This shall serve to document my journey towards enlightenment, and hopefully contain enough insights to assist other truth seekers in their quest. I do not promise to update this religiously as true insights are few and far between, but I will update it whenever I feel I have something worth sharing or which should be acknowledged. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I do the actual experience. I warn you this first post will be quite lengthy as I feel it's important for me to recall as much of this journey as I can from the beginning to now, mainly in the hopes of garnering some insights myself from the retelling of it. I actually don't expect anyone to read it in it's entirety, but if you do I appreciate any criticism you provide. "I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." - W.B. Yeats Looking back my journey towards truth started long ago. An excerpt from a depressed 14-year old mes now defunct myspace page yields the following: "I do not believe that human beings remember what it is to be happy anymore. We have lost our sense of purpose and being, and it is my goal in life to find it. I also want to push the limits of this physical body to find out what is actually possible outside the realm of doubt". At that time there were a number of things nagging at me, the proverbial "splinter in the back of your mind" as Morpheus eloquently put it. I was annoyed with societies treatment of each other and the planet, the complete lack of appreciation I saw in others of nature and it's beautiful tapestry. Worse I was very introverted and constantly judging others for seeking external validation, while at the same time being annoyed at how judgmental we have become. Most of all though I was lost. Those days I spent many a nights on MSN with people decades older than me trying to figure out the age old question of who am I? What is the purpose of this existence, and of the many "me's" and opinions waging war in my head over the future, which are actually me? Back then I had a bad taste in my mouth for religion, I had been forced by parents to attend church for many years. I instantly recognized the tendrils of it's oppressive nature as it enthralled many with it's politician like promises. Always promising to deliver the answer and never truly giving it, one story after another each as obviously false as the last. This entrenched distaste lasted a long time and turned me off of anything related to spirituality at all. Being lost as I was, and seeing no real avenue in 21st century life to pursue these questions I let life takes it's course and fell asleep. Giving into the ego completely I went on a 10 year ego trip, seeking no spiritual help, and "enjoying" many failed relationships and business launches. My young days of being in love with anime such as Dragon Ball Z, and questioning what is possible were replaced by the cold calculations of a computer scientist. Worst of all I had become to an extent intolerant and antisocial. I simply could not abide the company of those who externally validated, and moving into the realm of computer science and martial arts allowed me to dissociate from others near completely. Pursuing studies late in the night, or training the body which required no thought. This granted me a degree of personal freedom I truly enjoyed. I certainly wouldn't say I had done badly for myself, though I never truly pursued my potential. And even as intolerant as I was, I was never rude. Simply judgmental,close minded, and completely rational. All that being said I could not completely remove the splinter in my mind and moved on to create my own agnostic view of the world. To me everything was alive, and all things were part of some system or another. I recognized that the cells in my body all came together to produce me, just as humans as individual cells gathered together to produce humanity, and all of life comes together to produce what we call "Earth". This could be further seen in Solar systems, or galaxies, one body simply a cell for a larger and larger body. In this manner I noticed that all things were alive, not just those we interpreted to be. I thought of a planet as it's own organism dancing away with it's kin under the surveillance of a star. This recognition of life in the inanimate and the reconciliation that everything is a system based on another system, and all essentially part of one universe was a viewpoint I dubbed "universal perspective". I had thought about writing a book on it, but never running into like minded people I eventually shelved that as nothing more than an idle curiosity. It was replaced with mundane tasks like my dog, my love life, and of course MONEY. At the end of those 10 years, being about 24 I began to find a boredom in life's repetitious nature. So many around me were completely false and weren't interested in deep subjects like philosophy or existence, preferring to repeat weather patterns, or always retell of the same issues at work day after day. When I wanted money I could obtain it with ease which took the flavor from material goods. There just didn't seem much purpose in living except to experience the next day and fall asleep. I began to be pretty lazy and unmotivated. Becoming disillusioned to my idea of what love was also played a huge part in this. Having had multiple long term relationships only to see each one ultimately fail, left me with the realization that not only was what I perceived to be love temporary, but I could also have that like money on the fly. Falling in love was easy, making it last was the hard part. I spent the better part of the year in that state, putting on close to 60lbs and just not feeling like there was anything new to experience, or any