Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

ROBERT'S AWAKENING EXPERIENCE

Many people who read Silence of the Heart or the book of his complete transcripts, believe that the understand Robert's teachings. But for them, they only understand their own concepts based on an identification with their bodies, and as bodies that are alive, are human, and are embedded in family and society.

No one can undderstand Robert unless they have had similar awakening experiences which result in the beginning of disidentification with their bodies, their minds, and their humanities, and begin to identify with consciousness itself.

For Robert, that first experience happened when he was 14 in his famous math-exam awakening. Someone should locate his description of his experience and post it as a comment.

But basically, his consciousness became aware of the life force within his own body and its dynamic identity with consciousness itself.

It was experienced as a great white light, as bright as a thousand suns, yet jot burning hot. This light carried his consciousness upwards and outwards, quickly filling the universe, and he was that light, that consciousness that suddenly became aware of itself finding his new identity as consciousness itself, not as his former identity as the human named Robert.

In that brief experience Robert realzed himself as God, as Consciousness, as the life force transcending his identity as Robert.

Until you have a similar experience, you cannot really own Robert's teachings as your own, for they will only be concepts based on your reading, education, and identity as a human. You can only think about transcending your humanhood, but you can never really know what it is like as a liberating experience until you have this kind of disidentification with the body and mind experience.

In my own estimation, of all the many teachers out there claiming to not have a self, maybe one in 50 or 60 have had a similar experience to Robert's.

There are other types of awakening experiences that lead to the same result, but this is the juciest type of experience because everything within you is awakened to the inner light of consciousness, the presence of the life force within, discovery of the potential purity of consciousness not identified with the messiness of life as a human.

This is certainly not the final awakening, but it is an essential component of the total process of becoming a Jnani--the goal of Advaitin teachers. Eventually consciousness itself must be transcended.