Guided Exercise For Realizing You Are God

[Music]

This episode is going to be a guided spiritual practice, an inquiry into the nature of what you are as God. This episode is a little bit different than my usual episodes, which are very conceptual and theoretical and abstract. And here, we're going to get very hands-on and practical.

This episode requires your participation. So, if you're driving in a car or listening to me while doing the dishes or cooking something, you're going to need to stop. And you're going to need to come back and do this with your full attention and concentration. So, here is where the rubber meets the road. Here is where things get very real and practical.

Now, I've got to warn you that if you go through this exercise, you may experience some shifts in your consciousness. It may even lead to a mystical experience for some of you. It may even lead to some existential crisis for some of you. So, watch out. If you're mentally unstable, then stop when it gets too deep for you. But that's the nature of spiritual work. What we're trying to do is we're trying to deconstruct your mind. And I'm going to help you to actually guide you through the deconstruction of your mind and your reality. Are you interested in that? Are you interested in seeing what results after your entire mind and reality is deconstructed? What remains then? Let's get going.

You see, one of the problems with my work, and if you are a fan of my work, is that it's very conceptual. It's very abstract. It's very theoretical. And I enjoy playing with abstractions and concepts. And that's part of the limitations of just language and teaching. But the problem with that is that you can easily get lost in these abstractions and then veer off into some sort of conceptual understanding of spirituality without grounding it in any kind of actual practice. So, here is how you do the actual practice.

One of the most important things I can teach you is the difference between spirituality at a purely conceptual level, where it is for the majority of mankind, at the level of beliefs and ideas and theories, versus actual spirituality. What it really means to do spirituality. That's one of the biggest things you're going to learn from this episode if you actually participate. And it's not enough for you to think about what I'm talking about. You must participate. So, let's get started.

Where do we begin? Well, I want to help you to realize that you are God. That's our ultimate objective here. And I'm going to try to guide you towards that. But as I guide you, understand that the things I'm talking about really cannot be understood from your current level of consciousness. So, we're pushing you. We're really pushing you beyond what your current state of consciousness is going to allow. So, don't be disappointed if you're not going to fully get everything that I'm saying here. You probably won't. It's going to require years of practice for you to get some of the stuff that I'm saying here. But maybe you'll be lucky and you'll be able to get a little bit of a kind of a glimpse into something here or there. And more importantly than actually getting the full realization, even if you don't get the full realization, it's still valuable because it's going to show you what you need to do to ultimately reach the full realization at some point in your life.

So, you are God. The problem is, when I say that, you don't understand what I mean because you don't have a reference experience for the word "God." So, let's begin by simply having you bring to mind what you think I mean when I say "God." What does that word mean for you? Bring to mind any beliefs or images or stories that you have about that. And then, when I further say that you are God, bring to mind what you think I mean by that. What do you imagine I mean when I say that? So, you've got that. Whatever images you have, just kind of put that to the side in your mind. Just remember, remember what that is. We'll come back to that in a second.

Now, what I want you to do is I want you to ground yourself completely in present experience. So, when I say "experience," what am I saying? Nothing complicated. Take a look at your hands. Put them out in front of you like this and just take a look at them. And just become aware of this room that you're in, wherever you are. Look around you. Notice that experience is happening. Everything here: the hands, the room, your body, feelings and thoughts that you might be having, the sounds you're hearing, my voice. This is all experience. So, just focus your attention on experience. Notice that you are aware. That you are conscious. So, here, we'll be using the words attention, awareness, and consciousness interchangeably. They all mean the same thing for our purposes here. Notice that you are conscious right now. That's real for you. Your consciousness right now is more real than anything else. There is nothing more real for you than your consciousness. There is nothing more real than your experience.

So, now, take out your hands like this and put them in front of you, maybe a foot or two in front. And just look at your hand and become fully conscious that this hand is real and it exists right now, right here and now. I want you to bring to mind your ideas about God at the same time as you're looking at this hand. Bring to mind your ideas of what you think God is. What you've been told. What you hear me say about it. What you've heard some Zen master say about it. What you've heard Jesus say about it. Whatever. Bring those ideas to mind. And now, I want you to notice the difference between those ideas of God and this hand. Become conscious of that difference. And now, recognize that this hand is what I mean when I say God. Not any of those ideas you have.

So, now, keep looking at your hand. And now, make a shift in your mind that what I'm actually talking about, what I'm talking about you as being God, I'm not talking about some sort of airy-fairy metaphysical ideas out there somewhere, some kind of fantasy, some kind of Christian, Judeo-Christian version of God. What I'm talking about is the actual physical, conscious experience that you're having right now, which, of course, is not limited to your hand, but it includes your arm, it includes your clothing, the clothing that you're wearing over your body, it includes the physical objects in this room, it includes the entire room. So, there's nothing special about the hand that makes it God. Rather, the entire bubble of experience right here that you are experiencing, no matter what it is, this is what we mean by God.

