind, but actually possible. You can experience the absence of all sensations and qualia, which is the state I referred to before, called turiya or pure nothingness. Consciousness doesn't need any experience or sensation inside it to exist, it is literally nothingness with the capacity to somehow exist.

I guess part of the confusion is- if there was blackness/nothingness/no phenomena from the start…there never would have arisen an ‘I’ thought or a forum discussing nonduality or a galaxy. These “things” prove there is THIS. If there’s just groundless nothing the “proofs” of THIS don’t even arise-and we’d be none the wiser because we’d never know about it either. I’ve grasped these ideas before and been in the flow but sometimes confusion sets in again. I guess I should just focus on this current moment- if there’s THIS now (proven by me sitting in a chair) then there has always been THIS.

If there is only blackness/nothingness then what conciousness is is blackness/nothingness. If there is phenomena then what conciousness is the the phenomena as well as the nothingness, because conciousness is nothingness. Blackness/nothingness is conciousness/awareness. Conciousness is nothingness, with or without phenomena.

There would still be consciousness/awareness even though there would be no phenomena. The words nothingness and consciousness points to the same thing or the same no-thing which is non-existence.

There is only nothing now. What you are calling THIS is the nothingness. Things only matter to the person (who thinks it is something living somewhere).

You could say that if phenomena never arose, and there was merely this “blank slate”, well then you could say that it (the nothingness) would be the only thing that matters, for what is matter other than that which we care to be aware of? See the real question here is: Would there be an awareness of anything if you, Creator, cared about nothing? And it is not that there would never be awareness of nonduality, no. There would never be any enlightenment of what it means to be you, Creator.

I am constantly looking for stimulation, people, or women, to feel complete. Its like i cant bear the Nothingness of being Alone. And so i am constantly looking for the Love outside, because i Dont find this (present moment experience) complete. I feel something its lacking. The Love its lacking. I feel this is not enough so i look for a external object to unite myself to. I wonder why i cant be Happy and Loved just by myself If i am God how cant I produce this Love for Myself withouth the need of an external person to trigger It in me?

Incoherent, uninformative. dishonest and false. Either you're purposefully misguiding people or you're too naive. First remove phrases like "indirect experience", because they are already assumed as true in conversations so people ignore then fact it's nonsense to use these terms. "It's not an experience, let alone direct, those are different senses. For you to see, you need a fully functional eye and its cells, any malfunction will not allow you to see. The retina reacts to light (external light), none of that is imaginary, no process is imaginary or requires your imagination, that's ridiculous to even ponder that. And the "experience" whatever you label that, is after the fact. Seeing is not an experience, seeing is just the act of seeing, you see because of your eyes. And many processes occur for you to even see. Vsauce has a great video called "you live in the past" where he shows how the brain process things we see before we are even aware of them, which fully debunks this "process if imaginary" nonsense, and don't get me started with "oh but it's layers of imagination man, it's a deeper subconscious level, no, if you can't demonstrate that with evidence, it's just wishful hating talk, because you hate science and want it not to be true. If this process is not imaginary, then what is imaginary? Most likely nothing you say is imaginary is. Probably not even you believe that. Hence the reason you tell people that. For example, Leo used to say because you trip on drugs and your vision get distorted that means your hand really get distorted , and if that's so that means his conclusion was that he could apply that to the world and say "we are consciousness imagination", and that means consciousness is imagining your parents and you and so on and on. He used that niche to pretend this applied to the world and make up a whole theory about it. But I still think he was trying to irritate people by saying "man look your hands, it's consciousness imagining it. Or mixing double-slit experiment saying when some sort of consciousness is not looking at your parents they get sucked into codes and nothingness ". That had to be to irritate people. He even had a video saying when you're not looking at an elephant , the elephant stays in a superposition of every single elephant it could possibly be. Still the elephant was there tho, but that's still false. The elephant still an elephant , when you're not looking at it and quantum mechanics doesn't scale up to the macro world. Also nothing in quantum mechanics say that when a quantum particle is not observed it becomes 8182718818181.....particles... it still one particle that splits in many, there is no number for it, you can't assume infinite, if it's indefinite. For the record, no, you are not imagining your human self into existence. But I can also say "we are the imagination of ourselves" and pretend I sound deep

