Search the Community

The Egg By: Andy Weir You were on your way home when you died. It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me. And that’s when you met me. “What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?” “You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words. “There was a… a truck and it was skidding…” “Yup,” I said. “I… I died?” “Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said. You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?” “More or less,” I said. “Are you god?” You asked. “Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.” “My kids… my wife,” you said. “What about them?” “Will they be all right?” “That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.” You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty. “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.” “Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?” “Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.” “Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,” “All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.” You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?” “Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.” “So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.” “Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.” I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had. “You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.” “How many times have I been reincarnated, then?” “Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.” “Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?” “Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.” “Where you come from?” You said. “Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.” “Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.” “Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.” “So what’s the point of it all?” “Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?” “Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted. I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.” “You mean mankind? You want us to mature?” “No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.” “Just me? What about everyone else?” “There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.” You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…” “All you. Different incarnations of you.” “Wait. I’m everyone!?” “Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back. “I’m every human being who ever lived?” “Or who will ever live, yes.” “I’m Abraham Lincoln?” “And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added. “I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled. “And you’re the millions he killed.” “I’m Jesus?” “And you’re everyone who followed him.” You fell silent. “Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.” You thought for a long time. “Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?” “Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.” “Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?” “No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.” “So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…” “An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.” And I sent you on your way.

The feeling of Infinity and the feeling of Nothingness is the same feeling, because Infinity is so infinite that we can't even feel it. Don't believe this statement, just meditate on it

But nothingness or even apsolute nothingness is not apart from Everything. Nothingness is not actual Nothing. It exists and IS. There is no such thing as non-existence. It's all part of That or It which is Everything. Leo likes to call it God or consciousness and the sages and gurus likes to call it the Self or Brahman (God). But once you become conscious and aware of It, it doesn't matter what you call it. You are just putting labels, meaning and concept to It. And It is prior to all of that.

Nice! Next step is to not talk about it Notice how the mind re-frames what happened as "I" "experienced" "nothingness." I'm sure you're aware of this happening.

‘Everything’ is just a concept. There is only nothingness. And of course that includes that I don’t exist either. The Work of Byron Katie. I’ve been doing it for a year now, and the results are pouring through much faster than expected.

Yes, I’ve had a semi-permanent awareness for a few weeks that there is no me. But I wasn’t conscious that the whole world is nothing. I was only aware that ‘I’ is just an idea. This is the first time that the outside world collapsed into nothingness. It of course includes me not existing.

@How to be wise Excellent. If you stay with the experience, it will gradually shift from nothingness to peace and then bliss.

@How to be wise Interesting.But you said you all ready don't have the sense of me for several months. But you are saying you are experiencing nothingness for the first time. So nothingness is not you ? Or nothingness is an experience ? So who are you now ?

I'm not disagreeing with what you say. I would just argue in there being also this personal aspect of essence which is the cleaned up version of the false personality that the Fourth Way speaks of and realizing the nothingness of it. All the passions of the Enneagram within oneself transformed into the virtues on the flip side of the specific energy.

There is no static authentic self (unless you’re talking about complete Nothingness). As far as your character, yeah you’re always changing. This is why enlightenment is necessary in order to truly understand and learn how to embody true authenticity through trial and error. This is also why it’s important to apply radical ruthless honesty. All your lies, phoniness, pretending, putting on a certain image is important because it burns all of that up. I suggest you look into the following resources: Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton Practicing Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton Peter Ralston’s books Peter Ralston’s Cheng Hsin Workshop: Communication & Relationship Psychedelics God

In the ten ox analogy, this is like seeing the tracks and there is a sense the ox is near. I often listen to teachers and there is something they say that catches me, yet I just don't get it. Then my intellect may try to figure it out, which is a distraction. It's like trying to translate what they are saying, rather than just understanding it directly. For example, I felt this way when I first listened to Rupert Spira's metaphor with the movie screen. At the time, I was grounded in what he refers to as the "observer + object" stage. Yet, now he was talking about observer and object as one. I had this sense that a door was opening, yet I couldn't see on the other side. At these times, it is really important that I am in tune whether I "get it". For me, this "getting it" is embodiment. Yet when something enters that I haven't embodied, my intellect wants to conceptualize it. This has happened with common themes such as "you were never born", "form is formless" and "nothingness". When the speaker has embodied it, there is a sense about that person. For example, there are things that people like Leo and Rupert have embodied. This contrasts with my lack of embodiment. Intellectualizing about it is very unsatisfying to me. There is a desire for the real thing. The embodiment. One thing that helps me is to ask a question and let it sit without trying to figure it out. For example, I just sat with the question "What does it really mean that I "was never born""? Then one day, I find myself in a sensory deprivation tank and it was revealed to me. The question, uncertainty and seeking energy dissolved. My sense is what you write about regarding methods and techniques for insights is gaining momentum. I'm seeing more and more people seeking deeper truth. More and more people being attracted to deeper insights. I'm seeing more methods arise for insights and awakening. I think there is a shift in social consciousness from materialism to awakening and inner truth. And I think it is beautiful.

@PretentiousHuman yes. sure... but not "nothingness" not the concept / label of nothingness... what do you think of when you say nothingness? if you are thinking of something (which you likely are) then that isn't it. just a quick knowing, that what you are cannot be grasped mentally or by any word/label. the word being used here is nothingness... but it could also have been emptiness... or blankness.... or even, wioefjwioeness point is. what exactly does knowing i am nothingness do for you? you're simply reading the restaurant menu by saying/knowing i am nothingness to truly get this, you must order the item from the menu and taste it. i.e. directly experience yourself

@SoonHei That I am Nothingness?

@FoxFoxFox Can you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean by dimensions. How can something without attributes have different dimensions? Or does the way in which it is perceived divided into 12th dimensions? But the perception itself would be consciousness.. Confused. @ivankiss So it has intelligence.. I can't wrap my head around it. How can it have intelligence? How can something that is nothing and is completely void, have intelligence? Of course this brings up the problem that I don't even understand intelligence. I get stuck on one particular thing. I divide the world in my head into two conceptual categories: The void, nothingness in which everything is occuring and the forms that take place in it. (Including any phenomena like intelligence, sentience etc.). I don't yet understand how they are both the same. Exactly the part where the duality of something vs nothing collapses. Hasn't clicked yet.

@Tony 845 watch your ego being sneaky here trying not to get it's nothingness revealed. All our egos does that because it is scared of dying.

