Of Course There is a Self!

Many say there is no Self to be realized.  This is a common belief, both of Buddhists and neo-Advaitins.

But there is indeed a Self to "discover," or uncover, just as elements of the unconscious mind can be uncovered through introspection or dream analysis.  Those who say there is no Self just have not discovered it yet, probably because they do not believe it exists.  They have this concept blocking even an attempt to find Self, or they convince themselves of no-self by doing an hour's introspection, and find no I, no-I-sense, and no Self.  If only it were that simple!

You have to dive deep into your personal consciousness to find the sense of "I-Am," and follow it, abide in it, love it, until the Self, YOU, decides to show ITSELF to you, the small you.  This requires passion, dedication, and belief in the efficacy of the introspective process.  Next you have to love that I-Am sense, care for it, nurture it,  and abide in the I Am until something happens.

The Self first appears as something divine, as god or goddess, as "Other," until the small you, the human you, recognizes that God, that divine state, Christ or Krishna Consciousness, is you also.  Then your identity switches from you, to YOU and you.

This process is well-described in my book "Self Realization and Other Awakenings," and in Nisargadatta's Self-Knowledge and Self Realization found on the wearesentience.com website.

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Realization-Other-Awakenings-Ed-Muzika/dp/0984776737/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361905562&sr=1-5&keywords=muzika

Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

Now available in the Amazon Kindle store.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BKSFGI2

Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

www.amazon.com

Ed Muzika received his Ph.D. in Psychology during 1987 after having spent 12 years as a Zen monk under six Zen masters, and a two year stint with Baba Muktananda. In 1989 he met his Advaita teachers: Robert Adams, a 

The attack on spiritual passion

For the past several years I have seen increasing levels of attacks on the whole concept of spiritual seeking and the guru/student paradigm which appears not to extend to other areas of seeking, such as for psychological help and professional psychotherapy, or seeking expertise in other areas, such as learning musical or artistic expression from a master.

Seeking truth in the physical and soft sciences is also exempt from the negativity towards spiritual seeking.  You can seek for a lifetime, as did Einstein, for a general unification theory, or to design a space propulsion system for galactic exploration, but to seek to find yourself or to find God is seen as a delusion that opens you to exploitation by a class of charlatans.

Is seeking such as that of Freud and Jung for the essence of the heart and mind also considered delusional?  Both sought their entire lives to understand both their own minds and hearts, as well as their patients’ so as to relieve their own pain and that of others.

Why is this?  What caused this paradigm shift that this one kind of seeking is delusional, a form of mental illness that leaves you so weak and stupid that you cannot trust yourself by looking to others to find something within yourself that you have not yet found, whether truth, love, or an easing of the feeling you do not belong in this world?

If these seekers were to go to a psychotherapist for the same reason, would these naysayers still criticize their seeking as delusional and opening them to sexual, financial and other exploitations by greedy fraudulent psychotherapists?

Yet there is this common and apparently growing belief that all seeking in the area of personal truth, for love, to end some internal pain such as feeling alone or alienated is doomed to failure from the start.

This is such an absurd position to take: that all spiritual seeking from the beginning of time, that of the mystics throughout the ages, that of Christ and Buddha, that of Zen monks through the ages, that of all the Hindu mystics like Ramakrishna, the yogis along the Ganges, Milarepa in the Himalayas, are all delusional.  The attitude is that all spiritual answers lie within the self and the way to access them is simply to feel the needs arise within  oneself, let them flower and then watch them pass away into the beingness that contains everything.

Seeking drives will come.  Just watch them expand, flower and then pass away.  Don’t move.  Stay in the silence and observe that everything comes and goes within you.  Eventually you will realize you are this beingness itself and come to rest in complete peace and equanimity.

This attitude of passivity in many cases extends to the world.  Life comes and goes, don’t fight the coming or going.

