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Also, what about love? Many sages talk about love as a major factor in their enlightenment. What is the nature of this love in your understanding? Is this in the same vein as bliss of the Self, or more of a feeling related to the physical body?

so there I was sitting at home working on an illustration for a client and had this realization hit me like a brick: "I don't like doing this". I don't mean just that particular job, which was boring and not turning out so great, which I was only doing for the pay, but just what I do for a living in general - drawing, illustrating, designing, I didn't care for any of it at that moment. Sitting in front of the computer for hours, making chicken scratch motion with my hand to create images on a screen to be sent off in exchange for dollars. Having to constantly second guess myself and having anxieties about if the image or design will turn out right, if the client will approve and I get to continue my lifestyle. This is coming at a time when I've hit some major breakthroughs in my art and started to gain a following on social media. I've enjoyed moments of triumph and bliss while creating art and seeing the growth in my abilities. I thought my life purpose is to experience this growth and use it to offer something great to the world - but isn't that all just ego? Looking back I never really LOVED any of it, more like I was just bearing with the suffering to gain some kind of recognition or achieve a certain lifestyle. Isn't that enough though? How many people on this planet get to say they LOVE what they do for a living? I mean like 100% passionate, love every single aspect of it, get excited to wake up in the morning kind of love? Isn't that also the ego trying to make it about itself and be distracted by life? I don't even know what else I would rather do. On one hand it seems like I'm just in a depressed state and looking for a way out. On the other hand it feels like I'm just continuing with this farce because it's the only life I know and it's scary to consider anything else and admit that I should quit. If this is the 'resistance' or the ego backlash against me finally making progress in my skills and moving up in the world it's a bloody damn good one. I really have to tip my hat to the devil for this one because it's really the mother of all resistance to stop me dead in my tracks. This is not the first time I've had thoughts like this but I guess after all the things I've accomplished and all the growth I've made I thought that I wouldn't have to question myself like this.

@Wisebaxter I can explain. I didn't resist it, I went into it fully. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Was I afraid, fuck yes! I literally was dying, it's not that bad, but like it definitely scares you. And when you are some kind of nondual state you can start freaking out. It came together for me on my latest trip (I wrote up a trip report on here). I'm happy everything happened the way it did. I was frolicking around in nondual bliss for a long long time, living lifetimes and shit. I really loved it. However, when I came back down to my ego more fully I had walked into my neighbours' place. He had called the cops, the cops handcuffed me and called an ambulance. I'm still thinking this is part of the trip, I had ascended and none of this shit matter to me anymore. Anyway I was taken to hospital, kept there for a few hours, my parents were called but it was midnight so they didn't pick up. Just awoke to a message saying I was in the emergency department. I didn't have my phone or wallet on me so I couldn't call anyone for help. I caught a taxi back to my place after they let me out at like 1am. I get back and I'd destroyed my place, broken plants, flipped cabinents, torn the top of a glass table off, pulled off all my clothes and shit. There was dirt everywhere. I had crushed my guitar by falling on it. This didn't matter to me because I was in this nondual state. But when I came back down it suddenly mattered again.... Anyway, all I'm saying is. Be careful (again this was on 600ug), I couldn't really control myself and the shock of realising my true nature led to a god head feeling that my entire life was a lie and so didn't matter. I thought at the time I was handling it really well, I didn't handle it so well. Also I pissed myself thinking I was having the best orgasm of my life, ahha. That's all I meant about it not being pretty. I mean, during the trip I had the most beautiful time of my life. But just remember, you'll come back down and your ego will be left to clean up the mess. Still, I think it was all worth it.

