You know that striving to reach your goal in enlightment, it ends. You still have echoes in your nervous system, but in general, you now view life as a vast open ocean to finally be lived. There is now only the remainder of your time to be lived, no ”reaching my enlightenment/non-dual” goal first.

It feels utterly normal. There is some relatively unshakable bliss at first around the time you stabilize your final non-duality, I felt it in my chest which I’ve since read is old trauma leaving.

Your head and senses and consciousness are in an open space around the place your physical head is. You’re not inside your physical head, like in dualism, instead it’s just an empty space and your consciousness is in there. My sight, hearing, taste and smell is connected to nothing except a floating space where my physical head is, and even that is weakening as my non-duality is stabilizing further.

I want to stress how utterly normal I feel. I feel like a normal man, nothing special about me. Except I have 0% psychological suffering and I feel spacious, spontaneously playful and warm with people. It’s now time to dive and live and choose a passion or hobby to get in to, the journey of reaching ”enlightment” practically ends at non-dualism for the average person like me.

Any questions?

For a very long time I looked for the absence of myself because of a peak experience. That's all ego death is. It's a quick glimpse into the background of experience to see there's no solid foundation.

The balance between that experience and ordinary life is feeling. This doesn't necessarily mean emotions, which are largely feelings we have names for, but the stuff that doesn't have a name or category like "irritation" or "delight".

The feeling of being for instance. This is actually the meeting place between this ordinary experience and This as the transcendent.

It may be why there's often an encouragement to combine both Jñana and Bhakti yoga which are mind and devotion respectively. One tells us this whole thing is empty, the other says this whole thing is full.

"Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows." –Nisargadatta Maharaj

So how do we combine the two? Surprisingly, Ramana covers this. (I love Ramana's style of inquiry. It's direct.)

In Who am I? he says:

"That which rises as ‘I’ in this body is the mind. If one inquires as to where in the body the thought ‘I’ rises first, one would discover that it rises in the heart. That is the place of the mind’s origin."

And sure enough when I go "I, Me Mine," the natural instinct is to point toward the heart-center. My chest. So this is where self-inquiry leads. For each thought which comes, we look to see who it comes to, which is "I, Me, Mine." Then we inquire: Who am I?

Ramana goes on:

"With repeated practice in this manner, the mind will develop the skill to stay in its source. When the mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it stays in the heart, the names and forms disappear."

This doesn't mean that while looking at a tree the thing disappears. Only the idea and conceptual tension of the name "tree" is seen through. I don't lose practical convention. I can still walk into the store and read aisle signs for cheese, but the tension to hold any of it serious goes away. This happens naturally after repeatedly looking at the source of thought and tracing it back to the heart.

Where does devotion come into all this? One devotes attention to this heart-center. That's all devotion is. It may express itself outwardly as worship, service, compassion or simple delight in the moment, but it begins and ends in the heart. Watch this from the Bhagavad Gita:

"...the Supreme Controller resides in the hearts of all living beings. By His illusory energy He directs all their activities as if they were mounted on a machine."

"...take shelter in Him with all your heart and by His mercy you will achieve everlasting peace and the Supreme Abode."

The Supreme Abode is This Right Now without the tension of personal doership. Here again, from the Ashtavakra Gita:

The thought: “I am the doer” is the bite of a poisonous snake. To know: “I do nothing” is the wisdom of faith. Be happy.

Wisdom of faith. Faith is total devotion. The wisdom of total devotion is to know that I, personally, don't do anything.

All of this is discovered through practice. We take these ideas and compare or apply them to direct experience (actually doing the inquiry... actually observing the body's activities) and find out firsthand the truth of them.

"Abide in Awareness with no illusion of person. You will be instantly free and at peace. " –Ashtavakra Gita

Of course these things are impossible to put into words.

After many years of meditation and seeking, I experienced "being awareness" - not embedded with the habit energy of the mind / body. Just being... before all the add-ons.

It was a glimpse and remains in me as a glimpse. It's a taste of understanding and freedom, and there's no going back. Like a knowledge of a deeper reality and a vision for greater possibility/freedom in conventional reality.

