Osaid

I've probably studied Leo's content the most out of everyone. 😂

I recently realized that unicorns are imaginary. Every single unicorn you ever imagined doesn't exist right now. Seriously, try it, look at your experience. There are no unicorns, they don't exist, because they happen inside of your mind. When you look at a unicorn, that unicorn is occuring in your experience, nowhere else. All unicorns are just you as God playing with yourself. God just imagines unicorns for eternity to entertain itself. That is what God is. An infinite imaginative dreamer. All alone by itself, imagining unicorns. If you deny this, you are just too afraid to stomach the fact that all unicorns are imaginary. This is one of the deepest and most ultimate awakenings you can have.

Humans forget things. Only a human can forget that it is God. Only a human can realize that other humans don't exist. Only a human can realize that it isn't human. You are also accessing the fact that you forgot something through memory. Again, nothing here is absolute, it is your own anthropomorphic bias projected onto reality. This is all just a story about yourself that you are concocting, a very human story. This is all fundamentally stemming from the belief that you genuinely exist inside of thought.

Well observed. It is the belief that there is risk towards yourself in socializing which creates social anxiety. You have beliefs about yourself which you don't want to change, and you perceive social situations as something that can change those beliefs, so you act accordingly to prevent that from happening. Your emotions and bodily reactions are perfectly aligned with your intentions, which is to perpetuate the beliefs you have about yourself, but the permanent solution is to realize you aren't a belief. If you have beliefs about yourself, then the ideas that other people convey to you become a threat, because those ideas can change the beliefs you have about yourself, and thus it is a threat to your very existence, in a similar way that a wild animal would make you uneasy since it can physically harm you and affect your existence. The stomach sensation is probably cortisol and adrenaline build up, or what is called butterflies in the stomach. It is a normal physiological reaction to situations which we want to avoid, in the same way how you would get adrenaline when avoiding a bear. It can seem as if the solution is to simply "stop believing bad things about yourself" or something of that sort, but that is still in the realm of beliefs and it is just a changing of beliefs, so it is similar to fighting fire with fire. The root solution is more like realizing that it is actually impossible to believe a bad thing about yourself, or even think of yourself at all. It's not that social situations are causing social anxiety, it is the belief that you have about yourself in relation to that social situation which creates anxiety. Social anxiety = the belief which says "I am a bad person if this goes wrong." It is not the social situation, it is the belief about yourself that you create from inside of the social situation. This is exactly why you can be sitting on your bed, remember some cringey thing you did a few years ago, and then completely relive that situation emotionally while being on your bed. You didn't enter a social situation, you remembered a social situation you had from a long time ago, and that memory triggered the exact same belief that occurred at that time, which then triggered the same emotional and physiological reaction as well.

Solipsism is a belief about experience. It's relative to people. No people = no solipsism to contemplate and think about. Unfortunately most people actually perceive themselves as existing inside of imagination, which is what ego is, so it's very hard for them to see that thinking about people is not the same as people. It's just knowledge. As a baby, before you see the first person ever, you don't have any conception of other people. It's not metaphysics, and it's not absolute, it literally does not exist when you are born. It is just relative concepts. "You can't know that other people exist through imagination" != "other people don't exist" The latter is a conclusion arrived by perceiving the former. It's all imagination. You cannot know that other people don't exist without consulting imagination in the first place. "Realizing solipsism" is knowledge-building, it is not existential. And that seems to be the case with a lot of these different awakenings, you guys are just arriving at different conclusions and ideas and insights about reality which you didn't have before. You might as well realize that the tree outside of your house doesn't exist, tree-awakening. Or that that sun doesn't exist when you look at it, sun-awakening! The sun is absolutely non-existent guys! If you close your eyes and focus on experience, you can't experience the sun! This entire thing is so hilariously anthropomorphic, the only reason you focus on "other people" instead of the sun or a tree is because you are a human and humans care about people. No one cares if you realize that the sun doesn't exist, but everyone cares when you say "people don't exist", because that is what you as a human find relevant and intellectually satisfying. When someone says "hey bro the sun doesn't exist", it doesn't really matter to you, because you can experientially recognize that this guy just reached some intellectual conclusion which is irrelevant to your experience. The world is not ending. And you have not frozen to death. But, when someone starts saying that other people don't exist, you get your panties in a twist.

