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[Music] on this channel we spent a lot of time talking about awakening using the word awakening and in fact in pop culture the word woke now is uh is becoming trendy of course it doesn't mean what i mean when i say awakening but what do i mean when i say awakening so i thought i would do an episode just exclusively purely describing the subjective phenomenology of awakening what does it feel like to awaken never mind what it means metaphysically what it means for your life what the consequences are forget all that just what does it actually feel like and i remember when i first started learning about enlightenment and awakening i was also very curious about this and i didn't get very good descriptions that i found satisfying from other teachers and gurus a lot of them are kind of quiet about it or um they tell their personal story of awakening but it doesn't really do a good job of describing it phenomenologically so i'm going to attempt that here today now this is tricky to do by its very nature because it's an ineffable experience and really it goes beyond even the notion of an experience at all and also because there are many different types and depths of awakening that's one of the things you will realize if you do a lot of this work is that there's so much depth and also different types and facets to awakening in fact i released an episode in the past called the many facets of awakening which talk about the dozens of different facets that exist to awakening i've had hundreds of awakenings and many of them oddly enough have had different flavors and hit upon different facets now that doesn't mean that these awakenings all contradict each other actually the opposite is the case they beautifully synergize together shedding light on more and more of absolute truth but from different angles sometimes you get a glimpse of one facet then another facet then two or three facets together and then your mind is stitching these facets together and then in the future as you have your awakenings more of the fastest get illuminated simultaneously for your for your pleasure or horror depending on how you look at it some of these facets can be quite challenging to integrate but once you integrate them then that opens up the possibility of stitching them and connecting them with other facets that you've yet to discover and then eventually you can see the entire thing with all of its facets and that's when it gets really profound and then there's different degrees of depth to each facet and so forth but anyways it gets complicated so what i'll be describing here is how i personally experience awakenings there's a lot of variability amongst how people experience awakening and how various kinds of mystical spiritual experiences there is an enormous amount of variability and people use words like awakening and enlightenment and mysticism in in different ways for different states of consciousness so be careful about that too sometimes when people are talking about a spiritual experience or state and they use the same word they may not be talking about the same thing so keep that in mind too so just because what i'll be describing here is how it feels for me doesn't mean that it will necessarily feel that way for you so be careful with letting this sort of shape and color your own experience of awakening you might have an awakening that's different from mine then you might wonder like well but this doesn't match up with what leo said and that just might be because you're different you have a different neurology different genetics different way of interpreting the world and so forth or maybe what you had was not really a proper awakening and it can be tricky to distinguish between those things also you have to be careful to distinguish between the awakening itself versus the ego's reactions to it and a lot of times these can get conflated so the awakening will happen that's one thing and then your ego mind can still be intact and it can still be struggling thinking fantasizing projecting reacting it can be in shock it can be happy it can be crying it can be dramatic it can be psychotic whatever is going on and those reactions are not the same thing as the awakening itself you see it gets a little tricky there too um how do you distinguish those two things and then also you have to distinguish between awakenings and other mystical phenomena that can occur you could have mystical visions you might see ghosts and aliens and dmt entities and angels and jesus and buddha and that might be all well and good but is that really awakening maybe it is but maybe it isn't see it's a little tricky so what i'm going to try to explain here is what i would call sort of a a pure and i wore that i use that word sort of loosely a pure awakening without a bunch of mystical visionary stuff which could or could not accompany an awakening so just because there's mystical visionary stuff doesn't mean that it's automatically not an awakening but also just because it that's there you know jesus shows up to you or something or you see an angel that also doesn't mean it is an awakening so what exactly is an awakening well let's clear this up i actually sort of kind of want to guide you through it a little bit from like a first person experience so you can sort of imagine it for yourself but also with the warning that anything you imagine awakening is it's not so everything that i share with you here it's it's all just going to be stories and fantasies it's not going to actually be awakening the the real awakening if you ever experience it will be something radically beyond whatever you imagine it to be but anyways let's give it a shot so um also the reason that i wanted to show this episode is because maybe this will clear up some misconceptions because a lot of times when spiritual teachers don't fill in the blanks and they kind of just leave things vague and ambiguous that sort of zed approach you know that very tacit zen style of spiritual teaching the problem with that is that the active mind fills in the gaps with a bunch of fantasies and [ __ ] so personally i think that it's very dangerous to give spiritual students ambiguous vague notions of what awakening