Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

When it comes to Self-Realization and enlightenment, for all intents and purposes, your mind is the enemy.  The mind replaces “realization” with knowing, which is head centered rather than heart centered.  Heart-centered should not be romanticized and transformed into the idea that it means love-oriented.  Actually, heart-centered awareness means that it “feels” like your center of gravity has moved a foot downwards from the middle of your brain into the region inside your body around where the physical heart resides.

The center of your beingness, your existence moves downward into your chest, or with Zen, even lower into your gut.  You “live” rom those areas as opposed from your thinking brain.  Thinking can go on and on, but it becomes just background noise unless you need it for some functioning.

People who come into spirituality inevitably begin by reading books and later going to teachers, but all of this head-learning has to be let go of in order for your center of gravity to drop into your heart.  This is the first step into enlightenment, realization of deeper bodies than the one created by your brain, including the energy body, bliss body, emotional body, one’s sense of the divine, the knot between the divine and the personal known as the Atman, or the I Am sensation.

To dwell here you need to let go of ALL understanding, realizing that accumulated knowledge keeps you in your head, locked into various concepts, spiritual ideologies, and the known, not spontaneous, but studied., and instead “FEEL” within your chest for the I-Am sensation. 

When found, dwell there, abide there is the I-Am feeling, the core of your awareness.  Listen to sacred music, chanting, as often as possible.  Practice loving-kindness to all beings, human and animal.  

Using this base, start loving your sense of Self.

What causes this strategy or method to fail, is reading too much, taking ideas and sayings from Osho, Nisargadatta, Krishna Menon, Ramana, Jean Klein, etc., then thinking about these ideas, criticizing and judging others too much, keeping yourself in your brain and mind.