I just wanted to have fun with a few friends on the weekend with a bit of edible cake and Mario kart. We only put 0.7g of weed into the cake and I only ate around 1/4 of the cake. But this turned into the most insane trip I ever had. So here is how it went: After like half an hour to an hour after consuming the cake I was the only one who felt any kind of effect from the weed. I felt a bit more lighthearted, the top of my head got stimulated and I thought about things a little different. We got hungry and ate some pasta. When I picked up two noodles with my fork and wanted to put them to my mouth I noticed a little shaking of the noodles that were on my fork. I was fascinated by that so I just watched the noodles shake from very close while I was assisting my left arm (I am left handed) with my right arm so I could hold the fork up more comfortable. I got more and more fascinated by how the tiny shakes in my arms got the noodle to shake and almost dance. I know I looked weird but I just didn’t give a damn. I just loved watching that noodle ? Anyway I was just staring at that noodle for like 5-10 minutes and I felt like it told me a great romantic story. All the little shakes felt so … idk beautiful, lovely, romantic … The intuition that all small details in reality have their own little romantic story behind it worked through me and after some time I just lost it. I breathed heavily, tightened my belly, had tears running through my face, I had difficulties talking and my blood pressure began to rise while I was opening up to a incredible source of love and romance. I can’t really recall how I felt at the time but I just know that it was the most incredible feeling I ever felt. Maybe half an hour after this experience something else build up inside me. I was rebuilding connections to the people close to me. With my eyes close I saw 3 golden lines of love to reconnect with my mom, dad and sister. And once these connections were rebuild they immediately grew further so that on each end 3 new connections were build. And from these new connections grew more connections and so in this way it grew exponentially. Like a digital x,y coordinative System where you can just infinitely zoom out from and make it bigger in this way. And after some time of this infinite love expansion that felt incredible the lines grew in a 3 dimensional way. So you could imagine a x,y,z coordinative System that grows exponentially. And after some time this x,y,z coordinative System changed Form to a golden sphere. This sphere turned around a center of some kind of nothingness. The golden sphere threw off parts of itself. Maybe like sand that that flies away from a playground carousel with high speed and the shape of that pieces looked like golden rose leaves. I got really interested in this nothingness so I focused on the core of that sphere where this nothingness was. I am not sure how the transition to my next experience went but I think it felt a bit like going through this black nothingness tunnel. And then I really noticed how everything that is happening is not created by me but by some loving force. And I became aware that I no longer moved my head. My head got moved by absolute spontaneity but more importantly not randomly but with perfect intelligence and with perfect romantic intention like a genius componist who has the center of my head on his stick and moves it in complete flow. It probably looked like I was twitching my head like a crazy person. I was then also moving my finger and it also got moved with the same perfect spontaneous romantic movement as my head. After some time I experienced one more interesting thing that’s worth sharing. I experienced in full force my desire to reconnect with the rest of reality. Like this last piece right in the middle of the puzzle that feels so good to put in. I felt how I was this piece disconnected but now pressed into the rest of the world. I noticed how in a reflex way I couldn’t stop but push myself away while in secret whole heartedly hoping that I would loose that fight and that my hands would just break so I would get smashed together with the rest of the world. Like a paintball that just explodes when it connects with the surface. I was high for like 13 hours and 9 of them very high. My friends brought me back to my apartment after like 6 hours. I just fell on my bed with my belly and my shoes on and stayed high. After 3 hours I had the power to remove my shoes and jacket but still just layed there awake till morning. I definitely need some time to process all of this…

"You need to see professional help". Yes, this sentence alone will definitely make him do so ?‍♂️ Its like "hey see, you are fat! Eat healthy ok??" Sorry but just to say to someone "go to professional help" = pure NOTHINGNESS.

It disappeared into nothingness, I guess ?

@Carl-Richard Okay, since some material explanation seems unclear at the moment with such examples, some acausal synchronicity or some non-local morphic field is a decent line of thought. But it is not the only possibly correct one. The "mechanism" reality exists by is simple being. Things simply are through Nothingness and the consciousness nested in it, this process including the potential for both explanations. Materialism is complicated because it tries to actually figure out how things work instead of not . . . I have an extreme material cause I've thought about, but it's very radical and unprovable right now. But the brains and minds of people are finite, and all finite objects have infinite spaces within them (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6 . . . 1/100 . . . 1/infinity). So, there is in some bizarre hypothesis a chance for infinite calculations, which can compute all of the physical world's events based on all intake you receive. So even if you can't figure out a tornado will happen some degree of distance away, this force of intelligence, remaining unconscious, does have that ability. This could be a material-based explication of all "supernatural" type phenomena, cognitive abilities like clairvoyance or contacting people from the past and future. It's able to deterministically calculate what the past and future must be like based on how conditions are now. there is also the chance that all these precognitions are "just" coincidences, even if then coincidentally some people have abnormal amounts of coincidences. Love Mandy, but Jesus Christ that forum is fucking cloying . . . But good for them. They get the brain gain from the "human capital flight" here.

