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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. @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?
  4. So you mean there is really nothing is this nothingness?! I'm baffled Reread the first post
  5. @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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. @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.
  9. 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)"
  10. 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
  11. 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.
  12. whos next? - is part of your knowledge system, just accept that you are nothingness.
  13. 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?
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. @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.
  17. 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).
  18. 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.
  19. 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)
  20. @cetus56 @Leo Gura @Emerald Wilkins @Nic To answer your question I would like to go back to my description of my last enlightenment experience. One suggestion: Read this with your heart, not your mind. ... When I asked What does we are one mean ? My awareness was somehow taken back. Before everything that IS came to BE. Before we decided to express to create and enter form. We were “pure awareness, pure love and pure light.” Imagine an immense sea of pure light vibrating as pure love. That is what we were. We were blissful, we were complete, We were ONE !.. We were completely immersed in our being. Completely immersed in our beauty. Out of this ecstasy of joy and love a deep desire emerged and permeated all our being. The desire to share our joy, our beauty everything that we were. But how can we share ourselves with ourselves if we are One ? So we made a plan: We will create the illusion of separation. We will hide ourselves from ourselves only to find ourselves again in absolute beauty. When we find ourselves again we will remember the beauty that we ARE. That will be our gift of love. When we remember who we ARE we will become one again. That will be our promise. This is why everything that IS came to BE. It was an act of Love. How did it actually happen ? How did we create the illusion of separation ? Well this is probably the most beautiful part of the story. Contrary to popular belief we didn't have a “magic wand” in our hand. We couldn't create form out of nothingness. It was only us. So we created it out of our own awareness. Out of ourselves. Awareness can vibrate at any frequency. Everything you see is made of our own awareness vibrating at different frequencies. That is how we created the illusion of separation. We are lost in a sea of vibrating awareness. But it is only an illusion. We are still together. We are still One. Now to answer your question: As you know, the highest frequency is Love. When awareness vibrates as love it radiates pure light. Light is not our essential nature it is the result of our vibration. This is why mystics and theologians refer to God as having a triple nature. Christians “trinity” The father (awareness), The son (Love) and the holy spirit (light). As always I dont want anyone to believe me. This is only an invitation to look inside yourselves and find the truth. Look deeper.. and let me know if this makes sense to you.
  21. @Skenderberg Yes I have had moments where I realize I am nothing, there is nothing, and simultaneously that means I am everything. This is all having to do with consciousness, it has nothing to do with physical things like the stars. This is just for me but I have realized that there is nothing outside of my perception, and then when I think about what I am, ultimately I am just consciousness. Ultimately, everything is consciousness, which on a higher level translates to everything is nothingness. This does not mean that I literally am the stars and palm reading and whatnot and now we can predict my future from them (first of all we need to grasp the concept that there is no future). I believe that that's still thinking inside of the box in my opinion.
  22. The Enlightened Self What are you existentially? You think you are the body and the mind but that is not a correct answer. You are not a human being, you are just a story. The ”You” that you believe you are is just a story. The no self tells you that the self you believe you are is an illusion. When Leo says that there is No Self he doesn’t mean that you don’t exist, what he really mean is that the ego you believe you are is an illusion but there is still a Self but is RADICALLY DIFFERENT. The Self cannot be explained rationally. You exist as Nothingness. Nothingness exist and it’s the only permanent thing that exist and doesn’t change. Tip for Self-Inquiry: When doing it, don’t hang up on the idea that the self doesn’t exist. Drop the notion that you don’t exist and start looking for your True Self. Think like you actually exist but in a way you don’t yet know. If you are not the human body or mind, what are you? True Self: Pure transparent empty awareness/consciousness/presence/spirit. You are not an object, you are empty space that allows stuff to emerge and appear. You are the container of space and time. Features of Awareness: · I am pure presence, rock solid presence. · It is just there · You can shake it · All the attention go to the stuff that are happening within it · It shines light on everything else. It appears to be hidden but it is everywhere. · It is like the light. It is very difficult to get light get brightened by itself. How can awareness be aware of itself? · No shape · No location · No time · Eternal · Infinite (it’s everything) The paradox is that you are Nothing and Everything at the same time. Everything happens in Nothingness. You cannot think the way through this since the mind works with things, and you are Nothing. You cannot create a mental preview of Enlightenment. The paradoxical things is that this is not hidden. It is not located anywhere. You must do self inquiry. Tips - Don’t try to feel or think yourself - Don’t try to locate yourself - Don’t try to experience yourself - Think that you are not a human being - You are not an object, you are in a completely different domain - Nothing is hidden, everything is at plane sight. You are enlightened, but you are not aware of it
