Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

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."