thedoorsareopen

"You," as in the arbitrary conglomeration of mind identifications that you're currently feeling in your nervous system, doesn't really exist in a coherent way. But life is a paradox, a strange loop. "You" don't exist, and yet, you exist! Here you are! This thing is happening! Heart is beating, lungs are breathing, a physical location is seen. And the most fundamental truth that can be apprehended is, "I am." Don't fall for the neo-Advaita stuff. That is a very naive understanding. Who believes he doesn't exist?

I was born in California and raised by a white lady. I believe in American values even if they're an illusion. I was beaten and brainwashed by Muslims as a kid and have spent my entire life unraveling that experience. First I tried to go to college, get a job, etc. But every day I lived in a dark hole of loneliness because everyone in my world told me I was Arab. I'm half Egyptian genetically, but I grew up with American friends. I visited relatives in Egypt a couple times, but they were basically like full burka foreign Trump voters, it was very alienating. Okay, well, all my worldly plans blew up as I got older and the loneliness and self-alienation engulfed me. By the time I was 30, I was drinking 30 beers a day or a handle of vodka a day, but still I couldn't even die. So then I got into nonduality and learned virtually everything I could about comparative religion and spiritual practice. I can induce a nondual state at will now. And still, I am constantly inundated with inexplicable references to the Middle East wherever I go. I left the Muslim school I attended in 1996, and spent the next couple years being beaten and abused by my Egyptian dad. It got bad enough that I was put in foster care and my parents divorced. So he wasn't in the house anymore, which was a relief. But then 9/11 happened. So then Muslim violence was the topic of the news for the next 15 years. My dad remarried an Egyptian woman and had another family. But I was still kind of in contact because my full brother still lived there. He's pretty American, but plays into a lot of narc abuse dynamics with my dad, so I finally just cut them all off. Then Oct 7 happened. I just went to Burning Man, which should have been the height of free American hedonism, and instead it was plastered in tributes to the poor Palestinians. By the middle of the week, a Muslim guy camped right next to me. I fully believe reality is an illusion. The thing I don't get though, is like, if Muslims have God on their side, if this transcendent force of creation is rubbing these people in my face for a reason, why are Muslims generally stupider than Americans? Like, when I was a kid I was still brainwashed by the school I went to, which told me that Americans were evil, decadent and stupid. So I spent many years wondering if that could be true, and contemplating different value systems trying to determine look, is America really evil? It's no more evil than anywhere else in this human world, in the end. But Americans are generally smarter, savvier, and FOR SURE more in touch with their humanity. I feel that way, sometimes. When the constant references to the Middle East in my life aren't flaring up my alienation. I could go talk to any stranger on a bus and experience more genuine connection than I felt with my estranged Egyptian relatives. And man, those people did nothing but disrespect, abuse and marginalize me when I was still around them. I've been trying to move on, but if this is how reality is, I'm not sure how that would be possible. I live on the western edge of a continent on the other side of the earth from these people. By any rational accounting of things, there should just not be this much presence of that energy in my life. I never liked their culture, even when I was a little kid I thought of Islam like IngSoc from 1984. I thought I was doing the right thing fighting authority. But somehow I live in this middle place where Middle Easterners think I'm an asshole for rejecting their culture, and Americans think I'm racist for criticizing that culture. I feel completely alone in the universe. I thought nonduality, meditation, samadhi, forgiveness, fucking SOMETHING, would end this, but I forgive and forgive and it doesn't really change. I wouldn't feel so upset if they would just get the fuck off my nuts for a while. They were always trying to brainwash me, bind me, abuse me, demean me, degrade me, capture me, intimidate me. Like if they were just chill, it would be chill. I fucking WISH that heritage was worth a damn. But they're so miserable. I'm at the end of anything that could be termed a spiritual search. There's no more new information. I've read everything, practiced everything, experienced all the insights and awakenings. This fundamental karmic balance never seems to change.

