BOOK RECOMMENDATION

For those interested in the medical management of mood and other psychological disorders, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety and depressive disorder, and obsessive/compulsive disorders, I recommend getting John Preston's Clinical Psychopharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple,the eighth edition.  You can get it for about $14 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Clinical-Psychopharmacology-Ridiculously-Simple-Medmaster/dp/1935660179/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435676271&sr=1-1&keywords=clinical+psychopharmacology+preston

I personally use Preston's more detailed and deeper Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology for Therapists, the seventh edition. which costs about $34 at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Clinical-Psychopharmacology-Therapists-Preston/dp/1608826643/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435676271&sr=1-2&keywords=clinical+psychopharmacology+preston

Both books cover side effects as well as the various types of resistances people have to taking medications, even for severe mental disorders. Some obsess even about minor side-effects, and discontinue the meds, others worry about dependency, even though few psych medications are addictive.  Some feels meds are a crutch, and they shouldn't need to rely on meds to function, while others stop taking meds if they don't find immediate benefit, even though most take weeks to take effect.

Yes, meds can take away emotions and make you feel more dead, but for a short term fix on an anxiety disorder or severe depression, they give respite.  Medications can always be changed until one is found that helps best.

The Handbook, at least, talks about differing racial and ethnic responses to psych medications, and interactions between the meds and also with supplements like Omega-3, etc.

There is a very interesting discussion of medications used to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

SPIRITUALITY VERSUS PSYCHOTHERAPY VERSUS MEDICATIONS

PART ONE: SETTING THE STAGE FOR AUTHENTIC HEALING AND AWAKENING

Because I am back into the field of psychology, and have been reacquainting myself with therapy and psychotropic medications, I will be writing frequently about how psychology, psychopharmacology, and the pursuit of peace, enlightenment, wisdom, and Self-Realization, all fit together.

I first began my spiritual career through self-study of Zen and Ramana Maharshi in about 1966, almost 50 years ago.  I have lived in or been a member of endless Zen, Tibetan, Kundalini, Vedantic and other centers for at least 30 of those years.  I have treated people with psychological problems such as depression, manic-depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and schizophrenia directly for maybe 20 years, and for 30 years I have been a consultant to psychiatrists and psychologists defending their treatment of individuals according to ethical and medical standards for the court system.

I have also taught Zen and Self-Realization spirituality at the Extensions at UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara.  I was a teaching monk at the International Buddhist Meditation Center for years, and studied under six Zen masters learning hundreds if not thousands of koans and their answers.  Finally, I spent eight years with Robert Adams—a student of Ramana Maharshi—and five with Jean Dunn, one of two disciples that Nisargadatta named as successors.

During this almost 50 years of exposure to these diverse spirituality modalities and psychotherapies, I have been exposed to many, many thousands of people walking one path or another and have reached many conclusions, the most important of which is as follows.

Most people walking spiritual path do so as a result of psychological problems and the mistaken belief that spirituality can resolve psychological problems.  For them, they hold the false idea that if they were to awaken, all mood disorders such as anxiety and depression would disappear, as well as fear, such as fear of losing a loved one, or fear of death itself.  They also pursue enlightenment to increase self-esteem, decrease pessimistic and obsessive thinking, while others suffering from pre-psychotic or frankly psychotic intrusions of other-worldly states, visions, visitations from entities, hallucinations, hearing voices, or else being hyper-aware and bother by noises, smells, light, and energetic currents, seek respite through meditation, Kundalini, Chi-Gong, or other practices.

However, “awakening” and enlightenment have nothing to do with resolving psychological problems.  It works in entirely different spheres, yet people, out of fear of engaging in psychotherapy or taking psychotropic medications, spend years self-treating through spiritual practices, or reading about various famed spiritual teachers such as Ramana Maharshi, Rama Krishna, Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti, etc., and try to emulate or attain through book-learning what they think these teachers have attained, whether it be peace of mind, enlightenment, bliss, or total, benign indifference to suffering in this world.

But relief from major psychological distress and suffering cannot be obtained through typical spiritual practices except for one way: learning how to observe one’s thinking and emotions.  Self-observation can create a psychological distance between a person’s sense of self and the distressing symptoms they want to end.  They wall off their sense of self from the intrusive emotional and even physical pain.

Unfortunately, after a while, users of this technique often find they have walled off portions of their own self, from themselves, and are no longer fully functioning people without a full-spectrum of emotional richness, and without a wide range of human interactions, enjoyments, and ability to feel and to tolerate both joy and suffering.

