Hi Ayham, I remember that very well. Facing everything the separate-self can throw at you head on.... And it can throw a lot... Maya is not letting one off the hook easily... The Game-Changer for me was the book "Pointing Out the Great Way, Daniel Brown". At least for me personally, 95% of the meditation system out there would have never worked for me. They would have been too unpleasant, or needing more much willpower. Or I would have get stuck in the several traps there are, where ones practice can "bottom out", and lead nowhere.... So I can not highly enough express my gratitude for the heroic pioneering effort of Daniel Brown translating all these books, and getting the (in my opinion) most sophisticated meditation system of the planet to the West. It has been practiced and refined for hundreds of years, developed further, elaborated in hundreds of Tibetan Books, producing a steady stream if deeply enlightened beings.  It achieves a precision of technical vocabulary in the stage decriptions of evolving meditation, meditation experiences, resulting understandings and insights about ones mindstream and Reality emerging at different stages like nothing I have ever seen, and I studied more or less all major meditation systems, reading a few hundreds of books. The book is several hundreds of pages. It lead to me awe and deep respect of the Mahamudra-System when realizing at certain stages that I just had experienced the exact same flow of meditation experiences and understandings/insights than Tibetan meditators hundreds of years ago. Of course I can't summarize a few hundred pages of the book with the musings below. But I try to give a first taste of the system, with some personal experiences with it, and how it all developed for me, just to show off how great and oh so wonderful I am     . No, just kidding... Because I would have loved to have had something like a"user experience" with certain meditation systems like that 15 years ago, to get a feeling for a certain path, and the experiences others are having with it. Concentrative Meditation: I would recommend starting with concentrative meditation, the Elephant Path (all Tibetan schools use it). There are several stages of concentrative meditation that must be mastered, and tools learned doing it. They are very well described in Pointing out the Great Way, and "The Elephant Path: Attention Development and Training in Children and Adolescents", in the chapter of Daniel Brown. Here is explicitely stated what one learnes while learning concentrative meditation. By the way, that system is in my humble oinion more sophisticated than Zen or Vipassana, because it includes techniques like easing up and intensifying. That is essential for making it efficient, and these techniques are just not there in Vipassana and Zen. These aspects (easing up and intensifying) one learns there by conincidence, or not at all.  In the beginning, you don't stay long on the meditation object (breath, stone, candle, not so important), but just catch yourself when you have wandered off, your monkey mind taking you on a ride and elaborating something else. Now: Don't put negative reaction/feedback on that, but move attention/focus back. You can only control focus/attention, you can't force what thoughts emerge. So meditation is always moving attention back from wandering off, and the more you do that, the more pliant the mind becomes: Less wandering off, and if wandered off much faster to move it back. And when that goes quite well with a little bit less wandering off or loosing attention. Then, when its more automatic, you "ease up", which means you use less energy and focus, and see if you can stay on the object. If yes, good: Ease Up. Easing Up brings more clarity to what else goes on in the mindstream. Which lets you notice more of the subtler arisings of the mindstream emerging. When you drift off more than, then intensify: Inhale strongly, increase focus, energize. And see then if you stay more on the object. If you do, ease up. Find the optimum energy balance you need to stay on the object. One balances easing up and intensifying then.... Then your clarity will increase, your energy will become nice, joy can start to arise.  And then you do that for a few months, a year.... Meditation Experiences of Clarity, Lucidity, Bliss and Non-conceptuality (silent mind) can occur, but also go again. They are just experiences passing in you. This way, you train your focus and make your mind pliant. When you can stay on the objects for a few minutes without totally getting lost in elaborated thoughts, and keep some focus on the object while wandering off in thought a bit, you have partial staying.... at some point you have pretty good staying on the object for a few minutes. Meditation without an object: Then comes a big change, that you can start doing then: Change to the Mindstream of thoughts itself as meditation object. And try to stay mindful of the mind watching that mindstream.  If you can keep doing that (which takes a long time), you can start taking the meditation into daily life. Investigating the Nature of thoughts: See Pointing Out the Great Way for that. Thoughts are no different than consciousness, which is empty/nothing, yet has clarity/awareness, so its not a nothing at all. If you look into a thought, you don't find it, it disappears. Is cut off. One can never see or find a thought. Looking into a thought, an experience of un-findability arises. Empty, nothing specific. But with clear alert awareness of consciousness. Empty and aware. Nothingness, yet something that is not nothing. Nothingness. Emptiness. Consciousness. And more important: When really looking into the nature of a thought, it evaporates. Is cut off. Disappears. Reveals its nature of emptiness. With exactly that phenomenon is worked in the "Skill of Recognition", see below. Doesn't