Yeah. It's not about the story. I've untangled so much trauma, but it seems what is distressing me now is the earliest of it. Pre-verbal, and when that gets triggered, I have had no success finding equanimity because it's just, completely irrational. It's emotional and primal. I like the advice to get busy with something passionate. I guess from where I'm at I feel hopeless that worldly appearances could ever really occupy me anymore, but that's probably just incel vibes filtered thru what I think I know about awakening. I guess I need to stop engaging with the mind story and just up my morning meditation. Do the work. I recently did a Vipassana retreat and left early when I started hearing Arabic words. I never spoke Arabic. It's distressing to feel like my mind and body are totally porous to this thing I hate so much. After all this time, all the struggle, and it's just coming in from inside my mind. Must I really reckon with this? Is there no escape?

Thanks for the kind words, I'm actually surprised. I am such good friends with the splinters of my inner child. I learned a lot from getting to know them. But again, I am at the end of that. ACT, EFT, DBT, CBT, Inner Child Work, IFS, schema therapy, body scan meditation, somatic experiencing, yoga... I have fully mapped out my mind and body and the traumas in it. I'm like Charlie from It's Always Sunny talking about Pepe Silvia over here with this shit. I did a lot of healing work and learned some amazing things about the nature of humanity. But I just want to stop resonating with those people and be the fucking Californian I have always been. Maybe I'll go back to trying to manifest a Cadillac.

You make a good point. If someone were to realize themselves in the 1500s, they'd probably only have a life of indentured servitude to fall back to. We get to ride helicopters! Heh or any of the other thousand novel things going on in this time and space.

My favorite part of American Psycho the book was the long brand name descriptions of each item of clothing and accessories the characters were wearing. I seem to remember they went on and on to the point where you wondered if they were wearing 3 outfits all on top of each other, which fit the surreal vibe of the book. The discussion on sincerity vs irony reminds me of a discussion in another thread recently about how western society is stuck in post-modern thinking. Everyone knows you can't just sincerely like something, there's a personality trend to have some cynical detachment about things. But it's like people forgot why that attitude originally was valuable, and it's arguable that the downfall of western society is in being unable to make that leap to the next paradigm where irony and criticism can be used in service of actually improving culture and society, rather than just being a pose.

I don't see many people reading metaphysical things into Nolan, it's clear most of his fans are more secular and that stuff goes over their heads. But, he clearly knows what he's doing, or at the very least is an artistic vessel for truthful ideas.

If you're interested in nonduality, but don't follow an organized religion, how important is the concept of faith to you? I'm curious because for a couple of years I grooved on nonduality, meditating on oneness, and reading about Brahman. I thought I lived in an impersonal universe. Turned out I didn't read far enough ahead. Earlier this year, Ishvara, or just something more akin to infinite intelligence, or a more traditional idea of God has been revealing itself to me. I'm never exactly sure what I'm perceiving, all I really know is that I know nothing, right. But I've been surprised the last few months how resistant, resentful and unsettled I am that an all-powerful and aware transcendent intelligence really has been watching me this whole time (hey God!)... I'm still really resentful about the religious school I attended as a kid, and it's a severe mindfuck that there is something more than just the base, ineffable substrate of the universe. You mean you were watching the whole time? I feel like I'm right back to being a kid, struggling with free will vs fate, and really struggling with humility. The way I feel by default is very resentful about this, but I know that's not very skillful or helpful. I have been paralyzed in terms of returning to the world in much of a meaningful way since discovering nonduality, because I feel like I simply don't know where I stand. It kinda helped my emotional health a little bit, I was severely suicidal, depressed and dysfunctional leading up to that discovery, and since then I've been kinda limping along, thinking maybe one day I would figure out how to motivate myself to do things like socialize, start a business, try to get a job that isn't near minimum wage, but I feel like if there's an intelligence watching me, and I have already befallen the many struggles and crises and just overall complete and utter psychological and spiritual dysfunction I've felt in my life, and that intelligence oversaw all that suffering, I don't have much hope for the future. I literally had more hope when I believed God didn't exist, and I'm kinda not sure how to proceed now. I've just been defaulting to Vipassana meditation and gratitude practice, but it's kinda like once the high vibe wears off after a couple hours, I'm just back in the ego mind, which feels absolutely hopeless, and of course is conditioned to be fearful and is not at all welcoming of the "good news" that I am surrounded by intelligent Love. I seem to be vacillating between being high on meditation and prayer practices that cause me to believe in delusional love and light stuff, then being busted back down to depression sadness when I try to make contact with the world. I am kinda surprised that all these years of trauma recovery and study of spiritual practice and the human psyche have not really afforded me any confidence in the relative world. I'm not really sure how to project my intentions into the world or into the future. I was kinda curious what you consciousness explorers make of the concept of faith, if you're coming from a specifically NON-religious paradigm. I'm kinda thinking this whole nonduality trip was just a cul-de-sac of spiritual masturbation designed to turn an agnostic into a believer, and when I'm filled up with gratitude or samadi, I feel hopeful. But the hunk of meat that makes up my human mind is fucking disgusted and sad, I guess I'd always hoped that the ultimate real truth was something completely different from just... "magical irrational God just arbitrarily fucking with me by teaching me bullshit 'lessons.'" Even after all this meditation I'm struggling to place my faith in that. I guess I was deluding myself with nonduality that maybe I, the little me, was really "it," but it's becoming clear that I'm not. It's not that I thought I was that great, I guess I just thought if I lived in a cold, uncaring universe at least that meant that it really was all my fault, and I could do something about it with my merit, and instead it seems there's forces beyond my control after all, and it makes me feel sad and powerless.

