Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

                        THE PORTAL

Deep inside each of us lies a portal, a doorway between existence and nonexistence, between experience and nothingness.

The experiential world as well as all of the categories of experience we call the self lie on the existential side of the portal. Some have called the various levels of existential self, the Self, distinguished from the world. Others claim that all levels of experience are the one self. Opposing this experiential side of life is the posited opposite of nonexistence otherwise known as the noumenal world, nothingness, the absolute, or the witness.

Through intense spiritual practices over many years such as self-inquiry, love and devotion, we can experience all levels of human and non-human, divine self, before encountering the portal. Instead of "levels of self" or "self experience," I refer to the different kinds of spiritual experiences encountered on the way through the depths of experience, as rooms within our inner spiritual mention, all of which have to be observed, identified with, and then discarded. We have to, for example, entered the room of emptiness a.k.a., the Void, identify with void, and then come to the recognition that the void is really not me.

This we have to do with all the rooms in that spiritual mansion, the room of emptiness, the rooms of joy and sorrow, anger and redemption, grace and condemnation, and salvation, the rooms of love, devotion, surrender, and finally of God realization and self-realization.

Here we have reached what appears to be full realization of the totality of life and death, existence and nonexistence, wherein God as the life force itself, sentience, is aware of itself and all of its aspects experiential and noumenal. We are completely at rest experiencing the constant underlying experience of ourselves as the manifest Self, and as God, as well as nothingness.

Once all of these experiences have been deeply experienced, added to our sense of self, we release ourself from that identification and are free to penetrate deeper levels. Depending upon where we start our spiritual journey, either with the discovery of the vast emptiness within, or with our discovery of God and the manifest self within, there comes a time when we exhaust the inner search and  come face-to-face with the portal, the entrance to the absolute nonexistence, which could be called deep self, or when absorbed within, in complete rest as nothingness and eternity.

It is often said self cannot be found or observed by the self. This is both true and untrue. From the existential side of the portal, we are looking into the dark emptiness below that seems to be seething with activity, and we feel a powerful  force pulling us toward the other side into our deeper self, addressing from objectivity to subjectivity. But peering into the portal from the existential side we are really looking for activities and powers instead of objects. We are looking into verbs, not nouns. We are looking into our ability to hear, see, smell, taste, touch, move, think, judge, surrender or exert will. What we "see," really intuit, are vast amounts unseen energies and powers that trickle up to the portal's surface of visibility, beckoning us to pass inside to the eternal.

VIDEO LINK:  https://youtu.be/kqA_DnEA-Mw