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@Nahm And whats to say this infinite and infinitely intelligent mind is not a simulation of something bigger that is then mentally creating what we experience? Whats to say a lot of nondual concepts hold some truth but aren't entirely true and its all one big path/possible outcome being simulated. The raw idea of duality vs nonduality is a matter in how the mind perceives. But what if there is an alternative answer beyond comprehension? We all rely on a few core principles to shape knowledge 1. Thought 2. Experience through mortal faculties. Both of which can be utterly false. Imagine a person utterly convinced duality makes perfect sense and is the truth. In general its about like that for mind to manifest us and project any idea it wants on its creation. Almost feels like some big cosmic joke mind can choose for us to be aware of or not, or even make us think we are aware of some false alternative. Also I am using nonduality very loosely than a very tight linguistic term. Consider it now all of the ideas of writings like the Kyballion or the more recent topics that Leo has taught. I'm talking about all the ideas that often come with nonduality paradigms. (I just often shortened it to nonduality for easy sake)

Logic and reasoning could only take me so far. . . For me concepts and direct experience go hand-in-hand. If I have a nondual experience without conceptual understanding, I will dismiss the the experience as being irrational and “whoo-whoo”. If I have conceptual understanding without direct experience I’m unaware I am dualistically conceptualizing nonduality. Nonduality cannot be explained through language. Every word or idea is dual - it is not another word or idea. Nonduality can only be pointed to. Imagine someone pointing in space. The arm and hand are words. Logical / rational thinking focuses on the arm and hand (words). That mindset will not “see” that which cannot be explained in space. It can’t take it’s attention of the arm/hand. I find nonduality really hard to talk about because evertime I say what nonduality IS, I would need to say it is also NOT that. Nonduality is oneness and not oneness. Nonduality is dual and nondual. Nonduality is form and formless. For me, once I started having glimpses into nondual experiences, I started to “get” what nondual speakers are trying to communicate. It just is. This is my best shot at describing no duality in a logical framework: We often say: X is Y. You can use whatever words you want for X and Y. . . Yet, how the heck can X be Y? The human mind becomes hyper focused on the X and Y. That is a dual mindset. The nonduality is the . . . IS. If you want to have direct experience on a dual mind in action, try this out. It helped me. . . For 5 minutes: everytime your mind tries to convine you X is Y, replace the thought with X IS X. Examples:: Orange juice (X) is my favorite drink (Y) becomes: Orange juice IS Orange Juice. A thought orange juice is my favorite drink IS a thought orange juice is my favorite drink. She is rude becomes: she IS she, rude IS rude and the thought she is rude IS the thought she is rude. Rudeness is disrespectful can become: the thought rudeness IS disrespectful IS the thought rudeness us disrespectful. The thought nonduality is illogical IS the thought nonduality is illogical. That sunset is beautiful-> That sunset IS that sunset. The thought that sunset is beautiful IS the thought that sunset is beautiful. For me, this exercise was unpalatable to my ego because it could not be fully dualustic. You will quickly see how dualistic your mind is. The exercise is not a nonduality. Rather it is a step away from duality. Look for yourself. For me, it became totally obvious that X IS X is true and X is Y isn’t true. The claim that X is Y is the biggest scam in human history. We fall for the scam because we get conditioned to believe X is Y when we are young children.