that effect appear as very useful to get thoughts and the mindstream under control? Of course! That effect of the thought evaporating, revealing its nature as Nothingness/Consciousness when looking into it, and generalizing that oberservation and understanding on the whole mindstream and all events it contains and can contain. That is understanding the continuum of the mindstream. The nature of thoughts. You don't control the thoughts which arise, that is why you/the person is also empty, a concept. Because what are you, if you don't even control your thoughts, and what thoughts arise? After having mastered Concentrative meditation, and having understood (contemplation) the nature of thoughts as consciousness/awareness/emptiness/suchness/Nothingness, you can put that into practice: Skill of Recognition: (1. Yoga of Mahamudra system) Now it gets interesting. That was the decisivepoint for me once I understood that, and implemented it. Afterwards, it started to get nondual pretty soon... If you look HOW the thoughts emerge, (1) out of what they emerge, (2) what they are, (3) in what they move (4) into what they disappear ALL of that (1)(2)(3)(4) must be present. Thoughts DO appear. From "something". Stay in "something". Consisting of "something" All of that is Emptiness, or Consciousness, or Nothingness. Thoughts are made of "that","move in that", "dissolve into that". and you will never SEE that, or can say what it is. Nothing. But not a blank nothing. An aware Nothing. Actually the essence of all world-appearances, but that comes later, when it gets nondual, at the Yoga of One Taste. What happens if you investigate into emerging thoughts this way, is that they get FASTER. VERY FAST. Like 20-30 emergent thoughts/feeling arisings per second, most of them rudimentary. The mind does this to keep the illusion going. To make it too fast for you. But at some point, you learned to get that fast also... Basically, looking into a thought, one sees its Emptiness/Nothingness (one doesn't find the thought, it evaporates). It is cut off. Dzogchen calls this cutting off "Trekchö". Daniel Brown called this stage a "High Speed Search Task into the unfindability of the nature of thoughts". A High Speed Search task into their emptiness, into their nature as consciousness, as Nothingness. So the emerging gets fast, very fast. Daniel Ingram also mentions that. But at some point, with enough practice and familiarity, YOU get faster. You spot and cut off every very fast, subtle, fragmentary thought arising. None of them "grips" you anymore, since you have seen them all, and their structure. Just thoughts arising very fast. You don't control which thoughts arise. Depended origination, they are just emerging by themselves. You can focus on just their arising (of thoughts), just their staying, just their going away. At some point, they just emerge, looking into their nature is automatic, and they immediately dissolve. No duration. Just emergence, and poof gone. And when you are fast enough, you get a continuance of staying mindful. When that happens its pretty clear what happened. Your attention got so fast that you can stay mindful even through the high-speed thought emergence. At the end, they come very fast, they don't get "elaborated out". Thinking, or elaborating the thoughts out, is slower than their emergence. They emerge already fully complete with their content, and then slowly get "talked/elaborated" in your mind.  Natural reaction: So WHO the f*** am I (pardon my french) when I don't control what thoughts emerge and if they appear fully with their content in a fraction of a second, and get elaborated later in a hypnotic show over several second? good question... to be answered later. Outcome is:  You know the nature of every possible thought (Consciousness-Emptiness-Nothingness), of the whole mental-continuum of thoughts, all that there can be. Their nature. you can cut off or transcend/just watch your normal mindstream in most daily situations without getting caught up/hypnotized by it, which already here leads to a lot of bliss. Not sufficient bliss to get ones separate self completely handled, but already quite wonderful. That is the start of real freedom. You know how your mindstream hypnotizes you, and gets faster when you actually look into each thought arising and its nature. At some point you get fast enough to cut off every arising, or let it elaborate in a controlled aka mindful way. Yoga of Unelaboration (2. Yoga of Mahamudra-System) Here, you finish off with time. You open up the eternal always here mind. Past and future become deeply understood as imagined/manifested right here and now, not really existing. Only the eternal now exists. Not as idea, as concept, as understanding, but as felt and lived reality. Deeply realized. Always Here. Eternal. How ones True Being can be immortal/eternal/always here becomes a very real possibility here. Later on, the emerging possibility "of how that could work" become validated beyond any possible doubt. Pointing Out the Great Way: "From where does the first mind-moment [the thought-arising] arise? Then, where does it stay? Finally, where does it go when it stops? The "mind" in which all this is happening is Always Here. Always Here Mind. Time is not "out there", self-existing. You only notice time because of change, of emerging thoughts and appearances. time is a mere construct/concept. No change of appearances/thoughts, no time. "One" doesn't control the content of the emergent thoughts "Through dependent origination certain propensities [thought capsules with their full content already "inside" emerge] at the very subtle level ripen into subtle movements within the temporal mental continuum, which in turn become constructed into and elaborated as coarse-level thoughts [get elaborated into long thoughts that get told in awareness over