Ninja_pig

I think that everyone has a different definition of 'awake', and Buddhists generally don't meet Leo's high standards. To Zen Buddhists, being awake means to see through the illusion of the self and understand existence as pure void. To leo, being awake means an infinite awareness and direct experience of reality as pure consciousness, and eventually the understanding that you are god. These two experiences seem to be distinct to me, although some would argue they are the same. I personally have had this void experience that your monk was saying he had. I was able to achieve it after a few months of "do nothing" meditation. The point that all experience is just void. There is no real substance to reality at all. If you get skilled enough at meditation you can turn off your mind's reality making function and then you just experience pure nothingness while still being conscious, and absent of a sense of self. Check my "Why Reality is Imagination" article a more detailed explanation of that. All of reality is just ideas, and the self is purely a concept. It's not real. I also recommend Fred Davis on YouTube for a good explanation and guidance towards awakening.

I would say this qualifies as a mystical experience, but usually these type of "bright light" experiences are just a sign that you are beginning to progress, but there are much deeper mystical experiences. Those are the ones that change how you view reality and your perception of yourself. That's what spirituality is all about. Many people have mystical experiences at young ages. I would argue that it is very common but most people forget these experiences when they get older. It is common to be reminded of a time in our deep past when we these certain mystical experiences. Mystical experiences occur naturally in humans and especially in children.

Infinity=Recursion

@Judy2You're right about this. I've spent some time in a Buddhist monastery and I met many like-minded people, but they don't allow women there, and the definitely don't allow gay people there. I am severely lacking in yoga knowledge so joining a spiritually oriented yoga group would kill two birds with one stone. @ButtersHaha yeah, it's sad how few people never step foot into this world. Much of having a good relationship is just finding the right person. It's funny how rare spiritually minded people are.

I think abundant mindset is basically another way of saying positivity. I recently applied to graduate school, and I have had to spend lots of money on applications and GRE and stuff. I will have to worry about tuition soon. However I am not anxious. I know that there will always be enough money to achieve my goals. I will get scholarships, get loans, start a tutoring business, or get research funding to pay for things. I just know that the money will be there. Therefore I am not shy about going to school and following my dreams. My abundance mindset is how I'm able to try to make my vision happen without hesitation.

Through all of my past relationships, I have attempted to explain what spirituality is and what it means to me to my partners. They always either don't understand or don't even consider the possibility. Not that any of my partners have been rude or dismissive about it, but they just never get it. I know that there are women out there who are interested in spirituality and in consciousness. My grandma was one of them, and I think I get my spiritual inclinations from her. My grandma and grandpa had a deep conection, largely fostered over their shared love for philosophy. I want something like that, someone who knows that our love is a manifestation of God's infinite love. From a very young age I have wanted such a deep relationship, and despite having had great and fulfilling relationships, I have never been able to truly share that part of myself with someone else. Anyway I'm single (23M) so DM if interested

The funny thing is that one of the things you come to understand through awakening is that you knew you were God all along. You were just pretending you didn't know. It is impossible for God, and his self knowledge, to be incomplete in any way.

People's explanation for the origin of reality usually falls under into the category of the domain they spend the most time think about and studying. A physicist will tend to believe that reality is physical: a spacetime manifold plus quantum field with SU(3) X SU(2) X U(1) symmetry. Niel De Gras Tyson often likes to say "you and everything you know of is stardust". He is an astrophysicist. What do astrophysicists spend all their time studying? Elon Musk says that reality is a simulation. He is a coding wizard and a talented engineer. He likes to say "the probability that we are base reality and not one of many nested simulations is exceedingly small". That sounds like engineer speak if I've ever heard it. You often hear neuroscientist say that reality is a controlled hallucination created by our brains. They spend all their time studying our brains and their phenomena. Leo says that the universe is a mind, and reality is consciousness. Guess what topics he has dedicated his life to studying? I have talked to mathematicians who will claim that the universe is "literally math". I'm not saying that any of these people are wrong per say, just making this meta point on theories of everything that people tend to have. This is related to my other recent article"Why Reality is Imagination".

HAHAH I just barely made a post on this. Be prepared to have this same insight over and over agian.