@Shadowraix You can trust that the mind creates the duality (“constantly morphs data and hallucinations”) but trust is only required for the job of getting you to be radically open minded, and to inquire into yourself - then trust is no longer needed, as awareness can observe the mind directly, just like being aware of a tree. Awareness is the only “thing” that ever “observes” the “mind” or “thought” or “tree”. The overall is not looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s looking for hay in a haystack. It’s the biggest picture, the whole enchilada, it’s the obviousness & the entirety that is the “proof”, there is no thing which is not the proof. So a total flip of perspective is what’s needed. Something arising in your mind, is not needed, as that (thoughts), is more maya. Don’t “trust” information, data, etc - anything you “observe”, don’t “trust” that, it’s maya. Everything in “reality” can always be linguistically convincing & proven, and so can it’s opposite - because it simply boils down - to you. You already have the Truth. You are already it. Every thing, everyone, every object, every thought, every emotion, every reaction - each of these happen in the same place, at the same time, in You in Now. In YOUR awareness, right now. “My” writing is not taking place in your awareness, is it? What you are actually aware of, are pixels in front of you on a screen, which you are assigning whatever meaning, value and sense to. In appearance, it’s a message from someone else, in actuality, it’s you. Because the inherent nature of all that you experience, is Duality (One appearing as Two) ....each meets The Truth, or, You (Two is only an appearance, appearing in reality - One - You.) When each ‘thing’ in duality meets up with The Truth (You), relativity is experienced, by You, because you are not finite duality (appearance/illusion), you are infinite (reality). (Relativity): If it doesn’t feel good (a perspective you’re holding in the Now) - that is because it (the understanding / perspective) isn’t true. It’s falsity. Most of these are bad feeling thoughts which try to apply a finite tag to your Self; “I am this, I am that.” “I am this kind of person” “I don’t know how to do X” “I always struggle with X” “I will never have X” If it does feel good (a perspective you’re holding in the Now) - that is because it (the understanding / perspective) Is True. Even if your honest “What I am” is - “I have no freakin idea what I am” - The fact that it is true, that you are being honest, that understanding / perspective, is true for You (The Truth), so naturally, it feels good. Much much better than finite thoughts & words about/against the self (which is infinite in actuality) Falsity is Maya and it does not feel good. Feels worse the more we pursue it, ignoring our own relativity, our own emotional sensory system, if you will. Truth is the ‘What Is-ness’ of Now, because wherever you are, the Truth already Is. The term Nonduality points at not two. It is a pointer, like neti-neti, not that, not this, not two. It is limited to being a statement of what you are not, by the nature of someone else is saying it to you, because only you can realize what you are, and your being-ness is always Truth, which perspectives are always being ‘bounced off’ of, resulting in the experience of relativity.

There are a lot of various ideas that come with the nonduality paradigm. You can say everything is one but that is unsatisfactory and thats where you draw conclusions of some all infinite mind, true nature of consciousness etc. A lack of something to compare it to isn't evidence that nonduality ideas is correct though. Not being able to think of an alternative doesn't inherently mean that an alternative does not exist. What if our inherent structure of logic and ideas is entirely false and illusory. What if ideas within the nondual paradigm are partially correct and partially false? How can I be certain and KNOW these things? I don't think I can. I can draw most likely conclusions. Wouldn't to see the true nature with certainty require absolute infinite knowledge?

@Shadowraix What does nonduality actually mean? doesn't it just mean "not two"? So how is "not two" true? And if "not two" is the actual reality, there is no such thing as "not two" because in comparison to what would it exist? In comparison to two/duality, which does not exist if not two/nonduality is true? You can not compare reality with something else. Or to simplify: If nonduality would be reality, "nonduality" is already redudant, because then it is just reality. Reality != Nonduality. Reality = Reality Reality can not be another topic like math, demonology, philosophy, etc. If you approach nonduality with the question if it can be true or not, you just made another topic out of it. Reality is already self evident and doesn't care if it's questioned. Trust your self evident being

I second that. I arrived to this forum one year ago as an orange stage college science professor with resistance to evolving up to green. I embraced the multi-cultural aspect of green, yet I was strongly attached to rational thinking within a scientific paradigm. (Deepak Chopra was a whoo-whoo pseudo-scientist in my mind). Perhaps it was Leo's more cerebral approach that was able to get through to me that a relative framework is more advanced than a logical framework. I can now see how ideological I was with science and how much it contracted me. In the last year I dropped the textbook for my neuroscience course. I broadened the course to include psychology, philosophy, awareness and nonduality. We do brief periods of meditation in class, We discuss self-awareness, spiral dynamics and I have students keep contemplation / inquiry journals. I experienced strong fear and resistance to doing this. What would my colleagues think of me? Could I lose my job? Will the students laugh at me and think I'm some kind of joke? Will I lose respect? . . . Yet, I feel so much more grounded and confident - and I'm so much more genuine. It's no longer about me. It's about *us* and the students having awakenings. And the students have embraced it. I no longer need to take attendance. Today, the students asked if I could bring a meditation bell to our class. They come to my office to chat about life and reality. Today I had a long discussion with a student about her paranormal abilities. She told me I was only the third person in her life she felt comfortable sharing it with. It feels so good to be free of the scientific walls around me. I'm excited to evolve into Yellow and make my courses even more holistic and integrated. So @Leo Gura , please know that your message expands beyond this forum and into the minds of some college students.

