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Yep and all of us are right. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Being as the Actual Presence of True Nature We are in not using the term "being" in its everyday sense. Usually, "being" means mere existence, and that "existence" is, like everything else, experienced conceptually. The spiritual traditions, on the other hand, use this term to refer to the actual presence of true nature, which can be directly experienced. We are using the term in this latter sense. As human beings we are Presence, we are Being, we are actuality; we are not simply mental constructs. Pearl Beyond Price, pg. 27 The Experience of True Nature as Nonbeing Does Not Mean that there is No Reality, No Soul or Manifestation True nature is absolute being, but also absolute nonbeing. It is both presence and absence of presence. It is both but not exactly, because these are conceptual elaborations of which true nature is innocent. We say it is both being and nonbeing, or neither, only because these are fundamental concerns for the soul. Being is the last thing the soul needs to surrender as she opens up to her true nature. As she does this she learns about nonbeing. She experiences the emptiness and ontological absence of her existence, and everything else in manifestation. So she may believe that true nature is total emptiness, absolute nothingness, complete absence of existence. The experience of true nature as nonbeing or emptiness does not mean that there is no reality, no soul or manifestation. This is a nihilistic perspective that experience and understanding do not support. The wisdom of emptiness or nonbeing is an attempt to understand the final ontological mode of things. We normally believe that things exist when we perceive them. This belief is accompanied by a subtle underlying feeling or sense of what existence is. Things feel real in a substantial way. We consciously or unconsciously feel that the existence of things is a substantial solid quality. Existence becomes the existence of substance and solidity, which becomes opaqueness if we continue in this direction. In other words, we not only perceive that things appear to our perception, and not only believe that this appearance is objective and independent of our imagination and mental construction, but feel at the same time a sense of substance to this appearance, a sense of solidity. Existence for us then is not only the true appearance of things in perception but the imbuing of what appears with a quality we call Being. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 258 None of Us is to be Blamed for Our Shortcomings Each of the boundless dimensions in our work reveals to us and teaches us something about reality and about experience. We learn that reality has true nature. We’ve been using the concept of true nature in our teaching for a long time, and now I’m introducing Total Being, which is an overlapping, though not completely identical, concept. I am leaving it ambiguous on purpose. True nature is total purity and freedom all the time. If we only say, “Everything is always true nature,” that doesn’t account for the fact that most people don’t experience things that way. We could explain this by saying, “Well, that is because they are not aware of it.” But when we understand reality or true nature, we realize that people don’t really exist the way we think they do. So when we say, “They don’t understand true nature,” we believe that they are responsible for not understanding it. But when we blame somebody for not understanding it that way, we ascribe to them an independent existence apart from Total Being. They don’t have that; nobody does. So actually, it is Total Being that is ignorant—not the individual. An individual does nothing on his own because he is a manifestation of Total Being. So none of us is to be blamed for our shortcomings. Runaway Realization, pg. 170

I have the same experiences you've had especially after my first several LSD trips. I saw non-duality everywhere. My partner was my self, my parents were like me and even more so, were me. Everything become equalized and transparent, nothing had solidity. I was staring at a mirror all the time and it felt kind of empty - void. I really contemplated the meaning while living a 'typical' life; I was school trying to achieve good grades, maintain a relationship, and not appear weird to friends. and even then, I still didn't really know what IT is, which is why I was so confused about the meaning of meaninglessness or why everything is a mirror to me. What will happen if you keep going is you will transcend this and integrate it. you will let go of non-dual stance, the thoughts surrounding it and what will happen is you will just BE. and that Being will be who you are meant to be on earth. Not too long after of feeling the meaninglessness of life, I kept trekking on and I still didn't really know God, or rather, I could not differentiate God, I felt like what I was living was a disguise and Truth is purging of all my ego. Is God pure illusion? Is it a cruel joke? Are all creatures to suffer in illusion, until they realize it is? and then what, drop out? as in give up and die? Then I had a mushroom trip where I contemplated God and realized God is nothingness - the experience of no thoughts, and open awareness to what is. - Note this is different seeing non-duality via a neurotic point of view. I completely let go of trying to figure it out. I had a guitar in my hand and without any thoughts, I played what came to me, I completely let go, and there I found myself. Who I am in the light of God, who I am as a human; making sounds, vibrations, and ultimately I am fullness, I am love. I am nothing to my mind, but everything to God. I am experience; the suffering, the longing to know, the ache of being alive. What I didn't realize before was what IT was, what non-duality is, I saw it, but I didn't know what IT is made of and its made of love. So what I want is for you to keep on going until you realize that this meaninglessness you are feeling is actually the fullness of Consciousness, God and Love. To be full and whole is to be have a wholesome ego resting in the light of God. When I played that guitar, I had no idea who I was, but I was. That's the best way I can explain at the moment. but just keep going, please do not do something drastic until you are feeling whole.

What are you? It seems like if you strip away all the things that are not you, you aren't left with much. For example, if you lose a limb are you still you? It would seem so. So you are not that limb, or that limb isn't needed to define you. It quickly gets metaphysical. It appears that you could be a kind of disembodied (i.e. limbless) entity that observes or senses the world. In this view your body and the rest of the world is observed and is in some way separate from the actual you. I like to think of it like a bar magnet: You can see the lines going from North to South. You are the observer in the South pole sucking in everything from the world in the North pole. If you cut the magnet in half width-ways you get two magnets each with their own North and South; hence there are many observers in the world, each observing their own version of the world. Looking at this analogy the world (North pole) emanates activity and the observer (South pole) passively sits there taking it all in. But it's worth noting that without the South pole, the lines have nowhere to go, and without the North pole, there are no lines to observe. The whole is a system one part co-dependent on the other. Can we do better than this analogy? Notice how the field lines seem to circulate out and then back in. If you were to remove the magnet, but keep the lines it would form kind of circuit perpetually going round and round. Also notice that the field lines have no edges, it fills all of space in all directions. You could imagine how these circuits of field lines are self-sustaining, once they get going. There's also a sort of centre to the circuits where all the field lines squash tightly together into nothingness. So maybe, you're a self-perpetuating field of something? You are everywhere and are neither observer or observed, but both simultaneously. You have an ill-defined centre from which everything springs and is subsumed. This centre is the thin slice of the present moment, and all the lines are awareness or consciousness. That is what you are.

The unmanifest and the manifest... If you take a piece of paper and draw on the paper what you believe is out there independent of mind, you will find yourself drawing icons. In other words you are drawing perceptions. To say that any perception like sight is accurate to what is out there is to remove seeing from seen. Which cannot be done. There is ONLY infinity and perception. The world we call home is merely a dream. Brains are made of what we call matter, so are eyes. Brains and eyes are part of the dream, fundamentally they are icons, we might draw a brain or eye but you see they cannot really be out there in the way we draw them for seeing is part of seen. The brain and eyes are essentially nothing, as is absolutely everything. There is only experience. If you nuke the brain you do not destroy what you would call "out there", you simply erase an experience. If you imagine ANOTHER human's brain it is easier. When they die, the world does not vanish. This is of course obvious. But that is what I mean, see, the dream goes nowhere. The dreamer is emptiness... Nothingness... You cannot destroy nothingness because it is nothingness. There is nothing to destroy. Something is merely a manifestation of nothing. Everything happens within that emptiness. That is why there is nothing external, because all somethings are fundamentally one. Everything is "imagined" from nothing.

