MORE TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

My recent brush with the hard sciences in an attempt to confirm or disconfirm an underlying identity between our inner subjective and observable world, and our outer observable world, as well as the "laws" that underlie relationships within external observables, such as quantum mechanics, has led me to adopt a new attitude towards creating a science of spirituality--a rigorous discipline as opposed to comfortable beliefs that make us feel good.

From this point of view spiritual concepts that do not have any observables, or potential observables attached are useless impediments to finding truth. 

Concepts such as Kali, God, Chi, Shakti, Kundalini, resonance, entrainment, Self, self, ego, Shiva, Christ Consciousness, karma, rebirth, spiritual evolution, non-dual, Sahaj Samadhi, no-separate-self, etc., need to have some repeatable experiences or predictions associated with the use of that term, otherwise we are filled with a melange of concepts that are just unverifiable beliefs rather than truths to live by.

Most of these terms have their early origin in tribal and naturist folktales of three to five thousand years ago, folktales that were invented to make people feel they understood the world to a degree and made them feel more comfortable and at peace.

Kali is a delightful concept used to describe certain feminist traits ascribed to the universe itself, but how is it used by people today?  It is used as a comforting symbol to make us feel we have grasped by mind and heart some small truth about the universe or life or death.  But have we?  Of course not. We just have an idea that makes us feel certain emotions, or a sense of peace through understanding.

The problem with any new science of spirituality is to define "observable."

In outer science we can define exactly what an observable is: what instruments are used, what energies, what frequencies, what weights and measures.

With the inner sciences we speak about inner observations that are not generally accessible to all, but are found through certain kinds of "experiments" such as methods of meditation, self-inquiry, prayer, chanting, drugs, silence, Shikantaza, Koans, etc.

Now, different "brands" of spirituality have different methods of exploration and therefore should be expected to reveal different observables.

For example, Soto Zen emphasizes a meditation called Shikantaza, or just sitting, not letting the mind focus on any one thing.  In its rigid sitting, the attention gets global, embracing everything, until the boundary between inner and outer world disappears and you have pure, non-dual awareness or consciousness.  The world over time, becomes brighter, more alive, and one's sense of self becomes more attuned to the external world.

On the other hand, we have monasteries where Christian monks practice silence, various types of prayer, worship, thinking about surrender, visualizing Christ--whatever.  And what kinds of experiences can we generalize are the results?

In Soto Zen, one rarely hears about Self.  Self does not exist in a non-dual world. Nor will you hear about Witness, the Absolute, etc.

Rinzai Zen, on the other hand, tends to be more focused on direct teaching about the nature of reality and human existence through the use of the Koan system of about 25,000 original and checking situation conumdrums, such as, "What is the sound of one-hand clapping," or short stories of ancient confrontations where the monk is asked to demonstrate the meaning of certain pertinent elements of that story.

The result are monks that are far more action oriented and not much given to pondering the meaning of phrases, philosophies, etc., but who find language untrustworthy, and instead lead to life led from the gut by intuition.

Then we have the naturistsic spiritualities of shamnisms various forms, and Toaism.  We have spiritual entities, spirit guides, spirit possessions, magic, alchemy, potions, astral projection, etc.

And we have my favorite, Advaita as explained by Nisargadatta's teacher, Siddharameshwar who posited four levels of consciousness: body/world; Subtle Body (thoughts, images, energies, emotions); Causal Body (experience of non-existence, non-knowing); and Turiya (the body of I-ness, Self, Satchitananda, the ground of beingness underlying all other bodies, AKA the Atman)). Beyond these four phenomenal bodies lies the Witness, the Absolute, the subject which lies entirely beyond Consciousness which Nisragadatta calls the Self.

I make the distinction more clear by calling all levels of our phenomenal existence centered around the experience of a core self, the Manifest Self, while I call the noumenal witness the Unmanifest Self, the pure subject. In the end they are seen as being the flip sides of each other.

The point I am making is that different religions and spiritual disciplines explore vastly different sets of observables often sharing almost nothing in common. 

There is not just one Truth that all masters from these differing disciplines adhere to.

However, just to meet a lesser definition of a path or discipline, we just need to propose there are sets of potential observables that one can be made aware of by following certain practices, such as Shikantaza, self-inquiry with its many variations, prayer, Koans, Tantra, etc.