Surprised there's not more Nolan love here, his movies took on a totally new meaning for me after learning about nonduality and metaphysics. If Nolan isn't an awakened person (I don't really know anything about him personally), his films at least act as conduits for those ideas. There's tons of metaphysical resonance in his films: The writing's clunky, but in Interstellar he's clearly talking about Love as the ultimate force behind everything. Plus the Tesseract and higher dimensional thinking. There's a huge theme in his films, including Interstellar, of our future selves helping us. Obviously Tenet touches that too. Tenet is basically a story of a guy who initially thinks he's a random person being swept up by incomprehensible events, to realizing that he's literally the protagonist of a story he was directing all along, from his subjective future. It's a story of awakening. There's a line in Oppenheimer that got me... "It is a new way to understand reality. Einstein's opened the door, now we are peering through. Seeing a world inside our world. A world of energy and paradox that not everyone can accept."

I just wanted to say that your opinion initially comes off as extreme, but I feel where you're coming from. Yeah I don't have to imagine that. That was my experience. It has been such a mindfuck to realize how far from reality that really is. I literally spent my childhood unsure if I was going to grow up to fight in a holy war. It really makes you wonder if like... are incoming souls just booting up Call of Duty? Is it just an FPS and I'm the asshole who keeps trying to Mr. Rogers this shit? Is God just the server admin for a cosmic CS:GO instance?

I know this isn't the spirituality forum, but one of the whole challenges of being human is from the perspective of Love, there are a million things to be grateful for in literally every second, it's just that our survival-oriented brains exclude those from its narrative because it's oriented towards identifying problems to solve. It's closer to the metaphysical truth to become aware that every single thing that goes right is like a miracle, honestly. It's one of the reasons gratitude feels like an emotional cheat code, because you could always express more gratitude. Obviously we need to be critical of government, but it's like we all get up every day just continuing to grind the axe, and after a while, if those are the only thoughts you register about the government, that it's bad, corrupt, etc, you create that. My personal thoughts about the American government are like yeah, sure, there are a 100 bad things you can cite that were just never resolved, and represent ongoing threats to the rights of the individual. CIA plots, Patriot Act, drone bombing, whatever. But despite that, the government (and the society) delivers a certain high level of personal freedom and autonomy. It works. The government's not personally going to solve all your problems or make you a millionaire with a check in the mail, but eh, I've been in worse reality premises. It's something I can work with. But yeah ultimately it's up to us to create the realities we want. And I suppose if I'd befallen a serious problem like sickness, or being unable to work, those are pathways in our society that still need a lot of fixing to prevent people from falling through the cracks. It ain't perfect by a long shot, and as a citizen I hope I can help to see those problems move towards a real resolution. But despite the common tropes in our society, I never had problems at the DMV, or getting services when I was unemployed. I even dealt with the legal system once, and expected that the legal process would be very unfair. It wasn't. It legitimately rehabilitated me, and I had a lot of respect for how every step of the process was handled. There was a lot of effort put forth to impress upon me that it was in the best interests of the state, and the society in which I live, for me to be a happy healthy human. I was surprised. I'm just saying, there's the bumper stickers we repeat to ourselves every day. Life's a drag, politicians are crooks, this country's going down the tubes. But take a look, put your meditation hat on. Is that really what you're experiencing?