...around your neck and tug you off your cloud but I'm more than just a little curious; how you're planning to go about making your amends ...to the dead? " A Perfect Circle " So glad to see you well. Overcome and completely silent now. With heavens help you cast your demons out..." The never-ending journey comes to an end tonight. Reason is long forgotten. Yet there is one. I may not remember clearly enough, but... this journey has begun. And what begins must end. The idea must have been born at some point. That is simply the nature of ideas. They come to life - they die. They begin - they end. Perfect fucking circle. Some ideas might go unnoticed as they're fading away; dying. And some may swallow you whole as they vanish into nothingness; never to return. At times it was impossible to imagine being cool with death. Now impossible is no more. Now may bring death, yes. But death can never take now away. Even death has to die, disappear. And it will die right about now. Now contains all. Nothing can escape nothing. Detachment might also be rude. Sudden. Unexpected. Painful. Terrifying. Absolute horror. All depends on how attached one is to all. How willing to let go; fully and forever. How many strings are there still left to pull. How deeply one believed into illusion. Maya was my first love. I must've been around seven. It was love at first sight. Innocent and pure; as a special spark, recognized even by a child that has barely stepped into the world. I kid you not. Real story. Her name was actually and totally Maja and we were neighbours back in the day when I was still living in Serbia. Movement was not alien, even back then. My mother would move us around often. Until we left the country altogether. Never heard of Maja since. I guess she's telling her own story. Who knows? No one. Illusion was loved. Still is. I cannot unsee the perfection it holds. The flawless reflection. Following one closely, precisely. Everywhere, at all times. It's a true masterpiece. Would expected nothing less from God. Cut the cord and you will see no tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow never was. And even though yesterday all your troubles may have seemed so far away; now is the time to believe in yesterday no more. I had a great story going on here. Really. It was all-inclusive. Drama, romance, action, comedy, musical, fantasy. Wild dreams, passion, love, sex, spirituality, bliss, force, will, dedication, belief. Pain, struggle, suffering, loss, neglect, abuse, solitude, desperation. It's a killer story. It's a story about an abandoned six year old who desperately fell in love with music and has taken a holy vow; Never to stop until the dream came true. Ivan had nobody since forever. That too was not alien. In fact; it was a necessary part of the story. Hence Ivan's struggle to deal with and express his pain. His thoughts, his feelings. His mind, his heart. All Ivan ever wanted was to pour it all out onto the world. All through melodies and rhythm. Music was love unlike any other. Awareness identified with music more than it did with the characters, or the story. Awareness got attached to the beauty of sound, badly. Awareness never really believed it was human. Something has always been "off". Smelling funny. But awareness paid no attention to things that seemed off. It was way too occupied with dreaming the dream. Exploring and expressing itself through young Ivan, who knew exactly what his mission was. His calling. His purpose. The co-operation was beautiful, beyond any description. Brings tears to the eyes. Eyes that are dead. Young Ivan was always somehow, kinda aware of awareness. But he was way too immersed in practicing on his instrument of choice; day and night. Talk about willpower. Attachment to parents and relatives never even had the chance to develop itself. There just was nobody around. All there ever was, was a massive hole. A black one. A void. Emptiness. A sense of missing something big. No real sense of home. Music slowly but surely filled the void though. Healed the wounds. Showed direction. Navigated. Gave meaning. Inspired Ivan to be, to persist, to continue, to live, to dream. All until the dream was starting to become real enough. Ivan pushed as far as he could go. The guy is phenomenal. Absolutely amazing. I love him dearly. I always will. Ironically, as the dream started to become real, it simultaneously started falling appart. Slowly but surely. Fast and rude. Out of nowhere. Yet somehow it was ever-expected. Awareness took over completely. Even music had to go. No thing was left for Ivan to hold onto it. All turned to sand as he was desperately trying to get a grip. The story became too heavy to carry around. Nothingness asks no questions. Makes no exceptions. Interprets no difference. All must go. And all goes now, as the night turns into day. I know the pieces fit, because I watched them fall away. Countdown to nothing. No thing can follow into nothingness. What once was built with love, dedication, will and care - now is being destroyed, erased. Intentionally. On purpose. Total deconstruction is necessary and obviously relevant. Resonance is higher than ever. No one really knows the reason why. No one is in charge. It's the only possible way. May as well be called destiny. The prophecy has been fulfilled. Reconstruction will always be a possibility. Imagination will not seize to be. But now the story must go, completely. Death comes for all, indeed. Resistance is no more. Your halo is slipping down; to choke you now. As much as I would like to take credit for all or any of this, I cannot. I cannot unsee nothing. Nothing was ever behind my actions, thoughts, visions, dreams. It was nothing all along. Nothing will carry on now. It may have been all for The Dream... But death has come knocking on the door, claiming it's own. Declaring the end of the journey. It may seem like it's way too early... Yet one cannot deny divine timing and it's perfection. I have to let death pass through now. It's the only way to transcendence. To wake up fully. Freedom is. Love is. Abundance is. Creation will still be. Co-creation will still be. No one knows about it. No one will create nothing, forever. " Recall the deeds as if they're all someone else's atrocious stories... Now you stand reborn before us all, so glad to see you well... And not to pull your halo down, around your neck and tug you to the ground... But I'm more than just a little curious; how you're planning to go about making your amends ...to the dead? " [ this topic was inspired by APC's outstandingly amazing track; " the noose". You should go enjoy the crap out of it ] ; Goodbye Ivan.

? look into the hands shin.. see what's in there? The giving of the fucks. Notice it's emptiness, it's nothingness.

@FoxFoxFox I don't watch his videos anymore so I can't really say this or that about the quality. What his first enlightenment series did was respark an old fascination for truth that had stayed dormant for a while. It also opened up the possibility of the me being an illusion and a glimpse into nothingness.

The absolute or consciousness, nothingness, infinity and everything. Not the conceptual man in the clouds that we may have believed.

