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@Breakingthewall People tend to think of say, a black hole and say that there’s nothing within it, when really it’s just empty space. Same with cessation. When I say emptiness or nothingness, I mean TRUE nothingness. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word emptiness, but true nothingness has to be the deepest realization, otherwise it’s something and that’s not it. It’s not even an experience when you truly realize nothingness.

@Breakingthewall Nothingness isn’t infinite or a creator. Nothingness is nonexistent, meaning it’s not even space. Infinite means going on and on forever, nothingness isn’t that, otherwise it would be a thing. Space can go on and on forever, but space isn’t the same thing as nothingness.

@Breakingthewall Again, emptiness is emptiness. God and infinity by definition are a thing. God is what’s creating everything and infinity is the existence that goes on and on that god is creating, by definition. So they’re both a thing, if they exist, meaning they have to be within nothingness. And nothingness is nothingness, it’s not creating anything because then that would make it a thing. Saying nothing is god is changing the definition of nothing. God is EVERYTHING, and anything that exists is within nothingness, meaning god is within nothingness. Even if reality goes on and on forever, it has to be within nothingness.

@BenG It happened during manic episodes. People usually get that with psychedelics or meditation but I guess God wanted something different in my case. ? Yes, it was a big emotional turmoil because I was raised in religious family but always prefered science for the explanation of everything. So I made a full circle but I didn't expect that God would be me. ? I will still need one more episode to directly realise nothingness, for now I only understand it conceptualy. ?

I’ll have to try this OP! I had a similar realization by looking into my own eyes in a mirror, like an inch away from the mirror, on shrooms. All of a sudden, I realized that the person in the mirror was just looking at nothingness—which was me. It was actually incredible shocking to realize I was the ‘void’ that allowed a mirrored image to think I was looking into a mirror ? Like it made me panic for a quick second when the “shift” happened and I wasn’t there. That was the damn truth.

Spiritual factions emphasize either God or nothingness and then they go to war with each other over which aspect is the right one. I'm glad we can keep traditions alive here. ?

I'm willing but maybe not able ha ha. All this talk of arising and passing away, coming from and going to, puts me into the frame of time, space, processes unfolding etc. Duality and thought, in fact. But from the perspective of the timeless and spaceless (which isn't a perspective but I'm calling it that for convenience), there's just a singularity of infinite nothingness. I don't think (but could be wrong), there's a movement from the timeless into time, from nothing into appearance. Can't these be the same already, but it depends on my state of mind how I'm seeing it. It's the mind which moves, not the flag in the wind (to misquote the Zen story lol). Not sure if I've missed your points, this is all hard to articulate and communicate

@Adamq8 Thank you. You said yourself “there is NOTHING outside of god” meaning emptiness haha. But it’s all good now. My point is enlightenment is that nothingness.

I haven't experienced God, nothingness, or any mystical states so I can't say anything about the topic but I do "feel" that OP is half right. I don't know that's how I feel right now. ?‍♂️

I've heard this before, Sadhguru sayed also that the creator is not the end, nothingness goes beyond the creator even. But I still struggle to understand it fully. I've heard mooji say things like, everything comes from consciousness and there's is something beyond consciousness, absolute nothingness or smth. It's hard to wrap my mind around it honestly. It's like consciousness itself is appearing in something that is unspeakable. I share the same view also. I like what you're saying on this thread. Regards ?

And you WERE god but you are no longer. Once you, or god fragmented itself into infinity, it went on forever, making separations absolute. You may experience yourself as god as one being infinite love again, but there will always be something separate now. Otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite. And the ultimate realization is realizing the true emptiness that all of that was born into. Not just the nothingness within everything.

By the way, when I say emptiness I don’t mean the nothingness and everything god is simultaneously, that’s just empty space or blankness. I mean TRUE emptiness. God and infinity AND nothing ness have to be within something. And that something is the true emptiness, the deepest awakening. The reason they say “stateless-state” is not because they’re referring to the state of nothingness. No, true enlightenment really isn’t a state AT ALL. You will never awaken for sure unless you realize this, and humble yourself enough to know what enlightened people are truly talking about. It can be no other way, that infinity came from this. It is the deepest awakening, and you’ll know it. When you keep having awakenings deeper than before and infinitely deepest, it’s not the deepest awakening. God is within the deepest truth. And I temporarily realized it.

