I have been accused of being a grudge, of having no compassion, because I speak of the mathematical odds of ever becoming enlightened as 10 or hundred million to one.  This is what Robert told me.  This is what Nisargadatta says.

Therefore, is it really compassionate to lead people on with endless encouragement when I know how few will ever come to any real understanding of who and what they are and the nature of world and consciousness?  Or is it more compassionate to dissuade people from this onerous task, and have them do something else with their life, something which will give some satisfaction and meaning?

I am not alone regarding this.  People are all screwed up with infinite numbers of concepts about themselves, the world, consciousness, and the accumulated knowledge that they have read from 100 different sources.  All of these ideas lie side-by-side in a humongous mess all of which is contradictory to other concepts within this mess.  How can anyone find truth in this maze of confusion?

Finding truth, one’s elemental being, and prior to being-Ness, requires a very subtle mind and a clear grasp that all concepts are misleading.  As Huang Po said, “The only truth is that there is no truth; beware even of this truth.”  If you follow the mind and where it leads after reading books, or even after deep meditations, the mind will always lead you to untruth.  Truth cannot be found in mind and mentation or analysis.  Truth is found by going to the root of one’s own being, into that inner space existing prior to one’s own being this, prior to the mind, prior to consciousness.  And how easy is that?

Listen to what Nisargadatta Maharaj says about entering the spiritual path, or pursuing self-realization:

“If you think you are interested in spirituality, I am dissuading you.  If you follow any other vocation except spirituality, you will have some hope that you will succeed sometime.  But if you enter spirituality, all your hopes will ultimately be shattered.  You will be left with no hope nor expectations.  So I again advise you, do not jump into the spiritual thing.  If you do that, you will be licking without a tongue; you will be left with nothing.  You might even invite your own death; death will be there, death will meet you, you will be shivering in your shoes.

“Two college students had come here.  I told them: forget spirituality, follow your normal inclinations, tendencies, do your normal duties, just give up spirituality.  Why did I talk to them like this?  I got involved in spirituality, in the business of spirituality; and finally I lost that love of the self also thereby.  I have no more love for the self.  That is the reason I told them to not follow their spiritual inclinations.

“A chief anchor for anybody is the love for self, consciousness, the “I-love” state, the main bonding.  I started spirituality in the name of self-knowing only, because I love myself, I love to be.  And I wanted to know what is God.  And to know that means spirituality.  So in this bargain, I lost that; I am no longer fascinated by that love to be.  Because that is the main bondage, the main condition, the “I-love.”  So long as the vital breath operates, so long as the pulse will be beating, until then there is this love to be, until then there is the consciousness.  When the vital breath quits the body, the pulse will stop and “I-am-Ness” is no more.  Since my love to be is now completely finished, exhausted, I have no more fascination for that state of “I-love.”  Therefore I have no more love for anybody.  We normally involve ourselves in loving somebody else from the main standpoint that I love to be.

“I call this, our skull, and earthen pot.  So long as this earthen pot is not properly baked, you have to collect knowledge from elsewhere.  When it is properly baked then you will be in a position to understand of what I am talking.  But what will happen to you after you listen to my talks?  The shell will burst; it will crack.

“When you come here, you will be cremated yourself.  Whatever identity you will have, whatever idea you will have about your own self will be cremated.  Would you like this type of knowledge, which I am exposing here?  This love to be, this consciousness, unsolicited, spontaneously, it has come—for no reason.

“And since then it occupies itself with all activities.  These worldly activities are only due to that, self love, love to be.  But self-love is not real.  It cannot be eternal; is a passing phase.  All this knowledge, in final analysis, is of no use.  Since you will liquidate that very consciousness, finally whatever you have heard here is of no use.  Only within the realm of consciousness is knowledge innocent.  But having heard whatever I have said, if you retain it in your memory and because of your association with that knowledge, some new knowledge will also sprout in you.  All of this is no use really.  But it has one use: you will be able to parade your knowledge before the ignorant masses, you will have a chance to become a guru.