is because their mind is not just going to sit around idly and accept this emptiness that the teacher has left in the student's mind the mind is going to fill it in with all sorts of projections assumptions fantasies and expectations which are probably going to be very deeply wrong more wrong than if the teacher actually colored in some of the details so here's me coloring in some of the details all right so imagine this you're just sitting there like you are right now you're just sitting there you're looking around the room it's an ordinary room colors sounds feelings in your body nothing changes in your visual field colors and objects remain the same as they always were so one of the misconceptions that people have about awakening is that they they ask sort of like well what is the visual content because we're very visual creatures what is the visual content of an awakening like what do you see or what do you not see in the sense that like do i stop seeing altogether does my vision disappear do objects disappear is there just literally an empty void of nothing and what i'm telling you is no nothing visually changes strictly speaking in a pure awakening the only thing that changes imagine like this imagine there is a dial like a master volume knob on a sound controller this is the consciousness dial this dial regulates how conscious you are right now for you for an ordinary person that dial is set to like a a three let's say if you're sleepy that dial is like at a one if you're dreaming in deep sleep that dial is maybe at a at a point two and if you're totally unconscious that dialogue says zero so the difficulty of explaining this to an ordinary person who's never experienced it is that for most people their experience of what this dial can do only ranges from zero to three it's never gone any higher than three maybe it's gone to a four like if you've meditated for a bit you can sit there you can kind of focus and you can be a little more conscious and maybe it cranks from a three to a four if you're very very clear minded and sober so really in a sense this dial controls your sobriety ordinarily we think that like this normal state that we're in this is just this is sobriety right well that's a sobriety level three but you can crank this master knob of consciousness and it starts to increase your sobriety to a four to a five to a six it goes up to eleven and then it goes up to a hundred and then it keeps spinning to a thousand and then it keeps spinning to a hundred thousand and you realize that this knob spins forever there's no limit to how sober and conscious you can become it just so happens you lived most of your life out of three and so have all your friends and all the people you know and so there's a point at which the knob gets cranked let's say to a thousand or beyond there's a there's almost a very distinct threshold that is crossed where you look at the room nothing has changed the colors are all the same the objects are all the same you look at your hands your body you look around the room and you realize oh my god i'm awake this is what it means to be awake it's just that that knob has gotten cranked up so much you become so awake you become so woke that it's terrifying it's frightening how awake you are you become so awake that you're beyond human levels of weakness you're so conscious you're impossibly conscious your mind cannot fathom how conscious you've become you've become so conscious it's surreal it is beyond what you would think is physically possible or scientifically possible and your initial reaction is going to be something like what the [ __ ] is this this is impossible what is happening to me it feels like something some alien force has taken over your mind and your body it feels unreal but at the same time it's the most real thing there is because this knob this is the knob you might also call it not just consciousness but reality itself the more this knob is cranked up the more real things get the more you see things for what they are so like right now when you're at a three and you're sitting here and you're looking at it at a coffee table to you it looks like a coffee table and that's just what it is when the knob gets cranked up to a thousand or to a hundred thousand that coffee table even though its colors and its shape doesn't change at all what you understand it to be completely changes you no longer see it as just a coffee table as a physical object in a physical room part of a physical universe made out of atoms and whatever else you believe about it that object almost becomes like an alien object and it's as though you're looking at that object for the first time and when you look at that object you you truly see it for what it really is for the first time and it feels like the reason it's called awakening is it feels like you've awoken from the dream called life you become so conscious it's as though you're able to pierce through the fabric of physical material reality just with your mind and you're able to comprehend its structure in its totality what it is now this is not a mental activity you're doing in the sense that you're sitting there thinking a bunch of thoughts the way that a scientist might if a scientist was thinking about some complex problem it's it's not a function of complexity it's a it's a function of well consciousness you become directly conscious of what things are unmediated by any kind of thinking process you just intuitively grasp objects in a highly multi-dimensional way and you instantly understand what they are what they really absolutely are this is more than just experience this is a heightening a sharpening of what experience is because your experience usually is at a level three consciousness and here it goes up to a thousand or a hundred thousand so this awakening is a pure lucidity that's a good word for it lucidity we're just cranking up how lucid you are it's an impossible level of consciousness it's a it's a level of consciousness that can't be imagined when you're at a level three because that level three is what limits your imagination i could also describe it that it feels as though the air got sucked out of the room everything becomes just crystal clear and perfectly lucid it's like