Go to any coffee shop and you will invariably find cadres of people obsessively reading the Bible and taking notes.  They often sit together and hold Bible study classes in Starbucks or Coffee Bean establishments.

Christianity is a religion of learning how to tolerate suffering and overcoming fear of death through belief in a benevolent God in the form of God the Father and God the Son, to whom you give your suffering, and the belief if you lead a good and moral life you will live in heaven forever, free from suffering, and living in joy at Christ’s side.  For some this holding onto belief—Faith—actually works for a time, and sometimes for a long time and even a life time.  Others, not so much.

Buddhism in its original Theravadin form is profoundly pessimistic, holding that life itself is suffering, but there is a way out of suffering and that is the Eightfold path or right thinking, right living, contemplation, meditation, etc.

For most with energy gurus and many New Age spiritualities, the path usually consists to trying to attain permanently altered states of mind, such as endless bliss, joy, internal energies, Sahaja or Nirvakalpa Samadhis, where you forever dwell in states of endless bliss, peace that passes by understanding, or one dwells in the Void, emptiness, or pure awareness, the pure I Am, or some other state.  Many do obtain such states that last a long, long time, and are sustained through constant practice, mindfulness, etc.

Examples of this are the energy gurus who claim to have attained constant bliss such as many of Muktananda’s swamis, Hari Krishna swamis, the author of The Most Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Michael Langford, Jan Esmann, and many others, who practice Kundalini, pranayama, visualizations, and other exercises for many years in order to awaken one’s Kundalini energies and keep it awake.  Another is Eric Pepin who teaches mostly about navigating through various astral states and energy fields.

However, feeling bliss does not really resolve psychological problems, it is just that their experience is mitigated by the feeling of bliss.  Some of these energy teachers can become profoundly narcissistic and even frankly psychotic, such as Da Free John and Osho as he decompensated into frank psychosis after long-term extreme drug use. Muktananda himself died as a result of too-fast withdrawal from Valium which causes a plummeting of his blood pressure and heart failure.

I know this previous paragraph will draw huge amounts of critical comments from  former students of these teachers, as well as readers of these teachers who hold onto belief that these figures were the greatest, happiest, and wisest of beings, when in fact, many were closing in on insanity in the form of malignant narcissism. 

As my  own primary teacher, Robert Adams, said, “Insanity and enlightenment walk hand in hand.” Robert himself was profoundly withdrawn from  life and the world, finding profound peace by ignoring the world, its suffering, and activities.

This is the first introductory post on founding a truly integrated modality of healing psychological problems and finding awakening to one’s own self, or Self-Realization to both the Manifest Human Self, and to the Self as the ultimate Witness.

I will post about medications and the unfounded fears that people have about medications, such that they foster dependency, make you into a zombie, make you feel that you are sick, that therefore something is very wrong with you, further reducing self-esteem, or the belief that psychotherapy (and drugs) are a crutch, and no self-respecting person should ever seek help from a therapist, or from medications, and that one should  only life oneself by one’s own bootstraps.  This is pure poppycock.

I myself, as admitted above, have submitted myself not only do many spiritual teachers over 50 years, but also to eight years of twice a week psychotherapy in several different modalities, from Gestalt to psychoanalysis (4 X week), taken medications for depression and for anxiety, and have practiced and taught many types of meditation and of self-inquiry.  I still take a sleeping pill, sometimes several, to get to a deep sleep state because sleep apnea otherwise makes deep and REM sleep impossible.

In addition, the deep sleep, dream, and waking are all temporary states that come and go as they will,and are all affected by the health of the body as well as how long and well one has progressed in meditation.

Over the next few months I want to give you insights gained after having done it all for a half century.  I want to tell you what works, what does not, what practices or beliefs actually make for more suffering or delusion than the disorder one is trying to overcome.

Like I said near the beginning, most people practicing or even interested in spirituality, are doing so to escape suffering, and usually as an escape from psychological suffering such as depression, manic-depression, severe anxiety or persistent fears of death or pther events, escape from a pervading dread of the worst happening, low self-esteem, psychotic phenomena, or from physical pain, or even “imagined” of psychogenic pain.

These people want to do it all themselves and not take psychotropic medications, see therapists, or even go to  a spiritual teacher.  They think they can resolve their dis-ease and distress purely through the mind, book learning, self-talk, positive affirmations, belief in the Bible or Buddha, Christ or Osho, or Krishnamurti.