Thanks for the recommendations guys, great stuff at the gym when you want to blast some metal - but also don't wanna stop listening to non-duality... We need a new genre... "non-dual metal". My absolute favorites so far are Scar Symmetry! especially the Holographic Universe-album, check out those lyrics... and the music is stellar as well if you're into melodic death, lots of interesting songs on the other albums too. http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/scarsymmetry/holographicuniverse.html#1 Holographic Universe Bathe in laser light, the beam will underline The birth of universe from nothingness Prime awakening, the second beam comes in To bounce and interfere as drawn by will We're finding that we can never die A subject no more to loss than gain The more you try to connect with form The less you're yearning to see all you could behold Then the third beam comes to bring it all alive And bring to form the once chaotic swirl See creation sing the word infinity Behold this organized constructive skill We're finding that we can never die A subject no more to loss than gain The more you try to connect with form The less you're yearning to see all you could behold While all we did was to divide Breaking down the whole We never looked at what we found: Hologram within Why we relied on space and time No one here can know At last we looked at what we found Holographic worlds are in sight To consciousness we moved from where we used to find a god We have made this concept our own Now we believe that this reality came from a dream Forever tried to tell us: "Time is on our side" You recite this knowing and you find it all Night leads to day as mind finds a way You were asleep now you leave the role of one forsaken play This time we found a way to view the world inside Now we've come to know it and leave the past behind While all we did was to divide Breaking down the whole We never looked at what we found Rise from decay in worlds gone astray Truth lies beneath, hiding deep within a once forsaken way While all we did was to divide Breaking down the whole We never looked at what we found: Hologram within Why we relied on space and time No one here can know At last we looked at what we found Here unfolds the truth of all that is alive And here we wash away what was proclaimed Hail awakening, forever lead us in the urge to be alive We know you will

The ego cannot possibly have the quality of awareness. One finite object cannot be aware of another finite object. The only possible thing that can be aware is Pure Nothingness/Infinity. Just like how a movie can only be cast to a blank screen. If there is already an image on the screen before the movie is projected...the movie would be ruined. In the same way, the only "thing" that can be aware is the Thing-less. That which is beyond things.

In the nothingness there is unmanifest everythingness. The chair universe exists in the unmanifest. When an unmanifest-experience takes place in said unmanifest-universe it becomes perceived and hence manifest? How about that... There are perhaps infinite universes just like ours which always remain unmanifest, with unconscious rocks floating around or w.e., because there never develops a perceiver to """collapse the wave function""" from unmanifest into manifest? Hm. So the infinity contains both infinite manifested things and infinite unmanifested things. That could make sense if not Panpsychism. Yet it remains the case, there is nothing "out there". So what do we interact with? Well I suppose we too are part of the apparent outer world and interact with it thusly. A solid concrete wall will always represent something impassable regardless of how it is perceived? Even though it is fundamentally nothing outside of perception.

There must be a universe of floating chairs. But chairs aren't a thing unless perceived. Put a human in the dimension and they see chairs. Now, was it always chairs even before the perceiver arrived? Was that nothingness a bunch of nothing-chairs waiting to be perceived? If a nothing-chair crashed into another nothing-chair and there was no perceiver, what happens?

Right it's happening now. Is this the best explanation though, for how the cosmos all came together before it was perceived from within space and time? Is there another explanation? What about a universe of just chairs that is never perceived, for in total infinity this must exist (and really should since nothingness is legitimately without boundary). Though in chair universe the chairs wouldn't objectively be anything, until a human or something is plopped down into it and suddenly the chairs are there.

Right but how or why is it happening before a conscious perception of the material world exists? Because to experience something you have to be localized and finite. Say there is a universe with just chairs? Without a perceiver that entire universe is simply nothing. So how can it be going through cosmological changes? Once the nothingness is perceived it becomes qualia. If we finite selves perceive a wall, even some animal with no senses would fly straight into it. It could be perceived totally different and the model of reality would still work for that creature (eg it could seem longer or shorter, wider or narrower) but the creature's own physical form stretches etc with it so the model still works. But there is no wall there. So creatures which perceive nothing, why don't they go through the wall?

Instead of seeing you as something which is filled with awareness, mentally reverse this. You are an appearance inside the one singular awareness. This appearance that you know as whatever-your-name-is, is a brain. Awareness experiences the dream known as the material universe through something inside the dream of the material universe which is a brain. That is self-you. Self-you is an illusory plaything inside infinite nothingness/somethingness (the Tao, Brahman, w.e.), you see?