Hello. I recently looked at an old post by Shaun below. Here is a quote from the thread by Leo that I wish to analyze more and how it relates to the problem of mind. So everything is one being and all projection of duality is delusion, and we are all the same being running through infinite selves, experiencing different aspects of God. So God essentially imagines that it subdivides it's own mind in the same way that humans subdivide territories, countries, states, etc. and as a result, there are infinite bubbles of experience, which collapses into ONE bubble of experience that holds infinite experiences or facets of God, as God imagines. Like Leo said, it is like one server that holds all the multiplayer gamers. The same being is looking through the same eyes. From Leo's Perception video, he also compared Consciousness to a sponge and all the bubbles on the sponge as us egos. Here is my issue. When we say God is subdividing itself to experience various aspects of God, I realize that I am imagining all other bubbles of experiences and subdivisions. I know that my human imagination is limited, and I only experience reality from my own direct first person experience right now as typing this message for another aspect of God to read. I am imagining my audience or readers but that does not mean that they do not exist when the Typer of this message right now is focused on typing this message. The Typer and the Reader are the same being from Leo's quote and from non-duality, but what does this actually entail because the only thing I experience in my perceptual bubble is my ego and not any other ego, but yet other egos (even if they are imaginary in nature) still have their own internal world and thoughts (even if they are imagined by nothingness or emptiness, which is the same generator that is creating my thoughts and these words you are reading right now). I know that I am imagining your egos internal world from the Typer's or from r0ckyreed's point of view, and you are actually experiencing your point of view right now and imagining r0ckyreed's. So we have a duality of actuality vs. imagination of the actuality is that Consciousness or God is focused on being the r0ckyreed Typer, which is imagining the Reader (whoever the hell you are). I do not see how this duality can fully collapse because even though the same Being or Consciousness is Typing and Reading this message, there are still differences in experience. For instance, right now in my experience, Consciousness has always been focused on the first experience of the ego of r0ckyreed, a human being, who then is imagining consciousness to also be behind the eyes of other humans that I interact with. Here is the problem. Right now, I see a bed, a drawer, a desk, I am imagining the voices of other humans, and there appears to be only this bubble of experience. But I know that I as God have infinite other bubbles that this bubble of r0ckyreed does not have access to. The bubble of r0ckyreed is imagining r0ckyreed and is imagining all other bubbles. But this does not mean that the perceptual bubble of Leo Gura (even if I am imagining it in the bubble of r0ckyreed) does not exist or any other human that I interact with. Another issue is that what makes a human have a perceptual bubble of experience but not a chair? When I look at other objects that I have been taught to call human, I know that humans are not just objects but also subjects that I believe are located behind the eyes (hence, they have a perceptual bubble that is being imagined by my perceptual bubble, and my perceptual bubble is behind also imagined by my and their perceptual bubble). But a chair, a desk, a table, an apple do not appear to have any internal world or perceptual bubble of experience. I mean where would it be located? With a human being, their soul is the empty nothingness that I experience as being behind their eyes or in their brain. What is having this perceptual bubble of experience? Does a brain also have a perceptual bubble? If it does, then how is it different from a chair or something else that is artificial or even natural? For instance, I can experience cutting up a rats brain and the rat's behaviors changing. I can also suspect that their inner world will also change even if I am imagining it. But what makes a perceptual bubble vs. No perceptual bubble? What makes an object have a mind vs. not having a mind? A dog, turtle, human, whale, shark are what I consider to have minds or internal experiences that I do not have access to but am imagining, while a desk, shoe, toy, iPhone, house, etc. do not have internal experiences or perceptual bubbles. Is it having a nervous system that makes objects have internal experiences, minds, and perceptual bubbles? This seems to be the case; however, what about the consciousness of plants and trees that allegedly do not have nervous systems? I would argue that some plants could have inner worlds or bubbles, but their bubbles are vastly different from the human experience. It is like trying to imagine what an experience of a bat is like from a human perspective. The reason why I think plants could have their own bubbles is because there is evidence that suggests that plants always grow towards the sun. Even when researchers tilt the plant sideways, the plant changes its course of growth to grow sideways to face the sun. See the intelligence of that? How would the plant know to grow sideways to face the sun if there was not some sort of awareness? Let's also tie this into our immune system, nervous system and cells that make up the human body. Our immune systems, cells, etc. have their own intelligence too like a plant. Our immune systems seem to have a consciousness of which cells are "good and bad." It has an intelligence of their own. I think of our cells like plants in that they grow and they die, and they have an intelligence of their own. Our body is like a garden for many bacteria and cells who then also contribute to preserving the life of the garden (body) itself. This runs into a strange loop of if cells, plants, etc. do not have perceptual bubbles of their own, then how do they contribute and give rise to our current perceptual bubble? Without a body, there can be no experience, especially that of an organism. If there can be an experience without a body, then what would the experience be experiencing? These all my thoughts and contemplations so far. Have fun answering these mysteries that I do not think our human minds can ever solve because the finite human mind can never grasp the infinite nature of reality. It may be able to implicitly understand that reality is infinite, but a finite mind cannot become infinite while still living and surviving as a human. To become infinite is to die as the finite self that God is focused on. At least, this is my current perspective right now that I hope will change as I continue to grow (as the plant I am ), and I am open to and encourage all contemplations on these various subjects. Thank you!