Nonduality often gave me a rather nihilistic or helpless outlook on life.

[TheSpiritualBunny]

I don't know why, but I started to understand Nonduality way before watching Leo's videos or any other videos about it, I didn't even know that term back then. But during my later teens to early 20s, I just started to see that you can't seem to put things into strict categories, but they are on a spectrum. Like in chemistry, Metal and nonmetal. I saw that there isn't a strict boundary, but instead the elements gradually go from metal to nonmetal from left to right. Or with mental illnesses, no one has either just Depression or not, or ADHD or not, or OCD or not, or Autism or not (not really a mental illness). I just started to see how everything bleeds into each other.

Then at about 21 I started using drugs (not just psychedelics, so I'll keep it short), not for Nonduality, but just because I was curious. But I surprisingly got insights from them, stimulants often made me contemplate things, where at some point I came to the conclusion that wishing or imagining for something to be different makes no sense, because everything just is the was it is, and it can't be any other was. During my dissociative drug abuse I became completely aware that I have no free will as this ego, I'm (my ego self) is just a part of the whole universe, which happens in a continious flow. You can't blame anyone including yourself, it completely destroyed the boundary between what I'm responsible for and what others are responsible for. It went so far that I just became completely aware all language, distinctions, basically our whole systeme in which we operate is a complete illusion, it completely breaks down when you investigate it deep enough, I'm aware that the words I'm typing here are also just nonsense which can only work within dualities.

But this just made me feel very helpless, since I knew our whole thought systemes and languages are complete illusions, but we still have to use them. I couldn't say anymore what is my fault and what are other peoples faults. Doing something "good" didn't make sense anymore because that's also an illusion. However, I had a lot of puzzle pieces already, and finding Leo's videos about Nonduality helped me piece many of them together, like that there is an Absolute. love + hate = Love, good + bad = Good, free will + determinism = Will. But some things I still don't understand, besides deconstructing my ego to persue enlightenment, what should I do with that? How should I do good when everything is ultimately Good? I don't wanna use nonduality as an excuse to do "evil" things, but no matter what I will do, even if I go on the streets and shoot up Heroin, it is ultimately Good, since it's gods Will for the purpose to maximize Love. So this still makes me confused, and I don't know what to do about that.

Thank you for reading this, I'd love to hear your opinions or suggestions.

[WaveInTheOcean]

It is all illusion, play, maya. Everything that happens may be Good, Perfect, Love. But... this is from the Highest Perspective. From the Human Perspective, life, reality is serious business filled with dualities: heroin is bad for you, carrots are good. Being alone, isolated is bad. Socializing is good. Having no purpose is bad. Having a purpose is good. Etc.

No matter how high your consciousness get, no matter the peaks of infinite understanding you have climbed to, you are still bound by survival mechanics as long as you are a human being. You need sleep, exercise, food, friends, purpose, otherwise you will feel bad.

All language and thought systems are ultimately based on the axioms of survival. You must survive. 

You have to accept survival. You are a survival machine. Everyone are. Some are just more sophistacted than others, but survival machines we all are.

Now, why have I/You -- as God -- created reailty in such a way that it feels like I am not God, but a separate self programmed to survive? Well that's a good question. Probably for the thrill of it, creation.

I cannot create without making distinctions, without creating dualities, without fragmenting myself up.

Everything serves a purpose. You shouldn't be good. That's a choice you have to make.

Make some choices, you have to -- you are always making choices whether you're conscious of it or not.

Edited December 27, 2020 by WaveInTheOcean

[Nahm]

Go by how you feel. 

[VeganAwake]

Pertaining to Awakening or Enlightenment this all sounds completely normal. 

sounds like you're still getting a bit caught up in concepts/thinking but maybe not staying caught up very long ?

Nihilism or nothing matters does not sit well with the ego or sense of self because it gives it nothing to strive toward or grasp ahold of. 

