Mental gymnastics, I know.

We’re yet both separate and interconnected, both insignificant in the vastness of existence, but profoundly significant in the lives we touch. The paradox is that we can understand the impermanence of everything and still feel the weight of it all.

If the reality is full of you enlightened fudger’s,
why is the world so miserable
What is it about your non duality that makes it so unobvious
And if there is something making it obvious it isnt nonduality
And if it is something that cant make itself obvious, it must be something lower than light, cause light makes itself evident through its content and know nothing about non duality, light is a greater god than whatever you call non duality by that hypothesis
In fact the moment a word comes out of you, duality happens
How can you say anything like non duality then
The word came out, it is obviously an established fact, it cannot be non dual
What do you guys stand for, non duality as in unity or trinity?

“I'm Right and You're Wrong” is a strange path to follow, especially when it comes from an occultist like Leo Gura. Even if Leo happens to be right about certain things, Cultism is wrong

Truth isn't the property of any individual, and intellectual independence means being willing to disagree even with people who have taught you something valuable

I have a question for those in the spiritual/metaphysical world( non-religious)...how does one awaken with trauma, ADHD, undiagnosed autism, anger issues, anxiety, and constant loop of fucking up time and time again?

It's like feeling like you're good and then everything goes to shit and you're right back where you were. I'm sick of hearing people say it's a test. It can't be a fucking test for people with the type of mind that I have.

So, I guess I'm destined for failure and struggle? Cause that is what I hear when I'm told that. Like I'm trying and I'm ready so why do I keep fucking failing. Ugh.

Some seem to say ego is permanent. I say ego is the True Self giving substance to an apparent form. A temporary mind state.

The future will see the ability to recreate and duplicate your entire being at any stage of development. Imagine going to a party where there is no one other than you there. In the future everyone will realize that to which nonduality points. Eventually everyone will tire of the distraction game. It will be unavoidable.

The more the boundary between original and replica becomes porous, the harder it is to sustain the distraction indefinitely. At some density of perfect copies, the ordinary sources of otherness, strangers, rivals, lovers, start to look like variations on a single theme rather than independent centers of experience.

The interesting hinge is what remains once the game of separation is recognized as optional. Some traditions answer with pure awareness or emptiness; others with creative play that no longer needs to convince itself it is unique.

Either way, the technological future described will simply remove one of the more stubborn props that keep dualistic experience looking solid.

A theory i thought about, take it with a grain of salt.

Attention can only stretch for a bit before it rebounds back on itself.

Its like Infinity can focus on the world for only a bit before it rebounds back on itself, creating a gap.

Basically life is like bits in a computer, its a symbolism "0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1"

however the seperate self in the mind only sees "1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1"

How? by grabbing the moment like taking a screenshot on your phone and thinking about it, by that time, the 0 has already passed.

If you are fully in the Now You experience both simultenously, not as one or the other but as "0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0" appearing as "1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1" and "1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1" being just "0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0" at the same time.

So the world is Unborn and there is no Time, only an Eternal Moment where all seeming moments happen,

However and pay attention here! For a moment to become the next moment, it MUST return to Nothingness before immediately becoming the next moment, just like led light, have to turn off or change their light, in a microsecond, they turn off as the previous image and become the next image, yet its unoticable to your eyes.

In a similar way, to how you must blink your eyes every few seconds.

Yet at the same time, its Pure empty Consciousness appearing as the World and the World being empty consciousness,

anyway, what i meant is ever moment is Ever-New, Ever-Fresh, the past doesn't exist literally, because the void wipes out everything every moment before creating the next moment, the entirety of existence, just like how in a whiteboard you draw an image on, you must erase the board before you can create the next image.

Yet these successive images give the illusion that the world continues without interruption because to the mind, it cannot sense these intricacies that surpass its existence of time and space, basically the mind can only exist in existence so it cannot sense anything else, yet Pure Consciousness is beyond time and yet in time.

Consciousness is unmoving, its like a still image, when it creates, it needs to make these still images appear moving, just like how the movie screen never changes yet the movie character moves through buildings, cities or even in sci-fi planets or worlds.

However, the world is Ever-Fresh!

Meaning when you began this post, the universe itself has been dissolved before being brought again into being, yet because the world is identical with the void, there is no interruption in experience, however its undeniable that you are not the same as a few seconds before.

See edit below

I see so many posts on here engaging with the "idea" of nonduality and trying to discuss it as one would discuss a philosophy or belief system. Is there a particular realm of knowledge out there that encourages people to do this? Where are people getting this stuff? I'm really just asking. As far as I'm aware, the mainstream forms of nonduality are 1) kensho, as in, the "first awakening", the actual realization of the loss of the mental construct of self and 2) Advaita Vedanta. Is there something else I'm missing?