I also prefer calling it "infinite" instead of "one", because "one" implies "two." "Oneness" isn't too bad either, it has more flair to it than just "one." The word "one" pops up since being "two" is always made through imagination. But the actual reality is neither one or two, although the logical conclusion becomes "if it can't be multiple, then it is just one thing", which is not wrong necessarily, but I find that calling it "one" is too logical for my taste as well. It's more like there are many things happening in one thing, like you would see in a movie or painting. Or there could be nothing at all, depends what state you're in.

Bypassing the intellect through intellect. It's seeing the limits of intellect by questioning it until it evaporates. But I also don't agree with him that most people aren't sharp enough to do it, and I think self-inquiry is perfectly valid. It's just not encouraged or even seen as a valid possibility by most people.

If you don't imagine another person, you can't realize that they don't exist. Your entire realization is based in imagination as well, which is what I am trying to point out. Being alone doesn't mean that other people don't exist, that is an inference which comes from memory and identity, but it can't be experienced. If you say that other people don't exist when you are alone, that is the same as saying that non-existence exists. Every single time you say "this doesn't exist", that is not a perceivable thing, that is always 100% a relative dualistic concept. The only way you can ever reference non-existence is through duality. What I'm saying is super simple: You can't lose something by thinking about it, that is just you changing beliefs about yourself. If I am in a void, I would think yes, I'm alone. If a human appears in the void, I can view that human and think "Oh look, a human is here as well." I can theorize about whether the human has an experience or not, but that is not what the experience of the human is. I can look at a tree in front of me, but me theorizing about whether the tree has an experience or not has nothing to do with the experience of that tree. For most people, their identity is meshed with "other people", so I can see how having an experience where you are just floating in a void somewhere could create a solipsistic conclusion, but that is just an inference based in your identity. It's not that they have their own experience, and it's not that they don't have their own experience. It's just you thinking about what their experience is. The desire to prove their experience is an error in your own perception of thoughts, you can't prove a thought that you are having to yourself. It is the same as imagining a unicorn, and then thinking "I wonder if that unicorn has its own experience?" You can't verify that question you have formulated because there is nothing to verify, you made it up through thought. If you speculate that they have their experience, then that is a speculative position you can hold even when no one is around you. If you speculate that they don't have an experience, then that is a speculative position you can hold even when no one is around you. In both cases, it is just you thinking about experiences, it is not relevant to the experience of another person. In the same way that you can speculate about whether a tree has its own experience, but that speculation is irrelevant to the experience of being with an actual tree. You are mistaking your perception of thought forms for something absolute and existential. It is not more correct to not think about someone having an experience, and it is not more correct to think about someone not having experience. They are both just thoughts. You can't perceive someone not having their experience, you can only perceive the belief that they don't have their own experience. When you look at the color red, you don't say "I am experiencing not blue", you say "that's red." The former is a mental inference you are creating. In the same way, when you look at someone and say "that person is not having their own experience", that is a mental inference you are creating.

There's nothing absolute about being alone. If every creature on earth was wiped off the earth tomorrow except yourself, you would achieve "being alone" through relative means. It's relative. You're just personifying reality. "Alone" is relative to "other", it's a concept. If triangles had a God, they would give it 3 sides. If humans had a God, they would make it alone. If you concede that you can't think of other people, then you can't realize that they don't exist either. That is just more thinking. Thinking of other people is imaginary, and realizing that they don't exist is also imaginary. Both are imaginary. They are relative to eachother. When you say "other people don't exist because they are imaginary", that realization happens inside of imagination. If you never think of other people, you can't realize that they don't exist. You can't experience what doesn't exist. You can't imagine a person, and you can't "realize" a person away either. Thus, you can't become alone through a realization, that is always just a conceptual shift in identity. The idea of being alone is based on the idea of non-existence, in the case of solipsism, the non-existence is expressed as "other people don't exist."

Sadghuru's stance is interesting. From what I can tell, he doesn't find self-inquiry to be practical, which is what someone like J.K. promotes. He thinks that most people don't have an intellect sharp enough for that, so he would rather induce energetic states and practices to get people there, like yoga and what not. He sees it as more efficient. Aside from that, he seems to be much more absorbed in that sort of energetic and supernatural background, as he even talks about diet and spirits and such things.

