Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Spirituality can consist of stories told to us by people who claim to know. Stories such as “All is God; all is Brahman; the life force is God who lives through you; everything is Consciousness; everything is energy; the world is not real; you don’t exist; I don’t exist; the world does not exist; everything is Kali Ma; everything is Shakti; the Self contains everything; the ultimate witness is eternal; the world is temporary.”

I can assure you there are thousands of more such stories, and one man’s truth is another’s blasphemy. As Seung Sahn would say, “You make a mistake as soon as you open your mouth,” and as Huang Po, the Sixth Patriarch said, “The Only truth is that there is no truth, and beware even of this truth.”

Stories, when taken as truth or the real, divide us from other story holders and defenders.

Spirituality can also consist of spiritual experiences or visions, lights, energies, Kundalini, the Void, the Light of Consciousness, Third Eye experiences, the Subtle Body, the Causal Body, Turiya, the Witness, Love, surrender, grace, astral planes, demons, ghosts, and angels, the emptiness or the Void, the life force, the energy body, the sense of presence.   All of these can be experienced.  What is important is what you make of these experiences.

Do you connect them to a story, an idea of  what exists and how Consciousness or God works?  Do you use these experiences to support the stories of Kashmir Shaivism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, or mystical Christianity, or do you use it to create your own story?

Or do you reject all stories, all beliefs, all systems, and also let all states and experiences come and go without attachment, interpretation, or explanation?

100% of traditional spirituality, known as the world’s great religions, encompasses 95% of all spirituality, an consists almost totally of stories, with a bit of prayer, services, and chanting/singing thrown in.

I would say that 75% of all non-traditional spirituality exists in the area of seekers, seeking the best story they can grasp, or which “resonates” with what they already believe or think they know. It is basically confirmatory with their existing knowledge and intuition.

The other 25% of seekers are those who seek states, love, surrender, devotion, knowledge, self-realization, energies, and who practice meditation, self-inquiry, Kundalini Yoga, Jnana Yoga, and who will actually go to teachers  and try to learn from them.

It is from this 25% of the 5% non-traditional group that new teachings, new masters, new stories are born.  But even of this 25%, only 20% practice and seek even for a decade, and a rare one will seek for two or three decades, exhaustively exploring different paths and teachers, wandering to and fro until they settle on some story, some practices, some teachers. Most of this 15% burn out at some point and just leave the spiritual arena. Many of these will proclaim they have awakened based on one of their experiences, or a belief that enlightenment is just a knowing, an idea of the ultimate.

Only 5% of the 25% non-traditional ever attains a place where which can be called awakening  in any way.

All of these people know that all stories are just that and are not truth.  They also know that almost all “spiritual experiences” are themselves brief or last but a few months, and from which they spin their stories, write their books, and make a living selling workshops, retreats, and ashrams.

But the wise man knows peace because he or she has thoroughly explored himself experientially.  He or she has heard all the stories, and they no longer touch him.  He or she have experienced all the experiences common to those who self-explore, from energies, presence, the energy body, the sense of the divine, they feel the life-force directly, they have had visions, constantly experience the Void as well as the light and energies that permeate the Void, and ar also aware that they witness all of these things in Consciousness.
There is no where else to go, nothing more to be experienced.

There is no I, but he is at peace everywhere, for all places are equal, all chores the same.

No more seeking love, no more seeking security, no more seeking God, energies, enlightenment, or knowledge, he is at rest. All passes as entertainment for him.  He rests in his own emptiness, his own light, his own being and presence.  Sometimes, to others, magic seems to happen around him; but to him, everything is magic, everything is moving even though nothing moves.  But he does not add stories such as everything is consciousness, or Brahman, or Void, or no-self, or Ma Shakti.  These he knows as children’s stories or as the stories teachers tell to snare followers, and this act almost always works because so few have escaped the mind and stories.

       Propaganda, advertising, TV, newspapers, are all stories trapping people into a common world of mundane ignorance. The rest of the non-spiritual world is lost in entertainment, football, basketball, America has talent, Dancing with the Stars, poker, bridge, board games, and music.  All the while, those engaged in traditional spirituality are busy backbiting, arguing, or killing each other.