axiom

Solipsism is a problematic pointer. It is not that you are everything. It’s that this is all there is.

This is a story.

This is a good description.

This. Very nice description. Coming home, also funny, also scary.

This. No one can want it. No-one would ever want it. There’s very literally absolutely nothing to get. i would not use the word “self”. I would use the word “appearance”. Self implies awareness in some sense so may be misleading. “God” is also a word I might use. It does seem to have some baggage though. ”Infinity” seems like a very apt word also. Of all the most misleading words, “awareness” would be top of the list.

This! Beauty.

None of this means anything at all.

Yes, in a way. The word “ego” doesn’t seem quite right, but close. The crazy thing is, no one could actually want this. There was a moment of “oh shit!” when it was realised. Fear. And then, nothing left. it was all gone. Poof! If I could tell you to lose the hope, then that would be the message. Hope is standing in the way.

I’ve done lots of psychedelics and had some very profound experiences. Turns out all of that was a dream. Nothing to be cautious about.

Meaninglessness is all there is… and there is infinite peace and beauty, yes.

Hello Leo. It’s too obvious. A bit like how a nose is always at the front of your face but you don’t really see it (until you do)

All part of the dream.

It’s perfect. Very enjoyably pointless.

Nothing!

In part this happens because of semantics. Beginningless endlessness is just as impossible as anything with a beginning. So whichever position the self takes, whichever theory it likes best, it’s always going to be utterly impossible. Funny eh. Cosmic joke. The word “consciousness” is a misnomer, as is the word “experience”. As is the word “awareness”. That’s part of the problem. They are not actually experiences. There is no consciousness and there is no awareness. Awareness is a mirrored maze with noone inside it. The notion of a self experiencing a world may be exclusively human (circa 10,000-15,000 apparent years ago). But of course, time isn’t real either. There are only appearances. It begins and ends there. Appearances are not real, because only a self can make a thing “real”. This isn’t happening. Only a self can have the sense of happening. Thus all that is left is nothing being whatever it appears to be. Hilarious, obvious and slightly frightening all at once.

Nice, nice!

Awakening - in the way that Leo describes it - involves you becoming directly conscious of the infinitude of yourself. Enlightenment has many definitions so it’s hard to pin down exactly what is meant by this term. But if we go with the Zen Buddhist ox-herding fable / pointer, enlightenment is about the complete loss of self. The basic idea of this kind of enlightenment is that the self places a veil over reality. The self gets in the way of reality. When reality is seen with no self (no “you”) standing in the way, everything suddenly has an aliveness, a freshness, an immediacy. In this new context what was formerly seen as a hand is now a HAND. It is not even seen. It just is. In my opinion, both of these apparently dissimilar ideas are absolutely identical. The differences are semantic only. Non dualists and Zen Buddhists will talk about “no self”, yet what they point to is actually God. Infinity. Consciousness. What is. And from the other side, God is indeed no self, since it encompasses everything. It is a singularity wherein no differentiation of “self” can exist. God is everything. God is nothing. Everything is God, and nothing is God.

Yes, many people here agree with each other without realising it.

Advaita suggests that if you are it, then there can be no you, and there can be no it. Both collapse. Subject and object can only exist in duality. They ultimately cancel each other out because they depend on each other to exist at all. This seems obvious if you watch your thoughts arising. Advaita suggests that the observer is no more than a thought form. There is much disagreement about that here… mostly it comes down to semantics again.

@amanen Everything and Nothing. God Consciousness and (Neo) Advaita.

God realisation and Advaita ultimately point to the same thing. Two sides of the same coin. There are just different levels of egoic attachments to words like nothingness, God, "you", etc. Nothingness can also be conceived as "you" (the big you, AKA God, AKA Reality, AKA infinity, AKA everything). The word "you" does imply other however, and that's ultimately why Advaita doesn't like it, i.e. if everything is "you" then the differentiation "you" is in fact meaningless. 99% of the stuff people argue about on this forum is semantics. Remember that Gaurisankar and Mount Everest are the same mountain seen from different valleys. Or so the saying goes... (turns out it's not true actually, but that's beside the point )

This, too, is a belief about the appearance. The appearance is still the appearance whether or not psychedelics or ideas of internal & external reality seem to be involved. Let's bridge this gap. The appearance as it seems to be induced by high doses of certain psychedelics seems to be VERY energetically rich. It seems to feel inexplicably true. Inexplicably profound. For noone. Or it might be said, for the appearance. No ontological claims about the appearance can be made, since there is noone there to concoct them. And yet, when the self falls away, omniscience (for noone) can still seem to be an energetic feature of the appearance. The appearance can seem to manifest such that the "knowledge" of "infinity" or "God" is not separate from it, but part of it.

These days, if someone came to me and said they wanted to be rich, I’d probably give them a stern talking to. It’s a sickness… something of a pandemic in today’s world fuelled by fake lifestyle images on Instagram. In pursuit of wealth for its own sake, it’s not so much the sacrifices you know that you’re making - it’s the sacrifices that you never realised you were making which only become apparent after a decade or two. Far better is to follow a genuine passion, and let the money take care of itself… I think if you really become brilliant at something, and offer genuine value, the money will follow. But it must be driven by spirit, not by greed. Making money for the sake of it is the hollowest of pursuits. It’s like the pursuit of fame for its own sake. These kinds of things are not so much built on sand as they are built on air. It does not typically end well… even if it takes many, many years to realise it. It’s a shame that so many people today are hypnotised by the images they see on social media, take them at face value, and are sucked in to this void.