Search the Community

I think you are answering it in your same question. There´s none (true self = no/self = none = nothingness). But when you truly realize that there´s nothing, at that moment you will see reality without distortion, ergo you will be enlightened. And for truly realizing I don´t mean being understood by logic or reason.

@Frank B Why are you addicted to stuff? It's because you're avoiding emptiness, the emptiness that is experienced when you sit and do nothing What is meditation? Meditation is sitting with nothingness So, meditation is used to stop you from 'doing' things, it's an attempt to get you to face emptiness, because when you face emptiness, you stop running away to do stuff, which is your addictive behaviours. If you learn about enlightenment, you'll see this is very practical, because it gets to deeper truths about human nature and consciousness, all the other methods which seem practical on the surface, they are surface level solutions, so in the end they're not as practical as you think, they're like sticker plaster solutions, which one's more practical now?

@Lee You're implying it would make more sense if the universe was less convenient than it is right now? I think you just arbitrarly decided that. So let's place this arbitrary standard in the other direction and see what happens. Why isn't the universe MORE convenient ? Why did it take several billion years for our universe to stop being a lifeless, boring and chaotic mess containing not even a glimpse of organic structure to sustain any kind of sensory capacity or consciousness? Then, how the hell could organic life decide to develop itself through a global never ending mass murder frenzy we call the food chain? And why did our developing society need its armies to murder and rape, its leaders to plot and manipulate and its religions to lie and enslave? And now that things are finally getting a little better, everybody thinks they're getting worse, because they're watching... ...a little too much. Now even less convenient: If we want to change the world, we first have to struggle through the immense labor of changing ourselves. To change ourselves, we have to know what to change. And our subconscious mind will do absolutely anything to prevent us to do so. It often prefers making us commit suicide than accepting our own flaws. And if we decide neither to change ourselves nor the world, then we're stuck walking around like sedated zombies without a purpose. To finally end up as rotting piece of meat, lost in the infinite nothingness of death. You see how arbitrary the convenience of the universe is? That's because convenience is a human concept, not a physical phenomenon. Anyway, sorry for not answering to your question at all, but you might agree it was worth it

Addiction: Video Games Date: 4/17/2016 Time: started at 10:30 AM but session ended at 11:20 AM because mom distracted me. Day #: Day 1 Feelings Felt Psychologically: A lot of distractions but gave an effort to stay in the present moment and thought of nothingness. Some periods, had an urge for cravings to play but reminded myself no. Feelings Felt Physiologically: For like 3 minutes my right leg kept shaking. Questions You Asked Yourself: Some questions I asked myself was does this really work, how can I become a better write, how do I articulate my thoughts better, how do I reach a higher level of success. How Do You Feel After Your Session?: after my session, I feel more calm and alert. I have a little impulse to play but consciously I know not to and I won't. So far so good. Also I actually laid down because I am sick with influenza aka the flu. ****EDIT****

Nothingness-help section.

@Leo Gura Ok, I just wanted to take a minute and give an update. Again, every input is much appreciated! So I started to ask your recommended question alot and what came up was that I believe I am kind of this CEO in my head. I delegate the "lower tasks" like breathing to my body but I can stil use my body and kind of control it (walk right or point a finger but not how I digest food,... ). In addition I am not the mind but I can choose to use it. What is interesting here is that I cannot really control it because sometimes it just runs wild... In the same manner I am definetely not my thoughts as I cannot control them to any extent. In addition to that I am not "the voice" as I can perceive it. It is kind of an echo of my thoughts. Finally I feel like I am perceiving this world through "my" body and I am judging and labeling it. So who dies? I feel like "I am going to die". Who is "I" ? The whole of it. The body is going to die. The voice will stop. And so on. But all of that is not me. I am the CEO, the perceiver. This is what came up during self-inquiry. What was really helpful were two things: the free will vs determinism video and taking some extended contemplative walks tp ask this question in addition to self-inquiry. Now what also came up due to my logical contemplation where a couple questions: If what I call "I" is an illusion and I am "reality" why can "I" only perceive what this body perceives (is that reality?). And why can you only perceive what your body perceives? Which of the two is the "real" reality? Are there multiple realities? I know that the question makes no real sense as there is no "I" but it really breaks my fucking mind. What the hell is reality? And where do these thoughts come from? Who makes them? Is it this body (the trillions of cells)? What is this "nothingness"? Lastly, what really fascinated me was that the human body on a atomic level is much more empty space than matter. So if we touch something it is really the repulsion of different atoms against each other (from our hand against the atoms of the wall/...). Furthermore it is kind of freaky that everything (waves,...) moves through us. But what about thoughts? Are they energy? Is that how they arise ?! Just an idea... I have much more mindbreaking questions but I do not want to hold you off to long. What would be some suitable questions at this point to get through this "CEO perception" ? Thanks so much!

