I had an unusual experience at age 18. I can only compare it to descriptions of people who have had a stroke, and people that experience "Kundalini Shakti", the power of the coiled serpent in Yoga Kundalini. It felt as if my head and spine opened up, and liquid electricity began to flow through my whole body. Felt the dissolution of ego and separateness between the internal and external world. This lasted several months. I learned a lot about the connection between body and mind. When the experience ceased, I felt drained or burnt out. I learned from instruction in Kundalini Yoga that I had opened up that energy pathway without any of the foundational work to properly cool the flow of energy, and as a result overheated from a faster metabolism. My sympathetic nervous system was hyper-active, while my parasympathetic nervous system was underactive. Since then I have been slowly learning the foundational techniques of realization, through learning meditation and pranayama yoga/breathing practices, Taoist spiritual alchemy, did a lot of reading on biology and the relationship between the endocrine system and the nervous system. Diet and hydration is also foundational to health. The biology of whatever people report as Kundalini awakening is poorly understood, but I like to believe there is a deep metabolic reason for these sort of awakening experiences that has to do with strong feedback in the nervous system and endocrine system. In the book, "I am a strange loop", Douglas Hofstadterchaos argues that chaos theory can explain the persistence of self-consciousness; all chaotic systems exhibit self-referential dynamics that lead to the kind of sense of self which is both sensate or receptive to the state of the environment, as well as proprioceptive or aware of the internal state of itself. The question that is more difficult to answer is: what is it that is aware of the outside and inside? The brain and body are surely the interface which is aware of the world, and itself. But the distinction between the inside and outside isn't very solid. Hofstader describes a tornado as a good example of a type of primitive self awareness in physical processes that resembles life. The tornado has no mind, but it has inputs and outputs that causes it to steer towards and feed off heated air, it can merge or split like cellular division, it grows and then dies, it's organized toroidal flow of wind energy dissipating into the background heat of the air. I think biological life is very similar. A circular or toroidal flow of water and Oxygen and chemical energy and everything else that our body moves around. It has inputs and outputs, it lives and reproduces and dies wherever there is the energy in the environment to do so. The big mystery to me at the bottom of all these ideas about how biology supports consciousness will always be "does consciousness continue after death"? Maybe but I'm skeptical. The Taoist idea of immortality is, to me, somewhat like Christian idea of Resurrection, in the former you must cultivate an immortal spiritual body in life through virtue and spiritual alchemy (transforming your food and breath, and therefore your bodily substance and energy, into spiritual energy given form), and in the latter that cultivating a relationship with God and accepting the offer of salvation through repentance allows one to partake in immortality by Grace. Both traditions seem to state quite clearly that the truth must be apprehended directly through experience here and now, not necessarily after death. As it is written, "Behold! The Kingdom of God is within you!".
Oh, man - I can't pass up the opportunity to reply here! YES! Big E when I was 16 and on acid for the first time. I saw "myself" as the All - The Everything - the I AM That! :) I was looking out from the center of all things and knew myself as every blade of grass, every bird, every planet, every person, etc, etc, etc... :) The experience in consciousness was of being those things, not just seeing them, so knowing the details of all creation from the inside out. My first thought upon returning to my small self was to rip off my clothes and run down the street shouting, "It's just us - it's all love - there's just love!" My best friend was sitting for me at the time and calmer heads prevailed, but I have always felt like I'm one heartbeat away from some next-level, naked-love-run-evangelism :) Thank you for such a cool video and such a cool channel!
It's very true--and it is necessary. There's far more information that is coming into our senses than we can process. th-cam.com/video/YkYrQR8tFzk/w-d-xo.html
Yeah, most of our experiences are ways of conditioning that takes place in our minds, I think they become forms of beliefs and our filters to see. The mind tends to patterns. So to understand who we are we can take a look at our thinking, and if we’re honest we can observe all our fears and hatred, as well as our most sublime thoughts of bliss
Very true. It should be everyone’s mission to strive towards the “primal nature,” as Lao Tzu termed it. A mind liberated from attachments and conditioned ways of being.
I'm 36, after 10 years of yoga and 2 years of almost daily mediation. After readings on philosophy, Taoism, Buddhism and the Koran as well as the Bible. I had this wonderful experience one afternoon sitting on my couch. My soul and my heart have been filled with gratitude ever since and I have opened my eyes to a new world. We must stop the ego and radiate love. Peace and love for all❤
2 years of meditation? wow. i have a long way to go. by chance, do you drink alcohol, have intercourse, and/or eat meat because i have heard that these things you must quit if you want to achieve enlightment
I didn’t quit sex after the experience, but I did lose the desire for it. I also stopped looking at women with lust as objects. I found that I lost all interest in alcohol, I couldn’t drink it. If you want to know about my experience I can share more.
@@TheOne_isGODto realise your true nature you don't need to stop anything. But you will naturally don't get vicious, you will just enjoy sex like a feeling of something good, just enjoy alcohol like enjoying some chocolate. Everything becomes light, ease, peace.
I don't think you can "stay enlightened", or that we're meant to (that is, constructed to hold onto that state, with our busy minds and fizzing bodies). I've noticed that the few experiences I've had of contact with another person that was warm, beautiful, and completely trusting for both have been more and more elusive as time passed, and that the best way to keep these moments alive in memory was to let them go, to *not* clutch at them or try to recreate the experience in my mind. They were transitory by their nature, at least for me in whatever spiritual state I was then and am now. Maybe more experienced souls, Older souls in terms of lives lived, slide more easily into that kind of state, and I'm still too "Young". I don't know, and here toward the end of this lifetime (I've entered the low 80s), I don't feel any urgency about it. So I meditate every evening, and expect nothing, and that contents me.
Wonderfully put! It's a seemingly small but vital distinction that's easy to miss. Nothing is permanent, not even enlightenment. It has to be won over and over. A verb rather than a noun. Makes me think of that BoJack Horseman quote: "Everyday it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part."
Enlightenment is a realization and not an experience. You simply become aware of awareness by seeing your thoughts and not being totally identified with them. What follows is a transformation in the way you live, think and do. The old way of control changes to the new way of flow.
Everything is an experience, don't be silly. Not being affected by your thoughts is called passive awareness. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Enlightenment is knowledge. It changes the way you see the world, revealing the truth behind everything. You may gain a deeper understanding of others and their motives and all your senses become heightened. If sadness cannot enter your heart, grief, or fear of anything, then you're truly enlightened. But be cautious-spiritual enlightenment can come from two paths: the path of light and divine love, or the path of darkness and deception. Practices like meditation, if not approached wisely, may weaken your consciousness, leaving you vulnerable to false enlightenment-a projection of what you want to believe, straight from the deceiver, rather than the true essence of it, True enlightenment requires discernment and balance, constant purification of the heart from all desires, and continuous contemplation of the divine creator and his attributes, not just quieting the mind.
People who have an awakening often go through great pain amd tragedy. It is through those traumatic events do you finally see and feel everything all at once
I have wondered and thought about this, and can conclude that for us humans, for the most part we see enlightenment as growing up, maturing, because I know a lot of people that don’t get bothered or hurt by whatever is going on in the families, friends circle, community and society at large, and I think, as I once read in a metaphysical book, for us, peace is the closest to enlightenment, or the most sublime of the mental states, which is the love spectrum
I had a nervous breakdown 8 years ago and started meditating every day and now I don’t have any anxiety, depression and very little thinking. I no longer identify my thoughts as me. I still have days or weeks where feel this heavy load but it’s ok I let it stay as long as it wants. I literally didn’t my life stuck in my mind and controlled by my mind. I feel free now
yes, i have lived a life of hell and have come to the conclusion that all this spiritual stuff is great in theory but on planet earth i just sex, money and life of leisure. that is what makes my soul and heart sing. My spirit wants to enjoy life not be a slave ; 0
Reading "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker permanently changed the way I look at my fellow humans. It was enlightening in that it solved an existential question I'd had, mostly subconsciously, for many years, and I felt unburdened. A wonderful experience.
It altered how I perceive reality. Describing my experience is impossible but I can now recognise when other people try to describe it. It makes me smile.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
First big E: Taking LSD for the first time Second big E: 3 months after my chronic pain started, the moment I realised that pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice... my depression hasn't returned since.
