Enlightened?

Hello, this is POV Zero. I’m Ahmed and we are recording episode eleven. This episode will be about something I’ve been realizing over the past few days that has been becoming clearer to my mind. It has to do with the whole process of getting here.

I think it’s nice to know that over these episodes, I’m taking you with me on this journey of navigating the world through this perspective. But it’s also evolving. My perspective is evolving, although nothing is changing about the zero — nothing can change with respect to the zero. But Ahmed is navigating the world with this perspective, and that offers challenges, new angles, opportunities to dissect and deconstruct the perspective itself, and get to places which are actually the same place but from a different angle again.

This one feels like the episode that should be closing this season. Whether I will continue after this is unclear, but I am finding closure with these thoughts.

Where this all started: I talked about a moment where I fell into alignment with this perspective. Some would call it a moment of awakening — different words for the same thing. I got to a point where my perspective was clear to me with absolute clarity, and that hasn’t changed since. The perspective of nothingness, of the zero. The fact that it all goes back to one, it is one already. Tawhid, as we know it from Islam, or any other philosophy that works with the idea of everything going back to zero, to the singularity — it’s really the same thing with different words.

I got to that point, and it hasn’t changed over almost three months. What has changed is my understanding of what nothingness means for navigating the human planet, and what it means in itself. How can we understand nothingness with instruments that all serve to break things down? Deconstructing nothingness uses a language that is itself constructing something. That is the paradox.

The oneness, the nothingness, has to entail everything. And if it entails everything, it means it is an infinite amount of paradoxes that you have to hold at the very same time. That is inconceivable to the human mind. And that is really the point: we are limited in our ability to think about nothingness.

Language — the moment we try to describe it, whatever I’m doing right now is already an act of breaking it down. The closest you might get is silence — knowing that silence entails all sounds and is not just one sound among others. Knowing that the zero entails all shapes and forms and is not just one number among others. Knowing that white light encompasses all colors.

If we accept that, then we also accept that the oneness must be non-dual. As soon as we see duality, separation, we know it must be a deviation from the zero. And so when you navigate the world with this perspective, it raises questions.

I tried to go through them in these first episodes. I talked about pain, powerlessness, and how powerlessness can be a gateway into this perspective. I talked about which concepts of Islam resonate with the singularity. About parenting from the zero, about toxicity, the role of the past and future, joy and pain.

If you listened to the last two episodes, you heard my view that this space feels like joy at the human level — joy is where we should remain when it arises, not just doing away with it as temporary, but really sitting in it, seeking it, recreating it. But then I also talked about how from the perspective of oneness, pain must be part of the same thing. If there are no hierarchies, sadness and joy must have equal value from the point of view of the zero. They feel very different to the human, but the human is looking at them with a perspective that separates, categorizes, creates hierarchies. From the zero, there is none.

So I kept navigating the world with this in mind. Any feeling, any experience, as painful as it may be, is to be accepted as such. We go through it, embrace it, accept it as divine. It must bring us somewhere, and it will bring us back to oneness — it has brought us back to oneness already.

I’ve always had this habit — even as a younger person — of asking myself, when I hit my head or my foot against something: what is God trying to tell me right now? I’m getting back to this perspective now, looking at whatever I’m experiencing with curiosity: what is the divine, what is nothingness, what is the universe trying to tell me? What can I learn from this? From the zero, there must be something to learn in every encounter, every experience.

But if you keep thinking about that — this is where it becomes interesting — if you push the idea of non-duality, you realize: the moment I try to think about it this way, I am already creating duality. I am saying there is something to learn, and the learning itself is evaluated positively. My thoughts are expressed in some form of language, and even if I don’t express them, my thoughts create dualities the moment I think them.

That’s also where the idea of the monkey mind, calming your mind, opening your heart — all of that is already creating a duality between mind and spirit. And that’s where religions fail us, because they keep creating a God separate from us. That is the fundamental separation in religion, and it’s paradoxical: if God is the creator of everything, God must have created itself. God must be in everything and cannot be separate from the human being.

The idea that pain is a temporary wave in the ocean, and the enlightenment work is about realizing you are the ocean, not the wave — the ocean never becomes the wave, the wave is just one temporary expression of the ocean.

When you get to that understanding, you start accepting things, seeing the divine in the ordinary, not judging, not creating hierarchies. You can get to a place of bliss. I talked about fearlessness — even if your body experiences stress, pain, fear, you remain in a place where you know it’s temporary, it will be over, it’s perfectly fine, perfectly divine. You start thinking about even painful experiences as waves in the ocean.

Then you look at joyful experiences and try to see them the same way: this is joyful, but I won’t get attached, because this is also a temporary wave. And then you feel like the process of deconstructing, becoming aware — even the word enlightenment carries a positive connotation. You come out of the dark. You can be more and more awakened, more enlightened.

But from the perspective of the zero, that cannot work. There can be no such thing as becoming more enlightened, because that includes linearity between past and future, which cannot exist from the zero, and it creates a hierarchy: the enlightened state is more desirable than a less enlightened state.