You can't have a realization that makes you more alone 😂😂😂. "Alone" is relative to "people", you are not "people", you are all that you experience. You are the thing that views people and views your body. There is no "lack of experience" for you to feel alone about. Your experience of yourself can't be alone because it contains the duality of alone and together inside it. Normally, when someone is alone by themselves, meaning that there is no physical person or creature in their vicinity, they don't perceive that as some kind of existential solipsistic realization, and that is entirely correct. They are the only person in that experience, but they don't go around proclaiming "Oh my god guys I just realized I'm the only person that exists." Absolutely nothing changed experientially, your beliefs and knowledge about experience did. You are just stating the obvious when you say "Hey man, did you know that, like, you are the only thing you can experience? Because you're you!" This is like when someone smokes weed and they think they're saying something profound, but they've just recontextualized their experience in an overly existential way. Ok, you know that you are yourself, great, beautiful tautology. Now, what actually is that? What are "you"? What is this "yourself" you keep saying you are? Oh, sorry, you prefer calling yourself God? Or infinite imagination? Ok, fine, what actually is God and infinite imagination? Do you actually know what you are or are you just playing semantic games? Hint, it's not located in more knowledge or conclusions or answers, and it's not located in an awakening experience you haven't had yet.

Many tails to be discovered.

😂🎯 It's hilarious how hard the mind tries to escape duality. It just ends up saying completely tautological statements as if they mean anything. "Hey guys, I had a new awakening and realized that everything = imagination" "Hey guys, I had a new awakening and realized that everything = you" "Hey guys, I had a new awakening and realized that everything = love" "Hey guys, I had a new awakening and realized that everything = love = imagination = you"

You are probably accessing these experiences through some odd sleep state, as you say you are half asleep. Would explain why it happens at night. I have had hypnopompic hallucinations while waking up which transitioned themselves perfectly seamlessly, for example, I would be looking at a door and hearing screaming from behind it, and then at some point I would wake up, but my visual perception of the door would be continuous. Anyways, sounds like some very vivid experiences, which would only happen during astral projection or sleep paralysis or some odd sleep state. My only advice is to increase sleep quality as much as possible and make sure that your sleep is not interrupted, and that your stress and nutrition in general are fine.

It simply has no relevance to your experience. You can sit in your room by yourself, and you can either come to the conclusion that other people exist or don't exist. At the end of the day, your experience is still that of a human that sits in their room and contemplates mental conclusions about reality. Nothing regarding other people was changed or experienced. You are still by yourself in that room, just contemplating things. Other people did not change, your beliefs about them did. There is a difference between having a physical human in front of you, and contemplating theories and conclusions about other humans. The latter is ultimately just you changing beliefs and knowledge, and it has nothing to do with the former. You can theorize about other people having their own experience or not, but that is just theory. You will never experience someone not existing, that is something that only happens in theory. There is nothing metaphysical or absolute about contemplating knowledge or theory. You cannot become more or less alone by changing beliefs about yourself or other people. Whether you believe they exist or not, nothing has changed but beliefs, not their actual existence. It doesn't change what is actually happening. You can't become more or less alone by changing beliefs. You can say that there is one being, multiple beings, or none, but those are just changes in identity if they are taken as conclusions about reality. What you are experiencing right now is a human body, and believe it or not, the experience of your body right now is neither one being, multiple beings, or no beings, those are all just relative concepts. Your physical body is exactly just your physical body, and it is beyond any of those relative concepts. If you focus on the sensation of touch, can you call that "one being" or "multiple beings"? When you taste ice cream, can you call that "one being" or "multiple beings"? I am saying that both touch and taste have nothing to do with any beings, and that saying it has anything to do with a "being" is an unnecessary interpretation, and the same goes for your experience as a whole. Even when you say "there is no being" that is still a conclusion which exists within the paradigm of "beings that can exist." When you look at the color red you say "that is red", you don't say "that is a being which is the color red." The latter is an unnecessary identity being projected. If you say "there is a being in experience" that is knowledge about things that are in experience. If you say "there are no beings in experience" that is still knowledge about things that are in experience. Notice that both conclusions can be held in experience, even if other people are present or aren't present. Therefore, it is truly irrelevant to the experience of other people, but only relevant to your own knowledge about other people. Experience itself doesn't need knowledge or conclusions to be experienced. You are what you are currently experiencing. To really nail in this point, if you lived in a universe where you were the only creature that existed, there would be no such thing as "absolute solipsism", and there wouldn't even be a "lack of other people" to begin with, because you are the only human being in that scenario. You would have no frame of reference for "other people." This really shows that none of this has anything to do with anything absolute or existential, it is just a relative change in beliefs and identity.