If you’re on the search for your purpose and having trouble finding your passions/values, or maybe you do but you doubt them or think they are petty and lower-self. A key insight to understand is actuality in the realm of your passions. It’s super easy to be idealistic and deluded when creating a vision for yourself. One tends to create a life of having things instead of being your greatest self. So if you’re confused and doubtful just take a step back. Stop analyzing yourself so intensely. Look in your direct experience and find what you genuinely like to do, what gives you fulfillment and bliss in the moment? Sometimes those are too big of words. Coaches tend to place so much importance on the certainty of knowing what you want from life. And this scares a lot of people away from finding their true passions. All passions start out as enjoyment and fun in the present moment. Usually they aren’t even done for any particular reason or effect. You just do it because you like it. But once that voice sneak in and says, “You wanna do this for the rest of your life?” The ego tears your passions to shreds by adding seriousness, a reason, and priority. You really need an easy going detached approach to your work and life. Sometimes it’s hard to do, it’s easier when you know that life is a dream. maybe you feel guilty or shame when doing what you love. Maybe you think it’s petty or stupid because of family and societies influence. So you create new “mature” values with shallow goals and direction. The truth is, that won’t make you happy. Nothing but your fullest surrender to the present moment and your passion will make you fulfilled. Happy creating!

Yup, sounds about right... The end of all bliss/kundalini/chakra work is liberation. That's the whole point of liberation: it's the whole pot of honey at the end of the rainbow. God consciousness, unity consciousness -- nothing but pointers to liberation (which of course is already so much what is already the case that it cannot even be said to exist...).

@winterknight Lastly, have you any interest in pursuing bliss/Kundalini/chakra work? There is also speak of things such god-consciousness, unity-consciousness etc among legitimate contemporary sages. Have you any experience in that regard?

''I am that complete which prevails everywhere...complete in itself I, Shiva; the deity of eternal bliss I am Joy itself…I am Bliss itself I bow down to lord Shiva I AM SHIVA, I AM PURE CONSCIOUSNESS EVERLASTING, EVER PURE , ENLIGHTENED. I AM FREE I AM BLISSFUL CONSCIOUSNESS PRESENT IN ALL FORMS AND WITHOUT FORM. I AM WITHOUT A DUAL FORM. I AM THE SELF , SUPREME CONSCIOUSNESS. I AM CONSCIOUSNESS TRUE AND PURE.........'' What a beautiful prayer!

That's cool. You seem to have a curious mind and I appreciate your thoughts. Are you planning on doing an Aya ceremony? If so, I don't mean to scare you with the terror stuff. My first ceremony was absolute bliss. I was so connected to everyone in the temple. When it came time for surrender, the choice was my old egoic mindset or absolute beauty, love and harmony. I was like "Huh? This is it? The big surrender? Heck yea, I'll surrender!!! Helloooooo bliss!!". At one point, I walked outside and looked over the moonlit Peruvian mountains as ethereal music flowed around the temple. The beauty, love and joy was indescribable. I was in a magical land. I thought "How have I missed this beauty my whole life". Part of my difficulty the second ceremony was that I wanted to steer it back to blissville. It doesn't work that way. Mother Aya does her thing. Before the second ceremony, I was feeling a bit cocky. I made it through my first ceremony without a scratch and was actually giving first-timers advice. Then I was humbled big time.

@Amanaki so, for the past few years you have been living in bliss and ecstasy without a moment of interruption by negative emotions? Really?

@Leo Gura / anyone else can you confirm if i had an enlightenment experience? (dropping of the self) something you have said just clicked for me... that nothing changes but there's an extremely radical shift in perception on enlightenment and this can be seen as absolute bliss or absolute hell for me it was absolute hell... this was prior to me knowing anything about spirtuliaty / ego death / enlightenment... i was just a regular guy... now i did not get the "there is no me" but everything in my room, including myself in the mirror all became WTF. normal life objects such as my perfume, a glass of water, my own "ears", "nose" anything i looked at... i would have to rememebr what we normally call it and then question/wonder... WTF is this.. this was after a mild synthetic weed doseage... i rememeber saying to myself "please god, please let this be okay again, let everything be normal again this lasted about 20-30 mins... and then i slept praying to God when i wake up everything will be normal again.. (i thought i had gotten too high... but there was a part of me which was saying... HOW CAN I UNSEE THIS!? ) thank goddness for homeostatic i woke up "normal" but still rememrbered what i had seen my question is.. did i see the terryfying side of enlightement? is that why i did not get the no-self? leo has said, enlightement both shocks you and makes you extremely blissfull.. but either / or can happen as well.. so was this an enligthenment experinece for me? seeing the ox? seeing all without meaning? or does it go much much deeper? i still had a sense of being in my room and all... maybe that was too broad to question... but i did question every single thing about myself, how we live. my job.. everything was WTF i saw us/me as what we are... called us "mammals" it was literally like.. i am this animal who is wearing these clothes n shit.. and it was all of a sudden. one moment i was chillin being high n about to watch a movie on laptop and then next moment all the meaning of normal day stuff went away i have previously asked about this experieince of mine on the forum, but i thought it was a spontanoues dark night of the soul... but maybe this was seeing of the ox. but again.. i call it an experience.. and enligthement is usually supposed to be a "non-experieince" just wanna know what that was.. enligtenment expereiince but the shocking side of it (as i was unaware of this part of our existence at the time, did not know what to do except ask God for help)...

