How Awareness Feels Like?

[MsNobody]

I started this path of self actualization 8 months ago and with that I started feeling this shifts in my vision and body, I feel bigger, taller, like expanding, more aware of my body, things are clearer, lighter and more palpable, calmness, sometimes happiness, in the beggining it was like once a week, it used to happen when I was with someone I really like or doing something I love, like drawing.

But now Ive been feeling it a lot, most of the time, if I'm concentrated in what i'm doing, Leo's videos for example, reading a book, talking to a friend, I feel different in my body, its close to the sensation after meditation for a long time, that akward feeling "what am I doing in this body?" but at the same time I feel confortable and natural, this week I was at Starbucks watching Leo's video and a baby arrived with his mom, he started staring at me, I was in that state, his mom had to rearrange the stroller so he could face me, I felt a strong connection with him, it's all beautiful thinking like that but the thing is I do feel high, I'm just writing that cause I'm paranoid that something is going on with my brain

I've done Ayahuasca years ago, LSD and MDMA last trip was like a month ago, Im not intending to do anything so soon because of this feeling, I like the sensation and I do feel more connected to myself but its something totally new for me

I also have been reading a lot, I'm doing the life purpose course and watching Leo's videos, maybe my mindset is changing too fast, I'm changing soooo much with everything I'm reading and seeing, it's crazy

Sounds confusing and I know every person is different but I would like to hear from you guys! 

Thank you  

[Phrae]

What does it feel like reading this text?

[Neo]

Quote

I started feeling this shifts in my vision and body, I feel bigger, taller, like expanding, more aware of my body, things are clearer

I had a spontaneous occurrence of this while contemplating which I posted about. It was just a one off thing, but very dramatic.

I think I read somewhere is it is possible to be enlightened as a gradual process and not some amazing "flash" or such like.

Certainly, when I think back to my younger years, I seemed to have been in some dreamlike state, if not asleep. However I don't know if I confuse that phenomena and maybe everyone feels like that about their childhood, or 20's for example.

 

 

[Rocky]

I always believed it was just the feeling of being present and  in the moment.

Edited February 11, 2017 by Rocky

[FirstglimpseOMG]

I've been on this journey for eight months as well. I'm still figuring a lot of things out, & then ten more questions pop up every time I do have a realization. It's pretty cool. Maybe some of the wonder & slight worry that you have is only because it's all so new to you. If you were to suddenly have to drive backwards everywhere you went, it would seem awful weird and disconcerting for a while but after a while you would adjust and be cool with it, & keep doing it better & better if you kept it up.

It may be that those  nice new body feelings, and sometimes a wondrous feeling of connection to 'innocents' like babies, or puppies, etc., is a result of simply being more aware. I guess it's recognizing your own True Nature shining like fresh, pure light within newborns & nature.

Awareness can feel like 'paying extra attention' to many aspects of your day, more and more.

Awareness can feel like getting to know yourself, through new, more frequent and careful attention to many thoughts and feelings, and the tone of things with yourself, & possible reasons behind many of your feeling-tones. (They'll start feeling better and lighter, as you have noticed, and when that starts turning into a feedback loop, things get more and more wondrous, interesting & joyful.) A feedback loop might work like this;

You become interested in your existential nature and your curiosity leads you to a world of info and inspiration. The more you learn, the more interested and inspired you are, and naturally, you begin to become more aware of yourself and your surroundings. Pondering and contemplating the inside and outside world in new and different ways. This new awareness and way of learning and inquiring brings results pretty quickly, and you become more and more lucid and alive and actuated, bit by bit, and this feeling and tone drive you naturally to investigate further, go deeper, and reach further inside. Which of course produces insight and more and more awareness, which just makes you feel better and better as you somehow begin to really understand that lightness and love and joy and peace and contentment and fulfilment and inspiration and enthusiasm are your natural ways of BEing, and all the other, lower-frequency crap like envy and resentment and fear and loathing and all that, is a construct of the finite mind. 

Sorry, I tend to be long-winded. Awareness, to me, feels like a slow, progressively more acute and succinct way of becoming more and more of the light being of love that you discover under all your layers, and seeing that in everyone else too. Also, awareness to me is seeing the so called outside world more and more for what it really is. (Your own apparently physical self and the apparently physical 'outside world' are co-created, second by second, by only perception.)  All you have of the world to inform your brain about reality is your 5 senses, that's it. Period. "Perception is reality." Rupert Spira blew me away by hitting me with those three words once I began to understand naive realism (Thanks to Leo Gura.) Perception IS reality. 