A first step then towards a science of consciousness would be to list all the potential observables each discipline reveals, and what practices or methods are required to experience those observables.

Lastly, we need to list the belief systems associated with religion or discipline, however relevant or irrelevant they are to the actual observables.

With this approach which presumes a great deal of effort by many people working in concert, we would really have a handle on a science of spirituality, and the overall nature of consciousness, or at least its limits, its explored universe of discourse.

Of course my own emphasis is on Self-awareness, one's own experience of personal existence, of the I-sensation, and how that fits in with our other inner experiences, such as emotions, internal energies such as Chi and Kundalini, my awareness of the Witness, thoughts, etc., and how they relate to the world, which itself requires another great deal of investigation.

My Self, as I perceive it, is difficult to describe.  The words are too poor. I could describe it as feeling life or Life Force within me--pure beingness. But it is also almost experienced as a separate "other," as Krishnmurti described it, yet I know it is me.

It has incredible energy, dancing, turning, moving, and when I look within, in my subjective inner space, it is an amorphous white light expending from below my belly to my neck and fills my gut and chest.

But it's boundaries are always changing, sensitive to me and to the world, sending filaments of awareness into the world around,feeling it from my heart.

I identify with it.  It is I.  It is me. It is me more than my body is me.  Emotions pass through it leaving ripples in the light and energy field.  Feeling myself is pure delight.  The constant circulation of energies and light is fascinating to behold and even more fascinating to feel.  I need no companion because I know myself.

Besides that core of Self, around me is my sense of presence that fills the space around my body and extending into the room like an electromagnetic field sensing the room's own sentience.

But for the life of me, I cannot see how the world can be a projection of the Self. Yes, the Self is visual, the Self has a tactile sense and emotional feelings.  But even after 45 years of no-self and unity experiences my basic state is still that of a separately embodied Self, and I wish that all separately embodied Selves could get to know their own Self, for when they do, everything changes. It is the same Self of everyone.  It is divinity itself.

So, I as witness can observe the world, the human Ed with his body, mind, and emotions, and the Self.  Conceptually they can be separated, but experientially they are one experience.

When the mind, I as mind, turns its attention towards the external world and then the internal, there are similarities, but I cannot perceive any direct mapping or mechanism of one into the other.

But then, who actually believed that such connections can actually be felt or intuited.  It is just as likely as that which lies prior to Consciousness, which includes both the internal and external worlds, is the author of both worlds, that is why we have the similarity that we do have between the two, and thus the basic structures will never be directly observable, they can only be indirectly inferred based on experience, hypothesis, experiment, and proof.

I have been steeped in the mathematics of General Relativity once again as well as the math up to the Standard Theory and some string theory.

I am at a complete loss as any approach that would find any mapping or provide any theoretic structures to understand one's inner subjective world based on mathematics, geometry, topology, etc. Inner space has no metric, no ruler that would lead to a measurable space or the properties of that space.

Neither can I see any way to go from from subjective space to external space.  They "feel" the same to me and most meditators, but I see no way to explain the outer objective world as a projection of my inner world experience.

There is no entity that is an ego.  Each human has many different talents: ability to judge space, time, movement, kinesthetic, or how to move one's body in space and time, mathematic ability, ability to correctly prioratize tasks, to make accurate assessments of other people's actions, ability to learn and speak a language, etc. These are all executive functions of our minds, and are talents we are not usually aware of because they are us in thre plural.  We are a collection of talents, abilities, learned behaviors, ways of thinking, etc.

The ego, and even the Self, is not like an individual so much when we look closely, but as Nisargadatta said, like a city.  It is like a collection of people, houses, streets, cars, industry, social behaviors, stores, bars, criminals, and lawyers.  We are the same.

Thus to propose some sort of projection mechanism, such that someone says that the world is an illusion, we create or project the world by our thinking, attitudes, or any other suggested mechanism, is just an empty and pointless expression with no suggested mechanisms we can prove through experiment or even theoretically.

Also, I saw more deeply how fragile is the reality of science and the apparent emptiness of string theory, and even before that of quantum mechanics and the more arcane outcomes in General Relativity theory because of all the assumptions one makes to solve Einstein's field equations.

Unless someone has a suggestion of a research tact, I may be dropping this line of exploration soon.