What is God? Part 2... FAQ -Are you saying that I Am part of God or that I Am God? You are God and part of God, it depends what you define “You” as in that sentence. If you think of yourself as a biological creature that was born, the ego mind, that you, is part of God, the deeper you, the one you will discover through practice, that thing is fully God. When you are fully awake, you realize that you are the whole of God. That’s radical statement that exoteric, orthodox, religious teachings do not tell you, but it is the case. When you first realize God, you might experience that you are a part of God but not yet realize that you are the whole of God, that requires doing more work. -If I Am God, why Am I not experiencing it or feeling it? God is a trickster in his very nature, because trickery or illusions is the substance of reality. Reality is possible when you imagine that it’s possible and you believe in it in a sense, you have to trick yourself to experience reality in the solid physical way the way you do. In fact you are experiencing God right now. When you are born as a human being, you mistake God for this physical reality that you are in right now because of the sense of self, the ego that helps you to survive. You are in God all the time but you are not realizing because it is not important for your survival. The substance out of which everything is made is completely irrelevant to you in your everyday life, which is why you ignore it. There is nothing but God, you are not just conscious enough to realize this. -Why is God hiding from us? Why is God so tricky? For you to be born, you need to be born as a lie, as a deception. God is a shapeshifter, it is formless, pure potentiality and can materialize in all forms, it’s an infinite chameleon. The nature the Godhead is pure formlessness, pure potentiality. God is a shapeshifter, it’s difficult to spot because you confuse the form for a physical object. There is actually no difference between illusion and reality, this is how God creates, this is the very mechanism of the creation of anything. Appearance is reality, illusions is all you can have. What we call our physical world is constant never-ending process of forms emerging out of formlessness, like every word Leo is saying. The nature of creation must be tricky. -Why is God invisible? Isn’t that convenient? When you go to rock bottom to what is true, you have to accept what you find. It is actually highly inconvenient that God is invisible, because it makes it challenging but still possible to find it. You believe you are an observer inside the body… What is that observer? Isn’t it some invisible being…? Which of course is God… -Is God falsifiable? Is the Truth falsifiable? God is prior to science and the notion of falsifiability. Theories are falsifiable but God is not a theory, it is pure Truth. God is verifiable, not falsifiable. You can verify what Leo is saying. Falsehood doesn’t exit, only delusions exists. -Can you give me proof of God’s existence? No, it’s a personal journey that you go on, you have to cut through the illusions of social conditioning. It’s called Truth seeking, the spiritual quest, the “Hero’s Journey”. Don’t expect anybody to deliver it to you. God has the power to fully deceive itself and also the power to awaken. -Don’t you exploit the gaps of science? Science works to demystify reality, it succeeds to some extend, but it will never fully succeed because reality is infinite. In fact the more it tries, the more deluded it becomes. Take an apple cut in in half, you get more surfaces, cut in half, you get more surfaces and so on. There are always surfaces, but no substance to anything within reality. The substance of reality is nothing, the gap, the emptiness between the surfaces that unifies all the surfaces into a Oneness. -What do you mean with God is nothing? A nothing that exists and you can become conscious of it. An atheist and materialist have fully bite in to the illusion of physical reality, but also they also don’t recognize that reality is subjective and relative. There is no objectivity. Reality is however you hold it. There are no human beings, human being is the Universe being sentient of itself, God consciousness that you’ve confused for human beings, your parents, your friends are just figments of your imagination. Leo explains he had the traumatic insight that his parents never existed. Reality is alive, sentient and a-mechanical. The sentience, the aliveness that you feel, that is not yours, that’s the universe being alive and you are just a piece of that. That’s a big reframing of how you see reality. Reality is one spontaneous occurrence, therefor you can’t explain it through any mechanical process, it’s instant and direct. Atheists are also missing the importance of love, not recognizing that Being is Love. The physical substance of existence is made of love. Atheists don’t recognize oneness, they think of the world as being fragmented. But you are not really interfacing with the universe through perceptions, you are the universe. Atheists don’t recognize space/time, matter/energy, cause & effect, birth & death as illusions. You might say yes you know that time is relative and so on, but you are not conscious of that… they are all concepts. Atheists don’t recognize higher states of consciousness, and believe that everything can be understood from their currant state of consciousness. If you’d change that state of consciousness just a little bit, all your doubts, fears and concern would change! Science is completely contingent on your courant state of consciousness. Atheists don’t recognize that consciousness is not a by-product of the brain. Atheist don’t recognize science as limited. To understand God you got to use other methods. Can you prove that science can resolve every question? Atheists don’t recognize the existence of paranormal phenomena, at higher states of consciousness you can access various paranormal phenomena. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he as God has created himself. The atheist doesn’t recognize that all dualities and all knowledge he uses to understand the world is manmade or conceptual. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he is God. The atheist doesn’t see that reality has no limits. Outside the physical universe is infinity where anything is possible. -Can God be an hallucination or an illusion? You can trick yourself that you are conscious of God, but when you are conscious of God, that is unmistakable, you become conscious of God through no intermediary, not through language, symbols, perceptions, not even through experience. It’s direct. -Can God be a brain state?If you can experience God by taking 5MEO-DMT, doesn’t it prove that God is just a chemical? No, everything is consciousness, the 5MEO-DMT that you take is consciousness, consciousness interacting with consciousness. When you take 5MEO-DMT, you forget you ever had a brain and the existence of the universe, you realize that it is not brain state, not a chemical, not a neurotransmitter, it is God. God is absolute Truth, there is nothing like it and you whole reality collapses when you realize that. -How can you trust that psychedelics reveals anything true at all? This can’t be explained to you unless you take psychedelics in a sufficient dose that you have a breakthrough experience. You will say “oh that’s impossible!”, you got to stop trusting your mind of what is and what’s not possible. You cannot know what is outside the matrix when you are inside the matrix. -How can you be sure that you’ve been outside the matrix? To exit the matrix is to realize that there is matrix inside of another matrix inside of another matrix to infinity. To realize God is to realize that there is nothing but matrix within matrix. What you’re living right now is just hallucination and psychedelics show you that there is no other possibilities than hallucinations, a meta-truth. -Could there be something beyond God? Could God be part of a computer simulation? You are treating God a s a phenomenon, like seeing some alien. You can replace the word God with “everything” or “totality”, those terms are expendables and goes beyond itself forever, it’s the process of “beyonding” forever by definition. If you imagine something more is possible, you haven’t understand the notion of totality. A computer simulation is a very finite thing. They occur within God but God doesn’t occur within a computer simulation. -How do you know that the infinity you are talking about wasn’t generated by something else? God can only interact with itself. God has to limit itself for not being conscious of everything all the time. How do you play a chess game alone? It’s like playing chess alone with the right hemisphere of the brain running the whites, and the left hemisphere running the blacks. God tricks himself with false separations and generate the possibility of surprise. -Can God create a rock that he himself cannot lift? The Godhead is infinite potential, it can limit itself in forms, forms have limitations. -Can God destroy himself? Destruction is a concept that make sense within the roam of forms, but you cannot destroy the vacuum of empty space. It can destroy himself as incarnated versions like you, or as a star, it’s the fate of all forms, formlessness itself is the only permanent thing. -How do you know that your experiences of God are not confirmation bias of some stuff that you’ve read? When you have these absolute Samadhi experiences, all your conceptual knowledge flies out the window, you are in truth of it and this is self-validating. You can read about all human beings being unreal, when you have the experience of it, you won’t want to accept it, it is the opposite of confirmation bias. Leo never wanted God to be true, he studied ancient texts -How can you be so that you are right? Shouldn’t we be more humble with our truth claims? False humility is no virtue… Leo is just being honest. Absolute Truth is the nature of absolute Truth, wether you are conscious of it or you are not. If you are not conscious of it, you can’t understand how absolute truth can be possible. It’s a certainty, it’s not like scientific knowledge, you need to experience it to find out. To make the claim that we don’t know what God is a big agnostic mistake, because you are actually saying: we can’t know. -Is it possible to have a false experience of God? If so, how can you be certain that you haven’t misunderstood God? Yes it is possible, to have a false experience, but when you have awaken, you know what awakening is, but even so, you can trick and delude yourself, self deception is still occurring after your firsts enlightenment experience, this is why Leo is always crosschecking with other mystics and texts, continuously studying himself, and even so, he never claimed to be infallible, he is still open for recontextualisation of any kind. But the actual experience of God is not a self-deception. Certain lower degrees experience can be self-deceptive. -If God is all loving, how come there is so much evil in the world? Why is there so much suffering? There is no such thing as evil, it is a projection of your ego mind. From your point of view, you are a limited biological creature and you need to survive. What you call evil is what is threatening to your survival as a limited formed being within this larger universe, you are vulnerable to having your form radically changed… death. You