Suffering is the only way to remove black karma from our souls. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
This information has been so important for me. Aged 13, I had an OBE where I saw myself from the corner of the ceiling talking to a best friend. I knew I was The Observer and that the me I was watching was 'my child with whom I was well pleased.' From this, I was in a heightened awareness for nearly 2-months. It changed me completely; refusing to go back to school, I studied ancient Yogi texts, went into social work and then became a successful full-time psychotherapist for over 20-years. Aged 50, I went to the remote Himalayas to research/live ESP with the unified field for twenty years. Now 70, this is the first time I have heard anyone that really understands such an experience. Thank you
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe no practice can help you. The practice is for the ego identity. The "practitioner" is the very idea you have of yourself that has to be realized as illusory. This is the tricky part of realization.
@@WuWeiFlow Not talking about the ego, talking about the immortal soul Not so tricky when you realize that it is your soul that is reading this and the ego is judging, Falun Dafa is about purifying the soul and the ego then falls away. Impossible to do without a great master, lets see if your ego will let you understand and accept the truth.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Our brain is so complicated as we go through enlightenment. It is incredible the amount of drugs it produces and how quickly it can turn them on and shut them off according to our fear or acceptance of the experience. It is incredible, and I've only scratched the surface.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I've repeatedly had experiences of union with the universe, at this point I can self induce it almost all the time. At first they were isolated amazing experiences. Through a mix of meditation techniques I've learned to let myself enter the universal stream, the eternal song daily. It is the most amazing, blissful, thing in my life....A few years ago I was in chronic pain all the time, I would have never imagined I could access so much pleasure....I am a normal person, with a regular job in life, if I can do it anyone can do it. I don't take any substances, nor use devices to do it. I have learned to transmit the first insight into the experience to other people. It is my biggest wish to transmit this to everyone alive ❤. Thank you for this view into the biology behind it. 😊
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
this happened to me, the big E enlightenment. i dont know anyone else who has. thank God for youtube n videos like this. i think something was triggered in my brain after experiencing lots of grief. grief from the present and the past and all in between at the same time. one night after many nights of this i was crying, rather loudly as i mopped the kitchen floor where i worked.
Integrated Information Theory by Guilio Tonini quite strongly aligns with the Hindu and Buddhist view of consciousness. Our brains are the doors. When a crowd enters a room through a door, we dont say that the door generated the crowd. ~ Swami Sarvapriyananda
I'm practicing meditation and yoga since several years and always wondered if there could actually be a proper science of enlightenment. Seeing this video fills me with delight, it seems we humans make it up the right way. Maybe we can >produce< one day Enlightenment...
Mine was a Big-E. I hurt my crush really bad. I felt so guilty how I did her. I found the reason, and looked up at other things of what's wrong. I ate a marijuana infused cookie. I wasn't expecting it to be so intense. I started looking back at how my relationships are present, then seeing what was wrong from the past. That's when I had my epiphany. It's still too early to tell if it has changed. But I must say, it really opened my eyes, and I'm trying to work towards my goal now.
Is it possible that being in an enlightened state could equate to high levels of activity in the frontal cortex? If so, can you activate the frontal cortex more often with a combination of deep focus, deep breathing and radical acceptance?
Our brain merely being a receiver of reality is a very accurate statement. For example, we can only perceive the visual light spectrum of the light wave. Our brain interprets "pleasant sight, colours, shapes etc." based on the visual light spectrum we receive. However, if we were able to perceive the X-ray spectrum of reality, then our "standard of beauty" would be very different. How would our visual art, the world of architecture, fashion, etc., look if our sight perceived a different frequency? We can get a glimpse through X-rays or MRI scans, etc., and see the internal workings of our bodies. The same goes for sound frequencies, perhaps even at the level of the intellect.
It is our soul that thinks, not the brain. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
The brain does not think, it is the soul. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
That's very interesting. Is it possible for this to happen through trauma, or could trauma cause a kind of inverse of this experience--a negative epiphany?
@@The-Well it depends. It's more like conditioning, but conditioning works for a reason. Like when you keep getting sick when you drink from a water source, so you use another, or when you're conditioned by your bosses, parents, teachers, rulers, and clergy to be very skeptical of those who seek out authority, because the most celebrated ones almost exclusively do so for the ability to abuse that authority.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe look up the origins of modern karma during the british invasion. Practicioners were hand picked because they enabled the invaders so well, while the old karma got wiped out. Karma is bad.
@@matthewatwood207 We all have black karma on our souls either from this lifetime or previous lifetimes and as long as you have karma you are not permitted to return home to Heaven, Falun Dafa can help you solve this problem.
Lots of confusion and blurriness in this video, so it can be dangerously misleading. Real enlightenment is not to be mistaken with an experience of enlightenment, as the latter can also be an effect of WRONG realizations, that lead to the same great feeling of enlightenment but actually orients one to fundamentally wrong perception and evaluation of things. So chasing the feeling of enlightenment is NOT the way to go; instead, striving for detailed, thorough understanding of everything is the way to go for much more positive results in the long run. Not to mention that really understanding something (rather than just feeling so) will also automatically cause experiences of enlightenment, small or big, doesn't really count. Which explains why the scientific way of thorough examination from all possible perspectives without prejudice or hopes for certain outcomes has always been and remains the best way to go for real enlightenment (rather than chasing any kind of feeling of state of mind). The last part about collective consciousness is also wrong in how/where it seeks consciousness. Consciousness, just like a mere human hand, is a higher level entity that simply does not exist on the level of its building blocks (e.g. on atomic or even cellular level). So trying to find it WITHIN the cellular or subatomic interactions is pointless. On the level of cells, there is no such thing as a hand; but a collection of cells through their interactions can form a higher level entity: tissues. And the collection of tissues, through their interactions can form even higher level entities: muscles and bones. And similarly, those together can form the higher level entity that we call a hand. Consciousness is a similar higher level effect of such lower level building blocks. (And a Universe-level collective consciousness does not make any sense until we can actually define consciousness. But people's subjective "experiences" about such a thing are most likely illusions/misinterpretations as ONLY those, who have previously learnt about such concept -- thus having their brains predirected to such conclusions -- have reported such experiences.)
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
6:50. "What if." That's not a scientific thought, but one common to belief, not even established religion, but the kind usual in conspiracy theories. *Assuming* that taking mind-altering substances could allow someone to experience reality better, and comparing that to eyeglasses, is not logical. How do we know it isn't? Optics is measurable, you know exactly what you are going to get when you get a new pair of glasses, you don't upgrade your vision, but go from deficiency to normalcy. Assuming that the drug-caused experience is " reality normalcy" would require two things, that there were "normal" people: people who could live their lives in that state permanently and function adequately, and two, that all people who have drug-induced "illumination" experiences could give similar accounts of that "better experienced" reality. People who put on glasses don't see different things or different worlds, they just see the same world everyone sees, clearly. It's interesting that the neuroscientist supports his "what if" with the views of religions. Scientific research that requires mysticism to work, is scientific? Putting shamans as example is misleading: when you have a broken bone, Covid or myopia, do you go to a shaman for help? Does the neuroscientist here? Same as he says that drugs can give people a way to experience "reality" as it supposedly really is, we, who have known people whose lives were damaged or destroyed in the seeking of transcendent realities through drugs, and have watched them rambling, hurting themselves, making fools of themselves, we can testify that their "reality" is an intoxicated brain misfiring, and often getting irreparably damaged. Thinking, prayer and meditation can get you illumination if you wish that and try hard enough; drugs will give you addictions, disease and death without the guarantee of any kind of illumination.
Yes meditation which is really a non doing, just an understanding can give you the experiance easily. You just have to understand it and it happens in an instant. By being in a state of acceptance, non choosing. Allowing the mind. If angry etc allow, is stressed, if sick etc and you will notice a detatchment between you and your mind. Between you and the experiance the mind is generating and you will experiance enlightenment
We are always talking about details, the pieces of the puzzle. However the puzzle (the Whole) seems to just be what it is, and humans seem to reorganize the puzzle pieces and call it progression or regression, while it seems to me to only be the same put together differently. Our perception seems to be summed up to "thought in conciousness".