So, throw away all of your ideas about God. You don't need them anymore because you've got the actual thing right here. It would be sort of like you're sitting on a horse and then you're having fantasies about horses and you're wondering, "What are horses?" And so you're sitting on a horse and you're thinking about horses very deeply. You're closing your eyes and you're imagining horses and you're trying to think, "What is a horse? What is a horse?" But meanwhile, you're sitting on a horse. So, the mistake is to close your eyes and get lost in the ideas of horses rather than looking down at the horse that you're sitting on. That's the thing that matters. When you've got the actual horse right underneath you, you don't need the ideas of horses. You don't need people's stories about horses. You don't need their opinions about horses. You don't need to go to an encyclopedia to read about what a horse is. You just look down and you pet the horse. That's what the horse is. Likewise, here with God, you don't need some guru's ideas about God. You've got God right here. It's just a matter of recognizing something that you're not presently recognizing.

So, you might be wondering now, of course, "Well, Leo, if my hands are God and this is just God, isn't I mean, so what's the big deal? Nothing has changed. It's just a word game. It sounds like you're just playing semantics here." Well, of course, we're not just playing semantics. Something very profound is being said beyond mere semantics and word games. The difficulty is guiding you into realizing that difference. So, how we do that is we need to strip all of the conceptual baggage that you have constructed to make sense of and to explain this present experience that's happening right now. What's happening right now is God. The problem is that you're not fully recognizing what it is for what it is because you've created so many stories since childhood about what is really happening in this present moment. These stories are so powerful, so compelling, and so lodged in your mind at the subconscious level that you can't even imagine the constructive power they have right now upon your sense of reality. So, in a sense, we have to deconstruct those stories and explanations to create an empty room for you to then be able to realize the significance of what God is.

So, here's how we do that. So, focus your attention and awareness on this present bubble of experience that you have, this room that you're in. Now, we need to start stripping away all of the conceptual background structure that you've constructed to explain what this experience is because you think you know what this experience is. For example, let's start by removing the Earth from the equation. So, you think that you're sitting here and that this experience is happening on planet Earth. It isn't. I want you to recognize that the idea of planet Earth is an idea. It's a story. It's a conceptual background that you are placing underneath this present experience in order to ground it and to explain it away. Now, this is going to be difficult for some people to swallow. This, you're going to have a lot of excuses. You're going to want to tell me, "But Leo, what are you talking about? You're losing your mind here. I mean, of course, this is Earth. Where else would I be if not on Earth?" Recognize that that is more concepts and more stories.

So, see what you do is you create a story, and then you create another story underneath that story, and then another story to excuse that story and to justify that story. And so you have layers upon layers of stories backing up stories, which creates a sense of reality. And so the difficulty here is removing all the layers of story. And of course, as we try to do that, your mind will try to construct new stories to replace the old stories or to justify why the old stories should remain intact because your mind doesn't want to remove all the stories because then it would be lost. That would be a deconstruction of your mind. You might even start to feel like you're losing your mind when we remove all the stories. But just go with me here. This is an experiment. Have some courage to test this out and see what happens. I'm not telling you to believe me. Just do it. Do it right now. Remove your idea of planet Earth. Pretend as though planet Earth doesn't exist and you've never heard about it.

So, you see, we're taking a little bit away from this present experience. Now, this present experience becomes a little bit more mysterious. You see, because now, where is it happening? This present experience, this bubble. But we need to take more away. Let's take away the entire physical universe as well, not just the Earth. So, notice that this present experience for you, it it's not just a a bubble of experience floating in a void. For you, it's couched inside of various scientific schemes, such as planet Earth and the entire cosmos and universe as science knows it. Which you you have an image in your mind of the Big Bang. It happened 14 billion years ago, and then there was stardust, and there were molecules floating out in space, and then they congealed and created stars, and planet Earth was formed, and that is orbiting around the Sun, and this whole thing. So, I want you to forget all of that. Notice that it's just a story. Pretend as though you've never even heard this story before. If you can successfully do that, you'll notice that this experience becomes a little bit more mysterious than it used to be because you don't have an explanation for why it's here or what it even is.

Now, I want you to strip away any ideas you have from science, any scientific explanations you have for this experience, which will include molecules, atoms, maybe some sort of quantum mechanical stuff that you are using to explain away what's happening here. So, when you're looking at your hand, for example, and I ask you, "What is your hand made out of?" You're going to say, "It's made of molecules and atoms." I want you to notice that this is more story and ideas, concepts. This is not actually what you're seeing in this hand. You are not seeing any molecules or atoms in this hand. You are not seeing any quantum mechanics in this hand. You might say, "Well, the hand is made out of energy or matter." But you're not seeing any energy or matter in this hand. These are ideas, abstractions, and concepts. Fully ground yourself in the raw experience of the hand. So, the colors of the hand are really what the hand is made out of, not molecules and atoms. This is from your direct experience. You don't need to believe me here. This is not another story. Right? Color is what you see. Shape is what you see. That's what your hand is literally made out of. Please become conscious of that right now and realize that atoms and molecules and quantum mechanics and energy and matter is something you're projecting onto, overlaying on top of the colors and the shapes of which the hand is actually made. So, throw that away. Get as close and direct to your experience as possible, with no intermediary interpretations, overlays, or projections. Just strictly what's here is all that we care about. We want to remove everything that isn't strictly here right now.

