I just finished reading two new books of Nisargadatta's latter books.

Let me put it this way: It is almost impossible to understand what he is saying.

Never does he place the entire range of his teachings into an overall context. He speaks in aphorisms, pithy answers to questions asked to him by students, with answers only for them, according to his own admission. He tells readers not to read "I Am That" because those are not his current teachings, which have changed.

Also, the teachings in I Am That are very, very different from those in his first book written 25 years earlier, Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization.

Part of the "problem" in his own words, is that he does not think about any of his answers, they spill spontaneously from his mouth as Consciousness addressing Consciousness in the questioner, in an effort to get the questioner into a statee entirely prior to all concepts.

In this way he teaches much like me: helping students get entirely into a don't know state where mind is mostly ignored.

So many teachers, especially the neo-advaitins, have almost no spiritual experiences, but only a simplistic denial of the existence of an inner Self of any sort, from which a whole simplistic philosophy follows.

Nisargadatta wanders hither and yan, using undefined terms, or term s defined with other under-defined terms. It is as if he makes it absolutely impossible to follow or understand him.

For example, it is not clear what he means by Prior to Consciousness. It was not even clear to Ramesh Balsekar who spent years with him. Is he referring to an Unmanifest Self entirely outside of Consciousness, a noumenal Self, or is he talking about Robert's "gap," the experience of existence prior to the arising of the I-sense and self-consciousness, and ccalling that the unchanging and Absolute. If the latter, his entire philosophy is rather trivial.

He also talks about your existence 100 years ago and insists that not knowing what you were at that time, proves that you must have been there in order to be the unchanging constant background that is currently expressing you are unaware of your existence then. he says you are that knowing principle who is unaware of what you were then. This is really crappy logic, unless he is is referring just to the state of Consciousness before the arising of the I Am, the pre-I Am experience of awareness without thought or self-recognition.

And so it goes. There are so many cracks in his model that make an understanding of Maharaj's "wisdom," nearly impossible unless you are very nimble on your feet, accept what he says at that moment, and are not able to hold his multiple inconsistencies in your mind at once.

It is as if he says, "A, not B, not A, C, not A, not C, and B."

Ramesh held steadfastly, the Maharaj's absolute referred to the awareness state that existed before thought. To me, this is rather trivial, barely a beginning of spiritual discovery to me.

THINK ON THIS:

If you agree with modern science and medicine, we do not directly know either our bodies or our world. The world of objects is external to our bodies, and we only know of it through our senses.

Hearing, taste, touch, sound, smell, and sight are received data through the sensors of tongue, skin, ears, nose, and eyes, which fire neurons which the brain then turns into recognized patterns, objects, people, music, etc., which we call experience.

In this way, we do not know the world, we know of the world, through our senses and how our brains interpret it. The sense world is not the world.

In this way we can say our world is illusory, but convenient for functioning, and also, all that there is is Consciousness, or experience, because we cannot directly know those things outside of us as they are in themselves. It does not even make much sense to say how the world is in itself, as it can only be known through our Consciousness.

Even our bodies are such, the inner senses too are but representations by way of electrical neural patterns interpreted, of what are bodies are from the inside. We only know of it through our Consciousness.

Thus all that we know, from inside to outside directly, is experience, or Consciousness. The universe we inhabit, and even our bodies, are created by it.

All else depends on our prior existence, for its existence IN OUR WORLD.

At this point we have to make an assumption that the other people we experience in our world, are they "real" and separate, or do they just exist as our creation? In either case, we are speculating.

Even the scientific notion that there is a world external to our bodies is a speculation. It is also an assumption to say, Everything is Consciousness.

On the other hand, I cannot say, "I created the world," for I, Ed Muzika, had nothing to do with its creation. Impersonal processes, chemical and neurological, created Consciousness, and in it our representations of the world and our bodies are created (or found) through a further developmental process. It is those same developmental processes within Consciousness that results in the creation of the I sensation and later, the I-thought. Up until then, everything is just impersonal processing, and out of it finally comes the person, the I Am as a feeling localized in Consciousness, when if followed, accepted, and loved, merges back into Consciousness, until we realize, consciously, that Everything is Consciousness, as a spiritual revelation.

All is philosophy, and philosophies are theoretic knowledge that have emotional consequences: they make us feel one way or another, give us peace or give us doubts. Kashmir Shaivism has one philosophy about all this, Advaita Vedanta entirely different, Christianity and Sufism entirely different. They have entirely different "feels," and far different emphases, amd much has do do with their philosophical underpinnings.

A Zen master would ask you a question, such as, "Is the cup real?," and whatever answer you give, he'd cuff you in the head for thinking, fill the cup with tea, and hand it to you, as he has no time for confusion or useless speculation.

What appears as plain as the nose on my face appears to be as clear as a deeply buried vein of lead to others.

In order to understand what I say, you need to have so deeply experienced the emptiness of the body and world so that the Void is part of your constant experience.