real reason or goal to aim for. This next part is going to sound like a pretty big hype for psychedelics, please do not take it as such as I do not personally recommend them to anyone. My trip is here because it is an honest part of my journey and to deny it's effects would be false, that being said no one I tripped with has ever had close to the same journey as I had, and I cannot in any real sense say that these things will contribute to your search for truth. That depression and lack of motivation all ended in one night. The night I tried shrooms. I had always been a bit of a pot smoker, hanging around with techies brought this on, and I recognized from my own studies that certain illegal drugs were actually far more holistic than alcohol or cigarettes. So when a friend offered me to try shrooms, I checked out the ramifications on the body and decided it was worth a shot. I had no idea what I was in for. The onset was difficult, and most of my first trip took me through emotional hoops whereby I recognized every judgement I had made on people. The emotional weights I was still holding onto from failed relationships and blame I placed on parental figures were laid bare. It was like my self, and my conscious mind were two separate things, and I could study at my own leisure any emotional knot and trace it's roots in my personality. One play through of Pink Floyd's Endless River and I forgave my ex's, removed my judgements of people, and recognized within me how much I had been in the wrong in so many situations. I also found myself recognizing how lucky I was for the circle for friends I was with, and the partner I had. It was no longer a question of what spending time with them added to my life, but appreciating every facet of them as an art piece, not to mention realizing my own greed and how much I had missed out on because of it. I left that trip exhausted, but feeling like there was so much more to life in plain view that I had missed. This lead to our second trip as a group, which I approached with a much more open mind than the first. I was now seeing a light to the world and realizing there may be a lot more pieces to the puzzle of life that I had missed. Furthermore my recognition of universal perspective could not have been stronger, I felt as though I had denied the one part of me that may have held the key all along. This trip was the most intense, it was the day I recognized the conceptual universe. It all started with the question of what is possible, and how do you define possibility and impossibility? This lead me to realize that every argument I had for something being impossible was only based on second hand knowledge and not actually something I had verified, furthermore I recognized everything as a concept. "Up" was a concept, "Down" was a concept, "Zedd" was a concept, my friends were concepts, language was a matrix of concepts, countries and cultures were concepts, literally everything. This lead to the question, now that I can see these are just concepts, what is a concept made out of? What creates a concept, and how does one control a concept? After all impossibility was just a concept, it was the duality to possibility, neither one really having any true barring on the nature of reality. Coming down I found a great many likenesses between this conceptual reality and my knowledge of computer science. I don't want to get to technical, but my understanding of object oriented programming really started to beg the question of what is existence? Thus I have to give a quick rundown to be understood:  Object oriented programming is designed in such a way as to be very recyclable with ones code. When you create code you create a Parent class, and all instances of that class are child classes. To give an example linguistically, if I were to write a program for someone who creates vehicles I would first create a Parent class called "vehicles" which would have some properties: Number of passengers, type of engine, and fuel type.  I would then create child classes "land vehicles" and "air vehicles" which would have their own properties like number of wheels and number of doors for land, or number of wings and number of engines for air. The important thing to take from this is both land vehicles and air vehicles would also have all the properties of the vehicles class. I then took this metaphor and applied it to humans. Are not humans just a child class of humanity? Is not humanity a child class of the earth? Earth the solar system, the solar system the galaxy, and the galaxy the universe? Am I not then a child of the universe? Does that not grant me the same abilities and properties of the universe as well? If I'm a concept or code, does not code which recognize it's code have the same properties as all parent classes behind it. Essentially I was asking the question if I am a child of God, does that not also make me God with all that entails? I wanted to investigate further into the nature of code, now recognizing myself as nothing more than a concept with properties. I read the book "Code" by Charles Petzold, and came to understand that everything code expresses is a metaphor. Furthermore all things can be reduced to the state of "on/off" and the metaphor is constructed  by trillions of "cells" in these states, lastly he expresses how switches and relays came into existence. This made me question the nature of my brain, from a neuroscience perspective your brain is nothing more than a collection of switches and relays. Which lead me to the question, who is throwing the first switch which is moving through the network? Feeling loaded with questions I decided to visit "my objective self" again and question these very things, is physical nature