There's no telling how long some of these emotions will play out as they become the new norm. Just know it's very common and completely normal ❤

[TheSpiritualBunny]

5 hours ago, WaveInTheOcean said:

It is all illusion, play, maya. Everything that happens may be Good, Perfect, Love. But... this is from the Highest Perspective. From the Human Perspective, life, reality is serious business filled with dualities: heroin is bad for you, carrots are good. Being alone, isolated is bad. Socializing is good. Having no purpose is bad. Having a purpose is good. Etc.

No matter how high your consciousness get, no matter the peaks of infinite understanding you have climbed to, you are still bound by survival mechanics as long as you are a human being. You need sleep, exercise, food, friends, purpose, otherwise you will feel bad.

All language and thought systems are ultimately based on the axioms of survival. You must survive. 

You have to accept survival. You are a survival machine. Everyone are. Some are just more sophistacted than others, but survival machines we all are.

Now, why have I/You -- as God -- created reailty in such a way that it feels like I am not God, but a separate self programmed to survive? Well that's a good question. Probably for the thrill of it, creation.

I cannot create without making distinctions, without creating dualities, without fragmenting myself up.

Everything serves a purpose. You shouldn't be good. That's a choice you have to make.

Make some choices, you have to -- you are always making choices whether you're conscious of it or not.

Even thought I never experienced it, I kinda understood it that even tho I'm god, even at the highest state of consciousness I will never be able to experience unlimited power. Leo said he became so conscious that he could have put a million dollars in his bank account, but he didn't see the point in doing that. The reason you don't, and therefore can't do such things is that in these high consciousness states you just see that everything is perfection and love, so you wouldn't change the flow of it. 

So I just don't know what to do with my life, stuff like making a buisness, earning lots of money, sex and getting into relationships seems more and more pointless to me. I could try to make the world a better, well "better" place or go and meditate in a cave in the mountains, I don't know.

[TheSpiritualBunny]

5 minutes ago, VeganAwake said:

Pertaining to Awakening or Enlightenment this all sounds completely normal. 

sounds like you're still getting a bit caught up in concepts/thinking but maybe not staying caught up very long ?

Nihilism or nothing matters does not sit well with the ego or sense of self because it gives it nothing to strive toward or grasp ahold of. 

There's no telling how long some of these emotions will play out as they become the new norm. Just know it's very common and completely normal ❤

I don't really feel like that anymore. So from my understanding, I can really only do "good", as in good as a relative. Which means I can help reduce suffering for living things that my ego tells me are important. Which are Humans and probably the majority of animals. But I will still always be aware that this "meaning" is something my ego made up. It's just.......so strange, I do kinda love it.

[PepperBlossoms]

7 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

love + hate = Love, good + bad = Good, free will + determinism = Will.

By Love, do you mean appreciation/admiration/thankfulness?  Or, can you explain these some more?

7 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

since it's gods Will for the purpose to maximize Love.

Although I find that there really is no purpose to anything, there seems to be this push/pull towards optimization.. what if it is more about maximizing optimization and love is just interpreted and allows for as such? optimization cannot beat optimization as it itself is optimization.  Good/love tends to be what is more optimal for the system and bad/hate tends to be what is suboptimal.

Edited December 28, 2020 by PepperBlossoms

[Lyubov]

try a dualistic path then or just not take in theory that makes you feel this way. 

Several dull non-dual teachers out there who speak little on love or have a really dry style of teaching. 

I mostly ignore anyone out there in that sort of neo advaita / zen / overly new agey camp. My attention and time is precious and there is plenty of content out there for me to explore. 

Edited December 28, 2020 by Lyubov

[VeganAwake]

1 hour ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

It's just.......so strange, I do kinda love it.

Oh yeah it's wild & crazy... totally unexpected. 

[TheSpiritualBunny]

1 hour ago, PepperBlossoms said:

By Love, do you mean appreciation/admiration/thankfulness?  Or, can you explain these some more?

Although I find that there really is no purpose to anything, there seems to be this push/pull towards optimization.. what if it is more about maximizing optimization and love is just interpreted and allows for as such? optimization cannot beat optimization as it itself is optimization.  Good/love tends to be what is more optimal for the system and bad/hate tends to be what is suboptimal.