But, here's my take on what awareness feels like when I look at the really big picture, and look very deeply within and very carefully without; Awareness is only that. Awareness is everything, and everyone. All that the universe is, is within Awareness. Pure, self-aware BEing. Open, limitless, boundless, infinite, timeless Awareness. Then, when Awareness forgets itself as itself, all the universe, ALL of everything, including our differentiated, individualized by separate thoughts of a finite mind, 'selves', come into apparent 'existence'. Reality and each of ourselves is co-created as the dream of life, only when the limitless, unbounded, wide open field of awareness (God, source, consciousness, Awareness, etc.) falls asleep and thus is able to dream up a whole physical universe and 7 billion 'dreamers', just the only way infinite Awareness is able to experience anything finite at all, which is of course, us and all the other 'physical' (heh heh) objects in the universe.

Awareness IS the universe, and you. Awareness is God, Source, Pure empty, divine, infinite Consciousness, playing hide and seek with itself, purposely forgetting it's infinite nature in order to see what's possible inside it. We are THAT. All ONE.

Perception, Awareness, consiousness. It is us, it's all we have, and it co-creates us & our world second by second, and all the dreamed, individuated, finite minds & bodies on this spinning ball of dirt, see and experience this dreamed world by virtue of the Sleeping Giant that is Consciousness, Awareness, Source, whatever you want to call it. The only, one, ultimate consciousness, playing hide and seek with itself by losing itself in a dream-universe of separate and diverse objects & 7 billion 'people', because when it's awake, it can only know itself, Absolte Infinity and no-thing else. We all perceive this dreamt world more or less the same way because the Source is One, not many. The self-consistency Nature of reality that Leo mentions in his Naive Realism video episode is because there is ONE dreamer.

That dreamer's dream is 'our' awareness and reality, and all of us.

The best part of it is you and I, becoming more and more aware, by coming closer and closer to our True Nature, by becoming AWARE OF BEING AWARE. Our stunned little egos are having all these 'holy shit' moments as we turn our attention around from the outside world of perceptions (Reality created, second by second), and begin to discover the True Nature of our Awareness. The origin, the Source. 

Apologies for the long post, just trying to share I guess.

Edited February 11, 2017 by FirstglimpseOMG
Grammar

[jse]

On 10/02/2017 at 3:09 PM, Laisa said:

How Awareness Feels Like?

It feels like... pure, timeless/placeless Awareness, stripped of all thought.

[FirstglimpseOMG]

Hey, quit saying in one sentence what it took me a whole page to say, lmao!

[Trond]

On 2/10/2017 at 7:09 PM, Laisa said:

I started this path of self actualization 8 months ago and with that I started feeling this shifts in my vision and body, I feel bigger, taller, like expanding, more aware of my body, things are clearer, lighter and more palpable, calmness, sometimes happiness, in the beggining it was like once a week, it used to happen when I was with someone I really like or doing something I love, like drawing.

But now Ive been feeling it a lot, most of the time, if I'm concentrated in what i'm doing, Leo's videos for example, reading a book, talking to a friend, I feel different in my body, its close to the sensation after meditation for a long time, that akward feeling "what am I doing in this body?" but at the same time I feel confortable and natural, this week I was at Starbucks watching Leo's video and a baby arrived with his mom, he started staring at me, I was in that state, his mom had to rearrange the stroller so he could face me, I felt a strong connection with him, it's all beautiful thinking like that but the thing is I do feel high, I'm just writing that cause I'm paranoid that something is going on with my brain

I've done Ayahuasca years ago, LSD and MDMA last trip was like a month ago, Im not intending to do anything so soon because of this feeling, I like the sensation and I do feel more connected to myself but its something totally new for me

I also have been reading a lot, I'm doing the life purpose course and watching Leo's videos, maybe my mindset is changing too fast, I'm changing soooo much with everything I'm reading and seeing, it's crazy

Sounds confusing and I know every person is different but I would like to hear from you guys! 

Thank you  

I feel this connectedness as well. With people on the path, animals turning around looking straight at me and babies. It's cool I guess, it feels a bit strange in a way, but more so I just smile, feels like looking at myself lol. Gotten used to it. 

Also the thing with watching Leos videos and other teachers, as well as when I read about non duality, I often "fall" into this intense aware presence. Feels quite similar to being sucked into this silent void you can get in meditations. And everything just feels perfect. Even staring at my hand for no reason. Don't think this has anything to do with your previous drug use(although who knows), but I for one haven't even tried any psychedelics yet. Been on this for 1 year now.