@Samra Similar to your friend, during my Aya ceremonies I had strong CEVs yet virtually no OEVs. During two of three ceremonies, I experienced nonduality and a collective empathy with the group. I found that lying down intensifies the experience. As well, if my mind is still in a rational/logical mindset I would drink a second serving.

@Strikr You can't see infinite moves ahead unlike an infinitely intelligent mind. Its really that simple. And no I didn't attribute lots of writing to emotional charge. I attributed previous posts of yours such as "If god created me, he is a piece of shit to curse me with "life experience". He never even give me insight about "love" in fucking 25 years, this god is full of shit, and If I m god, I m full of shit, I would never enter a game that I don't know shit about. I never loved "hardcore mode"." You can't fathom why anything is the way it is now and so you just deny it all together. Unfortunately, every possibility includes all of the ones we decide as shitty. And actually I would consider modernized religions like Islam and Christianity a rebranding of nonduality corrupted. Nonduality isn't new by any means. Everything that Leo is teaching is actually written in hermetic philosophy. Something that was around during ancient Egypt eras. To be fully enlightened would be equivalent of drawing back into the all.

People use words differently. For some it is just an experience. For some it would be the same as "enlightenment", for some it is just "mystical union" that can appear as a state of consciousness which can be easily mistaken for nonduality. Nisargadatta Maharaj, Adyashanti and Bernadette Roberts write and speak on the latter all the time that "unity consciousness" or "universal consciousness" is not the final state although it is in itself relatively deep.

I've tried explaining this a few times, the few people I told seem receptive to it, but it takes a bit for them to wrap their mind around it. Although I always started by saying everything in its most fundamental form is mind. This is because it doesn't really force them to think too differently, you know the world still is what it is, but it just recontextualizes everything. Like how you can have a sand castle but its still sand despite its shape. Its just another step forward from everything being energy. The core point of nonduality of everything being one, I think one good way is to get them to look at you and ask "What separates you from me?" The shape of our atoms? The way they move? The distance of how far apart they are? These are all very arbitrary rules. There is really no definitive factor that separates anything. We can say there are multiple chairs in a room yet we have a singular universe which can highlight how our mind likes to group things up and is an illusion. So the conclusion is there is no separation, it is all one. Don't present it as an absolute truth or else they will get defensive and feel challenged. Propose it as some sort of theory. I like to pull many quotes from modern day phrases and religion to show them that nonduality is an ancient idea and exists in many areas. Especially the word universe deriving from a latin word meaning "all is one"

Distinction is a very tricky issue because distinction is the very nature of being. If you fully understood what a distinction was, you would understand the ultimate nature of reality, and you would be deeply enlightened. Distinction is NOT a concept! Distinction is the "substance" of reality. And what then is the nature of a distinction? Nothing! Yes, paradox here is not a mistake. What you're starting to intuit is that reality has no substance. It's a set of distinct appearances which are actually just a hallucination. Reality is not made out of matter or atoms or energy. Reality is made out of distinctions! Creation is distinction. Without distinction you have pure formless Infinity. And with distinction, you also have pure Infinity! The formed side of Infinity. Form is formlessness. Formlessness is form. Duality is none other than nonduality. Infinity contains an infinite number of distinctions. It's highly worthwhile to contemplate: What is a distinction? ------- Mind vs not-mind = a distinction Automatic vs not automatic = a distinction Consciousness vs unconsciousness = a distinction Real vs unreal = a distinction Subjective vs objective = a distinction Truth vs falsehood = a distinction Creation vs destruction = a distinction The universe vs me = a distinction ------ Consciousness is the substanceless substance within which all of these distinctions occur. Like an LCD screen on which images are rendered. Everything you've ever seen or thought or experienced is a distinction. Including existence itself.