State of Bliss does not mean Enlightenment , it is state you can get when you are at peace with everything that happens around you .

Enlightenment is bliss in it self. If you searching for a spiritual awakening and think of enlightenment, why would you still then keep living your old life? Enlightenment is the result of the spiritual path it is not an object or thing it is the culmination of the truth being brought forward in the cultivation of mind and body. Earthly needs will no longer be of interests,

Yes. That's my question. Where does the contents come from and why? Brahman is existence-consciousness-bliss and hindu scholars and scriptures are extremely convincing in what they are claiming. But i can't abide in it as long there is no real explanation why all this is. "Brahman makes all this to know himself" or "this is a game" won't fit to those deep philosophical explanations of prasthanatrayi.

I have a question. How do you know this or make this claim? Do you see that in order to make any claim whatsoever, there has to be a 'knowing' of it. Or else you're just spreading gibberish. This knowing itself is Brahman/Buddha mind/infinite that no space, time, object can bound and which alone exists. Actually it's factually wrong to say Brahman exists, is conscious, is blissful. Brahman is existence itself, consciousness/knowing itself, bliss itself. That is not Advaita Vedanta. That is pretty much all religious philosophy. This is just a fancy way of saying that ''God created the Universe'. If you say that 'something' appears in Consciousness, then how will you explain that something? Advaita Vedanta says that Brahman itself 'appears' as the multifarious subjects (all sentient creatures) and Objects (The common, physical universe). But none of it can ever stain or bind Brahman. There is nothing else other than Brahman. And you mention that Atman is the soul. But that is not the case. The soul is called Jeeva. Jeeva is the person we take ourselves to be with all our conditioning. With the death of the body, Jeeva does not die. It keeps on moving from body to body until it's karma gets burnt and thus get liberated. But the whole purpose of Spiritual paths is to directly realize that Jeeva is ultimately non-existent and it never existed. Atman was wrongly identified with Jeeva by imagining itself as Jeeva(like a dream). Once this realization dawns(Enlightenment), the Jeeva nature vanishes once and for all and the equation becomes like this, Atman=Brahman There were never 2 things(atman and brahman) in the first place.

Hello everyone, Whilst blissed out on LSD and feeling slightly sexually aroused my spine started shaking, I felt a rush of pleasure and a movement of energy throughout the spine. I couldn't sit still and was very alarmed. As the trip came to an end, I felt an amazing bliss of connectivity and feelings of total and complete oneness to a degree that I had never experienced on previous trips. I felt the light within me was renewed and it was beautiful and semi-enlightening. This was about 6 months ago. While my entire life I have generally been a very emotionally detached person with little sense of self just from my introverted personality alone, I felt a renewed disconnect from the self after that day and I made an agreement with my inner light to always follow it's guidance. The next day I did some research and realized this was in fact the start of a Kundalini awakening. It was beautiful. It was then that I quit my job and began traveling to new countries, did some vispasana retreats, and while my old ego self is always present while interacting with people, I am almost constantly aware that it is just a mask I am wearing behind a true self. My question is, what comes next? Is there a fuller form of enlightenment I have not yet come to realize? I feel calm, grounded, extremely at ease everyday although I have no idea where my life will take me in the next 6 months. I am detached from all emotions but I still find that there is a desire for more truth, a bigger enlightenment, and a push to get this pent up energy out into it's full form. Is this just a never ending trip down the rabbit hole? Or is Kundalini just one stage in a bigger more complete enlightenment?