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
This was actually pretty good. Too many of these short lectures on this topic start with too many questionable premises. His last thought is akin to the question of 'is water wet or dry?" Hydrogen and oxygen are not wet at a molecular level so when does this transition occur? When does consciousness/ thought experience occur? Etc. I find a lot of this kind of philosophy becomes a desperate attempt to validate religion/spirituality with our deep-seeded fears of the unknown after death. Altering your consciousness with pschadelic drugs has been going on for centuries but all it changes is your perception of it. Reality itself should remain constant.
Psychedelic drugs have a huge role to play in the future of enightenment. They don't change the ground of being and of course they cant change 'reality' (whatever that is), but what they can do is manifold. They can shake people out of their sense of complacency. They can open doors and provide insights that even many years of meditation can fail to do, and in effect move your practice up a level. They also drastically increase neuroplasticity, so your brain can respond much more easily to effort in meditation, yoga or whatever other method you apply. What's wrong with validating spirituality? What if it is true? I've seen evidence of, and experienced directly, all sorts of stuff in my life that cannot be explained by recourse to the brain alone.
Enlightenment can only be reached when we are alive. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
It’s like spacial awareness is a somatic sense that works with our vision both external sight and internal dimension of thought. This perception is a travelling and dynamic energy that can stagnate on unresolved mental tasks. Waking up the limbic system and engaging with the parietal lobe is a really interesting point but I think this is as turbulent as it is because it’s the natural occurrence thus far like drug use etc. Feng shui is really cool for understanding this perception.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I guess this answers the question about "can a person really change?" The answer perhaps then is yes, a person can change. But you have to get there, you have to have the big E or little e moments.
No, you need a great teacher. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I think Nirvana and Enlightenment experiences are an immune response, possibly some sort of biochemical cascade involving the endocrine, nervous and immune systems, in response to psychological or physical crisis. My organic chemistry lecturer at university did research into the tears of joy and sadness and their effect on the immune system.
Overall, yes, although nirvana sets up another conundrum which has to be accepted, that of the eternal mystery of the universe. This can be a real downer because it quells ambition and hope. So, nirvana has positive and negative impacts. Another example - my organic chemistry teacher at uni did research into the tears of joy and tears of sadness and their effects on immunity and found happiness, bliss, etc, keeps you healthy. I plan to to do some youtube vids this year describing all this stuff.
@@mystery-earth-garden Yes, in the Buddhist way of describing nirvana both ambition and hope needs to be abandoned in order to reach liberation (as it is often called within Buddhist thought). Neither hope nor ambition is part of the Natural State, but strategic approaches in our unenlightened relationship with the reality we try to comprehend and manage. Nirvana is a state in which all is understood and no strategies are needed. Nirvana is thus an irreversible way of being beyond being just another mind-state, according to Buddhist thought. It is described as the Natural State, an original state beyond any form of fabrication or ambition. It is our true nature, whatever we realise it or not. It is not a produced state but the true nature of awareness when all ambitions, hopes, fears and conceptualisations have ended. It is beyond the duality of past, present and future. It doesn’t have personality or a history. It is simply primordial.
That happened to me the one the sort of changes you. It changed me for the better. I was in my backyard playing my guitar and singing and all of a sudden I had an amazing beautiful encounter with "GOD".
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe nah you are it inside of you he or she is just a person that did that and share it and now you are supposed to only take what serves you and you are the way always that is the whole point don’t miss itb
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Just to add that you can have those little "e" experiences everyday. You just have to figure out the best moment or specific time (and/or even a place) during the day/night, when your brain is lot more active, creative and full of million ideas. Note: Many new/fresh ideas can come when you use any or all five senses. e.g, you smell flowers, interact with people or nature, eat some special food etc. etc.
It is the soul that thinks and has ideas, not the brain. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
And to enlightment.. i have heard it being defined as mainly having clarity and access to wisdom, which is exactly the state of having a good deep thinking time, but all the time. And guess who's in that level the most.. engineers, mathmaticians and psychologists.. hence it's some combination of a regular flow state, and that free floating attention used during all kinds of creative, abstract or social tasks. I'm not sure why that would be hyped so much.. i mean, we, as humans, already are enlighted often. Maybe yea, we're less in awe, if it is used for work already, but it is still basically the same mental activity, i would say.
Wisdom is obtained not through thought but through suffering. That is why over the centuries millions of nuns and monks cut themselves off from earthly delights. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I knew this as the Dark night of the soul. It happened to me just recently and I have the hard feeling it's about growing up change of stages and I also believe this re-arrange could happen multiple times and a lot more to talk about.
Enlightenment is not about bliss, ecstasy, love, those are natural qualities that came through the understanding of what we are, in the process of unveiling the wrong belief that we are the body and mind those feelings come as a construct of the previous normal anxious state Yet, even ecstasy and fear come and go, we mix up enlightenment with those feelings, but enlightenment is the simple recognition of we are withought feelings
Fasting - pure nutrition/water - long runs - ocean waves - meditation - organic caffeine with L-Theanine (Proper Wild). An ET of lightness is how the author of "Supercharged Self Healing" described me when we 1st met.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Enlightenment is self realisation , a complete and irreversible transcendence of the ego and a one in a million occurance. Not as common as you make it out to be. What you describe are spiritual experiences.
There is no monopoly of any tradition or culture that own the posibility to enlihtment, the posibility is everyehre and in everybody, inside everybody. The absolute, the infinity, canot be here and not there, is just everywhere and in everyone.
I think rupert spira would disagree that enlightenment is an extraordinary experience, but rather the end of suffering. If the suffering was previously very intense, the end of suffering is shortly felt as an enormous liberation, that will however come to an end as any emotion does. The persuit of enlightenment is the last stage of resistance towards life, where the searcher has already understood that happiness is less a matter of circumstances and more a matter of the right attitude, which is often described as humility or dignity. When the longing for happiness and the search for enlightenment finally end after sufficient failure, the last resistance towards life, the resistance towards unhappiness, also ends. And happiness is finally found.
Interesting, but I think it would be useful for those who want to delve deeper into certain topics, read and reflect on the advaita vedanta teachings and in particular those transmitted by permanently awakened Masters. Ramana Maharshi is one of these. And then I think it is useful to have a lifestyle that supports this research and favors the timeless experience.
Enlighten if we look at the word it breaks down to fill with light. What does it mean when we tell people to lighten up? It means to not be too serious and not focus on the negative.
@@The-Well I really enjoyed it! I had an awakening in 2017 at a ayahuasca retreat. So really interesting to look at 'enlightenment' with the science-glasses on. Keep up the good work!
This video describes the chemistry and bio-chemical observations of "enlightened" brains. Not that it helps you get there! Many world thoughts/religions (other than eastern) do NOT have a goal of getting you to an "enlightened" permanent state. For that you will have to go Eastern. However, the observations based on medical technology are very useful points of evidence. Thanks for making this video.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Unfortunately for me I had probably the biggest of Big-E's but was then accused of being Manic and labelled Bipolar 1 which is completely false. Still trying to win this battle.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I’m not sure if the Indian gurus would fit into the same categories as regular folk. There are many famous cases of literal divine consciousness manifesting within the human form there
Just one piece of advice as a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism: if you decide to achieve enlightenment, which is not a fixed state since you have to do your homework, daily, to achieve it, take into account that true enlightenment includes helping others become happy, or at least support them in any way you can to relieve their suffering even if yourself are suffering. If one expects to achieve this noble state of life through drugs or participating in exciting events only, all one is achieving is a fleeting state of enjoyment and satisfaction of the senses. Nothing bad about these as long as they don’t mean you’re going to have to risk your life or the lives of others. But know that this is all superficial and doesn’t leave a lasting positive impression or change in your brain, in fact, in your life at large.