And that’s when you realize: the enlightened state cannot be any more desirable than a busy or painful state, or even one where the human being is completely consumed by ordinary life — working ten to twelve hours, stressed, eating badly, smoking, drinking. From the zero, biologically negative habits that supposedly reduce your lifetime — from that perspective, the enlightened state of being at peace is not somehow better. It is not.

I assume you see where I’m going. That thought itself creates a duality between the enlightened and supposedly non-enlightened state. From the zero, there can be no difference between the two. When you look at supposedly enlightened people, you might notice some form of superiority or hubris — knowing something more than others, being less identified, less attached. Feeling this is something to strive for. But that creates a hierarchy, and that’s already duality.

The idea of being a mountain — storms passing, sun shining, heavy rains, snow — the mountain never changes. We might think of the enlightened state as that mountain: unshakeable. But that image is already constructing duality: the mountain on one hand, the storms on the other. The mountain is seen as something desirable over whatever happens around it. That is separation.

From the perspective of oneness, there is no hierarchy, no duality. Everything must be equally valid, equally true.

There might be people who warn against this enlightened state — appealing to caution, because we’re still human beings. When we think we’ve got it all, that everything is fine, all one, it can lead to spiritual bypassing — bypassing life and the complexities of the world. Because it’s not always “all fine.” Sometimes it’s just very painful and feels like shit. That is the human experience.

“This is all fine” must include the shitty stuff. If you stick to the enlightenment idea and start bypassing, not living fully, avoiding painful experiences — you might be dragged quite violently back into your human state, your nervous system, and that might shake your whole foundation.

With the episodes on joy and pain, I was trying to make clear that from the zero, pain is equally valid as joy. That’s perhaps a small protection against spiritual bypassing: if the divine is in everything, everything is to be experienced and taken as such.

But that implies a process to go through, work to be done for your nervous system to align with this knowledge. And that idea itself is dual — it implies a now and a future point. It implies that my current state is different from the one I’ll reach after doing the work. It implies something to be sought, which cannot make sense from the zero.

Enlightenment, the moment you seek it, is the moment you stop being on the path of enlightenment — a path that doesn’t exist in the first place. If the source can only know itself, if enlightenment is the source recognizing itself, then it implies abandoning the idea of enlightenment, abandoning the idea of a process where you become something different from what you are now.

This is a powerful but also violent realization, because it throws you back to square one. You’ve been doing work, going through life trying to apply this perspective, and then you realize: there was never anything to get to. There was no process. The very idea of a process is already a deviation from the source, from the zero.

That means there’s nowhere to go. Nothing to learn — but everything to unlearn. It is by unlearning everything you know that you get to the singularity. Because the moment you learn something, you break it into pieces you can perceive, and that perception creates dualities that take you away from the source.

You might be tempted to think about the seeking of enlightenment as negative, because it creates hierarchy. But thinking about it that way is already creating duality. And so you realize: with language, with thought, each time you think about it using non-duality, you end up at infinity. Each thought has already broken up the nothingness into something to be understood. It must take you back to infinity, and the infinity must be the zero.

It keeps going and going up to the point where there is no thought. It must be the point before the thought, before anything happened. The same happens with vision: you open your eyes and see colors, shapes. That already creates duality — contrast, one color excluding another. Every time you open your mouth, you create duality. Every time you see something, you’re not seeing something else. Every time you hear something, there’s something you don’t hear. Even touch — cold or hot, rough or fine — already duality.

You get to the point where the whole human experience must itself be creating dualities. And that’s where you realize the idea of Ahmed as an identity doesn’t make sense. Ahmed is just one form that excludes other forms, creating contrast, creating duality. Ahmed is just one expression interacting with other expressions of the very same thing — the nothing, the light, the source. The nothing experiences itself through different shapes and forms, and sometimes those are human beings with names, colors, heights, degrees of attraction. But that is also duality, so it cannot exist from the perspective of non-duality.

If you see all that — let’s call it the awakened state — you see you’re not actually Ahmed. You’re inhabiting this body temporarily. From the perspective of zero, you cannot exist: no past, no future, everything collapsed into the now, no hierarchies, no duality. You must be some sort of reflection or illusion, interacting with other illusions. This is all just love talking to itself, light talking to itself.

One could say the light cannot know itself, the source cannot know itself, silence cannot know itself. God creates humans to experience itself. The light needs contrast, needs colors to understand itself. The silence needs sounds to experience itself. That’s one way to look at it. But it doesn’t make sense to the human — it’s too paradoxical.

So you realize the human experience is already a limiting factor. All our senses, beautiful as they are, take us away from the source. But thinking about it that way is already duality: the human experience on one hand, the source on the other. Even that advanced awakened state cannot exist from the perspective of the zero. The human experience cannot be the end of the story — it’s so limited. If there are infinite possibilities and ours are limited, there must be something else.

What I’m getting at: step one is realizing I’m the ocean, not the wave. Step two: the ocean and the wave are the same. Step three: even thinking about the ocean is separating. Every thought is already a deviation. Perhaps the human experience itself is already a deviation.