"Whatever knowledge you originally had plus the knowledge you have heard, and the knowledge which is sprouted you, when you finally understand or realize all that, you definitely will come to the conclusion that is all unreal, of no use.”

What Nisargadatta is saying, is that coursing along a path of spirituality, of self-knowledge, means your utter destruction as an individual, as a human being, as a person in this world.  And not 1/10,000,000 people will attain even this.  Most get lost in concepts and words, and become knowledgeable and spout that knowledge to other people which helps them not because they can not come to any conclusion because of the morass of conflicting concepts.  And at the end of that path, even a successful path, you become nothingness itself and have lost all love for life and existence.  Are you sure you want that?

Why is attaining enlightenment so difficult?

The first reason “enlightenment” is so difficult, is sheer confusion.  Almost no one that seeks it has an accurate preconception of what it means or entails.

There are so many spiritual teachers and teachings today, that reflect many different models of spirituality, and levels of attainment in spirituality, all speaking at the same time on the Internet, or in written books, with very little commonality in terms of definition, goals, experiential states defined, or what enlightenment really is.

There are so many “spiritual” teachers now that identify “enlightenment” that define enlightenment as the recognition of a “divinity” within, and that “within” is not experientially defined.

So many spiritual teachers talk about internal energies, kundalini, Shakti, Chi, life-force, prana, etc. that define “enlightenment” as having accessed these energies in our awareness, and perhaps having obtained some mastery in the guiding or use of such energies for whatever purpose, as enlightenment.

So many of these teachers fall into the feminist “goddess” meme, as realization of the spirit within, and having an innate existence in every human being, but which is often labeled as the “divine feminine” within, with so-called “wild” energies of creation, sexuality, creativity, healing powers, and disruption.

There are so, so many such energy oriented teachers who talk about incarnational spirituality, that is of the energies that arise from and during the existence of the body.  They recognize that the body is not consciousness, but consciousness is of the spiritual dimension, and those are most closely identified with Shakti, kundalini, the life-force within.

However, for Robert Adams, Nisargadatta, Ramana, and the Advaita tradition as a whole, this definition of enlightenment is not even a halfway measure of what enlightenment means for them.

For example, take Robert Adams, who began every Satsang with a statement such as: you do not exist; you are not real; the world is not real; the world is like an optical illusion having no independent existence of its own; the world is a projection of one’s own self; your body does not exist; you have no body, no mind, and are not a thing.

Nisargadatta on the other hand emphasize that your identification of you as a body, is entirely a mistake.  You, the “I-am” is experiential, and it is the experience of being alive, that you exist, that you love to persist in existing, and enlightenment is attained by this identifying with your body, to re-identifying with your sense of existence, which has three elements: your body, which is in the form of a material-world host; the life force that the other teachers mentioned above take as being a real nature; and consciousness, the totality of which is the universe of experience within which our attention wanders and becomes randomly aware of the totality of what we find within consciousness, as consciousness illumines self and the world.

From Robert’s point of view, from Nisargadatta’s point of view, your fundamental identity lies completely outside the normal humans identification with their body, or with their minds.  For both these teachers, one’s identity first should be with the IM sense itself, which is a combination of consciousness and the life force, or Chit, or consciousness, and Shiva/life force.  The two operate together, the life force, and the awareness of the Lifeforce, result in the experience of the world, one’s own body, and all the activities of that apparent body within the world.

However, for these two teachers, there is no individuality.  Once you realize that the body comes into being purely spontaneously as the interaction within and between the elements of nature creating the physical body, its genome structure, its potentials, and the Lifeforce, which is specific for that body in space and time, you recognize that the identification with the body as an individual presents, itself is an error, is illusion or Maya.