Easiest if you let your brain think, have belief and act the same way as it always does, just don't identify with it. You are that which experiences all that. There you go, a head start, begin now @Ross I believe the rest will happen for you by itself if you stick to trying to observe the "I am" from the place before "I am". PS: For me, the place before "I am" is nothingness. So imagine nothingness in your mind, and the thing that is seeing that nothingness is the true nothingness, or that which you are.

Existence does exist...just not as phenomena (the world as we know it). That's what @Emerald Wilkins is referring to. Existence exists as you say: pure infinite potential. Also known as Truth, noumena, infinity, Being, nothingness, etc. You cannot "know" existence, because that would put you another level above it. Instead, you can only "be" existence. In a sense, you can really only come to the conclusion that "Truth is" through negating all that you are not.

@Infinite 1.You're becoming so mentally aware that the mind dissolves into 'nothingness'. From the perspective of mind, that experience it more as stillness or awareness becoming so prevalent that "mental awareness " or "mind" or self awareness become totally consumed. To vanish? or not to vanish? Is that not the remainder of the ox? Where is Leo?

So you mean there is really nothing is this nothingness?! I'm baffled Reread the first post

@cetus56 I don't know if you're going unconscious or not. Based on your description, I really only see two possibilities here. 1.You're becoming so mentally aware that the mind dissolves into 'nothingness'. 2. You're going unconscious. I can't tell you which one it is. When the content within awareness ceases to be, it appears to us as if the awareness ceases to be. This is because we are fixated on the content (what we are aware of), and ignorant of the reality (awareness itself). Awareness itself is neither something nor nothing, but since we perceive ourselves to be its content, we think that it vanishes with the absence of the content. Nothingness only appears to be nothingness, in relation to the belief that there is something other than consciousness (awareness). Awareness is all there could ever be. When you experience "absolute nothingness", which is the absence of experience (content), you then say "I realize that I had vanished". It's not that "you" vanished, it's that what you believe yourself to be vanished. Without being aware of the eternal self, the absence of content gets interpreted as the absence of self. Think about what occurs during deep sleep. In deep sleep we think that awareness vanishes because there is a complete absence of experience. In reality however, the state of deep sleep is pure awareness. Pure awareness simply means awareness without content.

Thanks for making that distinction. It sounds like it is mental awareness that sometimes is lost from you description. Like I said, it doesn't happen very often but when it does I always wonder what that is. It happens when true self or "pure being" (as i call it) is experienced as floating in a silent, infinite ocean. In that state there is a silent witness also of that experience happening. I once put out the intention to dissolve into that silent ocean, and I did. That's when it happens. I know I'n not dozing off. I know the difference. Than awareness comes back and continues floating in that silent ocean. Only at that point do I realize that I had vanished for a moment or two. That is the impression it gives. I thought I was experiencing absolute nothingness or total non-existence. So I guess by what you are saying, I am just becoming unconscious? No advantage in repeating that? So this raises another big question for me now about what happens when the physical body dies. I thought I had some idea of the answer to that. You become non-existent. Maybe not? Who can really say for sure? I'm thinking now about Allen Watts and his talk about becoming absolute nothingness. I will listen to that again with fresh ears.

Great clarification! I've been trying to imagine nothingness, now I know that the nothingness was observing that imagining of nothingness It was on the other side.