In addition, the Void itself is self-illumined.  It is permeated by Consciousness, beingness, which has its own inner light.

The body is permeated by this lighted consciousness/emptiness, making it like a hologram, like an entity within the starship Enterprises Hollowdeck.

In addition, if instead of just “observing” you mind, body, and emotions, you also FEEL them deeply, you become aware of complex energy streams inside your body, including Kundalini movements, healing energies, muscle tension and vibrations, inner quivering bliss states, and internal organ movements and states.

Next you become aware of your energy body, your sense of presence which extends outwards as a seeming electrical body permeating and extending beyond the body.

Lastly, after a lot of time exploring one’s sense of I, the I Am sensation, as well as all the emotions, images, ideas, and energies that arise from being embedded in this phenomenal soup, the Self arises in you as the “other,” the divine entity within, whether called God, Christ, or Krishna Consciousness, which becomes the center from which you live, living from the heart.

By now your mind is long dead.  It exists, but you pay it no mind. From here on, it is not the mind that speaks, but Consciousness through you. You hate reading spiritual stuff because you know the Self, at least the Manifest Self of the union of you, as human, with God, the divine within, called Atman by the Hindus.

Lastly, dwelling for a long time within and knowing/exploring this total soup, the boundaries disappear, you disappear.  You become nothing.  You no longer exist as a separate entity within this soup, nor do you become one with the soup itself because you no longer identify with any phenomena.

That is, all that exists is Consciousness, and you don’t identify with it. Identification disappears revealing the final truth that you are beyond Consciousness, Turiyatita, which can never be known.  It is the knower so to speak, except that is a simplistic explanation.  Actually, you are beyond all knowing, all phenomena, even the totality of Consciousness.

How many can understand all this? Only someone who has spent a lifetime of looking and feeling within. Nisargadatta clearly states in this last talks that he no longer has anything to do with his body or even Consciousness itself.  It took him 40 years from the time he realized his Manifest Self, Krishna Consciousness, which he talks about extensively in his first book, “Self Knowledge and Self Realization,” to his final books, the Jean Dunn trilogy, where he only teaches about the Absolute, going beyond Consciousness and the human condition.

He only speaks from this viewpoint and readers think they can go from where they are, totally clueless, to his absolute state without realizing Krishna Consciousness, the energy body, the sense of presence, the I Am, emotions, etc., before realizing that only Consciousness exists, and finally, you do not exist, you are entirely beyond existence, even as your human life and its problems continue.

Not one in a 100,000 can realize all this. Maybe not one in a million or even ten million because so few spend their entire lives in self-inquiry, going ever deeper into the soup of one’s phenomenal life.  This is why Robert said you can count the number of enlightened beings on the fingers of two hands.

The rareness of true enlightenment has been entirely destroyed by the neo-Advaitin phenomenon that equates enlightenment with believing you are already an enlightened and divine being.  For them, the message of spiritual practice, going deeper within, attaining awakening after awakening until arriving in the absolute, is destroyed.  

Going deeper into one's inner self, one's subjectivity, the inner light and emptiness, is not personal in any way. But stating the Nisargadatta and Ramana, and all sages, rejected personal wisdom, is just an understanding you have taken from others.

You need to escape verbal truth, words, concepts altogether and find out who you are. Such is not an understanding but a being from a not-understanding place.

Going deeper into one's inner self, one's subjectivity, the inner light and emptiness, is not personal in any way. But stating the Nisargadatta and Ramana, and all sages, rejected personal wisdom, is just an understanding you have taken from others.

You need to escape verbal truth, words, concepts altogether and find out who you are. Such is not an understanding but a being from a not-understanding place.

The real teacher is free of mind. It is there, but holds no sway. he or she acts spontaneously from within and from the core of his Self as a manifestation of God, the life force, Shakti, whatever you want to call it, not from mind.

No mind, no words. no mentation, no beliefs. he acts spontaneously and hates all teachings because he knows how they trap you into a viewpoint, convention, the false, the past, group speak, political correctness, and not directly from a silent heart.

Escape from the mind. Live from your Self.

The real teacher is free of mind. It is there, but holds no sway. he or she acts spontaneously from within and from the core of his Self as a manifestation of God, the life force, Shakti, whatever you want to call it, not from mind.

No mind, no words. no mentation, no beliefs. he acts spontaneously and hates all teachings because he knows how they trap you into a viewpoint, convention, the false, the past, group speak, political correctness, and not directly from a silent heart.

Escape from the mind. Live from your Self.

SOME PEOPLE JUST DON’T GET WHAT I AM TRYING TO TEACH.

Some say what I teach is “All over the place,” and not some simple and progressive method or teaching.

But if you want simplicity and unchanging teachings, you will create and be trapped in a box.

Five years ago I mostly taught from a viewpoint similar to Nisargadatta’s, juxtaposing finding the I Am or manifest Self, and the absolute witness.

Then I began reading from a Zen book called the Tiger’s Cave.  At this time Jo Anne felt upset and anxious, and eventually quit, because Nisargadatta was slowly become clear to her, and the new ground I was covering made absolutely no sense.