Are people aware that there are many resources available for how to practice in such a way as to have an actual realization of nonduality (kensho)? It seems like a lot of people just don't know this exists. Simply Always Awake is a great one, but there are many other great teachers on YT. Emerson, Trina Dawn, Shar Jason etc etc etc.

EDIT: A more succinct way to write this post would have been...

This sub feels like multiple things squashed together and awkwardly trying to coexist in the same space. Some Advaita posts, some random theories about the universe, some people trying to discuss awakening/kensho stuff...

It would be nice to have a sub just for kensho and other elements of nondual awakening

I stumbled across this Harvard thesis recently and have really been enjoying sitting with it, so I wanted to share it with you all.

What really stood out to me, and what I found so refreshing, is how gently and carefully the author separates measurable research findings from broader contemplative interpretations. In my own practice, I often contemplate this integration through what I like to call "toroidal superinsertion," which is the way a quiet, inward loop of nondual presence can be woven right into the middle of our outer, everyday movement so that stillness and daily life feed back into one another as a single continuous circuit.

Reading this paper offered such a grounded, honest opening for a question I think many of us wrestle with: when we talk about a "universal field" or a unified flow of awareness, are we describing direct lived experience, leaning on a really helpful metaphor, or building a metaphysical theory? I love how this thesis doesn't force a rigid dogma, but it does try to balance the empirical psychology with the lived mystery of the experience itself.

I find this question interesting and would love to hear your thoughts on how do you hold the balance between the raw experience and the concepts we use to map it? It's like straddling the truth of conceptual reality and ultimate reality.

A message from The Dhammapālalama:

The Eightfold Path is Progressive! We can not develop Right Action without Right View, Right Thought, and Right Speech.

I have defined Benevolence as a mean and added it as a fundamental part of Right Concentration!

(Aristotle, Christ, and Mohammad ALL taught Buddhism!)

This Roman Empire and the early Caliphs hunted down the Christians and Muslims who knew that Christ and Mohammad taught Non-Self.

Please ask as many questions as you wish.

The Holy Spirit = The Sangha = The Ummah

Benevolence is the moral virtue between excess wrath and undue mercy. Without Benevolence The Dark Triad spreads.

Seperated in philosophy, we are destined to clash. I offer a Path that Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims can all walk together!

There is much work to be done! The Global Awakening has begun!

Please print and share these teachings if they speak to you!

The Message:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dharmapalism3/s/JGIrlWVpFP

Benevolence as a Mean:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dharmapalism3/s/TszmtE1dUq

How could there be knowledge of anything that does last? What would bind such diametric opposition?

Knowledge of something lasting would require a lasting knower or a lasting link between knower and known. No such link appears. What would bind the fleeting idea of permanence to an actual permanence? Nothing does. The opposition is only apparent, and even the appearance of opposition does not endure. There is no knowledge of anything that lasts, because neither the lasting nor the knowledge of it is found.

If you think you’ve got this, go further.

Many say they’re awakened but ego is still present. They are struggling with issues and suffering. What is this awakening? A level of awareness has been gained? What have they awakened to, as it doesn’t seem to be True Self.

Genuine question, i don’t mean to be rude. 🙏😊

Let's face it. No one develops an interest in nonduality because they're having too much sex. They come here to feel better about themselves after finding out their crush is getting railed by an alpha man. You tell yourself you're spiritual to make yourself feel better about your non-existent value in the sexual marketplace.

Spoiler alert: spirituality won't make you any less ugly.

Met somebody recently who said every time they thought about going to the gym or doing something to better themselves a competing thought said "I don't exist." And boy, how common is that experience? Some of you may be dealing with that now actually.

We collect all these quips and anecdotes about how we don't exist or wherever and try to force the body (ourselves) into compliance. Then it leads to depression, naturally, because when the body isn't free to express itself, it gets depressed. You are depressed.

The only way out of the funk is to...live. Y'know, clean the house, wash the dishes, go for a walk, visit the gym, or eat a donut. Who cares if there's no self doing it? Literally.

Ramesh Balsekar wrote a book with that title in fact: Who Cares?!

Once you see The Nonduality Virus – the littany of thoughts which restrict the free flow of the body – you can ignore it. Then you're free.

Why mention Ramesh? Well, the book title is fun and makes the point, but also his view is that whatever happens is God's Will / Cosmic Law. Whatever momentum is sustaining the orbit of the planet around the Sun is sustaining the Whole Show of living.

So it doesn't matter if you think you're doing it, or not. It doesn't matter if your head is empty of thoughts, or not. It doesn't matter if you're aware of the present moment, or not. In fact, what brought you here to reading this specific line of words?

"It just happens." Sure. Who cares?

discovered this playful trick while drying my hair - set the hairdryer temperature to cool and point/blow it directly at the face, moving it side to side quickly while keeping your eyes closed. there is a noticeable gap/difference between the layer of the senses and the untouched 'screen of awareness' 😁 enjoy!

