Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

     Your knowing contains everything.  Without knowingness, there is nothing.  Your knowledge that you are, your consciousness, is a container of all visible forms.  Your whole world is in it.

     In deep sleep you are not aware of the body.  Identification with the body appears after waking.  The world takes birth in your consciousness.  All the great teachers of the past, all incarnations, Krishna, Jesus, Ramana, and Robert Adams, all had the same consciousness as you have now.

     In addition, you were never born.  That you were born is strictly hearsay.  You have seen others born, but not yourself.  You were told that you were born, were given a name, and developed over the years until the beginning of your first memory, whatever that was, which is the beginning of your existence as self-conscious consciousness.  Before that memory, you are not self-aware.  You held no concepts and reacted as taught.  Birth takes place when there is awareness of existence, when there is the knowledge I am.  Self-awareness is really the first knowing that you are as an entity, as a form with which you identify, but actually you are formless, knowledge only.

     Distant stars and planets invisible to the eyes, are made visible by a telescope.  Your consciousness is like that telescope because of wage many things become visible.  Consciousness is your instrument by which you become aware of external forms and internal processes such as thought, imaging, emotions, joy and pain.  Without Your Consciousness, Nothing exists!

     Observation is the quality of consciousness but not of the observer.  Witnessing of the consciousness occurs to the observer.  Consciousness contains everything, but witnessing of all that happens to the observer.

     As Nisargadatta said, “Although I am talking to pure consciousness, the birth principal, the listeners identify themselves as men and women.  Hence, misunderstanding and confusion.”  That is, the sense of ‘I-Am’ identifies with the form of the body, and the great confusion of human existence begins for each of us.  Spirituality is a process of deconstruction and dis-identification with objects in the world as well as the body, and re-identification with the totality of the appearance of the world, the visible manifestation of the universe.  Within that identification with the totality of the manifest universe lies recognition of the observer who lies entirely outside of that manifestation, and in this finds total freedom.