The same with Lila.  As long as I just taught opening and realizing the Manifest Self, she was good with it, and even the Zen teachings.  But once I began talking about the Subtle Body, energies, Chi, healing energies, she said she was unwilling to follow, and abandoned this path for a straight Kundalini teacher.

They didn’t want to abandon the spiritual box of secure and safe teachers of a Nisargadatta way, a Zen way, or a Tantric Kundalini way.  They clung to one model that gave the comfort of apparent understanding as opposed to letting go of the all matrices.

Advaita Vedanta is a matrix—a way of understanding yourself and the world, Consciousness.

This matrix is different from a Tantric Kundalini matix where the body and world are real, the Self is real, God is real, and the internal energies arenot only real, but vital for Self-Realization.

Zen too is a way of understanding, basically the impersonal interplay of all forms and the Void, from which they come and to which they return.  The emphasis is entirely away from intellectual knowledge of any philosophy of existence or the Self,to getting rid of thinking altogether, and learning how to respond spontaneously without the intervention of mind.

You see, I shift from world of discourse, to another world very easily because I hold onto none.  All worlds are just rooms in the mansion of the entirety of my inner and outer experience.

This is why I criticize other teachers when students start quoting them, or say, “So and so says X, Y, Z.”  Those students are trapped in that model, those teachings and have not even begun to lose all their concepts and directly intuit life from their core, non-mental experience, versus from their spiritual ideas.

I try to shift around fast enough so that no one gets too involved in one way or gets too comfortable. In a sense this is a very Zen-like way to leave the brain and operate from your heart, by not thinking too much, interpreting, or judging.  All this keeps you imprisoned in alternative sets of ideas, or matrices, a matrix, and you need the Red Pill of unknowing to escape, not just the first matrix, but each as they arise to take the escaped matrix’s place.

You always need to keep moving, keep exploring, go deeper and deeper into your inner Self until inner and outer distinctions disappear, the Manifest Self is experienced, as you yourself having Christ or God living in you, and going even beyond that to Cosmic Consciousness, where everything is Consciousness or Shakti, or God, and you no longer exist.

I weave and destroy worlds, how few want to or can follow.  Osho taught in a similar way; he spoke of many traditions from Zen, to Advaita, to Lao Tzu, to Christ, to Sufi teachings.

SOMETIMES ALL THAT IT TAKES IS A SMALL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE OR WHAT THE WORLD IS, THAT LEADS TO A THUNDEROUS EXPLOSION INSIDE, AND INCREDIBLE INTERNAL REORIENTATIONS TOWARDS SELF AND WORLD.

After many years of seeking self one day while taking a shower I saw there was no self-entity inside, and with that I saw there was no outside either. There was only emptiness and form interpenetrating.

15 years later, I fell in love, and the love grew so strong that I became Love itself. Quickly thereafter, God showed Himself to me as the divine within, which also was I, and I identified with this Christ Consciousness.

Five years later the Christ Consciousness became transparent, and reabsorbed into the totality of Consciousness, and I recognized that Consciousness was all that there was, and did not exist as an entity. If anything, I was everything, along with profound peace.

With each realization I became ever more aware that the world you live in is entirely your creation; it depends on your understanding of who and what you are vis-a-vis the world: are you the same or different?

Just the phrase "Everything is Consciousness" when fully realized, can bring the experience of that totality, that self-containment to you along with profound peace and rest. On the other hand, just pondering phrases like "You are love itself," or "God lives within you," can lead you to experience those states which profoundly change your reality.

Just small shifts in your understanding can completely change who and what you feel/see/understand who you are, or small shifts in experience can also change your understanding about you, God, and the world.

Unmanifest Versus Manifest Self

Robert, Ramana, and Nisargdatta are all correct: Self-Realization of the Manifest Self is NOT the final truth.

It is just that my own experience on my own path and well as arose from being a teacher, is that the personal self, the energetic self, one’s sense of presence, and the divine within, which I call the Manifest Self, should all be realized and fully explored before moving on to the Absolute, before “realizing” the final witness prior to Consciousness.

I have seen seekers caught time after time, in emptiness, boredom, depression, and even suicidal ideation because of trying to bypass the human self, the personality quirks, negative emotions, emotional pain such as guilt, shame, and rage, and thereby miss the aliveness of the Manifest Self and one's own divinity altogether.

Many seekers seek the ultimate understanding, the ultimate states, etc., prior to working through buried, repressed, and denied emotional pain, and therefore never taste of states of grace, surrender, identity with love itself, nor experience internal energies, let alone bliss and the great joy of complete surrender.

In spirituality you have to do your homework.

Recently, because Michael is staying with me and doing many of the chores I usually do, and recently I have had fewer medical reviews to do, I have been able to be quieter and go deeper into myself and thereby experience once again the pure Robert states of complete peace and rest far more satisfying than any of the bliss states ever encountered before. I did not exist, and everything, EVERYTHING, was experienced to be Consciousness; the external world, my body, my Manifest Self, were all experienced as Consciousness with no sense of separation.

