Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Robert is asking you to follow him into a radically new way of looking at yourself and the world.  He puts the emphasis on consciousness, not the body in the world, into a real physical existence.

He asks, do you remember your own birth?  Of course not you say.

Then how do you know you were born?  Somebody toild you about your birth, didn't they?  This is not direct knowledge, this is indirect based on other people's testimony.

He would say, "You think you are a body that awakens in the morning, and sleeps at night.  But is this true?"

Robert has a different approach. He says, so to speak, "What if you are not a body that has consciousness, but rather consciuousness that perceives a body and the world? How does that change things?"  

Now Robert did not actually say this, but he could have. He is really asking you to forget all that you think you know and instead actually look at and feel your own first-hand experience for the first time.

Watch how consciousness arises in the morning and the sequence after the arising of awareness. At first there is awareness without words, without the understanding that there is an I, a sense of existing.  He calls this the "gap," and this gap is all-important.  On top of the gap, the 'I' arises, and with it the appearance of the external world.

At night an opposite process takes place where gradually you descend into a pleasant darkness with no thoughts, no I and no world.  Then you many dream, which is an artifact of the mind.

When you awaken again it feels as if there is a you embodied in a body, situated in a real external world.  But this is what you have been taught.  This is not your direct experience.  Your direct experience is that you and the world have arisen similtaneously from out of an unknowing awareness, which itself arose out of a dark nothingness. 

Each morning you arise from nothingness and become alive, and each evening, you die to the world and become absorbed into nothingness.

Yet you take the external world and your physical body as the true reality, while what you really know is only objects within your consciousness, some of whom have taught you that you were born into this world as an infant.

Then you begin to remember going to school and taking classes on spelling, grammar, and mathematics.  You learn about the world, American government, World War I and II, the  Soviet Union, Deocrasy, and the natural forces in the external world.  Yet this is all second hand knowledge which are memories you store.  Robert asks you to drop these memories and look instead at the arising and passing away of your consciousness throughout your day.  Take your consciousness as the only reality and how does that change how and what you experience?