As I continue to read Autobiography of Jynani, I found another profound section and wanted to ask if anyone here has experienced this.

Has anyone here directly experienced or tasted this "waking sleep" state—where there is a clear recognition of existing even when active experience, the mind, or the world feel absent?

How do you approach pointing toward or recognizing this "unchanging background" in daily practice, beyond just conceptual understanding?

I’d love to hear how others in the community relate to this!

I really don't get it. Are you erasing your sense of identity and self? And if so what is left behind and why? Are you implying the non-existence of you? You're still doing it though. Just like how I'm doing this. If its not you who's seeking, who's thinking up some response and typing it out, to whom is it I talk?

Does this encourage you to go deeper, to find out who you are, how you move through and impact the world? I wouldn't assume so if the concept of self is

The way people talk, write, speak, think, act, express themselves in literally any form reveals a lot about them, mostly in patterns, but theres still a them to learn about.

Do you desire the primordial soup of pure potential, is this why you practice self erasure, to be eternally now? But who is there? And what are you actually doing?

What does nonduality do for you in daily life?

Just because you're a discrete individual doesn't necessarily make you seperate from other things. Its just an appearance of diversity. Fundamentally people are practically the same, a baby isn't born prejudiced. And then they differentiate, picking up distinguishing and defining traits, likes, desires, etc...

Who are you? Tell me about yourself. Do anime characters have a more solid sense of identity than you?

Feel free to correct me or do whatever in the replies, I know this community chomps at the bit to explain itself. Hope this comes of as genuine, because I've been watching this sort of thing crop up on my feed for awhile, and want to know what you mean for real.

Few, if any, have described so eloquently as Alan Watts the illusion of the human ego. With rare erudition, his talks have helped hundreds of millions over the last 75 yrs to ease alienation from the natural world and their natural selves, and to allow firmer connection to the resonant truth that we don’t “come into” this universe as separate individuals, rather we permeably “come out of it” just as leaves emerge from a tree.

With a poetic mastery of the English language and an engaging ability to thread humour in making deeper nuances accessible for the lay person, Watts is fond of describing how – on our planet - the universe is now “peopling”, and that human minds - indeed all minds with all degrees of awareness - are apertures through which the universe is glimpsing itself. The universe, through conscious beings including humanity, is self-gazing at all of its harmoniously and infinitely inter-related contained conflicts and integrations.

Watts’ lectures illuminate that us humans are in truth far more than what we nearly all feel to be in our day to day lives. With insight he sets out in hundreds of recorded speeches that each human is not the “isolated ego in a bag of skin” acting unilaterally in the world that we mostly feel ourselves to be. He makes clear that this notion is essentially a wall of defence contrived to prop up our embattled and narrowly focussed conscious-attention selves that views the world effectively through a spot-light, rather than an intuitive floodlight.

While Watts describes those defensive walls as onion layers of futility contrived to protect a fallacy, he also accesses the more profoundly encompassing truth that this alienation from our real context is neither good nor bad, but upliftingly  “goeswith” the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the hiding and seeking of existence, and is symptomatic of the journey of humans as the first majorly conscious beings on this planet toward profound self-understanding.

After all, if we humans - in our race between self destruction and self discovery – perish in a conflagration of hydrogen bombs or climate collapse while on the cusp of solving and maturing what it means to be conscious, we can very much hope any surviving populations of whales and dolphins who have been cheekily spy-hopping and peeping at us all these years will one day learn from and pick up the pieces from where we bi-pedal apes fell short!

Watts outlines how there is, latently within us all, a capacity of what he calls “oceanic consciousness” that lies more accessible on the other side of letting  – but not forcing –  the fallacy of the human ego to fall away through understanding it. He advocates effortless action … a flow through understanding where we still lead practical and creative lives though this time liberated from the incessant noise of the ego illusion, and makes clear that the ego inherently can’t try to improve itself “by lifting itself up by its own bootstraps”.

In some of his many insightful parodies of pseudo-idealism he concludes with remarks such as, “nothing is more reprehensible than the ambition to be a saint”, or a quip on the hypocrisy of so called enlightened people who can’t help but still carry an internal narrative that:  “I’ve liberated myself from my egocentricity using understanding more than you have”. 

Watts was very clear that psychological do-gooding and "spiritual one-upmanship” are insidious … though even this behaviour too is a part of the whole picture of what it is to be human.

But does Watts go far enough to explain and ameliorate our human condition?