you're sitting in a vacuum looking at the room the room becomes crystalline luminous hollow empty a pure luminous void now the word void here is a little bit misleading because when i say the word void you might tend to think like the room disappears the colors disappear but they don't all the colors are there they're sharper than ever they're brighter than ever you recognize the self-luminous nature of consciousness and all objects what you consider matter gets recontextualized as your own consciousness and its luminosity becomes uh just blatantly apparent undeniable this absolute luminosity you realize that consciousness is self-knowing and self-illuminating physical objects that you look at start to feel and take on the flavor of a hologram or a mirage an illusion now don't get me wrong when i say a hologram or a mirage i don't mean that the objects become transparent like hologram in star wars they maintain all the same solidity and color and opacity that they had before your hand will not go through a coffee table it will hit the coffee table just like it did before so in that sense it's not a hologram but what i mean is that you realize that the physicality that you attribute to that coffee table is actually always was just a projection of your mind and that really that coffee table is not a solid object the way that you usually thought of it it is like a mirage it is a mirage held within consciousness it's a solid feeling mirage but what you also realize is that solidity itself is also just another feature or mirage within consciousness so even though your hand cannot go through a coffee table in this state that that that doesn't undermine the fact that it's a mirage everything feels more vivid and there's a hyper presence like you're ridiculously present you're so present it's scary you never knew this level of presence was possible and then what you notice this pure luminosity that i was talking about really what it does it gives way to divinity what you realize is divinity or spirit the reason they call it spirituality what is spirit spirit is what at a level three we ordinarily call matter or physical stuff physical objects so everything that you're seeing right now in this video if you're watching this this is all spirit the entire room that you're in look around you look at your body look at your hands all of this is spirit in fact there's nothing but spirit so what happens is that physicality and matter gets recontextualized as spirit or divinity why is it divinity why is it spirit this will puzzle many people who have not experienced this and i don't know if i can help to really explain it because spirit and divinity are the best terms for it literally it is spirit it is divinity so as it turns out what divinity is divinity is not some metaphor and it's not some stuff that some religious people made up because they were fundamentalists and dogmatic ideologues divinity is what happens when when the knob of consciousness gets cranked up to a thousand or a hundred thousand the more it gets cranked up the more you recognize that everything that's happening here is divine what does that really mean i'm struggling for words to to explain it um well what you realize is that experience the raw qualia of experience is absolute truth it actually never was an experience it just simply always was absolute truth and when you realize the absoluteness of raw experience it gets it gets recontextualized as something that used to be temporal from something that used to be temporal into something that is now eternal literally what you become conscious of is that this qualia the phenomenal experience that you're having right now this present moment of this room of that coffee table of your hands or whatever else you're looking at is happening in eternity it's not happening through time it's eternal it exists eternally in the mind of god and so what happens is that all of these colors and sounds and feelings that you usually experience and attribute to biological processes in a human creature organism all of that gets wiped away and you realize that actually all of this is the light of god it's god shining through itself to itself it's the mind of god self-illuminated and color and sound and all sensation the entire phenomenal manifold of your five senses gets recontextualized and you realize it for what it really is which is pure magic it's a causal there's no scientific cause behind it there's no cause and effect there's no chain of causation that led up to it there's no physical laws there's no evolution there's no history there's no mathematics there's no computer simulation it's pure a mechanical magic it's pure manifestation mind manifesting itself instantaneously the mind of god and then if you're if your knob gets cranked up a little bit deeper i mean a little bit higher and and your and your awareness goes from looking out at the room more inwards towards towards the the center of who you are the observer of this room what you realize then is you have the i am god awakening you realize that you are god so first you realize that the room is god and then when you turn that in towards yourself then you kind of ask yourself what am i in relation to the room you realize oh yes the room is god but the room is me and i am therefore god and and there's a very distinct couple of insights that you get here one is first of all you realize for the first time in your life that god is real you realize what god is instantly like within less than a millisecond you have a complete well i would say complete but you have uh you finally have a recognition that god exists not as a belief or a speculation or a philosophical postulate but god right here right now right before you you're face to face with god you have an instant comprehension and intuition that god is real and now you finally understand what the word god refers to so for your entire life people have been using the word god and you sort of understood what it means intellectually but you had no idea until this precise moment and some switch was flipped and right as that switch was flipped now finally you understand what the word god was pointing to that's a huge epiphany that's a life changer right there so that's your