These people do not have any idea of how complex the problems of psychological pain and suffering are, and the many, many ways there are to resolve the suffering, but the fears of following those methods prevents true relief of that suffering.

As a taste, I will  say only one thing, one hint of what is to come.  Medication cannot resolve a deep depression, if anything, it will worsen it by divorcing yourself from feeling even more than the depression does.  The moist effective way out of depression is a combination of medication and appropriate psychotherapy.  This holds true for other mood disorders, such as manic-depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, obessional disorders, and even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I certainly cannot give all the answers to resolving these disorders all by yourselves, because even major depressive disorders have many different causes, and it takes a good medical evaluation to best determine the way to mitigate this type of suffering.  But psychotropic medications can often assist the spiritual seeker by freeing them of a depression, anxiety state, violent mood swings that undermine our ability to be steadfast and persistent in any successful spiritual practice.

Also, as an additional understanding I want to convey, it is almost impossible to lift yourself out of a Major Depressive Episode without psychotropic medications or psychotherapy.  It literally cannot be done through spiritual methods.

Often Major Depressive Episodes end just by the passage of time, as do strong periods of deep anxiety and panic disorders, but each untreated episode changes brain function and neurologic chemistry to the extent that there is a much higher chance of subsequent episodes, and each new episode further changes brain function and chemistry until the disorder can become chronic, and no longer requires an external trigger, such as death of a loved one or loss of a job or home.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

One of the greatest realization one can have is realization of yourself as spirit, as Consciousness versus a lifeless body.  Some, like Robert Adams, Nisargadatta, and Ramana after a while even want to forget their corporeal cloak, and call  the body illusion.  But they do not say that after they are dead.

Spirit and matter are identical. No body,no Consciousness.In any even in their later days as they are dying of cancer,their bodies are of utmost concern because of pain and limitations on movement.

No matter how they talk before their final days, in their final days they have utmost concern about their bodies, and with the body's death, they  are no more.  That individuality is gone forever, for that individual's Consciousness died even before the body was dead.

If their is anything that "survives" death, it had to be their before life, because that which is born always dies. The "soul" if it survives, must be there even before birth.

Yet, is that our experience?  Do we remember being 6 months old, ten months old, being an individual? No.

Do we even remember being a soul, a person, in deep sleep?

So really, our individual existence is a once and for all experience.

However, there is that mystical connection of Consciousness and matter, or embodied spirit that lies at the core of all of us.  Life and awareness arising out of embodiment.  This is where God and matter meet to create individual life forms, and it is out of this matrix were arise, and to this we return.  Nisargadatta called it Parabrahman, that principle that knows both existence and non-existence.

TO ME FROM MARK:

I wonder then if people like myself who have a supplemental Medicare program(in my case it being the AARP United Healthcare insurance) are still hurt as much by the ACA?

I bet they are and this will be particularly problematic in future years because of the Boomers swelling the ranks(which I also am).

Mark

Yes Mark, everyone over 65 is in the same boat now.

My mother has Medicare and United Health Advantage plan.

I also thought it was better to have Supplemental or Medigap insurance, but asking around, everyone gives a different answer.

At the rehab where my mom is, Sun City Health and Rehabilitation, I was told 
that the Advantage plans, outside of the restrictions on doctors and hospitals, actually provided more care, especially the ARP United HealthAdvantage,  Some plans, like Blue Cross Arizona API and Banner Health variants, are much more strict on restricting length of stay.  So you have to ask around.

My mom feel about 11 years ago and broke her leg.  Back then she was allowed to stay in a rehab unit for three months until fully recovered. Now, just a few days are allowed under current Obamacare.  That is why national medical care costs are down: few services and length of stayfor everyone covered by the plans, but more people are covered.  A lot of Obamacare is covered by the $700,000,000,000 taken from Medicare and spread around to a larger number of covered people.

OBAMA LIED TO US ABOUT THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT!!

My 97 year-old mom is in the hospital after a fall 11 days ago.  She was released the same day as the fall 11 days ago because she did not break any bones and there was no detected internal bleeding.

Yesterday she went back to the ER because of increasing pain in the right abdomen.  She has had all kinds of tests, and one possible problem is a precancerous lesion lacted in the stomach 2 years ago, but most docs there think the pain is secondary to the fall.  They can’t find the source, but are being forced to release her even though she has been on her back for ten days and can’t sit up because they can’t find anything that requires hospital treatment under the new, Affordable Care Act guidelines.

All are released from the hospital because patients can’t stay in the hospital if they can be treated on an outpatient basis.