Nothin to do but get on with it.

Well, I mean it's "me," in terms of some bullshit language games. But the dude waking up here didn't invent the universe and seems to have very little influence over the course of events.

Concentrating on the breath, yeah. Sometimes I focus on a dot on a wall or a candle flame, but not as regularly as the Vipassana. Is there really any practical difference between nonduality and believing in a dualistic god/man relationship in the end? I still feel like a ragdoll being tossed around by higher forces.

A few months ago, I was on 100ug LSD, thinking about higher dimensions. I've been consuming a lot of content in the 5D, ascension, higher dimensional oversoul type area, not sure exactly what it all means. I was sitting at my computer doing oneness or nondual meditation. I do this by doing a body scan, noticing the feeling of my body, and then extending that to my entire visual field, extending that sense of being or identity not just to my body, but all that is sensed by my body. I moved my attention up to the top of my visual field, then down to the bottom. Then left, then right. Then I noticed I could move it in, to focus on something in my visual field quite deeply. And then the real fun started: I noticed I could move it... "out"... my entire visual field started developing dark spots on the corners, as my visual field folded into a ball. I considered trying to animate this in video somehow, but I don't know how to do that. Sorry if I struggle to translate what I saw. My visual field folded into a ball, and I noticed that I could zoom back into the ball, or zoom out and watch height, width, and depth fold into another couple of axes that I've never seen before. The whole visual field looked like it was shards of a mirror folding into themselves as I continued pulling myself "out" of my visual field. I was looking at my face on my webcam in my computer screen, and when it started folding up, there were at least 5 of my face, all reflected off each other, folding into each other. Then I zoomed completely out of my visual field, and the shards of dimensionality folded past what I'd been looking at. I was still seeing visuals, but what I was seeing was impossible, and presumably it was still being filtered through my visual cortex. From my POV, I could see shards of my room folded on themselves hyper dimensionally, and a cloud of energy escaped where I had thought I was sitting, and started floating upwards. It seemed to be trapped energy that was maybe stale, or stuck, and upon realization of this hyper dimensionality, it escaped, traveling along an axis I couldn't sense as it basically magically floated thru all the shards of dimension I was sensing. Then it floated upwards immediately. It felt like a good thing, like releasing trauma or stuck negative energy like that. This place seemed interesting, because while all I could see was shards of my 3D room reflected in multiple dimensions that usually aren't there, the dimensions felt like real physicality, they felt like being able to sense a hyper dimensional substrate that's actually always right here, I just don't have the psychology to usually be able to allow it into my experience. IE, when I say the dimensions were folding over on themselves like shards, I could look down right at the shards. It was still a "place," just one that no longer made sense in 3 dimensions. I immediately got the sense that if I had the right psychology for this, I could travel along the axes of these higher dimensions. As in, the same way that height, width, and depth aren't in some other place, they're right here, so were the additional dimensions I was sensing. They're just extra axes of right here, that my brain and psychology aren't usually equipped to sense in any way. But with the extra dimensional information folded into my brain with the help of a psychedelic, I could sense them. I gotta tell ya, reading all the 5D ascension stuff, I spent 4 years or so reading about all that thinking it was just some flight of fancy. Honestly most of this spiritual metaphysical stuff doesn't mean much to me until it really directly impacts me. But that was a very interesting experience. Not sure if I could replicate it, not sure if there's really any value in that. Have any of you guys experienced this? After following Leo's work and absorbing spiritual metaphysical content on the internet for 5 years, I've never heard of anyone directly experiencing higher dimensions this way.

The Hyperion books are an amazing blend of scifi and religious thought. The concept in the books of "the void which binds" has a lot of overlap with nonduality and it's pretty clear to me that the author was on the same paths that a lot of us consciousness explorers are.