Only the experience of my body was somewhat different because I could experience it as “feeling” from the inside, which is different from my experience of the rest of the world through the five senses; yet even the body was just Consciousness too.

The sense of peace, rest, and relaxation was unsurpassed, far deeper than the Manifest Self that I discovered after being lost in emptiness for a dozen years. The Manifest Self was seen as separate only in an illusory way. It too was just Consciousness, like the walls, table, or my body.

I remember having had such peace before and it was when I visited Korea and Zen students and Zen monks did everything for me. When you don’t have to attend to details of day to day living with the constant decisions and activities required, it is much, much easier to reside in bliss or in a state where everything is recognized as Consciousness alone.

All that there is, is Consciousness.  This body is consciousness, the computer is Consciousness, the walls and TV are Consciousness, and I-too is an illusion in Consciousness.

I appear to be; the I Am appears to be, but all that there is, is Consciousness. I Am Unborn because I do not exist; only Consciousness exists.

I have no purpose, no end, no work to do; there is just ever-flowing Consciousness.

The Mountain Top Of Wisdom

Robert used to say "Everything is Consciousness, Consciousness is all that there is."  He opposed that by saying, "You don't exist," or "You are Nothing, No-Thing," meaning you (and me) are not entities or identities.

You need to understand that this is a belief, but as close to truth as you can get in words.

That is, you get rid of the concept that the universe is filled with objects, like our bodies, trees, chairs, and emotions, and accept an alternative truth that all that there is, all that exists are appearances, or apparent objects that objectively exist, and instead we presume there is only Consciousness, an infinite stream of experiences with no attachments to the concept of an underlying reality.  Thus Robert would say that what everyone considered the "real world" was actually like an "optical illusion."

One comes to ths oint of view when one looks into one's own inner experience and one finds no inner identity, no inner  entity that one can call self.  Only emptiness, the Void, is found and it is sentience.

So what we are is that which knows Consciousness, and we are not within Consciousness itself.  All that exists is just an ever changing flow of appearances, experiences, but no self of any sort, so we are not a thing, an entity within Consciousness. 

Instead, we are no thing, not Consciousness, who is aware of Consciousness.

I changed Robert's formula a bit by adding that there is an identity within to be found after one finds that the I-thought does not refer to any entity, and after we look deeper into the emptiness we have discovered to be ourselves,
and instead of "looking" within, we start "feeling" within, and then discovered the I-Am sensation, the core of feeling life and aliveness, the life force and core of our energetic body and sense of presence.

Yes, this I-ness, which I call the divine within, is not an entity, but it "feels" like one, like a coherent core of energy, love, awareness, and vulnerability within, which when concentrated upon, reveals a whole new inner world of "spiritual" experiences of awe, grace, light, power, and love.  It is a whole new world of inner experiences, which again are not entities, but ever changing feelings which connect our "heart-core" to the appearances of the external world.

In a sense, all that we have done is add a new dimension of humanity and divinity to the ever changing flow of appearances that causes our world to take on a new glow of love, humility, acceptance, and love because we now also live in feeling rather than just observation.  All of existence becomes not just "optical illusion," but feeling/illusion which embraces and encases all experience with a feel of love, acceptance, and grace.

More than this I cannot put into words.

FROM NOT-KNOWING TO SELF-REALIZATION

To me, spirituality is all about knowing your self, from the human personal level including emotions, desires, fears, and hurts, to the energy body level, Chi, Kundalini and bliss, to emptiness and the Void, the the Self/God nexis. You have to know yourself experientially, not as an object of knowledge.  That is, you learn to identify with everything that arises during the process of self-investigation and self-abidance, accept it, and love it, thereby bringing it into yourself.

The first step is to adapt a position of humility.  Forget everything you have learned about who you are from reading spiritual teachers, from Ramana to Tolle, Nisargadatta to Almaas, and just look and feel inot who and what you are.  Do not seek at first to understand, but just to be and look and feel into that beingness and accept all that arises as a result of turning within.  Accept that you know nothing about who and what you are except what you know from others as taught by spiritual teachers, society, scientists, society.  You are none of these things, for these are only words and concepts others have devised.  Don't borrow your self-knowledge from them.

You certainly can share what you find with others or with a teacher to get their feedback, but don't rush to get an understanding handle or framework for your experience.  Be accepting of a not-knowing state as long as it takes in order to create and open, simple-hearted, mind and heart, an innocent heart.  This is much more than half of the spiritual journey: becoming open to yourself at all layers, and feeling open to share what you find with others for the sake of feedback.

This is the preparatory stage for the seeker.  Before this, you are a pre-seeker, a soaker-upper of other people's knowledge and experience, and have nothing of your own.

Following a path of receptive not-knowing, you eventually will find your Self, both the Manifest Self of finding God/Self within, or the transcendent, non-Manifest, Noumenal Self.  Finding both is the true beginning of your spiritual life.  Once the Self is found, the light of intelligence burns brightly illuminating every step of your future path.