I met and fell in love with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Noble Savage a noble boundlessly loving creature who always laughed always smiled and never lied showering on me unconditional love - love, not religion for me I study it I don’t practice it. Read and experiment Ivan Turgenev’s First Love novel I won’t hold my breath reality is full of fucking savages and to reveal anymore is to cast pearls before swine Gospel of Matthew .👑🌎
Nice try. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
i see it simple. If we would need mushrooms to finally "put on the glasses", then we would function superior in those states in all regards. But we don't. Hence, the default, everyday experience must be the "glasses" one.
the question of where consciousness exists, and where does knowledge and understanding come from, is the big question 2600 years ago the Buddha came to realize there is only one life form on Earth, and that life cannot be separated from the inanimate planets and stars and the space between them, because our physical bodies are made of elements that were fused from hydrogen and helium in the core of stars into oxygen and carbon... from which DNA is composed we know today that life is a continuation, the life that is in you is the same life that was in your parents, living cells that combined and divided and make copies of themselves - not a separate different new life - one life going back billions of years How did Buddha come to understand all this just by sitting under a tree and meditating? We understand it today because we know what DNA looks like, what it is, how it divides and replaces its own molecules, how it evolves and changes. We know how oxygen is formed by fusion in the core of a star. But how did Buddha come to understand all this, without the science to reveal the secrets of the nature of the physical universe? Is the answer supernatural? The Buddha did not need to understand the details of chemistry and biology and evolution and physics to understand that we are all one with each other, and with the entire universe, but how did he reach the same correct conclusion? If we now understand it intellectually, from 500 years of successive science building that understanding, then do we need to be enlightened, emotionally - do we need to have that awaking experience to understand that we are the self aware consciousness of the Universe? Is enlightenment simply the left side of our brain being allowed to peer into the raw data collection of the right side of our brain, and seeing for the first time that vast collection of information, images, sounds, experiences that our physical brain has been collecting and storing since the day of our conception in the womb?
Spiriituality can never be explained by science.. Spirituality begins where science ends.. Spirituality is the journey of the Atman to reach the Brahman.. Or in other words.. Dissolution of ego.. To realize the effulgent Self through Sadhana or continuous meditation.. It is beyond brain , mind or time or space... One has to contemplate on the Self to realize the Self.. No academic explanation suffices..
Whatever the definition Dr. Newberg gives to enlightenment here it is not at all what asian spiritual traditions mean. For example, in the buddhist teachings there's a clear difference between being enlightened and having an experience of some sort. So in buddhism, it makes no sense at all in saying "enlightenment experience". If it is an experience, it is not enlightenment. Along the path, a practitioner will have many experiences before actually seeing what can't be seen, or seeing without seeing. There's nothing to see in enlightenment, and at the same time, all is seen. Words cannot describe it and brain activity will also never be able to describe or explain it. That said, his research seems very nice and enriching to our world and lives. We just need to be careful and not think that scientists who are not practitioners themselves will ever understand what enlightenment is.
Complete Physiological change means a complete enlightenment it's change is brain chemistry,some may have complete neurological change and may be it called complete enlightenment.Some very less so called half . But one thing is clear that every difference we have are just neurological, cognitive difference
The Asian traditions, and the Buddhist tradition itself, and even _within_ the Buddhist traditions, have many different models of the stages to 'full' enlightenment. Enlightenment can absolutely be a temporary experience or direct knowing of Reality, even if it doesn't stick. The effect of these experiences can be enormously important, because they can remove skeptical doubt, the greatest hindrance to a dedicated spiritual path, and they can tremendously relieve anxiety, another huge hindrance, besides anxiety just being an awful thing to endure. And getting rid of anxiety, depression, anger etc., all the negative emotions, is universally agreed-upon to be the goal of enlightenment. It just progresses in stages. In Zen, there are four. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are 5, 12 or 16, depending on what you mean and who's counting. In Tibetan and Southeast Asian, there are also eight stages of concentration and then eight stages of insight, but they don't count as 'enlightenment', even though they are very beneficial for you, and neither are they considered essential for enlightenment. It's all very confusing, which is why we need neuroscience to sort all this stuff out from an objective perspective. I also foresee AI teachers that have been programmed with all the information ever to exist in Buddhism and all the information ever to exist in Western psychology combined to tailor-make a Buddhist path for every specific individual, in a way no one person could ever come remotely close to matching. Trial-and-error over millennia has resulted in a tiny fraction of the world population at any one time getting enlightened, and that's not going to work for the future of humanity when we face so many challenges. We only have two or so decades, if that, so we had better get to work.
Hi . Thank you for your videos. I love your videos. I want to recommend this book The secret door by Antonio Serna. está en descarga libre hoy y mañana. He talks about the state of awakening and proposes how to achieve it. It's very short and revealing, and you'll like it. Greetings!
Next task - to use brain technologies to reverse-engineer enlightenment. Most of us don't have 100,000 hours to spare, you know? Or 10,000 hours. We just don't, no matter how much the teachers may want us to. Not gonna happen. So let's use modern technology to make much more efficient the ONE area - and the most important area! - of our lives that we have neglected to apply technology to thus far!
My experience began with watching a few videos about meditation. I dove deeper and almost could hold the idea in my head for longer than a moment. Then I did mushrooms. I spent the biggest part of a day dissolving into nothing. ‘I’m’ a different person now.
Dude, I totally hear you, every day after my shift at Walmart I waddle my way down to Finnegan’s pub and put on my beer goggles and by 10 PM like clockwork Cynthia, the bartender is the hottest woman I’ve ever seen again
How does that maje sense to anyone? Part of a universal consciousness then cone here abd tap into it, then fo back to it?? Why would you ever leave it??? Please apply a little more reason to your argument.
Have you ever had an epiphany (either Big-E or Small-E)?
I had an unusual experience at age 18. I can only compare it to descriptions of people who have had a stroke, and people that experience "Kundalini Shakti", the power of the coiled serpent in Yoga Kundalini. It felt as if my head and spine opened up, and liquid electricity began to flow through my whole body. Felt the dissolution of ego and separateness between the internal and external world. This lasted several months. I learned a lot about the connection between body and mind. When the experience ceased, I felt drained or burnt out. I learned from instruction in Kundalini Yoga that I had opened up that energy pathway without any of the foundational work to properly cool the flow of energy, and as a result overheated from a faster metabolism. My sympathetic nervous system was hyper-active, while my parasympathetic nervous system was underactive. Since then I have been slowly learning the foundational techniques of realization, through learning meditation and pranayama yoga/breathing practices, Taoist spiritual alchemy, did a lot of reading on biology and the relationship between the endocrine system and the nervous system. Diet and hydration is also foundational to health. The biology of whatever people report as Kundalini awakening is poorly understood, but I like to believe there is a deep metabolic reason for these sort of awakening experiences that has to do with strong feedback in the nervous system and endocrine system. In the book, "I am a strange loop", Douglas Hofstadterchaos argues that chaos theory can explain the persistence of self-consciousness; all chaotic systems exhibit self-referential dynamics that lead to the kind of sense of self which is both sensate or receptive to the state of the environment, as well as proprioceptive or aware of the internal state of itself. The question that is more difficult to answer is: what is it that is aware of the outside and inside? The brain and body are surely the interface which is aware of the world, and itself. But the distinction between the inside and outside isn't very solid. Hofstader describes a tornado as a good example of a type of primitive self awareness in physical processes that resembles life. The tornado has no mind, but it has inputs and outputs that causes it to steer towards and feed off heated air, it can merge or split like cellular division, it grows and then dies, it's organized toroidal flow of wind energy dissipating into the background heat of the air. I think biological life is very similar. A circular or toroidal flow of water and Oxygen and chemical energy and everything else that our body moves around. It has inputs and outputs, it lives and reproduces and dies wherever there is the energy in the environment to do so. The big mystery to me at the bottom of all these ideas about how biology supports consciousness will always be "does consciousness continue after death"? Maybe but I'm skeptical. The Taoist idea of immortality is, to me, somewhat like Christian idea of Resurrection, in the former you must cultivate an immortal spiritual body in life through virtue and spiritual alchemy (transforming your food and breath, and therefore your bodily substance and energy, into spiritual energy given form), and in the latter that cultivating a relationship with God and accepting the offer of salvation through repentance allows one to partake in immortality by Grace. Both traditions seem to state quite clearly that the truth must be apprehended directly through experience here and now, not necessarily after death. As it is written, "Behold! The Kingdom of God is within you!".
Only while watching Wall-E
First ever DMT experience (pharmahuasca) - i *think* it was Big-E.. (but could have been like a medium ē or something.. 🤔)
Yes…I’ve had both. Life-changing to say the least. 🥰🦋🌈✨
Oh, man - I can't pass up the opportunity to reply here! YES! Big E when I was 16 and on acid for the first time. I saw "myself" as the All - The Everything - the I AM That! :) I was looking out from the center of all things and knew myself as every blade of grass, every bird, every planet, every person, etc, etc, etc... :) The experience in consciousness was of being those things, not just seeing them, so knowing the details of all creation from the inside out. My first thought upon returning to my small self was to rip off my clothes and run down the street shouting, "It's just us - it's all love - there's just love!" My best friend was sitting for me at the time and calmer heads prevailed, but I have always felt like I'm one heartbeat away from some next-level, naked-love-run-evangelism :) Thank you for such a cool video and such a cool channel!
