Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Dear Edji,

I have followed both your website and blog for a couple of years. I also notice that you say love is the gateway to the I am and the I am is the gateway to nothingness, to the mystery of the self. I have the deepest respect for your teachings because you express my own experience so clearly and truly.

Two years ago I met a woman were traveling in France. Her name is René. We only saw each other three times over a period of three days.  But there was something about her that clicked in me instantly--the way she looked at me. She was very gentle, loving, and surrendered, instantaneously from the first moment we saw each other. I was taken aback, and sort of pushed her away, but she let me know with her beingness she loved me intensely despite my resistance. The whole situation was so strange. I thought this was something that happened to 15-year-olds. It was as if she had thrown herself at my feet in surrender, and I was touched deeply.

It turns out she was a follower of John Klein when he was alive, and was deeply aware of Advaita, as was I, who practice self inquiry for many, many years. Like you, my primary experience was always of an inner emptiness, where I was filled with peace, but no affect. Unlike you I was never a teacher, but a botanist. I worked with winegrowers the Northern California for many years, that is why was traveling in France as I do yearly.

So we shared that, a love of the infinite, but for her it was love of God, of presence, not of emptiness. She talked to God, and God talked to her. She told God she was lonely, and later she said God sent her to me to be loved by me.

We were together just a few hours, but a seed was born.

We wrote to each other, we phoned each other, and finally Skyped each other, sometimes for hours a day.

Something happened to us.  Anyway, her love for me opened me up, and like her, we had the most amazing loving experiences 6000 miles apart.

The process was the same for both of us, but she felt it first.

At first she felt it as an energy arising out of her belly and upwards into her heart, where her heart felt a little pain like a pressure as the energy was blocked. The pressure built up as her heart became filled with this energy, until there was like a puncture, and the heart blockage broke, allowing the energy, now felt as love, to course upward through her neck and face and upwards into the world and towards me distantly removed, as love.

Later, this energy began to be recognized as love immediately even before it coursed upwards, and what had been a weak stream of energy and love began to fill out in form, until it felt more like a river of love that filled her body and in which flowed outwards into the world continuously, yet still filling her more and more full, her entire sense of presence, with love. Then she would say she is the lover, who has become love itself, and she would say I was the source. At times too, the love transformed into heavy eroticism with alomost continuous orgasms on her part without any physical touch in any way.

This is actually quite a simplified outline. The process forms, and colors of love experienced by both of us kept changing, and changing, and changing both the quality and intensity. I had no idea love can take so many forms and have so many expressions.

This streaming love began expanding and happening more frequently, and it became more rarefied, and subtle, no longer seeming like a river of energy, but more like a gentle air, I gentle breeze which no longer moved as a current, but which became still and filled her body with ecstasy and swooning. She felt drunk with love, from time to time and went deep into a peaceful samadhi. This is another story altogether, how she gradually began to know about the infinite.

I just watched all this with amazement, and I felt so happy, so very happy that she was feeling this way with me, and because of me. Always, I too felt love of her and for her, which gradually became, as with her, a river of energy flowing from just below the diaphragm through my heart, up into my face and through my fingers and hands outwards the world towards her, and I too began to be filled with love, but only for her. I too had totally surrendered to her, my life, my soul.

Unlike René, I did not identify with love, but identified with me, David, as her lover. My love for her was always personal, and sometimes erotic, but was felt as a river of love running through me, filling me, making me blissfully happy, until I felt strong yearning and longing for her, which took away my happiness, and I felt like a crying little child wanting her love. Later I was to find that that yearning and longing, was preparatory opening to ever deepening levels of love. Love of a depth and quality that I never knew was possible, that I never felt before. And I am 54, and have been in love a lot my life. I am married with two grown children. I am very happy with my wife and our life, but my love for René had nothing to do with this and was entirely beyond this, in a way like an Olympic runner is faster than an 80-year-old with a walker.

Well, René is married and we never met again. But we continue to talk, and her love persists and grows, as does mine, but with inevitable ebbs and flows depending on how the environment is impacting each of us.

Sometimes it seems almost psychotically deep, deep childish fears and fantasies come out, and we both become a little nuts, demanding, childish, frightened or angry, feeling pushed away or abandoned, or otherwise narcissistically injured.

But soon I began to feel what she had felt. A rising energy of love in me that flowed upward into the emptiness that is my body, filling it with love, pausing briefly at the heart and spilling out into the world towards her. There was a progression. At first the flow seemed small, like a creek, but rapidly, over time became like a river, and then like and entire ocean of love flowing through me. Love flowed out of me through my face head, arms and hands, and mostly directly from my heart towards her distant presence.


Gradually just as with her, my love sort of became purified, lighter, more like air as opposed to a fluid, and my body felt filled with such sweetness, the essence of love, which was like a constant ecstasy which grabbed my entire being like a wrestler grabbing a child. I totally identified with the ecstasy of love, and I began to feel God's love for whomever or whatever appeared in front of me. I say God's love, because by now it was so great, so overwhelming, so beyond me, I felt it could not possibly be human.

Alternately we both felt almost drugged by the states of ecstasy that possessed us. Sometimes just saying a few words, like “René I love you,” sent her into multiple orgasms which gradually transmuted into ecstasy. I did not feel the orgasms I as did she, but I did feel the ecstasy, and a deep desire to be with her every moment of the day and night, which at 6000 miles apart was not easy.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, René is married, and we never met again. We never touched each other again as we wanted to, and perhaps we are afraid that if we were to meet everything would dissolve. So our love has become transmuted into God's love. That is the only way to explain it. The whole thing about how it started, how we never met again, and yet the love grows, and how the love permeates both of our beingness to the extent we both feel as one, is just so beyond explanation or beyond anything we ever felt before. Only attaching the word “God” to our experience makes any sense. I feel her presence in me all the time, and she feels me.


As she is very open, she told her husband as to what was happening to her, which has caused immense problems because of his jealousy--which I understand. It also caused her to feel guilt because she did not love her children enough to her mind, and her husband was always demanding that she love him more. He constantly tells her that they are married and she made a commitment to love only him many years ago. Anyway, this is entirely another story, but part of the "environmental" variables that affect day by day the intensity of how we feel towards each other.

Edji, you made a statement once that once, Muktananda wrote a book called, "I Have Come Alive." This is how I felt. Because of her love, I became alive. My own beingness is constantly suffused with this love that I have for her, and the same is true for her. Our sense of presence interpenetrates and are mingled. Sometimes I feel my own love for her, and sometimes I feel her love of me. They are the same. In a sense there is no need to meet, even though I deeply desire it, but I recognize that the yearning and neediness I feel sometimes, is a prelude to a deepening of this love, and it seems that there are no limits to how large it could grow. 


Already I have been astounded each time my love for her grew another step, but each step upwards in intensity, was followed by a plateau, and a diminishment of the intensity, which was again followed, almost as if I fell in love with her again, and the intensity would grow, and grow, and the quality of my love would change, becoming ever more fluid and vacuous, until it filled the emptiness that is me with a constant sweet with ecstasy. I fully understand when you said, "I am. I am. I am."

This was my experience too. The movement of love gave vitality to my sense of presence, my I am, purified it, rarefied it, made it more subtle, and more powerful. It is a constant unfolding.

I really don't know what your experience was Edji, but I feel something like this must have happened to you, and I love you for your ability to express the infinite with your presence and your words. Keep it up. I love you.

David