Search the Community

I’m trying to understand an experience I had that I interpreted as a possible awakening or mystical opening, but unlike the peaceful or blissful awakening experiences I often hear about, mine eventually became extremely frightening. I had been studying spirituality, nonduality, and consciousness for around five years, so I had a substantial theoretical background before this happened. I was already familiar with ideas like ego death, surrender, the illusion of separation, and the possibility that consciousness is fundamental. Then I went through a period where reality started feeling radically different. Perception became extremely vivid and unusual. Ordinary things could look strange or almost unreal, and I experienced an intense sense of love and unity. I also became deeply focused on another person, whom I experienced as the Beloved or as somehow representing Reality itself. At one point, it felt as though I was getting extraordinarily close to something fundamental. The usual sense of separation seemed to be dissolving. But then fear became overwhelming. I began to feel almost like prey being hunted, as though something was coming after me. It felt almost like I was approaching a point where the self itself would disappear. Instead of surrendering, I retreated. In the metaphor I've been using since then, it felt like a moth approaching a flame: the moth is drawn toward the flame, but eventually realizes that getting too close may mean its own destruction, so it flies away. Why do some awakening experiences seem profoundly peaceful while others become terrifying?

All that matters is he is here. So let's get him some pussy. Hell. With all that nonduality talk he probably needs it.

@Breakingthewall aren´t you supposed to be in the spiritual niche? Or did you get fed up from the endless nonduality debates

Hmmm, but do you think this might be conflating "only a certain kind of person is interested in authenticity" with authenticity only being important inside that microcosm? I perhaps may be misunderstanding your passage here - prompting to be corrected Consider mathematics: only a certain type of person might spend their evenings thinking about prime numbers - but that doesn't mean prime numbers are only applicable/relevant within the mathematical microcosm. ------ Are you pointing to authenticity being heavily context driven? If I ask someone "what is authenticity?" there is an inherited context smuggled in to the answer that changes the answer almost every time - and while context is always relevant, it seems even more so with authenticity. "Authentic to what?" then becomes the refining question - and I can't escape asking this. The above is why I also semi concluded authenticity does not have one universal definition (it can if we consider nonduality) .... because it is a relational term - it exists in the space between me and whatever I am acting in authenticity to. And that space changes as a result of any one of the two elements changing - it is relationally constituted.

@Inliytened1 nonduality is true, but also you are human monkey that has needs, in that paradox we live our lives. If you believe you are God a little too much, you soon will become a spiritual narcissist and bypass mundane human stuff acting from a high horse, look up Bentinho Massaro, great example of this

@Jodistrict exactly, just a bunch of nonduality nerds

That’s right I can’t stop talking with a passion about this stuff, I just can’t stop, I enjoy talking about this stuff, and will probably do so until I take my last breath. For clarity, I can’t stop talking about nonduality. l love the subject topic with a passion.

@cetusyeah that makes sense to me, the version of nonduality that Bernardo Kastrup and other rational-spiritualists where after death you just merge with the whole with no individuality left wasn't very intellectually or emotionally satisfying to me. I think in an interview Bernardo was asked about death and he said he pictures it being like a sensory deprivation tank. But I don't think the data (NDEs, past life memories, out of body experiences) supports that.

They can. In fact, they work quite well for many tasks without a world model, especially the ones involving symbol manipulation such as code and parts of math like algebra. But the gap still exists from the intelligence humans exhibit in that humans have an internal physical model of how the world works and they use it to make internal simulations and take actions (planning). When I lift a glass full of water, I have an internal model that predicts how the water will flow depending on the movements I make. I can even visualize it in my mind's eye (prediction). This prediction is continuous, and it captures nuances missed if we were to use only language to model it. If LLMs don't have this internal world model, they can only plan in token space — fragments of language — a representation that fails to capture the nuances of real world. Even if you say LLMs learn an implicit world model from text, it's still a text-learned model. Nonduality points that language carves the world into discrete categories, reality doesn't respect those cuts, and a text-learned world model inherits the cuts.