What does it mean when we are on one side and then we cross over to another and then perhaps cross back over again. The term comes from separating straw and detritus from the barnyard and the house. A boundary. Another threshold state is when you have just woken up - you are not quite awake and not quite asleep - can you carry the dream content across the threshold, sometimes this is difficult - the dream world dissolves away, out of your grasp. What do we have to cultivate in order to carry from the inside to the outside - what strengths and abilities do we need to have? There are many myths where a character has to go down into the underworld. You can't look back once the threshold door opens. We can't bring it back just as it was from the underworld, there is some translation and a shift that happens as we cross into waking life and visa versa. Some myths about faeries involve falling asleep on the forest floor and thinking you've been given a gift of money or something like that only to find dirt in your pockets, lol! Lovely sounding album. It makes me so happy to write up something detailed and get an accurate suggestion. We have to sacrifice ego and consciousness in a self annihilation to take a journey into sacred space, the deep unconscious. Faerie realms. The myth of Inanna had a serious of thresholds to reach her sister, each time she would have to lose an accoutrement, so when she passed through she surrendered naked. But you don't have to surrender everything. Jung's cultivation of active imagination: to be asleep and awake at the same time. To live in the threshold, if you were to go too fully into your unconsciousness you would lose your objectivity within the subconscious dreamstate and lose it's potency. To live in the liminal space, which Jung also called the transcended function, this place where the conscious an unconscious mind are in dialogue, which happens in the threshold. The place may be the ego becomes more of a supplicant, doesn't disappear but acknowledges relationship with something larger. The removal of the clothing of Inanna, she doesn't become unconscious, she does have to dispossess herself of something and perhaps even the defenses to be naked in the myth so that all the tiny nuances of change in the cave can be registered by the wholeness of her psyche. You have to maintain some consciousness at the same time that you are willing to sacrifice this consciousness and go in consciously to the "faerie realm", don't make noise, don't clatter about, hide behind some rocks or some shit, lol, observe carefully. Stay focused on your task of going to the Goddess of the Underworld with your request, and remember to be mindful and respectful and shed a lot of our usual states of mind and defenses and stay conscious. Inanna went through seven gates, and in each gate she had to let go of an item of clothing. It is the experience of crossing over that demands of us this relinquishing. A sacrifice of all these parts of who we think we are that have to be given up so that we go in naked or undefended. Liminality: a movement from one attitude or orientation to another and there is this concept of liminality that's been brought into Jungian thought, it was originally a concept that was developed in anthropology - the rights of passage - comes from Latin for threshold. It means the in-between space of initiation rights. Preliminal state - in the normal world - then you are in a threshold experience where you are neither what you were before but you're not the new thing, either and that is the liminal space. Then you cross over into the world of the initiated and then you're once again in a fixed form, but in this liminal space thing are a little bit fluid. One thing can become another and nothing is pinned down and is similar to when Winnicott's transitional space. My song of crossing. A robin has been hanging out with me, he knows I will give him blueberries. I can whistle and he listens and responds. We know this is the space of the symbolic where we can access symbolic attitude, where we can understand that things are not literal, that they move and flow into one another - that they can be both one thing and another at the same time. Analysis is another threshold experience. The symbol itself is the threshold because the symbol is the visible representation behind which exists a larger, mysterious reality - but some part of that unseen reality passes through the symbol and the ego is able to have some relationship to it or to be influenced by at least some derivative of it, so every symbol in a sense is that little strip of wood around the door that allows passage, but maintains it's structure so that the inside and the outside are differentiated. Wardrobe in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Looks like an ordinary wardrobe with fur coats and mothballs, but it is a space where one thing becomes another completely and it allows passage into a very different way of being. At some other level it is unknown and remains in that other world where it both beckons us and yet refuses to be just turned into something concrete like a stoplight. The difference between the willing threshold and unwilling threshold - do you go willingly or get dragged across? Puberty is an unwilling threshold at this primordial instincts drag us through this radicle change and on the other side biologically we were considered reproductively viable adults. Curiosity draws us through a transition for something that we hope for, that we submit to an extended threshold experience feeling that we will come through by choice into some other world or condition. Some things happen to us that create a change, a change in state, that this is a threshold that you have to cross, whether it is because mother nature has so degreed, and how in so many cultures some of these changes are celebrated and heralded or marked in some way by initiation rights or other kinds of ritual and ceremony of the passage into adulthood, and something like death, which is the final threshold that for most of us, we are unwilling. Patients in an active dying process, in hospice work there is a differentiation between the progressive illness and then the body is actively shutting down and death is imminent and then that moment after when the body, the brain has stopped - it a marked threshold, the active dying process that is very powerful. It is powerful to be in the presence of, beautiful, horrifying, unstoppable, dark and terrible that cannot be avoided. The opposite of it is birth. Another incredible threshold. There is a sense of something crossing over from another realm. There is a passage but there is also that state change where all of a sudden it's different. "The arrival." "The other side." Compared to the process and tipping point of now it is different. The work of personal growth and life is climbing a mountain, you keep taking step after step for all these years, and then perhaps through a process like analysis and a kind of willingness and trudging onward and work, you get to the top. And then one more step puts you on the other side to seeing things differently, having a different sense of self. A subtle but substantial change as well as the marked change of crossing over either into life through birth or crossing from life into death, but that we know something has shifted definitively and we may be having to take lots of steps down the other side of the mountain - it is a different landscape on the other side. Something irrevocable has happened. Finding the language to claim the thing that we have entered into is also part of an analytic process or process of self knowledge. "I have become different in some fashion and I have to hunt around for a way to describe that to my self so that I can have a conscious relationship to it." Broken thresholds: all of us, we live in homes and if you open the front door to your home, there's sometimes a metal plate or wooden plate at the bottom and some kind of sealing process around the door so when the door is closed it is air tight, or weather tight. So the threshold is meant to be robust so there is a clean demarcation. But if it is not effective, water will seep in and damage the floor of the winter weather will blow in and make the heating system inefficient. Example: psychosis, material from the unconscious begins to invade, crawl sin under the threshold which is not well sealed and people begin to have strange moods and feelings of terror and strange thoughts which are not related to reality that they're in. That can be a broken threshold. In a more benign way, Freud's list of defenses are broken thresholds. For instance that I am sitting over here and that there is a reality that's in the room and in order to cross the threshold and embrace reality I am caught in the broken threshold by denying what is actually going on and refusing to make the transition into admitting that something is true to myself. They can lock us in the threshold, when we are locked in a defense against reality, in a middle place where we can't make movement or repetition compulsion is a kind of broken threshold one cannot quite find the other side of. Addiction is a broken threshold.. "I cannot find a way to move and I am constantly cycling in a middle space." Being in the in between place can be fertile when talking about a before as liminality and have it enriched by a symbolic attitude and is something that we seek out when going into analysis or active imagination. We can also get stuck there in an unhealthy way. The distinction is that the liminal space when it works for us is a space of preparation for some kind of threshold experience, like the caterpillar in preparation when it starts to change to become a butterfly. Sci Fi can be profound and reference all kinds of archetypal things. Dead space - Anne McCaffery's books - dragons could go in between different worlds and in between them was nothingness - there was simply nothing and they were cold and some of the trips were short, but in one book there was a very long one. There might be no crossing of the threshold. Being stuck in a cycle where there are endless possibilities can seem lovely but is in fact, deadening. There is the sacrifice that is required of leaving the old state, leaving childhood for adulthood, leaving home, leaving an addiction, a state of denial. All kinds of things which require giving something up in order to cross the threshold. We don't always know what we are going to find on the other side of the threshold, there are not always guarantees that you are going to be happy. One of the qualities of threshold experience is they can be intense and euphoric. The liminal part of the right, there is an altered state of consciousness that is cultivated. It can happen in little ways in analysis or active imagination. It is a special state where normal rules don't apply and that can be heavy and when we use substances that's what we are cultivating in a superficial way, but doesn't lead to a location on the other side of the door. One steps into the threshold and just keeps spinning in the space, which of course then becomes corrosive. Thresholds are by nature have a dissolving process, and then re-coagulating in a different attitude or even just casually. Lying is a broken threshold, a way in which one is standing in a middle place, spinning ideas and words that deprive somebody of landing into a concrete position and traps both people in a liminal space in an unhealthy way. The caterpillar has to go into a solution so that it can take a position as a butterfly, refusing to leave the middle place of dissolving then becomes toxic. Becomes it's own process that's destructive. A lot of the practices of religion over eons are designed to make sure that people don't stay stuck in these liminal spaces. That you will have a crossing over the threshold from childhood to adulthood, to some sort of initiatory right. Roman Cathodic: confirmation, healing, service, matrimony, etc. - so that the liminal space is closed down in an appropriate way and threshold is crossed from an unmarried to married state for example. Stalks of wheat, grains are embedded in the grasses are carried into the threshing room, over the threshold and they are laid down and walked upon or acted upon in some fashion to break away the chaff and to reveal what is valuable and then the grains are then removed, brought out of the threshold and are then subject to some other process, but they are considered what is valuable. So to be threshed on the other side of the portal and to emerge differently, is inherent in the idea of the threshold. Many poets use the idea/metaphor of the threshing floor. It's a transition into a higher state, a state of becoming which may require some amount of aggression or violence but is in the service of individuation, of a assimilating something from the other side into awareness and into experiential awareness that changes us, makes us different and makes us more. Guardians of the gate: Some of these mythical thresholds have watchmen, gates of Hell had a three headed dog, there are gatekeepers and doormen that sometimes appear as innocuous figures but turn out to have secret powers. There are gargoyles, cathedrals. Janus is the God of doorways/gateways and passages and beginnings and endings. In the ancient and modern world, what is outside can contain what is dangerous, whether it is dangerous weather or whether it is dangerous creatures or people, and that to let someone into our hearts and lives and psyche - it is reasonable for them to be evaluated or to demonstrate something that gives us a sense that it will be beneficial to us or welcome for them to pass through - so the threshold becomes a place of testing and evaluating, perhaps even trial in an initiatic way. Are you ready to enter the sacred space or the new state, and to encounter in yourself you have the strength to have this encounter and if you don't know the magic word or the formula then clearly you are not ready or worthy. The desire to move into the other space is strong enough one then returns to the outer world and submits willfully to some form of educative or refining process, and the returns to see if they can answer the riddles or any number of things to achieve what is desired. But some things cannot be stolen, some things can only be gained through attainting a certain level, and sometimes those who seek to breach the threshold without having attainted it find that what is discovered is undecipherable because the preparation to be fit allows one to understand what is in the inner room. A lot of rituals focus on preparation for the crossing of the threshold so that you can receive what is on the other side in order to be present. The preparation is to ensure the would be crosser over, or initiate has sufficient ego strength and that has a direct parallel with therapy and psychanalysis that before you engage the other side, the unconscious, especially the deep unconscious you have to have enough ego strength to engage it and that is shown by your ability to prepare, to give Cerberus who guards the gate of Hell, you throw him three loaves of bread and that keeps him busy eating so you can cross through. All these things that show "Yes, I am prepared, I am grounded. I have done my homework." With increasing interest in psychedelics, a lot of people are just taking them, but in traditional cultures where they are used there is a lot of preparation before you cross the threshold into that experience - Crossing over without preparation gets people into a lot of difficulty with themselves and all kinds of mental disorders versus the guardians of the elders of the tribe, special diets, rites and rituals so that you have a container in your self and in the community that will help you through the experience and to disregard and disrespect the power of the unconscious has consequences. Different traditions around the world have different thresholds, for some you have to step over them or you could kill a family member, for others you have to sprinkle holy water on the doorways and for some a vampire can be deterred with garlic or two shake hands or kiss across a threshold - one carries a bride across a threshold as well as a ritual. Once we cross a threshold we cannot uncross it and how we assimilate it will be another whole process.