The docs tell me this is especially true with elderly Medicare patients, and the doctors have no say as to how long a patient stays.  If nothing is found that MUST be treated in a hospital, they must be released, even with pneumonia, open wounds, and other conditions for which they would have been kept in the hospital and treated before Obamacare.

The docs said that the most severe restrictions are on the Medicare elderly, likely due to the $700,000,000 billion taken out of Medicare to fund Obamacare (ACA).

These docs universally say this is the new state of Medicare and the new medical system created by Obama—they have no control over patient care.  Care provided is all a matter of government restrictions on stay and treatments, which are most onerous on the age and conditions of the elderly.  These doctors are angry and say the system is not treating the elderly as they should be treated, and were treated before Obamacare destroyed Medicare.

In a sense, we have a “gentle form” of “Death Panels” that the Republicans warned about, but they are living people that are making decisions not to treat the elderly, but the words and regulations written into the Affordable Care Act.

Obamacare may cover more people now than before, but it has done soon the backs of Medicare and the elderly.

There is a huge difference between adopting what Seung Sahn called a “Don’t Know Mind,” where he encouraged students to be dumb as a rock, and becoming totally passive, constantly resting in silence, doing nothing, going nowhere.  The latter is really a path of giving up, or denial of the problems and tribulations of the flesh, and more or less just waiting either for peace or for some sort of awakening.

Over and over my Zen teachers said the action is in the living, in daily life, work, family, problems and solutions. But Zen and Seung Sahn both emphasized diminishing thinking about the problems, ruminating, pondering, and instead, just act, and the first impulsive action is probably the correct one.

Then, over a period of time, doing this trains you to trust your instincts more than obsessive thinking.

This not to say that many situations  that most people encounter do not require a great deal of attention and thinking, but the training was aimed at acquiring a greater trust in instinct, one’s gut, rather than one’s head.

On the other hand, other spiritual paths emphasize increasing one’s trust in their hearts’ as opposed to their head.  These are the paths of love and compassion.

Once one has gained good access to one’s gut and heart, along with the a decreased dependence on thinking, one can use heart, gut, and head in an integrated, total way.

But, having access to Self, one remains curious about one's own beingness, as well as the world.  The complete Zen man enjoys problems, enjoys pains, enjoys exploration, life, family, etc.  He or she finds sheer joy in life, even the downsides.

THE KNOW-IT-ALL ZOMBIES

What I find now adays are far more people that think  they know everything about spirituality, enlightenment, and what enlightened beings are like based on a couple of years of reading books, and maybe a year or two of haphazard practice of meditation.

They know it all and speak in abstract platitudes about silence, truth, the divine, no-self, non-dual, Consciousness, emptiness, etc.  You know just by the abstractness of the terms they use that they are parroting authors they have read.

The largest segment of this population is young males from their teens to maybe 35.  Very dependent on intellect they like to argue and prove everyone else wrong except for their favorites, like Ramana or Nisargadatta, or else they preach the opposite that everyone is right and all viewpoints are equal.

These poor people really don't know that they really don't know.  They have no idea that they think they know who they are because they have read Ramana and Nisargadatta talk about reality and illusion and those ideas alone are just a map, and not a true grasp by direct experience of the real.

IT IS SO HARD TO ESCAPE RELIANCE ON CONCEPTS SO THATWE CAN LET GO OF THEM AND SEEK TO EXPERIENCE OURSELVES DIRECTLY, WITHOUT CONCEPTS OR MIND, WITHOUT AN INTERMEDIARY OF TEACHINGS.

When you first grasp who you are by a direct experience of Self everything changes.  For the first time you know something in a way entirely unmitigated by intellect.  You know your own Self directly, as a whole, as an entity existing within you, within your body, within  your sense of presence, within your energy fiekl, and you know it as the life force itself, as I, as I Am, as "I am alive"!

For the first time your really know what direct knowing is.  You realize that basically you are Knowledge itself, and also the Knower of Knowledge.  As Knowledge, you are the Manifest Self consisting of your body, your breath, your sense of I, also your emotions, thoughts, tactile sensations, sounds, taste, smell, etc.

And, if you are a long-time meditator, you also know your Manifest Self as emptiness, the Void, which some call silence.

But then you will also know that which lies beyond Consciousness, beyond the body, which is the Witness: that which experiences both existence and non-existence.

For most people, they cease existing when they go you sleep.  The sense of I disappears.  And in the morning they awaken and exist again. But they do not doubt that  they existed during sleep because they have an inner sense that they existed while asleep, and can even manage to have a sense of the amount of time that passed while they slept.  A few people remain aware of being asleep even while sleeping, so they are less aware of the non-existence of the normal person because they are centered in the principle of knowing itself, the Witness.

