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@Joe Schmoe Imagine for a moment that you are the number Zero. Zero is ground-zero reality: undifferentiated, untethered, just itself, not even an "it". Just the fabric of reality, eternal and unchanging. Synonyms for Zero: the void, Self, Brahman, Infinity, Truth, Pure awareness, nothingness, no-thing. Zero is sad because it can't be aware of itself. It is totally void of sentience and objects. So what does it do? It creates the finite illusions of One and Two. Zero inhabits One, the human I-perspective. This is where things get tricky. Zero wants to spice things up, so it inhabits many "One's" and tricks itself into believing in the illusion of Two. Another common word for Two is Maya. Two is the illusion of duality, particularly that there is a "perceiver" and there is the "perceived," as opposed to the One perspective which is just "perceiving." In that way, Zero can ride along in the One perspective and dream as Two: that it is a separate entity called a "self" or "ego." Two inevitably obstructs Zero due to identification. So enlightenment is like hide-and-seek. It's the realization and cultivation of your Zero nature. By creating the illusion of finiteness with One and Two, Zero can then use finiteness as a reference point to become aware of itself. Have you ever heard the teachers say that enlightenment is "Awareness being aware of itself?" Without One and Two, Zero can't be aware of anything (e.g. deep sleep). With One and Two, Zero can be aware of One and Two and itself. The path to enlightenment mainly consists of seeing through the illusion of Two. Seeing through your illusions is synonymous with disidentification, and it's often quite painful. But that's another topic. Many people see enlightenment as a good thing, some see it as a bad thing. Fundamentally, it's neutral. If it happens, it happens. Hope that clears things up a bit. If you're more confused, that may be a good thing. Cheers!

First of all, please understand - I started out this spiritual journey with basic assumption that materialistic science give us very precise answers on, generally-speaking, questions: how? I just thought that it failed to give answers when we ask: why? In fact, also philosophy and all faith-based religions that I've been exposed to failed in it. So then I took the attitude of agnostic towards mystery of existence. How does it work - mechanical laws, electromagnetic, chemical reactions and so on, all this fields of science. Then, you have BIOLOGY. In terms of biology, each of us is just "carnal machine" (so to speak), programmed by DNA code for survival and reproduction. Then we got medical sciences based on biology, that gives us in very real way answers on question: how does works organism? how we can heal it when it's sick? Also technical sciences on which based is our whole technology and civilization. What is common feature of all this fields of knowledge? Each one of them is objectively real. Phenomenon explained by it doesn't need awareness at all to exist. What about existing Cosmos and Earth before any organic forms of life emerged? According to scientific explanation of history of Earth - There was for long period of no organic beings. But there existed mass of matter and there also existed natural laws of physics. "However we propose to explain the emergence of consciousness—be it in biological, functional, computational, or any other terms—we have committed ourselves to this much: First there is a physical world, unconscious and seething with unperceived events; then, by virtue of some physical property or process, consciousness itself springs, or staggers, into being. This idea seems to me not merely strange but perfectly mysterious. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When we linger over the details, however, this notion of emergence seems merely a placeholder for a miracle. Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. To simply assert that consciousness arose at some point in the evolution of life, and that it results from a specific arrangement of neurons firing in concert within an individual brain, doesn’t give us any inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle." This physical principles is universal - you can make now the same experience as they did 200 or 2000 years ago and receive the same results as they did. Moreover, there is no need for conscious being to perceive results, because the same physical cause-effect phenomena was in game before even consciousness occurred. Of course, still, one could say that "Everything is awareness." or "Everything appeared from one single idea. (This echoes Plato's concept of Forms or First Principles)". It may be so. But does it deny existence of objective, physical realm of being? Sometimes I explain it to myself this way: Our basic realm of existence is biological, animal. But beyond that exist also possibility of attaining higher meaning - becoming aware of itself and then reach out towards the limitlessness of its conscious existence. I'm still carefully agnostic in case of our polemics. Does, as you say, physical objects are just "game" or Maya, that is secondary to awareness? Or maybe consciousness Is simply a freakish by-product of the brain’s natural functioning - an illusion or delusion incidentally caused by interactions of electrochemical energy? Is awareness prior to the physical realm or vice versa? Or maybe it's something like in-between: self-awareness is the most powerful tool in the game titled: Survival of the fittest. I don't know. I know that all these assumptions and concepts I wrote about counts for nothing in terms of non-dual practices. I've seen most of your videos on the subject of spiritual enlightenment and I agree that penetrating illusion of self demands stripping away all this layers of concepts. Let's face it - Thinking is indispensable. I won't abandon my rational mind. I need critical thinking (reasoning) as a tool. But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head. And certainly I can't agree with you on the subject of non-realness of physical objects. But thank God that at the very end of my exploration, I found meditation - the non-conceptual way of knowing. Non-dual, experiential awareness is like oracle that never speaks. It doesn't seem to have need to know all the right answers. Indeed, it doesn't need any answers to know.