Who wants enlightenment? The mysterious ego. What you truly are -- Soul, God, Pure Eternal Consciousness, Love -- is already Enlightened. Of course. So what is 'spirituality' about? It's about 'unifying' your mind, heart, body with YOU (Ecstasy/Spirit/Soul/Love). Yoga. Self-exploration. Self-discovery. Meditation. Self-contemplation. Getting in touch with Ecstasy through various practices... -- Breathwork, meditation, sex, tantra, love, community, silence aka 'observing being instead of doing', life-purpose, dancing, music, embodiment exercises, drugs, cathartic art, nature, travelling, casting yourself into the unknown, challenging your comfort zones, psychedelics. ?⌛☯️??? There are infinite ways. What works for you? What haven't you tried? What are you afraid of? The unknown. The unknown is a symbol for death. ☠️?️??️?☠️?? The only truth, we humans can all agree on around the entire globe, is that we shall all die. Death. Our physical bodies and accompanying memories (ego) shall die. Sooner or later. The past & the future are composed of 'nows'. Do you realize the implications of this? You are already dead. Don't you see? There is only NOW. Time is an illusion. A social construction at best. Time is the ego's mode of functioning. Only the ego 'regrets & worries'. Only the ego is stuck in melancholic/fearful fantasies about the past/future. Only the ego is 'in a hurry'. It's all thoughts. Where do thoughts appear? Now. Now, now, now, now. Where do thoughts disappear? Now. You are Now. Thoughts appear 'in you'. As long as you are believing you are controlling your thoughts, as long will your thoughts (ego) control you. Only when 'the need-for-control' is fully 'let go of', shall you see that thoughts are insanely mystical and appearing out-of-nowhere IN YOU (= Pure Consciousness) without any of 'your doing'. And only then will you be free: You are NOW directly in touch with Divine Imagination: thinking without thinking, feeling without feeling, acting without acting. By letting go of & completely surrendering '(ego)control', you 'remember'/'get back': *true, divine control*. Liberation. The past is the future. The future is the past. You see how they imply each other? You can't talk about 'the future' without 'the past' to contrast it with. But... You are, in actuality, always *right in the middle* - always *NOW* - and the past only happens/appears-to-you as 'thoughts / stories / interpretations' *NOW*, and the future only happens/appears-to-you as 'worrying / expectations / planning / fantasy / predictions' ... NOW! It is always, always, always ... *now* ... - don't you see ? ? ? And thus you are already both alive AND dead, simultaneously! You just 'are'.... Being'ness. But by inwardly, intuitively knowing that you will eventually die, while outwardly, acting like you are eternal, there is a deep dissonance IN YOU. Disconnection. Disharmony. Suffering. *Ignorance leading to fear of death leading to ignorance leading to fear.* A strong, deeply programmed survival-loop-of-ego. How do you get out of it? By realizing you truly already ARE out of it, and haver never *really* been caught;... only 'in-mind' (imagination). To ever believe that you are caught is exactly that: a belief. Imagination. Stories. The ego LOVES stories, haha. How do you realize you are already God? By letting go of beliefs, by letting go of clinging... to thoughts & old ways of behaving. By being open-minded enough to follow your divine intuition instead of 'always doing what you know & what feels safe'. 'Psyche-delic practices' means 'soul-manifesting practices.' You can do Soul-manifesting practices sober by just having a really deep vulnerable talk with your best friend or a stranger. What works for you? It doesn't 'have' to be psychedelic substances; that's actually only for the really curious or really fucked-up (imaginary) ego-brain-minds ;-). It's about being open-minded, curious & courageous enough to surrender to faith, instead of clinging to old conditioned ways of being. It's about going through 'enough' suffering/devilry/selfishness to understand that you don't want to live in ego (disconnection, ignorance, slave-to-fear) anymore. Enough of all that endless self-inflicted mental pain (=suffering), ignorance (=slumber) and selfishness(=devilry). Enough of that. It's then about being humble, brave & curious enough to take a leap-of-faith and cast yourself head-on into 'the truth/unknown, whatever 'truth' might turn out to be. The truth is death itself. And that is the unknown. You see? ... You don't know what dead is. Zero fucking clue; 'no one' does. Only those "who have already died without physically dying" are, perhaps, lucidly aware of 'what's going on'. They have become 'no one' (once again). See, that's the fucking trick: to die (ego death) before dying, and realize that there is no death. That what 'death' is, is simply equal to what 'the background' is in relation to 'the foreground' in a painting. They imply each other. Arise together codependently, reciprocally, simultaneously, 'go-together' ... just like heads/tails, physical/mental, up/down, selling/buying, bad/good GO-*TOGETHER* !! And be open to the possibility that perhaps life itself is actually 'the background' to a much more blissful larger 'foreground' (death). (Death as in 'letting go' -- not physical death per se) Life IS death. Death IS life. All opposites are seen as UNITY. Oneness. One. You are One. Right in the middle of all imaginary opposites. And here, with Me, right in-the-middle, the golden mean, there is infinite nuances, infinite balance ⚖️ ☯️ ? . Here, the world is too full to talk about, just: silence, feeling, looking, eyes, accepting, forgiving, listening, loving. Here, there is no right or wrong, just being. Here, there is no self, just is'ness. Here, there is no bad or good, just wonder. Here there is no selfishness or selflessness, just Eternal Infinite Unconditional Love ('Neutrality'). No judgments, just openness. Here, everything is nothing, nothing, everything. Here, everything is mystery, incomprehensible for the mind/the thoughts to understand or know or speak about. 'Mind' expresses itself through thoughts. The social conditioned survivalistic ego 'hides in the mind' and controls the thoughts, as long as it is untranscended. In other words: you feel 'caught' in the meaningless chaos of life; like a 'conscious poor-little-me', seemingly 'stuck inside a human brain' on 'probation' in a seemingly: physical, robotic, random, nihilistic, chaotic, outside world. Right? But be happy, cos if you're a good well-behaved conforming rabbit that blindly chases the carrots of life (authority, religion, science, looks, success, career, money, power, sex, alcohol, new iPhones and cars, achievements of all kinds, then, well, then you're supposed to be HAPPY! ? Death is simply liveliness. Destruction, annihilation, letting go of the old, dying ... IS: ... transformation, change, growth, novelty, LIFE. ????? Life (mind, thoughts, fear, ego, physical body, survival, safety, sex; judging, dividing the world into good'n'bad; chasing the next dopamine kick) is not your true self. It's a character (body) and a play (world). Death (letting go of all of the above) is not your true self either! It's a new character, a new play. Novelty! ? Eternity! ⏳ Impermanence! ?️ Infinity! ? ☯️♾️???????⚖️☠️❤️?️? So ... Why did you get disconnected from yourself in the first place? Survival: childhood trauma, of course (which you should work on in some form or the other). We must learn to love ourselves, before we can really love others. We cannot fix anyone -- only ourselves. When we have 'healed ourselves' through our 'inner teacher' (soul, intuition), we can 'help others' with finding their own inner teacher, so they, too, can become 'whole' ... again. .… Actual Enlightenment is basically when you integrate all polar opposites into your soul, cos you 'lucidly see' they are complementary (ONE). Many people seeking enlightenment on this forum are believing that if they became enlightened they could sit in a cave in the Himalayas and meditate for eternity in bliss; like that is the point of enlightenment; like you need to do 5-MeO-DMT 100 times or do 1000x 1 month silence retreats to 'achieve, attain' enlightenment…. BUT. GUYS. Let me be the first to tell you that while psychedelics, silence retreats and meditation/contemplation can be absolutely fantastic for some, if not for many, on the path, it is still just 'external, imaginary solutions' to an 'inner, imaginary problem'. The inner problem is let go of when you see that there (truly) is NO problem (only imagination). When you fully let go and see that death is life, life is death. This can happen during regular life, it can happen in a cave in the mountains, it can happen during meditation, it can happen on DMT, it can happen whenever. You have nothing to say in this matter. It is absolutely mystical and beyond your control, if, and when you awaken during this lifetime. God decides. The Universe decides. Not you, your cute little ego. You are just a small, perhaps big, wave skating on top of a bottomless, infinite, eternal ocean. The ocean is doing you, not the other way around;) If you can let go of identification with being a finite wave, you will start feeling and sensing the magic of the whole ocean more, which is liberation, which is enlightenment, which is awakening. After all, your true nature IS the ocean (Infinity, God, Consciousness, Love, Nothingness, w/e u wanna call that which can't be explained through language… *THIS* !). .… To live 'in the world' (the marketplace), or to live 'outside the world' (the mountains); now, that is the question! The hedonist or the ascetic? What to choose? I will say one should choose to land 'in the middle'. But before one can attain/remember the golden mean, one naturally need to have tried out 'the extremes' first. In the middle is where you simultaneously live life in the world (buy and sell at the market place, participate in society, enjoy the small pleasures) while also being lucid enough to see that it is all 'just': an inexplicable, incomprehensible, mystical, mind-boggling magical, infinite, eternal dance, where the best thing to do is to just 'keep dancing' -- always innovating, developing, transforming the dance, so that it never dies, but stays alive, in motion -- rather than to stop or hesitate and cling to one or two dance steps becoming scared, angry, annoyed or ashamed towards other, new or deceased or silly dance steps. Let the dance happen by itself as it unfolds rather than tripping yourself up all tight, alright? To 'strain, hold on, control' is a 'limiting contraction of Infinity' to ego. To 'relax, let go and let happen' is to become 'whole again with the Universe' - to melt back into the 'Now of Infinity'. Dance. Dance. Dance. Lifedance. Follow the Divine Intuition inside & outside 'your ego'. (It is all inside God's mind, anyway). Your ego is that inside you which is afraid, ashamed, angry, envious, etc. Act despite fear. That is being brave, that is following the intuition. Actually embody the sentence 'follow your intuition' by actually doing the things you are afraid of! Like ACTUALLY *DOING them*, I mean WITH YOUR BODY .. *not in your mind!* . (The classic trap on this forum: Replacing direct experience with concepts, trying to eat the menu, mistaken the finger for the moon, mistaken the map for the terrority, ENOUGH OF THAT! <3 <3) .… “Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.” “Dance is the hidden language of the soul”. "And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.” “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” “Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...It's about learning to dance in the rain.” “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” "You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like there's nobody listening, And live like it's heaven on earth.” “Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.” “Live your truth. Express your love. Share your enthusiasm. Take action towards your dreams. Walk your talk. Dance and sing to your music. Embrace your blessings. Make today worth remembering.” "Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” “You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.” “Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you'll see the world If I'm not mistaken... Kiss a lover Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure... Face your life Its pain, Its pleasure, Leave no path untaken.” "Do a loony-goony dance 'Cross the kitchen floor, Put something silly in the world That ain't been there before.” "Nobody cares if you can't dance well." “The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.” “Who're you going with, then?" said Ron. "Angelina," said Fred promptly, without a trace of embarrassment. "What?" said Ron, taken aback. "You've already asked her?" "Good point," said Fred. He turned his head and called across the common room, "Oi! Angelina!" Angelina, who had been chatting with Alicia Spinnet near the fire, looked over at him. "What?" She called back. "Want to come to the ball with me?" Angelina gave Fred a sort of appraising look. "All right, then," she said, and she turned back to Alicia and carried on chatting with a bit of a grin on her face. "There you go," said Fred to Harry and Ron, "piece of cake.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Yes. Every moment is a freeze frame. No time or space. Your inside your own mind watching everything unfold through a single point,but really in the greater sense,your everything and at the same time, more meta, your nothingness,like a void. Next life could be experienced through the Imaginary "life" of whatever you can try and imagine and beyond. Everything you can imagine is a happening that's occurring right now and it exists and doesn't exist at the same time. ♾️ ? Mind

