The Ultimate Truth

The Ultimate Truth is that there is experience and an experiencer. There is nothing beyond that, and even this apparent duality is an act of mind. When merged together, the experience and the experiencer are reduced to just Experiencing, a dynamic Presence.

Principles of Astral Projection

Astral Projection is an experience involving non-physical realms. It gives us a glimpse of what lies beyond our limited perspective as humans. It enables a journey into the vastness we call the Universal Mind. We will enlist some basic principles of this practice and will note some do's and don'ts.

States of Mind

It appears that Consciousness cycles through states, but Consciousness is changeless, its the mind that changes state. We explore various states of mind here. All of them are highly interesting and educating.

Introspection - 9 : There is only one Self

Unity, by Vrindavan Das

Goal: We will try to arrive at a conclusion via direct experience and logic that there can be only one Self. So the Self (consciousness) that you are experiencing right now is identical to the one I'm experiencing.

Consciousness and Machines

By Cameron Gray

The content below appeared first in a forum post.

AI is almost knocking on our doors. Everything that is needed for a fast development of AI is available at this time (2017). Which is -

• Superfast and cheap hardware
• High level programming languages
• Enough know how on brain and mechanisms of intelligence
• Cross pollination in the fields of electronics, software, neurosciences, psychology and philosophy
• Big data for training
• Corporate will and ample funding
• A good number of talented scientists and engineers in the field of AI (and AGI)
• Emergence of large immersive realistic virtual worlds (VR) for easy development and sandboxing of AI agents.
• Emergence of new theories that encourage out of the box thinking
• Destruction of old paradigms, end of dark age of AI 

Perhaps I missed a few, but you get the point - AI is inevitable.

Introspection - 6 : Consciousness Without Content

Goal

We will attempt to gain a direct experience of the pure consciousness, in other words, Self that is not engaged in experiencing anything, or when there are no contents to experience. Note that its not possible to even remember such a state, because there will be no memories of it, so we will just try to get a taste of it.

Prerequisites

Nothing more than that which is already mentioned for other introspections. Although sometimes a friend who can ask you questions mentioned below can be useful. Best done with eyes closed, but it is not necessary.

Introspection - 1 : Experiencing the Self

Goal

We will attempt here to gain a direct experience of the Self. It takes only a few minutes. It will answer the questions such as – who am I or what am I or what is this whole existence. The knowing is instantaneous but when the mind comes back, it finds it hard to accept it, at least in case of some people. The reason can be presence of beliefs, beliefs such as it cannot be so simple. And doubts like – its all fine, but …. (insert a question based on some random belief).

Prerequisites

Just an open, sharp, peaceful and intelligent mind. Absence of distractions, at least for a few minutes. Brutal honesty. Deactivation of beliefs, if any, at least for a while. Avoid making anything up, assumptions, hypotheses, guesses and all. It has to be very direct and self-evident.

Read the last article on The Art of Introspection for details on how to do it without getting lost or confused. Your gains will totally depend on these prerequisites, else its all just gibberish.

Brain vs. Mind

While we are on the topic of body, lets discuss some interesting stuff about the most interesting and mysterious organ in the body - the brain. As usual, I won't attempt to conclude too much and will leave the file open, since it is beyond my pay grade to talk on this fascinating subject. All I can do is, if you give me some statements about the brain, I can find out if they make sense based on my own experience and a bit of logical and critical thinking. I can also theorize about it but it may not be the whole truth. But I can surely dislodge some beliefs and take you to the stage of uncertainty - the "I don't know" stage, where all the real answers lie.

The Secret Life of the Self

By Android Jones

This is the secret of spiritual life: to think that I am the Atman and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings - scenes on a canvas - of which I am the witness.
-Swami Vivekananda

We have seen in the previous article that the Self arises as a result of the process of Experiencing that is taking place in the Presence. Experiencing is just modulations of Presence, so the Self is nothing but one such modulation. In essence, Self is Presence, like everything else is…. although its much more pure form of Presence compared to other forms. One can say that it’s just one step away from the Presence.


Self can be experienced, just as anything else can be. The act of experiencing the Self is truly wonderful. It’s the knower knowing itself. A blissful feeling. Presence likes to do it. This experience is also called self-awareness or self-consciousness. Nowadays, it’s a fashion to call it simply as Consciousness. It literally means to know together. The problem with this word is that its being used as a noun, verb and adjective all in one! This causes confusion. As a noun, its same as the Self (the experiencer or the knower). As a verb it’s the act of experiencing (as in, to be conscious of a thing), and as an adjective, it’s a quality that something has. Its also called the Witness consciousness or simply, the witness.