@ranzo1 I am not enlightened but I have experienced oneness, emptiness, nothingness, love like I never experienced before. I have a T/R (truth realization) experience, where I saw that the reality we are living is like being dead, you are not alive until you begin to be "born again" or enlightened. You begin to live when you are enlightened, right now we are nothing. At least in my experience. Experiences like that are like gifts, you have to say thank you and don't think too much about them. I know I am not the "person" or "ego" because that ego changes all the time, I know that we must be something more permanent, that there's a real self that we have to look for. But my recommendation is to meditate, that will bring the awareness you need. You never will know by thinking. I am not enlightened but I am feeling much better than before and I know that everybody can be enlightened. There's a pattern you can see in the teachings of people who are enlightened, in their teachings. When you awareness begin to improve you will notice those patterns more easily and you won't need any guidance or guru. Your true self will guide you.

Nothing I have written is true. I can only write from awareness of experience and knowledge and there are limitations to both. I can only speak within language and there limitations to language. Satan has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm writing about, sin and love have nothing to do with it either. There is only an omni-present awareness of nothingness. I quote "You twist everything with your beliefs and the lense in which you see reality and the filters in your mind" There are limitations to beliefs and there are limitations to the you that you call yourself. Any feeling other than the unconditional love enshrouded in reality and you are in disaccordance to your existential nature or being you could say. Is it making sense now? I'm talking on another plain, your existential existence and the realization of nothingness. My entire post is very nihilistic. But you only perceive it that way. You see things negatively, but there is nothing to be negative about, there is only unconditional love ever-present in realty. Your self image is blinding you from seeing this. Imagine being ever present in pure bliss for eternity. This isn't some Eutopean fantasy. Your level of awareness blinds you from seeing it. It's with you now, it has always been with you. Your entire life is a distraction from even being aware of it. But your existential being always knows it is there buried deep down or hidden in the core of your soul. You spend your whole life chasing your own tail. You are trapped in the neurosis of your mind if you aren't the very pure awareness of it. Don't fool yourself, you are not ready. Even as I write this I am not even close to ready, not even on the tip of the iceberg of it. This is all just cute philosophy according to what I am speaking of. There are limitations to knowledge. Knowledge is completely irrelevant. What we refer to as knowledge now, does not see outside the limitations of knowledge. Imagine being able to accept any energy that comes in your existence. Be able to be every single emotion in it's purest form. You block out the energy of others. It goes against your belief and you experience disconnection to unconditional love. This is why everyone has flaws, every being has a different personality and existential existence. Everything and everyone are connected. Connected deeply to the core of reality. Everything is reality and everyone is reality, unseparated. Unconditional love which is deep in the soul of every being and all of reality is the only thing that can connect us back to our deepest being. Which is why you can see the fiction of all beliefs. Beliefs create the very feelings you feel. Wouldn't you rather be relaxed and blissful in unconditional love in the ever-present moment? No, because you don't drop these beliefs, they are so woven into your self image. You use all your energy in an endless loop preserving your self image. You have a unique way in which you see and think how the world works. You will give your all to preserve your self image, defending it until your deathbed. You dislike the way people are and you are just waiting for the world to change, not realising that reality is already perfection. Change yourself and the world will change. But did anything really change, or do you just see it differently now? Relaxation is what you are. Stress is what you think you should be. The way people interact with you now is completely different. Did they change? No. You missed so much in people. You missed so much in yourself. You have context completely fly over your head. You don't see the beauty in every soul and the majesty of reality. "You hold that there is no God and also many other beliefs about how reality works, like for example that objects are made out of atoms. And these beliefs are fictions! Yet you don't drop these beliefs precisely because they are woven into your self-image to such an extent that if you ever did succeed in dropping them, your very existence as a human being would come into question. "You" would literally die. The body would remain. Which is called enlightenment (AKA God). So actually we could say that your atheism is directly preventing you from seeing God. That's the language that a Zen Master or Yogi might use. But which is often misconstrued by pre-rational and rational people as mysticism or fairytales. Notice how you start off by saying, "I am an atheist." In fact, "you" are a fiction equivalent in absurdity to a bearded man in the clouds. So the very first words out of your mouth are already false! And this is not a mere triviality or ad hominem attack, this is THE WHOLE point! Every false belief creates the sense of YOU. And that's all YOU care about, is protecting YOU! As long as you feel comfy, as long as YOU are alive, all is good. If not, all hell breaks loose. If I call you a racist idiot, your psyche automatically puts up a defense without even considering that you might be one. Notice that your very criterion for truth is an emotion of comfort and security. If it makes you feel secure and more like a real self, it is called true. Otherwise, false. But in actuality, truth is irrelevant to you. Yet you tell yourself otherwise. And so this one assumption has already tainted the very foundation of all "your" reasoning. You will now live your whole life (which isn't yours by the way) -- just like the religious person -- and NEVER question this assumption seriously. So your epistemic position is IDENTICAL to an Islamic fundamentalist. Like seriously! I'm not kidding. This shit is real and it's happening to you right now as you read this very sentence. And sadly, even as you start to suspect this, the illusion and dogma is so deep you still can't break free! Tomorrow, after this discussion is long forgotten, you will slip back into unconsciousness, back into fundamentalist illusion, dismissing one as a crackpot and all this as cute philosophy. And yet, you will also live for the rest of your life in fear of the truth, distracting yourself with every form of distraction invented by man just so long as you can avoid doing the investigation I'm telling you to do. You do intuitively sense that your life is a lie, right? That your life is a distraction from this truth? Your career, your girlfriend, your family, your friends, your favorite movies -- all of it is a distraction from this one thing: your fear of death. Which of course you should fear, because you are a fictional entity. You fear death as much as the fundamentalist fears having his religion questioned. That's not a coincidence. That's because you two share the very same ego structure! Yes, one can apply logic and reason to see the inherent limitations of logic and reason and thus transcend it. You are aware of Godel's Incompleteness theorem, yes? Which proves that every sufficiently complex language system (i.e., math, logic, science, English) is inherently incomplete, meaning that there are truths that exist outside of every language which are real but cannot be demonstrated within the system? Kinda a big deal, huh? But conveniently swept under the rug. You don't get to spirituality through faith. You get to spirituality through rationalism. Spirituality is what occurs when rationalism eats itself alive, like the snake eating it's own tail. Once the snake eats itself, nothing remains. And that's what spirituality is: the realization of Nothingness. But none of this can make sense logically because you're trying to use logic to make sense of itself without realizing what logic actually is. It's not what your ego tells you it is. It's like you're trying to fix a defective microscope by using another defective microscope. This, in a nutshell, is the entire absurdity of the science vs religion debate. ( @Leo Gura, actualized.org)"

