Unmanifest Versus Manifest Self

Robert, Ramana, and Nisargdatta are all correct: Self-Realization of the Manifest Self is NOT the final truth.

It is just that my own experience on my own path and well as arose from being a teacher, is that the personal self, the energetic self, one’s sense of presence, and the divine within, which I call the Manifest Self, should all be realized and fully explored before moving on to the Absolute, before “realizing” the final witness prior to Consciousness.

I have seen seekers caught time after time, in emptiness, boredom, depression, and even suicidal ideation because of trying to bypass the human self, the personality quirks, negative emotions, emotional pain such as guilt, shame, and rage, and thereby miss the aliveness of the Manifest Self and one's own divinity altogether.

Many seekers seek the ultimate understanding, the ultimate states, etc., prior to working through buried, repressed, and denied emotional pain, and therefore never taste of states of grace, surrender, identity with love itself, nor experience internal energies, let alone bliss and the great joy of complete surrender.

In spirituality you have to do your homework.

Recently, because Michael is staying with me and doing many of the chores I usually do, and recently I have had fewer medical reviews to do, I have been able to be quieter and go deeper into myself and thereby experience once again the pure Robert states of complete peace and rest far more satisfying than any of the bliss states ever encountered before. I did not exist, and everything, EVERYTHING, was experienced to be Consciousness; the external world, my body, my Manifest Self, were all experienced as Consciousness with no sense of separation.

Only the experience of my body was somewhat different because I could experience it as “feeling” from the inside, which is different from my experience of the rest of the world through the five senses; yet even the body was just Consciousness too.

The sense of peace, rest, and relaxation was unsurpassed, far deeper than the Manifest Self that I discovered after being lost in emptiness for a dozen years. The Manifest Self was seen as separate only in an illusory way. It too was just Consciousness, like the walls, table, or my body.

I remember having had such peace before and it was when I visited Korea and Zen students and Zen monks did everything for me. When you don’t have to attend to details of day to day living with the constant decisions and activities required, it is much, much easier to reside in bliss or in a state where everything is recognized as Consciousness alone.

All that there is, is Consciousness.  This body is consciousness, the computer is Consciousness, the walls and TV are Consciousness, and I-too is an illusion in Consciousness.

I appear to be; the I Am appears to be, but all that there is, is Consciousness. I Am Unborn because I do not exist; only Consciousness exists.

I have no purpose, no end, no work to do; there is just ever-flowing Consciousness.

The Mountain Top Of Wisdom

Robert used to say "Everything is Consciousness, Consciousness is all that there is."  He opposed that by saying, "You don't exist," or "You are Nothing, No-Thing," meaning you (and me) are not entities or identities.

You need to understand that this is a belief, but as close to truth as you can get in words.

That is, you get rid of the concept that the universe is filled with objects, like our bodies, trees, chairs, and emotions, and accept an alternative truth that all that there is, all that exists are appearances, or apparent objects that objectively exist, and instead we presume there is only Consciousness, an infinite stream of experiences with no attachments to the concept of an underlying reality.  Thus Robert would say that what everyone considered the "real world" was actually like an "optical illusion."

One comes to ths oint of view when one looks into one's own inner experience and one finds no inner identity, no inner  entity that one can call self.  Only emptiness, the Void, is found and it is sentience.

So what we are is that which knows Consciousness, and we are not within Consciousness itself.  All that exists is just an ever changing flow of appearances, experiences, but no self of any sort, so we are not a thing, an entity within Consciousness. 

Instead, we are no thing, not Consciousness, who is aware of Consciousness.

I changed Robert's formula a bit by adding that there is an identity within to be found after one finds that the I-thought does not refer to any entity, and after we look deeper into the emptiness we have discovered to be ourselves,
and instead of "looking" within, we start "feeling" within, and then discovered the I-Am sensation, the core of feeling life and aliveness, the life force and core of our energetic body and sense of presence.