In spiritual evolution from the Advaita point of view, one must disidentify with the illusion, or Maya, identification with the body as being an insignificant existence within a much larger external world, and take on a new identity as the totality of the Lifeforce and consciousness, with the individual instantiation as a local identity with the particular body mind.

As an analogy, it is a recognition that I am not a cup of water separated from all other cups of water in the world, but my essential nature is not the form of a cup holding the water, but with water itself, and water itself is the same everywhere, whether in the ocean, in another cup of water, or as rain or ice.  Water is a universal concept so to speak, and not just the water attached to one specific form such as a glass or bottle.  As such, water stands in here as an analogy for a new understanding of consciousness, as being the same everywhere.

The individual consciousness is an instance of, or and instantiation of the universal consciousness, which is the awareness of the manifest world including one’s own sense of existence, everywhere at once.  That is, I am no longer an individual soul operating within a body within the world, but I give up that narrow identity to realize that I, as consciousness, partake of the universal characteristics of a universal consciousness, with the wandering awareness, working in conjunction with the life force.  You realize that you are the totality of the manifest universe that you are aware of, and not a limited awareness attached to a specific body, but that body itself that you perceive, is only an appearance within your awareness, within your consciousness, and is no longer your identity.  You become free to become identified with limitless consciousness.  This is the first stage of enlightenment for the invite and’s and for the two teachers I mentioned.

The second stage of enlightenment, is to recognize even after this dis-identification with the body, and a re-identification with the totality of consciousness itself or universal consciousness, as well as with the life force operating therein, that you as an individual do not exist, because the Lifeforce is universal even though it is operational within your “so-called” body.  As such you have transcended your human identification.  You have transcended your status as a body’s incarnational status, of being a divine expression of the universal consciousness.  Instead, because of the universal nature both of consciousness and of the Lifeforce, you, as an individual does not exist.  This consciousness is purely impersonal as is the life force.  It is activities have nothing to do with any specific form with names such as Robin, Ed, Frank, Max, Janet, Deborah, or any other human name.  No individual form exists except as appearance within the play of consciousness which itself is entirely impersonal and not individuated in any way.

Within this expanded identification, you have no place as an owner, or as a door, as it act door, but it is a play of the forms within consciousness within space and time, within which your personal identity no longer exists.  How many are willing to give up their individual nature to attain misunderstanding?

What happens at this level however, is the attaining of complete peace, and rest.  There are no individual needs at this level.  One does not feel that one wants anything, even though the body continues to operate on its own as it always has to feed itself and they take care of daily duties, but no longer with a sense of ought, a sense of should, or a sense of I want.  The individual is dead, and now there is merely the play of an impersonal consciousness and impersonal life force.

This in itself, is a very difficult attainment in understanding, and usually requires a whole series of events or experiences that allow for progressive or even a sudden, total reorientation of one’s identification away from the body to that of reidentification with the totality of consciousness or the manifest universal consciousness.  But this is just the first stage of enlightenment from the invite point of view, from the Robert Adams point of view, from the Nisargadatta point of view.

The next stage is to recognize either through multiple experiences of dis-identification, or multiple deep recognitions and shifts in one’s understanding of one’s identity away from identification with universal consciousness in a recognition that what you are is in fact deeper than consciousness, then one sense of presence even.  What you are is entirely beyond consciousness of the life force which is the play of consciousness.

One now enters a new stage where one views oneself as a part from one’s body, from one’s mind, as the witness, which itself has no identity, no characteristic, no appearance, and no experience, but you do experience yourself, whatever you are, as a part in separate from consciousness and the life force.