several seconds] and appearances" dependend origination: "one" doesn't control which thoughts emerge. "The skilled meditator can view events transforming from very subtle propensities to specific subtle mind-moments and constructed coarse thoughts and appearances seeming to arise and pass in the temporal mental continuum through a process of dependent origination" Seeing and understanding the emergence of the thoughts (fully formed out with all their content, but not yet elaborated in the mindstream, emerging in the Always Here Mind), and seeing this in real-time because ones attention got fast enough, is a game-changer. That stage is very hard to fully understand in Pointing Out the Great Way. At least for me, it took me a long time. . I would have been faster with coaching.... Yoga of One Taste (3. Yoga of Mahamudra System) So here it gets nondual and mere appearance, floating in Nothingness. No more a solid and external/duality reality "out there" anymore. But an infinite limitless field of Infinite Consciousness, manifesting an appearing world of mere appearances arising in it. A loving blissful boundless timeless field of  bright lucid Awakened Awareness. This is where probably (my pet-theory) the Endohuasca-System starts working. https://dmtquest.org/endohuasca-magic/ The practice is basically taking the insights of stage 2 and putting them into practice, specifically also in daily everyday life. With that, one gets enough time and momentum in meditation to really make the difference, to get it nondual. To make all that with sitting meditation on the pillow, at least for me it would have been a full-time job. And I did a demanding career and some other stuff in the meantime also... The view taken all thoughts/mental events emerge in the Always Here Mind, or Simultaneous Mind (which means nondual).  same with all world appearances. The essence of all thoughts is emptiness/consciousness, and the essence of all visual field appearances is also emptiness/appearance/consciousness. That is called the "One Taste" of every arising (thought or world-appearance). Nondual in other words. and being aware of the emerging high-speed stream of thoughts emerging already with full content, but getting elaborated in the seconds following, and cutting off most of the emergent thoughts by looking into their nature, which has been automized by this point enough clarity and mindfulness is generated that at some point The Visual Field/"world": Becomes mere appearance and infinite/limitless becomes mere appearance appearances 1) the world no longer feels "out-there". Everything arising just arises in oneself. 2) appearances loose their solidity. One can not tell if they are solid "objects" out there, or just appearances happening in the timeless Always-Here-Mind 3) At some point later, with a lot of meditation-mindfulness-momentum, the "inside" feeling as pure empty awareness, a very transparent witness, but not even that because the awareness is no longer separate: the visual field becomes really mere appearance. One looks at something, and its just appearance hovering in Nothingness. You feel into it, and its essence is the same as the indescripbable Nothingness behind ones head. luminous mere appearances, very similiar to trip-descriptions. the limit of the visual field, and the wondering of "what is behind it", become limitless or infinite there is "nothing" behind it. One just imagines a border/boundary of the visual field one imagines that something must be behind it (like 3D-Space continues". No, 3D-space is imagined in dimensionless Nothingness/Infinite Consciousness. 3D-Space is not self-existing, dangling out there. That was a biggie for me, took a long time to get, and could have been much faster with coaching. Guess I am quite a visual person  Time is gone. Timeless Everything can only happen here, and now Past is imagined here and now , future also here and now  the "subject"/"me", the separate self Gestalt/arisings, feeling and being separate from the whole Reality, slowly gets transcended and dissolves, more and more aspects of the person/separate self are seen as arisings moving within oneself. finally, after a long path of transcending every identity/I-thought/I-feeling of the Ego/Body-Mind/character, it becomes a transparent witness, nothing but still something witnessing the visual field. At some point, One can't tell AT ALL what one is, nothing positive is left. I am not the body/person, anything. Only aware Emptiness. But somehow some murky Witness or something like that still there. One literally doesn't know what one is, besides the nondual field... One becomes the visual field of mere appearance, one is that in a nondual way. any sense of location or center slowly dissolves. One becomes the whole boundless timeless field of mere empty, groundless appearance. Sometimes lucid and shimmering, like mere appearance. Some traditions call that already Enlightenment, or Kensho/Satori/Awakening. And it is in some way. But Nonduality is not already Full or Great Enlightenment, where there is absolutely no doubt about ones nature, and the nature of reality. That can become clear like ice-cold water thrown in ones face.  Nonduality can be very well experienced by a separate self, just try some psychedelics.... To reach Nonduality sobre without psychdelics, one already has to be quite empty or transcended the separate self, but not necessarily (and normally) fully. With psychedelics, you don't need to empty (or have transcended the separate self) at all. 5 MeO will do that for, even if you don't want. Not fully empty, not the last step (no traces of  Individuality/transparent witness left, see above), but very very much. that brings us to the last stage, Stage 4 of the Mahamudra System, the Yoga of Nonmeditation. And here is where meditation, and the long time it enables in these very empty states of dissolving every last speck of individuality/last very subtle separate self arisings/last very subtle illusions, becomes paramount.  