Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

FROM SYNDRIA:

Reading this post is more like feeling your experiences in me. Edji, you have reintroduced me to my own inner landscape. I felt these nuances, energies, interconnections with nature and animals, wonderment, joy....all this rich inner life was mine as a child. I remember ...

But it got squelched in me early in life, and even my later spiritual practice felt walled off and unrelated to me. I felt dead inside, even though I could pass koans and sit in emptiness for long periods.

Now, using the map you've given me as guide, the love you've helped me rediscover within me, I feel like Im being slowly reborn, rebirthed. I really do. I'm not Self-Realized, not especially talented at self-investigation, but I now feel more alive, like I did as a child.

I still suffer and cry and complain, but its also now a joy to feel pain as part of me, a larger whole being. I'm not so identified with suffering at my core. Now pain is gradually becoming part of Life, along with wonder, delight, humor, joy, bliss, sadness, anger, all of it.

I feel very tenuous and vulnerable at just being human, but I love it too. You've helped me so much, Edji. I want the same for other people too.

I'm beginning to think that not many people are actually experiencing what they need to in order to grow spiritually enough to truly know the Self. That's very sad. I hope they can eventually hear you shouting. I'm happy, beyond words, that I did.