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I was in your shoes after my first "little awakening/enlightenment". These are symptoms of becoming more aware than usual, but at this point your ego is still going full speed. It causes a negative misconception about this whole subject. It feels like you are at loss, and you wish you could do anything to go back to being ignorant and blissful. At this point, after "knowing" all, you will feel like there's nothing left to live for. What's the point? I'm nothing but a empty nothingness without a purpose! I smile as I type this because you are in for a very pleasant surprise as you continue down your path. You can't lose anything because you never had anything to lose in the first place. A "purpose" as you describe is something your ego needs to be motivated. When the ego subsides, you won't need a purpose. The very existence you are experiencing will be plenty purposeful. This journey doesn't cost anything. It will give to you more than your ego will ever be able to repay. There is simply nothing more than false beliefs to give up, which were worthless to begin with. You must ask yourself for the source of this loneliness. In what ways do you depend on others to fill emotional voids in your mind? When you have time to sit in peace and be alone, what thought comes first: I need to find someone to keep me company? Or Now that I'm one with my thoughts, what can I do to grow and improve myself? Before you delve into subjects relating to nothingness, enlightenment, purpose, and actualization, you must slow down. Take time to really learn more about yourself. Research things you are feeling in this moment. Learn how to overcome loneliness, no purpose, depression, negativity. After you overcome these hurdles, you'll have a great base foundation to really start self-actualizing. I promise you, there is nothing to lose. Logically, you have everything to gain. Don't feed into ego produced negativity. Lastly, understand that you can't understand. You're taking very deep and complex experiences capable of obliterating an ego, and asking what the ego thinks of it. What do you think it will say?

Covers a few ideas that link quantum physics to nothingness, quite interesting to watch

I guess the reason you are getting frustrated is because there is no you to find. Whenever you are 'seeking' then you are acting from the standpoint of your ego. With the self enquiry it's a little different to the normal meditation as you are using your ego to come to the realisation that there is no you, and sometimes what happens with this is that all of a sudden the rug is pulled from beneath the ego and all that is left is awareness. So the intellectual realisation can trigger the experiential realisation. It's not going to happen over night though so I wouldn't get frustrated with it. Regarding the frustration during normal meditation, if this is happening then you are still identifying yourself with the ego. You have to let go of 'you'. A way to make this happen automatically which works for me is by practising the strong determination sits. Once things start to get really painful I accept the pain and the situation I am in, basically the ego surrenders, it takes a while for this to happen but when you do this the pain goes and so does your ego and you are left in a state of kind of nothingness where your vision goes strange and the pain is not there either. You also have a sense of not being in your body. Its pretty cool. One thing I would say is that sometimes I will have really bad meditation sessions where the monkey mind is on full whack, but then afterwards I will feel very relaxed. I think there is a saying that goes something like 'with meditation you notice your gains off the mat'

Hey everyone, I first discovered Actualized.org on youtube when I was looking for some self-help videos, and over some time I ended up watching almost all of them. Topics such as healthy relationships, gratitude, meditation, ego, self image, law of attraction, happiness, mindfulness, higher and lower self, building positive habits, etc... I loved learning about every subject, figuring out the right way to integrate them into my life, and generally improving the quality of my life. However, there is one topic that Leo covers in multiple videos that I haven't dived into: Enlightenment. I've listened to the "All Religions Explained in One Video" episode when Leo talks about it for a while, so I kind of know about the general idea behind it-- the nothingness, being created by the conscious, etc. The subject interests me, but to be totally honest, I'm not sure if I am ready to fully learn about it yet. When I heard the "Intro to Enlightenment" episode, I turned it off before getting too into it, thinking to myself "whoa i don't know if this is the right thing for me right now" because I was already working on other parts of myself. I'm still working on those, and I know I will need to continue working on them for quite some time to reach my goals. I truly appreciate Actualized.org and the community for helping me learn more about myself. So naturally, I want to learn everything Actualized.org can teach me. But I'm not sure if learning about Enlightenment is what I need at this time, because it implies reality is radically different from how I understand it now. I worry i will feel conflicted, because everything I'm working on right now is for this reality as i currently understand it. Will I still care about my worldly goals after learning about enlightenment? i guess my question is, is it advised that people wait until they are pretty well actualized (better version of self, got life handled) before trying for enlightenment? But, if I work on self actualization and become my best self, wouldn't it be harder for me to reach enlightenment later because I will be so much happier with what I have at that point as an actualized person? Wouldn't my ego resist it even more at that point, to protect what it has?