Solipsism is ultimately an identity or conception which is never experienced as anything other than identity or conception. It is trapped in a conceptual duality, and so it is never experienced. It is just as accurate to say "there are only other people" as it is to say "there is only you", because both concepts assume that something else can be the case, that is the only way both concepts can exist at all. My stance was basically summarized in this section: I elaborate more poetically on this point in another post of mine:

The funniest thing is when you realize that "imagination" and "concept" are themselves concepts. They are categories of experience. You can't experience a category of experience. So when you say "that's just imagination so it's not real", the distinction of "imagination" and "real" are themselves concepts and imagination. So, you are using imagination to determine that imagination is not real. There is no meaningful metaphysical implication of identifying that something is imagination, because that is just more imagination. It is just a tool to describe experience, yet many people hinge their entire existential position on it. You can say that there is "visual perception", but notice that this label of "visual perception" is a category of experience. It doesn't actually describe what is visually perceived, it just turns it into a general abstraction through thought. Categories only exist in thought. What is missed is that you can abstract thoughts through thoughts as well, by calling them "thoughts" or "imagination." You generally don't use visual perception to deny visual perception, but notice that you deny thoughts with thoughts. When you visualize an image in your mind's eye, you might have an extra thought/interpretation that comes up and says "that's not real, it's just imaginary." Or maybe a more relatable thought for the members of this forum would be "that is metaphysically wrong to think about" or "that doesn't exist metaphysically." Thoughts are a sensory experience just like visual perception, but you believe that you can truly dissect and figure out the entirety of reality using that sensory perception, which is false, in the same way that you don't "figure out" reality by tasting ice cream or visually perceiving something. All your metaphysical conceptualizations are still conceptual, they are not actually metaphysical or existential or absolute. And they get conflated with the absolute all the time, because the concept you think of says "This is absolute, not conceptual. I am God, I am this, I am that, there are no others." But this is still in the realm of concepts, and you are essentially just building up a philosophy which says "this is not a philosophy, this is absolute and existential because I experienced it before, yadda yadda." If you are still using concepts to identify yourself and explain yourself, you have not left the realm of the average philosopher coming up with their own theoretical conclusions about reality. What you are is not a theory or answer or conclusion or anything like that, it is just what you are, and that contains any theory or answer or conclusion inside of it. You are the thing which generates answers and conclusions about yourself. Notice that whenever you say something like "I am the only thing that exists", that statement only exists in contrast to the opposite duality of itself, which is "I am not the only thing" or "something else exists." So, it is still a conceptual identity. It exists in relation to a concept, the opposite concept, which is "there are other people." The experience of being the only thing that exists does not exist, and the experience of not being the only thing that exists does not exist either. Because they both depend on each other conceptually. They are dualities. When you see another person in front of you, that is not you being alone or together, that is simply just the experience of another person being in front of you. It's just that fucking simple. You can theorize all you want about it later, but that is exactly what you experienced. The "you" which can be alone or together is a conceptual interpretation of that experience. It does not change your experience of that person at all.