Nothingness ultimately, I suspect. I don't know if it was something even possible to misinterpret or hallucinate... Your eyes can't see your eyes (without a mirror of course). But what if your eyes were imaginary and so far back that any thing that's a thing AT ALL is in front. ANY thing. Then wtf is that if ALLLLL things are always in front? Must be nothing... Must be... Because any possible conceivable thing is guaranteed to be in front of this.

@Nahm I had various strong DMT trips where certain things were revealed to me. For example the loss of categorization of things and understanding of everything as "existence". There is 0% chance I would have any interest in this at all, but my own direct experience pointed me to Advaita Vedanta (the first thing I found when Googling for monist religions following the experience). I then read and found things which reinforced to me certain things which I viewed through the lens of the experience(s) I had. My actual experience has always reflected Advaita Vedanta exactly, not so much Solipsism except in bad trips but even then it wasn't that type of Solipsism. Very odd that in that first trip, I hallucinated a Hindu goddess (some blue figure with a forehead dot) on the comedown... I have also hallucinated people in prayer with their legs crossed etc. Not sure why I saw those things. My own experience has not been like Buddhist teachings so much, except Taoism. You can't actually refer to pure consciousness unless you call it I or me or you or consciousness. When I was pulled back very far away from objects, I knew myself to be nothing. All of me was removed from me. What is left, you would call it "I" because it IS what we fundamentally are. Not a "me" anymore. In those states Solipsism did not really occur to me. I never came away from any trip thinking everyone else is a cardboard cutout acting for my amusement. I felt unity with everything like an embrace, a "WE" are everything is how it felt... It never felt to deny the essence of others, only their material appearance and spatial physical separation. It never denied the sense of others existing as alter egos of what I fundamentally am (me is also an alter ego). It could feel lonely as others were like myself talking to myself. But it never occurred that those alter egos were basically wooden planks. If Leo thinks I am just a wooden plank I know for a fact he is wrong. Rupert Spira is able to verbalize exactly what I experienced very concisely. Leo is able to acknowledge nothingness which is also something I knew myself to be. I have not ever heard anyone else discuss nothingness. Just no-thing, which is not like what I experienced when I felt to be made of nothingness.

I think you are referring to nothing when you say "I", but that is different from not being. It seems to me that nothingness is the core of existence itself.

Because you're making a concession to some sort of agreed upon thing to discuss sobriety to begin with... We have a sort of agreed upon idea of what sober means and are talking in reference to what that idea is agreed to represent. Frank is very very very far from that. If everyone was like Frank, that would be called sobriety. It has NOTHING to do with states of consciousness, nothingness is always the same. What you mean is the contents of mind, what you mean by states of consciousness is just content of mind. And that differs.

Uses non-dual gaslighting This is probably my biggest issue with the forum in a general sense. I've been guilty of it before though I wouldn't always consider it gaslighting. My issue with it more stems from people who are clearly somewhat new in their journey and half the answers they get is "there is no you doing anything" as if they would ever truly realize that just by someone telling them. It could do more harm than good and cause some type of derealization in someone's life if they don't have a direct experience of this idea. I also firmly believe now constantly stating the Nothingness of reality as a means to an end for all questions is not non-duality, but a strong polarization of what "is". I'll add what is attempting to be said is difficult to conceptualize through language due to the limitations of it. Though, it's just a belief and I fully could be wrong about what I'm saying.

It's not a Buddhist student, is a student of training to embodying and becoming Nothingness (which is Infinity which is God), this is what the Buddha taught, you know the destination now, when do you start the journey boss?

I struggled with the “I” word for years. But after having one of several Aya DMT trips, I substituted it with “ME”. It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest Me can get to explain the awareness beyond words! Lol….. The more aware “Me” became, the more difficult it was for Me to use words to describe awareness and knowingness. (Don’t get caught up with my grammatical use of the word ME, just having some fun!) It’s like the words “Nothingness and Somethingness”. I struggled for years with these words after experiencing a state of no-thought, no-form, no-universe, no-nothingness/somethingness during my second Aya experience, and yet, I was aware of a “Me”-ness that was beyond sensations and thought (for lake of better words.). Some people use the word Absolute God to express singular, or combined meanings and words of; nothingness, somethingness, love, oneness, void, etc. But I struggled with the word “God”. Perhaps because of the dogmas that can, and are subconsciously attached to deep ingrained beliefs and emotions of the word! “Me” has since found the words “All-That-Is”, which (for Me) best describes the word God and the words Nothingness, somethingness, love, etc. which point to the state of awareness that cannot be defined, explained, or touched with a singular thought, or patterns of thoughts! “Me” has not found dogmas attached to “Is”, or “Is-ness”, which in the combined words of “All-That-Is”, embraces all words, thoughts, beliefs, emotions consciousness, and all awareness. Just a few thoughts, images, beliefs “Me” wanted to share! LOL…..