MY FATHER'S CHILD

My father died when I was 14. It was the biggest calamity in my life. He died in the arms of his mistress while supposedly on vacation with the "guys" in New Jersey.

He was an angry though not a physically violent man, reserving his violence to the emotional variety of being cold, critical, and extremely conventional in many ways, such as his idea of what "manliness" was. He equated manhood with being a warrior, physically strong, athletic, not with being a boy, sensitive, wanting closeness.

He and my mom argued a lot, and she even wrote a letter asking if he wanted a divorce on the day after he left on his "vacation." He died of a massive heart attack a day or two later at the age of 38. To this day, 59 years later, my mom still feels the sting of his infidelity and talks about it often to me.

Why I am telling you this, is that today I felt what it was like being around him once again, waiting for his cutting sarcasm and put downs, or just feeling the menace of his silent and cold presence. I felt weak inside with a little sickness in my gut, and trembling throughout my body.These feelings and images came unannounced,without apparent trigger, while sitting and watching the news.

I felt today small and frightened, but feeling these feelings was like a tremendous victory, for feeling that weakness, fear, sickness and trembling and images of him, brought those long-buried feelings and images to the surface to be fully experienced and re-owned, and I realized that though the feelings were normally out of the range of my conscious awareness, in retrospect they were always present in my body, lived by my body and undermining the integrity of my heart.

That shaking and smallness feeling, not-in-control feeling, was something my brother Ron suffered from far more than I did. Ron died in 1978 from a combination of drinking and Desert Fever at age 32, a victim of my father's coldness and of my inability to be supportive as a child myself to my younger brother. It all came back today to be lived again, and I am so happy, for as a human, today I am more complete.. I love that feeling; in it I feel so vulnerable and open as I was as a child.

MY TEACHINGS

The Self is very deep, encompassing all four bodies and including the phenomenon of mind and emotions.

The mind, our minds, are always an incomplete representation of the world and of who and what we are.  That representation of who we are, I, or self, is the form the I-thought took from the time we first experienced any sense of I, until the present time of your existence. The sense of I usually arises between the ages of 2 and 3-1/2.

This I-thought is the central idea or concept of your personal representation of the world and who you are, and it ties into all your maps, your concepts, regarding the world you live in: that you are a separate observer of the world, that you are an embodied human being, that you were born and will die.  It also encompasses all the ideas of science, politics, economics, religion, money, society, fashion, etc., which is the totality of your conceptual mapping of your world.

You live in this matrix of thoughts which you use as your guide to how to respond to external and internal stimulii and to plan paths to get what you think you need based on these maps.

Now there are whole classes os spiritual people from Jiddhu Krishnamurti, to various Zen masters, to classic Advaita teachers, to various forms of Buddhism that hold that this world that you perceive is not real in the sense it is mostly a learned matrix of thought.  They then state you have to learn how to investigate the totality of the world that lies "under" the matrix.

Unfortunately, most of the exploration of the world with a deliberately blank mind does little to counter the hold of the matrix on you.  What it usually does is add the experience of emptiness or the Void onto both your experience of the world through your matrix, along with a direct perception of the world without the matrix.

You can only become free of the matrix once you discover it in its totality by untying or disconnecting it from your I-thought.  Once you see the folly of the I-thought, that it is only a conceptual mapping of who you are, and with that insight, "see" and understand that the entire conceptual matrix that you have considered yourself to be, was fake, a construct of learning and immersion in the universal conceptual matrix of mankind.

This is the First Freedom: freeing yourself from the matrix.  But this is just the first step.

From here you enter a life of not-knowing, of being "dumb as a rock," with words seemingly unable to enter your mind and make any sense at all.  You are like a baby, immersed once again in raw data that makes no sense.  You may feel lost, or afraid by not having your matrix of knowledge to make sense of your world from day to day, or even decade to decade.

But, letting go of the matrix has freed you from the tyranny of mind.  The filter of concepts is rejected as something unreal that you have borrowed from mother, father, and even Buddha--ways of understanding the world that give you certainty and a sense of safety.

Entering this new world of no-understanding, no-concepts, no-sense has the huge reward of allowing access to a new reality and access to raw data regarding your self and the external world, allowing you over decades to find your real Self centered around the sensation of 'I Am'.  

When this 'I AM' sensation becomes totally yours you are reborn as a spokesperson for truth.  No one in the world may ever recognize it, because 99.99% of those who surround you have never really freed themselves from the matrix of mind; they have just added new worlds of artificial spiritual knowledge to their own maps of their mundane world. 

The hardest thing to do in existence is to free yourself by your own efforts from the matrix, because in the largest sense, before that release, you are the matrix.  You identity is with your ideas of who you are. Almost no one breaks free from the matix by their own efforts alone.

