Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

When I first started practicing self-inquiry 47 years ago, I had no idea of what I was doing. I just blindly followed Ramana's directions of following the I-thought and finding its origin. Of course the originating place of the I-thought is emptiness, so I got to know emptiness real well and thought that emptiness is what Ramana and Zen were all about.

Unsatisfied with emptiness, I never stopped reading books by spiritual giants, Ramakrishna, Yogananda, the Bhagavad Gita, biographies of Zen masters, koans, etc., and got to realize I had no clue as to what spirituality was about. Was emptiness the totality of spirituality?

I studied with six Zen masters over a period of 10 years, learned the answers to hundreds of koans, and mostly had thousands of experiences in meditation of "No-Self," where the I-sense disappeared, and 'I' became the entirety of my experience of the world, which led me to ask, "Which is real? My everyday experience of my body, mind, and world, or my meditation experience of no-I, no-self?"

I never then for a moment considered that both were equally real. I thought one had to be real and the other unreal, a construct of mind. Now I know both are equally real and that "reality" meant my experiences of the moment, and are not found in some final state, such as of a certain type of awakening, or some permanent state such as of Sahaja Samadhi. Also, I found Zen and emptiness quite lacking in love and human attachments, which was experienced as "coldness," and after a dozen years, I needed warmth.

The states I passed through, the Samadhis, the sleep, waking, and dream states, the Subtle Body, Causal Body, and Turiya--all experienced separately were all part of the one truth of what I am: all these things, these experiences, these states are all me, including the saving grace of love.

But at the beginning and for 40+ years it was all a muddle trying to "understand" what all of these different experiences and states "meant." So I got real comfortable with knowing nothing. One Zen Master--Seung Sahn--referred to this as becoming dumb as a rock with the realization that no truth resided in words and concepts, so let them go by knowing nothing.

Knowledge of self and Self escaped me, but I rested easily in not knowing.

However, when I finally had the experience of knowing who and what I was, realizing that the sentience that I was, the pure experiencing of experience, everything fell into place.
All of my spiritual practices, tens of thousands of hours of emptiness meditation and self-inquiry, of Kundalini-raising and body scanning, or koan-work and endless reading--all led to different classes of spiritual experience. Just emptiness alone was highly variable with "Progressive stages of emptiness meditation." Kundalini experiences were infinitely variable as well other experiences within the Subtle Body and the spirit world, and various energy and bliss states.

I even found the Absolute, which is the intuition of the Witnessing principle: that knows both existence and non-existence.
But it is the experience of Self that brings true understanding: I am that which knows, and knows not-knowing, but I am also everything that is known. All are me, from my experience of my body, my emotions, my fears, lusts, desires, weaknesses, my loves, my experiences of bliss, psychic energies, attachments, my experience of love, of Grace, of God, were all me; I was that which experienced everything, and also I was everything experienced.

This is when I developed the concept that I was a "spiritual mansion" with hundreds of different rooms of different kinds of experience all of which were simultaneously existent, and many of which can be experienced simultaneously or successively.

At this point my attention began to turn away from exploring to: 1. sharing this teaching, and 2. trying to make the world a better place through animal rescue work and animal causes.

But my message for you now is this: Fear not anything that arises in you; it is all you from depression, abandonment fears, fears of one's own feelings, fears of the environment, feeling vulnerable, feeling anger or rage--it is all you!

There is no separate you that can be hurt by feelings or "wild" emotions because they also are you and are not to be run from, repressed, or guarded against. Everything is you; embrace everything as your self!

When you can do this, you become complete and can truly realize your self as the Manifest Self, as sentience itself, as God incarnated as you, and with this comes unerring knowledge of who and what you are.

And you do this by a self-inquiry of feeling into one's sense of presence, thee I-sense, and being open to, accepting, and loving all that arises from within as a result of the feeling inquiry, as well as all that arises from environmental circumstance. We let everything into self and thereby become Self.