What you describe here is the normal notion of love from our society, which I think is just one way love is expressed, which is the most obvious form of love. Leo described it differently where he said that since everything is love, you can compare love to lego bricks from which our universe is made of, and a big lego brick made from the small ones is what our culture understands as love (it's at the beginning of "what is love part 2", he explains it better).

Ultimate love is everything, everyone can justify what they are doing, no matter how horrible the things they do seem. So everyone was or is acting out of love, even Hitler, because from his viewpoint, what he was doing would make the world better. Obviously Hitlers love was very limited, but it was the best he could do. Another example is cancer, which almost everyone hates. But everyone forgets that the same mechanism that creates cancer also created us through evolution. If you understand that, it only makes sense to love everything that happens in the universe, because it's only your ego that creats the illusion of evil. I think a good exercise is to think about someone or something you hate and try to love it, it's very difficult.

And I'm not sure, I mean "love" is just a word to describe something that can't be put in words, but it makes sense that love optimizes things. However, bad/hate doesn't exist, they are both illusions created in the dualities love/hate and good/bad, which both collapse into the ultimate Love which is what I just described and ultimate Goodness. But yeah, all of this stuff really messes with your mind at some point.

2 hours ago, Lyubov said:

try a dualistic path then or just not take in theory that makes you feel this way. 

Several dull non-dual teachers out there who speak little on love or have a really dry style of teaching. 

I mostly ignore anyone out there in that sort of neo advaita / zen / overly new agey camp. My attention and time is precious and there is plenty of content out there for me to explore. 

But dualities must collapse, they are illusions, it's how your ego seperates itself from the universe, or god, and therefor hinder you from realizing that you are the entire universe, and that we are all one, which is exactly what I want to achieve.

[PepperBlossoms]

@TheSpiritualBunny Thanks for the explanation.

It is kinda weird to think about how, if love is everything, then why is love everything?  Why do we bother to make and act in ways that will be helpful/loving/etc.?  Why of anything of all existence would it be that love is everything?  Why would reality itself pick that?  Why would everything pick love?

Maybe it is just so as that is what we observe it to be. 

I guess I am thinking that reality did not pick anything for it to be and that stuff just is being stuff and that we are projecting the idea of love onto everything; when it is just that what we categorize as love is just a response to stimuli (that tends to increase survival).

Life is constantly either transforming its present arrangement or keeping it the same and that gets grouped into the idea of love.

If life is just an arrangement, why would the arrangement even care if it survives or not?  Maybe our arrangement as humans has been arranged as such that we are tricking ourselves in wanting to survive but there are other arrangements in existence that have no care of awareness of the notion of survival such as non-cellular arrangements.

[VeganAwake]

5 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

which is exactly what I want to achieve.

Who is this I?

Where is I located?

What does I consist of?

[TheSpiritualBunny]

3 hours ago, PepperBlossoms said:

@TheSpiritualBunny Thanks for the explanation.

It is kinda weird to think about how, if love is everything, then why is love everything?  Why do we bother to make and act in ways that will be helpful/loving/etc.?  Why of anything of all existence would it be that love is everything?  Why would reality itself pick that?  Why would everything pick love?

Maybe it is just so as that is what we observe it to be. 

I guess I am thinking that reality did not pick anything for it to be and that stuff just is being stuff and that we are projecting the idea of love onto everything; when it is just that what we categorize as love is just a response to stimuli (that tends to increase survival).

Life is constantly either transforming its present arrangement or keeping it the same and that gets grouped into the idea of love.

If life is just an arrangement, why would the arrangement even care if it survives or not?  Maybe our arrangement as humans has been arranged as such that we are tricking ourselves in wanting to survive but there are other arrangements in existence that have no care of awareness of the notion of survival such as non-cellular arrangements.

