Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

The new book will be out in about 15-20 days.  The cover is indescribably beautiful, and the book is filled with photos and diagrams explaining Robert's teachings and Nisragadatta's as well as the recent changes in substance and style.  It will be well over 400 pages long.

Here is the short introduction; it provides a small taste of what can be found in the book:

You are not who you think you are. You are much, much more than that!

You are not just your body or mind. You are not just your emotions, thoughts, images, and dreams. You are more than all your relationships, family ties, career, and loves. You are these but also much, much more.

There are rooms within the spiritual mansion that is You that have never been explored because from infancy onward, You (and we all) have been educated, indoctrinated, acculturated, and nailed into boxes of social conformity and multiple networks of thought and communication.

The world of our senses is really an interpretation of an underlying “real” as experienced through multiple cognitive filters. Both the “real” external world and the “real” Self are far different from what we now experience.

This book is about that real world (and real You) which can be experienced and lived in after many of the filters are unlearned.

This unlearning is done through various kinds of self-investigations, both through the use of the mind, but mostly through exercises, learning how to shift awareness out of the “brain,” thinking and cognition, into the heart.

Experiencing the world through the heart's senses reveals a very different You, your real Self, and a very different world that is far more fluid, far more alive, far more energetic than the relatively flat world most of us live in.

This is a world where our bodies, our hearts, and even our minds become drenched in bliss so remarkable that all we can do is swoon and fall to our knees, feeling the ecstatic grace of total self love and love for another. There comes a peace so profound you do not want to move so as to not disturb it.

Finally, there may be an inner explosion like an erupting volcano of joy, energies, light and love that reveal the deepest levels of the Self to the 'little self' you had always thought yourself to be. I call this Self-Realization in contrast to the multitude of other kinds of awakenings or enlightenments so much talked about in Eastern and Western spirituality, although these other awakenings are thoroughly explored in this book.

Remarkably, you lose nothing in this realization, for you are still much, but not all, of what you were before. You still have a body and mind. You still have relationships with family and other. But you have also found the much larger world of flowing and healing energies of the subtle body and world, as well as a basic grasp of the flowing nature of the universe. Going even deeper you become aware of the ground state of Consciousness, the so-called Fourth State, or Turiya that interpenetrates and powers all other states of Consciousness, including the waking, dream and deep sleep states.

Finally, you become aware that you are watching all this unfolding of consciousness, and it does not touch you—you are entirely beyond it, as if in a different dimension. This part of you is not touched by anything in consciousness. This absolute part of you cannot be cut, killed, or injured in any way. This part of you, the absolute, the unmanifest, the noumenon, in one sense is immortal, and in another, beyond even immortality.

All these levels of consciousness and beyond are You. The above outline portrays more or less the progression of my experience. But I do not want you to travel my path. I want to help you travel your own path by taking away your illusions, concepts, contagions, and conditionings. I want to rob you, strip you naked of all your spiritual and scientific clothes so that you can see and experience yourself as something extraordinary, beautiful, loving, and 'divine', but still as a human living in a sometimes harsh and ugly world.

The following essays and talks work at whittling away one belief or conditioning at a time, preparing the way for you to see yourself and the world more clearly day by day. I will suggest techniques for self-investigation and increasing self-love to prepare you for that inner explosion of Self-Realization. I will tell you how to use love for another as an avenue for your own Self-Realization. I will guide you away from teachings that are so shallow that they have a million followers and almost as many teachers, but yield no real happiness.

This book is divided into two sections. The first is my own story, one of a pure cognitive approach to enlightenment, followed by falling in love with a deeper world both within and without, which led to my own self-realization. The next section is devoted to helping you see yourself and the world without filters and convention, so that you have your own Self-Realization based on who you are and where you came from. It may be very different from mine, because I do not try to capture you into one way, one system, but to escape them all to find your truth.

Come with me. Dive deep into your consciousness following the I-Feeling, for it will lead to unbelievably expansive experiences of love, bliss, and the brilliant light of Consciousness which will purify and transform every element of your life. In you this divine Shakti (energy) explodes all boundaries. You will discover through endless periods of blissful dissolution in Krishna-consciousness that you are everything. In that freedom, everything will be about identification: what aspects of everything, mundane or infinite, will you be in this moment?