first time ever discovering that god is real but just because that switch was flipped doesn't mean that you yet understand that you are god that goes a little bit deeper that requires a little bit more consciousness and actually a little bit more um facing of yourself because there's a wall of denial between god and you that prevents you from accepting yourself as god so a lot of people can have a mystical experience of god as other something out there beyond but they'll never connect the dot between themselves and what that other is which means that they're not fully awake but if we crank the consciousness up some more and we also lower your defenses and denials that wall of denial then you realize and you turn inwards you you take that awakened consciousness and you turn inwards you realize oh of course i'm god not just a part of god see again people are so in denial about the fact that they are god that they might even then say oh yeah i'm a part of god sure maybe no that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is that you are the entire god the god not a subset of god not a part of god not a toenail of god the entire [ __ ] god and it's only when you fully embrace that do you really understand and when what god is what you are and only then when i say you're you're truly awake until you reach this point you're not fully awake and at this point it feels very much like the universe has awoken to itself for the first time in your experience you as the universe realize you are the entire universe and you always have been and that you were just dreaming that you were human and when that happens your reaction is probably something along the lines of if you're like me oh now i understand now i really understand what's going on see you had no clue what the universe was up to what the universe was what life was you had no clue what these things were until this moment only now do you understand does it all make sense all the pieces of life and existence finally fit together and now you finally understand everything that's been going on you finally see the game that was being played here the cosmic game that god was playing with itself dreaming itself into a human existence another thing that will accompany this is a universal sense of self self with a capital s now you tell yourself something along the lines of i am the universe you've become universal you've went from a human in the universe to the universe dreaming itself as a human you become cosmic i am cosmic i am the whole cosmos and you feel like the whole cosmos your body especially gets recontextualized as cosmic stuff not not a physical object but really cosmic metaphysical your body goes from being physical to metaphysical it's beyond physical and yet the colors don't change the shape of your body doesn't change you just realize that your body always was metaphysical and that physicality was just some [ __ ] you were imagining to fool yourself into thinking you're human also this may or may not happen to you but ideally it would your sense of scale should disappear so the idea that you're a small human inside of some larger universe this should disappear you should take on the scale of the entire universe or what you should realize that scale is relative there's no such thing as scale that means that when you look at your hands you should realize that the scale of your hands is exactly the same size as the entire milky way galaxy there's no difference between the milky way galaxy scale the scale of your hands and the scale of one of your hairs on one of your fingers like each each hair on my hand is an entire galaxy onto itself that's how conscious you become and if you become even more conscious beyond that you can actually zoom in to every uh hair on your hand and you can realize that it's infinite that means it goes on forever you can keep zooming into that hair forever and in there you will find more and more complexity and form just like if you were zooming out of the earth you know you would keep zooming out and you would see galaxies and star systems and nebula and supernovas and whatever else and you could keep zooming in out and out and out well you can keep zooming in forever too and it's when you realize you can zoom out forever you can zoom in forever that no matter how zoomed in or out you are you're always in the middle of everything that is everything that you are and therefore you are literally infinite and cosmic and that there's no scale to anything scale loses all sense of uh of proportion at this point because it's infinite in all directions another distinct epiphany and realization that comes with awakening is this a profound existential sense of i am-ness i am i am i am i am i am i exist absolutely i am existence itself i am for the first time in your life you realize the significance of i am and when you say i am you're not saying i am a human you're saying i am as existence itself you are all of existence this i am this is absolute it has no opposite and you realize that you can't not exist another thing that usually accompanies this is of course you transcend death this can be framed in two ways one thing one way you can frame it you could say i've died literally died and yet i'm still conscious you could frame it like that or you could frame it as death is imaginary and death is impossible because i am i've always been and i'll always be because i'm existence itself so both are just two sides of the same coin and you can experience them in both ways you can experience that as though you're dying that's kind of if you're if you're coming at it from the ego's perspective then it feels like the ego is dying or it has already died so that can be kind of shocking from the ego's point of view or if you are able to let go of the ego then you can kind of just realize that the ego was just some imaginary construct and it's not even appropriate to call it death because that's just some it's just literally just like a thought in your mind you just let that go and then you realize that you're the cosmic god mind and then as the cosmic god mind there's uh death is just another thought it's just it's it's just a figment of god's imagination there's no such thing as death there never was