So, if you're successful in doing this, once again, this entire experience and your hand becomes more mysterious. Even more mysterious than it was because now you don't have an explanation for why the colors and shapes are and where they came from. What is sourcing the colors and the shapes? But of course, we're not done yet. Now, we need to remove other scientific models and imagery that you have in your mind in order to really fully get you into the present moment and into your direct experience.

So, now, here comes a very radical step. Are you ready for this? As you're looking at your hand, I want you to remove the notion of biology. Strip your experience of any biological notions that this is a biological part of a biological organism, of an animal, of an ape, of a humanoid. Recognize that that too is just concepts and stories and models. And that that is not actually, strictly speaking, in the direct experience. There is no direct experience of you being human. As outrageous as that sounds, that is the case. Please notice this. You don't need to believe me. Just notice it. It is the case that there is no humanness here. There is no biology happening here. There is no chemistry happening here. And there is no physics happening here.

Now, take the story you have in your mind that you've been told by science that this hand and that all of this experience here is just a byproduct of neurons in a physical human brain. Recognize that that too is just a story and a projection and an overlay. Pure concepts. You do not actually find any brain in your direct experience. There is no brain and there are no neurons. So, throw all that away. And now, look at your hand. And you should start to notice, if you've been doing all this, that your hand is getting more and more mysterious. What is it doing here? Because we've stripped away all the explanations for why the hand is here or what is sourcing the hand, how it's being created. So, there's a sort of emptiness that's being generated. Now, you don't really know what the hand is.

Notice if there is a subtle image in your mind that the hand is part of a human body, and that what you are is a human, and that the hand is just a part of a human body, and the human body is just this living thing made out of cells. Take that whole narrative and throw it away. Pretend as though you never even heard about it because it's not present in your direct experience. That's a conceptual overlay. Take the idea that you are a human body and that there is a human body sitting here and throw that away. There is not a human body sitting here. You do not find that in your direct experience. What you see is a hand. This hand is actually severed from this hand. There is no, you don't see a connection between this hand and this hand. They're two separate things. And this whole idea you have of a body, you don't actually see a body. You see pieces of things. You see some clothing here. You see some different colors. That's what you actually see. You don't see that full sort of human body the way you imagine it. You don't even see the back of your head. Notice that the skull that you imagine you have, this is just concepts. You don't actually see any skull. So, throw all that away.

Now, we're going to get a little bit more crazy. Now, I'm going to ask you to do something really crazy. Are you ready for this? So, while you're looking at this hand, I want you to take the idea that you were born as a biological entity. So, this idea you have in your mind that the way that you got here, like if I ask you, "How did you get to this present moment?" You, in your mind, will say, "Well, I came to this moment from yesterday, and I came to yesterday from the day before, and I came to that from last year, and I came to that year from the year before." And ultimately, you get all the way back. You rewind the clock until you get to your birth and you say, "Well, uh, I came out of my mother, and that's how I got here." And where did she come from? She came out of her mother. And my father came out of his mother, and so on, going back and back and back millions of years. So, take all of that. Recognize that that's just story and concept and overlay, and throw all that away.

So, I'm asking you to literally throw away the idea of your birth. That's a big ask. You're probably going to have excuses for why you shouldn't throw that away or why it would be insane to throw that away because it's real. These things I'm asking you to throw away, to you, all these things feel real. So, it's like asking you to throw away reality. So, you're not going to want to do it. But if you're wise, do it anyways and see what happens. This is an experiment. Treat this as an experiment. Just see what happens.

So, so now, throw away your birth. Such that now, if I ask you, "Where did this experience come from?" Notice that if you followed all the steps up to this point, you are not allowed to say that, "Well, this is, these colors and sounds, this is just the perceptions of a biological ape-like organism that was born from a mother on planet Earth, inside of the Milky Way galaxy, in the universe that came out from a Big Bang." You can no longer say that because we got rid of all those stories and ideas and projections. So, now, when I ask you, "Where did this experience come from?" What do you say? If you did this process correctly, you should be left speechless. You don't know where it came from. You literally do not know. It's a complete mystery.

So, now, what I want you to do is just to sit and bask in the not knowing while you're looking at your hands. And I want you to experience the profundity of what's happening right now. Because usually, we go through our lives and we're not experiencing how profound existence is or consciousness is because we, we already have a readymade set of stories that explains it all away and makes it feel mundane and unremarkable. But now, for the first time in your life, I want you to really train your consciousness on the fact that this moment exists, and it's completely mysterious, completely unknown, because we removed all the stories. And yet, here it is. It exists. But what is it that you're looking at when you're looking at this hand? Try to just become conscious of the astounding fact that anything exists at all. It doesn't matter whether it's a hand or a table or a car. Just keep looking at this hand. And now, become fully conscious of the astounding fact that there is anything at all in existence, and that you're looking at it right now. How amazing is that? You don't know where this hand came from. You don't know what it is because you removed the idea of atoms, molecules, energy, matter. And you've removed the idea of biology. So, you removed cells from the equation. You don't see any cells here. You see colors and shapes. There are no cells. Notice that. And you've even stripped away the idea that you were born, that this hand came out of some woman at some point as part of a biological organ. So, strip that away from your experience.