Yeah, it does seem a bit odd at first but it also kinda makes sense after a while. You also often hear this from people who tried 5-MeO-DMT that they felt such an overwhelming sense of love, they often say it felt so overwhelmingly loving that it was terrifying. I also like Leos analogy with raising a stray kitten. You can't just run up to a stray kitten and cuddle it, it will be terrified and bite you, you have to slowly earn that kittens trust and let it come to you. 

I also had an experience of oneness on 275ug ETH-LAD, I cannot put into words what was going on in my mind. But it also felt really loving, I didn't even understand why, it just did. 

1 hour ago, VeganAwake said:

Who is this I?

Where is I located?

What does I consist of?

It is you!

[Nahm]

10 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

everything is perfection and love, so you wouldn't change the flow of it. 

So I just don't know what to do with my life, stuff like making a buisness, earning lots of money, sex and getting into relationships seems more and more pointless to me. I could try to make the world a better, well "better" place or go and meditate in a cave in the mountains, I don't know.

“Your life” is none other than that divine flow of perfection and love. In a dream, use a Dreamboard to reveal this to ‘yourself’. When you put everything you want, like, love, etc...and see it in front of you (rather than in thinking)...vantage point of experience changes. Everything you are wanting to experience is realized to be already underway. The thoughts about experience are pointless. The experience is the whole point. Your thoughts about those experiences are not the experiences. Don’t confuse the fork for the taste of the food. 

[WaveInTheOcean]

10 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

Even thought I never experienced it, I kinda understood it that even tho I'm god, even at the highest state of consciousness I will never be able to experience unlimited power. Leo said he became so conscious that he could have put a million dollars in his bank account, but he didn't see the point in doing that. The reason you don't, and therefore can't do such things is that in these high consciousness states you just see that everything is perfection and love, so you wouldn't change the flow of it. 

So I just don't know what to do with my life, stuff like making a buisness, earning lots of money, sex and getting into relationships seems more and more pointless to me. I could try to make the world a better, well "better" place or go and meditate in a cave in the mountains, I don't know.

But you are already experiencing the outcome of unlimited power: your current experience in THIS present moment is a result of that. Denying the divinity and miraculous mystery of the present moment as it is RIGHT NOW, well, that is the ego's doing.

Don't get attached to the *idea*/*belief* of "I am God".

You have always been God, and always will be God. 

You feel helpless.
Well.
Take care of your ego's needs. Don't be in denial. Accept your shadow side (ego). Deep down, your ego wants to fall in love with life, it wants to pursue something, it wants to achieve something, it wants love, it wants to be recognized for being 'good'. Accept this and start to take action to meet your ego's needs.

Denying ego is the most egoic thing to do and the ego's sneakiest deception-trick. It hides itself in disguise in form of the idea "I am God", and then it believes "well, that's it, nothing more to do", ... but, this doesn't work out, because deep down, you don't actually believe you are God, it doesn't feel like it at least (feeling helpless, right), and in actuality, what your inner child wants is to go out in the world and participate in it. Find a way to participate in it that gives you joy. Do good things to your mind and body, find something you're passionate about, take risks, put yourself out there and see what happens. Don't be afraid, as you say, it's all just Perfect Maya anyway -- there's no reason to live in fear. Make discipline and work-ethic some of your top priorities. You have to do the hard thing, you have to suffer, to taste the goodness. 

Yes, life may be a hamster wheel without any deeper purpose other than life itself. But: you got no choice but to embrace it. You are free to create your own purpose. To me, it sounds like you are deep down afraid of life: a deeply obscured belief of 'I am not good enough'.... and instead of getting to the bottom of this by taking action, you sort of obscure it all by saying to yourself "Oh, it's all Perfect. There is no reason to do anything", which isn't *actually true* if you don't feel like everything is perfect.

LIsten to your inner child. It wants to achieve. It wants to evolve. It wants to participate. It wants craziness. Dare to be crazy. Dare to set your foot in the world and make your unique mark.

Integrate the spiritual with the physical. Don't deny the physical. If you do, you are stuck in duality. After all: the physical is spiritual. The spiritual is physical.