So what do you do? A few questions worth exploring: What would you do if nothing mattered? If nothing matters more than anything else and nothing can be judged? What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything?

The struggle with spiritual bypassing — society treats these ideas of awakening with suspicion because at some point you express something like: war is not different from peace from the perspective of the zero. They have the same weight. One is not better than the other — it might be better for the human, but not from the zero. That creates a lot of resistance. How could saving a life as a doctor be the same as taking a life as a murderer?

But if you ask again — what would you do if nothing mattered? — and you arrive at, “I can also hurt people and kill them” — why would you hurt somebody if you didn’t have to do anything? Something in your mind would be telling you there’s a hierarchy, something to value differently, which forces you to hurt. If you dissect that further, there’s never a point where hurting somebody is a possible outcome from the perspective of the zero.

That resolves the dilemma. If God and the devil are the same, the devil must be part of the divine. Killing and violence are not at the same level as kindness and gentleness — it’s that kindness is somehow closer to the source, and violence is absorbed by it. It’s the center, and violence must flow to the center, be part of it, absorbed by infinite light, infinite mercy.

The mistake is thinking of these as options at the same level that we can weigh against each other. Shift the perspective to the zero and see that violence, when it happens, comes from identification, judgment, hierarchies. One aspect of God cannot kill another aspect of God. One facet of nothingness is always known by other facets. It’s only when a facet is so identified with itself that it believes it is itself that it becomes able to hurt other aspects of the divine.

More questions: Where would you go if you didn’t have to go anywhere? How would you react if you didn’t have to react at all? How would you interact with people if you didn’t have to? Would it be mean or kind? How would you treat yourself if you were not yourself but somebody else? Who would you be if you didn’t have to be yourself? Who would you be if you didn’t have to be anyone in the first place?

These questions take you further from identification and attachment — knowing that identification and attachment are equally desirable as non-attachment. And once you have that, you realize you’re going in circles. The moment you start thinking, it’s like saying something into an echo chamber. It keeps repeating itself, dissecting itself, coming back in different shapes and forms. It goes in circles. It’s infinite. The human experience also leads to infinity.

If the awakened state is one where you observe, where you’re not identified, not attached — that idea is dual because it implies an observer and something observed. It creates subject and object. Language and thought are inherently binary, inherently dual, and therefore limited in their ability to take us to full understanding of oneness.

What happens when you get there? Some say it’s full presence. Just nothing. Mindfulness. Just being. The state of “it is what it is.” Total acceptance. To me, sometimes it feels like an endless fall — falling with your back first into an infinite void with no gravity. You just keep falling infinitely. That might be blissful, but thinking of enlightenment as blissful implies it’s somehow better. And that’s the thing again.

If our human experience is already creating dualities — even feeling joy, my nervous system attributing emotion to an experience — that eclipses another emotion, creates hierarchy. My mind names it joy. But even observing the emotion and saying, “I notice it, joy, sadness, but to me they’re the same” — that implies an observer, and that deconstruction is a construction of duality.

You get back to the same place again and again. It’s a cycle of the intellect trying to use dualistic tools to deconstruct duality. Never ending. From now on, if I keep thinking about it, I’ll go endlessly in circles. I could write anything and it would be perfectly true — because there’s no good or bad. The only place I can go to is not wanting to go anywhere and just being. Full acceptance.

Some call this state equanimity — not indifference but total availability, feeling everything at the same time. But that state is not something to be sought; it’s something to be unlearned. It gets to just being again, just presence, full presence. I know it’s perfectly fine to go in circles at this human level.

Ideally, I’ll always remember there’s nowhere to go, just presence to be inhabited, nothingness to be inhabited. But I also know I will just exist. And if I look at this existence as something taking me somewhere, I will realize that if I’m climbing a ladder, once I get to the top, that top will transform into the beginning again. It just goes on like that.

The question is: what is the energy that is climbing? What is this thing that is climbing? Who am I? What am I actually doing? These are the questions we’ll always return to: who am I really? What am I doing at this human level? What do I want to do if I don’t have to do anything? Where do I want to go if I don’t have to go anywhere?

That’s all I wanted to say. The only truth is that there is no such thing as truth. Oneness — the only way to know the zero is by not wanting to know the zero. The only way to know it is by forgetting and unlearning everything. Whatever you know now is already too much. There’s nothing else to learn. There’s everything to unlearn. The zero can only know itself.

As long as we keep taking the light, deconstructing it — breaking it into colors, sounds, trying to understand it — whatever we do is already a deviation, a separation. You can decide to stay very close to it and do the bare minimum: look, what does that do? What does constructing duality do to my understanding? But knowing you will never understand it the way humans understand. There will just be nothing. Perhaps silence is the closest. Infinite light is the closest. And we know it is there already. It has always been there. The only thing we can do on this planet is unlearn to remember that we are this thing.

And if we don’t do it in our lifetime, it’s perfectly fine — because we’ll get back to it anyway. We have already gotten back to it already. You see how it’s circular.

With that in mind, I wish you all the best. Be kind, be gentle. That’s the best thing you can do on this planet. Peace out.