Question about nonexistence

[WelcometoReality]

1 hour ago, WokeBloke said:

I know I'm not what I think I am not even "pure infinity".

Regardless I can't get rid of myself or escape myself. So paradoxically I am enslaved forever by myself. Prison and prisoner simultaneously. But I'll try to make a good prison lol.

That sounds heavy. Kudos for sharing!

What is it you want to get rid of?

[BipolarGrowth]

People who haven’t “experienced” the appearance of cessation within existence cannot understand what nonexistence as a word even points to. 
 

Reach cessation then you can theorize from there. 
 

How to reach cessation: https://www.mctb.org/

Edited March 13, 2022 by BipolarGrowth

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Benton said:

Is this different from God-Realization?

It's tricky. It's sort of the pinnacle of God-realization. You realize you are God then you become the Godhead, which is a formless Infinity, like you might imagine the universe prior to the Big Bang.

11 minutes ago, Benton said:

@Leo Gura Did you use a psychedelic to achieve cessation?

For me, I realized cessation is imaginary.

[billiesimon]

4 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

If you got a glimpse of pure Infinity, you would be so horrified you'd call it death. It's a lot like death, except you are conscious forever of endless nothingness. I've seen it. It's the most terrifying thing you could imagine. But also, it's LOVE.

It's the last thing you could possibly want.

Even though I'm way way behind your awakenings, I know what you mean by "terrifying". Glimpses of awakening can be utterly shocking, especially glimpses of infinity (I've had a full week of suicidal depression after a glimpse).

But I notice that I'm also deeply attracted to it, I can't stop seeking the Self. It's somehow addictive and deadly at the same time.

Isn't it normal that we crave infinity/awakening while at the same time fear it? I find it completely normal since we are finite egos and we always crave for perfection/eternity. Isn't it so?

[VeganAwake]

Real & unreal 

Is & isn't 

This & that

 

Things can seem to be completely real and simultaneously be recognized as completely unreal.

The personalized story of ME seems totally important and convincingly real.

Awakening is the realization that this separate ME character within the body desperately seeking a better experience in the future is fullness experiencing lack or completeness experiencing incompleteness.

Infinite experiencing finite.

Not an identification AS the infinite, it's a recognition that the infinite was all there ever was. There never was a finite individual in which even could become infinite. 

Freedom for no one!

❤ 

[BipolarGrowth]

1 hour ago, Benton said:

That sounds wild. I’ve never reached a state of cessation before. When I experienced infinity it was an infinite fractal type deal. Beautiful. Infinite love.

Cessation interests me though. Would it be possible to achieve it through neti neti? Or is their a psychedelic that would make it easier specifically? I have that book btws. I havnt read it yet I have another one I need to get through first.

One of my greatest experiences of “infinity” was in the split second before my first two cessations. Experiences people associate with Infinity are far different than cessation though. I’m sure some people have reached cessation through neti neti, but I wouldn’t consider it the most likely option. 
 

As far as psychedelics go, 90% of the times I’ve reached cessation, it has been on THC which is kind of ironic seeing how people often see the substance as not having value in serious spiritual pursuits. Specifically, it was a delta-10/delta-8 THC mixture. Daniel Ingram says that it’s incredibly rare to reach cessation through psychedelics however. I think he said maybe a rate of 1 in 1000 people he’s talked to who claimed cessation in a way that was convincing got there from psychedelics as opposed to meditation. 
 

It’s probably rather unlikely that these forms of THC would help you reach cessation unless the use of other psychedelics has significantly increased the potency of THC and you’re able to use it consistently without seeing the typical negative effects people see with frequent THC use. It also would probably require a certain synergy with your unique neurochemistry which makes things even less probable. I have heard one other person claim that they have reached cessation on THC, but I’m not sure if he actually did or not due to some ambiguity in his description of the event. 
 

I wouldn’t count on a substance to get you to cessation even though it was beneficial for me. Vipassana meditation is probably the best thing from what I’ve seen to increase your chances. Daniel Ingram’s forum https://www.dharmaoverground.org/ has a lot of people who have reached cessation and plenty of people aiming for it there. It might be a good thing to check out if you are quite interested in it. 

Leo’s comment that cessation is imaginary is correct. Regardless, a 9.5/10 woman riding your dick is also imaginary, but there are certainly valid reasons to enjoy that and things to be gained in a relative sense from such an experience. Cessation is no different other than it has the potential to be exponentially better than the example given of sex with a 9.5/10 woman, and it also has the potential to change your perception permanently to make life far better than it would’ve likely been without reaching cessation. 
 

A personal theory of mine is that reaching cessation has a lot to do with how much time you spend in radical states of consciousness while also doing active investigation of such states. I think the main issue with serotonergic psychedelics aiding toward reaching cessation is that people typically cannot spend nearly the amount of hours in psychedelic trips in a sustainable way as much as they could do with meditation. 
 