  23. I just thought I would share my experiences here. Hopefully they might be helpful to somebody on here who’s trying to understand what they are going through. So enlightenment? I watched Leo’s video about spiritual enlightenment. He talked about how it is such a rare thing, maybe only one in a million could achieve it. So, yes, that sounds daunting. It seems like some people have a tendency to lose their minds on their way to enlightenment. So I thought a somewhat different perspective on the subject might be helpful. I think my own experience perhaps isn’t enlightenment but just a stopping point along the journey. I don’t know. Everyone has their own way of labeling their experiences and this is how I see mine. This may be something that is easier for you to wrap your head around than enlightenment. Maybe it is just a story that I tell myself to create drama in my life. You be the judge. Life has no meaning until you give it meaning and all of that. I think my experience is somewhat rare but perhaps not as rare as what Mr. Gura describes as enlightenment. If I’m going to put a label on what happened to me I would say it was me developing my own morality and sense of ethics and where that ultimately led me. I think it is something that a lot of your teachers have experienced, especially the ones that you liked really well. It is perhaps not such an unattainable feat of the mind. So I was a quiet introverted kid. I lived in my own head a lot. I liked to read books. I would find myself lying awake at night thinking about things like – What happens when we die? Do we just disintegrate into nothingness? Can I be okay with the belief that I will one day just disintegrate into nothingness? That’s sort of sad and disturbing to me. What does it all mean? - My mom took us to church I think more to socialize and have a community to fit into rather than through any real need to instill faith in God. My dad had a somewhat strained relationship with his mother, who was very religious, and I think that made him jaded about God and religion. He used to read passages of the Bible and make fun of them. He did not go to church with us. Eventually I started to hate church and began to refuse to go. It was just boring. All through junior high and high school I thought about these types of topics a lot. A lot of the time I would be going about my daily business on autopilot with thoughts like this in the background. Hey, I likely could have spent thousands of hours on this. I don’t know. It was automatic to me. It was just something that I did. I didn’t feel the need to share these ideas. I just thought them. I read a fair amount of the classic books because I had to for classes and some on my own. I liked authors like Mark Twain, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, etc. Lord of the Flies comes to mind as an important book in my thoughts. At any rate, what I now realize is that I was drawn toward books in which the characters faced moral dilemmas. If you look at any famous classic book, it probably revolves around some big moral dilemma that the characters are experiencing. One of my teachers would talk about God a lot and I thought he was kind of kookie, but I liked him. There was another teacher who I now realize seemed to be sizing me up on the moral development scale. I remember him asking me “What would happen if you turned in your assignment late?” As I was always waiting until the last second to turn things in. So the year was 1995, I was in college and taking a couple of history classes and a class about the philosophy of morality. I was an introvert and never fit in to the college scene very well. I was more immersed in my studies than the average college student I would guess. But I was studying all of this stuff, Greek and Roman history, Socrates, Charlemagne, World War I and II and it just seemed to me that everything was starting to make sense and come together cohesively in a meaningful pattern. History wasn’t just a series of random events but almost seemed orchestrated and moving in a direction of greater freedom and social justice. Political systems were becoming less and less authoritarian as people gained more and more power. I felt so inspired and uplifted by these ideas and couldn’t sleep at night. I was just thinking and thinking about all of these ideas and trying to put all of the pieces together. The philosophy of morality seemed to fit perfectly into the paradigm that I was forming. I remember reading Kant and his ideas about why human beings should have value. Why should we have human rights and a respect for life? Because human beings were endowed by their creator with these rights. If there is no God than human life has no value and we’re just a bunch of sacks of meat. I’m sure you could argue against this all day, but this was my uplifting realization. During this time I was thinking a lot and just didn’t feel like eating so I think I lost 20 pounds, and I wasn’t heavy to begin with. At any rate, I was thinking all of these thoughts one night and it just hit me that there must be a God and I felt this shift in me like my ego and the part of me that wanted to be selfless came together and something entered my heart. I don’t want it to sound like another BS religious experience. It was a profound shift in me. Unfortunately, I was still very much me, an awkward introverted girl trying to navigate my college experience and not really doing a very good job of it. I felt like wow, I need to do something and take action on this. I tried to talk to people about it and of course they just thought I was nuts. I dropped out of school and pissed off my parents royally and made a whole slew of strategic blunders. I tried to find someone to give me guidance, but I realized I was on my own. I had to figure out my own path and I did a piss poor job of it. I didn’t really heed to call to go on my own hero’s journey, as they say, and wound up going back to school. I didn’t have the skillset to deal with my experience and didn’t find anyone to guide me to a better path. So this became a big source of shame for me. This experience I had and couldn’t really relate to anyone I knew about. I felt like I was failing the world in a sense. I wasn’t ready to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King or anyone awesome like that. I’m not going to relate my whole lame life story after that point. It is not impressive. At some point I started to learn about the dark side, conspiracy, 911 etc. and then my life took on a whole new level of effed upness. I’m not going to relate that story here. But this phenomenon is something that is understood and studied in the psychology field. I’m no expert on the topic. I do recall one of my high school teachers