Yup, that's nonduality. What else can be said?

Real and false is an illusion of duality, transcend that misperception of the mind which manifests as the concept of real and false to perceive nonduality as it is.

When I started experiencing epidsodes of nonduality I had difficulty communicating with people. I withdrew and spent a lot of time in nature. It's been an ongoing process of adjustment to interact with others.

I think this thread is getting away from my point. I'm not talking about Jesus's teachings per say or the nonduality component. I'm talking about the man himself, his story, studying his own development and he came to be relatively. I actually have thought about it and I'm glad you brought up the open-mindedness component as I think that would be the key to get the larger and more important juice out of something like that and really to put into context what's being said and also to weed out the bullshit from the nuggets of wisdom.

This is a good article that compares Jesus and Buddha. http://www.spiritofthescripture.com/id1869-jesus-and-buddha-a-raw-comparison.html#more-1869 I encourage you to go through the archives as well... The man who runs the website and writes most of the articles is well versed in nonduality, but the main purpose of the site is to interpret the Bible allegorically and esoterically, as it is a roadmap to enlightenment and not supposed to be a religious book

@Rilles The practices are not adding anything, or ‘increasing consciousness’, but relinquishing filters of cognitive dissonance. Practices are periods of time spent without all of the sensory content in typical day to day living, and with attention to the “contentless / emptiness”. If general misunderstandings of duality / nonduality have not been rooted out, then after ‘practice time’, upon returning to ‘the rest of the day’, misunderstanding is retriggered via mental reactions, the “separate I” is mentally reconstructed, and the giddy is gone. Stomach breathing can bridge the practice time into the rest of the day because attention is kept to the breath, allowing thought to come and freely go, revealing thought’s ‘just things’ (Maya / Illusionary) nature. Mental processes resolved, new ‘frequencies of observation’ (access of self) are revealed as being incomprehensible, which is why thinking was preventing access. An example would be the all too easily overlooked simplicity in the power of your attention, prior to focus, prior to thought, prior to verbalization, prior to reaction, etc. Just, attention. Easier to see with love first, and then literal creation of your own reality. So consider there is not a ‘withdrawal’ at play, but the opposite, the ‘adding of things’ (thoughts).

I see you guys are not actually contemplating what ideology is. Ideology is NOT the entire domain of thought! One can think and conceptualize without being ideological about it. Be careful with lumping all thought and speech into ideology, as if there is only nonduality or ideology.

Well, it's very simple. All that nihilism really boils down to is that being is meaningless. Which is what nonduality reveals. That's all. But the ego-mind don't want to accept that. To the ego-mind it seems negative or depressing or chaotic. You gotta be very careful though. Meaninglessness does not mean what you think it means! You don't need to dive deep into nihilism per se. You just need to become conscious that ego-mind constructs all meaning for the purpose of its survival. Once you become deeply conscious of this, life will cease to have meaning for you (at least for a while) and it will feel like a deep depressing nihilism as you realize that all your life motivations were predicated upon lies and illusions of the deepest sort. But keep pushing past that, surrender all your illusions, and you will eventually get to pure being, liberation, divinity. This is what they call the dark night of the soul. It's really more accurate to call it: the final death-throes of the ego.

It does. One vs two is a distinction, a duality. Nonduality is both one and two. All distinctions are embraced at once, creating one unified field containing an infinite number of distinctions. Oneness and many-ness are in fact identical. Notice that a carton of eggs is both one and many at the same time. There is no contradiction because number is a relative projection of your mind. You're the one deciding whether you see the carton as 1 carton or a dozen eggs.