So profound are these states of realization that they change everything for you. You become totally alive because you do not live in your head like the 25 year-old, know-it-all-from-books-person.  This person is not alive; he lives in his mind which is comprised of his ideas of what he thinks Ramana, Nisargadatta, or Jesus meant or experienced.  They are shadow people living in their uninformed imaginations, inflexible, not open to tenderness or gentler and sweeter emotions.  And, they are oh so self-assured, and also so very, very wrong.

JOB OPPORTUNITY

1. Historian for taking information from patients regarding background, history, and injuries, psychological and physical, received while working. And also for family litigation.  This will be in Los Angeles.

2. Medical Records reviewer. Do preliminary review of medical records regarding a patient to serve as reading material for busy physician to review before submitting a final report.  This person can be located anywhere in the world with access to the Internet.

It does take time to learn these skills, especially the historian job. 

Trainee can use own typing skills or learn Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate and edit results.

Preferred candidate will have a background in psychology, medicine, pharmacology, or biology.  Pay will depend on proficiency in all the skills required and will start as part-time and can eventuate in full time.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE AS A HISTORIAN OR MEDICAL RECORD REVIEWER HIGHLY DESIRED.

Contact:         edwardmuzika(at)gmail(dot)com   ASAP

FROM SANZO KATORI; HE DESCRIBES AND INITIAL REALIZATION OF THE MANIFEST SELF EXPERIENCE:

Sanzo Katori I'm sorry but I feel the need to elaborate to answer your question. When I was 19 I had a glimpse of what I believe was the Self or god. One day I felt a lot of anxiety and depression and a great sense of death riding me the whole morning. My body was vibrating more than it ever had during meditation. It felt like my whole personality and being was being sucked into this infinite void. It kept feeling like oi was going unconscious so I had no choice but to lie down.

I fought not to for at least a half hour in extreme fear until I simply passed out. I remember being in black as simply awareness(though I didn't know it at the time) and getting random sensations from my body. Like it was black, black, black..then the sensation "cold"... Black, black, black..then a sensation of " thirst". And it went on like this for an unknown amount of time with different sensations.

When I came back to my body, everything within my body and out in the world was buzzing with blissful energy. Colors pulsing through me and everything in the world. I was an nihilist/athiest/Buddhist until that day.

No self and Facebook talk and all the books I read on religion fell flat. My worry about my life and DEATH which had sapped every ounce of joy and love from my soul until that day disappeared.

My stomach was a soft ball that my true being resided in and it felt like the deepest sweetest rest that I can never truly put into words. Please understand I do not just mean mentally, my whole and entire being felt like it had finally found its home with a bed to rest in after traveling a desert alone for eons. Somehow though as powerful and separate as this energy felt, it intimately felt like it was myself. It was like I was me experiencing god and being that god simultaneously. Like the same humility love and grace as a human seeing god, but somehow being that power energy and bliss. That is what drew me into your teaching because it is the same way I would have described that day.

I felt like the energy had always been pulling me along and decided our actions in a sense or at least gave direction to them. I didn't have to hold the reigns to my existence any more. This lasted for the rest of the day, and when I awoke the next morning I felt empty and hollowed. Extremely human and extremely fragile. I stayed in depression for a few weeks after losing that. But that day changed my life. Since then its been all meditation and following you as my guidance.

I believe that was the "explosion of bliss and love" you speak about. It HAS been more of a low level constant version of that since then as long as I am consistent enough with my meditation. Sometimes when I am injured or sick, I am more human than energy, but I can say that yes especially when it is more powerfully coursing through my body that I feel without a doubt that I am this energy that is somehow condensed into the experience of this world, my body/mind, and emotions.

I do not understand the mechanism of my experience. I can just feel and see my body as a conduit for sensations and emotions, with thoughts wisping through my head and an underlying current of fluctuating energy that is sometimes colored by my emotions or energies from the world. And this energy sometimes feels separate like it is part of my body and the world being witnessed by me and sometimes I feel like i simply am the energy experiencing the sensations of my body and world. Sometimes the energy is low and I am just watching my empty shell of bones and blood in this world as a human, just never strictly identified as a human.

So I've just been continuing waiting for another explosion, sometimes it feels like I will again and I still get a little afraid since its been so long and it was so powerful of an experience. But either way, I only see darkness inside for now, but I feel the self massaging me and letting me know of her presence through the darkness and I'm just here waiting for her to burst from my inner darkness again and show me her greatness and beauty. She's giving me gifts and trials along the way.