@Parki enlightenment says there is no you, or that you are Nothing, because Nothing is nothing, it cannot be a thing, and so it can't be localised, because space and time are things, nothingness is outside of space and time, so it doesn't have a location The second point is something that I struggled to understand too, I think because as organisms we are structured as points of consciousness, we are only aware of our own body because that's where as organisms, our consciousness is located however, I remember Leo's video about his enlightenment experience he said it felt like he was outside his body looking at himself, so maybe it takes enlightenment to stop being stuck inside your one perspective

@SkyPanther I am not the self-aware nothingness? is that what you say? than what am i?

what this issue with is this is that you are infesting your mind with theories and believes. Its a lot harder to get to an experience by creating a map of enlightenment and its easier for your ego to mask the experience - meaning that you might not even believe it happened after. If you have an experience your ego will probably mask it with language: "is this eternal, is this nothingness , is this it, is this what i am looking for etc". Be careful , just do the work. I am saying this because this happens with me a lot. As a scientific/rational thinker I have built a model on enlightenment in my head. I wish i never did and it hinders you practice.

You are not exprience nothingness, you are the Nothingness. And I said IF you are enlightened, you may still have consciousness after you die, no one know for sure because there's no way to communiate and no one know what after death Like I said above there are very few people still have consciousness in deep sleep.

@7oo13ad wait a sec. are you saying that when i become enlightened, then im going to experience nothingness even after my death?

Yes that Nothingness is eternal and you can't experience anything until you are AWAKE (enlightened). Else you gonna sleep forever again when you die, just like before you were born.

@7oo13ad and isn't it so? doesn't leo say that nothingness is eternal, it cannot die, so in a sense it turns out that im immortal, but why the fuck do i want immortality if i cant experience anything? how am i immortal than?

@Natasha I wish it was true, but why does that all seem like a wishful thinking and unreal? I really want to put my mind around this, but i just cant get dedication, im too sceptical, i started strong determination sittings, i was doing it for one week and then i quit. oh man. now i have watched this neti neti method two times and im doing that guided meditation a lot on my own, but i dont know. Like once again as leo said i am nothingness that is self-aware, im not self-aware when my body is asleep. I just cant grasp it.

@stephanie If you took an EEG, all you would have is an EEG, you would have no idea whether that person was actually experiencing nothingness.

@Shiva Thank you for your input. I get it, it's one "theory" Leo has and it's cool to check it out and look into it. But for myself speaking, I remain open to all possibilities, not just following one. As fas as depression and realizing the nothingness - I didn't mean enlightenment, just that there is nothing special to me except for being part of evolution, and no soul, spirit etc.

@Mutupo Ok, so it would be interesting to do an EEG on someone who realizes the nothingness.

So after Leo’s last video I’ve been having lots of questions. I don’t see lots of posts here and assume it's not what people want to talk about. But still I want to get it out, even if it's just for my own relief! 1. The realization that there is nothing I’ve had many times in my life, starting when I was 16. Not being able to talk to anybody about it, it contributed to depression for sure. So that nothing part is pretty easy for me to comprehend nowadays, because looking at evolution it only seems natural that there can’t be an “I” or third entity. 2. However since yesterday I’m questioning if the realization of nothingness can be aqurate. Because after all this realization is a thought/feeling/word appearing. What if there IS something but we can’t detect it because we only have 5 senses? 3. Leo describes nothingness as an endless field. I’d be curious to know why. If it’s nothing it’s nothing or? How can nothingness be a field? Please correct me if I misunderstood. 4. Leo says the nothingess has falsely identified with our body. If so, what would the alternative be? We would be born and our parents would tell us what? That we are nothingness and shouldn’t take that body we are going to identify with too seriously? Ultimately it would mean (physical) death. Of course it’s important to ask questions about oneself and existence, but we shouldn’t forget that life is to be lived. Because after all we can be nothing when we are dead. Gee, at least I hope so. Or can the nothingness continue to falsely identify with new life by default?

You're trying to do something that goes against everything you've done in this life. I think the concept you bring up is to be used more as inspiration. In your present state of consciousness, it probably is incomprehensible. You can understand what it means by what Skypanther said but this is only the brain trying to understand itself within the limits of the brain. In order to experience it you need to start transcending limits of the human mind, which can take a lot of work over a long time, but with consistent practice its almost inevitable. I feel like its rare for a person to even ponder the possibility of consisting of nothingness, if you can do this, which you have, you've already cleared the first hurdle. I think trying to understand that you're nothing while being a human being can take a lot of passion out of living. Be careful not to use this as an excuse to be depressed! If you don't become depressed while accepting a truth you don't fully understand, then you may find an abundance of passion and purpose for this existence. I hope you can find it on your journey.

You can't understand nothingness, because it is nothingness. You can accept nothingness but it can't truly be understood. It's impossible to understand nothingness, because it's nothingness.