This separate “witness” itself has no characteristic whatsoever, has no appearance whatsoever, has no mind, no touch, no taste, no sound, no smell, and thus the last resort because one has nothing one can say about it, can only call it nothingness, but it is really beyond nothingness or something this altogether, and as such no words can point to it, no thoughts can think about it, nor can one have a vision of it.  This “witness” is the “true” you, but itself is beyond description, beyond words, beyond experience.  Your only experience at this point is of utter peace, utter rest, utter lack of need, and being separate entirely from existence and eternal rest, and this experience of utter peace and utter rest is itself an experience that is not you, but sort of is the final “perfume” residual of your past existence as the manifest universal consciousness which are no longer identify with it which no longer exists for you.  You are entirely beyond that, even though your body continues to operate within the my butt no longer with your awareness.

This is why Nisargadatta says the essence of the knowledge he is conveying  be apprehended by more than 1/10,000,000.  At other times he says not more out of 100 million.  Robert says the true Jnani is the rarest of things, the number in the entire world can be counted on the fingers of the hands.

Thus I have tried to explain the difficulty of obtaining “enlightenment” from the Advaitic point of view.  From this point of view you transcended your humanness, then transcended consciousness itself, to become something which might be called a witness that lies entirely beyond experience or understanding, and is sometimes described as Nothingness itself.

Yet, this enlightenment is not an obtaining.  It is really a progressive dis-identification with first the body and mind, then with consciousness and the life force, to a reidentification with that which is Nothing.  The Jnani then looks upon death as the final liberation with that apparent body and apparent mind, allowing him to rest in nothingness.  How many “seekers” could possibly identify with this in without first having tasted the perfume of Nothingness, the utter peace beyond understanding, the state of having no need and no awareness of the world first?  To the seeker who is not even dis-identified with his own body, how can such a goal be taken as real or possible, let alone as something to be desired, when in fact it is beyond all desire altogether?

This is why enlightenment is so difficult.  It is utterly beyond conception, beyond understanding, and even beyond attainment, because there is no individual to obtain it.  The individual is long-lost after absorption into the universal consciousness, and does not exist at all In Nothingness.

Self inquiry the beginners way versus a far more advanced method.

Self-inquiry, the beginners way, is the way both Ramana and Robert Adams taught, which is to ask the question “who am I?”  And silently wait for an answer.  Or, if your mind gets distracted by thoughts or anything else, the method requires that you ask who is it that got distracted, or better, who is it that is witnessing these thoughts?

This method turns your attention, your awareness, away from things in the external world, and even away from things in your “external” mind, and focuses it deeper toward your subjective witness, towards the watcher, feeler, and listener, and takes you ever backwards into emptiness.

However, it is quite easy to get lost in that emptiness, into that empty space of internal lighted consciousness, and dwell there for long periods of time, into that blank emptiness. 

Therefore, in the past I have urged people to instead of looking for who I am inside, to instead “feel” inside for your own source, the ultimate witness.  But by feeling, something very different happens than by looking.  By feeling, by being carefully attentive towards the “human” essence within, one's “felt sense of being,, one begins to feel internal energies, which if pursued, develops into a sense of presence.  By sense of presence, I mean within yourself you find your energy body, your energy being, prana, Shakti within you, within and around your body.  And at some point this explodes within you as something miraculous, stupendous, totally remarkable, and seemingly as the divine within you, as God.  One might call this the felt sense of your being as opposed to the witness, this Atman, the incarnated, localized, God within you and it each of us.

I was very surprised yesterday while reading I am that by Nisargadatta Maharaj, page 254 the following incredible speaking:

Maharaj: Coming back to the idea of having been born.  You are stuck with what your parents told you: all about conception, pregnancy and birth, infant, child, youngster, teenager, and so on.  Now, divest yourself of the idea that you are the body with the help of the contrary idea that you are not the body.  This too is also an idea, no doubt; treat it like something to be abandoned when it’s work is done.  The idea that I am not the body gives reality to the body, when in fact, there is no such thing as a body; it is but a state of mind.  You can have as many bodies and as diverse as you like; just remember steadily what you want and reject the incompatible’s.

If you have a body, you must have a soul.  But here now, through all of your bodies and souls shines awareness, the pure light of chit.  Hold onto it unswervingly.  Without awareness, the body would not last a second.  There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.  Discover that current and stay with it.