A nonduality teacher can never teach another person what’s being spoken. They’ll have nothing to give you. There’s no teacher, only speaking, only the message, only the listening and only the hearing of the message. Only when the message is heard with absolute clarity is the message listened to, heard. People either hear the message or they don’t, no other person can be your listening or hearing. Only you. From the moment pure clarity is heard…there’s no more teacher or student, or message. There’s just you and you alone.

There isn't a right or wrong path......every path is neutral.....that's what the meaning of nonduality is trying to point out. Every path can't be known? Its freedom from that psychological belief that something needs to happen in order for THIS to already be the Grand Finallie. THIS is already home base.

@Emerald I agree that there are many spiritual bullshiters on this forum, that is why I never open a topic in the spiritual niche on this forum, because you just get nonduality psychos argue everything as unimportant and the only important thing is that everything is one. Aka spirtiual bullshiters or spiritual bypassing, ignoring everything worldly. I appreciate you saying what you find attractive in a men, but also we will give our opinion on that. I think I am attractive, but I still have many nice guy stupid habits, every guy does this, they open the conversation and ask all the stupid questions, I do this too and it is so hard to unlearn, so many mistakes that are able to be avoided. Actually 90% of what I am working on around game right now is talking allot with many girls and trying to ask no questions in the first 2 mins, speaking loudly and being able to free flow more without letting the nerves make you end a conversation prematurely. Also if I can joke in the beginning of the conversation, I already know I am doing very well.

Thanks for letting us know. There’s no such thing as nonduality. From belief to clarity. 👍

Angelo Dillulo is a popular nonduality teacher on youtube. The video critic is a former monk. One of the subjects discussed is the monetization of spirituality and the wider culture of modern non-duality.

It’s the traditional method. It’s the same with the Vedanta Society. When you are initiated you will be given a mantra with no talk of nonduality even though Vedanta is nondual. That is because in the traditonal way, purification most come before self realization. You have to quiet the mind before you can make meaningful progress in meditation. In my opinion, the traditionalists are correct. Westerners cherry pick and want the cherries without doing any work.

From what I understand, he is saying the telos of reality is directly intertwined with its complexity. Without nested order, you cannot have evolution. Evolution happens within one's own life, and as a species, so if you believe the relative is a microcosm of the absolute then ontological and spiritual evolution becomes a necessity. If one believes the unifying substance or substrate of reality is some form of matter, then I can see how one would come to the conclusion that evolution is purely a precipitate of biology. What nonduality doesn't fully articulate is that the universe has to be structured in a way that is top down, and bottom up, at the same time. This is how order and complexity are tied to telos.

To be fair , my understanding of what is so called standard nonduality is primarily influenced by actualized.org, so maybe I'm taking some things for granted that a lot of practioners don't .

That sounds like standard nonduality 👀.

Wouldn't meditation under anti-psychotic medication be perfect for you? It stops you from relapsing into another psychotic outbreak while still being able to integrate your psyche and explore nonduality. Just stop doing crazy shit like running naked into the street. It's just bad gameplay. Think of yourself as God playing a human video game chracter. If you fuck up your human's life you are fucked, doesn't matter if your ultimate self is not affected in the grand schemes of things. If you meditate under anti-psychosis you will probably still experience a sort of mini psychosis because ultimately the experience is not caused by chemicals going haywire in your brain; it's due to awakening. Just integrate the lessons sober before you go hardcore into meditation. Someone completely sober can induce psychosis in themselves just by what they think about. Just be careful of having already figured out grounding mechanisms before you start to engage in spiritual practice. It sounds silly but masturbating is one of my mechanisms. As long as you do it privately it will ground you because it will reinforce the paradigm that we are currently operating under i.e. we are both human males and woman are sexy and you wanna fuck them. If you deconstruct it further then you can realize that women are just a figment of your greatest self but that doesn't really matter since it's a great part of reality and you should accept that boundary to remain a sane human being able to function in reality.