It is relatively easy to fool someone still caught in their own matrix into believing in the reality or truth of some teachers because they reveal inner experiences that fall outside of your pre-guru matrix of reality.  They may reveal to you an inner world of energies, or Kundalini, of a sense of Presence, the Subtle and Causal bodies, astral projection, and using intentionality to change your world, or to heal yourself or others.

But revealing new experiences that you can find within yourself is not the same as unraveling the entirety of the matrix that keeps you within a dream of an artificial reality, and, in fact, usually the teacher merely adds a new sub-matrix of his or her understanding which you incorporate into your matrix of the mundane world, your interal picture or model, and thus a cult is created, elevating that teacher and his or her followers to a status of a shared special understanding placing you above all others.

You know, if you spend any time with either a real teacher of freedom from the matrix, or a false teacher that merely adds rooms to your matrix, you would be hard put to see any difference from any other person, much to your surprise.  Most seekers have ideas of what enlightenment is like or what behaviors can be expected from enlightened beings, because this is part of your acquired matrix of spiritual knowledge gotten from reading spiritual books, and also from your unmet needs of an idealized parenting that you never experienced but still search for. 

So my way of teaching is different from the sequence of my own awakening, which was a sequence of realization of the unreality of the I-thought, and the consequent dissolution of my thought-matrix, living then in complete unknowing ignorance and rejection of the matrix, and finally realizing my Manifest Self, my center of sentience, aliveness, existence, and true knowledge of Self, the divine principle of sentience within.

I urge students to find the I-sensation, not the I-thought, and abide there are much as possible.  Abiding there one finds a sense of complete rest, or being home.  But the abiding must be accompanied by a sense of acceptance of all inner phenomena that arise as a result of turning within, otherwise it is not brought into your sense of identity.  Further, this acceptance has to be a loving acceptance which gradually becomes steady and then by its permanence is recognized as an aspect the the divine Self within.  

With time, that divine Self becomes the center of your being, your heart of hearts, the feeling measure of who and what you are.

The hardest thing for any student to do is to stay with a teacher that keeps exposing the unreality of your inner matrix, because it feels like an attack on you because you identify with your matrix rather than with your Manifest Self which he or she is constantly redirecting your attention towards, but which you are not yet ready to feel or see.

A true teacher is always pointing you away from your naive spiritual concepts towards your inner heart of hearts, towards your Manifest Self, and during that process of recognizing that true self within the divine sentience, you will also experience an implosion of the mundane Matrix of Thought that keeps you imprisoned in the universal dream.

I have problems with all Hindu and Buddhist traditions, including Advaita Vedanta and Theravadan Buddhism. Meditation is not open-ended self-discovery, but directed to realizing truth as embedded in their Sutras.  This is merely learning someone else's truth.t

I used to recommend the book "Stages of Emptiness Meditation" until Max--at least I think it was him--pointed out that the entire thrust of the book was to discover the truth and weaknesses of different philosophical positions, such as Samkhya, Yogachara, and Vedanta regarding the nature of reality, time, Consciousness, dual and non-dual.

Once I spent a lot of time with Sri Ratanasara, a very senior Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka.  I kept pestering him with questions about Consciousness, mind, Self, no-self, etc., and he pointed out these were all philosophical positions that depended on definitions and logic.  he was very clear that real truth lay outside of the mind that tried to figure things out with concepts and logic.

The way I advocate is to find the self-sensation within and abide there. This is different from finding the source of the I-thought, which is emptiness, the Void, and discovering that, destroys the entire matrix of conceptual knowledge.  The various schools of Buddhism and Hinduism cleave to philosophical traditions and often equate enlightenment with a deep understanding of one or another philosophical schools and the truths they teach.

Having a misspent youth getting a BA in philosophy, rejecting it as bullshit, then going to Rinzai Zen that teaches in an entirely different and less intellectual constraining way, I have a deep loathing of book learning and a highner acceptance of the go-it-alone school of enlightenment seekers.

Yet, had I not spent 12 years in Zen and many years in the Advaita milieu, I am absolutely certain that without the base they provided me. I would never have discovered my Self.

For me Self-Realization is a process of  progressively parsing out differing aspects of my own experience, penetrating to ever more subtle levels of consciousness, the various conceptual bodies experiences, the energy body, the sense of presence, feeling the divine, feeling grace and forgiveness, as well as very deep layers of love resulting in an identification with love, and finally leading to an experience of Self.  The Self is found through loving one's own sense of self, and going ever more deeply into that sense of self until Self itself is thoroughly uncovered, exposed, and integrated into your life.

This is not Advaita, Zen, Buddhism, but radical self-investigation without words or concepts.  Each person invents their own path and shares it with others through a radical openess, and in so doing helps others to open to similar or deeper levels.

I Am Either Nothing or Everything

The realist philosopher and the scientist hold the view that when we see a tree, there really is something out there several yards from us composed of atoms, electrons, quarks, or strings, which emit photons when electrons change orbits, which travel to our eyes—which I can feel—which generates chemicals that set off a string of nerve impulses that travel to our brain, which has learned over time to turn that into a subjective reality that allows us to pick fruit from the tree and take shelter from the sun’s rays.