(Comment: is this not what Robert Adams called “the power that knows the way?”)

Of course, all these are manners of speaking.  Words are as much a barrier, as a bridge.  Find that spark of life that weaves the tissues of your body and be with it.  It is the only reality the body hats.

Q: what happens to that spark of life after death?

Maharaj: it is beyond time.  Birth and death are but points in time.  Life weaves eternally its many webs.  The weaving is in time, but life itself is timeless.  Whatever name and shape you give to its expressions, it is like the ocean—never changing, ever changing.

(Comment: this is similar an idea that he expresses later frequently in the books edited by Robert Powell about Maharaj’s talks.  In these books, he refers to that unchanging/changing ocean of consciousness, of sentient-life, as the universal consciousness, of which every individual sentient being is a part, participates in universal consciousness.)

Q: what you say sounds beautifully convincing, yet my feeling of being just a person in a world strange and alien, often amicable and dangerous, does not cease.  Being a person, limited in space and time, how can I possibly realize myself as the opposite; a depersonalized, universalized awareness of nothing in particular?

Maharaj: you assert yourself to be what you are not and deny yourself to be what you are.  You omit the elements of pure cognition, of awareness free from all personal distortions.  Unless you admit to the reality of chit, you will never know yourself.

Q: what am I to do?  I do not see myself as you see me.  Maybe you are right and I am wrong, but how can I cease to be what I feel I am?

Maharaj: a prince who believes himself to be a beggar can be convinced conclusively in one way only: he must behave as a prince and see what happens.  Behave as if what I say is true and judge by what actually happens.  All I ask is the little faith needed for making the first step.  With experience will come confidence that you will not need me anymore.  I know what you are and I am telling you.  Trust me for a while.

The body and mind are only symptoms of ignorance, of misapprehension.  Behave as if you were pure awareness, bodiless and mindless, spaceless and timeless, beyond where and when and how.  Dwell on, think of it, learn to accept its reality.  Do not oppose it and deny it all the time.  Keep an open mind at least.  Make your mind and body express the real which is all and beyond all.  By doing that you will succeed, not by arguing.

MUST READ TITLES:

There are very few books that I recommend as spiritual "work" in the Advaita and Tantric modalities involves detaching yourself from all previous understandings, including that you are a human personality, and from any objective knowledge.

This leads to a new kind of openness, of seeing and feeling one's own self as consciousness itself, with your body but one "objective" appearance in your own consciousness.

The disidentification with the body, the reidentification with consciousness as a whole, and the subsequent need to recognize that you are prior to consciousness as an ultimate witness is a rather difficult journey.

It requires faith in the teacher and his or her teachings, learning how to rest in ones own self thoughtlessly, and learning to abide in the heart chakra to get "underneath" your mind so that it does not bother you anymore. You lower your center of gravity of conscious awareness away from your brain towards your heart and gut, allowing you to experience your inner light of consciousness, and the emptiness within that is illuminated.

There is nothing of more help than the five books I list below, especially the three books of Nisargadatta talks edited by Robert Powell  who was a professional editor at U.C. San Diego,  He knew his craft of editing well and did a great job on these three books. They are much more clear than those of Jean Dunn who was one of my two direct teachers, the other being Robert Adams.

The Ultimate Medicine
The Nectar of Immortality
The Experience of Nothingness

Then there is Pradeep Apte's book, created by selecting all paragraphs from ten books of Nisargadatta's talks where he spoke about the "I Am" sense, aka as beingness, and its emergence from Nothingness. 

The Nisargadatta Gita

Also read The Ashtavakkra Gita as translated by Thomas Byrom as it is one of the most beautiful and moving expressions of what Nisargadatta, Robert, and I speak about.

Some of these books can be found on the website: hppt://wearesentience.blogspot.com.