I have seen this attitude growing on Facebook. Someone writes a relative or a dear companion animal is very ill and likely dying, and these naysayers advise the person just to let the person or animal go.  Any measures to prolong life are considered as fighting the will of the universe, which they consider must feel painful, so just witness the death and your grief from a place of abiding in beingness, stillness, peace.

I feel a profound anger towards this new paradigm and its proponents. To me it robs people of their passion for life, for finding what they feel is lacking, and ultimately it prevents them from having any profound spiritual awakening, for such an awakening requires passion and power to dive within the depths of one’s own consciousness, dive deeply into one’s own pain, or to seek God within or without, or to find love as one has only dreamed of and has not experienced.  For when love comes to the spiritually mature, it is altogether a different experience than when it comes to a 16 year old or even a 30 year old accountant whose life has been numbers and credits.

Love when it comes to the spiritually mature seeker is utterly transformative, utterly beyond the understanding of someone who has not spent years looking into their heart and soul, for such a one becomes very sensitive to inner movements of consciousness, inner energies, and is receptive to internal explosions of self-realization and knowing the infinite.

This movement of passivity, that seeking itself is the problem, and just remaining still wherever  you are, passively watching, absorbing, and then watching the movement pass away has had several modern proponents that teach this instant enlightenment of just stopping and watch the movements arise and pass away within you.

First is Jidda Krishnamurti who criticized the guru/chela relationship as personally disabling, turning the student into a slave to words and corrupt gurus.  Second is Papaji who proclaimed you are already enlightened, no need to struggle to be yourself, because you already are. Third is Ramesh Balsekar.  The entirety of his talks were about the pain of the “poor seeker,” and who stated the ultimate goal of spirituality was to come to some peace with oneself.

All three, but especially Papaji and Balsekar led to the development of neo-Advaita and the teachers of non-teaching, teachers of you don’t need teachers, but just to abide in your own presence.

To me, they together are preaching a false and incomplete doctrine of peace through passive watching and absorbing arising from within and from the world, and smothering the smoldering passion with an atmosphere that lacks oxygen. I feel they are robbing people of passionate expressions of love and ecstatic self-realizations that are possible if one is open to being grabbed by arising loneliness and starvation of the soul for something more than one has at the moment.

For me the passion was to find the “real” lying behind the appearance of the world.  I was inspired by the stories of Milarepa and the Chinese Zen monks of a thousand years ago such as Joshu and Bassuii and their struggles to awaken to a truth beyond what is espoused all around us by parents, friends and society.  I thought there must be more, and there is much, much more.

You are much, much more than this body, than your mind and the petty emotions that have followed you your entire life. 

In everything I do, rather than to put your fires out, I want to stoke them.  I want your smoldering passion to erupt into intense flames of love, intense seeking within, intense practice of meditation on your own sense of self until it grows into a solid sense of presence, of I Am, and until that explodes into a full Self-Realization of yourself as God or Goddess, as the divine other, finding intense love beyond anything you can imagine.

I want you to know you as I know you, as love itself, as energy itself, as presence itself, that when it fully knows itself is overcome by its own beauty and perceived infinite power.  You are not your body; it is a pale expression of what you are. 

When you have found this YOU, you are different.  The world around you responds to you differently.  You will find the world seeks you and desires to be in your presence.  For you love is everywhere and in everything. Love seeks you; you no longer have to seek it. Whatever you want or need comes to you; you no longer have to seek it.  There is a power in you that you feel emanating from deep within your gut, like a dynamo, a million watt generator flowing energy from your gut out into the world, and the world responds. 

Your heart’s fire ignites the heart fire in others; your passion spreads to the world towards the eventual goal of teaching everyone to become their brother’s keeper and the shepherd of all life.

You mission is to burn brightly and not be smothered by those who urge you to just watch the passions of seeking arise within you, watched from a still place, to arise, flower and then burn out.  I say no to this passive watching.  

Instead dive deeply into your heart and feel your I-ness, find your heart’s core, your heart of your heart and their find your beloved, whoever that may be, whether God, or some external other.  Then begins a journey so magical that few can even contemplate it.

