Conversation between Tony and Ed

Once Robert responded to a student who asked why his teaching was different from Laksmanan by saying, “My message is different; each teacher has a different message.”

Tony, you appear to believe there is only one truth when in fact Nisargadatta and Ramana had very different messages. For example, for Ramana, everything that was, was Consciousness; Consciousness was all that there was. For Nisargadatta, Consciousness itself was also an illusion, not just what presented in Consciousness. The truth was that he was the Witness, the Absolute, prior to Consciousness.

Now you keep using words and concepts in totally uncontrolled and undefined ways, tossing the words about carelessly, without operation definition, and blaming me for not understanding them because you use them the same way as Ramana and Nisargadatta. But you do not, because even Ramana and Nisargadatta differ from each other as to the most fundamental.

Look at the words you use and try to make sense of them undefined as they are: “return to silence,” “eternal bliss,” “beingness,” “unchanging reality of Self,” “Only that which does not change is reality,” “expansiveness of unbounded awareness.”

Don’t you see: none of these words or phrases is defined. You are just repeating what you have read without fleshing them out with your own experience.

Take your first paragraph to me and see if you can explain what you mean:

The shift to knowing that what you really are is unbounded awareness, necessitates a complete surrender of the very mind that is pursuing the inquiry. The nature of the mind is to objectify. Awareness cannot be objectified. When there is no mind, which is limited, the unlimited is revealed. To be established in that is to realize the Self. The mind will no longer concern itself with such questions of seeking. Subduing the mind is the key, not intellectual understanding. It is not easy because identification with the egoic mind is very strong.

Tony, what do you mean by “the shift to knowing what you really are is unbounded awareness, necessitates a complete surrender of the very mind that is pursuing the inquiry?”

How does the mind surrender and to whom?

Then you say the nature of the mind is to objectify. Awareness cannot be objectified.

This is truth by your definition, not your experience.. 

Where there is no mind, the unlimited is revealed.

This again is definitional argument, and again experientially what you are saying escapes me.

You did not answer my question. You said being was unchanging, but I said it disappears in deep sleep. Nisargadatta agrees with me, but Ramana does not. Nisargadatta says he was prior to beingness and that beingness depended on him.

You are not discussing any of these issues, just accusing me of not understanding Robert, Ramana, and Nisargadatta, but I do understand them deeply, Tony, and I have a different message—a message for our time. I speak of realizing the Manifest Self, the divine within—God.

You have no response to this but to dismiss what I say as missing the point. But I can and have many times carefully described the experience of realizing the Manifest Self where you see yourself as an embodied human being and also as the embodied God. God has become embodied in you.

This is not a non-dual teaching because it admits the separate existence of human beings, but all are in-God, or God is in them. The experience is of being totally immersed in the totality of being an embodied human being with layers of self, from feeling the physical body, to feeling emotions, to feeling bliss, to feeling sorrow, pain, and suffering in oneself and others, and all of this is made possible by becoming alive in God, or vice versa, God gives life to you.

It is a new message to you Tony, and more similar to Christ’s than Robert’s message, or Ramana’s.

As to your question about whether I am at peace or not, I can only say I am both at peace, but also far beyond it, because I am also the Life Force, Shakti, the grace of God, the Witness prior to Consciousness, I am bliss, but also experience loss, sadness, grief, anger, and many other feelings, and welcome them all equally.