Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

The most important step one can take towards understanding who and what you are is realizing you are not your body, but you are the totality of your consciousness, in which your body is an appearance.  If you can find in you a sense of self, of I Am as a sensation, you need to see and feel clearly that the I Am, most especially the 'I' sensation, has no identity with your body.

You have to understand, 'see clearly', and feel clearly, that all that you know is provided by your mind and your senses, including your experience of your body.  You have no form.  Consciousness has no form.  It is not fixed, and objects arise and disappear in your field of consciousness.

That which you regard as you, your body, was not present as an object in your consciousness until you became self-aware, self conscious as a separate I somewhere early in childhood.

Presently you are aware of your body and identify with it, protect it, feel its pain and pleasures, but if you silently observe both the sensations and appearance of your body, you will observe that it does not "feel" like your sense of self, your 'I' experience.

If you spend some time abiding in your sense of I, you will understand that your I-sense has no identity.  It does not "feel" the same as your body feels, nor your thoughts and mind.  Emotions happen to the I sensation as a witnessing subject who has the ability to take that emotion into the I sense temporarily, allowing you to integrate that emotion into your larger sense of presence, or being alive, energetic, and sentient.  But ultimately, emotions are not you either.

The inner energies you may feel, the sometimes raging an burning energies of Shakti, the divine feminine, too, is not you. The bliss that comes with acknowledging this feminine life force, that too, no matter how powerfully felt, or long felt, also is not you.

And thus you progress in self-inquiry, going deeper and deeper into hitherto unexplored aspects of your self-experience, the further away you get from your body and the world, and have experienced a progressive loss of identification with all aspects of your consciousness that previously you regarded as you.  

This too is the point of Buddhism, to reach the utter peace of separation of your identity from all aspects of consciousness, thereby experiencing complete and utter peace of being away from the drives, expectations, and fears of being a moribund sentient being, subject to the drives, desires, fears, suffering and pleasures of the flesh.

So, complete realization is a two-step process: realizing the inner divine fire, Shakti, with her fierceness and bliss, and then going deeper, becoming the pure witness.

Now, knowing this, realize how rare such knowledge and attainment is.  Most people only play around the edges to this depth of self-abidance, self-knowing, and self-realization.  It is attained only by great effort, great determination, great persistence, to see that fundamentally you have no identification with anything in consciousness. Not one in ten thousand travel this way.