We don't see the world as it is. But through a lens of biases and cognitive filters that make up who we are
It's very true--and it is necessary. There's far more information that is coming into our senses than we can process. th-cam.com/video/YkYrQR8tFzk/w-d-xo.html
@@The-Well even though in many cases this information that is coming in is poor, our brains do an amazing job of filtering and enhancing it
Yeah, most of our experiences are ways of conditioning that takes place in our minds, I think they become forms of beliefs and our filters to see. The mind tends to patterns. So to understand who we are we can take a look at our thinking, and if we’re honest we can observe all our fears and hatred, as well as our most sublime thoughts of bliss
these mental and cognitive biases literally alter your senses over time
Very true. It should be everyone’s mission to strive towards the “primal nature,” as Lao Tzu termed it. A mind liberated from attachments and conditioned ways of being.
I'm 36, after 10 years of yoga and 2 years of almost daily mediation. After readings on philosophy, Taoism, Buddhism and the Koran as well as the Bible. I had this wonderful experience one afternoon sitting on my couch. My soul and my heart have been filled with gratitude ever since and I have opened my eyes to a new world. We must stop the ego and radiate love. Peace and love for all❤
2 years of meditation? wow. i have a long way to go. by chance, do you drink alcohol, have intercourse, and/or eat meat because i have heard that these things you must quit if you want to achieve enlightment
Your journey has just begun.............................Falun Dafa is the Way. Never mind peace and love for all, evil exists.
I didn’t quit sex after the experience, but I did lose the desire for it. I also stopped looking at women with lust as objects. I found that I lost all interest in alcohol, I couldn’t drink it. If you want to know about my experience I can share more.
@@lyfzuxz Falun Dafa has all the answers concerning creation.
@@TheOne_isGODto realise your true nature you don't need to stop anything. But you will naturally don't get vicious, you will just enjoy sex like a feeling of something good, just enjoy alcohol like enjoying some chocolate. Everything becomes light, ease, peace.
I've found that all of us have moments of enlightenment. The tough part is staying enlightened.
So well said! Concise yet so profound. A little 'e' epiphany?
Yes, and I think that is because our practical/survival brain (aka EGO) has to take control back to run our lives,
That part is very hard
I don't think you can "stay enlightened", or that we're meant to (that is, constructed to hold onto that state, with our busy minds and fizzing bodies). I've noticed that the few experiences I've had of contact with another person that was warm, beautiful, and completely trusting for both have been more and more elusive as time passed, and that the best way to keep these moments alive in memory was to let them go, to *not* clutch at them or try to recreate the experience in my mind. They were transitory by their nature, at least for me in whatever spiritual state I was then and am now. Maybe more experienced souls, Older souls in terms of lives lived, slide more easily into that kind of state, and I'm still too "Young". I don't know, and here toward the end of this lifetime (I've entered the low 80s), I don't feel any urgency about it. So I meditate every evening, and expect nothing, and that contents me.
Wonderfully put! It's a seemingly small but vital distinction that's easy to miss. Nothing is permanent, not even enlightenment. It has to be won over and over. A verb rather than a noun. Makes me think of that BoJack Horseman quote: "Everyday it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part."
Enlightenment is a realization and not an experience.
You simply become aware of awareness by seeing your thoughts and not being totally identified with them.
What follows is a transformation in the way you live, think and do. The old way of control changes to the new way of flow.
Enlightenment is when all attachment to this planet is given up.............................Falun Dafa
💯
Everything is an experience, don't be silly. Not being affected by your thoughts is called passive awareness. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Enlightenment is knowledge. It changes the way you see the world, revealing the truth behind everything. You may gain a deeper understanding of others and their motives and all your senses become heightened. If sadness cannot enter your heart, grief, or fear of anything, then you're truly enlightened. But be cautious-spiritual enlightenment can come from two paths: the path of light and divine love, or the path of darkness and deception. Practices like meditation, if not approached wisely, may weaken your consciousness, leaving you vulnerable to false enlightenment-a projection of what you want to believe, straight from the deceiver, rather than the true essence of it, True enlightenment requires discernment and balance, constant purification of the heart from all desires, and continuous contemplation of the divine creator and his attributes, not just quieting the mind.
@@bassamel-ashkar4005 The difference between knowledge and wisdom is suffering........................Buddha.
People who have an awakening often go through great pain amd tragedy. It is through those traumatic events do you finally see and feel everything all at once
Yes that is most certainly the case. 🙃
Yep, it can make the obvious... obvious. 😢
I have wondered and thought about this, and can conclude that for us humans, for the most part we see enlightenment as growing up, maturing, because I know a lot of people that don’t get bothered or hurt by whatever is going on in the families, friends circle, community and society at large, and I think, as I once read in a metaphysical book, for us, peace is the closest to enlightenment, or the most sublime of the mental states, which is the love spectrum
I had a nervous breakdown 8 years ago and started meditating every day and now I don’t have any anxiety, depression and very little thinking. I no longer identify my thoughts as me. I still have days or weeks where feel this heavy load but it’s ok I let it stay as long as it wants. I literally didn’t my life stuck in my mind and controlled by my mind. I feel free now
yes, i have lived a life of hell and have come to the conclusion that all this spiritual stuff is great in theory but on planet earth i just sex, money and life of leisure. that is what makes my soul and heart sing. My spirit wants to enjoy life not be a slave ; 0
Reading "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker permanently changed the way I look at my fellow humans. It was enlightening in that it solved an existential question I'd had, mostly subconsciously, for many years, and I felt unburdened. A wonderful experience.
Wonderful book.
Irvin Yalom's books about death anxiety are powerful too
Just the first step on a long journey....................Falun Dafa
It altered how I perceive reality.
Describing my experience is impossible but I can now recognise when other people try to describe it. It makes me smile.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
First big E: Taking LSD for the first time
Second big E: 3 months after my chronic pain started, the moment I realised that pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice... my depression hasn't returned since.
Suffering is not a choice, it is black karma being scraped from your soul. Falun Dafa can show you the Way
Suffering is the only way to remove black karma from our souls. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
This information has been so important for me. Aged 13, I had an OBE where I saw myself from the corner of the ceiling talking to a best friend. I knew I was The Observer and that the me I was watching was 'my child with whom I was well pleased.' From this, I was in a heightened awareness for nearly 2-months. It changed me completely; refusing to go back to school, I studied ancient Yogi texts, went into social work and then became a successful full-time psychotherapist for over 20-years. Aged 50, I went to the remote Himalayas to research/live ESP with the unified field for twenty years. Now 70, this is the first time I have heard anyone that really understands such an experience. Thank you
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe no practice can help you. The practice is for the ego identity. The "practitioner" is the very idea you have of yourself that has to be realized as illusory. This is the tricky part of realization.
@@WuWeiFlow Not talking about the ego, talking about the immortal soul Not so tricky when you realize that it is your soul that is reading this and the ego is judging, Falun Dafa is about purifying the soul and the ego then falls away. Impossible to do without a great master, lets see if your ego will let you understand and accept the truth.
Brilliant. He just stated that in the most clear and concise way that I have ever witnessed. Thank you.
You're very welcome!
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Our brain is so complicated as we go through enlightenment. It is incredible the amount of drugs it produces and how quickly it can turn them on and shut them off according to our fear or acceptance of the experience. It is incredible, and I've only scratched the surface.
Falun Dafa can answer all your questions.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I've repeatedly had experiences of union with the universe, at this point I can self induce it almost all the time. At first they were isolated amazing experiences. Through a mix of meditation techniques I've learned to let myself enter the universal stream, the eternal song daily. It is the most amazing, blissful, thing in my life....A few years ago I was in chronic pain all the time, I would have never imagined I could access so much pleasure....I am a normal person, with a regular job in life, if I can do it anyone can do it. I don't take any substances, nor use devices to do it. I have learned to transmit the first insight into the experience to other people. It is my biggest wish to transmit this to everyone alive ❤.