I just watched the Neti Neti video and it was extremely helpful. So much so that I really felt something towards the end close to an enlightenment experience and it got me thinking. So what happens when I die? And what was before I was born? If nothingness has awareness, does that not make it a thing? How can it really be properly aware if it has no senses? If a robot was to be created capable of all the senses and thoughts a human can have, would it also be this empty nothingness existentially? And would that imply then that all things, rocks, cars, trees are also this empty nothingness? I kind of understand this truth of no self and empty nothing but I just couldn't help but ask these questions. Then again, if I have to ask these questions, maybe I don't understand it at all. Can this please be moved to the enlightenment section? I put it here by mistake.

Ok, so in Leo's video on the Neti Neti method I noticed this trend of dismissing any thought about what you are, on the basis that you are not that thought itself. But obviously when you have some thought regarding your nature you are never claiming to be that thought, you are simply claiming that the thought describes or points to you true self. You are claiming that some thing exists which you are but you don't know much about it. This whole method seems to just create a strawman and defeat it. If it's said that any thing you identify with must be a thing you have experienced, and not just experienced for a while but experienced non-stop throughout your life you are bound to fail to find such a thing. Meanwhile, this nothingness did not have to be experienced all throughout your life. I hope it is somewhat understandable what my problem here is. I'm sure there were many people that did the Neti Neti method and it worked for them but I just felt cheated. Can anyone explain?

100 ... just kidding 27, I'm glad of the chance to share this journey with younger and older mates after all if we are nothingness age as no real meaning but we can learn from different experiences each other.

I "think" .. this is the great danger about conceptualizing nothingness/awareness/oneness whatever you wanna call it. We create models aka this and that is like a gate/ how can the gate open/ what is the gate made of/ who designed the gate/ what color is the gate of? you can start to ask all kinds of meaningless questions you see? and treat those mental images like actual facts... but what we actually!! ACTUALLY DO while we try to "get" what is, we instead get lost in a thought! mental masturbation! what you did as a child was not conceptionalizing! you didn´t create the thought of a gate opening and then it happend ... it just happend because you didn´t think at all and you just were presend and then "after the fact" you added that concept of a gate to it ...forget about that gate in a literal sense, it is a nice metaphor but useless for reaching a feeling of oneness!

<05-01-16> I'm Sick of Life (but I still don't want to give up) I have to be brutally honest here. I just finished not only watching Leo's new episode but really getting into the meditative state Leo asked us to be in for the guidance session and I came out of it feeling very angry, very miserable, and very very frustrated. You should probably tell that I did not get the experience that I wanted to have yet I felt like I should. I really felt failure deep in my experience. Again, I want to be brutally honest despite how I want to feel or how you think (yes you, the reader) I should feel. I felt like punching something, it was genuine frustration. And I felt hatred. . . . at nothing. Not hatred towards nothingness, I mean I just felt hatred towards nothing in particular, not even myself. I just 'felt' hatred, it was both a very weird and uncomfortable experience. Then I got the usual feelings of dissatisfaction and loath towards the life I experience in general but stronger. I'm sick of life and I don't want to tell anyone, except online. It feels like all the suffering I've experienced through life in my memory all cropped up at one time and I just feel hatred towards all of it. Society has screwed over my life and for a very long time, it seems I haven't had the awareness to admit it to myself and now I do. It should be shameful how stupid and ignorant modern society is and just how easier life would be if everyone was more aware than they are now. But, I still feel like I should keep pushing through regardless. Notice that despite how I feel, I haven't mentioned feelings of doubt, hesitation, or quitting despite my angst. It's almost like my emotions aren't dictating my actions and they are completely separate. I have this intuition, just a gut feeling, that I need to keep advancing regardless simply because I have no other options. I want to examine those other options very closely: Give up - That feels impossible for me psychologically. I've crossed a point-of-no return not only with enlightenment work but with personal development as a whole. Kill myself - I literally have no reason to do this. I'm not even anywhere near considering it. Run Away and Find a New Life By Myself - And how am I supposed to do this? It's simply unstrategic. And you know what, I had to try to come up with those other options and I think the last one was forced. Keep moving forward and persisting is the only thing I know. It's almost depressing to me that this is the only thing I know to do when dealing with failure. It's like I have no control or choice whether I should keep moving forward. I JUST DO IT. I don't even want to mention anything about my ego right now because I don't want to write an entire novel in just one entry.

@DizIzMikey Still looking for a full experience of the nothingness - it is impossible to have full experience of nothingness, otherwise it will be already something.

I like @cetus56 's response. Consciousness is nothingness, pure and perfect as is. You can experience this without looking at your wife as a big blob of nothing