In the couple months leading up to my first cessations, I had almost lost my big toe in a lawn mowing accident. I was off from work due to the injury and was using THC for pain relief as well as some consciousness work since I had nothing better I could do being rather incapacitated on the couch unable to move without assistance. I was also running into reverse tolerance with THC at this time where every week or two I would hit a new threshold on roughly the same relatively low dose of THC which made the trips more and more intense. It was rather common for me to reach states while on THC similar in strength, intensity, and profundity to what I experienced on very high doses of serotonergic psychedelics. Once this became a weekly or even daily thing to be in such states, I think this increased the chance of reaching cessation quite a bit. 
 

Whatever practice or substance you use, if you want cessation, I think it all comes down to how regularly you can reach high states of consciousness, and most of the rest is just up to luck. Many have practiced spirituality diligently for an entire lifetime and not reached cessation. I was not trying to reach cessation when it happened. I think I would’ve likely never gotten there without Leo’s teachings. I had hardly any in-depth understanding of Buddhism or Buddhist forms of meditation prior to cessation, so I certainly can’t credit it for getting me there although it does appear to be the system which is most focused on cessation and produces that “state” in more practitioners than other forms of spirituality. 

[BipolarGrowth]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's tricky. It's sort of the pinnacle of God-realization. You realize you are God then you become the Godhead, which is a formless Infinity, like you might imagine the universe prior to the Big Bang.

How would you say that this Godhead state compares to or differs from the 6th jhana? It sounds quite similar the way you describe being the Godhead here. The 6th jhana is a state of boundless/infinite consciousness with the capital S Self sense of everything being you while all of this occurs in a formless fashion. I imagine you already are familiar with descriptions of the 6th jhana judging by your book list, but I went ahead and added that description in case my assumption is wrong. 

[Leo Gura]

13 hours ago, BipolarGrowth said:

How would you say that this Godhead state compares to or differs from the 6th jhana? It sounds quite similar the way you describe being the Godhead here. The 6th jhana is a state of boundless/infinite consciousness with the capital S Self sense of everything being you while all of this occurs in a formless fashion. I imagine you already are familiar with descriptions of the 6th jhana judging by your book list, but I went ahead and added that description in case my assumption is wrong. 

It's hard to say what is meant by that 6th Jhana description. It could refer to the same thing or something different. Such descriptions are underdetermined and leave room for interpretation.

[K Ghoul]

On 3/12/2022 at 5:59 PM, WokeBloke said:

So I can't ever be free of my own existence.

 

On 3/12/2022 at 6:01 PM, funcool said:

No. 

Maybe this how the concept of hell and heaven /devil and god has come to existence. People having glimpses of infinity and for some it registers as horror (hell), for others as love (heaven), the formlessness has been conceptualized

 

[BipolarGrowth]

On 3/13/2022 at 2:22 PM, Leo Gura said:

It's hard to say what is meant by that 6th Jhana description. It could refer to the same thing or something different. Such descriptions are underdetermined and leave room for interpretation.

I could say the same about the Godhead description you gave. The “unfortunate” aspect to all of this is that we use words that we can hope are understood in the same way we use them, but no one can possibly tell the fullness the author intends to convey through such a quick exchange of buzzwords, however succulent they may appear. 
 

(No sensations of body, objects in the room, no sounds, etc.) = (formless) as I use it here, at least in the deeper variations of the formless states. In other spiritual contexts, I’ve seen people describe experiences at least quite similar to 6th jhana as cosmic consciousness or Brahman. The 6th jhana is built on the foundation of the 5th jhana which is formless in the sense given above and feeling space as boundless/infinite. Feeling space to fill the entire universe isn’t quite the same as the 5th jhana potentially as people may still feel there to be some edge to the universe or, in other words, some limit. This is feeling space such that there is no edge imaginable in this state. There is no edge which can be felt whatsoever. The 6th jhana is all of the aspects of the 5th jhana with the addition that there is a strong recognition/sense that the entire field of awareness/consciousness/sensations is you. 
 

Being in a formless jhana is similar to psychedelic experience in the sense that intensity and feelings of profundity are increased. There are certainly other things in common though. The problem with this added detail I give is that it still wrestles with the fundamental problem of communication I highlighted at the beginning of this post. An interesting thing about the 6th jhana is that there is still variability in the degree to which it is felt, and definitions of it do not necessarily separate the 6th jhana from including other aspects than the few used to distinguish the state from others. What you describe could be close to the 6th jhana, the 6th jhana, or the 6th jhana with other things incorporated into the experience as well. 
 

It’s hard to tell. Feel free to share more details of what you describe the Godhead state to be if you want. It would certainly interest me, but it’s not utterly important by any means.