Bufo Alvarius

Appreciate the clarification and great to hear you’re not applying nonduality as a blunt tool across all situations. At the same time, I wonder if sometimes the language of “nothing is happening” or “it’s all meaningless” can, when held too tightly or shared out of context, have the unintended effect of flattening or bypassing the richness of what’s arising, or come across as more nihilistic to the reader. Maybe that’s just me, but I find that when (in these spirituality threads) only the negation side of things is emphasized, without also speaking to the fullness and aliveness of Being, lived and embodied as the dream, it can lead to a worldview that feels bleak or depressing. This can especially affect people who are just beginning to deconstruct ideas and narratives of self and world. If all they hear is the “nothing side,” without balancing the dimension of fullness, presence and integration, it may leave them feeling lost or disoriented rather than free. Anyway, just my two cents, thanks for the dance 💃

Kudos to your honesty about still deconstructing, I see few people on the forum being so open about it. Let me clarify: What I initially referred to as a “specific loop” that I see recurring in your deconstruction is the ongoing mental habit of negation, abstraction, and reduction in pursuit of nondual clarity. Specifically, it's the recursive pattern where: one sees through the self → concludes “there is no one here” → extends that into “nothing is happening” → then into “it’s all meaningless” → and then uses that to deny even the richness of what is happening now. This becomes a nihilistic loop, not because nothing is actually appearing, but because all appearing is being filtered through the lens of “must be nothing” to preserve a kind of nondual purity. When you say “all appearances are meaningless” or “everything is meaningless in the Absolute sense,” that might be a carryover from that same loop. After all, what arises here, including this exchange, isn’t meaningless unless a concept imposes that view on it. What if meaning isn’t personal, but natural? What if the very aliveness of this moment, this appearing, carries a significance that isn’t for someone, but simply is? I see where you’re coming from, the I AM as the dream, and beyond that, nothing appearing. But even in this explanation, there’s appearing. There’s speaking, differentiation and communication. Even saying “nothing is happening” is something happening. So the issue isn’t whether there’s a person (I agree there doesn’t need to be). The issue is that the radicality of Being isn’t in collapsing everything into unreality, but in the simple, self-evident fact that this is. And it is undeniably and vividly happening. To me that doesn’t negate the dream, it rather redeems it. And this is where embodiment comes into play: as living presence, as meaning that doesn’t belong to a self but arises naturally, as Being itself.

@Princess Arabia It sounds like you’re not just theorizing but speaking from a place where identity has collapsed. But I also feel your deconstructive framework is incomplete. Not wrong, just locked in a very specific loop that you might not be seeing. You often say things like “there is no experience,” “nothing is happening,” or “this is just a dream talking to itself.” But the very fact that you're saying it, using communication, expressing meaning and carrying intention, already contradicts the negation you're trying to express. Even if we say “there is no one saying this,” the saying is still happening. Even if nothing is the speaker, then that nothing is now modulating as forum dialogue. So your argument still depends on what it denies: the fact of arising and of meaning-making. Yes, the separate self is an illusion, experience has no true owner and awakening isn’t an event or achievement but the falling away of story/narratives, but it’s a mistake to stop there. It seems like you draw from that insight the conclusion that all appearance is meaningless, that everything is just the dream continuing itself or that awakening is a kind of feedback loop inside the illusion. But when you use that to flatten everything into “just dreaming,” you also flatten love, insight, creativity and reflection, all of which are equally expressions of that same nothingness. You seem to think that because there’s no “you” experiencing, there’s no experience at all. But even the statement “there’s no experience” is something arising. So is the writing or the reply. Something is clearly happenin, not to someone, not by someone, but as itself (or Being doing itsef). So the dream in a sense is Real, though not as a fallback into duality, but as the realization that what appears and what is are not in conflict. Like they write in the heart sutra "form is emptiness, emptiness is form". So technically speaking, if you call everything “just dream” (including your own expressions) then you end up undermining the very ground from which you're speaking. So challenge your deconstruction and the finality with which you might hold it. If your seeing has brought you to pure no-self, but from there everything collapses into “nothing happening,” it is missing the capacity to reveal what is happening. What follows is not a return to duality, but Being as itself, a living presence that gives rise to meaning, not a nihilistic, dead, presence that lacks meaning.