just a dream you have this surreal sense that your entire life was a dream and this is the most astounding thing ever because it feels like you've broken reality it feels like you've broken your mind you've gone so deep into your own mind that you've realized that the mind wasn't contained inside of a brain but rather that the brain was just a construct of mind and when you've realized that you've you've broken through the physical barriers that you thought were there your whole life it's as shocking as walking through a wall so imagine if you just tried to walk through a wall right now and it worked imagine how astounded you would be well what i'm describing here is as astounding if not more astounding than that when it's happening to you it's so surreal it seems so impossible that it strains your mind's credulity like sometimes critics will hear me talk about the stuff and say oh leo well you this is just stuff you experience because you want to believe it no no you don't understand how deep this goes this is so deep these realizations are so deep that you can't believe it you can't even imagine it you're in shock that it's happening to you and yet it is happening to you that's what's so shocking about it and also of course what accompanies all this is that it's so [ __ ] obvious you say to yourself of course this is the most obvious thing ever of course i'm the entire universe dreaming up my life of course it's so obvious it's just crystal clear there's no doubt whatsoever you're absolutely certain of it you're so certain and it's so obvious that you might start to laugh because it's it's it's like a joke that anybody could ever doubt this another aspect of the realization is that it's so radical and you'll probably be muttering to yourself as it's happening to you this is so goddamn radical like it's it's radical beyond any definition of radical there can't be anything more radical than this in reality another thought that will probably cross your mind is that this is not at all what i thought it was going to be like here i spent years and years reading about awakening and thinking about awakening and dreaming about awakening and fantasizing about being awake and now that it's actually happened to me it's nothing like i imagined not even close all that stuff that i thought awakening was it's all [ __ ] none of it was awakening this is the real awakening all of those were just stories and delusions and you you realize for the first time in your life what it truly means to say that the map is not the territory for the first time in your life you've realized the territory and it's completely different than you thought it was it's it's it's so far in the opposite direction of what you thought it was that you can't even imagine how you could have been so wrong imagine being so wrong about the nature of reality that you couldn't possibly be more wrong that's how wrong you are and you'll realize that and it'll shock you how wrong you were and all of your ideas about the buddha and jesus and all this stuff it'll shock you how wrong you were in a good way because it's even more amazing than you imagined it's impossibly amazing it's just it's literally impossible what's happening to you is impossible and yet it's happening to you and that's why you call it divine it's way too good to be true it's impossible that this is true it can't be true and yet it's absolutely true another thought that will probably cross your mind is there was never a self of course of course there was never a finite self of course there was never a human self that was born of course how could i have been so [ __ ] stupid to ever buy this ridiculous notion of a human self inside of a human body this is this is just idiotic i was such an idiot for believing there was no there was a self of course there's no self how could there be a self this is what you'll be telling yourself and then um after you're done with that you'll look around the room in your awaken state and you'll realize oh of course so this is what is meant by nothing this is nothing now i'm conscious of nothing and again you'll be shocked that nothing is not what you imagined it to be nothing is not a lack of color or sound or taste or sensation or objects nothing is the entire experience of life as you've always experienced it it's nothing life has gotten re-contextualized is absolutely nothing this is nothing and then you'll realize that it's also everything and then you'll realize that i am nothing and i am everything and that of course they're the same thing how could nothing and everything be different what would separate them and you'll realize that there are no boundaries being anything what is a boundary of course there's no boundaries and then you'll realize pure oneness since all the boundaries dissolve between everything you'll realize of course reality is just pure oneness and then everything will make sense oneness explains everything and then maybe you'll realize that since i'm everything i'm also the coffee table i'm the cup i'm the faucet i'm the refrigerator i'm the pencil lying on the table i'm the carpet i'm the chair i'm everything and then you'll realize maybe if you go a little deeper and you turn that awareness even more deeply into your own psyche you'll realize oh my god i'm also everyone not just everything i am my mother i am my father i am everybody who i've ever interacted with they are all my own mind they were all me this entire time all people are me you might also realize or become conscious that the past is imaginary you're imagining the past in the present it might also feel like every moment in your life has been perfectly engineered to lead up to this very point of awakening as though the very function of life and existence itself has been this moment of awakening and of course that's exactly what life is life is just a construct to allow god to awaken to itself so that time that you were a kid back in elementary school and uh your parents bought you an ice cream cone and you look that ice cream cone and then it fell to the ground and then you started crying you remember that time and you realize of course that was just a stepping stone to my awakening right now and everything makes sense at that point