I also now want you to strip away the idea that this hand is alive. Because that's also an idea. You don't have a direct experience actually of life or a living thing here. This hand is not alive. That's a projection. Throw that away. And now, we need to throw away the whole background of human history. So, in history class, you were taught where humans came from. You were taught that, for example, if you're American, then your ancestors probably came from England, and then the English ancestors, you know, they came from maybe from Rome or from Germany, you know, from the European continent. And then those came ultimately from Africa. They teach you. And then those, whatever, you know, those came from monkeys, and those monkeys came from mammals, and then those mammals came from dinosaurs and reptiles or fish or whatever. And you have this whole lineage. You have a whole history of like, there was, you know, the American Revolution. Then before that, there was the, you know, the French Revolution. And before that, there was, um, all sorts of stuff you learned from European history. You know, there was the Roman Empire. Before that, there was the Egyptian Empire and Kingdom. And before that, there was other stuff. There was Mesopotamia, there was Babylon, whatever ideas you have. So, take all that and realize that none of that is present in your direct experience. All that is just stories and projections. Throw all that away.

And now, here's the next really big step, rather challenging. Now, I want you to throw away the idea of time. So, you think traditionally, you think that this hand is however old you are. You think you're what, 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 60 years old, doesn't matter. You think this hand is a certain number of years old. Throw that away. But not just that, there's more to time than just years. Now, I want you to become conscious of the fact that you're actually holding time and imagining time in your awareness right now. You are actually imagining that time is flowing. After I'm speaking, you think time is occurring. Now, of course, I am speaking and stuff is moving, but that is not the same thing as time. So, this is a little bit of a subtle distinction where you have to, you have to recognize that time is an overlay that you are projecting upon this present experience. So, the present experience is happening, stuff is moving, but it's actually not happening through time. There are no seconds, minutes, hours, years, days, months, weeks. Throw all that away. That's just a projection. You don't experience any of that actually. You don't experience seconds flying by. You don't experience minutes or hours or days. And you furthermore don't experience a direction to time. You might think that, "Well, time is moving from right to left," or however you conceive of it, it's moving in a certain direction. There's a timeline as years pass or seconds pass, time moves this way, and it doesn't move the other way. Throw that away. That whole thing is just a projection. There is no direction here. Motion is happening, but it has no direction.

So, now you're sitting here looking at this experience, and specifically now at your hand. And now things have become really mysterious. You don't know what this hand is made out of. You don't know where it came from. You don't know why it's here. You don't know what it's a part of. You don't know what its function is. And now, look at this hand and look at it as though it does not exist within time. Literally, try to see that this hand is timeless. And now, take your consciousness and shift it away from the hand and put it onto consciousness itself. So, take consciousness and put it on the fact that you're conscious itself. And start to wonder, "What is consciousness?" And remove any projections you have about consciousness. Because remember, in the past, you used to explain consciousness as just something that biological organisms have. Biological organisms are born with consciousness, which is produced by the brain. But we removed all those. So, now, just become conscious of the mystery of consciousness. Where did it come from? What is it doing? What is it made out of? It's not made of atoms or molecules or cells or neurons. It's not happening in the brain. It's not happening to a biological creature, an ape, who is walking on planet Earth, because we threw all that away. Consciousness, just consciousness. The mystery of consciousness. And become conscious now that consciousness is all that there is. This is not a belief. This is literally your direct experience. There is nothing but consciousness in your direct experience.

Now, consciousness can shift and it can focus on different aspects of itself. You can focus your consciousness on the hand. You can focus it on itself. Consciousness focused on consciousness. You could focus it on various physical objects. Maybe there's a lamp in your room. Maybe there's a couch. Maybe there's the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the lights, a cat, a dog in the room. You can focus your consciousness on those things. But no matter where you focus your consciousness, it's always consciousness. So, now, I want you to shift your consciousness from itself out into the room. Look at that lamp. Look at that couch. Look at that wall. Look at that ceiling. Look at that cat. Look at that dog. Whatever is around you. And notice, as you're looking at any of these objects, that they are literally made out of consciousness, the same as your hand. You're conscious of the dog. You're conscious of the couch. You're conscious of the lamp, just like your hand, just like yourself.