Only this 4. stage enables the final crossing over to fully, without a doubt, knowing what Ones True Self, and Reality, really is. Without that, suffering, grasping for ever more Awakenings, and still being a bit "gaslighting-ability" of the finality of ones realization/awakening, continues. Yoga of Nonmeditation (4. Yoga of Mahamudra System) What is already the case, from stage 3 Yoga of One Taste: The visual field/world already arises in the Always Here Mind as mere groundless luminous appearance, with Nothingness as its essence in an infinite limitless field of Awareness Space in the timeless Always Here Mind so many ingredients of the True State of Things, ones True Identity as Boundless Changeless Timeless Reality are already in place. That is already very lovely, filled mostly with bliss. Like really really nice. But not fully the Unshakeable Unchanging Reality that one intuits to really be, with its Infinite Love, Peace and Bliss. Only one thing is still missing for conforming fully to the enlightened mindstream, and fully crossing over to it with the sudden recognition of ones True Identity, Reality itself, Absolute Impersonal Infinite Consciousness, Nothingness. and that is the last remants of the Empty/Transparent Witness, or what Brown calls artifical activity. The last remnants of individuality, of I-feeling, I-thoughts arising in oneself. The last aspects of being a bit separate from Reality itself, from being not fully empty/transcended. A very subtle transparent witness, already being nondual, identifying with an infinite nondual field. Bassui (Zen, in Three Pillars of Zen) calls this Awareness of Emptiness, or Awareness of Beingness. A very subtle feeling of still  being aware of SOMETHING, even if that is infinite Nonduality. Not full and complete nonduality and oneness. Still a subtle (very subtle) separate self aware of the Totality. Not the Totality being fully aware of itself, like in perceptions perceiving themselves. One can do NOTHING here to cross over to Full Enlightenment/Basis Enlightenment. Because that would be an act of a separate self. An effort. A movement of a separate self WANTING something, manipulating the mindstream, grasping for the understanding, doing something.... One can only automize the meditation/mindfullness, staying fully present, letting the Awakened Impersonal Awareness flow by itself, let IT do the meditation itself, get out of the way... Bringing out the full force of this Utterly Impersonal Awakened Awareness. Ones True Identity. And that is the last contra-intuitive trap: ONE CAN'T FORCE IT ("artifical activity"). Because forcing it would be a separate self arising doing it. One can try to force it (for example Koan-style), but then the Crossing Over normally happens in a moment of grace, of relaxation, when artificial activity is not present. And once the last very subtle remnants of the separate self are seen as moving within oneself, just changing and temporary arisings/movements consisting of I-thoughts and I-feelings, the last subtle lenses ("Individuality,separateness") are recognized and dropped/transcended/no longer believed and just cut off/let go/Trekchö-style. All and any center gone, no separate anything remaining anywhere, forcing its claws of suffering into the natural bliss of Enlightened Infinite Nondual Empty Reality itself, perceptions perceiving themselves, shimmering in Infinite Always here Nothingness, in Infinite Nondual Consciousness. The Universal Mind, Nothingness. Realizing that nothing is lost if the separate self illusion is realized and seen as that what it really is, and always was: Just appearances happening and moving within the Always Here True Self/Reality. All that is lost is an illusion, what is gained is Reality itself and its inherent bliss.  And indeed welcome home, to a home you never left, on a journey that never really happened.... Bon Voyage!  Selling Water by the River PS: By the way, that is not a nice theory and beautiful claims, but a path actually walked over many years (although because of lacking coaching and not being too smart sometimes from my side making it take longer than actually needed). But I am still very very thankful that I picked that path, and not 10-15 years face against the wall Zen-monastery Koan-style. That would have also maybe worked (but I don't know, that system has many pitfalls the Tibetans have identified and made maps for to avoid these), but would have been much less pleasant, at least for me. Would have felt like digging a hole with a shovel instead with a climatized excavator, doing most of the meditation in daily life instead of some hardcore-monastery-fulltime-environment. So I can understand all those that don't like meditation, because it is maybe the hardest thing one can actually do, depending on the system. Give this system a try! PSPS: Before one maybe starts thinking that nothing matters, and Karma is just an Illusion, since Individuality and everything else is an illusion anyways, and nothing matters, like ethics, common sense, Karma, compassion and so on: Be sure that reality will give you a crosscheck if that is really the case, or just a funny idea/concept. And then let's see if suffering hurts and grips, or is still just considered an Illusion. Compassion and Boddhichitta for all beings (which are nothing but the same One Reality without a second) actually is a pretty hard entrance criteria to any of these states decribed above. With honest and practiced compassion/ethics/Boddhichitta, one has the support from all of Infinite Reality on ones path. And how much intuition and intelligence emerges in ones mindstream is guided only by this One Infinitely Intelligent Reality without a second.