Yeah I kind of got too lost in terms of what my lifestyle is supposed to be and how pointless everyday lifestyle feels, like whenever I'm in public I just look around at what people are doing and it feels like they're doing nothing even if it looks like something, I'm trying to get with the nothingness of all this somethingness There was this funny quote where someone asks something along the lines of "master, what changes after enlightenment?" and the enlightened guy replies "nothing much, you still have to do the laundry" but then I was watching Leo's video of the benefits of enlightenment and it started to feel like no there's actually more than this life right now

Well... I'm Theravada. I think of Nirvana as Enlightenment. Maybe my translation is a little off. After reach, I kind of thought Nirvana and Enlightenment are a little different in some people mind. When they say Enlightenment, it's more like realization of truth. Ya know... realizing the real nature. For Nirvana, one must pass through the state of realization and being one with the nature which is nothingness. Not many talk about Nirvana in this western country though. But......... I don't think that is a problem. Once one knows the true nature, one sure will accept the teachings of Buddha automatically because they are exactly what you see in your enlightenment experiences. In Theravada, every words of Buddha was kept and learned. All about Hell, heaven, reincarnation things are not the same as what most people believe. They are actually very different. Soooooooooo different. The annoying part maybe tons of rules. Don't worry, you won't go to hell if you don't follow all those rules. I don't even think of Buddhism as religion because it's not believing. All Buddha taught was reality. You believe it or not doesn't matter. Whatever happening around you will still be happening whether you notice it or agree with it or like it or not. That is why life is suffering because we are pitiful. We are pitiful because we think we have control over many things but ............... We actually don't.

whos next? - is part of your knowledge system, just accept that you are nothingness.