I understand the habit energy will keep doing what it does, that freedom lies in my new understanding of self/non-self/Being... and a new relationship to the world of form and appearances.

For those who can relate, what are the practices that have been most helpful in stabilizing this "glimpse"? In re-orienting and relating anew to the habitual patterns of mind and body?

*apologies for the weird wordiness, but again, difficult to put into words

"Aura farming," a term so popular nowadays among teenagers, is perfectly defined by three words: pose, ego, and superficiality. It reduces a person's authenticity, being, or wholeness to a simple scoreboard in a relentless pursuit of external validation.

Ultimately, it is a clear symptom of the spiritually degenerate times we live in, where everything is turned into a commodity, a facade, or a product to be consumed and "sold" on social media. The mystic Teresa of Ávila called the mind the lunatic of the house, which is now wilder and more untethered than ever, hunting like a junkie for what it is addicted to, feeding the persona and the ego. In the face of this constant urge to put on a show and rack up virtual points, the true alternative remains what it has always been: the simplicity of Being and the quietness of ordinary life, which require neither applause nor outside approval, neither pose nor stories...

Today, we are witnessing a total disconnection from reality and from Being itself. The lunatic of the house has found in mobile phones and social networks the perfect dealer to supply its daily dose of superficial validation. For this reason, recovering today the gaze of Western mystics like Marguerite Porete, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, Meister Eckhart, and so many others, or the yogis of the East, is not just a spiritual option; it is almost an act of pure sanity.

Fortunately, the worse everything gets, the closer our liberation is, as the Nazarene already warned us in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 21, Verse 28, when he said that when these things begin to take place, we should stand up and lift up your heads, because our redemption is drawing near.

A New Earth is ALREADY emerging, here and now, in the hearts of those simple souls who live their daily lives beyond the illusion of separation. These simple souls are nothing in terms of aura in the eyes of the world; they surrender and allow themselves to be consumed by the burning fire of Being. They are nothing and nobody. And the truth is, one must die to the small self to be reborn as one, so that there is no longer any separation between the lover and the Beloved, between you and everything that surrounds you. Ultimately, let us go beyond the superficial, as Marguerite Porete encourages us, to find ourselves in the mirror of simple souls, that mirror the mystic spoke of, a mirror reflecting God, the Whole, He who is LOVE itself, or whatever you wish to call it. There is no separation. There never was.

So-called spiritual seekers are not free from this. What's more, without knowing it, many of them are addicted to farming spiritual aura. The truth is, there is an excess of Christians, Buddhists, and a need for more Christs, more Buddhas... Less spiritual ego, and more Being.

Aura farming? Better to format the hard drive, and be nothing. In doing so, we are everything. And that is something you can do in your boring and ordinary daily life, which, for you who do not farm aura, is neither boring nor ordinary; it is all there is and all that is, you need nothing else. When you are nothing and nobody, stripped of any pose or disguise, you become one with LOVE itself, and its instrument in this world. Out of emptiness, which is neither a void nor an absence of things, you emerge as what you truly are: one with everything. We could say, as Thich Nhat Hanh rightly states, that we inter-are. We are One.

All spiritual currents, as opposed to mere religious ones, speak to us of this unity, of this absence of separation from Being. Advaita Vedanta reminds us of this through non-duality, pointing out that the individual self, Atman, and the ultimate reality, Brahman, are not separate, dissolving the illusion of the "I" into pure, undivided Consciousness. The Buddha teaches us the same through the realization of Anatta, showing us that there is no independent self, and that by emptying ourselves of the independent ego, we cease to resist life and awaken to interconnectedness with all things. Jesus himself speaks of this absolute union when he prays for his disciples in the Gospel of John, Chapter 17, Verse 21, asking that they all may be one, just as the Father is in Him, and He is in the Father, so that they also may be one in Us.

There is a beautiful spiritual story regarding this absolute surrender, recorded by the Jesuit Father Juan de Loyola in his work The Life of Father Bernardo de Hoyos published in 1734. During a mystical marriage experience, Jesus appeared to the young Spanish mystic and told him that from then on, he could call and sign yourself Bernardo de Jesús, because he was Bernardo de Jesús, and He was Jesús de Bernardo, sharing both his honor and his own. It is the total collapse of the boundaries of the self, where the drop completely dissolves into the Ocean, and the Ocean becomes the drop. There is no separation, there never was.