Read Nisargadatta with as much openness and faith that you are capable of.  Don't stumble over his ideas in protest. Read what he says with great precision.  Stop after each line or paragraph and ponder its meaning.

Why does he say what he says about the origin of consciousness?  What is his intent?  Read his intent and see if you can go along with his intent.

Practice self-abidance in an easy chair or formal sitting as often as you can.  Immerse yourself into your self.  Abide in your own presence as thoughtlessly as possible.

Play sacred Indian Kirtan and Bhajans as often as possible in the background as you read, or when you pursue the I Am as your own consciousness and beingness.

Make your life as simple as possible.

If YOU DO THIS, YOU WILL BE SHOCKED AT HOW RAPIDLY YOU WILL PROGRESS.

And, of course come to our Sunday Satsangs and the Robert Adams and Nisargadatta Teaching Group on Facebook.

Pierre Thériault: Many out there say that enlightenment is not about experiences. And many say it is much more a dismantling of the old, than a transformation into something new. Please feel free to write a lot about what you call the manifest, and thanks for sharing those letters with us.

Edward Muzika: Pierre Thériault Experiences and knowing go hand in hand. But it is not a conceptual knowing. It is knowing that all so-called conceptual knowledge and ideas, including about one's own identities, are all add-ons to the fundamental feeling of being alive and existing.

When you abide in that original knowing, directly perceiving/feeling one's own self, resting there for a long bit, extraordinary experiences come along with a direct perceiving without the intermediary of mind or concepts.

With the subsidance of mentation, of mind, one then operates directly as a manifestation of universal consciousness. But even that is a concept and serves no one. Just trust to find oneself, and abide there, baking in that oven of self abidance until you are thoroughly cooked, or as Robert Adams said, you have become a hollow shel of your former existence.

As for extraordinary experiences, I post letters from students and others about their experiences mostly to inspire others to maintain or increase their intention and persistence towards abiding in the I Am sense, which becomes a recognition and abidance in Self.

THERE IS NOTHING TO DO; YOU ALREADY ARE ENLIGHTENED!

You have heard this sentence before, mostly coming from the “direct pointing” group of neo-Advaitins whom I will not name here.  This group “teaches” you about what you find in your own subjective experience when you look within.  They do not teach you how to introspect correctly so much, as to tell you what you find when you look within the way they did.  They tell you what you find, and they tell you that that is The Truth.

What they will say is that by looking within you will find that there is no “I” anywhere to be found.  That is, there is no entity or “object” that “you” will find when you turn your attention inward.  They conclude that without an I existing inside you as an entity, there cannot be any object existing outside of you, in opposition to the inner I, as it does not exist.  Thus there is no duality between inner and outer, between I and not-I, meaning that there is only one whole, integrated, phenomenal existence.  Now, all that you have to do is believe this, and keep repeating that there is no I, and all experience/phenomena is one continuous field, and by this knowledge you are considered enlightened.

This of course is bull shit.  Just a couple of conceptual notions conjoined which you accept as truth.

However, there is another way of looking at the phrase “you are already enlightened,” and “there is nothing you need to do in order to discover this.”

In fact, the enlightened mind, your enlightened mind, is already and always available to you within your present experience, no matter what that experience is.  It is just that the fully wakened her mind, the mind when experiences normally after one wakes up in the world appears, is incredibly complex, transient, and distracting.  It hides the base level of mind or consciousness that one finds in deep meditation, or the transition states between waking and sleeping.  It is in that transition state where one goes from deep sleep to waking up, before the I-sense, the I-am sense comes into existence, where you are awake, and aware, but not yet self-aware in the sense of knowing I am.  This I-am sense, is what Nisargadatta calls balkrishna, or the original child ignorance.  The I am sense is not there directly after the birth of the body, but it takes a few years for the consciousness developing the human to become self reflexive, and the I am sense is born, with I as a separate object from everything else in the world.