Yes, this I-ness, which I call the divine within, is not an entity, but it "feels" like one, like a coherent core of energy, love, awareness, and vulnerability within, which when concentrated upon, reveals a whole new inner world of "spiritual" experiences of awe, grace, light, power, and love.  It is a whole new world of inner experiences, which again are not entities, but ever changing feelings which connect our "heart-core" to the appearances of the external world.

In a sense, all that we have done is add a new dimension of humanity and divinity to the ever changing flow of appearances that causes our world to take on a new glow of love, humility, acceptance, and love because we now also live in feeling rather than just observation.  All of existence becomes not just "optical illusion," but feeling/illusion which embraces and encases all experience with a feel of love, acceptance, and grace.

More than this I cannot put into words.

FROM NOT-KNOWING TO SELF-REALIZATION

To me, spirituality is all about knowing your self, from the human personal level including emotions, desires, fears, and hurts, to the energy body level, Chi, Kundalini and bliss, to emptiness and the Void, the the Self/God nexis. You have to know yourself experientially, not as an object of knowledge.  That is, you learn to identify with everything that arises during the process of self-investigation and self-abidance, accept it, and love it, thereby bringing it into yourself.

The first step is to adapt a position of humility.  Forget everything you have learned about who you are from reading spiritual teachers, from Ramana to Tolle, Nisargadatta to Almaas, and just look and feel inot who and what you are.  Do not seek at first to understand, but just to be and look and feel into that beingness and accept all that arises as a result of turning within.  Accept that you know nothing about who and what you are except what you know from others as taught by spiritual teachers, society, scientists, society.  You are none of these things, for these are only words and concepts others have devised.  Don't borrow your self-knowledge from them.

You certainly can share what you find with others or with a teacher to get their feedback, but don't rush to get an understanding handle or framework for your experience.  Be accepting of a not-knowing state as long as it takes in order to create and open, simple-hearted, mind and heart, an innocent heart.  This is much more than half of the spiritual journey: becoming open to yourself at all layers, and feeling open to share what you find with others for the sake of feedback.

This is the preparatory stage for the seeker.  Before this, you are a pre-seeker, a soaker-upper of other people's knowledge and experience, and have nothing of your own.

Following a path of receptive not-knowing, you eventually will find your Self, both the Manifest Self of finding God/Self within, or the transcendent, non-Manifest, Noumenal Self.  Finding both is the true beginning of your spiritual life.  Once the Self is found, the light of intelligence burns brightly illuminating every step of your future path.

MY FATHER'S CHILD

My father died when I was 14. It was the biggest calamity in my life. He died in the arms of his mistress while supposedly on vacation with the "guys" in New Jersey.

He was an angry though not a physically violent man, reserving his violence to the emotional variety of being cold, critical, and extremely conventional in many ways, such as his idea of what "manliness" was. He equated manhood with being a warrior, physically strong, athletic, not with being a boy, sensitive, wanting closeness.

He and my mom argued a lot, and she even wrote a letter asking if he wanted a divorce on the day after he left on his "vacation." He died of a massive heart attack a day or two later at the age of 38. To this day, 59 years later, my mom still feels the sting of his infidelity and talks about it often to me.

Why I am telling you this, is that today I felt what it was like being around him once again, waiting for his cutting sarcasm and put downs, or just feeling the menace of his silent and cold presence. I felt weak inside with a little sickness in my gut, and trembling throughout my body.These feelings and images came unannounced,without apparent trigger, while sitting and watching the news.

I felt today small and frightened, but feeling these feelings was like a tremendous victory, for feeling that weakness, fear, sickness and trembling and images of him, brought those long-buried feelings and images to the surface to be fully experienced and re-owned, and I realized that though the feelings were normally out of the range of my conscious awareness, in retrospect they were always present in my body, lived by my body and undermining the integrity of my heart.

That shaking and smallness feeling, not-in-control feeling, was something my brother Ron suffered from far more than I did. Ron died in 1978 from a combination of drinking and Desert Fever at age 32, a victim of my father's coldness and of my inability to be supportive as a child myself to my younger brother. It all came back today to be lived again, and I am so happy, for as a human, today I am more complete.. I love that feeling; in it I feel so vulnerable and open as I was as a child.