Hi guys. I'm Fearey and I've been a long time lurker of the forum. I started watching Leo back in 2012, and transitioned from being interested in self-help work, to consciousness work back in 2014. I've been following most of Leo's content up until 2019. I still watch some of his content from time to time. Few seem as dedicated to providing quality content and explaining it in a thorough manner as Leo. I'll always be grateful for that. With regards to the post title and SD stages in general, I consider the process of trying to find the true nature of self (the process of self-transcendence) to start at SD stage Coral / integral stage Indigo. What follows, having transcended the self, being the entering into SD stage Teal / integral stage Violet. Going through the later stages of Coral was a very depressive, painful experience for me personally. Dwelling into nihilism was commonplace. Not just simple depression, but an all-encompassing, existential dread. Feeling like you're slipping out of existence. It was a weird thing to let go of assumptions and beliefs I had held about myself all throughout my life. Assumptions I had already accepted as fact long ago. What followed, however, was a powerful sensation of peace and belonging. To explain my process of moving from Coral to Teal I'd tell you to imagine taking away all the parts of yourself that makes you you. Then witnessing the remaining emptiness/nothingness that's left as the self somehow becoming something more than what you had before. Note: I'm entirely open to the possibility that my interpretation of SD/integral stages with regard to self transcendence could be flawed, or incorrect. I've been lurking the forums for some time and I'm well aware about the grudges held about people mentioning or claiming to be at stages past Turquoise, as there seems to be so little understanding of these stages, making such claims seem unfounded. I'm not coming from a place of bragging, I'm simply interested in sharing my own personal experience with like minded individuals. Having experienced the completely altering shifts in being that comes from entering a state of obsessively trying to solve the question of self, to the even bigger shift that comes as a result of actually being successful in it, finally transcending the self, leaves me quite certain that both of these represent stages of development past stage Turquoise on the spiral. I could be wrong, however. To close, for any tier 2 individuals highly interested in consciousness work, I'd very much recommend The Book of Not Knowing and The Genius of Being. Both are books written by Peter Ralston and will take you on a journey down the deep end of self-realization. Both has helped me tremendously, and I consider them two of the most impactful books I've ever read.

Consciousness is not material but need material eyes, ears, nerves, brain, to exist. Otherwise is a white blanket. Consciousness is the reciever of the synthesis that your brain creates of all the exterior world. Yes consciousness can exist without a body and a brain, but this conscious would be aware of nothingness.

The problem is you assume we exist as separate bubbles at the same time. Rather try to think of all bubbles of conciousness as being superposed outside of time as pure potentiality/nothingness, with only one moment being actualized at a time: the one you are experiencing. There's nothing outside of your experience, neither outside of my experience, and there's no contradiction.

Warning: Complete Transparency! I go deep into detail here! Build up 'J' wanted to come over tonight, again. I had to say 'no'. She slept over last night already. Well... we barely slept, but yeah, she was here. I don't want this to start moving into a weird direction. A relationship - I mean. Am I worrying about nothing? Or is it for a good reason? You be the judge. On the second night she came over a bit later. It was almost 1AM. She worked late and she also promised a coworker to give her a ride home. I open the door for her and give her a hug and a kiss. We head up to my apartment. Again she's rocking a short dress. Looking all hot. We're both feeling good and excited about the date. Already talking about God knows what. The night is on fire. Both figuratively and literally. The passion in the air is undeniable. Summer is here. She already feels a bit more at home. A bit more comfortable and relaxed than last time. She moves around my place more freely. We talk and talk and it seems like we could go on forever. Again I must emphasize how good of a listener I think she is. I really feel heard when I speak. Not necessarily understood all the time, but heard for sure. She's present. Mindful. She's not elsewhere while she's with me. I really appreciate that. It's a breath of fresh air. Climax We skip the massage this time around. I have no idea what movie we started watching. A few minutes in and she's giving me this slow, super-sensual blowjob. She's got some serious skill. Definitely knows what she's doing. Meanwhile; I'm smoking a joint and playing with her gorgeous titties and her cute, little round butt. Need I say more? I felt like a fucking King. For a few moments; I kinda struggled to take in all that epicness. To receive all that goodness. It was so damn good it started being too good. To my fragile little ego - of course. A few more puffs and I lay my head down, melting through the bed and into the deep, endless nothingness. She keeps going and going. I feel like I'm falling forever. Never hitting the ground. It's beyond epic. Pure ecstasy. God knows how long it has been, but I finally open my eyes. She knows I'm back. She stops for a moment and smiles at me. 'Are you enjoying yourself?' - she asks. I smile back at her and put my dick back into her mouth. Sliding it slowly deep into her throat. She's gagging a bit but I keep holding her head down. I was so close to cumming into her throat right there, right then. But I resisted and released her. She liked that a lot. A few tears running down her cute, round cheeks. Her eyes half closed - so seductive. A naughty smile on her face. There was little to no space for a thought to occur in my mind... But I remember this thought crossing my mind at some point; 'Holy shit! I just got my dick sucked so good I reached infinite bliss. Enlightenment!' Haha! It was ridiculously good. One very important thing I did not mention 'till now... is her HAIR. Jesus Christ. It's so damn long and so damn thick. Beautiful, brown curls. All the way down to her butt. Great to play around with. I wanted to eat her out so bad. Her pussy is so lovely. It is the essence of femininity. It's so delicate. So delicious. A true work of art. My tongue works its wonders. I speak quite a few languages. I think it's an advantage. Her head is buried deep in the pillow. Her moaning is turning me on like crazy. It's so raw and unfiltered. So real. So primal. So hot. I slowly slide my finger into her. Her pussy is gripping me tight. Just unbelievable. How can a girl be this damn tight? I am losing my mind over it. It's incredibly hot to me. Soon there was room for another finger. I am digging in all directions. Shifting gears. Exploring her divine temple. Then I lock down on her G spot. 'Come, come' motion. My tongue circling her clit. I can hear her chasing the biggest orgasm of her life. Barely having any room left for breathing. Her body showered with adrenaline. She does not cum. I kinda knew she wouldn't. She was chasing too hard. Instead of letting it come to her. It's exactly the same as with Truth-realization. And it's also a pattern I'm used to seeing in girls. Some girls struggle to cum. At least in the very beginning of hooking up with you. No matter what you do, they're always going to be just an inch away from that mind-blowing orgasm. I also struggle with this, from time to time. While the majority of guys cum too fast... I sometimes take forever to cum. Anyways; despite her not cumming, she definitely enjoyed the fuck out of the ride. I give her a few seconds to catch her breath and then start pushing my dick into that tiny, little hole. We agreed to ditch the condoms. Not gonna lie, that entry hurt a bit. No matter how wet she was and how long I've been fingering her. My dick is just too big to enter her just like that. I definitely cannot just shove myself into her. It's a slow, delicate process. I keep pushing slowly, gripping her body tightly. Breathing into her neck. Pulling her hear. Softly whispering in her ear. She's opening up for me. I can feel her muscles relaxing, giving me space. For every centimeter I go deeper; she goes higher and higher. Her eyes roll back and I finally hit the wall. There is no more deeper than this. A few moments of stillness. Vibration. And the ride begins. We fall into a rhythm. Lock into a steady tempo. Breathing in and out of each-other. The sound of her juicy little pussy taking my fat dick is too damn hot. It's jerking my mind off. ASMR style. I turn her around. Her hair wrapped around my hand and I'm hitting it from behind. There is no way I can do it full force. I'd kill the poor little thing. But goddamnit the girl can take it good. She's a real champ. I pull on her hair harder and now she's up and against my body. I kiss her neck. Both of her titties in my one hand. My other hand playing with her clit. She completely loses it. So much so she starts taking control and pounding back real hard. She turns into a wild animal. Yup, you guessed it. She crossed the line and hurt herself a bit. But she shook it off quickly. Demanding me to fuck her more. I love fucking her in all positions. But there's something special about her riding me. Jesus fucking Christ. Serious cardio workout. I'm lowkey afraid of us getting a heart attack at times lol. It's just otherworldly. She's gripping my body tight with her thighs. Her boobs on my chest. She's moaning directly into my ear. Both of my hands on her gorgeous, round butt cheeks. Better yet; both of her butt cheeks in my hands. It just fits perfectly. I love being in charge in this position. It hits the perfect spot. For both of us. I came like fucking Godzilla. The build up was insane. I pulled out the last split-second and came all over her ass and back. ...And we're both shaking again. Laughing while trying to catch our breath. It was a laughter out of pure happiness. Pure joy. Pure satisfaction. She stays like this on top of me for some time. We kiss and cuddle for a while. And then... I look into her eyes and say: 'We must be careful not to fall in love with each-other...' She knew right away what I meant. I mean... This is waaay more than just some casual, empty, meaningless sex. This is hardcore love-making. It took us both by surprise. We took a shower, I walked her to her car and then went for a short walk. It was then that I decided to start this diary. Final thoughts: Yes. The third time, which was last night, was even better. True story. Spoiler alert: She came all over my face. And all over my dick, too. That's why I needed a break tonight. Funny because not that long ago I was bitching about how I feel like fucking all day, all night. And now I can't do three nights in a row lol. I guess even the good can get too much. Or worse; lose its magic. I don't want that to happen. Then there's also this whole 'falling in love' thingy. Which I'm not entirely sure what to think about. I don't want to panic. And I also don't want to cut this out. It's amazing. It should not be stopped. Just moderated. I sure as hell don't want a relationship. She says she doesn't either, but I'm not so sure about that. I think she's falling hard for me. I don't want to hurt her or break her heart. And I don't want to fall in love with her, either. It could happen so easily, unless I, or, we stop it from happening. I need some time and space now. I don't want to lose control over this situation... I ditched 'V' earlier today. - Another FWB I had from before. It did not make sense to keep her around now that I'm regularly hooking up with 'J'. Besides her, there's still 'K'. We rarely hang out, but whenever we do - it's always awesome. Nowhere near as awesome as it is with 'J', but still pretty damn good. More on all that later.