I'll be honest, it's still hard for me to understand how God realization is different from traditional nonduality, maybe I haven't tripped enough (then again Leo also says to not trip much in your 20s sooo....). By traditional nonduality I mean Advaita Vedanta , not Buddhism, although plenty of Buddhists said Advaita things , like Huang Po and Bankei who said all was mind. But what I will say is, Leo excels in the realms of developmental psychology and conscious politics, that's something the traditions don't have.

First of all, nonduality is a relative quality/perspective, not Absolute Truth (which includes and transcends both duality and nonduality). Secondly, relative opposites never dissappear. They just become integrated, and thereby transcended. That's the beauty of Reality. It accommodates and allows absolutely everything, because it is absolutely everything. ☯️

Duality and nonduality are two sides of the same coin.

Illusion. This is one of those words which are being thrown around in spiritual circles like they're confetti, and yet very few people seem to understand what the word actually refers to. So, let's analyze the confetti so that we can see it for what it really is(n't). Here's what an illusion is NOT: It's not something that isn't real. It's not something that doesn't exist. It's not a hallucination that is being "dreamed up" by some mysterious invisible being. Here's what an illusion IS: It is an incomplete perception (which is a tautology, since all perception is necessarily incomplete). It is a relative perspective (as opposed to absolute truth). It is a part of reality (as opposed to ALL of reality). Here's an analogy: When we see a magician standing on a stage and performing a magic trick, why do we call that magic trick an illusion? Is it because there is no magician, no white rabbit and no hat that the rabbit is being pulled out of? NOPE. We call it an illusion because we are only seeing part of what is actually happening; we see a real magician pulling a real rabbit out of a real hat, but what we don't see is all of the stuff that is going on behind the scenes - all of the things that have been carefully hidden from our view so that we can be amazed and surprised by the things that we do see happening on stage; and since we are missing the full picture, it appears to us like magic. Does this mean that the illusion is "bad"? No, it doesn't. Not only is the existence of illusions not bad, but in fact it is a necessary condition for reality being able to experience/be aware of itself, since reality can only ever be partially perceived and experienced, but never as a 100% complete whole. No illusions = no experience of reality. Here are examples of things that are illusions: The black letters appearing on a white screen that you are seeing now are an illusion. The thought "those black letters appearing on a white screen are just an illusion" is an illusion. The notion that there is something rather than nothing is an illusion. The notion that there is nothing rather than something is an illusion. The notion that reality is physical is an illusion. The notion that reality is a dream is an illusion. The notion that you are human is an illusion. The notion that you are not human is an illusion. The notion that you are consciousness is an illusion. The notion that you are not consciousness is an illusion. Duality is an illusion. Nonduality is an illusion. Oneness is an illusion. Multiplicity is an illusion. Solipsism is an illusion. Time is an illusion. Timelessness is an illusion. Form is an illusion. Formlessness is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. No free will is an illusion. Meaning is an illusion. Meaninglessness is an illusion. Self is an illusion. No-self is an illusion. Anything that can be perceived, experienced and be expressed with words is an illusion. Again: An illusion is NOT something that doesn't exist. An illusion is a part of reality that "stands out" (in your awareness) from the rest of reality. So not only do illusions exist, but as a matter of fact, ILLUSIONS ARE THE ONLY THING(S) THAT EXIST. That which does not exist - which doesn't "stand out" - is the Absolute, which is no-thing aka. everything. --- All of what you just read is an illusion (-> a relative perspective). And all of what you are going to reply will also be an illusion. Now, are you going to cling to one illusion and reject the other, or are you going to be aware of that which holds, encompasses, expresses itself as and transcends all illusions? Your choice.

He is both a genius and a creepy loser. Nonduality. Yin-yang.

It is timeless. Its the same message you've been hearing your whole life except its wrapped up in a great, entertaining movie. Just like the word awakening is. Or enlightenment, God realization, nonduality, buddha nature, christ consciousness, gnosis, the list goes on forever. To borrow from The Matrix again here, you can only be shown the door - you're the one that has to walk through it. If you haven't experienced 'Know Thyself' then to you its just a story - a pointer. If you do Know Thyself then you lost any angst over pointers such as God and/or solipsism.