believe suffering exists, because it is a mechanism within you that helps you to avoid dangerous situations. Without suffering, you wouldn’t be alive. When God incarnated itself, it makes itself limited, it obligated itself to play the game of survival which necessitates pain and suffering. From God’s perspective the world is perfect. It’s like looking at a horror movie from the audience point of view or from the point of view of a character of the movie itself. The goal is to not feel too much sucked in the movie. You can’t believe that this actually applies to your life, and it is the most important thing that there is, death is the worst thing there is, suffering feels so bad, you confuse all the suffering and the pain for reality because you are egotistical and selfish, you had to be to experience the universe at all. You are God caught in a bind. As human beings we are addicted to excitement, violence, horror, sex, food, suffering and pain. Secretly you don’t want to give up your suffering to be happy, if you did, you’d be awake a long time ago. -If God is all loving and good, how come he doesn’t care if we are murders, rapists and so forth? It’s because it is so all loving that it doesn’t judge. You as an ego, because you care about survival and have something to lose from it, you judge murder, rape, criminality and war as bad and wrong. You created an identity of being moral, good and upright, viewing yourself as a defender against all the bad guys. But you are full of hatred, you hate murder, rape and war… God loves it all, which is why they exist. This love is too radical for you, you are not ready to embody this love because you have way too much to lose, you have life, your children, your money, your business,…, to defend. You are not ready to be all loving. For you to be all loving, you’d have to be dead, you’d have to be the Godhead, not this incarnation as a human being… or you’d have to be conscious. -If God is all loving, why is it not evenly hateful? Evil doesn’t really exit, it exits only from the ego mind’s point of view. In a sense, God is evil and hateful, but it is doing it through humanity. God loves evil and hate so much that it doesn’t mind living through it as a human being. God wants to know what it’s like to be murdered, getting raped, being a slave or in concentration camp and so on. Hate and evil is visible only from a limited point of view. Do you think God created everything except murder and rape? He created everything included all the stuff you consider evil. It’s only evil from your point of view. -Is there a devil? If so, did God create evil? The devil refers to the mechanism of survival, the ego, separation, illusion and falsehood, not a red man with horns. You are the devil, the thing that is going to die is the devil. God created that, not only created it, but God is the devil. We are talking about oneness, totality. You cannot separate ego or the devil from God. Stage blue people in spiral dynamics looses it right here saying that the devil and God are polar opposite… If the devil exist, then it is part of creation, who created everything? God. The devil is God in disguise. God will incarnated himself into devilish forms, create selfishness and through that, God experience what it’s like to be a devil. -Why is mainstream religion so confusing, diluted and inaccurate? Why don’t they explain it in a straight forward manner? Religion is very tricky and you have appreciate where it comes from. It’s problematic to evaluate old religions from a modern perspective. There was no notion of science back then. They didn’t share modern values. How do spread the idea of God with very tribal people that are not scientifically minded, who don’t know how to read, ethnocentric and racist and so on, you will use a lot metaphors and analogies. This stuff was passed down often times as stories, not even written down. The people who wrote it down and passed it down hundreds of years after Jesus’s death , were not even enlightened. Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed were maybe enlightened but they didn’t have video recorder or even write any books themselves. Back then, what is good and bad what advanced stuff, you didn’t even had countries. The ego corrupts all these teachings. Countries and states, rulers and kings used religions to enroll the masses, justify their own rule, make war and so on… The problem with God is that it is such a personal subjective realization that you can’t spread it through mass means. Some fanatics will only believe the teachings, not doing the teachings by himself, wait until you are dead and then create a cult, an ideology. -Why do all the religions disagree so much? How do you know you study the text properly? They all agree with each other, if you look and study the text properly. You need direct experience, mystical experiences. When you have those, it becomes easy to sort the wheat from the chaff and to see the commonalities. The attitude to try to integrate religions is only a 50 to 100 years old notion. When you don’t see religions holistically, than a lot of surface disagreements will seem as though they run all the way down to the bone, but they don’t. -Isn’t religion responsible for most of the war and evil throughout history? Yes, but technology, capitalism too. People are very tribal, selfish wether they know religion or not -Why use the word God and not “reality” for example? Everyone believe they know what reality is. Whatever word you use, there will be a lot of confusion around it, people will find ways to delude themselves about it. The ignorant mind can’t help to be ignorant. -Why do different religions have different visions of God? Reality is one giant mind that uses different kinds of symbols. Even scientific understanding that you might think is literal, is actually symbolic and metaphoric. Your mind needs to make sense of the formless in a formed way. So the christian will have his vision with a vision of Christ and vice versa with a moslem, a Hindu, and also as an equation for a scientist. Your understanding of God is going to be filtered through your culture. -Aren’t you stealing ideas from eastern religions? No, but the eastern teachings are less corrupt than the western teachings. No culture has a monopoly on God or the Truth. -Buddhism and hinduism are different. Buddhism doesn’t have a God! Buddhism has a God: The Ox, Buddha mind, Mu, nirvana, no-self, the Dharmakaya. The mistake many buddhist and Hindus makes is that they think there is a difference between the “buddhist no-self” and the “Hindu Self”, but they are degrees of awakening. For having consciousness of God you need to go beyond, not just being a self but to realize what is the ultimate self ,what is the nature of reality itself. You need to realize God as the formless but also as the form and unify the two together and that there are no distinctions. Buddhist have a God, but they don’t speak about it in the traditional sense. Buddhist don’t believe in a God per say, but they got practices that get them to the consciousness of your true nature, which is God or Mu, nirvana… -How can God be an experience? A more proper word than experience would be Being or direct consciousness. When you come into contact with the Godhead, nothingness you have to integrate it with the experience that you are having here, see that the pure Void is identical to the sensory feedback you have “down here”. You can recontextualize the experience you are having here to the point that it’s not an experience anymore, that will be absolute Truth. -Why do you cross-reference your sources if God is a direct experience? Because you can trick yourself and become a Zen-devil, which is pursuing Zen practices without reading the scriptures. -Why don’t you kill yourself and become God? There is a reason why God incarnated this life, you are here to experience this life. If you kill yourself, you are going to end up right back here, there is nowhere to go, God is constantly reincarnating himself, you will just have another form. While you are in this incarnation, do the most out of it, do the work to become enlightened. You don’t want to wait until your last breath to realize God and do spiritual practices unless you want to realize on that day what you have missed and be miserable with yourself and others. The point is to live a conscious life. -How can ego exist in the presence of God? God is all powerful and is able to present a situation where it forget itself, it has to awaken to itself. The God’s head incarnated itself into forms it can see the full ramification of what it is. God is becoming conscious of himself, not only as humans but also as animals and bacterias. -What is the point of talking about God? To realize that it’s a possibility, it transforms your life, opens the possibility to live with a true genuine joy, health and well being. To point you to technics to achieve that and point out the trickeries and traps. To inspire you to live it, not only to listen to the possibility. -Will science ever be able to understand God? The way science is defined today, no. It will have to open itself more to mysticism and non-symbolic methods of investigation like first person experience, scientists will have to take psychedelics. The bridge between mysticism and science as we do it today is already starting to happen today by a few pioneers. The line between science and mysticism is a line that the human mind is drawing, it’s not a hard line that exists in the world. -Can’t we give more time to science to answer all questions and realize that we don’t need mysticism at the end? No, it has to include mysticism. Modern science has serious limits, it only works through language, concepts and through the mind and there are aspects of reality which are true and are beyond the mind, that needs to be access through methods that are not equations or rulers and particles colliders and photographs. -Is it possible that science and spirituality work together in the future? Yes, to help to integrate the two together is Leo’s greatest contribution to mankind, laying the epistemic foundation to the reform of science. -If God is alone does it feel lonely or is God sufficient in itself? The Godhead doesn’t have any quality but when incarnated as form, God feels lonely! When you will be awake, you won’t feel lonely even if you are alone. -Why are some people very curious about God and others are not? People are born with different brain types and genetics and also went to different schools. Some people are more interested than others in metaphysical questions. Some people are born more spiritually gifted. Many spiritual advanced people might have been killed throughout the ages in favor of the kings, dictators and tyrants who wanted to rule the world. -By what mechanism does God create things? There is no mechanism, what you see is exactly the mechanism. The entire universe is spontaneously, a-mechanicaly existing, it’s just being. The mechanism only appears to you when are looking through it using the human mind, making sense of little pieces of it, breaking it apart and making it seems like there is a mechanism of cause and effect. The problem is, you are not conscious of it, it is literally one solid miracle. Scientists are pushing the experience down to the point where they can’t explain it anymore (with quarks or even equations being at the source of our experience) and say maybe we will