However, that original pristine state of being awake, but within which the I am sense has not yet come, where self reflexivity is not yet there, this pristine state of consciousness is what Ramana, Nisargadatta, and Robert Adams call the self, and as such the I am sense, and the external world experience are states of consciousness added on to that nonverbal pristine consciousness, as are the states of deep sleep and dreaming.  Waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the I am sensation, are all states added onto the pristine waking state without the aspect of self reflexivity being get added.

This is the state the knowing of which is called awakening or enlightenment.  It is just ontologically prior to the balkrishna or child ignorance state of self reflexivity of the I am sense.

As such, this “state” is always there in our present experience whether or not we have ever directly experienced it without the simultaneous existence of the sleep state, the dream state, or the waking state, all of which are added on to that pristine pre-I-am awareness.

That is, this pristine consciousness, this Self, is always there in all of our experiences, but without meditation, without focused awareness, without awareness of the transition between sleeping and waking and being to isolate that pristine Self-consciousness, we have not had the of knowing the self and only the self without the busyness of the waking mind, the external world, or the lethargy of the deep sleep state.

Now you can understand that part of the phrase it says you are already enlightened, because that enlightenment state is always present in your present awareness, but you are not aware of it specifically as the ground state, the Grundlage, of all other experiences, of all other states of consciousness.

However, we also need to understand the second part of the sentence, “there is nothing to be done to know the state directly.”  This nothing to be done however, means that there is nothing to be done in terms of achieving something for the I or for the self.  There is no need to do chanting, mantra, frustrations, devotion to the guru, seva, or anything else, EXCEPT to become increasingly aware of your own consciousness.  That is, you use awareness of consciousness, to become increasingly aware of all aspects and subtleties, and movements, or none movements within your own consciousness.

You practice kind of meditation called self-inquiry, wherein your attention goes inwards, or is Ramana my heart she says, “heartwards,” while normally our attention goes outwards, into people and into the world.  Heartwards really means you turn your attention inwards, and downwards into your chest area rather than into your head area.  The center of gravity of your attention must get out of your head, because that is where thinking occurs, and must sink downwards into the heart, or even lower into the gut, in order to get “below” the level of thinking, level of mind-busyness.

As Ramana Maharishi and Robert Adams, as well as Nisargadatta, clearly point out, this requires effort, as most of us have the constantly chattering mind.  But all effort made to look within, or to feel within, that area of the heart, is effort well spent towards the eventual goal of discovering that pristine, pre—I-am consciousness, becoming aware of that pre- I-am consciousness.  That is, we use awareness to explore all of our consciousness, and to tease out the root states that we are not normally aware of because of our busy minds and the distraction of thought and of the world.  So there is nothing to do, except to become increasingly aware of our own inner experiences, our own inner consciousness, and our own awareness.

But this is a far different understanding than offered by the direct pointing neo-Advaitins, who say you already are enlightened and there is nothing to do—believe this and you are free.  True traditional Advaitins say there is something to do, an that is to become aware of the Self through self-inquiry, self-abidance, and real Self-knowing.

April 9, 2017 Enlightenment Through Finding and Loving the Life Force

Enlightenment requires awareness of one's inner Life Force; without it the body collapses and there is no consciousness or mind.

Contemplate one's inner self, the body and mind from the inside, through observation and "feeling" for the I Am sensation of being alive and present. Once located, just rest there, abide there.

But one can accelerate the awakening of the Life Force or vital breath by deeply loving someone who feels it strongly and can express or share it.

This Satsang tape is on how to realize the Life Force, especially with respect to Nisargadatta and Robert Adams.

https://youtu.be/v9FzHZfk6A8

SATSANG SUNDAY APRIL 9, 2017

SATSANG TODAY 11 AM ARIZONA/CALIFORNIA TIME, 2PM EAST COAST TIME.

Go to:

http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com

Password is:   edji

Come 15 minutes early and join with chanting