[MsNobody]

@Phrae Feels like my laptop is 5 meters away from me while I'm typing when actually is only 40 centimeters 

@FirstglimpseOMG wow that was amazing, I love your description and everything you have within you, thanks for sharing a bit of your world. I guess I'm becoming more aware, I watched this video about naive realism and yes, it was a slap on my face, ive watched some things about it before but only with this video that I experienced it, so crazy, it was one of those aha moments that destroyed all the sand castles ive built in my life, you talked about the 5 senses and it reminded me of something, I started taking shower in the dark a couple weeks ago, I dont know where this idea came from but its like a meditation, I shut down one sense and the others become stronger, feels amazing, melts my perception of reality.

Im just amazed with life, the more I understand about it the more I see how simple and perfect it actually is, we just like to complicate sometimes

@Tronds World @jse @Rocky Thank you all guys, I'm so glad for being able to share and read such beautiful and usefull things in this forum! 

[Markus]

It's called a high concentration state for a reason It's all good. There's nothing wrong with you girl.

[Azrael]

On 10.2.2017 at 9:09 AM, Laisa said:

Sounds confusing and I know every person is different but I would like to hear from you guys!

One of the biggest failures I see people make is putting awareness as this rare, pure, unreachable thing that you can only get after years and years of mindfulness meditation and even then you're just beginning to see it. That's not true. It's natural that we fall into this trap because we were raised in a way that you need to work up to something great and can't just have it without work.

Well, this one is different. Awareness is everything you know - it is knowing itself. When you look at your hand awareness is the non-dual potential and by its nature of being non-dual it must create a dual world which in your case is looking at your hand right now. It is behind every perception you have, every thought you have, everything you will ever experience is awareness itself.

So the journey is basically just needed to get a frantic, crying child to see that it actually doesn't have to go anywhere to be happy but that happiness and love (oh know I'm sounding hippie) is the basis and root of all action. But it takes some time to make this transition.

So one meditation you can indulge in is simply being aware that you are aware when you are aware. So any time your mind runs off and goes into thought stories, let it do that. When it comes back and hands "your" awareness back to "you" just be aware that you are aware again.

After some time doing that, the most amazing things follow.

[FirstglimpseOMG]

@Azrael Nicely said, thanks for that. This forum is a gem. I'm only just beginning to be able to become present in the moment at will, but it seems to be something that improves exponentially with some real effort. I can sometimes just recognize in the moment that I am Awareness, and everything stays in the picture but the central-feeling sense of self seems to just dissipate. Then that empty, pervasive awareness begins to feel like it's literally made of, and the making of, everything it's aware of. Then my lazy mind habitually remembers it was doing or thinking about something and finds it's place, and the magic of life so easily becomes commonplace again. 'Til next time!

@Laisa  Happy to share, glad my words sometimes make sense. I'm figuring it all out as I go, and having a very good time. My ego is so strong and good at what it does that I forget so easily the magic of just BEing, but more and more awareness and opening up to all possibilities is tilting the scales nicely. A little slowly and not really consistently yet, but.. Woohoo! 

 

[Azrael]

1 hour ago, FirstglimpseOMG said:

Then my lazy mind habitually remembers it was doing or thinking about something and finds it's place, and the magic of life so easily becomes commonplace again.

If that is your case find the magic in the commonplace. A Zen master doesn't sit on his ass meditating all day, he is cleaning the toilets, cooking the food and planting vegetables. Now, his disciples do that as well. You don't sit for 10 years, get enlightened, and then go back to normal. You live normal every day and make that your very practice. 

I'm not telling you to stop your formal practice - Zen monks meditate of course - but you have to keep a balance. And to live a life you need to think, cook, eat, sleep and handle your daily affairs.

So, don't put enlightenment and self-realization into such an conditional state like sitting with an empty mind. Realize that in every situation your dual view of reality is consistently changing, that all you really know for now is your first-person perspective and that this expands and contracts in every situation.

And you now that, when you go to sleep you go away. When you wake up again, you come into existence - at least that's what you know for now. Think about that. Where do you go when you sleep and what brings you up again when you wake up.

What makes your first-person picture change when you tilt your head from side to side? What determines where your conscious awareness goes in every moment. Why can't you hold still for a complete hour. Who determines that?

Now, every question here has a scientific answer of course. But meditate on this like you did not know any science at all. It still happens. It doesn't happen because science makes it happening. It just does. Why? Where? And who?

Find that out, then a walk into the grocery store will become as magnificent as sitting in deep meditation.

[FirstglimpseOMG]

Thanks bud. A part of me knows that the magic of life is all of experience. The second I start resting in the now, with a natural awareness increase, life becomes so exquisite, so slowed down and so detailed, hi-def & joyful. I love slowing down & dwelling on the moment by moment joy of BEing. When distracted or anxious, (often it seems), the magic that flowed and shone so beautifully and naturally contracts faster than Sean Spicer's scrotum when it's "Live from New York!" 

But yeah, I have a lot of cultivation to do.