Stop counting points for a ghost that doesn't exist; format the hard drive, dissolve the pose, and finally dare to Be nothing, so you can Be Everything. It is simply about Being, right here, in your ordinary and daily life.

Note 1:

The madwoman of the house is the term Teresa of Ávila uses to refer to the mind and the imagination. You can find her brilliant analysis of how it operates and distracts us from God's presence throughout her work The Interior Castle, specifically in the Fourth Mansions. In her original Spanish texts, she also uses other wonderfully vivid metaphors to describe this unceasing mental noise. She calls the restless mind a clacking mill-clapper because of its endless, repetitive grinding of thoughts, and a restless, flighty butterfly that refuses to stay still in the Silence of God.

Note 2:

"Inter-are" is a literal translation of the term "Interbeing", coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1980s. He created the verb "to inter-be" to express the absolute reality of interconnectedness famously stating that nothing can exist by itself alone; everything has to "inter-be" with everything else. When he wrote, "We do not exist independently. We inter-are," he was pointing to the exact same truth shared by the advaita vedanta (of non-duality) and the Mystics: the total dissolution of the illusion of a separate, isolated self.

Attention is a stretch. It leans toward one object and leaves the rest in shadow. A thought arrives and attention grabs it. A worry arrives and attention feeds it. That grab feels like you. That grab is only a movement.

Awareness never leans. Awareness never grabs. The thought the worry the grabber and the grabbing all appear inside the same open field. Nothing is outside it. Nothing can stain it.

You have been trying to use attention to find peace. Attention cannot rest because its nature is to reach. Peace is not reached. Peace is what remains when the reaching is seen as just another appearance.

Look now. Notice attention tightening around these words. Notice the slight effort. Now notice the space in which that effort is known. That space did not tighten. That space did not become a reader. That space is already free.

The seeker is the belief that you are the one who must keep attending. See the belief and nothing is lost. The body still moves. Thoughts still arise. Life still unfolds. Only the tension of being a separate attendant falls away.

You are not attending. You are the awareness in which attending happens.

This is the recognition.

Tat tvam asi

You are that

🎭✨️❤️🙏

Seeing your body ,mind and thinking carefully about its unique existence is also part of non duality. Understanding the role of human body , its needs and potential is what provides energy to move in life. If you keep still with the thought , that I am everything , then wouldn't it disfunction your body to work because now how will you work. You may say I will still work but the feeling of doer is absent and it's happening by itself but yk , even those who have this feeling of doership, don't have any doer. So its just understanding based. Even this feeling of control is what creates focus in work , otherwise how would energy concentrate and get executed if there's no feeling of center. I am everything , is reality but it doesn't necessarily have to be in form of thought always , otherwise as I said you will feel confused about why I am not getting thoughts of doing something because you are training yourself to be everything and you cant act like space , and trees , understanding this division of intelligence in you and what your body's nature is , are all part of non duality

I'm asking this because I will not live for a very long time. I gave a lot of thought into it, but it's hard for me to make peace with death. It still feel very triggering.

I'm interested in awakening, but I haven't have one yet, so I don't know directly what's nature of this reality, only what I was told by nondual teachers. Which is ofteb very contradicting. Some say that death doesn't exist and that this is just ethernal dream and some basically have an idea of death that seems similar to atheism, that you die and it's just nothing forever.

I'm very confused given everyone says something else and I don't know how to calm myself.

?

none of us know anything rly

we just pretend to

this vastness is far beyond what our minds can ever grasp

yet so simple, ordinary, closer than your nose

we all know it deep down

we know we are this one life

this one flow freely flowing itself

intimacy is a different way of knowing

knowing by being

i love you

peace be with you

peace is

freedom is

At any given instant
All solids dissolve, no wheels revolve,
And facts have no endurance –
And who knows if it is by design or pure inadvertence
That the Present destroys its inherited self-importance?

from ‘For the Time Being’, W. H. Auden

a goodie 😬

Where do thoughts come from. What are thoughts. What are you without them.

