THE MOST AMAZING THING

What is the most amazing thing you cn think of?  The Grand Canyon?  Niagra Falls? That the universe is 15 billion light years across?  Atomic energy?  The human mind?  Television? That society seems to work at all with all its complexity?

I think the most amazing thing is me, and by proxy, you!

We are alive.  We see, feel, touch, smell, and taste both the external world and our bodies.  Every morning when we awaken, the world is there for us to experience.  And, one day were were not; then we were born, and gradually became consciousness of the totality of existence which gradually separated into self and personal experience, and the world, and “real,” external, and public existence.

These clumps of complex matter, of proteins, cells, molecules, nervous system, brain, blood, bile, etc, somehow become self-aware and even communicate their awareness to others in words, gestures, voice tones, and mood. This collection of atoms, quarks, electrons, somehow became self-aware, and also aware that others had this same awareness.

What a miracle.  This is the most amazing thing I can think of.  We have become alive!  From nothingness and non-existence, bodies came alive and became aware.  From nothing, from non-existence, I came alive.  How wonderful is this?

Yet most people seem overcome by negative moods about themselves and about society and the world.  Why, because they have been hypnotized that life itself was not enough.  You had to have things, accomplishments, titles, money, possessions, children, etc., and we think, think, and think, and fall short of what we should have and should be.

This is Buddha’s discovery: drop thinking about what you should be or should have and dwell in the miracle of your own being, and you will be happy, peaceful, and radiant.

It is also the spirituality of Jesus, or God becoming carnate, fleshy, embodied, and talking of the kingdom of heaven, while saying the direction towards that heaven was by forgetting your own concerns and wealth and take care of others.  Again, getting attention off og your own desires and judgments of falling short or measuring successes on a daily basis, live to help other sentient beings as you would have them help you.

I say, shut the fuck up.  Stop all your thinking about Ramana, Nisargadatta, Christ, Jeff Foster, Tolle, Robert Adams tell you about yourself, and as much as possible, live in yourself, your own experience, feeling it deeply, sinking into your experience, without judgment, without stories, without running commentary, and just feel within, and feel the world without,  FEEL, not think.  FEEL, not judge.  FEEL the Self within, and there you will find God who is you, your core and deepest Self.

JOB OPPORTUNITY

1. Historian for taking information from patients regarding background, history, and injuries, psychological and physical, received while working. And also for family litigation.  This will be in Los Angeles.

2. Medical Records reviewer. Do preliminary review of medical records regarding a patient to serve as reading material for busy physician to review before submitting a final report.  This person can be located anywhere in the world with access to the Internet.

It does take time to learn these skills, especially the historian job. 

Trainee can use own typing skills or learn Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate and edit results.

Preferred candidate will have a background in psychology, medicine, pharmacology, or biology.  Pay will depend on proficiency in all the skills required and will start as part-time and can eventuate in full time.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE AS A HISTORIAN OR MEDICAL RECORD REVIEWER HIGHLY DESIRED.

Contact:         edwardmuzika(at)gmail(dot)com   ASAP

FROM SANZO KATORI; HE DESCRIBES AND INITIAL REALIZATION OF THE MANIFEST SELF EXPERIENCE:

Sanzo Katori I'm sorry but I feel the need to elaborate to answer your question. When I was 19 I had a glimpse of what I believe was the Self or god. One day I felt a lot of anxiety and depression and a great sense of death riding me the whole morning. My body was vibrating more than it ever had during meditation. It felt like my whole personality and being was being sucked into this infinite void. It kept feeling like oi was going unconscious so I had no choice but to lie down.

I fought not to for at least a half hour in extreme fear until I simply passed out. I remember being in black as simply awareness(though I didn't know it at the time) and getting random sensations from my body. Like it was black, black, black..then the sensation "cold"... Black, black, black..then a sensation of " thirst". And it went on like this for an unknown amount of time with different sensations.

When I came back to my body, everything within my body and out in the world was buzzing with blissful energy. Colors pulsing through me and everything in the world. I was an nihilist/athiest/Buddhist until that day.

No self and Facebook talk and all the books I read on religion fell flat. My worry about my life and DEATH which had sapped every ounce of joy and love from my soul until that day disappeared.