An ant will perceive the tree differently because of differently structured receptors, as will a cat, gorilla, or realist philosopher. We never can really know how that tree—if it really exists separate from us—is perceived by a butterfly or a stork.

According to a realist, the thing in itself can never be known.  We can only know percepts of the tree.  We can never be the tree and know it from the inside, as the tree as subject.

But we can know our own bodies from the inside, as tactile feelings, skin sensations, stomach ache, strained ligaments, sore muscles, hunger, thirst, sexual arousal and satisfaction, which means we perceive our bodies differently than we perceive a tree with the external senses.  We perceive our bodies with different senses, inner senses, and in many ways, seemingly closer to our sense of self than we would consider our experience of a tree as sight, sound, touch, smell, and hearing of it. There is something about our experiences of our bodies that feel more intimate to whatever we call our sense of self than most external experiences.

Yet, in every conceivable way, our experience of our body directly through our inner receptors is no different than perceiving a tree with external receptors: our experience of our body is still an experience, as is our experience of a tree: it is still an experience.

Ramana calls the totality of what we experience ‘Consciousness’, a major component of which is the act of being aware of or knowing, whether of a tree or of our hunger. They are things in Consciousness.

But there are other classes of experiences other than of our body or of the external world, classes of experiences that some have and some do not, but which can be experienced upon practice.

There is the experience of emptiness or the of the Void that many Buddhists and many Advaitins speak of. Robert Adams spoke of emptiness all the time as the ultimate, but many others deny that such an experience can be had because things exist within it; experiences exist within the emptiness, sometimes also called Nothingness.

Unless you have experienced emptiness, you’ll find any description to miss the point of conveying the experience.

The best I can describe it, it is like the experience one has in a planetarium or on a flat plain anywhere in the desert, and when you look up you see an utterly black sky with thousands of stars and galaxies spread across the sky, including the Milky Wa, vast, empty, yet well lit.

The experience can be of a vast awe, or of air being sucked out of your lungs, but this is what the constant experience of emptiness, the Void, Nothingness can be like.  It permeates all of space and all objects and experiences in space such that we “see,” “feel,” “intuit” that experience and space are two sides of phenomenal existence.  Form and emptiness are the same.  Forms arise and disappear within the background and container of emptiness. They are inseparable.

It is in the Void that the advanced meditators can rest in the midst of an apocalypse and not be moved.

Then there is the experience of the light of Consciousness. When your eyes are closed, looking all around and even inside the “space” or emptiness that pervades your body experience, you will find it lighted with a white background of light.  This is the light of Consciousness.

You can also become aware of your energy body or sense of Presence that pervades your personal emptiness and your body, and appears to extend outwards from the body and interacts with the world.

From here we can go on to investigate shamanism, energy healing, astral projection, ghostly energies, and manipulating the world with your mind and intentionality.  This is the level of Siddhis or powers.

Then and lastly, there is the experience of the Manifest Self, the sense of the divine within, what Ramana called immortal or deathless spirit, and which I call sentience or awareness of that divine, as well as the life force itself, called by some Shakti.  This is an experience of God as me, as life itself as me, as the awareness principle itself as me, and this me has tremendous energy, tremendous turning, whirling, changing, and self-love, self fascination, self-preoccupation, happiness, and bliss.  Most of all, from within one feels a silent voice crying out, “I Am; I exist!”

Buried within that sense of I Am is a place I like to call my “Heart of Hearts,” a subjective place of the most exquisite intimacy, vulnerability, kindness, and love, and resting there is resting at the feet of God, a place of utter holiness, grace, and acceptance/surrender.

But you see, in the largest sense, all these experiences share a common element: they are all experiences; they are all aspects of Consciousness, from the I Am to a tree, or the emptiness container and background..

All that there is is Consciousness.  I may dislike that particular tree, but it is still me in the sense that it is part of my Consciousness.  I may dislike some emotions, but they still are me and dwell within my Consciousness.  The same is my experience of my body, my eating food, my urinating, of experiencing another sexually; it is all Consciousness and therefore it is all me whether I identify with that experience or not.

Truly, for me, my primary identification is with my Heart of Hearts, the place of grace, surrender, and love; but all of Consciousness is me in the sense it is my experience, even my experience of you.  You may not exist apart from my experience of you, so in that sense, you are me, my experience, even though you stubbornly fail to recognize your existence is due to me. (joke)

The feeling comes that all things are Consciousness including the Void, the light, energies, Presence, God, etc. There is only me; there is only Consciousness which is the same as Self.

Of course this is only waking consciousness.  There is also sleep and dreaming Consciousness.  But all the magnificence of the world, of God, of the Manifest Self resides in waking consciousness which rapidly slips away as we fall asleep.

There is the mystery of dream, dream interpretation, dream astral projections, the ever-changing imaging, sounds, drama, of the coming and going of the dream state, like colored clouds taking away the external world and our bodies because the unique chemistry of our bodies requires various stages of a complex vegetative state called sleep with its several stages including dream, from which the waking state can arise again and again, in endless flowing succession.