Just because everything happens in the now, does not mean it does not take time to explore and understand what is happening in the now.

Exploration of the now through introspection and meditation reveals vast inner dimensions that open when the inner world is made the object of our attention which are not evident upon just cursory attention.

The same with the external world.

You can attend to it as Krishnamurti advises by being highly attentive to it alone without the intermediary of thought and conditioning, which gives the external world a new rawness, a new boldness, and great beauty.

Or, we can explore the external world in a million ways with a million disciplines such as physics, chemistry, geography, sociology, anthropology, genetics, neural sciences, medicine, zoology, oceanography, astronomy and cosmology, metalurgy, ornithology, geology, and forestry.  Millions of ways and methods exist to explore the world and all take time and thinking.

Yet many, many, gurus of the stupid eschew mind and the value of thought in exploration of either the outer or inner world and say all searching and exploration take you from a place of peace and rest.  So they say, "Just stop thinking and exploring, and just be," as if that sentence alone helped anyone stop doing anything or solved any problem.  It doesn't.  It just sets you on a new course towards the goal of doing nothing, and I saw what that did for Robert's Sangha.  It resulted in a deadening of interest in the external world as well as the internal world.

For other New Age or neo-Advaita gurus it can mean an intense focus on external world experience in the now, or internal world experience in the now but without the time-binding glue of understanding.  Mere observation only creates a duality and makes it impossible for any experience to be entered in the Self---our subjective heart of hearts, our essence, our vulnerability.

Thus the crux of my teachings is focused on how to allow experiences into our hearts, where it moves us, sweeps us away, caresses us, touches us deeply, magically, tenderly.

Keeping this state of tenderness is the hardest thing for most.

SUUGESTIONS FOR A SCIENCE OF SPIRITUALITY

A PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE 

SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The high point of my career in physics was in 1962 as a sophomore at Western Reserve University, later changed to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where I had a full scholarship in physics. At that time I had a physics guru in the department named Joseph Weinberg who had been black-balled by Senator McCarthy, who suspected Weinberg of being Dr. X who leaked to the Russians, information from the Manhattan project which allowed them to build an atom bomb in 1949.

Joe was brilliant, and like me, was able to destroy the credibility of any actual physical experiment just by standing near it. We both shared a distain for experimental physics and the results. In fact, in both High school physics and freshman physics at WRU, my lab experiment results never were what they were supposed to be.

I had self-taught myself General Relativity, tensor calculus, and Riemannian Geometry, and in 1962 taught tensor calculus to incoming fellows who had scholarships to study under Gerald Tauber, who was the department’s expert in cosmology and relativity. Joe was mostly a quantum physicist who used to regale me and other students with tales of directing battleship cannon fire using slide rules during WWII.

But I doubt he had ever been on a battleship, as he was a protégé of Robert Oppenheimer, and was a mathematician on the Manhattan project which Oppenheimer ran during that same period of time.

1962 was near the low point of General Relativity research as Einstein had just died 7 years before, and his last 20 years was spent mostly in seclusion at Princeton. Little effort was being expended on Relativity or cosmology, as most everyone was exploring quantum mechanics because that is where the money and interest was: atom bombs, H-bombs, nuclear energy, particle theory, etc.

The big breakthroughs that resulted in string theories, brane theories, and Hawking’s research on black holes were still a decade or two away. Since not much was going on in this area, and the department was not much interested in Relativity, spacetime, cosmology, etc., I gradually lost interest and moved on to study economics, seduced the elegance of Keynesian economics, the bane of all conservatives who would soon embrace Friedman’s monetary theory and later the trickle down economics of Ronald Reagan that has effectively destroyed the vitality of America’s economy by shifting wealth to the top 1%, leaving not enough money in the economy to support the consumerism necessary to sustain a manufacturing economy. This, along with the horrible trade deals such as Bill Clinton’s NAFTA free trade legislation (and the upcoming Obama new trade legislation), has broken America’s economy.

However, I did learn one thing from both fields: there was really nothing there!

In both fields many, many very bright people spent an inordinant amount of time speculating, hypothesizing,and mathematizing these speculations. For them, it was all about imagination and speculation based on physical intuition, and then mathematical manipulation of field theory equations, such as imagining the shape and energy/matter density of the universe, and plugging in parameter values in field equation matrixes. That is, there were few observables to check the rampant imaginings, allowing for all kinds of unchecked or uncheckable worlds.

