Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

NISRGADATTA’S TEACHING METHODOLOGY

If you read Maharaj’s last talks as presented by Robert Powell, and do so very resolutely with full attention, you can capture not only what he is saying, and his phenomenology of consciousness, but you can see what he is trying to do to his listener’s mind:  He is using words, concepts, to 1. Drive a wedge between ‘you’ and your identification with your body, and 2. Drive a wedge between your direct experience of the totality of your experience, and your feeling of identification with your experience as individual and personal.  Two wedges: one between you and identification with your body, and one between your sense of personal and individual versus the totality of Manifest consciousness.  He tells you not to narrow down into the confines of a limited and vulnerable body.

After these two wedges are properly inserted and accepted by his listener, they are open to the unicity experience of identifying oneself with the totality of one’s whole experience, the totality of one’s Manifest experience, as I previously described as my Zen experiences at Mt. Baldy.  In this experience the sense of I spreads and permeates the entirety of your consciousness, including of your body and of the world.

This technique uses words and concepts to induce the unity of consciousness experience, or identification with the totality of the Manifest consciousness, which Zen accomplishes through a brute force combination of a rigid meditation style, along with great external stress in the form of a harsh and physically stressful lifestyle of silence, lots of physical work, exposure to extremes of coldness and seasonal heat. This combination both unity consciousness while in meditation, along with a joining back to ordinary consciousness for day to day life is relatively unique to Zen.

One can then say both states of ordinary waking mind and altering unity consciousness are equally real or unreal.  The concept of real becomes meaningless.

Try reading Nisargadatta’s book The Ultimate Medicine from this point of understanding his method.

He explains how consciousness, the life force, energy, and mind only operate naturally in a physical body composed of material and chemical processes.  He says all arise from these processes, so essentially, the life force and consciousness become alive only when supported by a body, making consciousness and the life force secondary to impersonal physical processes, chemistry, etc., which allows him to ask, “Where is there room for an identity, a personal, an individual?”  This is quite brilliant.

He wants you to shift your identity away from your body, to an identity with the totality of Manifest Consciousness, your experience of everything, including your body and the world, rather than just identifying with the body.

After you can do this, the spiritual development is out of your hands, so-to-speak.  The words themselves involve your minds on a very deep level and continue the process of de-individuation, and disidentification first with the body, and then later, with the Manifest Consciousness itself.

Other teachers, like Robert, were content to describe their own experiences and borrow Hindu philosophy for their ontology, but Maharaj does something completely different.  He describes a method of awakening by breaking the mental identification bonds and habitual acceptance of “common sense’ that keeps your mind and consciousness so narrowly focused, and so unaware of the entire spectrum of spiritual experiences, from unity, to energies, to bliss, to surrender, and finally to experience oneself as the witness only, the witness of all these comings and goings of consciousness which is Maharaj’s final stateless state.

In this state you experience yourself as entirely separate and untouched by the flowing and passing states of consciousness that bring you your waking, sleep, dream states as well as the experience of I Am, as that too passes.  This is not a state as states describe happenings in consciousness and are changeavble.  The witness is beyond all this as well as life and death, knowledge and absence of knowledge.