handing out a worksheet about the levels of moral development and moral reasoning. Lawrence Kohlberg is a psychologist who spent a fair amount of time studying the subject and breaking down the various levels and what type of moral reasoning is behind them. You can size yourself up on the scale. So thanks Mr. Leo for your videos. I am started to see the light I think at the age of 40, yikes. Yes, we all need to grow the fuck up and meditate and figure our shit out. So enlightenment sounds like an attempt to bliss out of reality. What I experienced is not that. It is something that ultimately created more suffering in my life. I still had a lot of layers of crud over my shiny authentic self as Leo would say. I’m finally finding ways to lift those layers of crud. It’s a slow process and the hero’s journey still seems like something I still don’t really want to take on. I have to or I will remain miserable and un-actualized. That’s all that I’m going to write for now. Hopefully this will give you something to ponder on your journey to enlightenment. Anyway, here is some info about moral development Levels and Stages of Moral Development Level 1: Preconventional Morality The first level of morality, preconventional morality, can be further divided into two stages: obedience and punishment, and individualism and exchange. Stage 1: Punishment- Obedience Orientation Related to Skinner’s Operational Conditioning, this stage includes the use of punishment so that the person refrains from doing the action and continues to obey the rules. For example, we follow the law because we do not want to go to jail. Stage 2: Instrumental Relativist Orientation In this stage, the person is said to judge the morality of an action based on how it satisfies the individual needs of the doer. For instance, a person steals money from another person because he needs that money to buy food for his hungry children. In Kohlberg’s theory, the children tend to say that this action is morally right because of the serious need of the doer. Level 2: Conventional Morality The second level of morality involves the stages 3 and 4 of moral development. Conventional morality includes the society and societal roles in judging the morality of an action. Stage 3: Good Boy-Nice Girl Orientation In this stage, a person judges an action based on the societal roles and social expectations before him. This is also known as the “interpersonal relationships” phase. For example, a child gives away her lunch to a street peasant because she thinks doing so means being nice. Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation This stage includes respecting the authorities and following the rules, as well as doing a person’s duty. The society is the main consideration of a person at this stage. For instance, a policeman refuses the money offered to him under the table and arrests the offender because he believes this is his duty as an officer of peace and order. Level 3: Postconventional Morality The post-conventional morality includes stage 5 and stage 6. This is mainly concerned with the universal principles that relation to the action done. Stage 5 : Social Contract Orientation In this stage, the person is look at various opinions and values of different people before coming up with the decision on the morality of the action. Stage 6 : Universal Ethical Principles Orientation The final stage of moral reasoning, this orientation is when a person considers universally accepted ethical principles. The judgment may become innate and may even violate the laws and rules as the person becomes attached to his own principles of justice.
  24. Mindfulness is your ability to objectively observe phenomena in the present moment, as they arise, without mental distortion. Awareness/consciousness you will not really understand without an enlightenment experience. What they are cannot be described in words. But if one was to try, the best description I've heard is that awareness/conscious is pure empty knowing, and ultimately absolute nothingness. It's the eternal "space" or dimension within which everything phenomenal becomes known.
  25. I have been making many topics lately but i am running out of stuff to make topic's. In the self-actualization video, that Leo has. He explains, how you can practise self-actualization, through a guided technique of his. He explains, that you have to be aware of the 'nothingness' and go along with the ride, which some people refer to as the (Gate-tunnel) I am going to explain my own insights, from what difference, i have discovered, when doing (Transcendental meditation and Leo's technique = 'be aware of the nothingness) Now, i cannot tell, if this is the case but i can only explain what i have witnessed from doing each practise. Firstly... Let's start out with Leo's technique, which is to dig deep into your subconscious mind and practise the emptiness and if possible, go along with it. I have sometimes but only very briefly been able to go with the ride and that usually lasts a second or two. When i open my eyes by then, i see everything from a 360 degree view. The thing is, when i practised this technique and were able to succeed, then i experienced more love and openness to everyone around me. Unfortunately the feeling would only last = 6 hours perhaps, in a non alcoholic or 'weird feeling' way. The next one; Transcendental meditation. When i practised this one 2x20 min a day, i feel as if i smoked hash... just different thing. The thing about this technique is that, i find this one here to be the more powerful technique toward attaining 'self actualization' Now, i cannot say this for sure. I just have a feeling ... The thing is that, the first one i described 'Leo's technique', is the more difficult technique to master and become enlightened with, but i find it that, it is less damaging than Tm because of the different aftermaths of the two. I am just a beginner but i cannot hide the fact, that i feel the butterflies in my chest 'the bad ones', when i practise Tm. I have been reading about this whole thing of 'chakra energies' and how they can make a man go neurotic. I find Leo's technique to be the most unharmful technique of them all. Is it true? I dont expect a good answer, but if anyone has a clue, i will welcome them . I will hopefully get the answer, that the 'Leo technique' is the safest and slowest option toward attaining enlightenment but i expect nothing in the world of spirituality. Now, i mindful meditate half an hour a day, regardless of the first two techniques mentioned above, to make sure that my progress get's saved ...