This was the result of the dominance of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with its Einstein Field Equations and the necessity of making simplifying assumptions in order to come to exact or even approximate solutions. For almost 100 years physicists and mathematicians have been fighting over reconciling physical laws, such as Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and equations, quantum mechanics and its laws, with the “truth” of General Relativity, then later attempts to subsume Relativity within a larger Unified Theory, such as string theory.

Really, there was very little there but imagination and mathematics, and once in a while a predictable outcome which then refocused interest in a new theory of the week that was heralded to be a coming breakthrough that would explain everything in the world. Hawking had even stated in 1976 that the search for the knowledge about everything coud be had by the end of the century.

If you look into it deeply, what one sees is that physics has two languages: mathematics and physical intuitions expressed in terms of visual models such as Einstein thought experiments about the identity of gravity and acceleration, his so called-elevator thought experiment. It also has the precedent of established truths of physics that usually challenged the current models, such as the problem of extending laws of thermodynamics, well established for a century, to black holes, which created the famous tussle between Hawking and Susskind.

Physics is all intellectual speculation mixed with ways to express its speculations in terms of mathematics and in terms of expressed physical intuitions.

Against the results of such ruminations, each “solution” hopefully predicts something measurable by experiment or observation, such that the “real world” is compared against the theory. Sometimes as theory will lay fallow for 30 or 40 years because it did not generate any testable observations when originally formulated.
In other words, most of modern theoretical physics from early quantum mechanics and most of Relativity has consisted of attempts to simplify or make solvable complex equations, which when solved by making assumptions, creates models of space-time, or of quanta, continuous or discrete space and time, etc., which then can be tested against observations in experiments or astronomically. Even if observations failed to verify, even that could be explained away as insensitive instruments, or else a new variable could be thrown into the equations to explain what was observed.

Physics was very, very messy from the 1980s on really because of the lack of observables. It was all talk, equations, yelling at each other, with an great lack of observables. And when the observables began to come in hot and heavy through satellite data and Hubble among others, the storms that swept through physics went through the roof because there was so little there that was anticipated, and so much data results that were totally unexpected.

There a literally thousands and thousands of physical theories that have come and gone, based on observations, simplifications of boundary values on tensors, simplifications on assumptions of the distribution of mass and energy throughout a galaxy or the entire universe, and quantum principles. Theories arise, have their day in the sun, then fade as observations provide no proof or no observables are predicted.

There is no rigorous science anywhere. The mathematician Hilbert had attempted to create such a rigorous mathematics in the 19thCentury, called the Hilbert Program, which was to require all mathematics to be provable based on a set of axioms agreed upon in the beginning. Nothing would be regarded as “real mathematics” unless it had this logical basis.

Kurt Godel, one of Einstein’s closest friends proved there were always an infinite number of exceptions within any such “real” mathematical schema, of demonstrably true theorems that were not provable within any given set of assumptions. This destroyed the Hilbert Program, but also allowed mathematics the freedom to escape the bonds of rigid logic, and science could add any fanciful variable to make equations balance.

The assumptions, the simplifications of equations in order to reach solvable sets of equations, the ad hoc adding of variables to make the theory fit observations make the whole endeavor subject to derision.

In my opinion, the whole purpose of theoretic explorations in thought and mathematics is to predict something in nature that had not been seen before. Without that, theoretic physics is intellectual masturbation.

WITH REGARD TO SPIRITUALITY, DOES THIS MESS IN MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS HELP US UNDERSTAND HOW WE COULD BETTER PURSUE INVESTIGATIONS OF THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, OF OUR RELATION TO BOTH CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD?
I say yes!

To escape all the useless infighting found in a hundred years of physics, it is better to focus research first on the observables and leave the theorizing and building binding scaffolding until later. Comparing brain based theories of Consciousness to idealists’ theories opens the way only to endless argumentation and speculation. We must first focus on exploring our inner worlds directly, through observation, meditation, self-inquiry, and self-experiments. Everything begins with the subject, the I, the me, the observational perspective.

Physics deals with space, time, and all the observables in space and time. It deals with the structures found in space, like curvature and whether space is continuous as it appears to us at the level of human observation, or is it discrete, packages of space and time, not unlike a particle?