Satsang Today, Saturday, February 23

SATSANG TODAY

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 

6 PM PACIFIC TIME

CONSCIOUSNESS IS EVERYTHING

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SELF-REALIZATION AND OTHER AWAKENINGS

Our book, Self-Realization and Other Awakenings is finally in print.  There are over 400 pages on a large number of topics including my own story which makes clear what and how I teach.

There are sections on methods of self-inquiry and meditation, various types of awakening from the neo-Advaita and more classical awakenings, to the awakening to Christ or Krishna Consciousness, classically called Self-Realization.

There are sections on human love both as an aid to-self realization, but also as service to the Beloved, within and around us everywhere, which can lead to the most sublime states of grace and surrender.

There are a few letters from students asking advice, and a few telling of their awakening experiences and how they came about.

The various “levels” of consciousness are clearly articulated both in text and by diagram, with an explanation of how all levels are connected by the I-sense, which lies at its base.  The apparent dichotomy between Witness, or the Absolute, and Consciousness in all its manifestations and “rooms” is clearly explained, as well as showing this division is only apparent.

If you want, you can wait a few weeks for the Amazon and Kindle distributions at a lesser cost.  However, buying it from the links below provides more income to support We Are Sentience in its dual mission of saving feral cats and spreading the teachings of the dual lineage of Ramana Maharshi via Robert Adams, and Nisargadatta Maharaj via Jean Dunn.

LINK TO PURCHASE: http://hdcity.net/sr_order.html

SELF-REALIZATION AND OTHER AWAKENINGS

SELF-REALIZATION AND OTHER AWAKENINGS

I have described in the past experiencing love as a flowing internal river, flowing from the gut, into the heart and upwards into the head and out, or directly from the heart to another.  This internal flow usually has a golden or white light, and internal river of light moving through the body and one’s sense of presence and outward into the world.

I have described bliss similarly, as an energy moving and flowing within, upwards and outwards, and when the bliss stops flowing, it fills one’s beingness with a static energy of ecstasy, and it feels like one is going to explode in a titanic orgasm.

But there is something beyond love, beyond bliss, beyond ecstasy, which is being so bewitched by the other, whether it comes in the form of an external beloved, or internally, as a vision of god or goddess, or as the Self, the fundamental power of the universe, that one falls on their knees in gratitude and grace, wanting nothing more than to serve that beloved.  The whole world wants nothing more than to serve your beloved also.  You all bow in worship, in service to that other, which is none other than YOU, the Self of all, in the other.

This surrender feeling, this grace is totally unlike “normal” love.  It may be called divine love, but it is really you at your deepest layer.  It doesn’t overpower you like bliss or ecstasy with a kind of physicality.  It is far more refined, and rather than the love or bliss having the light, the whole world seems bathed in this smoother, gentler grace.

Then you are happy, happier than ever before except for a few times in life what you felt this same way.  The happiness has no properties.  You are not happy because of something, you are happiness itself.  Not lotto winning happiness, but God-winning happiness, so sublime that even Rumi falls short of describing it.

After a rough start to the day, I began feeling this again in the afternoon and evening: grace so sublime flowing from my complete surrender to my own internal beloved however triggered by external events.

This is the grace of I Am.  This is the grace that flows from loving God, goddess or guru.  It comes sometimes when one’s will or self-mastery is most sorely challenged, when you feel your greatest humiliation or failing. At other times it comes without sign or reason.  But it does come and it comes ever more frequently when you love another or when you love your own self.

Today I felt this and had a vision of the purpose of our future ashram and how it will change everything.  I see it very clearly now and even see some of those who will be involved.

Our book is now going to the printers and will be available very soon in print directly, or on Amazon and Kindle.  It is entitled “Self-Realization and other awakenings.” 

Satsang Today, February 16

SATSANG TODAY, FEBRUARY 16, 6 PM CALIFORNIA TIME

SUBJECT: IS ANYTHING REAL?

