Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Excerpts from June 4 Satsang:

Most who practice Advaita do so to escape from life. A smaller number practice to find truth. Few persist to realization.


But I want to tell you a little secret. Almost every master that has gone beyond and has found the absolute, wants to come back to the world, to the body, to the marketplace.

Sasaki Roshi, one morning in Taesho at Mt. Baldy in 1972,  said enlightenment can become boring and talked about the need for involvement in life.

Maezumi Roshi spoke one time to a class I was teaching at the UCLA Extension. When asked about enlightenment, he said the most exhilarating part of Zen life was participating in life. When asked to define Zen, he opened his arms wide and said loudly, "Breathing."

Seung Sahn Soen Sa taught that emptiness, and the absolute, being the ultimate “not this, not this” experiences, was only half way, or 180 degrees on a circle of spiritual development that ended at 360 degrees, or back again to ordinary mind, but now acted in having seen the infinite.

Rajneesh during his last two years settled on Zen Buddhism as his vehicle and changed his name to Osho, a title for Zen master, and began preaching his doctrine of the new man, which is not a man who wanted to transcend his, but a man who transcended through meeting life however it came to him or her. That is, putting it in my terms, the new man transcended by immersing in the I am, his sense of presence, and meeting the external from his heart and guts, from his whole being.

But many of you are probably saying to yourself, I came to you because I wanted to escape from the world, the world is a horror.

I agree, but you don't have to be a horror.

When you find your own sense of presence, and the energy in that presence, you will feel joy and bliss, which will captivate you, and take you all the way to the absolute, without leaving the world.

This joy, this bliss, will allow you to carry both sides of the paradox of love and hate, of acceptance and violence, of nurturing and killing simultaneously. The world cannot be accepted in its totality by the mind. The mind is too small. Even the heart is too small, because it seeks only love and acceptance. You must allow all your sense of presence to expand everywhere, to accept all things and all happenings and to react appropriately however that is for you.

This requires your whole being to be open, not your mind, not just your heart, but also your guts, your muscular activity and your sexuality. It must recognize your own violence and anger, give it acceptance and let the energies play through you and energize you. You must own everything and bring it within you and thereby gain mastery.

This is the easy way, the rich way, the way of personal intensity. However, there is one great difficulty with this way, and that is getting totally involved as an individual in the world again thereby missing absolute, the infinite, the God in you, the consciousness of you, and God in others. Instead you can get lost in the personal once again, so this practice definitely has a weakness.

This is why I think meditation is important for anyone practicing this way of immediacy, as you can learn to rest in your own sense of presence, and in the void if you can find it. This gives you a resting place from the intensity of involvement. However it is the intensity of the involvement that lead you to the I am in the first place.