I started performing salat at age 3, was instructed at this school and prayed at school. I said I only practiced at age 8 cuz that was the only time I ever tried to carry out the whole 5 prayers a day, fasting all Ramadan, praying Taraweeh, and really believing in it. I took tutoring lessons as well. I was basically being trained to go on to be a sheik or imam or something. My dad basically wanted to pay money to someone to turn me into a Hafiz, but he didn't want to actually parent me, so it was a weird disjointed experience where on the one hand I was being trained in this foreign religion, and on the other being mostly raised by a white lady from Cali. I don't know if that's normal, it was just my experience. But after growing up and learning more about what western society is like, I'm pretty flabbergasted at what passed for teaching standards there. Don't get mad at me, Saudi Arabia funded a bunch of radical Islamic schools around the world in the 70s and 80s, and this is what they were teaching in your religion's name. I can't vouch for that, and apparently neither can other Muslims. It's basically the same response the global Muslim community gives after heinous acts like Oct 7 -- "Hey, wasn't me, I didn't personally kill people, so I have no responsibility in this." People do shitty things in the name of Islam, non-Muslims criticize, Muslims get butthurt. The cycle repeats. No one learns anything. I wonder if Muslims can develop a sense of shared collective responsibility for things done in the name of their faith.

What can I say? Wahhabist propoganda is a hell of a drug.

Rakats are a measure of Salat, not wudu. Wudu is ablution. And yes, those movements are burned into my nervous system as well, the cupping of the hands, the washing the head etc. 4 rakats in Zuhr, 2 in Fajr.

Yknow how the Jesuits say, give me the boy to the age of 7, and I will give you the man? That school taught me those things pre-age 7. Which if you know anything about the brain, means those beliefs and experiences are permanently etched into my brain. Of course you have to dismiss my experience because Muslim beliefs cannot hold up to the light of day. So you have to deny, gaslight, standard cult stuff. I have seen Muslims deny the things they taught me, many many times. It's part of their survival strategy. Don't hate the player, I guess.

I don't really like labeling myself an ex-Muslim, cuz I only practiced for a year when I was 8. But I unfortunately did have a lot of Islam related experiences. I was dragged on the pilgrimage to Mecca against my will, as one example. Muslims did a lot of things to me without my consent, which I have never experienced in any other spiritual or religious community. I have complex thoughts about the issue that I don't hear echoed very often, honestly it makes me feel pretty isolated because aside from the effect their bullshit teachings had on me, I otherwise grew up with an American parent. It's a real weird culture clash, Wahhabi Islam and materialist southern California culture. Funny enough, since getting into spirituality I have started to see some value in Islamic stuff, but I only find that's true if the religion is explained by NON-MUSLIMS. Like, if a western professor talks about it in a comparative religion context, or an eastern meditation practitioner talked about mystical Islam or something. But all I've seen from actual Middle Easterners is racism, delusion, and justifications for the shame-based culture of intergenerational trauma they've got going on over there. I think the reason is because if a non-Muslim talks about it, they can take what's good about it and house it in the context of a modern world largely underpinned by the implicit beliefs of the global economy which largely come from the west. But if a Muslim talks about it, it's not usually about a personal practice or a cultural understanding. It comes with the full ideology of Muslim society: that Islam must spread around the globe and establish a worldwide Sharia government. Plus Muslim personal ethics fucking suck. Way too many of these people are still comfortable with murder, oppression of women, and all the other crap. To give an idea of what I mean about shitty Muslim morals, I attended a Muslim school for 8 years in SoCal. I met so many Muslims at the time who told me verbatim that the laws of the United States were quite literally tools of Satan, and thus Muslims had a DUTY to break the laws as a form of passive jihad. They told me this verbatim, many many times. My Muslim dad followed this advice and got arrested about 20 times. Not to mention the school instructed me for 8 long years that it was my soul-bound duty to wage jihad against the federal government of the United States, to make my life's work to infiltrate an office of government on the federal or state level, to if not destroy America, at least turn it into a Muslim state. (Which is adorable, BTW) So... I don't ever want to follow a religion in my daily life that explicitly instructed me to be hostile to the country in which I live. I don't want to follow a religion who's sense of civics is so twisted, they explicitly instructed me to break the local laws in which I live. Do you hear that? This school/mosque, theoretically a place of moral instruction, was literally instructing kindergarteners to grow up to BREAK THE LAWS of the land in which they live. A "moral" institution. Does it get any more twisted than that? Don't get me started on how the teachers, in a school in Orange County CA in the early 90s, used the authority of the office of teacher to instruct us kids that "the Jews" have "pig brains" and walk with limps because they're so crooked. It just goes on and on. These people are not serious yet. The Muslim region of the world still has a lot of work to do to evolve up the Spiral Dynamics chain and join the rest of us here in the 21st century. I say that as an Arab American who has been to the Middle East many times. In the US most white people would consider that racist, I think, but my experience with the Muslims was harsh and my freedom from them was hard won. It's really easy to have naive beliefs about what goes on inside Muslim society, looking out from the West. Is every Muslim like that? Of course not, but I don't care. Too many of them are, and the group think still leads to things like Oct 7. 20 years later they're still marking days on the calendar with mass murder. You can't convince me they hold any moral authority whatsoever. Furthermore, whatever secret sauce teachings the Sufis got, you'd be better served by going with Advaita, Buddhism, or any of the nonduality teachers. I find that the western conversation around Islam is too constrained by westerners's well meaning attempts to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt. That's part of our character as a society, it's part of how we help people assimilate into the west. But then Muslims take advantage of that to both-sides things like the Oct 7 attacks. Frankly my opinion is that we in the west have this word, religion. And we assume that each one is equal to each other one. But I perceive vast differences between the coercive practices of the Muslim community I was a part of, the dearth of substance in their teachings, the moral character of the followers, contrasted to other religious and spiritual traditions. Obviously #NotAllMuslims, but that's my hardwon opinion after dealing with those jokers for a couple decades. Don't miss em.