know in a 1000 years what is beyond those. But it is so direct you can’t point to it, you can’t know or explain it, but you can become conscious of it, the pure manifestation of nothingness -Where did God come from? God always existed and will exist forever. The formless Godhead is eternal, but forms needs to be created, so you created your own body and mind. It’s a paradox, it’s both eternal and you created yourself. -Why did God create itself? Because it want to experience itself, it’s a never ending process of self creation and being. -Can God be an alien or artificial intelligence? No, God includes both. -Could God have evolved? No, but at the same time it is constantly evolving. -How do you reconcile God with darwinian evolution? Design and evolution are actually the same thing. When a human being designed buildings this is evolution too. All this happens in a larger context in the mind of God, all that is happening with intelligence and sentience, it didn’t happen through randomness and chaos. -If I created myself as God, why did I create this shitty life? You do have the option to change your life at anytime, feel free to exercise the option of spiritual development to grow yourself and awaken. Imaging what it was like in the roman days where 40% the roman population were slaves. God is in love with any situation you can imagine to be, it doesn’t judge, it lives through any possible scenario that a human can live through, you as God will live through all that, so depression, death, cheating, lying… That’s why the Buddha said that life is suffering, the only solution to that is to awaken. Awakening allows you to deal gracefully with any kind of shitty life. It’s so easy to loose your happiness in life because it is so conditional. -Is it possible to become conscious at all times, not only as peak experiences with 5MEO-DMT or only in some meditative state ? Yes, it is called Sahaja Samadhi, the ultimate state of Samadhi. -How come people realize God and than fall back into duality? The absolute Truth is such a huge thing that you are rarely going to get with one go, you will have to deconstruct your old way of building reality. he illusion is so powerful, it is almost hypnotic in how it sucks you back in, it requires a lot of work to overcome the temptation of going back to your previous state. -Why does it have to be so hard to realize God? Because of the survival drive, it is significant and responsible for everything in your life, it dominates your entire life. God is the undoing of the survival drive. God is the opposite of life, it is death from the ego’s point of view. Ego is also in your genes, forms of life without it must have been erased a long time ago. Changing the mind is a slow process, and it depends on how serious and committed you are. -Can you realize God while having a family? Yes, but don’t try to do it all at once. -How come God can be realize through visualization, shouldn’t it be an obstacle? One of the key to realizing God is concentration. Because the universe is a giant mind, what you imagine tends to become your reality, you can sort of materialize a vision of your deity and merge your sense of self into it and that can be how you realize God. Be careful with your deity like Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Krishna or anything else, as the biggest awakening is not going to have any form to it. -Am I too young as a teen to pursue God? No, if you like metaphysical questions, go for it. But you have take care of solving your survival too. -Can God be experienced at any stage of the spiral in spiral dynamics? Yes, how you experience it will be affected on where you are on the spiral. If you are at stage blue, you will have a very limited, ethnocentric, moralistic version of God. At stage orange you will have a very scientific version of God. The higher you are on the spiral level of development, the easier it will be for you to have mystical experiences and to interpret them properly. So it’s important you evolve to stage yellow or even turquoise. -Why does God needs to self-realize? It doesn’t. God’s whole point is just to be and exist. -Is God personal or impersonal? Both, we can think of the universe as filled with impersonal objects and atoms, but at the same time, as you as a human are part of it, you are the universe, so the universe has human qualities. You are the human quality of the universe. You have to integrate the personal and the impersonal together. It’s a very personal experience when you become really conscious of who you are as God and at the same, there is a sense of no-self. -Does God take an active role in manipulating our lives? The Godhead itself, no. But as everything is moving in and outside your body it is also manipulating our lives all the time. -Does God have an agenda, where is creation going? No, there is no point besides just being, but at the same, that evolutionary process from our human perspective that is unfolding, it seems like it evolves to greater complexity, greater self-awareness. God is getting more and more complex and might one day reach infinity. -Which is more true pantheism or panantheism? Pantheism says that everything, all of reality is God. Panantheism says all of reality is inside of God. Both are true, you might experience them separately but also simultaneously and overlapping each other. -How did mankind first learned about God? Back then, there wasn’t so much distraction so they could have been seating around a lot, meditating, but also through the use of psychedelics like mushrooms around the entire world. Herbalism and shamanism dates back from tens of thousands of years at least. And some people are naturally born spiritually gifted. -Why did God decide to take on my particular human form? God is taking all possible form simultaneously, one of which is particular human form. -Why did God create humans and animals? God is going to take on anything that it can. In comparison with a rock, humans and animals can experience what it’s like to be some sentient entity. Humans are a step above animals in their ability to interface with the universe. -How can the realization of God be used as a human perspective? The ego loves to ask this question, you can become famous and get a lot of sex, but you can also elevate the consciousness of mankind. You can teach, master your emotions, improve how you do science, become hyper-creative, become a better athlete, a better parent, improve your relationship and sex life. Consciousness improves everything do, even business, it can transform your business or your relationship. Awakening might end one relationship and form new ones that will be much healthier and conscious. -Does realizing God gives you special powers and abilities? Yes it can. Magical healing, clairvoyance, telepathic abilities, abilities to see auras and so on, but there is no guaranty. -Are miracles possibles? Everything is a miracle, this very moment right now is a miracle. But, yes paranormal stuff can happen, synchronicity can happen, we can’t know how much from the past is true, if Jesus walked on water for example, but healing can definitely happen. -Is everything in the Bible false? No, but there are racist, ethnocentric, closed minded and factually incorrect stuff. There is also good stuff like when Moses talks with God and he ask God: “Ok, I will go back to my people and tell them that I saw God but what shall I call you?” God answers: you can tell them that “I Am”, my name is “I Am”. Or when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is found within, that’s a good pointer, nirvana is found within. But there is a lot of misleading stuff in the Bible, so Leo doesn’t recommend it as a high quality spiritual text. There are much better modern books to teach you the practices and make you realize what the Bible is pointing to. -What is our duty towards God, shall we worship and pray to God? In the greater sense you have no duty, you just have to be. In another sense, your duty is to awaken, raising awareness of the entire cosmos, to participate in this evolutionary game that God is playing. The problem when you pray to or worship God, people are doing it under the presumption of a duality between God and themselves. So the thing you are praying to is exactly yourself. Worshiping and praying is a sort of masturbation. There is nothing to worship but yourself. -What does God want from us? Nothing, be whatever you want to be. But try to be as conscious as you can, try to appreciate your own magnificence as God, otherwise you are going to miss the beauty of life. It’s like going to theater to watch a great movie and not looking at the screen. You can just turn around and look at a beautiful movie. But if you want to sit backward, it’s fine too. -Will following my religion lead me to God, shall I abandoned my religion? Leo is allergic to ideologies, dogmas and fundamentalism, he recommends that you abandon your religion because it’s going to get in the way. It’s brainwashing, you can never lose the only truth that there is, which is God. You don’t need a religion. You don’t need a belief systems. -My religion, already says all you are talking about, aren’t you just rehashing the same stuff? Leo talks from a higher level, the books from the main religions are very ethnocentric, there are not truly holistic, religions try to be exclusive, it is also dogmatic, it is not empirically based and not integrated with modern science. You need to go beyond. We have modern psychological insights, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, anthropology, sociology, economics, linguistics, post-modernism, modern philosophy… there is so much stuff beyond what you learn in the Bible, the Koran, classical Buddhism or Vedanta. You have to adapt your spiritual practice to fit the modern world to deal with new technological complexities and realities. Holy books don’t talk about spiral dynamics, shadow work or psycho-pathologies that weren’t known back then. -What are the most important requirements for realizing God? 1)Lazer focus concentration abilities for hours on end 2)Radical open-mindedness 3)Genuinely metaphysically curiousity. -How can I know that I can trust you? You shouldn’t, you have to validate and verify everything that Leo says, discover what is true for yourself. But don’t mistrust Leo in a cynical sort way too, you have to have open-mindedness to consider this all as a possibility. You can’t be as much untrustful that you can’t run the experiment for a few years. These questions and answers can go on forever, these are just stories, you are not going to figure out God through question and answer because it’s a great way to avoid to do the actual work. Actually, at some point these answers becomes an obstacle. You have to discover those answers by yourself, it’s like discovering the answers at the back of the book of your maths problem, rather than solving them yourself. The only way to understand God is to awaken to God, to become God, to look and feel yourself as God, from that will come all the answers. Remember that you can’t awaken before you awaken. Try to be comfortable not knowing for awhile while doing the practices, trust that one day you will figure it out. One awakening is not enough to understand everything Leo says here, it took him over a dozen awakening experiences to come that far. actualized.org will help you find God with the latest potent and cutting edge stuff.