It may be wildly cliche on this forum, but I think I have a unique angle on this idea that makes it worth sharing. In this essay I will clearly illustrate that reality is imagination in plain language using your own direct experience, no psychedelics or meditation expertise required. This insight recently struck me from a new angle while practicing mindfulness meditation. During mindfulness meditation the goal is often to focus our awareness on some object of perception or imagination. This can be the breath, the pressure between two fingers, or an imaginary object such as a crystal ball or lotus flower or something. I stuck with the breath because I could never hold a clear picture of a crystal ball for very long. After refining my attention over the course of a few weeks however, I started to experience my breath as much vivid and 'there' than before. In a way it became more 'real'. Immediately, I was reminded of many crystal ball meditation proponents who claim that the perception of the ball stabilizes and becomes more vivid with practice. I would never have guessed that the same thing happens with observing breath. As it turns out, even focusing on the breath is using imagination just as much as visualizing a crystal ball would be. As you breathe, you experience your chest expanding, the air rushing through your nostrils, into your nasal cavity, down your throat, into your lungs. However, there is no "air rushing past" nerve. There is no nerve that sends a signal when the chest is expanding, and another one that sends a signal when your chest contracts. Instead, raw sensory data comes in from nerves all over your lungs, diaphragm, nose, and throat. These signals are very low level. Your brain must then interpret these signals and build those higher level perceptions (chest expanding, air rushing) using a predefined mental model, otherwise known as imagination. As a result, most of what you experience when observing your breath is not coming directly from sensory neurons, and the mental image of breath can become more vivid even if there is not an increase in the quality or quantity of sensory neurons in your respiratory system. This realization about the breath led me to a disturbing question: if my breath is imaginary, what else is? The answer, it turns out, is everything. All of our senses work this way. Our brain interprets raw input and constructs our experience of reality. We don't experience the raw input of our senses directly—or rather, we do, but what dominates our experience is our brain's interpretation of that input. Consider vision. How does your brain take action potentials sent from photoreceptors in your retina—this stochastic, messy noise—and turn it into what looks like a real, three-dimensional environment? The world you see is not the real world. It's a controlled hallucination, a construction built by your brain using information from your eyes plus your intuitive understanding of how three-dimensional reality works, how light works, and so on. We take the environment our brain creates and mistake it for reality itself. The same applies to hearing. You can focus on the raw sensation of sound, but even this is already an interpretation. Your brain must take action potentials from the hairs in your cochlea, which respond to pressure waves entering your ear. Your cochlea performs a frequency analysis by examining the spacing between these pressure differences, then converts them into frequencies. But you don't experience frequencies—you experience meaningful sounds. Your brain tells you: that's a fan, that's a door closing, that's footsteps. When someone speaks, the sound signal gets directed to your language processing areas, which parse the sounds into words, which then get sent to your higher-order reasoning centers so you can understand what's being said. At every step, your brain is constructing meaning from noise. Consider proprioception and touch. Your brain maintains a mental picture of your body, and you overlay sensations—heat, pressure, roughness, pain—onto this mental model to give each sensation a location. You don't experience raw nerve firings; you experience "my left shoulder hurts" or "my hand feels cold." The mental body map comes first, and sensory data colors it in. In every case, our brain follows the same pattern: it takes sensory input and turns it into an interpretation. That interpretation requires enormous amounts of imagination. What's being imagined? A mental model of reality. Our senses provide the raw data that colors in this model, like a picture in a coloring book. The outline of the picture—the fundamental structure of our experienced reality—is imagination. The sensory input just fills it in. As Peter Ralston points out in The Book of Not Knowing, we imagine everything, and our entire sense of reality is built on concepts. You can see this principle at work in children and animals. Watch kittens play—they pretend to hunt, chasing a feather on a string or a ball of yarn as if it were prey. Human children do the same thing. They invent hundreds of unique characters with distinct personalities and complex relationships. They create entire worlds in their coloring books or with their toys. They love video games precisely because these activate their imaginations. Ralston's insight is that when kittens grow up, they don't stop hunting—the behavior just becomes more practical. Similarly, adult humans don't stop imagining—their imagination just becomes more applied, more integrated with everyday life. Think about what you know about the world. These days, perhaps 95% of what we know doesn't come from direct personal experience. We learn it in school, through books, the news, YouTube, social media. We build up a picture of the world, and most of it is imaginary. We have to take information and construct a mental picture, even though we've never actually experienced most of what we claim to know. Most people have never seen Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin in person. No one alive has seen Adolf Hitler or ancient Egypt. No one has ever seen a living dinosaur or witnessed the Big Bang. No one has seen a black hole up close or visited another star or set foot on an exoplanet. Most people have never seen direct evidence of atoms—if you asked them how we know atoms are real, they probably couldn't explain it. They believe the story because it's a reasonable explanation and they've heard it repeated enough times. (I'm not denying atoms are real—I'm just pointing out that this too is part of our imagination.) When you really examine it, most of our "reality" is imagined. It's something we've constructed from information we get from other sources. And notice how reality itself changes depending on the mental picture you build. You hear about a new car model and suddenly you see it everywhere. You learn a new word like "presumptuous" and suddenly you hear it constantly. The cars and the word were always there—your mental model just didn't accommodate them before. Now it does, and your experience of reality shifts accordingly. All the information we receive—from our senses, from other people, from the news—gets filtered through our imagined reality and used to continuously construct and augment that reality. This is how the human mind works. This is why imagination is the bedrock of reality as we experience it. Here's something worth sitting with: the whole idea of "reality" is itself imaginary. The notion that all our experiences and everything we know comes from a unified source that exists outside ourselves—that's just another concept, another product of imagination. The idea assumes a fundamental division: there's "me" (or "us") and then there's "reality out there." But this division is itself a concept, perhaps the first and most fundamental concept. We need it to have all other concepts. We start with the assumption that there's a world outside us, and then we can reason about it abstractly rather than just taking our senses at face value. To have an idea about something, you need to separate yourself from it. Your mind creates a division between you, your body, and reality. Of course, we know there's no real division between the human body and reality. Both are governed by physics, made of atoms. Your brain follows the same laws of physics as everything else. But we still create this distinction because it makes thinking easier. We imagine an "outside world" separate from our "inner ideas," and we try to build an accurate inner picture of the outer world. We assume the outside world exists beyond our imagination. But here's the thing: we can never verify this. We can't confirm that there really is an outside world that exists beyond our perception and imagination, because perception and imagination are all we have. Everything is imagination. To say that there is a reality—a real world out there—is an assumption, something taken on faith. It's a quirk of how the human mind works. We can never know whether we're just imagining everything or whether there really is a reality out there. And perhaps there's no meaningful difference. Even if there is a "real" reality, we have to imagine all of it. Our consciousness never comes into direct contact with this supposed outside reality. Even to pretend it's real doesn't really make any difference to our experience. What we call reality is imagination, and what we call imagination is reality. They are one and the same.