I can speak to this. These messages are coming because in 2019 and 2020, I woke up to nonduality (thanks to Leo's channel btw). Except, without spiritual or metaphysical training, I honestly didn't even know wtf I "woke up" to. It's taken me several years since to integrate these awakenings, and really awakening and integration are ongoing. So, I had a stage where despite my awakening, I was still just looking for someone to "tell me what it all means." Which, of course, is diametrically opposed to the idea of self-knowledge. I ended up manifesting vast amounts of people on Youtube talking about various spiritual and esoteric topics that I never saw anywhere pre-2019 and awakening. First, I was curious about manifesting a Cadillac, so endless realms of Youtube "manifestation coaches" popped up. But I wanted to know the bigger picture, but was still too antisocial to leave my Youtube page. So then came astrologers, meditators, metaphysicians, mystics, and finally people began talking about "ascension into 5D." So recently, returning to the truth that we are all one, yet retain our relative beings, there is this narrative forming of a worldwide global awakening. Will this happen? Sure, it's happening, it was happening before, and will continue happening again. You have seen these videos because your attention is open to these things. It appears to you in your own personal universe. But to those who've never gone down these rabbit holes, they're in whatever stories they currently resonate with. Politics, religion, money, etc. To them, an announcement of a worldwide global awakening doesn't mean anything. To those of us who are resonating with this, we will see the global awakening. It will appear to us in a way that is persuasive. But the world will keep on spinning, new people will be born, new human journeys for Spirit to embark upon will continue. They will have their own awakenings, their own journeys, expressed to them in the way that makes sense for their purpose at that time. Perhaps it will appear as this narrative of "worldwide global awakening," or maybe it'll express as some other thing. But as we know here, the awakening already happened, it is happening, it is about to happen, and you are ALREADY IT. If a video message about global awakening is salient to you, then good. Perhaps it inspires you. Perhaps you can meet up with those people already talking about it, and do what you can to raise awareness of the people around you. I happen to know that you can be pretty awakened without ever putting it in spiritual or metaphysical terms at all. I have been obsessed with awakening while still being an unenlightened fool, and I've seen people who didn't think much about God or spirituality who were genuinely good, loving, arguably awakened people. But, to those who have awakened and think that we have to now convince the other 8 billion humans to all "awaken," and to express that awakening in the terms that people like us here do, in terms of like Alan Watts and enlightenment and metaphysics and such... I don't think that's ever going to happen, nor do I think it's the purpose of this veiled life of forgetfulness and remembering. We can provide knowledge to those who come after us, we can provide material for them to become more conscious, but we cannot live their journeys for them. New people come into the planet every day, and each one has the potential to stand on the shoulders of all who came before. To extend the map of meaning that humanity has created, and expand the horizon of choice available to each individual on this planet as they embark of their journey of discovery and self-realization.