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Swear Words Versus War and Starvation

Satsang today, Saturday, February 9, 6 pm Pacific Time

Topic: Imaginal World, "Real" World

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Searching Versus Exploring

There are some who say when it comes to spiritual searches, that they are not necessary; you already are complete and sufficient; just stay with whatever arises.

But I don't look at spiritual searches as some effort needed to complete one's sense of self, but as an inner and outer exploration of all that is me, from emotions, inner energies, arising images and thoughts,  and hidden areas of the unconscious, as well as far deeper or more subtle levels of Self.

This exploration ensures continuous aliveness, but you retain an ability to rest doing nothing at any time, until moved to again move in childlike wonder.

Cooking Live Animals in Korea and China

Petitioning Mr. Sun Guoxiang 

STOP COOKING LIVE ANIMALS

1. 1. 
    
   2. Petition by
      Linda Camac
      Philadelphia, PA
 
2.  

Putting a live dog, or any animal, in boiling water, or a hot oven, or using a blow torch on cats, is not only blatantly wrong, without further explanation---but if one is necessary it is TORTURE.

The 'reason' that is given for cooking animals alive is that they simply "taste better" after their bodies are adrenaline-soaked with fear and pain. 'Taste' is never an excuse for unspeakable cruelty, nor is 'culture' an excuse.

China is making so many strides to become a first world country, but with all due respect, with this kind of accepted culinary method, China AND Korea will be looked upon as backward nations by the rest of the civilized world (one foot in the 21st century and one foot in a primitive age). 

Any animal placed in boiling water or cooked, while still alive, in any manner is obviously terrified, in unimaginable pain, despair and doomed to a slow and lingering death. 

Animals in the food chain should, at the very least, be given the most humane death possible.

Deepest apologies to the supporters of this petition for this gruesome and offensive photograph -- but their story must be told and the horror is beyond mere words -- this needs to be exposed and make people aware so they will not visit these countries and give them tourist dollars.  China's department of tourism is advertising a lot on TV to attract tourists lately --- we can also write to the National Tourism Department of the People's Republic of China and tell them why we are not visiting.   This over-the-top torture of animals must be outlawed!  If it is hard for us to look upon it, imagine how hard it is for the thousands of dogs, cats, and other species to endure this dark side of man.  Life is certainly not a gift for every living being.    

To:

Mr. Sun Guoxiang, Chinese Consulate - New York

Ambassador Park, Ambassador Korean Embassy U.K.
National Administration of Tourism for the People's Republic of China 

STOP COOKING LIVE ANIMALS
Putting a live dog, or any animal, in boiling water, or a hot oven is not only blatantly wrong, without further explanation---but if one is necessary it is TORTURE.
The 'reason' that is given for cooking animals alive is that they simply taste better after their bodies are adrenaline-soaked with fear and pain. 'Taste' is never an excuse for unspeakable cruelty, nor is 'culture' an excuse.
China is making so many strides to become a first world country, but with all due respect, with this kind of accepted culinary method, China AND Korea will be looked upon as backward nations by the rest of the civilized world (one foot in the 21st century and one foot in a primitive age).
Any animal placed in boiling water or cooked, while still alive, in any manner is obviously terrified, in unimaginable pain, despair and doomed to a slow and lingering death.
Animals in the food chain should, at the very least, be given the most humane death possible.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

No Satsang Today, Saturday, February 2.

I wanted to record Satsangs and have just acquired a digital audio recorder that I need to figure out how to use, and combine it with a camcorder.  The audio recorder can be used to feed into my Dragon Naturally Speaking, speech recognition program so that it will supply a rough transcription, sans punctuation.

In addition, Deeya is arriving today, and I'll pick her up from her hotel tomorrow, and I need to clean my car.  Right now there are several hundred pounds of catfood, plates and bowls that need to be removed.

And, I have a slight hangover from some brandy I had last night.