And now, expand your consciousness to occupy the entire room, like a bubble of consciousness. And notice that this entire bubble is what you are. You are this bubble of consciousness. You are not the body inside of the bubble. You are the whole bubble, of which the body is just one part, all the other parts. And this, how do you know that you are the whole bubble? Well, look, you can move your head, and the bubble moves with your head. Every object moves with the bubble. No matter where you look, it's just a bubble. You are the entire bubble. And now, as you're conscious of the entire bubble, start to wonder, "Where did this bubble come from? What is this bubble? Where is this bubble?" And notice if your mind brings up any kind of the old stories that we were supposed to throw away, because it probably will. It'll probably say, "Oh, well, this bubble is just inside of a brain, which is just part of a human body, which is just a creature who's walking on top of the Earth, which is spinning around the sun, which is part of the Milky Way galaxy, which is part of the universe, which came out from a Big Bang 14 billion years ago." Throw all that away. None of that is part of your direct experience of this bubble.

So, one thing I want you to take away from this exercise is that even though scientifically minded people love to tout science as this hard, objective, purely factual activity, and that spirituality is the opposite of that, spirituality is just airy-fairy belief systems and fairy tales and wishful thinking and soft thinking, which is not grounded in any kind of reality, and it's just pure philosophy and pure mental masturbation talking about God and such things and spirits. And now, I want you to flip that completely around to realize that spirituality is what we are doing here. Spirituality is the most tangible, the most practical, the most hard of activities that you can do as a human being when you're doing it correctly, as we're doing it here now. And that actually, it's science which is pure abstraction, pure conjecture, pure story, pure projection, pure overlay, pure assumption, and pure wishful thinking. It's pure imagination, fantasy, utter fantasy. Atoms, molecules, apes, biology, evolution. Throw all of it. It's pure fantasy. What's real is consciousness, and nothing but consciousness. Even minutes and seconds and hours are fantasy.

So, you're sitting here as this bubble. You've stripped away all of the concepts from this bubble. Now, just take a moment and allow yourself to sit here in peaceful meditation. There's nothing you need to do. There's nothing you need to think. There's nothing you need to explain. There's nothing you need to imagine. Just sit with raw, direct experience and consciousness of the entire room that you're in. If your mind imagines things and projections, scientific stories, history, biology, whatever, personal memories from the past, recognize that all of those are just ideas that are arising within consciousness. Don't give them any import. Don't give them any significance. Don't believe them. Believe direct experience. Notice that all of those ideas are pure fantasy.

And now, you're ready to perhaps get a taste of what God is. So, now, looking at your hands again, and being very careful to make sure that all of that fantasy has been stripped away, you should be sitting in a totally rather empty experience. It should feel kind of hollow. You're sitting here, you're conscious of stuff, there's colors, there's sounds, but none of it has any explanation anymore because we've stripped all the background explanation away from everything. And if there are still explanations that you have that I didn't guide you to to strip away, throw them all away yourself.

So, what do I mean when I say that you are God? God is an infinitely conscious, singular being that exists mysteriously for its own sake and nobody else. It doesn't exist in space or time, and it's not made out of anything. Not matter, not energy, not anything. It's completely groundless and unknown. And yet, it is conscious, and it exists, and it is a sentient being. There's one thing we forgot to strip away for you to make sense of what I just said. We need to strip away, of course, this one's difficult. Are you ready for this? We need to strip away the fantasy of other beings. Your entire life, you've imagined that you are one biological being amongst millions of others. Now, as you sit here and you're fully conscious, strictly of what is actually present in your experience, you can perhaps become conscious that all other beings, humans, animals, and so forth, are of course just pure fantasy and projection. Have you ever experienced any other beings? No. Only you. You are the only being that you've ever experienced. So, I want you to throw away the idea of other beings as though they never even existed. I want you to throw away the idea of other bubbles similar to yours that exist somewhere else in the universe. Throw all that away. I want you to throw away the idea that there are other planets on which there live other beings living life independently of you. I want you to throw all that away. I want you to throw away the idea that there are other rooms in your house. Throw all that away. That's fantasy. There is nothing in the universe but this right now. This is not a belief. This is not a philosophy. Just notice and become conscious that that is literally what is the case for you. I am merely telling you what is the case for you. Have you done that? Good.

Now, you're sitting here all alone. You're conscious. You can become conscious of you as this sentient being that is sitting here. You can move your hands. You can say things. You can feel things. But you have no idea what any of these things are because we stripped away all the explanations and stories and projections. And now, I'm telling you that as you're looking at your hands, you're looking at God. God is the universe being conscious of itself, experiencing itself as sentient and intelligent and feeling, seeing, hearing, and whatever else you're doing. That's what reality is. Reality is a bubble of sentience. But you might still wonder, "Why do you call it God?" Why would this be called God? Well, it's not human. It's not biological. It's not an ape. It's not a hominid. It's not a Homo sapiens. It's not matter. It's not energy. It's not atoms. It's not cells. It's not neurons. It's not brains. So, what is it? It's just consciousness. Pure consciousness. But now you ask, "Well, what is consciousness?" Well, consciousness can't be defined because it has no ground. Consciousness is not anything. It's nothing. Consciousness is not made out of building blocks like atoms. Consciousness is an infinite field, a singular infinite field, which morphs and changes and takes on various properties: colors, sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts. It's a sentient field. One of the most crucial things you have to understand here is that this field is not human. You are not human. Think back to where the idea came from that you are human. At one point, somebody indoctrinated you with this idea, and you just believed it like a sucker. There is, in fact, no evidence that you are human.

