I Experienced The True Nature Of My Self - How Should I Go From Here?

[alifesurreal]

Hello to Leo and everyone else on here!

I am new to this forum and would like to ask a question regarding the true nature of self.

A little bit about my background:

I am 41 years now, had a severe burn out about 2 years ago after which I had to let go all of which to me defined myself all my life. My passions, my gifts, my addictions. I never thought it was possible that such a thing happened. It felt like there was a car crash inside my head and I was standing by watching it with a mix of horror and entertainment.
This was when my second life began. A life without a meaning.

The time was right for me and I wanted to start reading wise lines by old men. So I read Herman Hesse's “Steppenwolf” which caught me cold in my deception and self pity. Intrigued by his way of writing I read “Siddharta” and this is how I stumbled across buddhism. One thing led to another and I learned about Taoism, read Eckart Tolle and the likes and elegantly finished it all off with Jiddu Krishnamurti who's down to earth no bullshit way of writing made me realize that I could live without the ornamental and ritualistic sides of buddhism. I had learned to watch my thoughts and recognize the destructive sides of my ego.

My life had gained a completely new quality.
I could not understand how I had been so blind and wrong my whole life before.

Anyway, it's been almost two years and many books & insights later when I stumbled across Leo's videos on youtube.

 

And one evening here something happened. I had just finished watching those detailed enlightenment videos of Leo and was now listening to a lecture by Sam Harris about free will when it hit me: Not suddenly, but slowly I was starting to feel the reality of matter and elements around me and in me, the actual reality of my body being a bunch of just matter temporarily aligned to form a functioning system and my “Self” being nothing more than a part of this as well.
Or rather not even that. It dawned on me that me, the living self that seemed so well defined and solid is actually just an illusion, a byproduct of all this matter in me. And that along with Sam Harris's free will discussion made it click.

This is what it might feel like for an artificial intelligence to become aware of its artificial nature, to realize that it is only a simulation, nothing more.

I felt a feeling of growing panic and dizzyness in me as I realized that the Pilot and the Machine had switched places.

So I was just a projection of my internal background processes and my SELF was continuously trying to catch up with what was being presented from the inside, trying to pretend it was the author of everything.

The more I wanted to reach inside my mind and find something solid to hold on to, the less there was anything tangible there. There was only nothing. Emptiness. Not even emptiness, just not anything.

This realization was almost physical, it came from my gut and made me feel dizzy and nauseous.

Without a real self that was in charge of everything it now felt as if I was being dragged along by my body and mind without much control at all. A trapped feeling almost.

At that time I assumed that this was my ego panicking and refusing to let go.
There was no bliss and no magic. It was more like I was lost in an ocean and my lonely island of support and orientation had just sunk and disappeared.

I had to literally drag myself out of that feeling by distracting myself with music and moving around in the apartment, because I felt so overwhelmed.

Now, 2-3 days later I have talked about this a lot with my wife which helped me coming to terms with this all.

As I write this now I am experiencing a slight unease again but it's much less intense.
I have re-watched Leo's enlightenment “the shocking truth” video again and this time all of his statements registered on a whole new level in me, it all made perfect sense to me.

 

So here's my question:

How do I proceed?

I am not meditating or following any structured approach to enlightenment. But I have a deep deep urge to feel and experience the truth of reality. These things I realized and experienced a couple of days ago are with me now most of the time, but more on an intellectual level as opposed to a physical experience. I am aware my panic was my ego refusing. But this has decreased over the last days. I feel like I peaked through a window and I do not want to loose this again.

Everyday life is ripe with temptation and distraction to lure you back into ignorance.

Do you have any tips on how I could proceed in order to go deeper on this? Or at least stay on track?

If this had happened through some kind of structured approach like meditation or psychedelics, I'd have a better clue how to proceed, but I don't have that practice.

It would be very nice to read your thoughts on this.
This forum is like a treasure trove to me

Greetings from Hamburg

Lynn

 

PS: Sorry for the VERY long post!!

 

[123456789]

2 hours ago, alifesurreal said:

Do you have any tips on how I could proceed in order to go deeper on this? Or at least stay on track?

Start a meditation habit.

Edit: Do not develop any craving to have this experience again, it will only slow your growth.

Edited October 30, 2016 by Mr Lenny

[Bob84]

@alifesurreal Try to grasp that its your ego who wants it back.

[Shin]

And the more you want it back, the less likely it will happen.