@Dodo Nice work

Nah you right.

Wow, this is an interesting concept, and it partially lines up with my musings on the nature of time and space. Are you saying that the time component of the metric tensor being in the upper left corner means that it has some priority in the calculations? I didn't know that there was any real significance to the order in which the components of the tensor were arranged. Although I think it's interesting that time and space have opposite signs. Do you know why that is? I have often thought that there is no such thing as time, there is only the eternal present moment which is everchanging and continuous. That's just what my personal spiritual experiences have informed me of, and I have the suspicion that there is no real 4D spacetime manifold, but representing it that way mathematically gives us an elegant way to talk about relativistic dynamics. If there is no such thing as time then there may also be no such thing as space, although that's something that I have not thought about as much. Space may just be a relationship between discrete points in some abstract graph like Stephen Wolfram says. I have heard of symmetry principles in Norther's theorem and the Dirac equation, but I have never heard of vacuum oscillators. What is that? Is it something to do with string theory?

Yes! Spirituality is about embracing every aspect of the human experience. We can't be trying to throw out things that are distasteful to our own philosophies. We must live in the present, in the real world. Spirituality is about connecting to who we are, not deprecating our humanity. A master will be aware of every emotion and every mental happening and love it. They will enjoy the ride. They will dance to the symphony of life.

No life is mediocre. Only limited human notions of excitement and adventure can make it seem that way. Every life is extraordinary! There has never been a human experience the same as yours, and there never will be again. God chose to experience a life that seems mediocre to himself when he tricks himself into thinking that he is human. Think about how your life is part of the bigger picture of life and the universe. Everything matters. Find the beauty in every moment. You are beautiful. More beautiful than you can possible imagine! Just look inside for long enough and you will agree.