Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

As a child in the 1950s I was much interested in relativity and cosmology.  I remember talking to a teacher in the 5th or 6th grade about the equivalence of mass and energy.  Then, in college I studied physics as an undergraduate and even taught a small group of graduate students about the tensor calculus needed to understand General Relativity.

Then physics began to bore me.  I just could not understand how mathematics was able to describe "reality" in terms of the ultra-small (quantum mechanics) and the ultra large (General Relativity).  Neither realm was open to my direct experience and I began to doubt all the truths of physics no matter its ability predict certain astronomical phenomena, and also allow the creation of atomic weapons via quantum mechanics theory and energy/mass equivalence.

So, I went into Western Philosophy and Eastern spirituality, and dropped out Western Philosophy in a short while because I thoroughly understood I was only learning about learning, not reality first hand. Philosophy talked about knowledge (epistemology), and reality (ontology) in a hands-off manner.  It was even further removed from the real than was physics and mathematics.

So, I went inside myself, looking for a "logical atom of knowledge,"  the most basic hypothetical "atom" of knowledge and logic.  So, even while looking within for the I thought as taught by Ramana Maharshi, I also studied logic, first predicate calculus then higher order logics, Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Kurt Godel and many others, finding the same thing: the subject matter essentially pointed to nothing except itself. It was all words and concepts with no substance.

So I dropped all conceptual seeking and just searched for the origin of the I-thought and got into Zen, traveling finally to Mt. Baldy to study with Sasaki Roshi who took the koan "Who am I?" away from me and focused on emptiness and identity, form and emptiness and discovered looking without the mind and thereby becoming the world, which led to the question, which was real, my duality experience as a human, or my unity experiences with nature?

Then I spent another 23 years exploring inwardly, in Zen, with Robert Adams, Jean Dunn until the conceptual self dissolved in a flash and I dwelt in emptiness for many years thereafter, until I realized myself as the Manifest Self, as Life itself, as sentience come alive from matter, as a sense of the divine within that inhabited and was constantly associated with my body.

So, once again my body became important as it was my vehicle for exploring this world of 4-dimensions, and was embodied flesh, a human life, both mundane and divine.

However. the experience of the Manifest Self provided a threefold experience: of "me" being existent, having the knowledge that I exist, and feeling the life-force within as energies and bliss.

Finally I found that ultimate kernal of knowledge that had initiated my search many years before: it was me, my sense of I, my sense of existence.  Knowledge of the Self revealed that the Self was knowledge itself.  I was that ultimate kernal of knowing.  I was knowledge.  I was existence also, and also bliss. 

This is the heart of my heart, the innermost cave of intimacy: knowledge of my own self-existence as the divine embodied within a body in the context of humanity, culture and a physical universe of 4 dimensions..

Now something new is arising within me: a drive to understand the relationship of my inner world experience with my experience of the outer world.

Earlier, in the 1970s I had thousands of experiences of the boundary between the two disappearing, leaving only unity, unbounded existence, which culminated in the No-Self awakening under Robert Adams in 1995, which led to realization of the Manifest Self of Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss within my embodied existence.

Unlike Robert, I could no longer doubt the existence of my body or my Manifest Self as the divine, as Atman.

The inner world is so different from the external world.  External world physical phenomena for some reason, followed laws that are expressed in the mathematics used in theoretical physics.  But the inner world is different.  There are no units of measurement to describe events in one's inner space. There are no units of Shakti, bliss, love, or time. There are three dimensions of inner spacial experience as in the external world, and there is time.

There is an inner light of Consciousness similar to external light, especially that of the sun--clear and white, but with different colors too showing inner energy movements..But inner time is very variable as opposed to the cool ticking of a clock or metronome.

The inner world is also filled with images, colors, objects that are not physical and usually last only a short time.  Then sleep comes with its dream states even more variable, then deep sleep, which for most brings peace, and only a slight awareness of passing time.

Therefore the question naturally arises concerning the relationship between my inner world and the outer world.

A lot of spirituality is directed to very simplistic equivalency statements, especially found on Facebook, like: there is only one experience, undivided into inner and outer; there is only one; there is only God or Shakti in both experiences.  Some say there is no Self or self separately from the observed, so there is only one experience/experiencer.

But none of these "explanations" explain the relation between my experience of my inner world and my experience of the outer world, nor of either as related to the theoretic world of science, of theoretical physics, products of the mind.

Are they completely unrelated, or are there ways of understanding the inner world as related to the external world, an inner experience science and external world science?

Interesting to contemplate, is it not?  

For example is there are inner equivalence to mathematics as a way to explain and predict inner experience?  What would such an inner language look like?  Would it follow logic like mathematics?

Since there does not immediately appear to be any internal units of experience to measure size, intensity, or apparent duration of such experiences, the language would not recognize integers, only continuous functions in some way.

Is there any direct relationship between the inner space experience and outer space?  Ditto light and energy?  Are one's inner energies measurable in any way, and can they be used to influence external events as alleged in Reiki or Quantum Touch healing?

That is, what is common to, or is operationally related in both worlds?

We know one common element is our physical body.  We experience it from the inside and can see it outside in a mirror and I can look at most of me as a body directly except for portions of my face and eyes.

How to start?  We can't start, I think, by using external science based understanding to explain our experience of the inner world as neurologists and other scientists are trying to do, because such explanations move far away from direct experience and are only secondary ways of knowing about inner experience without the directness and intimacy of direct experience.

Can we explore the area of energy healing to see if there exists any measurable or quantification possible interrelations, and even if not quantifiable, at least the suggestion of a causal interrelation, or the existence of a common reference system to explain inner phenomena.  In the past we have had our inner experience explained in terms of Jungian or other archetypes, Christian mysticism, Freudian analytic models, the Self-psychologists, and Object Relations theorists, as well as the developmental psychologists such as Klein and Winnicott.

But where do we go from here?  Suggestions?