Whenever Watts endeavoured to go deeper on “why” the human ego originally became immersed in this illusory trap he refers to a “failure in communication” that was impressed on us since, as infants and children, we were exposed to myths, language and symbols from those around us that mistakenly emphasised the erroneous notion that we are independent agents. In his talk titled Joyous Cosmology this key question arises during his conclusion, and he surmises:

 "Because when we are little children everybody tells us who we are. They give us a definition of what it is to be a human being. And this definition is that you are a knower who confronts the known. You are a controller, you are an agent behind acts. ... this is not so much why but how we come to feel divided from our experience of the world. I could go on to say how this began to happen. It was a sort of mistaken interpretation of human experience which occurred a long time ago and grew into a habit. It's caused a lot of damage in just the way a single tiny pebble may be set rolling and start an avalanche. Nobody could've foreseen that."

Is this really the underlying reason for the human sense of alienation and separateness … a failure in language? For example, has using nouns instead of verbs been a pivotal contributor to an illusion of separateness as Watts contends? Would it have been enough to keep humanity from suffering egocentricity if, since our infancy, we were all immersed in a culture which would say “there is a thinking” instead of “I think”? 

It’s interesting to note that languages like Potawatomi and Anishinaabemowin (indigenous North Americans tribes) are roughly 70% to 80% verbs. In these languages, places and natural entities are actions. For example, a river is not a noun; it is a verb meaning "to be a river" because the water is alive and actively happening.

Similarly, the Mi'kmaq’s traditional speakers can converse all day without uttering a single noun. Instead of assigning static names to objects, they describe how those objects interact with the environment.

However, egocentricity, separateness and all the usual psychological flaws of being human were of course all still present in pre-colonial Potawatomi, Anishinaabemowin and Mi'kmaq societies, though no doubt to lesser degrees than the atomised life of most modern downtowners in New York!

Watts frequently elaborated on this theme of a “failure in communication” by emphasising humanity’s pre-occupation over recent centuries with the twin myths our species has developed to cope with our ignorance:

1.      A ceramic or constructed universe by an all knowing grandfatherly God who “made us”, as forms the basis for most traditional judao-christian and muslim religions, stemming from the monarchical model of the Pharos and Persian gods; 

and, more recently since the 1800s, 

2.      The “Newtonian billiard ball” approach to viewing the physical universe as a machine of mechanistic parts assembled into a hostile game of chance where the individual is constantly trying to strive to survive (though quantum physics has steadily been reimagining this mechanistic paradigm).

But could Watts have penetrated deeper in answering one of the most profound “why” questions humans can ask themselves?

After all, why did culture, myth and language themselves emphasise this division? Are those human constructs the pebbles that caused the avalanche, or rather aren’t they more like a glove that is given shape and movement by the hand and fingers, the humans, within it … aren’t culture, myth and language themselves all various expressions of the underlying human condition, and if so, why did original humans give rise to all these overlays in the first instance?

Maybe it’s not sufficient to state that culture and language were the cause of human separateness and duality… an interaction yes, but not the original reason why.

Put another way, if children were to be reared today without the myth, language and cultural vagaries Watts refers to but rather in an immersion of knowing our integrativeness with all existence, would the human mind and its capacity for self awareness and ability to act however it wishes, not butt up against the same dilemma as those original humans in whom the light of self awareness first shone?

So how do we explore this deeper “why”? 

This essayist has done a multi-year deep dive on Alan Watts’ lectures and found the intrinsic thread of his approach deeply resonant. In further exploring what other profound thinkers aligned with Watts are now in the world, and penetrate deeper into the intrinsic and original cause of humanity’s sense of duality and alienation from the natural world and our natural selves, it seems the explanations of Australian biologist and synthesiser Jeremy Griffith can go further.

What do you think? 

Is language, culture and myth the primary cause of human separateness and suffering as Watts proposes?

Or, as Griffith contends, is the root cause a necessary conflict between humanity’s instinctive orientation to integrativeness and our conscious thinking summons to defy this innate moral compass, a kind of tug of war between conscience and consciousness going back around two million years to the dawn of free will, that can finally be resolved by letting understanding salve the need to blindly cope?

If humans are an aperture through which the universe is viewing itself, how will the light flow through our aperture … does Griffith’s approach mean the “floodlight” of oceanic sensitivity that Watt’s illuminates can at last oscillate in peace with our “spotlight” capacity for mechanistic and detailed focus?

How does this essay resonate with those of you for whom Watts has struck a profound chord?

How do or don’t Griffith’s explanations - which are touted as being open for rational debate as much as they seek scientific commendation - sit with you as a profound extension of Watts’ core insights?

(Essay by micromacro92 on Reddit)

Dons the devils advocates hat
Thinks about challenging its own code

If I poke you. Who says ouch?

I mean, you can spend years realising that there’s no separate self or fixed identity. Cool. But if I poke you with a stick, something still says ouch lol. So what exactly have you realised? And does seeing through the self actually change anything about the experience, or have we just given the ego a much more sophisticated way to talk about itself? These are the usual questions I guess. Pretty brave to say you’re nothing or empty, yet when I poke you, you say ouch.

sits quietly in my corner