But again, why do we call it God? We call it God because it's eternal. It's divine. How is this experience here divine? Well, to see it as divine and eternal, you need to strip away all of the humanness from it. You need to strip away all of the biology from it, all of the chemistry, all of the physics. Strip all that away. If you succeed in doing that, and then you also need to strip away time. Strip away, remember the idea of time. If you fully succeed in doing that, this experience will literally turn into absolute, absolute being. Not biological, not physical, not material, not in time and space, but eternity.

So, for this to you, for you to really get this, you need to now strip away again, because this is so difficult to do. Strip away once again the idea that you were born. Experience this present moment as though it's existed by itself, independent of any prior moments that you might be imagining. Because again, prior moments are fantasy. There are no prior moments. There was no birth. There is no history to the universe. This is it. This bubble right now is it. And if you can succeed in stripping all that away, you will recognize that this here is eternal. Eternity outside of time and space. This moment is timeless. It's been happening forever. Every single moment exists forever. It has existed forever. You are not a human who was born on a rock circling the sun in some galaxy somewhere. You are an infinite sentient being who has been conscious forever. You have been sitting here imagining this room and all other people and galaxies and stars and planets and animals and objects and your parents and your birth and human history and human civilization. You've been imagining this forever, without beginning or end. And you will keep being here forever because you're also, of course, imagining your death in the same way that you're imagining your birth.

And now, look at your hand and see your hand for the first time for what it really is. Your hand is not a finite biological physical object. Your hand is made of pure, infinite consciousness. Look at your hand. Recognize that this hand, you could zoom into it forever, and you would see more structure and more structure and more structure, like a fractal of infinite consciousness. This hand has no scale. It has no dimension. It has no inches or meters. It is not happening within time. This is the universe's hands. Move your hands. And as you do so, recognize that you are moving your fingers with the full power of the entire universe. This is the entire universe. The universe is not made out of stars and planets and things. This is the whole universe. These hands have existed forever. Now, move your hands with complete recognition of these hands as being the hands of God. Look at the beauty and profundity and intelligence of the design of your hands. The intelligence with which they move. The perfection of these hands. These hands are infinite.

And now, for the final move, take your consciousness and turn it completely inwards, as though you're kind of looking inside of your skull, at the very heart of who you feel you are. Looking at your own face, as it were. Of course, there's no face. What do you see? What are you conscious of? There's no face here. What you're conscious of is pure consciousness itself. There is like an empty, white, transparent void right where your face you used to imagine was. There is a pure, just a pure field of consciousness right here. This consciousness, if you focus in on it more and more and more and more, kind of turn your gaze inwards, as though you're looking inside of your skull, and just hold your consciousness there. And recognize that what you're looking at is, you're looking at the very heart of what you are, which is pure, infinite, empty consciousness. This void inside your skull goes on forever. It's infinitely deep. That's what you are. Pure, empty, infinite consciousness. And in that void is arising this entire bubble, including these hands, including these sounds, and the feelings in your body, and the thoughts in your mind. And so, you are this infinite, eternal void, which is literally imagining and dreaming up the entire material world around itself, including these hands, including thoughts and ideas and projections. And out of this, you are constructing a life. And then you are creating layers of stories, including physics, chemistry, biology, history, cosmology, astrophysics. You're creating ideas such as that there are atoms, and there are planets, and there are stars, and there are galaxies, and that you were born, and that you're going to die, and that there are other people. And you're, you're, you're imagining all of this, and it's materializing around you as this, this infinite void that you are. And although right now you may not be fully conscious of it because your state of consciousness is not sufficiently high to allow you to see this, actually, you are willfully generating all of this stuff. You are generating every single one of these fantasies. And you are even generating, for example, the shape and structure of your hands and how they move. You are imagining this with your consciousness, even though your ego doesn't have control over it, per se, within your current state.

And so, here you are, the universe, just sitting here. You can't go anywhere because you're absolutely inevitable. You have to exist precisely as you exist right now. And if you existed as something else, you would exist that way, not this way. And it would have to be that way rather than this way. But you have to exist in some way. So, this is the way in which you exist right now. And this, what you're experiencing, is absolute truth.

Bring to mind any ideas you have when I say the word "truth." What is truth? What do you think is the ultimate truth? Bring to mind any ideas. Now, compare that with actual truth. Everything you're conscious of right now, in every moment, that is actual, absolute truth. And any of your ideas, throw them away. That's not truth. That's fantasy. Everything that's ever happening, anything you're actually experiencing, anything you're conscious of, that's absolute truth.