So many stupid comments. Meditation leads to pure awareness which leads to self realization = the end of suffering and living in peace and bliss all eternity. Seriously, do the people of this forum really don't have understanding what it is to realize one's true nature? I advice to read the ancient text than forming your own opinion what liberation is and isn't.

@Joseph Maynor it’s a permanate realise of energy that starts to circulate, heal and rewire different chakras in your body. Brings up a lot of repressed emotions/traumas which causes depression and aniexty but can also cause periods of bliss. The process can go on for several years. This is from personal experience and from hearing enlightened people talk about. For example, Saduguru, Adyshanti, Craig Holiday and Gopi Krishna all went through this process.

For me, the reason that there are more people than ever on the path to enlightenment is the internet. Its a shift in power. Before, everything said was in a way controlled by society. You could say, the king had the final saying. You needed money to print a book. With the internet, everyone can speak. Its truly a bliss. I started my way on the internet as a 12-13 year old kid. And when I use it, I cant describe the joy my brain has. The fast response, looking everything up in a matter of seconds. It took some time for me to use it in a healthy way. It can be very addicting and you can become unconscious if you are not careful. But my neurological wiring would be 100% different, if I wouldnt have been exposed to it. And I feel its in a good way. I think its bringing more peace than evil, and history so far has proven this. I would go so far and say its a catapult for civilization to move up the spiral. Technology in general. Its the reason we dont all have to work in the fields for 12 hours a day and can live a more comfortable life than the kings of the kings a few hundreds years ago. Not that it means much, love is the only thing that is important. But if you can live 30 years longer, you can also love 30 years longer, so there is that?

Enlightenment is bliss enlightenment means blowing out. what you experience when enightenment happens is pure joy because you no longer clinging to earthly living. it is purly spiritual

@Amanaki ur 100%right I know what enlightment is I saw all leo videos but I just wanna know if I should just switch to self inquiry cause my goal is to be enlightened not to get some bliss

Dude my whole point is that there isn’t some mystical shmystical “energy”. Some, yeah sure you feel a connection but really, toss those ideas. He’s a totally ordinary person that still knows something extrodirnary. I’ve met some enlightened people and my favorite part about these people is that they operate outside of these fantastical norms that we think enlightened people operate as and in. There is no intentional disguise either. He got what he was looking for and now it’s life back in the market place. Business as usual and it will remain business as usual. Climb the mountain then descend in whatever fashion you choose. This whole oozing bliss stuff to be enlightened is literally just a fantasy. There’s a truth to it but enlightened people are never all going to fit a certain bill, because enlightenment also about living life authentically. Some choose to wear robes and start an ashram and that’s their holy divine life. Some choose to live as an “ordinary” lay person and that’s their divine life. Also I’m not saying he’s some master. I don’t know and I really have no interest because how the hell am I or anyone really going to know what he knows? It’s irrelevant and as he said “it’s not a big deal.” Granted he’s saying that after the fact so keep that in mind. Like anything else, it’s a big deal until you arrive and get it.

When you get an sensation anywhere in the body or in mind, make a mental note to you self, example " pain in forhead" then let it go After some time you do not need to make mental notes then you sit with no thoughts in mind, you become observer. In meditation you dont look for an answer the outcome of the meditation is the answer, ultimat bliss. But there is nothing in meditation only silent

If someone has very thoroughly dis-identified with ego, this question does not arise. The ego is the sense of 'doership.' No doership -- no question about what course of action to take for a someone. So if this question disturbs, the question arises: who asks this question? It is beyond space and time and form, beyond even existence and non-existence. Yes, it is not coming from anywhere in particular. Different. Yes, there is no particular sensation or feeling that corresponds, correct. No -- there is an end to the search. Something witnesses the very act of witnessing, something beyond the "I that witnesses." It is the recognition of our true nature as being, awareness, and bliss. Though for seekers it has to be viewed as something to be achieved, it is actually but a word for something that is already the case.

Can you define both the peace/bliss and suffering here? Is this peace and bliss a physical/mental/tactile sensation? Is physical pain=suffering?

How do you know he is liberated? If you truly think that, you have to ask him if he still suffers. if he answers there is only peace and bliss and no more suffering. then yes he is liberated.