@Mikael89 True. Also this nothing or nothingness is fully aware and conscious. Most people misunderstand what nothing really is and means.

When I inquire and try to look "at awareness/myself", I always kind of see this vibration which colours are made out of. Espacially when I defocus my gaze. Is this what is meant by "nothingness/awareness"? Is this what to focus on with self-inquiry?

What is God? - A No Bullshit Explanation For Smart People - Part 1 “He who knows himself knows God.” St Anthony This is based on Leo’s own experiences, not dogmas or ideologies that he believes. Don’t take his word for it, you can become conscious of it yourself. How do you communicate something that is beyond words? Your mind doesn’t want to hear what Leo has to say. The mind find ways to misunderstand what God is very easily. Wha is the source of all of existence, all of creation, beyond where science typically goes? Does God Really exist? Yes, but what does it mean as God is not what you think it is. There are 3 types of people: 1) The religious people, the theists who deeply believe in God. 2) The Atheists, who don’t believe in God, believe that God is a creation of mankind to brainwash others. 3) The agnostics believe that it is impossible to know and we have to be open to both possibilities All those categories are deeply confused and misunderstand what God is, they are confused in their own unique ways, but each of them have a bit of truth that is being missed amongst all the confusions. So we got to take that bit of truth, collect it and discard all the confusions and delusion. Leo used to be an atheist until 3 years ago where he had direct experience of God so he can clarify the confusions. As atheist you have to understand the “pre trans fallacy” popularized by Ken Wilbert. We have 3 categories of worldview. They are stages of cognitive development of the psyche that the humans goes through individualistically and collectively. 1) The pre-rational, fundamentalists, believes that God is what they believe it is, follows the scriptures, the bible believes in Noe’s arch and so forth 2) The rational, become more skeptical, appreciates science and it becomes the new religion. They think of themselves being so above the first stage, they don’t see there is a trans-rational stage 3) The trans-rational, is hard to describe because it is beyond language and beyond the mind. It is not a rejection of reality but it is going beyond rationality and realizing its limits. The “pre-trans fallacy” is what the atheist or scientifically minded person does, they confuse the trans-rational stage with the pre rational stage. Taking about God doesn’t mean that you are one of those christian fundamentalists! This communication is a trans-rational communication. Religion is full of delusions, but religion is also right about God being an actual phenomenon and not an invention of the human mind. The theists confuse their ideas and beliefs or images of God for God itself. The key insight is that God is an experience not a belief or a theory. Can you find proof of the existence of God? What is proof, what is an experience, how does science or knowledge work? But you don’t find proof for God as you would find proof for some murder. God is the most fundamental thing ever, the origins of existence itself. Proof requires that first you have existence, science and rationality depends on fundamental things that needs to be in place before they work. Proof is a second order phenomenon. Truth or being is prior to proof. You can’t have a castle without bricks but you can have bricks without a castle. Atheist try to find proof for God by trying to find bricks in the shape of a castle, they take the castle as the primary and the bricks as the secondary. Gödel’s and Alfred Tarski both proved that proof is always a weaker notion than truth. Everything that is true is not automatically provable! Prove to me that you exist. It’s actually impossible because existence is more fundamental than proof. The only reason you think you exist is because you feel that you exist and that happens through personal experience. Try to prove that colors exist to a bind person, it’s not possible. For proof to happen, a lot things have to be in place like common based experiences for individuals so we can build a consensus and we can have standards of what qualifies a proof and what doesn’t. These standards can be different depending on the community or culture you are a part of, and what time in history we are talking about. Proof is a very complex notion which requires a lot of various building blocks which itself cannot be proven. Certain things in life cannot be proven and yet, they are true. The main reason why God doesn’t make sense to you is because you’re failing to account for different states of consciousness. Right now you are in the conventional state of consciousness. You can also be in drunken state of consciousness, certain things are open to you and other things are closed in that state of consciousness, every state comes with his own limitations and possibilities. Same when you dream. And then, they are rarified superhuman with high levels of consciousness. So it is not possible to understand God from your courant level of consciousness you need to raise your level of consciousness way higher. It’s like trying to explain colors to a blind person. To understand colors you got to directly experience colors. Science is a figment of consciousness. You can do science and rationality because you are in particular state of consciousness. The reality of an ant is much different to the one of a human. Well, there are much greater states of reality than the one you live in right now. You also fail to take into account states of cognitive development, the “pre/trans fallacy”, and also spiral dynamics. The human psyche evolves and grows. You can anticipate the things you can’t understand right now and will understand in the next stage. You also assume that reality is a material, physical system, which is wrong. Reality is more like a giant mind which can imagine and think up all sorts of sub realities within it, one of which being what we call physical reality. If you assume that the universe is a box with lots of objects in it, subjected to laws of physics, than your universe is very limited. You assume than consciousness comes from the brain a materialistic explanation for the universe. From the materialistic paradigm, God makes no sense. Science has never proven the existence of a external materialistic world and it never will or the existence of another human being. These things are metaphysical dogmas of science. Science just assumes that this is how it has to be, exactly what needs to be question if you want to understand God. The existence or the non existence of God seats on the very top of your web of belief, the operating system that governs your whole life. The ramification of realizing what God is are so widespread, it’ll change your entire orientation to life which is why you get so emotional about it when you discuss about the existence of God. The emotions, the dogma is there as a smoke screen to get you to not investigate for yourself. Whatever attitude you have towards God is what prevents you from understanding what God is. Are you going to surrender that attitude, or are you going to cling and defend it at all costs. If you say you don’t have an attitude and don’t want to open yourself to some kind of brainwash, that’s an attitude, and this is exactly why you will never understand God. Have you ever experienced God for yourself? That is very different than believing in God. Have you ever experience that there is no God? For the atheists, just because you haven’t experienced God yet, doesn’t mean that there is no God. For the theists, don’t confuse your beliefs in God with the actual experience. Are you directly conscious of God right at this second? Even if you experience mystical experiences in the past, you don’t really know what it is, all you got are memories and pleasant stories, interpretations which are very different from actual consciousness of God. The misconceptions of God: -The biggest one being that God is a belief. -A superstitious, religious notion, wishful thinking, a defense mechanism that naive people adopt in order to avoid facing death, wishing for an afterlife, wishing for more meaning in their life than there really is, a defense mechanism against the nihilism of reality. It is true that a lot of people do use it as a crutch to face some tough philosophical realities, but that is not the origin of the notion of God. -God is a bearded man in the sky. God is not a man, a she and not even a thing. -God is incompatible with science, evolution and advanced society. Both can be true, this what the trans-rational stage is about. -God has rules that you must follow, that God punishes evil doers and sinners, that your role in life is not to be a sinner. God doesn’t punish nor judge anyone. You are given total freedom, if you want to be a murder or a rapist, God is fine with it. You have to separate cultural norm and morality from God. -God is exclusive to one religion. My religions has one right God and all the others are wrong, no religion has a monopoly on God. All religions talk about the same one God, their apparent diversity depends on your interpretations of them, even polytheists religions like hinduism relate to the same one God. -God is other than you. How can God be me? How can God be other than you? To notice that, you will have to change how you conceive of yourself and also how you conceive God to bring those two things together. If I’m God how come I can’t create things out of thin air? Because you are in this limited human form, God is all about limitation. So what is God? -God is the supreme being, the first cause, the source of all creations, the universe, the multiverse, everything. God is infinite, boundless, the All, the One, the Absolute, God is also omniscient, all knowing, omnipotent, having unlimited power and the ability to create anything that it wants, God is also omnipresent, benevolent, all loving and good, incorporeal, eternal and immortal, perfect and complete. All of it is correct. The problem is accepting it and understanding how it can possibly be. Leo has through direct experience validated all of these facets. -God is a radical state of consciousness but at the same time, God is all state of consciousness. God is not restricted to one state of consciousness, but in this state of consciousness, you are not conscious that this is a facet of God. -God is also the absence self, or You. God is you and the absence of you, both are the case, that is a paradox. God is the absence of you as your limited egoic identity. The thing that you think that was born, that has a life story, the you that you think as a creature, the biological you, that you is a false conceptual self. If you get rid of that thing, you will realize and experience yourself as God. What remains of you is nothing, you experience yourself as pure emptiness. When we strip all qualities of you, all that remains is a state of pure and empty consciousness or awareness, and that’s what God is. This is You with a capital “Y” different from the conventional “you”, the biological you, that thing has to die to realize God. You are the obstacle. You want to see God, and the thing that in the way of you seeing God is yourself. -God is also synonymous with reality, existence and truth. In that sense, atheists call their God reality, nature or existence. The problem is that atheists are not conscious of what reality, existence or nature actually are. God is the word you use to describe what your experience is when you become conscious of what nature and reality are. It’s conscious and divine. Atheists treat reality as mechanical system, God or reality is not a mechanical system, it’s a giant mind, and that’s what you are missing as an atheist. So as an atheist, you have created a false God for yourself, the mechanical reality, an external, objective reality that human being can study with science. That thing doesn’t exist, you invited it, that is your God, the thing that you cling to, just like the fundamentalists cling to their notions of God as the bearded man in the clouds. -God is consciousness, that thing in you which is conscious of existence. The problem is that atheist, rationalist, materialists think of consciousness as a thing that the brain does, that consciousness exists within a physical-mechanical universe. But that’s not what consciousness is, there is only consciousness, there is no mechanical-physical universe, all of that is content within consciousness. Consciousness is disembodied. Consciousness is not a computer simulation, it is not happening in the brain. Brains, computer simulations, big bangs, universes, science and rationality, all of that is content within consciousness. How does the consciousness occur? Consciousness is singular and has no opposite and that it is pure magic. There is no rational explanation for it, demystifying it is exactly what materialist are looking for, and that’s impossible. -God is Being. What is Being? Everything is Being! So how come I can’t see it? Because you are not interfacing directly with Being, you are interpreting Being all the time. Your interpretations create a smoke screen that prevents you form directly experiencing Being. You see the world as being made out of trees and cars and animals etc… but it’s not. What’s actually there is pure Being but you are making sense of it such that it helps you in your survival. -God is now. It’s the only thing that exists. Not the past, not the future. What is now? You can’t put your finger on it. God is the one thing that can’t be pointed to, because the thing that is pointing to God is God itself. If God is everything it means that it can’t be pointed to, it is prior to interpretations, prior to the mind. The process of understanding it, is itself in the way of having it. You can’t know that you are God because you are God. Knowledge is already one step too far, you need to BE God. -God is non-duality, is boundless. There are no categories that we create, good/bad, male/female, here/there, God is the unification of all those qualities. Those distinctions