Hello all My first post here. Been listening to Leo for a couple of years and been on this confusing but awesome journey of clawing myself out of the materialist paradigm. I have done lsd and 5 meo a handful of times and I’ve had the world melt away and been thrown into the void so it’s obvious to me that the computer I’m typing on isn’t some kind of external object with independent existence that I’m perceiving through the eyes, but that this is a dream. What’s still bugging me though is this whole POV thing. From what I’ve read others talking about on this forum I don’t seem to be alone with being confused about it. I’ve read quite a bit of people’s comments and I have picked up what kind of jargong you guys have here so first I feel like I should mention some things before I get to the actual question and example. First of all, I’m not claiming to be awake or anything. I don’t really care who’s what. I used to think I understood everything and would even look at myself as ”special” and even ”above” others, but then some brutal ego backlashes humbled me. All I care about now is understanding this for myself. Not look like I got it all figured out, but actually figure it out. Just telling me I’m playing mind games or whatever and then not explaining in what ways or why you think so doesn’t help me figuring anything out. If you’re in a position to say that you’re supposedly not in that trap yourself and should be able to give me some guidance, or maybe you just want to give the impression publicly that you have come so much further. If that’s your intention, please don’t bother to comment.
Just telling me I don’t understand and then not helping me is also useless. It’s like the teacher telling the kid just starting out math class he doesn’t understand any math. Yeah, like why do you think he’s there? Also, please don’t spew some nonduality one-liner on me, I’m looking for serious feedback and not interested in hearing the same old lines every newbie loves to write under all the Rupert Spira videos. I’m also not interested in hearing about your definitions of what enlightenment is unless you’re able to talk to me about it in the context of what I’m writing below. With a lot of spiritual folks I more often than not get the feeling that I can’t even have an actual conversation without them starting to tell me about their definitions of enlightenment, or maybe just get a ”there is no you” thrown in the face without even engaging my question. If you’re not engaging what I’m actually writing and just repeating some platitude I won’t take you seriously. A lot of spirituality folks I’ve talked to always dismisses my desire to understand and tell me I should just drop it because it can’t be understood and that I should ”just be” or something similar, but I’m not content with that. Maybe it’s just you who have a weak mind so it’s easier for you to say ”it can’t be understood” because you don’t understand yourself and then confuse your own limits for what’s possible. I’ve even been told ”you’re very philosophical” in a derogatory sense, as if that’s a negative when doing this kind of work. Jeez. With that out of the way I hope I can be taken seriously here. So I have been doing a lot of different thought experiments during and after my trips and I’ve found the video game analogy to be a great visualization to create clear distinctions to understand better so I would really appreciate to get some feedback to course correct me if I’m deceiving myself.    For you who play video games this might make sense. Let’s say I play some 1st person game but split screen. So I split it into two 1st persons perspective and then in each of the two perspectives we have a body from the 3rd person perspective. With this example it’s easy to see that the two bodies from 3rd person perspective don’t exist in the same world, an external world, but that they only exist as an appearance within each of the 1st person perspectives. If one of the game characters would observe his hand we wouldn’t actually have just one hand but two. The hand from the 1st person perspective isn’t even the same hand as the one that’s in front of the face of the body from the 3rd person perspective that’s part of the other 1st person perspective.   There are no internal worlds because the 1st person perspectives that we usually think of as internal are not that because it’s the other way around where the bodies that we previously located the 1st person perspectives in instead themselves are in those 1st person perspectives. The 1st person perspectives can’t be located in anything appearing because that would basically be claiming that one 1st person perspective is located in another and that would be the typical grounding that materialists do where they locate objects inside of objects to create ”experience” as something owned by a body. If we would turn both of the 1st person perspectives around, both of the bodies from the 3rd person perspective would now have disappeared but none of the 1st person perspectives would have disappeared as they were never located in those bodies. So when I’m interacting with another body I understand that there is no 1st person perspective located in that body or owned by it, there is no difference between that body or a rock or whatever, both are appearances within this 1st person perspective, but I still think of it as if there is another 1st person perspective where what I usually call myself in daily normal self-referencing, my body from the 3rd person perspective, is an appearance. Alright, so here’s my confusion about solipsism. In this analogy there are not two subjects, the bodies are not what’s experiencing or owning any of the perspectives, nothing is being perceived through the eyes or being calculated or created by any brain. Neither is existing in an external world and neither is having any inner experiences. It’s all direct appearance without inside or outside. The whole story of sense organs and biology and external independent world and so forth are something that’s being imagined and then projected as an overlay on the one-layered appearance to create a sense of a separate reality with multiple subjects. There would not be two separate positions either. If we go further than the screen analogy and imagine we would remove the dividing line between the two 1st person perspectives and merge them so that they are superimposed on each other and then do that with every possible perspective, then all perspectives are located at the same point that itself has no location. A pointless point lol..where everything emerges out of, which is what I think people mean when they talk about the Godhead. Basically that nothingness that sits where I previously imagined and believed my head was. So there is no one looking out of any head, only the Godhead that’s not located anywhere that is looking. My body from the 3rd person perspective, that’s only an appearance within the other 1st person perspective and with no existence outside of it, is also something I’m looking at as the Godhead. I could see how someone might call this solipsism but my understanding of what’s usually meant by that word would in this screen analogy be equal to if we simply removed one of the two 1st person perspectives on the screen and now only displayed one and that’s it. That’s all of it. Which means that when I’m communicating with another body there is no other perspective with an appearance of me as a body from the 3rd perspective talking. Sounds like a pretty small infinity to me if all there is would be only this one perspective being imagined by the Godhead. Also, when someone says ”there is only you” or ”you’re only talking to yourself” it can mean drastically different things depending of what ”you” and ”yourself” is referring to. If you said that to a materialist who believes he is a body that’s walking around in an independent external world and using his brain to construct an internal image of that world, that would make no sense to him. Some of these things can be very confusing depending on where you’re coming at it from.
I don’t see how one subject has to mean only one perspective. I mean, in the materialist model we have many subjects but one world. So if you’re coming from that paradigm with thinking it’s only one world and then you hear something like ”there is only one subject”, i.e. you, and you erase all the other subjects you previously imagined to exist under the materialist paradigm, but then still hold the idea of only one world subconsciously, I can see that it’s easy to then draw the conclusion that the forms that are present for you now is all there is. But if you drop the ”one world” idea then one subject doesn’t have to mean one appearance.   Am I on the right track with this line of thinking? Anyhow, I’ve been wrecking my mind incessantly over this the last few month and people are saying different things regarding this and I guess this will be no different but would appreciate some feedback about all this from someone with some real experience and hope we can talk about it within the framework of the analogy. If I’m fooling myself I wanna know. That doesn’t mean I will buy anything you say though.   Thanks!