[Leo Gura]

@alifesurreal Firstly, re-read your original post and count all the places in it where you refer to yourself as "me", "my", and "I". As you've started to realize, none of that is true. "You" are not fighting with the illusion of "ego". You = ego! And it doesn't exist! Right now, there is not a you reading this sentence, there is only a sentence floating in emptiness awareness.

The process forward is very simple: sit down and inquiry further into this. What are you? Why are you still attached to that body? Where are your boundaries really? Who is aware?

See my How To Become Enlightened video for the exact process. You basically just sit and inquire without making any assumptions and dropping all prior beliefs about how you think reality is structured.

You've barely scratched the surface. Keep digging. This goes so deep you cannot even imagine yet. And yet it's all right there, right in front of your nose, hidden in plain sight.

[alifesurreal]

Thanks a lot for your helpful and kind replies!

I am very aware that both the desire to hold on to any experience as well as the quest for knowledge and awakening are both ego driven.
And I guess you're very right Mr Lenny, more meditation it is! I understand that it's most effective tool for self inquiry. I just rarely find time to meditate without being disturbed by someone or something. But I will somehow make space for that in my life! Meditation has done me good before, just I had not used it for self inquiry.

And thank you Leo for chiming in. As you say, I've barely scratched the surface, yet it's already shaken my foundation quite a lot. I think it's Socrates who said "I know that I know nothing" and that is exactly how I feel these days. But this is intriguing. Every journey starts with a small step and I look forward to whatever I (or whatever my Self is) might encounter on the way.

*edit: Ha! I just saw that Mr. Lenny has that very same quote from Socrates in his signature.
And I thought I was the only person on the planet that knew about Socrates! Damn you again, education system!

Edited October 31, 2016 by alifesurreal

[123456789]

@alifesurreal

16 minutes ago, alifesurreal said:

*edit: Ha! I just saw that Mr. Lenny has that very same quote from Socrates in his signature.
And I thought I was the only person on the planet that knew about Socrates! Damn you again, education system!

Haha! 

[Leo Gura]

31 minutes ago, alifesurreal said:

*edit: Ha! I just saw that Mr. Lenny has that very same quote from Socrates in his signature.
And I thought I was the only person on the planet that knew about Socrates!

What's really freaky is if you ever catch a glimpse of your subconscious mind actually using unconscious information from your visual field to then influence your conscious thoughts and original ideas.

Was this merely a coincidence?

Or did your subconscious mind "see" the quote from Mr Lenny (without you being conscious of it) and THEN that triggers your thoughts about Socrates?

Food for thought

[Wouter]

@Leo Gura Did you catch such a glimpse? How can it be triggered?

[Leo Gura]

@Wouter Yes, I've caught my mind doing that in the past. It's pretty freaky.

Not sure you can deliberately trigger it. The more you learn about the subconscious mind and its workings, the more open you will be to accidentally see it at work constructing your conscious experience behind-the-scenes.

[Azrael]

12 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

What's really freaky is if you ever catch a glimpse of your subconscious mind actually using unconscious information from your visual field to then influence your conscious thoughts and original ideas.

At some point in the practice the barrier between the subconscious and the conscious will break through to a large extent. For me that began to happen after I watched your "Free Will"-video and meditated on the question "What will happen next?". It was a very physiological feeling of opening that then resulted in basically 4 months of the deepest existential crisis I have ever encountered, because all the repressed shit came to surface. But, along the horror came 3 major awakenings, every one deepening the one before and the last one being a Kundalini awakening. I just found that out months later because I didn't know what happened. In retrospect I'm very happy that his purged out "so fast" and now I'm pretty good and relaxed and my mind is calm.

But throughout the opening of the unconscious I got several semi-supernatural abilities. I know this sounds cheesy, but it's basically increased intuition. I can consciously close my eyes and start dreaming - like really seeing pictures and hearing sound, being in a dream. I can consciously talk to my subconscious and it provides answers if it has answers or if not it estimates. I can bring my whole body to a very relaxed/focused state in 1-2 minutes in kind of every situation. I can consciously hallucinate if I want to (this is nuts). I can meditate w/o a timer for an hour and my unconscious will give me a hint in the last 5 minutes that I'm done. The list goes on and on. It's really crazy in the beginning because one never knew that this is possible.

And it feels like this is only the beginning. Maybe I make a more detailed post about this in the future.