I know what you mean, I've been down the rabbit hole, I've crossed the gateless gate, I've rested in my nondual state as I Am, and learned the intricacies of neuroscience and psychology, and I'm running out of information to explain why I'm still not perfectly executing the goals I say I want. I've gotten pretty good at following a routine for like a week, but eventually I just want some unstructured fuck-off time to read random Reddit and YouTube stuff, even though I've reached the point where there's no further information I really need to understand any of the following subjects: my childhood trauma, discipline, how my brain works, how to manage my emotions. It's just, I'm not a robot, that's the bottom line. But I have large goals and am not happy about the current amount of time I devote to them. The only thing I can say is I continue to try to get better at making the goals I have into tasks that I can make into habits and start doing more and more unconsciously. Exercising, writing, setting up websites and stuff like that. That's where I'm at now.

I've experienced this before, is this not the Non-Dual Experience? I thought it was, and if it's not, then I guess I've got more work to do... what is non dual experience then?

I'm not sure if I've hit my turning point yet. I might have, but maybe not yet. Turning points only look like turning points in retrospect, I expect. I empathize with your feelings of realization and regret. I've progressed mentally and spiritually, and find that once I unlock a certain limiting belief, I find it easy to regret the specific instances that led me to those limiting beliefs, or that I didn't internalize the information I needed sooner. These regrets come up in my awareness uncomfortably. But I would say, try not to attach to these thoughts too much. Before I was even on a spiritual or self-actualizational journey, I still regretted things when I moved past them, and while you may not be able to stop the thoughts from popping into your mind, you are able to choose to remove awareness from them. A lot of my problems stemmed from attaching too strongly to these regrets in the first place. I literally developed PTSD from it, which of course added to the pile of regrets and problems. But it also led me to pursuing mindfulness and investigating metaphysics and my psyche. Would it be nicer if we were zen masters at age 18? Yeah, maybe. But I think regret is felt based on something lacking from your life now. What you feel you are lacking in changes over time, along with your position and perspective in life. A couple weeks from now you'll learn another mindblowing thing that could lead you to regretting some different event or missed opportunity from your past. You could attach feeling to it, and sit in the self-discovery hangover, or you could drop it and do something else. Consider this, as well. I found that I had actually encountered a lot of this information in the past, many times in fact. But it went right over my head because of either a false limiting belief I hadn't smashed yet, or because I simply didn't understand enough about life or myself yet to understand the significance of the information. So for this stuff to work requires a little bit of the right kind of experience, which requires time, perhaps getting older or reaching a new life stage. Knowledge + experience = wisdom, and you're feeling that now. Your initial reaction may be regret, but what matters is what your ultimate reaction is. You can consciously choose to take action of some kind to self-actualize, whether it's career/business stuff or developing your meditation practice or whatever else. I've cleared up a lot of my mental problems, but it seems to me that my brain simply has a circuit that works like this: When it learns something new that's useful for my interests, my brain instantly tries to slot it into my past, usually age 18, and when it realizes that's impossible because time travel isn't an option, it generates negative feelings. Maybe I can engineer that out of my brain, but maybe not. What I can do though, is think something else, challenge the regret, choose to do something about it, or even feel gratitude that my brain cares about me. There was a time when I couldn't sleep and stayed up all night carving PTSD into my brain feeling endless regret about shit, so it's progress. I've found that the regret I felt way back in the day was based on believing in limiting beliefs that said my experiences were negative, when those beliefs were the highly distorted beliefs of a sheltered teenager, and ultimately were completely false in the face of my full potential as a human. So I felt all that regret over nothing, right? What you focus on, expands. Focus on making a plan, or on making tomorrow slightly better than today.