One perspective on Life is that it is constantly evolving towards greater complexity, and therefore Life is better than Death for it allows the evolutionary process to continue. If this is True, then it can be said that God favors Good over Evil and Life over Death for Good and Life allow for complexity to expand. But from the nondual perspective, there is just the Eternal Now with Life constantly shapeshifting forms. Are the waves moving towards greater complexity, or are they just arising and falling into the ocean of Nothingness? If so, does this mean everything is random, and that the Universe is orderless? Or is there indeed a Divine Order to existence? Perhaps it's both/and? The Dreamer is just dreaming, but in the dream the complexity of the dream characters are ever-evolving?

Through the fields of scars and wounds, shining with dim light of non-existence. What tranquillity! What sweet peace! What inward serenity! What supreme felicity! An earnest of bliss! To reach beyond the web of spiritual deceit that mankind has been weaving for millennia and face the most horrible truth of all. Every single dream… shattered, trampled and lost. Every single word… silenced forever and evermore. Descent! Regress into prime, hideous, beautiful… Descent! Regress into prime, hideous, beautiful nothingness. Here, in fact, we may be in the presence of one of the most necessary of all Devils: the Ecumenical Unifier, champion of all efforts to remove invidious distinctions between nature and nurture, body and spirit, interdiction and impulse, time and eternity, individual and community, male and female, Hell and Heaven-and ultimately, of course, between man and God. While we may believe our world - our reality to be that is - is but one manifestation of the essence Other planes lie beyond the reach of normal sense and common roads But they are no less real than what we see or touch or feel Denied by the blind church 'cause these are not the words of God the same God that burnt the knowing I am nothing, I am no thing, I am not incessantly Not of the sun; nor the moon, nor of the stars... immesurably Not without me, nor within me, nothing sees... inwardly I will not sleep,I will not wake, I will not rest... impatiently Out of the many comes the One To lay waste the all and return to the None Without light The dark encloses all Our works would be but ash No knowledge of the time that crushes love to dust Or the life that's frozen deep within our veins Without dark The light burns out our eyes And turns each of us to ash Our hearts, too hard to ever learn to feel And mouths, laid open, deep in silent song Trapped within That which all collapses For fear of what may lay beyond When peace eludes And devastation happens A subtle glimpse of where we each belong

Watch shinzen Young's videos on dpdr on youtube. It's basically the experience of nothingness. God without love. He explains it. He also tells you how to get out of it. Love the tranquility to death or reconstruct a false sense of self.

@WaveInTheOcean couple points - i don't think that video Leo did on omniscience was a conflation of the finger and the moon or the map and the territory...rather it was to point out that God is not just Nothingness as some traditions preach. It is Infinity. That said I am the first to point out that I don't feel like it's an axis going in two separate directions. If you quiet the ego mind (no mind) you can become Infinite Mind. And this can be done via meditation as I can directly validate. Psychedelics just cut to the chase from what I have read (never had the need to try them).

This is more of a rant to be honest,,,, Fundamentalist Christianity amounts to a heartbreaking stupidity essentially being as Yogananda termed it. "Little more than the practice of " Jesusism" and "Churchianity", One reason Is the refusal of those to have an honest look at what was perpetrated by the Roman government's influence in manipulating many of the early Christian texts such as what occurred in the Council of Nicaea around 325 AD. Those who take the dogma handed down and accept it as a belief are doing them selves a grave disservice by simply perpetuating simply no other than a vested interests in knee high bullshit. What sense is there in an Anthropomorphic God the father scapegoating his son in a horrific sacrifice and torture because he made a snafu when he’s supposedly created us yahoo’s. I do give credence to the idea that there was an historical Jesus though who did carry out an act for demonstrating a much needed lesson for the evolution in consciousness for the betterment of mankind. That of mercy towards others and overlooking of grievances or forgiveness. But do you think this highly conscious being actually wants to be worshiped as a sort of idol? In my mind Jesus wants for all of us to be gifted with the kind of understanding whereby we can see though the ignorance and violence of those who still get caught in its grip. I have to admit that I’m still one of them but I keep on trying as best as I can. From Maurice Nicoll- THE LAW OF THE PENDULUM “Our moods are all hung on to pendulums. We should not trust them. Unfortunately, we identify with them. We take them as ourselves. We say: ‘I feel,’ ‘I think,’ and so on. We forget that ‘Real I’ is in the centre of the pendulum-swing, and we allow ourselves to swing between ex- citement and dejection, between enthusiasm and depression, between over-valuation and under-valuation, between conceit and humility, and so on, endlessly. In all this there is no centre of gravity.” V. 1, pp. 328-9 THE FEELING OF NOTHINGNESS “When the Work says that a man must come to realize his own nothingness before he can be re-born, it does not mean that he must humble himself and so on, but that he must by long self-observation actually begin to realize that he is nothing and that there is no such person as himself. The object of this is to get into a position, psycho- logically speaking, between the opposites...Why is it so important to get somewhere into the centre of the pendulum and not swing to and fro? Because here, between the opposites, lie all the possibilities of growth. Here influences from higher levels can reach us. Here, in this place where one can feel one’s own nothingness (and where one is therefore free from contradictions), influences and meanings com- ing from higher centres, which have no contradictions, can be felt. Not regarding yourself as good or bad, not priding yourself on being just or otherwise, not thinking you are well-treated or badly-treated, not being caught by either movement through identifying, you come into this mid-position. This is not easy! With personality active, it is impossible.” V. 1, p. 329 INTERNAL PHARISEES “They read about the Pharisees and Christ’s continual condemnation of them, but they do not see that it applies to themselves—to their own False Personality. The Pharisee in you is your False Personality; it is always pretending to be what it is not.” V. 3, p. 916 CHANGE OF MIND “The mind must change before the rest of the man can change. This is the same teaching as in the Gospels where it is said a man must first repent which really means in the Greek, change his mind. To change one’s mind means to think in a new way. But, to think in a new way, one requires to have new ideas and new knowledge.” V. 2, p. 430 CHANGE OF MIND II “Now Man, a self-developing organism by creation, does not realize how much he owes by remaining asleep in life. He thinks he is owed. Thinking sensually, he must. This attitude needs to be reversed. It cannot be except by ideas that bring about metanoia—that is, change of mind...Now when a man in the Work begins to realize how much he owes by his life of sleep and yet can have it cancelled, he ceases to preoccupy himself daily with what he believes others owe him.” V. 5, pp. 1649-50