Thank you for this view into the biology behind it. 😊
Any advice on how you got there? I am genuinely interested.
@@KasperSparrowA good place to start is self enquiring, ask yourself 'who am I' or 'what am I' just a tip, you are not your thoughts about you.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
It is refreshing to hear and see - from a scientific side - what enlightenment 'does' to us as spiritual beings having this human-based experiences.
this happened to me, the big E enlightenment. i dont know anyone else who has. thank God for youtube n videos like this. i think something was triggered in my brain after experiencing lots of grief. grief from the present and the past and all in between at the same time. one night after many nights of this i was crying, rather loudly as i mopped the kitchen floor where i worked.
Integrated Information Theory by Guilio Tonini quite strongly aligns with the Hindu and Buddhist view of consciousness.
Our brains are the doors. When a crowd enters a room through a door, we dont say that the door generated the crowd.
~ Swami Sarvapriyananda
Impressive authenticity and open-mindedness in the quest for understanding the nature of our relationship to reality. Thank you.
Truthfulness-compassion-tolerance.............................Falun Gong
I'm practicing meditation and yoga since several years and always wondered if there could actually be a proper science of enlightenment. Seeing this video fills me with delight, it seems we humans make it up the right way. Maybe we can >produce< one day Enlightenment...
Start doing Nam Japa
Mine was a Big-E.
I hurt my crush really bad. I felt so guilty how I did her. I found the reason, and looked up at other things of what's wrong. I ate a marijuana infused cookie. I wasn't expecting it to be so intense. I started looking back at how my relationships are present, then seeing what was wrong from the past. That's when I had my epiphany. It's still too early to tell if it has changed. But I must say, it really opened my eyes, and I'm trying to work towards my goal now.
Take heart; seek joy, love and peace and then you will understand the world through these perspectives.
Words are cheap. Falun Dafa can show you the Way
@@jeff_forsythe Jesus Christ is my teacher
@@Callummullans First there was the Ten Commandments, then Jesus and now a new Gospel, do not be like the Jews of old and be afraid of the Truth.
@@jeff_forsythe there is no new Gospel. There is the word of God. My faith is in Jesus Christ and not the men of this world.
@@jeff_forsythe Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the light.
Is it possible that being in an enlightened state could equate to high levels of activity in the frontal cortex? If so, can you activate the frontal cortex more often with a combination of deep focus, deep breathing and radical acceptance?
Our brain merely being a receiver of reality is a very accurate statement.
For example, we can only perceive the visual light spectrum of the light wave. Our brain interprets "pleasant sight, colours, shapes etc." based on the visual light spectrum we receive.
However, if we were able to perceive the X-ray spectrum of reality, then our "standard of beauty" would be very different. How would our visual art, the world of architecture, fashion, etc., look if our sight perceived a different frequency? We can get a glimpse through X-rays or MRI scans, etc., and see the internal workings of our bodies.
The same goes for sound frequencies, perhaps even at the level of the intellect.
Our brain does not think, it i the soul that thinks and orders the brain to take action..................Falun Gong
@@jeff_forsytheCultist
It is our soul that thinks, not the brain. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
His book, the Rabbi’s Brain, is really compelling stuff. Glad to see him getting some more shine!
The brain is like the cockpit of an airplane and the soul is the pilot.......................Falun Gong
The brain does not think, it is the soul. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Enlightening Trauma definitely has a big E and T.
That's very interesting. Is it possible for this to happen through trauma, or could trauma cause a kind of inverse of this experience--a negative epiphany?
@@The-Well it depends. It's more like conditioning, but conditioning works for a reason. Like when you keep getting sick when you drink from a water source, so you use another, or when you're conditioned by your bosses, parents, teachers, rulers, and clergy to be very skeptical of those who seek out authority, because the most celebrated ones almost exclusively do so for the ability to abuse that authority.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe look up the origins of modern karma during the british invasion. Practicioners were hand picked because they enabled the invaders so well, while the old karma got wiped out. Karma is bad.
@@matthewatwood207 We all have black karma on our souls either from this lifetime or previous lifetimes and as long as you have karma you are not permitted to return home to Heaven, Falun Dafa can help you solve this problem.
Lots of confusion and blurriness in this video, so it can be dangerously misleading. Real enlightenment is not to be mistaken with an experience of enlightenment, as the latter can also be an effect of WRONG realizations, that lead to the same great feeling of enlightenment but actually orients one to fundamentally wrong perception and evaluation of things. So chasing the feeling of enlightenment is NOT the way to go; instead, striving for detailed, thorough understanding of everything is the way to go for much more positive results in the long run. Not to mention that really understanding something (rather than just feeling so) will also automatically cause experiences of enlightenment, small or big, doesn't really count. Which explains why the scientific way of thorough examination from all possible perspectives without prejudice or hopes for certain outcomes has always been and remains the best way to go for real enlightenment (rather than chasing any kind of feeling of state of mind).
The last part about collective consciousness is also wrong in how/where it seeks consciousness. Consciousness, just like a mere human hand, is a higher level entity that simply does not exist on the level of its building blocks (e.g. on atomic or even cellular level). So trying to find it WITHIN the cellular or subatomic interactions is pointless. On the level of cells, there is no such thing as a hand; but a collection of cells through their interactions can form a higher level entity: tissues. And the collection of tissues, through their interactions can form even higher level entities: muscles and bones. And similarly, those together can form the higher level entity that we call a hand. Consciousness is a similar higher level effect of such lower level building blocks. (And a Universe-level collective consciousness does not make any sense until we can actually define consciousness. But people's subjective "experiences" about such a thing are most likely illusions/misinterpretations as ONLY those, who have previously learnt about such concept -- thus having their brains predirected to such conclusions -- have reported such experiences.)
@@ILikeLanguages What kind of references would help you?
One can only wonder how Buddha has reached his enlightenment without a proper scientific aproach 😳
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
6:50. "What if." That's not a scientific thought, but one common to belief, not even established religion, but the kind usual in conspiracy theories. *Assuming* that taking mind-altering substances could allow someone to experience reality better, and comparing that to eyeglasses, is not logical. How do we know it isn't? Optics is measurable, you know exactly what you are going to get when you get a new pair of glasses, you don't upgrade your vision, but go from deficiency to normalcy.
Assuming that the drug-caused experience is " reality normalcy" would require two things, that there were "normal" people: people who could live their lives in that state permanently and function adequately, and two, that all people who have drug-induced "illumination" experiences could give similar accounts of that "better experienced" reality. People who put on glasses don't see different things or different worlds, they just see the same world everyone sees, clearly.
It's interesting that the neuroscientist supports his "what if" with the views of religions. Scientific research that requires mysticism to work, is scientific? Putting shamans as example is misleading: when you have a broken bone, Covid or myopia, do you go to a shaman for help? Does the neuroscientist here?
Same as he says that drugs can give people a way to experience "reality" as it supposedly really is, we, who have known people whose lives were damaged or destroyed in the seeking of transcendent realities through drugs, and have watched them rambling, hurting themselves, making fools of themselves, we can testify that their "reality" is an intoxicated brain misfiring, and often getting irreparably damaged.
Thinking, prayer and meditation can get you illumination if you wish that and try hard enough; drugs will give you addictions, disease and death without the guarantee of any kind of illumination.
Yes meditation which is really a non doing, just an understanding can give you the experiance easily. You just have to understand it and it happens in an instant. By being in a state of acceptance, non choosing. Allowing the mind. If angry etc allow, is stressed, if sick etc and you will notice a detatchment between you and your mind. Between you and the experiance the mind is generating and you will experiance enlightenment
We are always talking about details, the pieces of the puzzle. However the puzzle (the Whole) seems to just be what it is, and humans seem to reorganize the puzzle pieces and call it progression or regression, while it seems to me to only be the same put together differently.
Our perception seems to be summed up to "thought in conciousness".
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
This was actually pretty good. Too many of these short lectures on this topic start with too many questionable premises.
His last thought is akin to the question of 'is water wet or dry?" Hydrogen and oxygen are not wet at a molecular level so when does this transition occur? When does consciousness/ thought experience occur? Etc.
I find a lot of this kind of philosophy becomes a desperate attempt to validate religion/spirituality with our deep-seeded fears of the unknown after death. Altering your consciousness with pschadelic drugs has been going on for centuries but all it changes is your perception of it. Reality itself should remain constant.