I am searching for my true self for few days now, and I stumbled on a question today, so let's ask it and see if anyone has an idea. Is my true self the same nothingness as your true self? Is the true self separate for each human or is it just 1 universal thing (no-thing)? Any thoughts?

From" A Bird on the Wing" by Osho - "The more simple a thing the more difficult it is to understand. " So my logical mind immediately kicks in by the following : If enlightenment is infinitely simple, then it is infinitely hard to understand <=> Nothingness is infinitely hard to understand <=> we shouldn't try to understand it, because we need an infinite mind for that.

Killing yourself really never helps. Don't think of it like:"Yeah if I die then all the people around me would be sad." Because you can do whatever you want. It is your life and you are free. Right now you say you are at a bad point in your life. I don't know how the relationship to your girlfriend, friends and family is but I would really consider talking with them about it. You might think that they will see you as a freak but I would rather think of intensifying your relationship to all of them by being truly honest. You might as well tell us your lifestory here, but they already know it and can help you much better in certain aspects. All I can tell is what I do for myself because I decided it to be the way to go: True isolation, meditation, confront yourself with nothingness. No light, no stimuli, no music in best case scenario and you just go deep inside yourself and see what is going inside you. Just fill up your mind with yourself. Think about where your thoughts automatically go. Search in the past for moments that hurt you. Maybe you find regrets. Just go all in. Make this inner trip all about you. Maybe you might think about certain people that had a big influence in your life but just think about what they did to you, the positive and negative of course. It might not be easy. But abstaining from certain things really can make a difference already. I did 2 months of no porn and I can tell you that in the first 2 weeks I've never been crying that much. Sounds ridiculous but it is the god damn truth. Just get yourself some isolation and when your body is wanting some specific stuff then you might be addicted to it. And addiction usually means nothing good. But most people have some addictions that rather seem harmless but it is not if you are willing to live a better life.

@Truth I admire your refocus on the true purpose behind a powerful sit. @Arik I prefer the Do Nothing sit, as well, and I have a question for some insight; maybe if both of you and anyone else can chime in, of course. So I've been noticing in my recent sets that after 10 to 15 minutes, I reach the calm and peaceful state where I am almost letting go so I may fall into the nothingness and let it consume me. This is like the breaking point most of the time because I will become aware of being at that point and it will anticlimax, bringing me out of my mind, back into a regular state. Question: How do you work on reducing this awareness from awakening after you seem to have already gotten the monkey chatter under control? Is it simply trying not to try, even more so than in the method that is already prevalent to meditation? If so, then damn, I guess J wouldn't be too surprised at such a truth to be confounding. Also, does it make sense to begin with the awareness technique and then directing that awareness into the sensations of the self before letting go of awareness into the do-nothing method. I found myself to naturally fall into this routine.

Tricky question. As far as I know, true self is a true, core vibration of every individual, but at the same time You are the U (you) - niverse and the universe is you so it is indeed a separate concept but acts as a part of the whole (all that is/nothingness/god).

I had when I was getting awake experiences of nothingness (I didn't have any identity, I didn't know who I was) and oneness, very short. But it got me thinking about what @Leo Gura said about going back to the source. I also heard Eckhart Tolle saying the same thing.

Here is a good website that i found, on how to clearing your mind and accept space and nothingness... When Leo talks about clearing the mind, that it takes work is because of the (monkey mind) which is explained on this website below. http://meditation.radiantdolphinpress.com/clearmind.htm When you learn to clear your mind of thoughts, the easier with time it get's, to be able to focus the dark without thinking, which is described to be natural and effortless. Of Course, the beginning is always hard, but it get's easier. Man up and become the actualized self with time! This state if perhaps, so important to me, that i take off at least 4 hours of practise every day and i only just began ... It is still hard but it has certainly gotten easier. Enjoy (y)