and then if you crank that uh that knob a little bit further you realize what you really are what god really is is infinity what is really going on what is reality really how did it get here infinity you are infinity pure infinite consciousness at this point you're overwhelmed with a sense of wholeness and completion you feel totally complete you feel totally at one with yourself you're completely satisfied a satisfaction beyond anything a human can imagine you're totally complete forever you are infinity you're everything you're everything that could possibly exist you're total you're complete you're absolute and this generates the deepest sense of peace that you can possibly imagine just a profound sense of tranquility hits you and you realize to yourself that this is the greatest thing ever there can't be anything greater in the universe than this and then you probably think to yourself this will change the whole world if only the whole world knew about this this changes everything you might also be tempted to go inwards and to kind of define what you really are like but what am i you still aren't clear about what you are because the ego mind is trying to put its finger on what it is what on what on what god is and it can't everything the ego points his finger at isn't it and so there's going to be this sort of confusion in your mind where it's like yeah i understand i understand that i'm god i understand that i'm nothing but what is nothing i want to define i want to grab it i want to encapsulate it i want to i want to well how can i latch onto this nothing and you realize of course that you can't it's undefinable literally infinity is undefinable ungraspable it can't grasp itself it's slippery and that slipperiness is it's very essence and that's why you struggled so so much to grasp it because you can't grasp it gra even god can't grasp itself it's a mystery onto itself and then you fully realize the mystery of what you are the mystery of infinity the mystery of god this is a profound existential mystery that leaves you in awe and wonder and yet you're absolutely conscious of its mystery that it is a mystery it's an eternal mystery unto itself that's just the nature of infinity you also realize that it's utter perfection it's absolutely perfect it's heaven you are in heaven at this point and you realize infinite beauty it's infinitely beautiful you are infinitely beautiful you realize for the first time in your life your own infinite beauty and your own perfection which melts away all of your self-judgments and hatreds and criticisms and lack of love for the first time in your life you appreciate how beautiful you are and you fully accept yourself and there you go that's what i would call a pure awakening now be careful here because what i've described is actually not a single awakening but a series of many awakenings that i've had kind of combined together so the chances that when you go on your next meditation retreat or you do your next psychedelic or whatever or you do some yoga the chances that you're going to reach this level of depth and breadth of awakening that i just described here is extremely low virtually zero in practice what's going to happen is that you're going to get glimpses of these different facets that i've talked about i've stitched together many facets here for you to present sort of the whole thing but it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to grasp that whole thing all at once especially in your early awakenings it's just too much it's shocking some of these facets just by themselves are so shocking and terrifying that it will take you months to integrate just one of these facets after you have it assuming you even reach it which could take you years just to reach it and then you got to integrate it and then you got to go back for more and find new facets and integrate those and stitch those together so the whole thing i mean this this we're talking years here maybe decades of work to reach that what i've talked about and also even though i painted a relatively complete picture here of what i would call a pure awakening i still haven't communicated the highest levels of a way this is still not the highest levels of awakening this is what i would call sort of intermediate levels um the highest levels are are so shocking it's and so inevitable they can't really be talked about uh basically at the highest levels i mean i'll give you a little clue even though i won't tell you much um at the highest levels what happens is you just at the highest levels the colors and sounds and feeling the the visual field actually starts to break down and collapse because you're becoming so conscious that even the physical distinctions between walls your body and the coffee table all of these physical distinctions start to break down you realize that they were all imaginary and the entire the entire room sort of collapses starts to collapse in on itself as the dream and mirage that it is um and then it it it turns into just an infinite singularity basically it um imagine what what what existed sort of before the big bang if you take all the matter in the universe and you condense it down into an infinitely small uh point that's smaller than the the tip of a needle and yet it's all completely conscious of itself that's what you become you become this perfectly symmetrical you become almost spherical or imagine imagine becoming a uh a geometric point a point in geometry has zero dim it's a zero dimensional object it has no length or depth or breadth or size and yet it exists and in that point is contained absolutely everything could possibly be and that's what you become and it's perfectly conscious of itself and that is the that is sort of the pinnacle of the godhead so that would be the highest awakening at least that i've personally accessed um and at that point there is no form there is no colors and sounds because you're too conscious even for colors and sounds to exist so there you go now maybe you have an idea of what you're shooting for now again these are just my experiences of my awakenings um to be honest i have no idea what it's like for other people because i only have my own awakenings to work with so i'm just speaking from my