Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

THE ROAR OF SELF

For years I asked myself what I was.  I searched within for the source and found nothing, only emptiness.  There was no self I thought.  There was no entity that the word ‘I’ pointed towards.  The ‘I’ represented an empty set.  I didn’t exist; I as an entity was not part of the manifest world.

This scared the hell out of me until one day I called Robert Adams, my teacher, and told him how frightened I was because I “saw” that I did not exist, because I had “looked” within, and “saw” nothing there. 

Robert said, totally contrary to his public teachings, “Of course you exist; you are speaking to me aren’t you?”

For years I did not fully understand what he was saying, but in 2010 I realized who and what I was, as none but life itself, as the life force within me discovered through feeling within instead of looking, and that feeling within took the form of devotion and surrender to God or to another sentient being such as myself.

As the result of loving another personally, totally, surrendering my life to her totally, something was born in me which until that moment I did not know existed.  I became aware of myself as life and the functioning of life.  I was the seer, hearer, toucher, thinker, feeler, talker, listener, etc.  I was able to grasp myself through feeling, and not myself as an object, but myself as subject.  I was that sentience, that awareness, that came to life in a body.

There was no separate soul within me, although the word soul could be given to that which I am, which is pure sentience, pure knowing, that wakes up each morning arising out of complete nothingness.

When your mind is clear of concepts, recognizing that no words can touch what I am or what the world is as life, but can only create a map of reality that really has no resemblance to reality at all  except as the most limited  and paltry imitation, then your attention naturally flows inwards to the explosion of life within you, which is exactly the life that flows in every sentient being from the tiniest mosquito to the largest whale.  We all share that magic of life.

The body without us is nothing more than a bag of water and flesh, insentient.  But when life enters, the body, mind, and the force of the life force shines, explodes, revels in its own existence.  You feel the full force of what is you, as you, and as a power in the world.

The universal principle of sentience, life, which is everywhere, has become alive in you and me, and we share that commonality.  We are closer than brother and sister, father and son, for we share the same aliveness, the same sentience, the same ability to love, to share, to be devoted to each other, because life loves life in all its forms.

And, when this knowledge is totally matured in you, every moment of the day you can feel yourself as the source of the visible universe.  You are that life force, that experiential bubble interacting with other sentient bubbles.

Yet, no matter how deeply you “look” inside with your mind or intuition, there is no separate entity which you can label as self or soul.  The one who seeks the separate self or soul is that which he or she seeks.  There is nothing more to you than the life force within which you feel as yourself: the experiencer of everything, including your own manifesting in the world.

Using Nisargadatta’s nomenclature, the word “beingness” refers to being sentient, being aware, such as when you first wake up in the morning but are not yet in the world.  You are just bare awareness without being aware of anything.  Then, in a moment, energy flows up from your gut into your brain and suddenly you are aware of yourself, as a body/mind, lying in bed.  You also become aware of the existence of the world around you as well as the life situation you are waking up into, such as the need to go to work.  This second awakening Nisargadatta refers to as the ‘I Am’ concept or the ‘I am” sensation of feeling.

Then all the rest of the network of thought which is you map of the world, comes into existence, and you begin to live in your own mundane world like most everyone else.  The mighty I Am, the sense of being alive as the subject, then gets broken up into a universe of meaning, of needs and wants, goals, objects, and others, and thereby you immediately lose the ability to recognize yourself as the life force itself, the universal life force that has incarnated in you as a particular life form, a life form that has the ability to dance with and love all other life forms as one’s own self.

We can love others and through that love learn to love one’s own self because we find others who love us, and receiving their love makes us feel complete. Ultimately, the life force itself loves us, and through us, loves itself.

Then we are fully aware of the joy of being, the joy of shared love as well as the great pleasure we can give each other through a highly awakened sentience, a highly aware and sensitive relating to others, including sexuality.