Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

FROM DEEYA:

So relieved you delayed the surgery.   My love to you, your mother, Kerima, Michael... 

Perhaps the sky too is sad...  It's been pouring here since many days.

Can I take it from you Ed...?   Help in any way?  Holding you all close.

Let me know which day, as things unfold.

MY RESPONSE:

In the end, it is all about life and death, is it not?  You with your father, and me with my father in 1956, and now with my mother, my only living relative.  Watching her at almost 100 and during the last days of her life in her usual equanimity and good spirits, but with a failing body.

In a sense, these last days--they may be her last days or she might pop back--are again focusing my attention on my own consciousness, and with the thousandth-time rediscovery that I am not it.  It is just there, like a handheld flaming torch held at arms’ length with the fire burning bright, then waxing and waning, and my consciousness is like that.  The only difference is that the torch illuminates the world without, while conscious illuminates the world within, and in the case of a human being, the "within" also contains the external world as an appearance of a without.

But it is still all just a brief light show that is self-contained, and within which we find the appearance of a personal identity and an apparent body, which is also an appearance in that play of light.  There is nothing there.  It is like hand shadows cast by fingers and hands in a light beam onto a wall.  No more than that.  All the other stuff, emotions, wants, needs, judgments, morality and ethics--all gone!

And I observe, neither interested or uninterested, and not feeling anything, no relation, no pity, no despair, no happiness, no sadness, sensations untouched by the filters of human evaluative consciousness.  Thus, I am now with Robert, And It Really Is Good!  All the wars are over.  All the goals have been won or lost and no more arise, hoping my mother will continue towards a peaceful death.

Michael has been a godsend.  I have finally accepted him fully as a son and now see very positive spiritual future for him.  He is a good person.  He is very gentle and loving and caretaking with my mother.  I appreciate him highly.  And Kali loves him too.