There is no "Mom" for you to kill. Surely there's an animated body that is labelled as "Mom," but "Mom" herself doesn't exist. Just as I can say that there are fingers typing these words right now, but nobody's typing them. All there is in "my" experience are sense perceptions and sentience. Any "I" entity comes from thought, but that's just a sense perception, so in reality there is no "I" entity. There's only a puppet without a puppeteer. I won't even bother saying that you can confirm that in your direct experience...

Matter is a concept we use in tandem with atoms, molecules, and space. What's actually there is just sense perceptions and sentience...but even those are concepts. A concept is essentially an invention that comes from the mind. Concepts are illusions, for they appear to exist when they actually do not. Another word for concept is story. When you watch a movie, does the story or content of the movie actually exist? No; it's just sounds and some light projected onto a screen. Enlightenment is the realization of Absolute Truth. Absolute Truth is Absolute, meaning that it's True for eternity: True before you were born, True now, and True after you die. It's not that Absolute Truth is "possible"; it's that it never left. It's always been here. Enlightenment is a direct encounter with that fact. You can't comprehend the Absolute Truth by mind, nor is it an experience; but you can become aware or conscious that Truth is. That's really the only way I can describe it. It's like how you know when you've orgasmed during sex: you just know.

I was stuck on this one for a long time. Yes, ego death is an illusion, since ego never existed in the first place. But in the realm of the phenomenal world (i.e 'reality' as we know it, our sense perceptions) there's a body and a sentience ("I Am"). That body + sentience was birthed, and eventually, it will cease to function and dissolve. That's what most people refer to as physical death, and it's most definitely real in regards to the phenomenal world. Your sense perceptions and sentience will cease at some point. So, yes, the sentient focal point you call "I" will cease to be. The way to confirm this is to examine what happens when you go to sleep. In deep sleep, there is no awareness of being alive, no sentience, no thoughts to confirm your existence. The focal point you call "I" is not the Truth due to its ephemeral nature. How does the transition happen from one state of consciousness to another? Nobody knows, and nobody can know. We don't even know if reincarnation exists; that's just a baseless assumption. How does physical death happen? It just does. Why? Because. At this point, you're probably pretty down in the dumps reading what I just wrote. Fortunately, you're not any of these ephemeral things. Even when the body and the "I Am" dissolves, there is still something there...but it's not a thing at all. That, whatever that is, is Truth. Truth was never born and hence can never die. It's always been. Here's a quote that helped me contemplate Truth: "Imagine that an ultimate Big Bang in reverse, a sort of anti-Big Bang, suddenly blows up all existence. Absolutely everything that could possibly be experienced is gone. Add to that: time has also been blown away, and space is non-existent. So there is really nothing at all left. Has Being ceased to be? Has existence disappeared or diminished in any way? No. Not at all. We confuse being some thing with Being. We confuse experience with what is. Notice that with nothing at all, existence still is. It just isn’t any thing. It doesn’t exist in or as space or time, and so not as process or experience. In other words, is can’t come or go, it can only is." -Peter Ralston Ultimately, even if the sun explodes and everything gets destroyed and nobody is sentient to experience it... Truth still is. It's just not in the form of anything. To acquire a grounded consciousness of that is another story.