@Olivier5,
Quote:And how do you know that this 'experience' of yours is not an illusion, eg a way to escape a reality that you're afraid of?
the 'experience' i talked about was that of nothingness being everythingness. i fully agree with you that this 'experience', like all experiences, is an illusion absolutely. this is why i am claiming that the 'experience' of understanding nothingness being everythingness, or non duality, is what could be called the 'final experience' for individual consciousness.
so how do i know this experience is not an illusion? because that 'final experience' came from directly looking into the possibility of all illusions. instead of assuming that certain things are NOT illusions, like your own consciousness, the physical universe etc, i honestly and deeply investigated into the possibility that they are all illusions. that investigation is still ongoing, and will be eternally, because that is simply the nature of 'intelligence', something that naturally occurs to our consciousness. intelligence continuously seeks to find truth and dispel illusions. so if you keep going with it as far as it can go, then the final question has to be what if intelligence/consciousness ITSELF is an illusion also. what does this mean, that consciousness itself could be an illusion? it simply means that because consciousness always has an 'unknown' witness, it is necessarily always a questionable phenomenon, ie, there is never the possibility of knowing all about the subject behind consciousness.
so pure, universal intelligence accepts that it can never actually KNOW its own identity, and therefore it cannot be sure that it is this 'i' individual consciousness which is appearing temporarily.
once you accept the possibility that you are not the 'i' that you assume you are, then the possibility of understanding what you actually 'are' arises. paradoxically, no matter what understanding of what you 'are' you get to, it is always necessarily wrong also because the one who understood this remains elusive as an unknown aspect of yourself.
so if you read all of the above, does it seem like i am afraid of reality? i acknowledge the appearing reality one hundred percent and have no problems with it whatsoever.
or does it seem more like it is you who is afraid to really investigate reality?