It's very important that you strip away the projection that this here, this is just a veil of perceptions, and that there's some deeper reality behind the colors, behind the sounds, behind the feelings, as though this bubble here, like Leo, this bubble, these are just perceptions. It's just perceptions. Perceptions could be an illusion. They could be wrong. No, perceptions could not be an illusion. They could not be wrong. That is the illusion. The illusion is that perceptions could be wrong or are an illusion. Perception is absolute truth. That's it. And there's nothing beyond perceptions. And remember, perceptions are not occurring to a biological organism, to a human. Perceptions are actually God. Perceptions are actually the cosmos being conscious of itself. Reality is such a thing that it is fully, absolutely conscious of itself. And whatever it's conscious of is precisely exactly what exists. Nothing more, nothing less. What you're conscious of right now is all that exists. You are the entire universe. You are conscious right now of the entire universe. Now, you say, "But Leo, what about the planet Mars? I'm not conscious of what's happening on the planet Mars." There is nothing to the planet Mars other than your fantasy of there being a planet Mars and there being something on the planet Mars for you to become conscious of. That's what the planet Mars is. The planet Mars is not a place that you go to and become conscious of stuff. The planet Mars is a fantasy that you're imagining right now. And you're saying, "Well, Leo, but I'm not experiencing what other humans are experiencing. So, I can't possibly be the whole universe." You are the whole universe fantasizing that there are others besides you who are experiencing something other than you. But Leo, this is complete solipsism again. You are projecting something you heard other humans say, and you are imagining that there is this philosophy called solipsism, which has some bad connotations to it and is somehow negative and horrible, and you are projecting that onto the present moment. That's actually what you're doing.

I want you to understand that spirituality is absolutely nothing but you being conscious, fully conscious of exactly what you're doing as you're doing it. The more you do spirituality, the more conscious you become of how you fantasize things into existence, such that you stop being fooled by your own fantasies. This is it. Reality is an illusion of consciousness. And that's what God is. God is the universe dreaming itself into existence through imagination. And what is God made out of? It's made out of nothing.

And now, for the final, ultimate move. I want you to look around this room. Look at your hands. Feel any emotions in your body. Notice any thoughts that are coming up. Just take in the entire moment. And as you're sitting here, I want you to recognize, in one fell swoop, that this entire moment, these hands, are absolutely nothing. Strip away every possible projection and fantasy until you even strip away the idea that something is happening here, that this is something. It's not something. It's nothing. Or you could recognize that something and nothing are indistinguishable and therefore identical. And that actually, as you're sitting here, all that is happening is nothing, even though it looks like something. Your mind is going to want to come up with excuses and to reject what is being said here, even though what's being said is patently obvious because it's occurring directly in your experience. Your mind is so used to fantasy that it's going to want to try to jump into fantasy mode and come up with fantasies in order to challenge what's absolutely true and obvious. Because your mind probably doesn't like this. Your mind might be scared of this. It might think that this is bad or evil. You might not like the idea that you're all alone and that others don't exist or are fantasies within your own mind. You might not like the idea that you are God. You might not like the idea that there is no history. You might not like the idea that there's no end. But just sit here. Sit in the emptiness. Sit and enjoy the emptiness of what you are. Recognize that you don't need. You don't need a bunch of fantasies. The fantasies that you used to cling to are not necessary anymore. You don't need science. You don't need religion. You don't need history. You don't need psychology. You don't need biology. You don't need a life history. You don't need a personal story. You don't need your memories. You don't need your parents. You don't need your friends. You don't need anybody. Because you're God. Why would God need anybody? God is complete. God is absolute. God is everything. God imagines everything. And when you fully accept this and embrace this, which you might struggle to do for a while, but when you fully embrace this and surrender to it and accept yourself.

As God, there's no problems. You don't need anything because you're complete. This moment is perfect. Just stop imagining other things. If you remove all your fantasies, this moment will be perfect, and you will sit here happily in peace forever. You'll be sitting here forever because you have been sitting here forever, imagining all sorts of things.

And of course, the final thing to realize is that God is love, and that you are love. What does love have to do with it? Well, love is just the complete acceptance of who and what you are, and the embracing of everything that exists as your own self. After all, if you recognize that this is all that exists, and all that exists is you, this entire bubble is you, and you are creating this entire bubble, this is what you are. Then what point is there in resisting it? What point is there in hating it? There's no point.

Once you accept it and embrace it, then you see the magic of it, the magic of the fact that it exists at all, that anything exists at all, and you love it. When you take your consciousness and you turn it inwards here, into your skull area, and you notice that what exists here is not a skull or a face, but actually pure, empty infinity, infinite consciousness. If you keep zooming into that, you'll also recognize that that empty infinity is also love. It's pure, infinite love. It's pure unity.

And when you look at your hands, you recognize that your hands are absolute truth. They are the truth. They are the hands of God. They are timeless. They are eternal. They are forever, even though they are aging. And at the same time, they are made out of love because all of consciousness is just made out of love. And what is love? Love is nothing. Love has no substance to it. Love is just infinite, empty consciousness, which is fully unified with itself, fully accepts itself as what it is, without needing or wanting to be anything but what it is, because it's completely in love with itself.