By god I hope any of that makes any sense. And sorry for the length.

ED'S RESPONSE:

It makes complete sense. What you describe is a self-realization experience that needs to be repeated to make it permanent. Each time you experience it, it leaves a deeper trace as an after effect.

But do not struggle to bring that experience of again.

Instead, just relax and love whatever arises in yourself from coldness and darkness, to anger, to love.

AND, LISTEN TO SACRED MUSIC A LOT! Chanting, Muktananda style, Krishna Das, Yogananda.

SANZO TO ME AGAIN:

Sanzo Katori: Thank you so much for validating these experiences for me. I had a strong intuition that this was the case. I will do as you say and not try to force or expect the experience, and continue onward . One of the surprises for me along the way has been the amount of love and bliss given even before it becomes permanent. I really hope more people try it out for themselves, because this existence is laden with suffering in my eyes, and this is the only succor that softens that pain for me.

MATTI ASKED ME TO DESCRIBE MY EXPERIENCE OF BEING SELF AS BEST I CAN. HERE IT IS, THE BEST I CAN DESCRIBE SOMETHING SO DEEP AND PRECIOUS THAT ALWAYS WAS INSIDE OF ME, BUT LITERALLY  EMERGED ONE DAY AS AN EXPLOSIVE EXPERIENCE OF SELF-RECOGNITION:

SELF-REALIZATION is not anything you could dream of before it happens because everything is transformed.

Before Self-Realization you are filled with ideas about spirituality, self, Self, ego, Consciousness, emptiness, healing, self-actualization, identification, spirit drumming, astral projection, no-self, etc.

After Self-Realization you are filled with Self and all searching ends with the certain knowledge felt throughout your entire being, as to who and what you are.
Before Self-Realization you have a million ideas of who and what you are garnered from ready many books, listening to dozens of teachers and gurus, but you are filled with doubt or confusion no matter how strongly you hold onto ideas about Self derived from reading Ramana, Nisargdatta, Tolle, Zen, Buddhism, Advaita, Christianity, etc.

When Self explodes forth from within your heart and gut, for the first time it seems, you know you are alive, that you exist.  The life force spills out into the world from your heart and gut.  The Self is alive in you. Pure energy; oure experience; pure life itself; sentience; and you are That life force and sentience, and you also witness that life force and sentience.

For many, the "true self" is the Witness of the life force, That which is beyond Consciousness or is ontologically prior to Consciousness, and the Manifest Self is illusion.  But for someone who first experiences the Manifest Self, suddenly everything in life becomes clear: there is something within you as you had "thought" you were, that is far greater, far more powerful, yet far more vulnerable and undefended than you had ever been.  There is a 100% openness to al experience, from the greatest joy and bliss, to the deepest sorrow and grief.

And, you know absolutely, positively, who and what you are as an almost infinite spiritual elements within, a core of energy and light that permeates and suffuses every moment of your bodily existence in a radiant energy felt most strongly in your gut and heart.

And when you look within, or feel within, you see and feel a core of life force, or energy every changing in terms of its form and outline, ever interacting with the world through exchanging energy fields and tendrils. The Self reaches out through your heart and gut contacting the world with gentleness, tenderness, lovingness, and yet you are always grounded from within, attached to this core of life-force, which often is experienced as bliss, often as energy patterns, and often as pure tenderness and vulnerability.

The Self is alive and palpable as a physical force, a manifestation within one's subjective field that exists alongside that witness of Self, Parabrahman, the Unmanifest Self existing prior to Consciousness.  Manifest Self and Unmanifest Self coexist in inseparable duality and symbiosis.  Where one is found, so is the other. You are both Manifest and Unmanifest Self known directly.

At first the Manifest Self is experienced as other to you, who until this point had no identity except for ideas given to you by others, by teachers, by family and society.  I am a man; I am a child; I am Caucasian; I am strong, weak, confused, intelligent, stupid, worthless, etc.  All idea about who and what I am.  This is the false self that is destroyed by the initial experience of no-self, of emptiness, of the Void nature of internal existence found in unity experience of no separate self.

But within that emptiness, deeper, Self is found through loving that emptiness and all that emerges from it, such as painful emotions, memories, and emergent vulnerability.  Love is the key to experiencing the Self, for Self is first felt within, then observed with one's inner vision as light and energy patterns.