MY TEACHINGS

The Self is very deep, encompassing all four bodies and including the phenomenon of mind and emotions.

The mind, our minds, are always an incomplete representation of the world and of who and what we are.  That representation of who we are, I, or self, is the form the I-thought took from the time we first experienced any sense of I, until the present time of your existence. The sense of I usually arises between the ages of 2 and 3-1/2.

This I-thought is the central idea or concept of your personal representation of the world and who you are, and it ties into all your maps, your concepts, regarding the world you live in: that you are a separate observer of the world, that you are an embodied human being, that you were born and will die.  It also encompasses all the ideas of science, politics, economics, religion, money, society, fashion, etc., which is the totality of your conceptual mapping of your world.

You live in this matrix of thoughts which you use as your guide to how to respond to external and internal stimulii and to plan paths to get what you think you need based on these maps.

Now there are whole classes os spiritual people from Jiddhu Krishnamurti, to various Zen masters, to classic Advaita teachers, to various forms of Buddhism that hold that this world that you perceive is not real in the sense it is mostly a learned matrix of thought.  They then state you have to learn how to investigate the totality of the world that lies "under" the matrix.

Unfortunately, most of the exploration of the world with a deliberately blank mind does little to counter the hold of the matrix on you.  What it usually does is add the experience of emptiness or the Void onto both your experience of the world through your matrix, along with a direct perception of the world without the matrix.

You can only become free of the matrix once you discover it in its totality by untying or disconnecting it from your I-thought.  Once you see the folly of the I-thought, that it is only a conceptual mapping of who you are, and with that insight, "see" and understand that the entire conceptual matrix that you have considered yourself to be, was fake, a construct of learning and immersion in the universal conceptual matrix of mankind.

This is the First Freedom: freeing yourself from the matrix.  But this is just the first step.

From here you enter a life of not-knowing, of being "dumb as a rock," with words seemingly unable to enter your mind and make any sense at all.  You are like a baby, immersed once again in raw data that makes no sense.  You may feel lost, or afraid by not having your matrix of knowledge to make sense of your world from day to day, or even decade to decade.

But, letting go of the matrix has freed you from the tyranny of mind.  The filter of concepts is rejected as something unreal that you have borrowed from mother, father, and even Buddha--ways of understanding the world that give you certainty and a sense of safety.

Entering this new world of no-understanding, no-concepts, no-sense has the huge reward of allowing access to a new reality and access to raw data regarding your self and the external world, allowing you over decades to find your real Self centered around the sensation of 'I Am'.  

When this 'I AM' sensation becomes totally yours you are reborn as a spokesperson for truth.  No one in the world may ever recognize it, because 99.99% of those who surround you have never really freed themselves from the matrix of mind; they have just added new worlds of artificial spiritual knowledge to their own maps of their mundane world. 

The hardest thing to do in existence is to free yourself by your own efforts from the matrix, because in the largest sense, before that release, you are the matrix.  You identity is with your ideas of who you are. Almost no one breaks free from the matix by their own efforts alone.

It is relatively easy to fool someone still caught in their own matrix into believing in the reality or truth of some teachers because they reveal inner experiences that fall outside of your pre-guru matrix of reality.  They may reveal to you an inner world of energies, or Kundalini, of a sense of Presence, the Subtle and Causal bodies, astral projection, and using intentionality to change your world, or to heal yourself or others.

But revealing new experiences that you can find within yourself is not the same as unraveling the entirety of the matrix that keeps you within a dream of an artificial reality, and, in fact, usually the teacher merely adds a new sub-matrix of his or her understanding which you incorporate into your matrix of the mundane world, your interal picture or model, and thus a cult is created, elevating that teacher and his or her followers to a status of a shared special understanding placing you above all others.

