Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Dear Ed,

I feel compelled to drop you a note to express my appreciation to you for the information and advice you are providing on your website, and to particularly thank you for the clarification you have provided in a number of areas.  

It is greatly appreciated that you have taken the time and made the effort to provide plain, straight forward information as a “how to” among the myriad of literature available regarding self-realization.  

As a brief introduction, my wife has been in communication with you since last summer when she got Robert Adams’ information from you and, while encouraging me to undertake some of the readings she has been getting over the last couple of years, I have honestly felt a certain internal reluctance to do so as a lot of them seemed to be, for lack of a better term, philosophical discussions without much true direction.  A lot of the literature seemed, to me at any rate, to be a bit of a catch-22 situation where they are written by individuals who became self-realized, expounded the wonders of it, but did not really explain how others could attain that state.

I’ve probably been missing something, but it always seemed to me that, while obviously requiring significant committed effort to ‘realize’, the overall process should be somewhat simple and straight forward.  I think the main problem that I had was a constant reference to abide in the “I” or the “I am”, but it never really seemed to be clear to me what “abiding in the I am” really meant.  

In accepting that this is all an ‘illusion’, I have to question how we can abide in something that only exists as part of that illusion?  It wasn’t until my wife gave me a copy of your article Hunting The “I” and Pradeep Apte’s “The Nisargadatta Gita” from your website this past week that I’ve been able to come to grips with that and recognize that abiding in the “I am” is merely a tool to move beyond the “I am”.

To be honest, my background is science and engineering so I tend to have a no-nonsense “cut to the chase” attitude of “where am I going, how do I get there and what steps do I have to take”.  

Finally, between reading these articles this week, and having two telephone discussions with a close friend in the U.K., D. who has also been in communication with you (the ‘D’ who was liberated last week), I have a much stronger sense of direction and purpose.   For this, I sincerely want to thank you.

I feel that with two excellent resources such as yourself and D., I will finally get the information and guidance I need to join the growing group of individuals that are working towards liberation in this lifetime.

With love and gratitude,

A.