Yet deep sleep and dreams are also Consciousness: experience. For example, I am always aware of sleep as a state being held at arms length just outside my waking world, and in sleep I am aware of the absence of the world and the strong sense of I Am felt in the waking state.  Yet there is still a weak sense of I Am, of identity with a witness, and an awareness of an absence of the world and a different sort of Nothingness than the Void.  The Void is emptiness permeating experience, while deep sleep is awareness of no experience, an absence of experience.

These states come to me in endless succession and part of me is aware of them but not of them. Even the Manifest Self is apart from this part of me; God in the form of waking Consciousness comes to me and gives me my body and the world.  Simultaneously I am aware of me, the world and God in the same instant. Without me, Consciousness itself would have no witness, no purpose, a play without an audience.  I am either Nothing or Everything, yet I know the Self, which is both..

This is the Truth of Ramana, Nisragadatta, Robert Adams, and myself.  We just use different words to describe the mystery variously, promote different methods, different emphasis on self-inquiry and self-abidance, and different emphasis on various aspects of Self.

The power of this understanding is that you are the creator and sole experiencer of the entire world from far flung galaxies to your cat, to your Heart of Hearts.  They all depend on you.  Kings and presidents are merely bit actors within one state of your Consciousness, even if one of them kills your body, they die with you when the waking world disappears.

THE NEED FOR A COMPLETELY RADICAL DEDICATION TO SELF-DISCOVERY

Though I often emphasize the need for acceptance and love while doing self-inquiry as part of a path to Self-Realization, deep down inside my emphasis is on correct understanding, Jnana, which is different from conceptual knowledge.

Self-Realization is all about parsing out the I-Am sensation, penetrating through the concept/thought level of the I-thought and attached matrix of current thought “reality.” Then we penetrate the I-sensation itself and dwell there, resting in your source.

Doing this for a prolonged time reveals both the Manifest Self of sentience, energy, bliss, and the Unmanifest Self, the basic knowing principle. In one sense you are the knower, and in another you are the known, Consciousness. I am Consciousness means that you too are Consciousness alone. All that exists is Consciousness, but the knowing principle is not within Consciousness, but beyond it.

But all spiritual teaching—everything you read or here in guru-talk—occurs on the level of thinking, including instructions on methods such as self-inquiry and various forms of meditation.

There are other methods of conveying or transferring enlightenment, such as awakening one’s Kundalini, Chi energies, or devotion, surrender or listening to sacred chanting and music. Shaktipat can help awakening the Shahti within you, but the teaching about Shakti and reality are still conveyed in words.

My way of teaching is to destroy all the hooks students have that attach them to mind, to gurus, to all spiritual understanding and self-concepts, to immerse in not-knowing anything, and simultaneously immerse in the I-sensation, the feeling that I exist, I Am. This becomes one’s only book, only sutra, only method.

This is a very radical approach. Admit you know nothing, and all spiritual teachers are talking on the level of mind, and you need to get deeper than mind, much deeper into levels of Self that have to be parsed out of the totality of our experience.

Once we can leave the mind behind and immerse in pre-mind experience, whether of emptiness, the void, or the sense of being lost and not-knowing, or in our energy-body layer, or into our somatic sensations of body, we find a far more clean and simple totality of experience.

Any teaching, such as Osho’s or Krishnamurti’s dozen of books, Zen books, Ed’s books, are aimed only to get you to look within with an open, accepting and loving attitude and feel what arises.

All books and teachings about reality, Self, void, presence, energies, etc., are words tthat point to what the speaker found within him or her self, and which you may never find within you, because they may not speak to your path, or what your own path of self-discovery will uncover.

This is a radical path of not knowing, pushing aside all conventional spiritual knowledge, scientific knowledge, political and economic knowledge, and plunging into one’s own Self experience, following the I Am sensation.

How many are willing to do this? How many want nothing more than to know who and what they are leaving behind Yogananda, Krishnamurti, Ramana, Muzika, Bennett, Buddha, and cleave only onto oneself.

I have found very, very few people who are willing to thrown themselves away as they presently know themselves.

Be who you are

Self-Realization is not about attaining or discovering some exalted spiritual state, ecstasy, or Samadhi even though that is what you get when you read Ramana's students.

Self-Realization is finding that breath of life within you that is you, and just abide there. That I am sensation is illusive. You can grab it for a moment, two moments, but staying there is difficult. And lots of unsuccessful practice will dry you out.

But if you are dying or intensely in love, the Self comes alive as it did for Ramana when he felt his body dying. Everything intensified, and intensely attentive, he was a able to grasp the entirety of the "force of his entire personality" as well as the full energy of his life force which gave the body life, which held the body within its awareness.

It is easier to discover that Self that you are, not in the quieter transition states, but when you burst with energy and feel your body brought alive by the force of your own awareness, which you are.