Then it deals with objects from sub-atomic particles, which are now legion, to atoms, to molecules, to planets, stars, galaxies, and the distribution of such throughout spacetime and what these things mean.

So, spirituality has three things in common with external science in terms of observables: space, time, and observables.

Science uses as its language mathematics and physical intuitive speculations expressed graphically or in ordinary language.

Now science deals with external space and external objects that is shared by one and all, while spirituality mostly deals with one’s inner world of emotions, inner energies, internal feelings of our bodies, and our separation from other observers.
That is, science assumes there is one common external world (this world as opposed to the many alternative realities predicted by string and brane theories), while spirituality generally accepts that each of us is the sole observer of our own autonomous and localized viewpoint delimited by our skin, versus someone else’s experience within their own skin.

Within this inner and separate universe of each of us, what matters is this: what is the nature and structures if any within our experiences of emptiness and time?
We can also then explore similarities of the observables within the container of inner or “imaginal” space, from emotions and moods, to memories, to visualizations, to thoughts, to energies variously called chi, Kundalini, Shakti, meridian, etc., out of body experiences, the experiences of physical pain in illness and injury, laughter, depressive features and grief, joy, bliss, confusion, desires and impulses, and finally meditative states like Sahaj Samadhi, unity experiences, the causal body, Nirvana, and ultimately the Witness supposedly prior to Consciousness..

All of these have been experienced by some people and not others. The inner and outer world experienced by one person may be entirely different from another’s.
Science says there is only one common external world and they struggle to better understand that one world, while a spiritualist may say that while we all share identical sentience variously called beingness, the Witness, the subject, etc., (which unifies us in the small sense) the objects experienced, or the experiences themselves are entirely idiosyncratic to each specific individual.

That is, each of us lives within our own subjective universe, and look out into the common external universe, the rules of which are defined by Newtonian or Einsteinian mechanics universally.

However, we come to two problems when comparing an inner science to external science: 1. what is the language of inner science as opposed to mathematics and thought experiments about physical intuition; 2. how is it that our inner worlds differ so much between people?

We are not equally sensitive to inner phenomena. Some people are exquisitely sensitive and aware of emotions, others may almost totally lack emotional awareness (we call these Republicans). Some are aware of inner emptiness, the Void of Zen, others are not. Some are aware of an inner light or transparent clear light associated with the opening of the Third Eye. Some are exquisitely aware of the feeling of their bodies from within, and others, not so much at all.

Some of us are acutely aware of inner energies that vary from a slight tingling in the extremities, to violent shaking, to the various intensities and durations of ecstasies and bliss. Some feel the Kundalina “snake” rising in their spines. Some feel Chakras. Most people don’t feel either.

We have to realize there exists this variability of sensibilities and sensitivities regarding the experience and thus reality of various inner phenomena. We also have ro realize that various spiritual practices, from the endless variety of meditations, the various practices of self-observation and self-inquiry, practicing chanting, japa, etc., can lead to experiences most people don’t experience. There are explorers of the inner world, who by using various types of meditations and perceiving energy practices, open up inner worlds for exploration that are entirely real for them, but not within the observation space of others. These may or may not be verified through testing or observation. So far, for example, there has been no major study using double blind methods and a large sample that proves the effectiveness of energy healing, such as Reike or Quantum Touch. What we have are a lot of ad hoc and separated incidents of healing or the failure to heal, that has not proven healing at any rate better than the placebo effect.

Therefore I propose the following:

The emphasis for spiritual exploration (of self and Consciousness) and discussion should be what has been or can be perceived or experienced by different observers using different self-investigation techniques from meditation, to self-inquiry, to auto brainwave investigation, flickering light frequencies, on the experience of emptiness and of time.

Then, we can begin, or it can begin in parallel, the investigation of what exists internally, such as recognizing the differing experiences of emotions, visualizations, thoughts, memories, healing energies, chi, Kundalini, and the experiences of the body from within and how that varies based on our meditation practices, beliefs, and health.

The language we should use is NOT mathematics in any form, but descriptive language as devoid as possible of theoretic baggage such as God, generics such as Shakti, Kali, or the Void. All these terms initially have too much theoretic or theistic baggage that would hinder understanding in the long run.