just a bunch of metaphors, am I just a metaphor, and if all of existence is just code floating around, what the heck am I while actuality going through it? The answer I found was staggering, I was god, everything was god, and all of these concepts aren't actually what reality is. I was in awe, and my vigor for life was renewed, the trip ended and I found myself hoping to find like minded individuals to pursue this with. That is the day I found Leo's spiritual enlightenment videos, and Part 2 really hit home where he proposes the conceptualized version of reality. I was hooked. I spent the next 20 hours in a meditation, the first of my life. And came to a feeling of being everything and nothing, I also had no idea what any of this meant (though at the time I was sure I did). Over the next months I spent every waking hour pouring over any bit of literature I could find on enlightenment, from Carlos Castaneda, to Eckhart Tolle, to out there books like Matrixism, and Becoming God by Ford. Everything was new, and I found myself sitting in a mindset of realizing that rationality is only one perspective. This allowed me to open my mind to every possible source of information regardless of how much I previously would have judged it. I found myself firmly in a post rational state and in complete awe. Anything that could give me an insight was worth spending time on, and I felt firmly like I had at least recognized the existence of "The Matrix" even if I had no idea how to extricate myself from it. I cooled down when I started realizing that all this hyperactivity wasn't getting me anywhere, and as Leo says you have to actually do the work. Which leads me to where I am now. Daily I meditate for 3 hours, an hour and half in the morning, and an hour and a half before bed. For the first half hour I observe myself, let the monkey mind work and recognize where all things are coming from. I've found P.D Ouspensky's model of centers very useful for this. When is the emotional center controlling the movement center? When is the intellect center taking control of the movement center? When are emotions masquerading as intellect and vice versa. When am I allowing imagination to extricate me from the actuality of the present moment, and losing consciousness? For the second half hour I leave my eyes open and continue to ask the questions What is the truth, what is reality/existence, who am I outside the voice, and what is reality when I erase concepts? During this period odd stuff starts happening with my vision. The world begins to blur and nothing retains it's form, as though the world itself is dissolving before my eyes. I find this perception interesting, but ultimately I use it only as a meter for whether I am trying to control the moment or not. If i let the perceptions flow and am not exerting control it changes drastically, when I do exert control the definition comes back (albeit muted). I do not believe these perceptions are "The Truth" they are a distraction, but they do help me observe my own reactions to them. For the last half hour I just sit and watch the perceptions, I dissociate completely from any thoughts that happen to arise and simply stay in the state of "being", whatever happens in this state happens. I don't take any of it seriously I just sit back and enjoy the show and flow on to the next moment staying aware of any reactions I have. I think it's important to note I do not delve into psychedelics anymore. While I found the original experiences to be quite fruitful, I find that the true conscious traction comes from doing the work stone sober. Psychedelics sent me on a rampage yes, but having that realization outside of them would have been a lot more powerful. Sadly for the first months though I was invigorated I couldn't help but hear a voice in my mind asking "maybe all of this is just crap, and you messed your mind up with drugs". I am no longer in this viewpoint, but then I also no longer even feel the need for weed or psychedelics in general. These observations done over months have garnered enormous insight into my machine like nature, I no longer feel like I have free will. And generally when I start getting emotional I recognize it's because I've identified with something and can't help but laugh at "my self" for taking it all so seriously. Life is presently an amusement park, and I enjoy everything a lot more. From reading, to creating, to my relationships. Everything is interesting and intriguing, and everything is there just for the moment. Time no longer holds any meaning, time is only a perspective and in my opinion both the past and the future do not even exist. The present moment owes nothing to either, and arguably there is no way to tell if the memory of the last moment is actually real or if the present moment is just providing evidence to justify it's existence. While I enjoy asking the existential questions I find many of them to be arbitrary, and simply continue with my self observation in hopes that one day the ego will completely dissolve, and I will become the truth, when that happens I can't wait to see what the results will be. If you made it through this completely then bravo, future posts won't contain nearly this much information. It was just me going back to the foundation and remembering all the moments that pushed me to where I am now, and has allowed me to dive just that much deeper into my knowledge network. I appreciate you spending the time and hope it has garnered you some insight in one way or another. If there is sufficient interest I will share more of the insights I garnered along the way in a more concise manner. "It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell." - Paraphrased from Buddha.

Sincerely
Z