own experience here um now some people will say well but leo aren't these just pleasant experiences that you're having these are just states that are generated by the brain right no if you think that you don't understand what i'm communicating these are it's it's improper to even call these experiences although they're not different from experiences but what you call an experience what you think of as an experience is a deeply corrupted notion that your ego mind is concocted so to call what i'm talking about here's experiences is is absurd what i'm talking about is absolute truth and it's not rendered by any kind of brain it's not beholden to any scientific process any mechanical process it's not beholden to atoms to molecules to matter to neurons to computer simulations to calculations to mathematics none of that it's beholdened to nothing it's bounded by nothing it's limited by nothing it's pure infinity it's not happening to a human it's not happening to a creature it's not a biological event it's not a physical process it's not evolutionary it didn't evolve it didn't have a history it wasn't caused by anything if you think oh leo well this was just caused by a chemical psychedelic no it wasn't caused by anything oh leo but this was just caused by some meditation technique no it wasn't caused by anything it's uncaused from your current level of consciousness at a level three that's impossible and you can't understand how that's possible until you crank that up to a thousand or more and remember be careful because none of your ideas of awakening are correct and even everything i shared with you here you might say ah leo okay so now i understand what awakening is right wrong you have no idea everything i told you is as wrong and far away from awakening as you could imagine when you actually awaken you will look back upon this and you will laugh at how wrong it was so you might wonder william why did you tell me all this well because that's that's the that's the existential bind that we're in if i don't tell you about awakening we're damned if i do tell you about awakening we're also damned we're damned if we do and damned if we don't that's just the limitations of of language and of mind and of your level of conduct you got to understand that this master control knob of consciousness this is the bottleneck of everything right you can't be at a level three consciousness and then just assume that from that level you can see higher levels you can't you can't see above your level so the only solution to that is not to stay at your level and then try to imagine higher levels the solution is to actually grab that knob and [ __ ] crank it to a thousand that will solve your problem no amount of sciencing or logicing this thing or debating this thing or imagining this thing or fantasizing about it is going to change the fact that you're stuck at a [ __ ] three when you're at a three no amount of thinking will get you above a three no amount of logic will get you above a three no amount of science will get you above a three you will be at a three forever until you crank that knob to something higher that's just the nature of the beast all right that's it now you understand what awakening is all done uh so i'm done here click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org on the actualize.org website you will find resources you will find a book list the book list is crucial to help you to wrap your mind around some of the things i say that i'm saying i say some radical and crazy things on this channel uh that your mind will probably not want to believe it'll be unbelievable literally to your mind so how do you validate some of these things well obviously by cranking that knob but before you're actually going to even muster the curse to crank that up read some books i got some incredible books on my book list written by masters and experts and teachers and researchers and phd's and god knows who else that will help you to convince you that this is something that's not just ideas that i've made up these aren't just leo's delusions right i'm not the first person who's talked about this i won't be the last thousands of people have experienced this stuff for themselves you can too right so the books help with that they help to learn a little bit of authority to this stuff if you need that now you don't need that the truth doesn't depend upon the authority of any book or human but your dense mind might be benefited by that so check out my book list check out my life purpose course that's also available there you can also find my blog where i post all sorts of interesting insights videos links resources articles don't miss those i put quite a bit of time into my blog come to the forum ask questions support me at patreon.com actualized i appreciate that and check out my second channel called actualized clips and then i'll end on one final point which is actually rather important so listen close look a lot of spiritual teachers and masters will try to convince you there's this trend this sort of neo-invited trend online like they'll try to convince you that awakening is nothing special awakening is the most ordinary thing it's not astounding it's not special it's not interesting it's just the most ordinary thing so don't go chasing after some extraordinary thing right you've heard this if you watched many of these sort of neo-invited teachers guiding you toward through self-inquiry and stuff like this this is deeply misleading deeply deeply misleading there can be shallow versions of awakening which are not very extraordinary but there's just no way that you are going to comprehend the absolute nature of yourself god and the universe and not be totally blown away by it the only way it won't blow you away is if you don't actually comprehend it fully and i see a lot of people who get into these neo-invited teachings with self inquiry and this sort of direct pointing methods and so forth um then they start even denying things that like god they start denying things like love they start denying things like infinity and whatever else dismissing these as just mystical experiences or some sort of ego concoctions or whatever because awakening is just supposed to be this simple ordinary