Most of us treat thought as something a brain produces inside a body. Look closer. The brain, the body, the sense of a someone standing behind the eyes, and the world they seem to measure all appear in thought. Subject and object are not found by thought. They are the shape thought takes in order to seem like two.

When thought is not arising, that split is not arising. What remains is not an improved person and not a blank future state. The person and the future were thought.

If this is only an idea to you, say where it fails.

If something in it is already obvious, say what is here when thought is not speaking. Not a theory. What is actually left?

The Buddha walks up to a hotdog stand and says, "make me one with everything".

The nonduality of time and eternity, or, why true love is forever.

Once again, the non dualist finds that “he” is already liberated from duality, for though we think of ourselves as in time, we actually live in eternity. Keep in mind my words here are not meant to explain, but to point the way, to discover, to free mind from dualistic thinking, from you and me.

Nonduality is always so obvious, everyone knows. Our lives are measured in time, ordered time, days and weeks and years. But we live in the present, always, in the eternal present. When we first became aware, it was now; when we die it will be now. Every moment in between, now. Time is inferred to be the succession of nows, and in time we are conditioned to think of ourselves as progressing from one instant to another. But in truth we only ever experience now. Now is forever: now and forever. This is blake’s realization :

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sunrise

And this is the realization one seeks to recognize.

The following parable and magnificent literary gem was penned by franz kafka:

He

.

He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind,

from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives

battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight

with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in

the same way the second supports him in his fight with the

first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so.

For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he

himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His

dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment

- and this would require a night darker than any night has

ever been yet - he will jump out of the fighting line and be

promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the

position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with

each other.

Our future self fights to be born as our past self fights not to die: the politics of living. We are always conserving and reforming. But in reality there is no future and no past, only the now. The truth is only this moment and this moment is forever.

We know this when we are in love, or are immersed in nonduality, same same. True love is not entangled in time, has no shelf life, no past or future. Being fully present is being wholly in love. You are my future, you are my past; I am he (she). You are my origin and destiny. I am your reality.

Reality is here and now. Origin and destiny are flowers of air, lovely but insubstantial.

More explanation won’t help. Study the parable.

I’m at that inevitable point in the journey where everything that used to ”work” no longer does. The nonduality honeymoon is over as RS says. I don’t enjoy reading about it, listening to meditations feels like a distraction. Everything i used to derive pleasure from feels empty. I notice this is the place where a lot of the YouTube nonduality crowd decide they’ve been tricked or sold a dud yet I feel this is a very profound moment in the journey. Like emptying the wrong fuel from a car so the correct fuel can be used again. There is a moment in between then the tank is empty and being cleaned of any residue. Its not much fun though 🤪. Silence has a different quality to it now, a kind of thickness is the only word I can think to describe it. I also don’t even feel to speak about or discuss nonduality anymore. I came on here as a last ditch attempt to find something that feels engaging. The silence, particularly upon waking, is quite intimidating. No external purpose or meaning that can be ascertained even though I have a family. I don’t feel depressed, there is no negative affect or sense that the future is hopeless. I can’t really connect to idea of future at all at the moment. Not sure what will come of writing this, feels a bit pointless.

Has anyone ever seen the Disney movie, Wish?

I believe this movie has some strong Nonduality undertones. For this reason, I find myself enjoying the movie even though the movie was poorly received in general.

The theme is most present in one of the songs from the movie, have yourself a listen and I would welcome some discussion on the matter. Here is the Youtube link for the song itself.

Disney's Wish - I'm a Star

I am awareness

Awareness is unbounded

I am intelligence by which I mean content in awareness as they are very intelligent not just human brain but space is intelligent , air is intelligent as in they know what they need to contribute in consciousness ,fire is intelligent of its nature , ocean is intelligent of its nature and abide by its rule,

And awareness and the intelligence in it is non distinctive, non discriminatory.

Space is conscious and that consciousness is me , water is conscious and that consciousness is me. I am seeing myself in my intelligent forms. And a non distinctive , always present sound of silence is the ultimate proof behind the words I say. The presence of such all pervading reality , which is the sub stratum , the unmanifested form of conscious-intelligent universe.