I repeatedly stated that there are many facets and levels of depth to nonduality, and also all kinds of mystical and non-ordinary states of consciousness. But this is actually a case for using more psychedelics, not less. It's precisely because there are so many facets and various kinds of states and levels of depth that without psychedelics you will almost never explore even a small percentage of them. There is also a confusion happening here between stages of development vs states of consciousness. They not the same thing. Also, NDEs are not permanent. By definition, an NDE is a near death EXPERIENCE. And I've never conflated NDEs with awakening. They are very different things. I have repeatedly told you guys that this entire field is much more nuanced and complex than most people assume. And therefore, psychedelics are a great tool to explore this vast landscape and see what's up. The only problem is that people don't want to do it. They want one simple solution rather than doing 100s of trips and dealing with all the questions they will raise in your mind. No one is suggesting that you trip once and close your mind down. Just the opposite. You trip more and more, with each trip your mind opens more and more. It's sort of like you're being told, "Hey, go travel to Africa, there's cool stuff to see there." and you say, "No way, it's too dangerous!" or you say, "I've been to Africa once and seen everything there is to see." Both attitudes are deeply misguided. You could trip 100 times and still not see everything there is to see. People who have tripped less than 50 times, I can't even take them seriously. They have a massive lack of experience. So before you ask people for advice on psychedelics, first ask them, how many times have you tripped, and on how many different substances and at which dosages and under which conditions? That will shut most people up as it would be embarrassing for them to admit their lack of experience. Before you even think of hanging up the phone, answer it 100 times. You never know who's calling. Whatever excuses you have for not doing psychedelics, that's just what they are, excuses. Are there dangers? Of course! Exploration of any kind is dangerous. If you want to be safe, stay in the middle of mindless herd. Exploration is for daring souls. The mindless herd will always whine and complain about why exploration is evil. Don't ask a sheep for advice on how to be a lion.

No, it is not beyond. It is just that. But there are many facets to that insight and many degrees of depth to it. I merely said that enlightenment teachers do not understand that 5-MeO can go there as directly as it does. If there was a pill you could take which would give you the level of consciousness of a Zen master with 40 years of daily practice, 5-MeO would take you there in 15 minutes and possibly even give you a deeper insight into that than that Zen master has had. Of course, the difference is, after 60 minutes, you'd be back to normal. Whereas the Zen master is stabilized in his insight. The purpose of 5-MeO is to give you a very deep glimpse of total nonduality. To show you how little you know and how worthwhile it is to pursue.

This seems to suggest I am a blank screen and external stimuli enter to color the blank screen with images, sounds etc. This feels like a degree of separation. An anolgy closer to nonduality would be there is a blank screen from which pixels arise. The screen and pixels are one. Rupert Spira uses screen analogies a lot.

@hundreth I really appreciate that you went out of your way to find the sources which you were referencing. However, I do want to note that Leo is still more or less right about his assessments of JP. JP MAY talk about eastern religions and myths, but he always finds a way to sneak his agenda into them, westernizing them without realizing it. For example, he talks about ying and yang quite a lot. Every single time he will proclaim that "it symbolizes order and chaos!" No. No it doesn't. Ok, maybe you COULD interpret it that way, but the origins of Taoism don't give a shit about hard dualities like "order" and "chaos." The whole point of the symbol is to point to the fact that "all is one." It tries to convey that seemingly opposite things are one and the same. The symbol is a glaring signpost for nonduality. JP, however, relentlessly uses it as "proof" that "even the eastern people agree with me about order and chaos!" Man, I really used to like that guy (followed him for a solid year before he got famous) but as I've started to grow and develop myself, It's becoming more and more clear to me that JP is stuck in his own paradigm. Again, he MAY find sources from halfway across the world, but he will warp their meanings to fit the overwhelmingly western map that he wants to see.

Uh oh. Make sure you're not just regurgitating nonduality jargon Leo's told you. If you've had profound awakenings of your own, awesome. But I can see some ego doing the talking here Don't make the mistake of proclaiming outright that existence is "not real." You don't actually know this. It's real and unreal superimposed upon each other at the same time. If you experience this directly, you might find it delightfully simple. But that in itself is complexity. Remember, we're talking about literal infinity here! OF COURSE it's complex. And OF COURSE it's simple. It HAS to be both! Try not to settle on definitive conclusions about reality, that's a telltale sign of delusion.