emptiness or something what they imagined the buddha taught that's actually not what the buddha taught but they imagine that's what the buddha this is this is weak sauce spirituality it's a weak sauce version of awakening this is not even close to a full awakening uh it's a it's a very deep trap these people have no deep grasp of what reality actually is what they've done is they've fooled themselves into emptying their mind through some kind of practices and they've had some little glimpse of no self or something like that or emptiness and they think that they've comprehended the entire beast and they haven't they haven't and i've i've been misled and gaslit by these people for a long time in my own journey it's taken me a lot of struggle to figure out just how [ __ ] wrong these people are so watch out there's traps within traps within traps in this work and when you think you fully awoken that might be the biggest trap of all so watch out watch out with these shallow teachings if your teacher or guru is teaching you a version of awakening that is not completely ripping your whole reality apart and making you [ __ ] in your pants in awe and horror leaving you completely dumb struck and flabbergasted and writhing on the floor in in ecstasy and wonder and mystery and horror then it's not a it's not a full awakening it's far shy of that you're not comprehending how deep consciousness goes now at the same time even though i say that of course these teachers are right in a certain sense in the sense that if what you do is you're always chasing some sort of peak experience or high or you're chronically abusing psychedelics and you're not willing to just sit down and do the work and to actually do the hard manual labor of like a 10-day boring ass grinding meditation retreat that is a problem so there's sort of a middle ground here between it's not an either or like that you treat awakening is just some ordinary simple nothingness or emptiness or you're chasing some sort of egoic mystical experiences it's like no there's something in the middle these things that i'm describing these facets are definitely not egoic experiences and they're way beyond just ordinary realizations of no self no self is relatively minor and easy attainment on this in this work on this path god realization is way beyond that and then you know infinite absolute infinite consciousness is even beyond that so just keep that in mind um don't rest on your laurels when you have some awakening or some attainment great but then also the reason i'm saying this is is not to elevate myself but just i'm saying this so that you don't get stuck at a low version of awakening because i see a lot of people do that and they fool themselves and then they convince themselves that okay that's it i'm done i'm done enough of this chasing and seeking it's just all ego like they take this attitude and they think that they're being wise and spiritual when they do this they aren't they're [ __ ] stupid they aren't fully awake they don't really understand what reality is and you can you can easily easily demonstrate this to yourself once you do fully awaken you can you can just look at people you can ask them if you just ask them one or two questions and just how they answer you instantly tells you that they're not fully awake and that they haven't realized what god is or what love is or what infinity is or these other things you can instantly recognize these things and then you can you can laugh at these stupid neo-invited people who tell you that awakening is not astounding and extraordinary it is the most extraordinary [ __ ] thing that there could possibly exist is so extraordinary you can't even imagine how extraordinary it is and yet at the same time it can also be very ordinary that's the paradox of it and you have to distinguish what i'm telling you here from some sort of you know mystical visions of jesus and stuff that's not what i've been describing here i've been describing a very pure form of awakening there's a lot of weird new agey mystical mystical visionary stuff that you can experience with spiritual practices various kinds of cities and astral projections and dmt entities and angels and [ __ ] i haven't talked about that stuff at all i consider all that tangential now i'm not denying those things can be conjured up by consciousness consciousness can conjure up anything so i don't put anything beyond the can of consciousness but uh that is not that is not like the purest highest awakening in fact i wouldn't even call that awakening proper like to see an angel if you see one it's not awakening it might be a powerful mystical experience it might be life-changing for you it might even improve your life it might get you to believe in god because if there's angels you probably figure well god must be real too it might do that but that is not the same thing as realizing that you are god and by the way i have not in this episode described all of the facets of awakening there are more facets that i have neglected here for example one of the facets that i neglected is the facet of self-design i talk about it in my episode the many facets of awakening go check that out um but even that episode doesn't cover all the facets because i'm still discovering more facets i've had hundreds of awakenings i'm still discovering more facets so one of the facets is self-design you become so conscious that you're god that you realize how you're actually designing the entire universe right now as you're sitting here you see that's what that's what a full awakening really gets you it's it's a deep comprehension of everything it's like the ultimate big picture it's not limited to some angel or some buddha or some jesus it is a cosmic scale self-understanding so by no means is what i explained here the full picture there's more stuff that i didn't have time to explain that i forgot to explain i literally have to keep lists of all the facets that i've discovered because there's so many it's hard to keep them all in my memory but um if you want that list at least uh a good portion of that list go check out my episode the many facets awakening and stay tuned in the future for more and i'll share more facets that i've discovered as well