Don't make the mistake of replacing direct experience with concepts. Concepts and thoughts are fine and all, if they serve to do conscious actions. If you just wander around in concepts and thoughts forever without actually directly experiencing anything those thoughts and concepts points to, then suffering will catch up with you.

[Nahm]

@WaveInTheOcean  ??? 

[Mu_]

19 hours ago, TheSpiritualBunny said:

I don't know why, but I started to understand Nonduality way before watching Leo's videos or any other videos about it, I didn't even know that term back then. But during my later teens to early 20s, I just started to see that you can't seem to put things into strict categories, but they are on a spectrum. Like in chemistry, Metal and nonmetal. I saw that there isn't a strict boundary, but instead the elements gradually go from metal to nonmetal from left to right. Or with mental illnesses, no one has either just Depression or not, or ADHD or not, or OCD or not, or Autism or not (not really a mental illness). I just started to see how everything bleeds into each other.

Then at about 21 I started using drugs (not just psychedelics, so I'll keep it short), not for Nonduality, but just because I was curious. But I surprisingly got insights from them, stimulants often made me contemplate things, where at some point I came to the conclusion that wishing or imagining for something to be different makes no sense, because everything just is the was it is, and it can't be any other was. During my dissociative drug abuse I became completely aware that I have no free will as this ego, I'm (my ego self) is just a part of the whole universe, which happens in a continious flow. You can't blame anyone including yourself, it completely destroyed the boundary between what I'm responsible for and what others are responsible for. It went so far that I just became completely aware all language, distinctions, basically our whole systeme in which we operate is a complete illusion, it completely breaks down when you investigate it deep enough, I'm aware that the words I'm typing here are also just nonsense which can only work within dualities.

But this just made me feel very helpless, since I knew our whole thought systemes and languages are complete illusions, but we still have to use them. I couldn't say anymore what is my fault and what are other peoples faults. Doing something "good" didn't make sense anymore because that's also an illusion. However, I had a lot of puzzle pieces already, and finding Leo's videos about Nonduality helped me piece many of them together, like that there is an Absolute. love + hate = Love, good + bad = Good, free will + determinism = Will. But some things I still don't understand, besides deconstructing my ego to persue enlightenment, what should I do with that? How should I do good when everything is ultimately Good? I don't wanna use nonduality as an excuse to do "evil" things, but no matter what I will do, even if I go on the streets and shoot up Heroin, it is ultimately Good, since it's gods Will for the purpose to maximize Love. So this still makes me confused, and I don't know what to do about that.

Thank you for reading this, I'd love to hear your opinions or suggestions.

I think I know how you feel.  Kinda like, whats the point of me being here if its all perfect already?  ya, I don't have a simple answer, however it may be insightful to look into this "feeling/thought/idea of self" and just be with it and love it for a while.  May shift something for ya.

[Javfly33]

@WaveInTheOcean It feels that way because you are sleep.

If you would be awake there would be no survival problems.

You exist as awareness being aware of thoughts. Mean while a human body can survive. But you are able to be seated in the back seat.

[LfcCharlie4]

2 hours ago, Nahm said:

“Your life” is none other than that divine flow of perfection and love. In a dream, use a Dreamboard to reveal this to ‘yourself’. When you put everything you want, like, love, etc...and see it in front of you (rather than in thinking)...vantage point of experience changes. Everything you are wanting to experience is realized to be already underway. The thoughts about experience are pointless. The experience is the whole point. Your thoughts about those experiences are not the experiences. Don’t confuse the fork for the taste of the food. 

You sum it up so well it’s hard to add anything  

But, I would just say everything being meaningless & pointless is the greatest freedom of all, it frees you up to do whatever YOU LOVE & you decide is meaningful 

Since everything ultimately is meaningless, you are free to choose what relatively “matters” to you in this dream, and then you can just enjoy it without the Ego / separate self demanding it be a certain way etc 

Im summary, simply act from love & do what you love to do.

Although, this is a common issue most people go through in this work, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it  

[Nahm]

@LfcCharlie4

For sure. ??. Meaningless reveals meaningfull.