We might each describe how we experience the void within, and how our experience of emptiness has changed over time based on meditations practiced, observations, and guided inquiry. I suggest we use as a basis for starting our inquiry, accepting a text, or set of texts by Buddhists who have specialized in investigating emptiness and time such as in the text Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness (Link removed. (Just removed.  I remembered it incorrectly.  It is actually a Buddhist polemic, and very little is devoted to actually experiencing emptiness directly.  It is more about the Buddhist theory of emptiness, just like Siddharameshwar's introduction to Advaita is not really observationally oriented.)

There are many Buddhist texts that describe these multiple emptinesses based on observations of emotions, and also theories about perception itself, or the reality, or lack thereof, of the observables, such as continuous or discrete time.

Let is start here. Look at Amazon and find books about the experience of emptiness. Let us concentrate first on how various meditators actually experience emptiness, and leave alone for now their theories about what those experiences mean in terms of the reality either of the emptiness, the observer, or of objects within the emptiness.

In this way we are following Einstein by focusing on the nature of spacetime itself as opposed to the objects in spacetime. There are other approaches, but my intuition is there is a lot to be found here by focusing on the experience of inner space and inner time, and then talk about conjectures about what these experiences mean when we generalize or in terms of “reality.” Let us stick to observables as much as possible and not get lost early into speculations of what they mean.

Also, psychologists have been investigating emotions and self for over 100 years from Freud and Jung, to the object relation theorists, which would be separate tact to take as a line of investigation in order to come up with a better understanding of the inner world, or our subjectivity, and then to find a better understanding of the relations between out inner experiential world and the outward observed world, and lastly, to the speculative worlds of theoretical physics and mathematics.

A third approach would be a similar experiential investigation of energy workers of their own experiences of energies, and begin to catalog them.

With this as a base, we can also more productively explore the various kinds of alleged awakening experiences and various meditative states, such as Sahaj Samadhi, various non-dual states of unity, the experience and meaning of Zen Kenshos, the experiences of embodied spirituality of Christ and Muzika, the experiences of No-self, the experiences or descriptions of any state prior to Consciousness, and any new understanding of the nature of Consciousness and its relation to awareness or to an ultimate Noumenal Witness.

What would really assist in understanding of Consciousness and ourselves, is not a lot more funding of research studying Consciousness as being an artifact of the brain, but studying in from the inside, and that the “one universe” outside that science explores, is also an artifact of our Consciousness, and the structures of our inner space, time-sense, and rules of thinking, because the rules of thinking, logic and mathematics, really are subjective in use. That is how the left brain operates as opposed to the right brain.

I want to open the door to a re-exploration of the experience of Self and God, or the world and spacetime in ways not done in 500 years in spirituality so that we understand ourselves as the center of the universe as easily and readily as we understand ourselves to be tiny blobs of protoplasm floating around in an infinite physical universe. That infinite universe also floats around within the consciousness sphere of all sentient beings.

There is no "True" knowledge until you have the pure, uncontaminated knowledge of the Self. Before that there is only symbolic knowledge, third hand knowledge learned from textbooks, or second hand knowledge learned from one’s own experience.

But knowing the Self is entirely different; it is the pure knowing of the sage where you realize the identity of Self and Knowledge.

This is not a state of realization that can be gained through awakening of the Kundalini or Tantra. It is not obtained through the Not-Knowing of Zen, or the emptiness of Buddhism. 

It is 100% opposite to neo-Advaita.

It is an entirely different path.

In this path one just listens to the truth of Self, both of the Manifest Self, which is mostly ignored by Buddhism and neo-Advaita and is the sense of the divine awareness/consciousness within, and of the Unmanifest Self--the Witness prior to Consciousness.

Then you let the truth sink in over time and begin a long period of self-inquiry with observation and with feeling within for the sensation of I-Am, of I-exist!

Then, one day, for whatever reason or whatever trigger, you experience the Manifest Self of God embodied in you, which leads inevitably to the realization of the Noumenal Self that witnesses all this: that one who lies prior to Consciousness.

Once you have tasted this true knowledge of Self, the discovery of your identity with God as embodied Self, and the world, and the Witness, everything changes.

Confusion vanishes; certainty takes its place; every moment you know who and where you are. God is in you and you are in God. Emptiness is in you, and you are in emptiness. Bliss is within you, and you are within bliss. You become as solid as Mt. Everest. Unmovable even while moving.