That inner Self is alive, ebullient, joyful mostly, but with times of grief, sorrow, anger and fear passing through Self, like light passing through a prism, or a cloud passing through the sky, not touching the emptiness that I am, but touching and caressing the energy being that I am--the Manifest Self.  

This Manifest Self can better be described as having found one's soul, one's most secret heart of heart's, heretofore well hidden and protected behind many layers of psychological defenses, but now totally open and exposed to the world.  

Now it announces itself loudly, insistantly, saying, "I am alive!  I have come alive, ready to receive and experience every iota of human experience, joyful or painful, for now I am complete.  Now I am grounded in myself.  Now I am most powerful because I am open and vulnerable, and as such I cannot be fooled any more by all the ignorance hitherto forced on me by teachers, books, scriptures, family or society, because I know who and what I am directly in my heart, as life itself."

I spent the first 27 years of my life learning useless scientific, political, and economic theory--all bullshit.  It was all mindstuff, what my friend Lee Werth calls “convenient fiction.”  Yet all  during this accumulation period, beginning at about age 18, I had extreme doubts about all the scientific, academic, and political “knowledge” I was learning.

Then, from age 27 until age 53, I spent a painful amount of time both learning spiritual bullshit, and then shedding it.

At age 53 I experienced deeply complete emptiness and No-Self; without Self there is no external world, and the rest of knowledge fell away, leaving me pristine without all the bullshit spiritual “truth” one finds on FB and from popular gurus.

Then at age 67 “I” became self-aware of the identity of me, I, God, Self, and the world, simultaneously, and I now live in the Self all the time. That Self-awareness did not come as a result of self-inquiry, knowledge, ideas about infinite mind, thought vortexes, Krishna, chanting affecting DNA strands, spirit drumming, Sahaj Samadhi, Shakti, Kundalini awakening, etc.--those had all been experienced, understood, and dropped long before.

I became Self-Realized simply because I fell in love with a real woman, and my heart opened in a way as never before. I was then able to leave emptiness, the Void, the Absolute, Witness,  and become a human living in the same exciting world that I knew when I was 12 years old: a world of real people, real problems, real responsibilities, real pain, real bliss, real love, real external objects, a real body--and most of all Self-Knowing.

Anything you find in science, in economics, in political theory, must help you in real everyday life otherwise it is just useless junk cluttering up your life.

You need to escape from Ramana-fixation and understanding; escape from Nisargadatta’s disappearance into the Absolute Witness; escape from emptiness and no-self, escape from multidimensional realities, astral worlds, escape from politics; monetary and fiscal theory, escape from special relativity and quantum mechanics, spirit drumming and demon possession and just dwell in your own experience of Self, living lovingly and compassionately, also aware of the pain, suffering, and the ignorance of all others that dwell in teachings and any kind of head knowledge, whether physical or spiritual--it is all bullshit.

Only the experience of Self is real.  Beware even of this statement, because it too is only bullshit, useless knowledge, until you experience your Self for yourself.

Freedom from knowledge is a lifelong affair, whether scientific, spiritual, or political, and when even partially attained, allows for the possibility of true knowing of Self.  Then for the first time, you will experience what knowing truly is: pure knowledge without the coloring of ideas and intellect; it is knowing from the body and heart, and knowing yourself as pure knowing itself.

Of course, if you believe like Buddhists and the neo-Advaitins that there is no self, Self, or separate self, you will never find Self.  You have to be open to experience something within what you had thought to be self, and find something so new, so magnificent and so mind-blowing than you could ever have imagined.

HUANG PO:

"The only truth s that there is no truth; beware even of this truth."

ROBERT ADAMS

"You have created a teacher to wake you up. The teacher would not be here if you were not dreaming about the teacher. You have created a teacher out of your mind in order to awaken, to see that there is no teacher, no world - nothing. You've done this all by yourself."

MY RESPONSE:

This is convenient bullshit that sounds very profound, but in fact is just another theory that had an origin in time and space, and will pass away like all others.

Yes, emptiness is everywhere, inside and out, as well as objects, and ideas. Robert stated all were unreal because they were impermanent and that only the subject that was permanent. This is just another theory--one among thousands.

Don't limit yourself to this one "thuth," nor any others. But your own light, but don't go it alone until you have awakened. After awakening you can be your own light. Before that all is confusion, mystery, darkness.

SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I recently stated I have dropped the pursuit of finding a science that embraces an understaning of the inner and outer worlds together.  I stated that both share certain observables like a sense of space and objects in them, but inner space is not measurable, and inner objects are fleeting and unstable.  I further stated that any commonality that would explain features common to both would likely reside in the Witness who existentially stands prior to both.  That is, to understand commonality between the inner and outer worlds, it would be necessary to investigate the witness itself.
This can be done in many ways and is being done in many ways, such as neurologists investigating brain functions and identify areas of the brain associated with different processes in consciousness.  Other THEORIZE that consciousness is an artifact of quantum level processes.
But both approaches are external to consciousness itself.
Science of the external world is all theories, mathematical equations, assumptions about causality, etc.  Theories come and go.  They are like clothing fads.  In large scale physics, the models and theories have changed wildly over time, and many scientists over the last three centuries have felt we were on the verge of understanding everything.  Then something happens....
New experimental data comes in that harms that understanding, or a new Einstein or Newton comes along with new ideas that seem to explain that which hitherto has not been expalinable.  Scientific theories come and go and are based on underlying assumptions and the mathematics that describe this understanding, which themselves predict new results that need to be checked, and if confirmed, becomes the newest and latest "truth" about the world.  But these truths constantly change, and we are forced to make more and more absurd and anti-intuitive assumptions about the nature of the universe and the nature of the elements that compose it--atomes, quarks, bosons, etc.
There is no stability in science.  There are no invariant truths in science.  
Science consists of assumptions and matheatics, and checking against obseravbles, which themselves have become increasingly distant from the observables of everyday life.
However, there are many other ways of exploring consciousness.  Meditation, self-inquiry, Kundalini Yoga, Zen, Buddhism, etc., are all about ways to understand the world from the inside, using consciousness to explore consciousness.
Also, psychotherapy has its roots in many differnt disciplines, from developmental psychology investigating the evolution of the ego and self from infancy through adulthood, and the consequences of various failures to reach developmental milestones.  Then there are various theories of dreams and archetypes, and various attemtps to understand consciousness through brain functions, medications, and even hallucinagines. 
I propose a different way.  My way is just a constant focus on the self within, in all its many aspects, from the self as body feelings, self as emotionsor experiencing emotions, self as one's sense of presence, the energy field that fills the body and extends into space, various internal energies and images, the experiences of actually knowing something, and what that feels like.  Then, actually finding for oneself, who you are as a totality: knowing both your human self from inside, but also the Self of all--the basic sentience that allows you to know, experience, and understand in the first place.

I don't like Ken Wilber's theoretic approach and never have.  It is all mind and bending other people's theories to fit his concepts.
The exploration must come from within each of us exploring our own awareness of both our inner and outer worlds.
What I find the biggest barrier to understanding who and what we are are the concepts we have beforehand as to who and what we are.  
Most people cannot just observe what is going on in themselves, or even feel what isgoing on in themselves, because they are constantly talking to themselves about what they see,feel,hear, touch, or smell.  Their inner world is filled with self-talk, ideas fostered by reading about Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Osho, Jesus, the Bible, Jan Esmann, and others who purportedly tell us about the nature of our inner and outer worlds.

I find few willing to abandon self-talk and all these theories and fantasies, and feely look and feel inside without stories, which requires great openness, courage, and an ignoring of self-talk by having an attitude of: What is really within me? I want to know for myself, firsthand, who and what I am.

Yes, you can have guides that supply methods, helpful hints gained from their own explorations of their own consciousness, but the center of your exploration has to be you and you alone.
Doing this kind of exploration in groups can be very valuable as you relate to others what you have found and what you think that experience means. Others tell you of their explorations and each bounce off ideas about tactics to explore within.  In addition, as a person within a group, you naturally develop ideas about othersand develop emotions and feelings about others that need to be shared/  This helps develop intimacy and vulnerability which enhances one's ability to explore unconscious areas.

I have tried over the years to form such a group but it really requires physical and emotional closeness.  An ashram-like, or community-like situation that allows immediate feedback in real time as opposed to strangers giving feedback on Facebook.  The group has to slowly grow together, gradually get to know each other, and develop a closeness and trust that all exposures will be accepted if not criticized at some point, or denied by others.  

This group effort really provides a supportive network to do deep self-exploration with all working together, helping one's own self and the other.

I did this for many years at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in the early 1970s with Ed Wortz, a Geestalt therapist and Zen student, with Song Ryong Hearn, Thich Thien An, Maezumi Roshi, and then with Swami Shankarananda and Muktananda ashrams in the late 70s, then into individual psychotherapy for six years with a genius psychotherapist, Eric Reitz, now living in Northern California.