Psychedelic drugs have a huge role to play in the future of enightenment. They don't change the ground of being and of course they cant change 'reality' (whatever that is), but what they can do is manifold.
They can shake people out of their sense of complacency. They can open doors and provide insights that even many years of meditation can fail to do, and in effect move your practice up a level. They also drastically increase neuroplasticity, so your brain can respond much more easily to effort in meditation, yoga or whatever other method you apply.
What's wrong with validating spirituality? What if it is true? I've seen evidence of, and experienced directly, all sorts of stuff in my life that cannot be explained by recourse to the brain alone.
Enlightenment is achieved through suffering..................Falun Gong
@klank67 For many, Reality is a hidden constant.
Enlightenment can only be reached when we are alive. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
It’s like spacial awareness is a somatic sense that works with our vision both external sight and internal dimension of thought. This perception is a travelling and dynamic energy that can stagnate on unresolved mental tasks. Waking up the limbic system and engaging with the parietal lobe is a really interesting point but I think this is as turbulent as it is because it’s the natural occurrence thus far like drug use etc.
Feng shui is really cool for understanding this perception.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Thank you! Some visual ques in your break down of the brain will really help lamen understand
The soul thinks, not the brain. Falun Dafa can show you the Way
I guess this answers the question about "can a person really change?" The answer perhaps then is yes, a person can change. But you have to get there, you have to have the big E or little e moments.
No, you need a great teacher. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I think Nirvana and Enlightenment experiences are an immune response, possibly some sort of biochemical cascade involving the endocrine, nervous and immune systems, in response to psychological or physical crisis.
My organic chemistry lecturer at university did research into the tears of joy and sadness and their effect on the immune system.
So nirvana is a healthy response or not?
Overall, yes, although nirvana sets up another conundrum which has to be accepted, that of the eternal mystery of the universe. This can be a real downer because it quells ambition and hope. So, nirvana has positive and negative impacts.
Another example - my organic chemistry teacher at uni did research into the tears of joy and tears of sadness and their effects on immunity and found happiness, bliss, etc, keeps you healthy.
I plan to to do some youtube vids this year describing all this stuff.
@@mystery-earth-garden Thank you and subscribed.
Like most of us, you are lost. Falun Dafa can show you the Way
@@mystery-earth-garden Yes, in the Buddhist way of describing nirvana both ambition and hope needs to be abandoned in order to reach liberation (as it is often called within Buddhist thought). Neither hope nor ambition is part of the Natural State, but strategic approaches in our unenlightened relationship with the reality we try to comprehend and manage. Nirvana is a state in which all is understood and no strategies are needed. Nirvana is thus an irreversible way of being beyond being just another mind-state, according to Buddhist thought. It is described as the Natural State, an original state beyond any form of fabrication or ambition. It is our true nature, whatever we realise it or not. It is not a produced state but the true nature of awareness when all ambitions, hopes, fears and conceptualisations have ended. It is beyond the duality of past, present and future. It doesn’t have personality or a history. It is simply primordial.
That happened to me the one the sort of changes you. It changed me for the better. I was in my backyard playing my guitar and singing and all of a sudden I had an amazing beautiful encounter with "GOD".
If you are seeking the Way.....................Falun Gong is it.
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
@@jeff_forsythe nah you are it inside of you he or she is just a person that did that and share it and now you are supposed to only take what serves you and you are the way always that is the whole point don’t miss itb
Spot on! Love this, and yes, have had Big E experiences, and open for more!
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Just to add that you can have those little "e" experiences everyday. You just have to figure out the best moment or specific time (and/or even a place) during the day/night, when your brain is lot more active, creative and full of million ideas.
Note: Many new/fresh ideas can come when you use any or all five senses. e.g, you smell flowers, interact with people or nature, eat some special food etc. etc.
It is the soul that thinks and has ideas, not the brain. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Very good end credit music as always & with good content.thank you @The Well
Thanks so much, really appreciate it!
I did TMS FOR DEPRESSION. It did nothing. ECT too. So i cant mess with anything without being extremely cautious.
It's seems Like the farther we go into enlightenment the more complex our brain becomes
And to enlightment.. i have heard it being defined as mainly having clarity and access to wisdom, which is exactly the state of having a good deep thinking time, but all the time. And guess who's in that level the most.. engineers, mathmaticians and psychologists.. hence it's some combination of a regular flow state, and that free floating attention used during all kinds of creative, abstract or social tasks.
I'm not sure why that would be hyped so much.. i mean, we, as humans, already are enlighted often. Maybe yea, we're less in awe, if it is used for work already, but it is still basically the same mental activity, i would say.
Wisdom is obtained not through thought but through suffering. That is why over the centuries millions of nuns and monks cut themselves off from earthly delights. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
You have thought me so much Dr Andrew Newberg I have learned much wisdom from you
I knew this as the Dark night of the soul. It happened to me just recently and I have the hard feeling it's about growing up change of stages and I also believe this re-arrange could happen multiple times and a lot more to talk about.
Enlightenment is not about bliss, ecstasy, love, those are natural qualities that came through the understanding of what we are, in the process of unveiling the wrong belief that we are the body and mind those feelings come as a construct of the previous normal anxious state
Yet, even ecstasy and fear come and go, we mix up enlightenment with those feelings, but enlightenment is the simple recognition of we are withought feelings
Fasting - pure nutrition/water - long runs - ocean waves - meditation - organic caffeine with L-Theanine (Proper Wild). An ET of lightness is how the author of "Supercharged Self Healing" described me when we 1st met.
When you are enlightened, nature see's you because nature lives in the stream most never see
The Well of Learning ✨
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Enlightenment is self realisation , a complete and irreversible transcendence of the ego and a one in a million occurance. Not as common as you make it out to be. What you describe are spiritual experiences.
Thanks.
There is no monopoly of any tradition or culture that own the posibility to enlihtment, the posibility is everyehre and in everybody, inside everybody. The absolute, the infinity, canot be here and not there, is just everywhere and in everyone.
I think rupert spira would disagree that enlightenment is an extraordinary experience, but rather the end of suffering. If the suffering was previously very intense, the end of suffering is shortly felt as an enormous liberation, that will however come to an end as any emotion does. The persuit of enlightenment is the last stage of resistance towards life, where the searcher has already understood that happiness is less a matter of circumstances and more a matter of the right attitude, which is often described as humility or dignity. When the longing for happiness and the search for enlightenment finally end after sufficient failure, the last resistance towards life, the resistance towards unhappiness, also ends. And happiness is finally found.
Like everyone else, you need a great teacher. Falun Dafa can show you the Way
Interesting, but I think it would be useful for those who want to delve deeper into certain topics, read and reflect on the advaita vedanta teachings and in particular those transmitted by permanently awakened Masters. Ramana Maharshi is one of these. And then I think it is useful to have a lifestyle that supports this research and favors the timeless experience.
1:25 Limbic Centre, Emotional centre
Hippocampus #empathy
amygdala fear centre
Feeling of connectedness
Enlighten if we look at the word it breaks down to fill with light. What does it mean when we tell people to lighten up? It means to not be too serious and not focus on the negative.
Insightful. Thank you.
Glad to hear it! Thanks for watching!
все сводится в одно в итоге - прожить жизнь не мешая другим и чтобы тебе не мешали.
Many and the psychological change is true.
Great information!
Glad you think so! Thanks for watching!
@@The-Well I really enjoyed it! I had an awakening in 2017 at a ayahuasca retreat. So really interesting to look at 'enlightenment' with the science-glasses on. Keep up the good work!
This video describes the chemistry and bio-chemical observations of "enlightened" brains. Not that it helps you get there! Many world thoughts/religions (other than eastern) do NOT have a goal of getting you to an "enlightened" permanent state. For that you will have to go Eastern. However, the observations based on medical technology are very useful points of evidence. Thanks for making this video.
Thought occurs as a concentration of those nerves firing, IMO.
Truly understanding evolution's implications is big-big-E. Most vocabulary becomes useless
Mother Theresa's PR campaign was a success, since many people seem to think she was kind, humble, and of a higher consciousness.
Why no presentations ?!
Not completely unfounded but here are some big statements. He understands how we interface with reality?
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
Incredible content, thank you.