You know, if you spend any time with either a real teacher of freedom from the matrix, or a false teacher that merely adds rooms to your matrix, you would be hard put to see any difference from any other person, much to your surprise.  Most seekers have ideas of what enlightenment is like or what behaviors can be expected from enlightened beings, because this is part of your acquired matrix of spiritual knowledge gotten from reading spiritual books, and also from your unmet needs of an idealized parenting that you never experienced but still search for. 

So my way of teaching is different from the sequence of my own awakening, which was a sequence of realization of the unreality of the I-thought, and the consequent dissolution of my thought-matrix, living then in complete unknowing ignorance and rejection of the matrix, and finally realizing my Manifest Self, my center of sentience, aliveness, existence, and true knowledge of Self, the divine principle of sentience within.

I urge students to find the I-sensation, not the I-thought, and abide there are much as possible.  Abiding there one finds a sense of complete rest, or being home.  But the abiding must be accompanied by a sense of acceptance of all inner phenomena that arise as a result of turning within, otherwise it is not brought into your sense of identity.  Further, this acceptance has to be a loving acceptance which gradually becomes steady and then by its permanence is recognized as an aspect the the divine Self within.  

With time, that divine Self becomes the center of your being, your heart of hearts, the feeling measure of who and what you are.

The hardest thing for any student to do is to stay with a teacher that keeps exposing the unreality of your inner matrix, because it feels like an attack on you because you identify with your matrix rather than with your Manifest Self which he or she is constantly redirecting your attention towards, but which you are not yet ready to feel or see.

A true teacher is always pointing you away from your naive spiritual concepts towards your inner heart of hearts, towards your Manifest Self, and during that process of recognizing that true self within the divine sentience, you will also experience an implosion of the mundane Matrix of Thought that keeps you imprisoned in the universal dream.

I have problems with all Hindu and Buddhist traditions, including Advaita Vedanta and Theravadan Buddhism. Meditation is not open-ended self-discovery, but directed to realizing truth as embedded in their Sutras.  This is merely learning someone else's truth.t

I used to recommend the book "Stages of Emptiness Meditation" until Max--at least I think it was him--pointed out that the entire thrust of the book was to discover the truth and weaknesses of different philosophical positions, such as Samkhya, Yogachara, and Vedanta regarding the nature of reality, time, Consciousness, dual and non-dual.

Once I spent a lot of time with Sri Ratanasara, a very senior Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka.  I kept pestering him with questions about Consciousness, mind, Self, no-self, etc., and he pointed out these were all philosophical positions that depended on definitions and logic.  he was very clear that real truth lay outside of the mind that tried to figure things out with concepts and logic.

The way I advocate is to find the self-sensation within and abide there. This is different from finding the source of the I-thought, which is emptiness, the Void, and discovering that, destroys the entire matrix of conceptual knowledge.  The various schools of Buddhism and Hinduism cleave to philosophical traditions and often equate enlightenment with a deep understanding of one or another philosophical schools and the truths they teach.

Having a misspent youth getting a BA in philosophy, rejecting it as bullshit, then going to Rinzai Zen that teaches in an entirely different and less intellectual constraining way, I have a deep loathing of book learning and a highner acceptance of the go-it-alone school of enlightenment seekers.

Yet, had I not spent 12 years in Zen and many years in the Advaita milieu, I am absolutely certain that without the base they provided me. I would never have discovered my Self.

For me Self-Realization is a process of  progressively parsing out differing aspects of my own experience, penetrating to ever more subtle levels of consciousness, the various conceptual bodies experiences, the energy body, the sense of presence, feeling the divine, feeling grace and forgiveness, as well as very deep layers of love resulting in an identification with love, and finally leading to an experience of Self.  The Self is found through loving one's own sense of self, and going ever more deeply into that sense of self until Self itself is thoroughly uncovered, exposed, and integrated into your life.

This is not Advaita, Zen, Buddhism, but radical self-investigation without words or concepts.  Each person invents their own path and shares it with others through a radical openess, and in so doing helps others to open to similar or deeper levels.