Realize what you are, the irreplaceable uniqueness of yourself that no thoughts about yourself can touch or describe. This can really be a permanent and immediate shift done from a sober baseline state, and the only reason it doesn't seem possible for it to be that way is because all your glimpses of non-duality have been induced through temporal states, through chemistry or energy changing activities. I recommend self-inquiry: What am I? What are all my thoughts and beliefs about myself pointing to? How do I know I am myself and not somebody else? The meditation creates a situation which does not contain certain stimuli. Outside of meditation, certain thoughts and activities "trigger" you back into beliefs about yourself. You are always in a non-dual state, but there are just beliefs that you aren't. There's no such thing as absolute/relative, non-dual/dual, finite/infinite, those are pointers, and pointers can only exist in the realm of duality. They never actually occurred. To believe that any of those actually has some significance to your experience is confusing the map for the territory. That map has to be thrown out at some point if you really want to get serious about what you are experiencing. If there is truly some kind of energetic shift, I would say that is similar to changing your physiological or biochemical structure in order to induce a certain state. Which is the point of certain yoga, like kundalini yoga. But it is not necessary or inherent to realizing what you are, if that makes sense. In the same way that a psychedelic can induce a non-dual state, but the psychedelic itself is not necessary for non-duality to exist. It is simply a result of the forced chemistry change that the substance/activity/method brings. In this case, the desire to "master energies" for me seems similar to saying "I want to master psychedelic states" or "I want to master self-inquiry so that I can become non-dual." All of them bring experiences of non-duality, but they are not striking at what is fundamental, since they are just methods. I am not saying to abandon any energetic practices, I believe this is how someone like Sadghuru mainly teaches people, but the idea that you have to control some kind of energetic knob to realize what you are is confusing a practice/method for non-duality itself. It is not necessarily wrong, it might even trigger a permanent shift, but my only concern is that you shouldn't confuse non-duality for a practice or method. It is something that can be perceived while you are enjoying a cup of tea, or watching a TV show, or playing video games. It is a simple yet profound shift that just happens, either you get it or you don't.

I know, right? Boring! Been there done that. Where's the solipsism? The infinite love? The omnipotence? The thrill? The profundity? The depth? The newfound insight? The metaphysics? I want DEEPER. Awakening™ is in another castle.

It definitely feels lighter, like a weight being lifted off your head. There is actually a noticeable and measurable difference in how the body uses energy, it becomes more efficient. Sleep becomes different as well. Incessant thought-creation uses up a lot of energy and strains your perception. I literally had an experience happen where it felt like my body was gonna start floating lol. Sometimes energy gets high like that. Overall, I think it's a natural consequence of being zoomed into the present moment.

It didn't. You can't understand this because it isn't the case. You've created a relationship between "me" and "awareness", which is of course perceived as limited, because it can't be the case and isn't the case. Awareness can't expand or cover anything. Awareness is just awareness. It doesn't become more of itself, or expand itself, because it is itself, always. You can't get it down because it's not there. There's nothing to "get down." You're making it up. Nothing you can speak is actually the case. You can't speak the color red. Any conclusions you have about yourself are basically garbage, because they are not the thing. In the same way that any conclusions you have about red are garbage, because they aren't red, they are just conclusions about red. Conclusions != red. Conclusions != you. Finite doesn't exist. Relative doesn't exist. Limited doesn't exist. Only deception can perceive deception. Only the limited can perceive what is limited. Conclusions about the color red only exist as conclusions, not the color red. So the conclusions can only ever perceive red as a conclusion, not the actual color red. Because that is the mode of perception it is stuck in.

That was quite the read. Leo is really in a divine goose chase.

Leo's favorite religion is Buddhism. He even went bald to show his devotion to monkhood.

Does "working on lucid dreaming" involve a change in sleep schedule? I would consider that interrupted sleep. I remember I was able to enter sleep paralysis with about 90% accuracy just by following a certain sleep schedule. I think it will be very hard to work on issues while you're dreaming non-lucidly. Like, you're not gonna do shadow work while in the dream. That's gonna come from waking up and analyzing the dream, and then working on yourself from that waking state. That's what I think at least. I also think that is the simplest way to do it. Although you might be able to do something with lucid dreaming, but I don't have much experience in that.

Nightmares tend to be a manifestation of unresolved worries and thought loops from the waking state. Your dreams cycle through and process all the different thoughts and worries and scenarios you have during the day, and also many of the thoughts that you suppress. In the dream state, there is no ego to prevent thoughts from manifesting. The strength of the dreams and how often they occur can be greatly amplified through bad or interrupted sleep quality. If you enter a deep and peaceful sleep, you won't get much dreams. Just as an example, if there is a certain thought which occurs to you during the day which creates a feeling of impending doom or something of that sort, and you find yourself encountering it often, this can trigger your dreams to carry a similar emotional sensation.