Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Sufism and the Jnana traditions

Susie: I just spent time with L. Vaughan-Lee who holds to 'nothing' (eg. knows all is made up, that Absolute Truth destroys everything you ever thought or had any meaning) and yet at the same time he works with the 'concepts' that bring 'life', 'light', the 'sacred' and 'meaning' consciously into being. The 'Beloved' is such a concept. He rightly says that without 'nurturing' a 'sacred' 'substance' of 'creation' life is exactly as Shakespeare describes: "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage and then is heard no more, a tale full of sound and fury told by an idiot, signifying nothing". just dispensing with concepts and passivity does not necessarily bring life alive or alight.

Ed: Susie, what is the “Beloved?”

A feeling of a want (?) like a desire, intuition (?) is what has drawn me, from a sense of fatigue of worldly experiences, to those Teachers and even to your sphere on fb Ed. My experience of 'the Beloved'? how to do this justice in a few words on a fb thread. nothing is really it. a weary feeling of so little in this world having any real interest, knowing somewhere how it is to feel when something is real, alive,and truly flowing, and looking to see this everywhere and in everyone, some days feeling close and seeing a little of this brightness, aliveness, beauty and connection, but often feeling sorrow, limitation,suffering, disappointment as I look outwards, and feeling more connection and peace when I am quiet and turned inwards and disappear somewhere else so to speak or when going to sleep in bed. A feeling of wanting to give myself to this something and little else.

Ed:  

I see Susie, you were speaking to Vaughan's concept of Beloved. Then relating your experience of wanting something like the Beloved inside yourself. Thank you for sharing that, Still, the "Beloved" itself is not defined or shared as experience except the search for the Beloved. It is still a concept, and you have learned Vaughan's and Tweedie's concepts of spirituality, which you shared. But the only experience shared was of dissatisfaction and wanting a resting place, or "home" or the return of love from something inside yourself, so you are compelled to turn within. .... This is exactly the same instruction provided by Ramana, Robert Adams, Nisargadatta and I. Look within. Look for the I. Immerse in the I-sense, the I-Am when found, and love that I Am and it loves you back a hundfred fold. Beloved = I Am. But do either speak of going beyond the Beloved, beyond experience and beyond consciousness itself? Do either speak of finding God, grace, or the Beloved in another human, in the personal? Or is it all impersonal?

Susie:  you mean Tweedie and LVL? Will reflect if either of them speak of going beyond consciousness? certainly they relish nothing more than absorption in emptiness where nothing remains, Tweedie calls it a state beyond the mind. You are the knowledge, the understanding and you are one.

Ed:  No, not emptiness. Emptiness is still an experience. One abides in emptiness, it interpenetrates one's own existence and sense of presence. I am talking of that which lies beyond Consciousness altogether. Beyond form and emptiness, emptiness and form. This is of what Nisargadatta speaks, and Robert at times. For Consciousness is temporary, impermanent, not the final rest state of the unborn.

Susie:  LVL speaks of Absolute Truth as completely other, terrifying, no words, concepts, destroying everything, all meaning, all concepts, unimaginable, where nothing you believe exists. He speaks from experience.

Ed:  The Jnana Tradition:

Susie, now that he has given you that concept, is that something you want?  If so, you have borrowed someone else's experience, which he put in concepts for you to grasp and make your own, and you want to go after his experience. 

But what if you never have his experience?  What if it is unique to him?  What if your path, your body/mind situation inherently has different and perhaps even more profound experiences laid out for you, if but you would take them?  ..

Each human is unique.  Look at those of whose experiences we read, U.G. Krishnamurti, Bernadette Roberts, Segal, Robert Adams, Mother Teresa.

Each has had such profoundly different experiences from each other even at the end of their lives.  Yet our minds want security and we look for uniformity in their experiences and uniformity of understanding. For if there is no uniformity, what is the point of following someone as an authority to reach your own ultimate end and truth?

What I ask is why do you want to walk down someone else's path to go to where you may not have a ticket.

Because you distrust your own ability to fill that sense of lacking and wanting, you will follow someone else's ideas, concepts, exercises, etc., which may take you even further from your own destiny.

But this may be your destiny, to follow him and to succeed or fail at his mission or to find your own down that path.  I understand that.

But there is another way, which is to take that wanting and sense of lacking, go within and find out where that takes you.  This requires more courage because there are no signposts of concepts and instructions to guide you unless you go to the kind of teacher who keeps taking your concepts away rather than give you more as a GPS through other concepts.

I wish you well Susie.  I feel you have a bright future.  But I think it could be brighter once you let go of the idea you need to add more concepts in order to get to less.  This is a more frightening path because there is nothing to hang onto except faith in yourself or in a guide that can take everything away from you.  If you can get Vaughan to guide you in this way, on a personal basis rather than just learning his presenting concepts, I think your path will more quickly unfold.