What exactly is he calling "enlightenment" so many people who believe in no gods. And more are losing their faith. So what is to be taken from this???
Enlightenment is the key to heaven ❤
My everyday life for a few years. That is who we really are. Changing l peoples lives for the better ❤️💓❤️
Aoum 🙏🏽 Aoum 🙏🏽
It happened to me during the solar eclipse. I sound insane. My bday is 11/11 1:11. I continue to ignore it because its crazy. Idk
Unfortunately for me I had probably the biggest of Big-E's but was then accused of being Manic and labelled Bipolar 1 which is completely false. Still trying to win this battle.
Well it is very hard to erase data completely. It's easier to overwrite or work with it.
100% true, everything he said. I am living proof
We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
I’m not sure if the Indian gurus would fit into the same categories as regular folk. There are many famous cases of literal divine consciousness manifesting within the human form there
You state,unusal,what do you mean?
Just one piece of advice as a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism: if you decide to achieve enlightenment, which is not a fixed state since you have to do your homework, daily, to achieve it, take into account that true enlightenment includes helping others become happy, or at least support them in any way you can to relieve their suffering even if yourself are suffering. If one expects to achieve this noble state of life through drugs or participating in exciting events only, all one is achieving is a fleeting state of enjoyment and satisfaction of the senses. Nothing bad about these as long as they don’t mean you’re going to have to risk your life or the lives of others. But know that this is all superficial and doesn’t leave a lasting positive impression or change in your brain, in fact, in your life at large.
Damn Dr. Newberg this was good. I feel like you reached into the ether and pulled out something tangible for the empiricists to munch on.
You look at a grain of sand and expect to find a beach.
Been there seen that.
I met and fell in love with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Noble Savage a noble boundlessly loving creature who always laughed always smiled and never lied showering on me unconditional love - love, not religion for me I study it I don’t practice it. Read and experiment Ivan Turgenev’s First Love novel I won’t hold my breath reality is full of fucking savages and to reveal anymore is to cast pearls before swine Gospel of Matthew .👑🌎
Look at the world with the eyes of a child. Fresh,brand new.
It’s easy to get enlightened. It’s a lot harder to fully embody it.
Nice try. We all have black karma on our souls and it is this karma that stops us from realizing our own Divinity. The practice Falun Dafa can show you the Way to remove that karma, good luck.
i see it simple. If we would need mushrooms to finally "put on the glasses", then we would function superior in those states in all regards. But we don't. Hence, the default, everyday experience must be the "glasses" one.
Nickel please
Is it only me or does he look like the guy in Tarzan???
the question of where consciousness exists, and where does knowledge and understanding come from, is the big question
2600 years ago the Buddha came to realize there is only one life form on Earth, and that life cannot be separated from the inanimate planets and stars and the space between them, because our physical bodies are made of elements that were fused from hydrogen and helium in the core of stars into oxygen and carbon... from which DNA is composed
we know today that life is a continuation, the life that is in you is the same life that was in your parents, living cells that combined and divided and make copies of themselves - not a separate different new life - one life going back billions of years
How did Buddha come to understand all this just by sitting under a tree and meditating? We understand it today because we know what DNA looks like, what it is, how it divides and replaces its own molecules, how it evolves and changes. We know how oxygen is formed by fusion in the core of a star. But how did Buddha come to understand all this, without the science to reveal the secrets of the nature of the physical universe?
Is the answer supernatural? The Buddha did not need to understand the details of chemistry and biology and evolution and physics to understand that we are all one with each other, and with the entire universe, but how did he reach the same correct conclusion?
If we now understand it intellectually, from 500 years of successive science building that understanding, then do we need to be enlightened, emotionally - do we need to have that awaking experience to understand that we are the self aware consciousness of the Universe?
Is enlightenment simply the left side of our brain being allowed to peer into the raw data collection of the right side of our brain, and seeing for the first time that vast collection of information, images, sounds, experiences that our physical brain has been collecting and storing since the day of our conception in the womb?
Spiriituality can never be explained by science.. Spirituality begins where science ends.. Spirituality is the journey of the Atman to reach the Brahman.. Or in other words.. Dissolution of ego.. To realize the effulgent Self through Sadhana or continuous meditation.. It is beyond brain , mind or time or space... One has to contemplate on the Self to realize the Self.. No academic explanation suffices..
The one who wanted, can no longer be found
Whatever the definition Dr. Newberg gives to enlightenment here it is not at all what asian spiritual traditions mean. For example, in the buddhist teachings there's a clear difference between being enlightened and having an experience of some sort. So in buddhism, it makes no sense at all in saying "enlightenment experience". If it is an experience, it is not enlightenment. Along the path, a practitioner will have many experiences before actually seeing what can't be seen, or seeing without seeing. There's nothing to see in enlightenment, and at the same time, all is seen. Words cannot describe it and brain activity will also never be able to describe or explain it. That said, his research seems very nice and enriching to our world and lives. We just need to be careful and not think that scientists who are not practitioners themselves will ever understand what enlightenment is.
Complete Physiological change means a complete enlightenment it's change is brain chemistry,some may have complete neurological change and may be it called complete enlightenment.Some very less so called half .
But one thing is clear that every difference we have are just neurological, cognitive difference
The Asian traditions, and the Buddhist tradition itself, and even _within_ the Buddhist traditions, have many different models of the stages to 'full' enlightenment. Enlightenment can absolutely be a temporary experience or direct knowing of Reality, even if it doesn't stick.
The effect of these experiences can be enormously important, because they can remove skeptical doubt, the greatest hindrance to a dedicated spiritual path, and they can tremendously relieve anxiety, another huge hindrance, besides anxiety just being an awful thing to endure. And getting rid of anxiety, depression, anger etc., all the negative emotions, is universally agreed-upon to be the goal of enlightenment. It just progresses in stages. In Zen, there are four. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are 5, 12 or 16, depending on what you mean and who's counting. In Tibetan and Southeast Asian, there are also eight stages of concentration and then eight stages of insight, but they don't count as 'enlightenment', even though they are very beneficial for you, and neither are they considered essential for enlightenment.
It's all very confusing, which is why we need neuroscience to sort all this stuff out from an objective perspective. I also foresee AI teachers that have been programmed with all the information ever to exist in Buddhism and all the information ever to exist in Western psychology combined to tailor-make a Buddhist path for every specific individual, in a way no one person could ever come remotely close to matching.
Trial-and-error over millennia has resulted in a tiny fraction of the world population at any one time getting enlightened, and that's not going to work for the future of humanity when we face so many challenges. We only have two or so decades, if that, so we had better get to work.
Hi . Thank you for your videos. I love your videos. I want to recommend this book The secret door by Antonio Serna. está en descarga libre hoy y mañana. He talks about the state of awakening and proposes how to achieve it. It's very short and revealing, and you'll like it. Greetings!
LSD was very enlightening.
Did you just say "when you know you know your brain works better? You might iike to talk to me. I think I can explain some of your questions
Next task - to use brain technologies to reverse-engineer enlightenment. Most of us don't have 100,000 hours to spare, you know? Or 10,000 hours. We just don't, no matter how much the teachers may want us to. Not gonna happen. So let's use modern technology to make much more efficient the ONE area - and the most important area! - of our lives that we have neglected to apply technology to thus far!
My experience began with watching a few videos about meditation. I dove deeper and almost could hold the idea in my head for longer than a moment.
Then I did mushrooms.
I spent the biggest part of a day dissolving into nothing. ‘I’m’ a different person now.
It's quite amazing how doing mushrooms - even once - can be a life changing experience. See also: th-cam.com/video/5T0LmbWROKY/w-d-xo.html
Dude, I totally hear you, every day after my shift at Walmart I waddle my way down to Finnegan’s pub and put on my beer goggles and by 10 PM like clockwork Cynthia, the bartender is the hottest woman I’ve ever seen again
The video fails to answer the question it asks in the title.
The enlightened tend to disregard the brain.
Heck! When enlightment comes,🤲 why would this little meaningless individual being matter?😊
the irony is palpable
How does that maje sense to anyone? Part of a universal consciousness then cone here abd tap into it, then fo back to it?? Why would you ever leave it??? Please apply a little more reason to your argument.
It’s nothing to do with experiences.
What actually is Enlightenment? - th-cam.com/video/lOy6Eb5pkyY/w-d-xo.html