do exist but at the same time are all unified as one. To become conscious of the oneness of reality, which you are also a part of, is to become conscious of God! God is his own creation. All what is happening right now is oneness, that is God, the whole universe is one movement. -God is a strange loop, it created itself. Using conventional logic, such thing is impossible, but God is not limited to logic, it has infinite power that includes the power to create itself. It is an elegant solution to the solve the problem of where does existence comes from. If God created the big bang for example, if you need one object to create another, the logic of cause and effect goes on forever, but not if God itself is infinity and accounts for every possibility and therefor, it did create itself. -God exist for eternity, it created itself but also simultaneously has always existed and never needed creation. You need direct experience of God to understand this. Leo experienced how he designed his own body, including every hair and every molecule. -God is absolute infinity, there is nothing outside of it. -God is everything and nothing, your body is God, your thoughts are God but God is also not any of that. How can both be true at the same time? You need to become conscious of that. Because God is consciousness and consciousness is not a thing, it is not located anywhere. And a thing that is not located anywhere is actually the same as everything. To be nothing is to be everything and to be everything is to be nothing. In the vacuum of empty space there is a hammer, you might think that where the hammer is, there is no vacuum. Vacuum doesn’t mean it is empty of objects, vacuum is empty also when there are objects in it. You don’t think of it that way because you think dualistically. -God is the answer to all mystical, metaphysical and philosophical questions. God is not an answer of any scientific questions. How can anything about this be true? the answer is, it just is, Truth can’t be proven, Truth just is. It’s our job to stop the cycle of endless justification and trying to find reasons an explanations. At some point we have to accept it as it is. You can’t get beyond or underneath consciousness because there is nothing there, it just is. What does God look or feel like? -God feels like awakening from a dream. That means that all the physical world you are experiencing right now, the walls, the earth and so on is just a figment of your imagination. That does not mean that you have the power to think the floor out of existence. Imagination encompasses actually all of reality, not only when you are in thinking mode. This very moment is being imagined, it does not exist anywhere, it’s been imagined by God and God is nothing. This moment is an imagination within the mind of God but also identical with the mind of God. The physical machinery of God is identical to consciousness or the mind. God’s brain or mind is this very moment. -God feels like dying, as a culture what we have labeled death is actually God. We named the realization of God, death. When you die, you become God. The only thing that is going to die is your idea of physical reality and the idea of you as a biological self, nothing real is going to die. In a sense, there is no such thing as death. Death is a concept that you have imagined. God is infinite, it cannot die, it has no place to go. -God feels like a total surrender, whatever the universe wants to do, you just do that. -God feels like the biggest mindfuck ever, OMG, wow, awesome and terrifying. -God feels like exiting the matrix, it simultaneously leaves you in the matrix and transforms the matrix and you cannot talk about it otherwise people think you are insane. -God feels like a metaphysical orgasm and cosmic holographic fractal, the universe is being aware through your eyes, the universe is using you like a puppet. -God feels like a universal mind like idealism and solipsism. Idealism is the opposite of materialism or realism. It tells us that there is only mind stuff. Solipsism tells us that there is no such thing as other sentient entities, there is only you. As God you are all alone, oneness necessarily implies loneliness. The reason it has to be one is because it is infinite. -God feels like emptiness and nothingness. This emptiness feels light, radiant and full. -God feels like infinite intelligent. The universe is not random, it not chaotic, it deliberately designed using disembodied infinite intelligence. -God feels like infinite beauty and profound peace, it feels like times stops, like eternity. -God feels like immortality, when you realize there is no biological creature or a brain that is creating all this, then you realize that you are immortal as God. If you are identified with your body and your biography, that will of course die, in that sense you are scared of death. If you are identified with all of existence, that can’t die. What about the big Crunch theory? Leo talks about existence, not only our universe. -God feels also like the greatest gift, the greatest joy, like heaven or Nirvana. -God feels like infinite love, divine, radiant, magical and alive. The entire universe is alive, it’s sentient and conscious. When you realize that, that changes how you relate to the universe. You have a broader notion of what life is. -God feels like not knowing, like a irreductible mystery. You can’t know God, you can be God, knowing is always indirect. -God feels like the greatest moment of your life, life will never be the same. Why is God so confusing? -God is a level of consciousness, most people don’t appreciate that there are different levels of consciousness and they never access higher levels of consciousness and therefor they try to understand something that is beyond them. -God is formless and can’t be pointed to when the mind only can deal with forms. Science only works with forms. It is precisely because God is all forms that you can’t see it. -God is beyond the mind. There is the inherent assumption that if something exists, is true and is significant, then you just can think about it, understand it and believe in it. But we use our mind to understand things inside the universe, we never ask our minds to go beyond the universe. Scientific questions are about the content of one state of consciousness. Existential questions are about consciousness itself, not the content, but the context. Science can’t see that the science is being done inside of a dream. -God is a total mindfuck, most people don’t like to get mindfucked, it’s scary -God is a deep paradox and a strange loop. Paradox threatens the conceptual castles that we build within philosophy or even within science. Paradox threaten the illusion of simple cause and effect, the linear explanation of how existence works. -God requires radical open-mindedness. Most people are closed-minded, they are not willing to open their mind to radical ideas. Are you open minded enough to accept death and to see it as a good thing, or to see your parents and your friends as creation of your imagination and that they don’t really exist? -People are not willing to do existential investigations because they already assume that they know. For religious people, their biggest obstacle to God is their ideas about God, it’s the same for atheists. -God is confusing because people are egotistical and arrogant. God conflicts with ego, control and survival. God requires surrendering your ego and control, taking energy and time away to chasing money, sex, power and material luxuries. God is the opposite of survival, Truth can inhibit your survival. -God requires facing your own death, not just as an idea but actually facing it. -God cannot be symbolized, put into words or be communicated. These words are pointers, but you can’t see God with words, nor can you draw a picture or put God into some equations. Equations are finite, God is infinite, you can’t put infinity into an equation because your equation is itself part of infinity, you can’t put the larger into the smaller. -Very few people have direct experience of God, it requires thousands of hours of meditation and contemplation, various form of inquiry and investigation. -Our culture, medias and society are very materialistic. -Metaphysics and epistemology aren’t taken seriously in the educational system, it should be the foundation of all education. -The success of science creates a false illusion of existential understanding. Creating technology and existential understanding are two different things. -The foundations of science are misunderstood. -God doesn’t seem possible or even practical. What you can get out of this is the obstacle. It is looking at reality from your personal egoic point of view. -Reality is subjective and relative. Pre-rational and rational people have a hard time dealing with relativity. The very substance of existence is relative, atoms and molecules are relative to your own mind. They don’t exist for other creatures but for you. The subjective nature of reality is denied by science and most people. Objective reality is just a concept within your subjective conscious experience. There is nothing objective about the universe, it’s pure subjectivity, pure relativity. -The mind is self-deceptive. -Skepticism is misuse. You think that proof should be delivered to you, taking the responsibility away from you to do the hard work and to discover the Truth. Leo is not trying to prove anything here, he is just presenting you with possibilities of things that you can verify for yourself. A true skeptics puts his skepticism to the test and questions his own assumptions. Could it be that skepticism itself is just a self deception that prevents you from doing the work that leads you to higher states of consciousness beyond skepticism? -God reveals everything to be an illusion: society, culture, governments, language, religions, science, logic, rationality, your own birth, your biography, your parents, your friends etc… can you deal with that? -It threatens power hierarchies, from religion, to business, economic, political and social system. They are all build on illusions, false justifications. Trying to ground its power in some sort of fixed position in reality which doesn’t exist. Mankind but especially the one on the top of the power hierarchy justify their power through their appeal to God, the truth or the fairness, the goodness or whatever. When they do that, it’s always the ego at work. Tyrants always play the games of illusions, trickery and deceptions. -Once you know God, no one will understand you, you will not be able to communicate with anyone other than the people who already experienced it, which is irrelevant because they already know. The trickery of God is a work of art. What are the various names for God? There are many aspects to God, some of these words points to different facets of God some other words point to the whole thing. God, enlightenment, awakening, oneness, the All, the One, Godhead, nothingness, Truth, non-duality, the absolute, ego death, infinity, absolute infinity, self-transcendence, self-realization, consciousness, awareness, presence, the Now, Being, existence, reality, isness, liberation, moksha, no-Self, true-Self, the Self, Universe, Universal mind, Mind, Spirit, Wakan Tanka (Sioux), revelation, illumination, Theosis, Kenosis, ecstasy, rebirth, Holy Spirit, Nosis, Agape, Brahman, Atman, the void, emptiness, nirvana, Yoga, union, Buddha mind, no mind, kensho (chinese-japanese buddhism), satori (chinese buddhism), stream entry, the groundless ground, the gateless gate, the Ox, Prajnia, shuniata, Bodhi, Mu, Shiva, Rigpa, Krishna, Samadhi, sat chit ananda, Allah, Taohid, Fana Al-Fana’a, the greater Djhihad, Jehovah, Om, I Am, tat tvam asi, Hashem, Deus, Zeus, Teotl (aztecs), supreme Being, Lord, Creator, the all seeing eye. How do you experience God? -Metaphysical questioning, so questioning in a lot of depth the fabric of existence and what knowledge is. -Deconstructing your entire life and belief system, until nothing remains -Self inquiry -Meditation (adding some deconstruction of some kind) -Concentration and visualization, build crazy high level of focus -Yoga, Kriya Yoga -Psychedelics -Deep suffering and deprivation (fasting, isolation) -Meditation retreats and solo retreats -Dark room retreats for 7 days (natural psychedelics) What are the way not to experience God? -Through the mind, beliefs, ideas, concept, thinking, opinions, imagination, knowledge or language. God is prior to all that. -Through scientific modeling, equations, theorizing. -Through proof or double blind clinical studies. Your experience of God have to be subjective, you have to be involved in it. -Through debate, discussion, cynical skepticism, academic study. It is possible to have epiphanies while studying scriptures and sacred texts but it should be used only as an adjunct to your other work. -Going to church or through traditional prayer where you pray for God for your egotistical goals and plans. But certain prayers are quiet meditative and can help you in that sense. -Through rituals and ceremonies. -Through books, videos, audios, although they can be helpful on your journey. You don’t want to do the stuff that works, precisely because your ego is afraid of death, it’s too frightening to do technics that are actually powerful. So you’d rather do weak technics by design of the ego. You need to open your mind to Samadhi (direct consciousness or Being), not through knowledge or concepts, thoughts or theory not even through ordinary experience because it presupposes a subject/object duality between the experiencer and the experienced thing. Samadhi is a collapsing of those, it’s a non-dual form of perception or knowledge. Your actual form of perception is grounded in your materialist metaphysics, you being a biological entity looking at an object, photons reaching your eyeball, the information goes to your brain and produce perception. But there is something beyond perception, beyond knowledge. Samadhi is not hallucination nor fantasy, is not scientific data. Psychedelics are the only tool that lets you access these very advance truth very quickly. On 30mg of 5MEO-DMT most people will experience God, but you got to experience it for yourself to make it significant to you.