468. What It Means To "Go Meta" House of cards has some great breaking of the 4th wall. Examples: Attracting females is not about what is explicitly stated, it doesn't matter what you say verbally when you're trying to attract a female. What matters is the implicit honest signals that are sent based on how strongly you're able to embody your masculine authenticity and the kind of confidence and humor and detachment from outcome that you're able to display. This is one of the craziest and unbelievable aspects of game when you learn to really game. It doesn't matter what you verbally say, it matters what you sub communicate and what you do. This is what most people don't understand about pickup. Even women say those cheesy pickup lines won't work on me it's just showing they're misunderstanding pickup. It matters how the guy shows up. If shows up and he's confident, he's cocky, he's humorous, he's lighthearted, he's detached, he's cool, he's suave, it doesn't matter if you know he's a player you'll still get attracted. It can be really effective to be meta about picking up a girl. The authentic opener. Admitting something bad and negative about yourself. You're able to have balls and own all things about yourself. And people admire that. Meta-lying. Lying about lying. Deception Self-deception series, very important. There's a meta component to deception. To execute a successful deception you also have to deceive about the fact that you're deceiving. To deceive yourself effectively you have to twice deceive yourself, meta-deceive yourself. By deceiving yourself that you deceived yourself. If you are in denial you'll also deny the fact that you're in denial. Criticizing others. The selfishness of others only bothers me because I myself am selfish. If I want others to stop being selfish I have to make the first and final move, which is to eliminate selfishness within me, and then it doesn't even matter that others eliminate selfishness within them because it no longer bothers me. That'd be Selfish with a capital S. Strange-loopy collapsing between selfishness and selflessness. Neti-neti method. Going meta on the entire world. I'm not this and not that. Keep going meta on everything until you're awake. The finger-pointing to the moon cited by zen masters. Going meta on the finger. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Every single logic itself requires a meta-logic to ground that logic in. And then a metalogic requires a meta-meta-logic to ground it in. That's because all logics are ultimately groundless. Because all of reality is ultimately groundless. So anytime you're dealing with a closed system, which is what a logic is, there's always some larger system that that closed system has to be couched within some larger frame. Any finite frame has another frame outside of it. Meta-philosophy. Philosophy about how to do philosophy. Meta-politics. If conventional politics is about dividing ourselves into tribes and trying to dominate the other one. Meta-politics is about raising the consciousness of everybody involved in the game to the point where they can recognize all these tribal dynamics. And the way in which our worldview and our belief systems are shaping our biases and then we're fighting over these different biases. How it's all just about brute survival, and that our survival agendas are arbitrary and that really we need to spiritualize our politics and make it about consciousness not about winning any particular one policy battle like abortion, civil rights, racism, gun control, etc. Really, politics is about raising the consciousness of mankind and getting everybody to love each other. Meta-science. The stuff of deconstructing the myth of science. How we can make science better? by questioning its foundations. Meta-business. How to create a more conscious business. How business is done as a whole. What are the externalities that businesses create? What kind of impact do businesses have on their environments and on their marketplaces. How do businesses shape the consciousness of mankind individually and collectively? How businesses are just functions of survival usually and then trying to look at business from this higher perspective. Meta-media. Media about media. Meta-relationship. There has to be you and her and then the larger holon of the two of you. Meta-spirituality. The study of all the different schools. Aligning all of those together and taking the best parts. Understanding what all of them are trying to do. Meta-work. Doing work by while you're doing your work finding ways to do your work better. Meta-sex. During sex, you want to be in the flow and moment. But meta-sex would be figuring out ways of how to please each other better and learning how to improve the quality of the sex and the intimacy and then that would be meta-sex. Meat of this episode: Many of our deepest problems can only be solved by going meta. Getting locked in battles on content while not seeing the structure. If you're gonna do something well you must bring the method of doing it, or process of doing it, itself under scrutiny. If you want to do language really well you have to observe your language and create a language about language. If not it's like looking at the moon through a telescope but never spending any time to inspect the telescope itself. If you're too attached to your method then you'll not be able to step outside to then improve the method. It's not that you don't want to look for corruptions where there are none. But that if you went and truly looked you'd be horrified. Going meta creates detachment, that's one of the superpowers of going meta. The whole logic behind spirituality or awakening is that you go meta, meta, meta, meta, meta, meta, and go so meta that eventually you identify with absolutely nothing, and then nothing can hurt you you become literally immortal. Your truest nature is infinite transcendence. That's what makes spirituality so confusing, your mind doesn't want a direct path towards emptiness and complete detachment. It wants to attach to stuff. Therefore it makes spirituality into this very complicated, controversial, difficult ordeal, simply because on its way to nothingness it wants to cling to absolutely everything that it can. You personally suffer when you can't sufficiently suffer and also important domains of life like science, politics, logic, religion, they also suffer when they aren't able to. Jail-breaking the mind requires that the mind go meta. The mind is always engaged in an active process of constructing reality, but the mind is not aware that it's doing so and needs to deny that it's doing so. If you don't deny it you realize that reality is a construction and therefore becomes illusory and therefore it loses its reality. Reality is really just a lack of consciousness of the fact that you're dreaming this whole thing up. The trick is to dream it up and then deny that you dreamt it, that's the whole game. That's the game humans play, always constructing reality to suit ourselves. The trick with science is that no amount of science can get you to realize that you're inside of a dream. Science is happening within a frame. Scientists think that it is this universal solvent. But it's just a picture, in a frame, hanging on a wall in a giant museum with a thousand other paintings. The same goes for rationality. Also just a single painting in a frame. If you get stuck in one single frame from your vantage frame it will seem as though that frame is all that there is. That's what a frame is. It seems total, but it's not total. That's the whole trick. To realize that it's not total, you have to be able to go meta. If you can't go meta or beyond something that thing ends up being the totality of your reality. But really you've just confined yourself to a kiddie pool and there's a giant ocean out there. And no amount of logic or debate will convince you that there's more outside your kiddie pool. The only thing that'll convince you that there's something more outside your kiddie pool is the intuition that there might be something more and then your personal effort to step outside the pool and go find something more. That'd be going meta. That's why scientists can be so dumb, and why highly rational people with high IQs can be so clueless about the nature of existence, and consciousness, and spirituality. Why is meta such a deep feature of reality? It's because reality is infinite. It has no limits. No outer boundary. Completely open-ended. There's always more, no matter how much you've seen, there's always an infinite amount more. Reality is one, reality is infinite, absolute infinity. But we humans we're finite creatures, and we create lots of finite closed systems via language, symbols, thought, and logic. We always try to grasp some little corner of reality, but every little piece of reality we grasp is not the whole thing by definition. But then we take our little finite closed systems and we wanna pretend as though they are the whole thing. But every finite closed system has a boundary around it. If it has a boundary around it that means there's an inside and there's outside. Infinity is that which has no inside and outside, inside and outside are the same, but within every finite closed system, there's always an inside and an outside. And this is where the problem happens. If you have a system that has an inside or an outside that means you could be inside it or outside it. So to go meta is to jump from inside to outside it. Then you can see it. If you're inside of it you can't fully see it. When you're inside of it it seems like it is the total thing. When you're outside of it you can see that oh this is just one part of something larger. Since reality is made out of holons you can infinitely jump outside one holon to another one and another one. And why's reality infinite and not finite? Simply because there can't exist anything outside of reality that would constrain it or put a boundary around it because anything that's outside of it by definition has to be inside of it. As it turns out truth exists, truth and reality are identical, and Truth is infinitely meta. Truth with a capital T is the whole of reality, everything that exists. And that Truth is infinite, it spans forever, it's endless. And this Truth is transcendental, it can't be captured with symbols, thoughts, logic, or any kind of closed systems or language. Any time you try to capture the Truth in a closed system you can capture a piece of it, but the piece is never the whole, therefore you can keep talking and talking and talking but you're never ever going to be able to reach the end of Truth. Truth always escapes symbolic and systemic encapsulation. (Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) So why do smart people not understand God? Because God is not a bearded man in the cloud. God is infinity. God is Truth. God is infinitely meta. To understand God your mind needs to become infinitely meta, literally detach from the whole of reality, every single one of your attachments. And you have to grasp it implicitly. You can't grasp God explicitly in a finite manner, because God is infinite. You can't make God finite. Scientists, rationalists, and other materialists make the mistake of asking for proof for God. But you're asking for a quantified, formalized, finite, explicit, symbolic proof, via language, or logic, or mathematics or whatever, but by definition that can't be God because that's finite. The problem is that you're not understanding what you're asking for. That it's impossible. And the impossible thing that you're asking for you're taking as evidence that God isn't real. It's like you're asking for a square circle. The more fear you have the lower you are stuck. So really just ask yourself what things am I clinging to? What are the payoffs you get by clinging to your ideology? The problem with spiritual growth is that it can't be forced upon you. You have to come to it yourself. Don't let Leo push you beyond where you're at. Maybe you have to go explore the lower stages. Burn through those attachments. And realize they're not as great as you think they are. Then you come back after those 10 or 20 years. When you see the frame of a situation and able to pop outside of the frame, when you do this there's a certain delight that fills your soul. The delight of meta-recognition. You recognize that the finger is pointing towards the moon, rather than just a finger that you look at. You discover that there's something implicit that's being suggested. And when you discover that implicit thing it gives you delight. Going meta has this slippery quality to it. Just like with a really good joke has a strong punchline, and you either get the punch line or you don't. And if you don't get the punchline, explaining the punchline to a person who didn't get it, is not the same thing as just getting it right of the bet. Next time you get that meta-recognition notice how it feels, and ask yourself why are you enjoying it? And then maybe it'll make you more and more interested and then it'll maybe one day lead to your awakening. With going meta you're in some way touching the implicit, touching the divine, discovering the divine within the universe. That's one of the charms of doing spiritual work. Going meta on the topic of going meta. The ultimate level of meta.