For sake of discussion let's call this nothing. In other words reality is nothingness. Now I wonder if you would say that there is 0 nothing or is there 1 nothing? Since nothing could be defined as the absence of everything or complete nonexistence, is it appropriate to say there is 1 nothing if there is truly nothing here? My reasoning is: If there is nothing here then that means there is no nothing. No nothing means 0 nothing. This is because nothing implies the absence of all things including itself! So if there was truly nothing here then there wouldn't even be 1 nothing here. Just nothing nothing! Anyway identifying yourself as the word nothing sounds like a mistake to me.

Leo, you speak so absolutely on topics your ignorant on. You haven't attained or mentioned half of buddhist meditation: Jhana. They have the 6th and 7th Jhana: The mind base of infinity consciousness, and mind base of nothingness. Pretty much the whole Theravada practices these from the Visiddhumagga . Jhana has no duality. There is no Leo left, that dies before you even enter the first Jhana. You have never had the competency or experience in meditation to even know what your talking about. All your pyschedelic experiences still exist a duality, and Leo still exists. In real Jhana which plenty of monks (ajahn brahm) have achieved, there is no self or duality, it's full absorption into nimitta, you die at the first stage and go through 8 . Have you ever thought of studying and learning about this stuff, before making such ignorant comments? Just because your incompetent in this area, what type of integrity do you have. It's the same as people discounting psychedelics; either you achieve infinite consciousness via jhana, or don't speak about it, cos your deluding yourself and misleading people like a devil.

I know exactly what you mean. But this energy, when you look at it through a microscopic attention, it is just vibration, just a movement. It's not solid at all. So it's not really there as a something. It's just a modulation of nothingness, as Rupert so eloquently puts it.

It's not a vague hardly tangable like a haze thing that nobody can put their finger on precisely. It's actually very much tangable, like a psychic doer. It's "I'm the doer" feeling. Like a tension of seeker in the psyche. One who becomes aware of this seeking tension in the mind gains the power to disidentify from it and the tension stops. I DISSAPEARS. a state of no seeking and no seeker happens. When there's no seeking, there is no seeker, when there's no seeker there's no I. Then you realize your true nature was never an I but nothingness.

@Breakingthewall My experience of sizelessness was usually one of malleability rather than rigidity which is why I question it. That is how I am meaning infinite vs limitless. Limitless would be malleable whereas I imagine infinite to be fixed. Limitless would be that unexplained abstract things like color can appear from nothing but then can also go back to nothing, rather than their constant somethingness being set in stone, unable to ever regress back into the nothingness ground of being. I've had various experiences of sizelessness. Usually what happens is, consciousness grabs onto whatever it can. When you are fully "out of body", it feels to encompass the complete width of your vision as well as sounds, touch, etc. If you lost an eye, its scope would narrow. There wouldn't be a fixed extra width where vision used to be, rather it molds into whatever it is aware of. So I don't think they're the same at all but, I wonder which one it is. Is it an infinity of the malleable kind which can spit out infinite things and then swallow them back into nothing, its size always encompassing the scope of its contents? Or of the rigid kind where no things rise or fall but are all forced to eternally be.

I do wonder if the separation was real or just perception. I.e., was something seperated from nothing such that I genuinely experienced BEING nothing. Or was it such that there was only something, and the sense of distance was perceptual - as in I was not nothingness but straight up nonexistent. I do recall the experience well. There was something, but it seemed that the something was a mirror wherein peering into it I could know myself to be literal nothingness. A nothingness which was present. I'm not sure which. But the actual experience had, it seemed I was nothingness and nothingness was observing the something. My ego etc being an element of something. Of course we see things come from nothing all the time (where is a thought before it is conceived)... But this is indeed a good line of inquiry... I've seen Rupert Spira in particular explain why duality must appear to exist, and consciousness appear to limit itself. Here is where you have to figure out if it's limiting in pairs of nothing and something (meaning there is an Atman), OR simply limiting as slices of something, which would be Anatman... If the latter, there is still a total nowhere things do evidently come from using human language.