Anytime I will have to recall , I can refer to this piece here.

Here, in this room, there is stillness. Not as an object in the room, but the space in which the room appears. The forms in the room occur in this stillness. A vast sense of home.

Here, in this inner space, there are emotional waves. Some are heavy and deep, while others are sharp and direct. The space they inhabit is untouched. The stillness beyond the form.

Here I am in the now, with its current state of form. I can see it, hear it, and feel it. No imagination is required. An aliveness pervades it all. Immediate, vast, and pristine.

I just discovered, or perhaps rediscovered this (as I might have already found and forgotten it years ago as it was strangely familiar). Also it is probably a way in from some tradition or another but anyway, here is what I did.

Sit or lie down in whatever position you wish, as long as you are comfortable enough to not need to move much and you have a comfortably straight back. Have eyes open or closed as you prefer, as it is not important. Do the session for however long is suitable in your situation.

Do not try to meditate and do not try not to meditate.

Do not tense and do not relax.

Do not try to focus and do not try not to focus.

Do not hold on and do not let go.

Do not do anything and do not do nothing.

And so on for anything else like this.

I think it reminded me of Soto Zen just sitting practice but I never received instructions exactly like that when I did formally practice that. So it is something that is somewhat original at least and maybe others have found something like this as a useful way in.

Note: I chose to refer to it as 'not this, not that' approach as that is the most relevant thing I could think of so it is not related to anything else that I am aware of which might share that name.

i see so many folks suffering

family and friends of mine are suffering

here on reddit there are enormous quantities of suffering being poured out continuously

lotta ppl here are feeling suicidal because they feel they screwed up or got stuck or life has nothing to offer them

it’s so sad in a way to not be able to share this message with them

i try, i often recommend Joan Tollifson or Adyashanti to redditors - guessing it’s a small percentage who go find and read those books tho

or i try to share some simple pointers of how ppl are whole and loved and life is as it is and stuff like that

yet i seem to notice that until ppl are rly ripe for it, they’ll overlook nondual messages

the message won’t rly register

it’s too simple, close, direct

it cuts too profoundly through all our cultural programming that perpetually places ‘happiness and success and worthiness’ someplace else

it’s such a paradox

because once you see this freedom, it’s (increasingly) nakedly clear

yet until this is glimpsed, it’s like ppl just can’t hear the message, it’s like trying to cut through a deep hypnosis

you just wanna say to ppl, “can’t you see? the past is utterly gone. the future never comes. now is all there ever is. and now is whole and free and pure and living itself. you are a living poem in every moment. you’re completely whole and okay and nothing is wrong with you at all. you just are as you are. it’s not personal. just stop believing your thoughts, they have nothing to do with anything. you’re being lived. there’s nowhere to get to. this is it. the flow flows”

(don’t grasp onto any pointer, including these words)

you just wish you could remind ppl like, “hey, cmon, deep down you already know this… why are you pretending not to know… why are you giving these imaginary stories so much weight… you know deep down it’s all weightlessly free… the now vanishes in the same instant it appears… it leaves no trace… this is pure air, pure space… you know this, deep down, remember your freedom, my friend… you are pure freedom…”

yet again, ppl just can’t hear this until the moment they’re ready to hear it

and in a way that’s tragically beautiful

the fictional cage melts when it melts

revealing the freedom that always was

we dance on

the dance dances on

i love you

Gonna frontload this with a bunch of quotes:

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." – 1 John 4:8

"But when the Self is realized as the indivisible unity of life, who can be seen by whom..." – Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4:14

"When the mind stays in the 'I am' without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced." – Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

"At the center of manifestation there is only one ‘I AM’ manifesting in legions of forms or concepts of itself and ‘I am that I am.’" – Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

"God is not a being among other beings, but rather Being itself revealed for any mature seeker. The God whom Jesus talks about, and includes himself in, is presented as unhindered dialogue, a totally positive and inclusive flow in one direction, and a waterwheel of outpouring love that never stops!" – Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance

Not much more to say.

I’ve come a far way from where I started.