@tedens I follow Isha's path which i shared my experiences many times in this forum over and over. Isha path involves everything from creating a blissful life, health, material success, to moving into deeper states of detachment and nothingness, and then the last stage is about samyama which is purely to dissolve yourself. Once sadhguru initiates you into samyama it will unleash a lifetimes of memory to dissolve you very fast. Life will begin to roll on fast forward. "Once you sit with me, one foot of mine will always be in your life, it's heavy and it's on the throttle (laughs)"… "Life on full throttle" #sadhguru. That's his favorite quote Sadhguru'a methods are really beoynd logic. It's really an amazing path, complete path and very comprehensive path. I didn't go to the samyama program so I'm still not on the path of Mukti. I don't feel ready for this. I enjoy immensly my progress just as it is. Never grown so fast in my life. When the time comes, when i feel ready for samyama I'll go for it naturally. So i don't have anything to tell you really Sadhguru says a desire for samyama or Mukti can only come for happy people. For those people who experienced this life in great meassure and now want to go beoynd. That's the whole effort of the first programs. To create a blissfulness inside you and to live life intensly so that the desire to go beyond would arise in them. then there's the last program designed just for that purpose. "Suffering will not seek" #sadhguru

@Nahm i understand that I'm consciousness ever present, ever perfect, etc... I'm not arguing with you at all. All you say i agree. But you simply don't know anything about karma. That's why it's a pointless conversation. @AstralProjection somethingness is always limited. all the magic powers, all immortality is something and somethingness is always limited. There's no other way. It's unbrakeable logic to say only nothingness has no limits. It's impossible for this to be false. Yeah i was hard on him but i wish i was even harder because his full of bull. No.... Advanced spiritual masters dont disagree with themselfs. Only fools and phylosophiers like tom come up with random statements which make no sense. He even uses words like "I think"… "i guess" "that's my opinion" like that... He's just a random phylosopher. A guru is not a phylosopher, guru knows life inside out from experience. What a guru says is not ant opinions it's a fountain of truth. There are scriptures written thousands of years ago by realized beings and since then nothing changed at all, nothing new has been sayed. Everything that could happen here and beyond is all written down and it stayed the same until now . If two spiritual masters disagree then one of them is a fake guru who knows nothing at all. Basic logic... Either you know the truths of life or you're speculating about life and are unwilling to say idk. Truth is the same for everyone. If both know the truth they will not argue.