And then you realize that everything is perfect. Reality is perfect. Reality cannot be made better because it's already eternal, infinite, beautiful, and perfect. And then you just sit here, and you just bask in that. You stop your fantasizing. You stop thinking, and you just sit silently in what we call meditation. You just sit. But really, what you're meditating upon is the fact that you are God, conscious of itself, totally loving itself, totally accepting itself, just being what it is, because it can't be otherwise. You can't be anything other than what you are: absolute truth, absolute love, absolute consciousness, infinity.

And so you sit here in your room for the next hour, and you just enjoy it, recognizing that you have solved the entire riddle of the universe. And having solved it, having unraveled the entire illusion, there's nothing more to do. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to get. There's nothing to pursue or to aspire to, because existence is all there is, and you are it. You are existence. So you just sit and you bask in the joy of existing. And that is true spirituality. Everything else is just this simple. That's all of spirituality.

Now, of course, your state of consciousness can change. So right now, your state of consciousness is not very high. Even if you went through this, it might have elevated your consciousness a little bit, but your baseline state of consciousness is still very low. There's a lot more you could become conscious of. For example, you could become omniscient. You could become conscious of crazy things that you can't even imagine right now. But no matter what state of consciousness you're in, it doesn't ultimately matter because every state is equally God. It's just that some states allow you to see more of God, and some states allow you to see less of God, but all states are God. And it really doesn't matter what state you're in, per se, although of course, it also does matter because the higher states allow you to fully feel and recognize what I've been talking about here.

Because, to be honest, even if you went carefully through all of this exercise, which I hope you did, the majority of you will still not have actually fully understood or even partially understood, become directly conscious of what I was talking about here. You got a little bit of a push towards the right direction here. We've corrected many misconceptions you might have had. This is all good stuff, very important. But did you fully realize yourself as God? Probably not. Maybe a few of you did. If you did, it would knock you to the floor. This is not, this is not a realization you're going to overlook. If you're sitting there thinking like, "Well, yeah, maybe I did, Leo, but I'm not sure," you didn't. That means you didn't. When you fully realize yourself as God, you're going to be sure. You're going to be real sure. There's nothing more sure of that you'll ever be in your life.

So if you didn't have the full God realization yet, don't worry. This is a process. Right? Don't expect to get this in one day. This, this might take you some number of years to get. If you really want to understand what I was communicating here, I highly recommend that you try this guided exercise on a psychedelic responsibly, carefully, without getting yourself into trouble or hurting yourself. But if you take a psychedelic like LSD or mushrooms or DMT or something like that, and you go through this exercise, you may not even need to go through this exercise. You might just get it just by taking enough psychedelic. But if you take the psychedelic and you go through this exercise, that will maximize your chances of getting it.

Now, that doesn't mean you won't lose it. You might get it, then you might lose it. You might get it again, you might lose it again. But still, even if you get it and lose it, it's still better than never having gotten it at all. So in this work, you kind of do the best you can. You take whatever you can get, whatever mystical experiences you can get, you take them. And then you keep doing the practices, and over the years, you become better and better, and you remove all the fantasies, and you become more understanding of what true spirituality is about. And you deconstruct more and more of your stories of science and religion and New Age ideas and all this. You deconstruct all that. And then eventually, you're just left in this pure sort of Zen state of God consciousness. And then you're happy. You're satisfied. And then you understand everything. You understand that everything is not understandable. That's the nature of God. It's a mystery to its own self because it's infinite. The nature of infinity is that infinity is mysterious, even to itself, because it keeps going and going and going forever. So it can never fully reach its own end or limit, because it has none.

And that's it. See? Very different from what you thought spirituality is, isn't it? Very different. Because when you're reading books about spirituality, your head gets filled with so many fantasies and ideas of what it actually is. And, uh, it turns out that it's not that at all. The map is not the territory. So what you really learned, if you did this lesson here, is you learned the lesson of the map is not the territory. What I was pointing you towards here is the territory. Keep focusing your consciousness on the territory, carefully avoiding getting lost in the maps. Even though the maps are important and necessary, they ultimately become an obstacle. Eventually, you want to throw away all the maps and just bask in the territory itself.

And then that is the ultimate form of meditation: is just you existing as the territory, as God, as the universe, as love, as consciousness, as absolute truth, as nothingness, as everything, and just being content with that. All right, I'm done here. Please click that like button for me if you like this episode. And come check out actualized.org. That's my website. On there, you will find my book list, which has a ton of amazing, some of the best spiritual books, books on consciousness and metaphysics and philosophy that you'll ever find anywhere. Go check those out. They will change your understanding of this whole topic, even though, of course, they are just maps. And, um, you will find my life purpose course. You will find my blog with exclusive videos and content. You will find the forum where you can go ask questions. You can support me with donations at patreon.com/actualized. And, uh, that's it. Now, practice this. Keep practicing this. Practice this a little bit every day for the next year. Try to ground yourself in what is actual in your direct experience. And that's really all there is to it.