Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

PART ONE: ON “ORDINARY MIND” TEACHERS AND TEACHING

Many spiritual teachers hold that “ordinary mind” is the end state of spiritual evolution.  Others refer to it as “that which is,” meaning sense date and objects as experienced without thinking. Robert Saltzman gives a good description of this “egoless” state.

“Awakening  is not religion, and has nothing to do with "God." God, as an idea, is a creation of the ego. When awake, that is readily apparent. And as for the non-religion religion, Buddhism, its sutras were meant to be used the way a thorn is used to remove another thorn from your foot. When you get the offending thorn out, you throw both of them away.

“It has nothing to do with magic, pseudoscience, or the rejection of scientific logic. If messing around with astrology, crop circles, faith healing, 2012, intelligent design, etc. seems "deep," you are about as hypnotized as a human being can be, and you have endless material to keep you that way for as long as you like.

“It has nothing to do with mystical experiences like that time in the meditation hall when you "merged with the all." Mystical experiences are produced easily by any number of techniques. A week of silence and fasting will engender plenty of altered states, as will whirling in circles, eating a psilocybin mushroom, or sitting in an isolation tank. But none of that has anything to do with seeing things as they are,

“Awakening does not come from kind of "practice." Procedures such as prayer, chanting, meditation, etc. just give ego more jobs to do so as to postpone awakening--postpone seeing ego's delusion. Perhaps some traditional meditation will calm you down enough to be able to notice your thoughts at all, but once that happens, any further "sitting," becomes, in my experience, just another project in strengthening the ego, not seeing through it.

“I can recommend--and this is hardly a "practice"--is just to be quiet internally. You don't have to sit in an ashram. You can be quiet in the middle of Grand Central Station. Stop clinging to habitual viewpoints, opinions, judgments, desires, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears. Just let all of that noise recede into the distance, and then see how empty and formless "me" is. When you actually see that, you are awake.”

My guess is that most neo-Advaitins fall into this category, as do atheists, and of course Zen students, who, though they may experience so-called magical states of mind and experiences, consider such to be a Zen-sickness period that will pass.  They refer to the experiences as Makyo or illusion, and Zen books are filled with descriptions of monks with various forms of it. And, all believe that “what is” arises after the ego dies, ends, unravels, etc., but are hard put to describe or explain what an “ego” is of how it is experienced separate from That which witnesses.

I call this a first level awakening, the discovery of the all-permeating Emptiness or Void, from which all experiences come, and to which they return.  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form according to the Heart Sutra, which all Zen centers and monasteries chant morning and evening. 

For these teachers, they are no teachers and have no existence, they just live out the appearance of life.

However, from my point of view they have stopped far short of realizing the Self, which they consider an egoic construction, as are all “mystical” states, the experience of God, inner light, descending grace, Christ Consciousness, Krishna Consciousness, bliss and ecstatic states.

They “deconstruct” everything and find nothing.

For many years after my “awakening” with Robert Adams to this state of unknowing—ego dissolution—I might have held a very similar point of view and teachings, adding only the concept of the Prior to Consciousness Witness, the Absolute, the Unborn, Unmanifest Self standing behind experience, which itself cannot be experienced, but only apprehended or intuited by the mind, but can be lived by becoming the Witness, in which case it disappears because you are the Witness looking-out, clear-eyed, with no mind, having no head (Douglas Harding).

This is the final state or understanding of Nisargadatta and his lineage: The Absolute, which is beyond the physical, subtle, causal bodies, and Turiya, the bliss body, the substrate of awareness that supports and permeates the physical, subtle, and causal bodies, and which is experienced as Pure Being (Existence), Pure Knowing (of existence), and Bliss—Satchitananda.

This is the epitome of classical Advaita, going beyond the four states of existence, even beyond bliss, to the Absolute, untouched by life or death, phenomena or noumena, existence or nonexistence, beyond even mortal or immortal.

There I did dwell for about 14 years preaching no-mind, no-self, emptiness, the Heart Sutra, ordinary mind.  Until one day I met a woman and fell deeply in love, so deeply my heart blockages were completely shattered and I entered a world of grace, love, humility, bliss, energies, and compassion not dreamed of by any of the teachers of the above philosophies based on their no-mind, no-self, non-dual experiences.

PART 2: SELF REALIZATION, GOD, MYSTERY (COMING SOON)

PS:  In reality, if anyone could be said to have an ego, it is Robert Saltzman, who has no ability to tolerate any spirituality or experiences other than his own, calling other teacher "deluded," sick, or in every way inferior to his understanding.

If you read his bio, he never really had an awakening experience, but simply a dream of being in a rowboat, looking back to shore, and seeing a large structure deteriorating, which he interpreted with his mind as symbolizing his falling apart ego.  Indeed, he expresses his vision as constantly falling away from his past ways of understanding or behaving.  There never was a clear no-self experience of pure nothingness.

I think most neo-advaitins fall into this category of nopt having fully realized or identified with Emptiness or the Void.