The realization that “I am the only perspective in this moment” is a collapse of externality and separation and reveals that experience is not happening in an external reality, but as immediate, first-person phenomena. However, the mistake is turning this experiential collapse into an ontological closure, i.e. “therefore others do not and cannot have perspectives”. You don’t have access to other perspectives, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You never did. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Solipsism cannot prove others are hollow, it simply proves that others are inaccessible from here, just as your own past or future is. To claim ontologically “they are just my dream” is a leap beyond what direct phenomenology actually shows. If I claim “I am the only real perspective,” and you claim the same from your side, then either: 1. One of us is “real” and the other is a NPC (but this cannot be determined without begging the question), or 2. Being is appearing as simultaneous centers of consciousness, each structurally identical, each with an “onlyness” that feels exclusive from the inside. The perspective under Nr. 2 honors this symmetry: Each ‘I’ is the same Being dreaming from different nodal points, like one sun reflected in many mirrors. The dream is shared, but each dreamer has a local first-person seat --> not distributed across space, but arising always as here/now, since Being does not move through space or time but modulates within itself, like multiple programs running in parallel on your PC: each has its local state, but they share the same memory space and central processor. No thread is outside the system, every process is this process, just seen from a different window. This does not mean duality returns. It’s not about “me” and “you” as separate entities again. It means that there is only Being. That Being is modulating itself as simultaneous experiential perspectives, each containing the illusion of solipsistic centrality. Just as you cannot access my experience, I cannot access yours, but both are actual. The “NPC” frame collapses here: every node is as real as yours, because it is yours, just from another angle. Radical solipsism as described by you is useful for deconstructing identification, but if you stop there, you may fall into existential nihilism or egoic inflation (“only I am real”) and fundamentally misunderstand relationship and reflection as illusory, when they’re in fact profound tools for awakening.

Language about consciousness can sound dualistic, but what is actually being pointed to is nondual phenomenology. When we say “something appears within consciousness,” it’s not meant to suggest two separate things (a container + an object), but that experience itself is inseparable from consciousness. It’s not that consciousness contains an object. It’s that the object is the modulation of consciousness, not separate from it. To say “something appears in consciousness” is only shorthand for there is only appearance, which is not apart from the field that knows it. There is a difference between knowing as information vs. awareness of absence. You can be aware of not knowing something without that implying dualism or a separate knower. For example, when someone asks you a factual question and you can’t answer, you’re still conscious of the gap. That recognition of absence is not knowledge about a thing, it's simply awareness without content. There is no separate “someone” in that experience unless you conceptualize one. The experience is just: “there is no answer here.” In direct experience, you are conscious even when no “thing” is present to be known, seen, or defined. Because consciousness is not knowledge and it's not content. Consciousness is that which is prior to all content, including the thought “I don’t know.”

You are conscious as the perceiving, not “of” perception as an object. If you treat consciousness as a container that holds or observes perceptions, then you create a dualistic model (subject + object), which does not reflect your direct phenomenology when inspected closely. Consciousness is not “what I’m aware of”, it is the fact of awareness itself. The appearing of the field is consciousness. Different perceptual faculties do not equal different consciousnesses. Yes, a dog’s experience is a different content, but it is still arising within the same fundamental consciousness (Being/Awareness). The modulations vary, not the consciousness itself, because sensory experiences appear within consciousness, not the other way around. You're not conscious of things, you're conscious as the field in which appearances arise. Perception can be distorted or altered but consciousness itself is not a perception or belief. For example: if you see a hallucination, that hallucination is real as experience. What can be false is the conceptual interpretation, not the appearance itself. Consciousness is not mistaken, only thinking is. So no, “what you’re conscious of” isn’t absolute truth, but the fact of consciousness, the isness of what appears, is the only undeniable ground. And that ground is the same, regardless of species or state. This is assumed from the human perspective, not known from direct experience. In fact, you have never experienced non-consciousness. Even sleep (dream, deep sleep) has experience. You can’t confirm the absence of consciousness, only a blank spot in memory. So consciousness is not something that comes and goes, it is the ever-present field in which the sense of time, birth, and death arises. This is conflating consciousness with knowing, but they are fundamentally different. Consciousness doesn’t require you to know something in order to be present. In fact, you can be conscious of not knowing. That felt sense of mystery, uncertainty, or even silence is already something appearing within consciousness. Consciousness is not just a container of facts or knowledge, it is the field in which both knowing and not-knowing arise. Mistaking consciousness for intellectual certainty reduces it to content, but consciousness is not content. It’s the formless clarity in which all experience, including the absence of answers, appears.

She does Temple / playparties here in Berlin and Kho Phangan. Funny how this community / her teaching finally reaches your shore.

@Leo Gura out of curiosity, how/where did you find Brittnee Bond? (the girl in the vid from your femininity blog post)

@Synchronicity Great to see you're visiting, Ethan, always fun to read your perspectives. Hope you're doing well, bud

and was that a positive or a negative experience, like what was your reaction to it?

@Leo Gura How does Leo cope with the fact, that you're Infinity?

Welp, brings a litte story to mind: "After enlightenment, the Buddha hesitated to teach, telling his student 'No one will get it anyway.'. His student replied 'Maybe one person will.'. And so the Buddha began to teach."

According to his newsletter, Peter has been working on a new, very advanced consciousness workshop, called "Absolute Consciousness". He will hold this workshop for the first time in this year's fall retreat. He's also working on a new book, which is supposed to be an extremely advanced consciousness book, for those interested in pursuing a much deeper consciousness. Curious to see what he's been cooking.. Peter-Ralston-Summer-CHNL-2025.pdf

This guy gets it

@Rafael Thundercat good question, I was hesitant to share this at first, as this was done purely out of curiosity and I haven't really contributed much in that sense. I guess in the end, it was the excitement of reading a Chatgpt Leo