@Loving Radiance @FlyingLotus Well edited notes! 200. All Of Religion Explained In One Video Religion vs Science - The origins of all major religions are actually grounded in a truth that the rational, scientific mind hates to admit. Why are there so many similarities between religions? And why have they gotten such a strong foothold on culture and society? Rationally minded people have a lot more similarities with religious people than they'd like to admit. Everything said here is empirical. You can verify this in your own direct experience if you want. The problem with the science vs religion debate: humans are extremely dogmatic. Clinging to a worldview or belief. Doing it unconsciously. Thinking you have the facts. This isn't a problem of religion, but of the human psyche. We don't just treat these issues emotionally. Even your rational view of looking at the world is just as grounded in emotions and dogma. Another problem is that the rational person doesn't see any supernatural stuff and says: "why then would I assume that supernatural stuff exists?" Why do so many religions exist? With so many common elements and threats? You have to think about this very open-mindedly. Following explanations of the origin of religions are wrong: Religion is just primitive stupidity, superstition, tradition, social-political controlling mechanism. Might be true to some degree, but they miss the core. The core: There is an absolute Truth and this absolute Truth is accessible to human beings. It is not accessible to the rational mind. This the rational mind hates. But if your mind is rejecting this idea and it's not even open to this possibility you're being dogmatic. Rejecting out of hand. Why does this happen? You've got a sense of personal self. You believe that you are a body, this mind, and brain inside the body. You've got this personal story, you can remember the time you were born, the way you grew up, the way you're gonna die, etc. That all makes pretty good sense. Except there's one problem. Problem: If you look very carefully and very deeply, what you're gonna realize is that this sense of self that you have is actually an illusion and that there's nothing as a sense of self. You can jailbreak the mind from the brain. Answering the deep existential question of who you are. You are literally nothingness. Cannot be believed or logically understood, it has to be directly experienced. That'd be enlightenment. Second enlightenment. What is existence? The absolute nature of existence is revealed. All of reality comes from Nothingness. Another enlightenment. Everything is nothing. The same on an existential/metaphysical level. Absolute Truth is the ultimate enlightenment. Existence arises out of nothing. This Nothingness/ultimate Void is God. The source of everything. No space, no location, no size, no personal God. Nothingness doesn't have any of those qualities. We're not talking about an idea of Nothingness, which is something. We're talking about literally Nothingness. You are Nothing. God is Nothing. You are God. This is the core of every major religion. All major religions are grounded in the truth of no-self. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Sufism, Yogic practices in India and the east are founded on this. This explains a whole hell of a lot if you look at religions through this lens. But the truth of no-self has to be directly experienced. Thinking about Nothingness is something. You can't get at the Nothingness through thinking. You cannot do science without language. There's a third alternative of understanding reality. 1. Conceptualize about it. Creating a model about how reality works. Science and religions do this. 2. An even better one. Experience it with your own senses. First-person experiences. And science is great because it founded its models on experiences. It seems like this is the end of the story. 3. What if you could actually be the thing itself. But you're extremely attached to your selfhood. Jailbreaking your brain doesn't happen easily because everything in your psyche resists it. You can't communicate being. Being something, you have to be it. Everything you communicate about it is just more story. So the only way to get and use this third alternative of being is to actually do the being yourself. Because it's so difficult to actually jailbreak your own mind that when you talk about these things to other people they construct stories and they turn this stuff into belief systems. And those beliefs turn into myths. It's mostly talked about in analogy. Because you can't talk about it only be it. That's a big problem because other forms of human knowledge can be easily spread. So the only way you can mass-spread the truth of no-self is by turning it into a belief system that makes it necessarily false. Think about what life was like 5000-2000 years ago. Scientific principles and sound philosophical reasoning processes were nonexistent. So there was not a very scientific way to explain the things explained here now. Then a few in a million breakthrough and some stay silent, but then others want to distribute their realization of living in a dream. All they could do is tell stories because their path to an enlightenment experience wasn't well studied or established. It also had to be made palatable to the culture, that's in a sense what religion tries to do. But no matter what explanation you give of no-self it doesn't really matter. Because every explanation is wrong. The only right "explanation" is to have the person become the Truth themselves and get it for themselves. Every twist put on it is just a tool, a teaching mechanism. The question is are you gonna be receptive to this tool or want it. Getting lost in ideas and stories, looking for it where you will never find enlightenment. That's what ended up happening with religions. Talking about it without realizing what the hardcore mystics were talking about. If you study every major religion you discover that there's a hardcore mystical strand called esoteric. Living religion in a true way. Seeming very radical and very anti-mainstream. But that what the truth is. They're usually demonized. They can't compete with the hyped-up bullshit that's generated when you take the truth of no-self and you spin a bunch of crazy story about it and give it to the dogmatic mind. The dogmatic mind can't understand the truth of no-self, but it can very easily take no self, spin some tails around it and then understand those and latch on and cling to those. Which is exactly what religions do. Terms and concepts in religion mean really: God = Absolute Nothingness. You are it. But identified with your body. Heaven & hell = Hell refers to your current existence of being stuck and identified with your body that's going to die. And because of that, there's suffering. Heaven is the disidentification of yourself with your body and becoming absolute Nothingness. No one and nothing can't be harmed. It exists absolutely all the time forever. Untouchable. Faith = Your ability to open your mind up to the third possibility. (Concepts, Experience, Being) You have to have faith in it.