Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

The Ashtavakra Gita warns that if you want to know the truth about yourself, knowing your “True Self so to speak, you need to shun the poison of the senses.  Wind, earth, sky—you are none of these things.   Set even your own body aside and rest in your own awareness.  You are that before the reach of the senses, the witness of all things.

In a sense, though this appears to be contrary to my current teachings, this warning is true.

If you are too interested in things and events in the world, it is so difficult to master the inner world, for the searching within, even the resting within, is contaminated by wanting something outside, whether love, fame, security, sex, or food or drug states.

If you feel constantly hungry and eat 6-7 times a day, or take prescription drugs or Marijuana to get high more than occasionally, you are still very far from the Self.

Now, there are two Selves, the Unmanifest Self of Advaita, the ultimate witness—that which is beyond the sense, beyond Consciousness—and the Manifest Self—sentience, the sense of presence as an entity embedded in the world, with a location and timelike extension.  This is what I call the divine in all of us—the magic of being alive!  I, an insentient lump of flesh have come alive!  How marvelous I am!  From me, the whole world is experienced.  Without me, or someone like me, it has no existence.

When this Manifest Self is first seen, it brings you great happiness, joy, and is the object of endless fascination.  The total object of your affection so to speak, is yourself, the light and sentience within, the phenomenal manifestation that fascinates and informs that Absolute, which is you, with the play of Consciousness, which is also you.

It becomes the fascination of your life; nothing else really matters in comparison.

And with it comes great compassion because you realize all living beings are like you; you share life; you share awareness—sentience; you share love of one’s own Manifest Self, which, like the flame of a candle, is identical to the flame of another candle.  In that sense, it is the One Flame of Sentience, of the Manifest Self.

Once you fixate on the Self, all habits begin to fall off because you don’t have time or energy for them, for you have seen, felt, and dwelt in the joy and integrity of the Manifest Self—God; the divine.  Such magic, from me the world is born and for you too!  How marvelous I Am.  I am alive!  I am the ghost in the machine—the Holy Ghost—the spirit—Life itself.

How marvelous I am!  I am throughout the universe with no boundaries, no restrictions, everywhere.