My stomach was a soft ball that my true being resided in and it felt like the deepest sweetest rest that I can never truly put into words. Please understand I do not just mean mentally, my whole and entire being felt like it had finally found its home with a bed to rest in after traveling a desert alone for eons. Somehow though as powerful and separate as this energy felt, it intimately felt like it was myself. It was like I was me experiencing god and being that god simultaneously. Like the same humility love and grace as a human seeing god, but somehow being that power energy and bliss. That is what drew me into your teaching because it is the same way I would have described that day.

I felt like the energy had always been pulling me along and decided our actions in a sense or at least gave direction to them. I didn't have to hold the reigns to my existence any more. This lasted for the rest of the day, and when I awoke the next morning I felt empty and hollowed. Extremely human and extremely fragile. I stayed in depression for a few weeks after losing that. But that day changed my life. Since then its been all meditation and following you as my guidance.

I believe that was the "explosion of bliss and love" you speak about. It HAS been more of a low level constant version of that since then as long as I am consistent enough with my meditation. Sometimes when I am injured or sick, I am more human than energy, but I can say that yes especially when it is more powerfully coursing through my body that I feel without a doubt that I am this energy that is somehow condensed into the experience of this world, my body/mind, and emotions.

I do not understand the mechanism of my experience. I can just feel and see my body as a conduit for sensations and emotions, with thoughts wisping through my head and an underlying current of fluctuating energy that is sometimes colored by my emotions or energies from the world. And this energy sometimes feels separate like it is part of my body and the world being witnessed by me and sometimes I feel like i simply am the energy experiencing the sensations of my body and world. Sometimes the energy is low and I am just watching my empty shell of bones and blood in this world as a human, just never strictly identified as a human.

So I've just been continuing waiting for another explosion, sometimes it feels like I will again and I still get a little afraid since its been so long and it was so powerful of an experience. But either way, I only see darkness inside for now, but I feel the self massaging me and letting me know of her presence through the darkness and I'm just here waiting for her to burst from my inner darkness again and show me her greatness and beauty. She's giving me gifts and trials along the way.

By god I hope any of that makes any sense. And sorry for the length.

ED'S RESPONSE:

It makes complete sense. What you describe is a self-realization experience that needs to be repeated to make it permanent. Each time you experience it, it leaves a deeper trace as an after effect.

But do not struggle to bring that experience of again.

Instead, just relax and love whatever arises in yourself from coldness and darkness, to anger, to love.

AND, LISTEN TO SACRED MUSIC A LOT! Chanting, Muktananda style, Krishna Das, Yogananda.

SANZO TO ME AGAIN:

Sanzo Katori: Thank you so much for validating these experiences for me. I had a strong intuition that this was the case. I will do as you say and not try to force or expect the experience, and continue onward . One of the surprises for me along the way has been the amount of love and bliss given even before it becomes permanent. I really hope more people try it out for themselves, because this existence is laden with suffering in my eyes, and this is the only succor that softens that pain for me.

MATTI ASKED ME TO DESCRIBE MY EXPERIENCE OF BEING SELF AS BEST I CAN. HERE IT IS, THE BEST I CAN DESCRIBE SOMETHING SO DEEP AND PRECIOUS THAT ALWAYS WAS INSIDE OF ME, BUT LITERALLY  EMERGED ONE DAY AS AN EXPLOSIVE EXPERIENCE OF SELF-RECOGNITION:

SELF-REALIZATION is not anything you could dream of before it happens because everything is transformed.

Before Self-Realization you are filled with ideas about spirituality, self, Self, ego, Consciousness, emptiness, healing, self-actualization, identification, spirit drumming, astral projection, no-self, etc.

After Self-Realization you are filled with Self and all searching ends with the certain knowledge felt throughout your entire being, as to who and what you are.
Before Self-Realization you have a million ideas of who and what you are garnered from ready many books, listening to dozens of teachers and gurus, but you are filled with doubt or confusion no matter how strongly you hold onto ideas about Self derived from reading Ramana, Nisargdatta, Tolle, Zen, Buddhism, Advaita, Christianity, etc.

When Self explodes forth from within your heart and gut, for the first time it seems, you know you are alive, that you exist.  The life force spills out into the world from your heart and gut.  The Self is alive in you. Pure energy; oure experience; pure life itself; sentience; and you are That life force and sentience, and you also witness that life force and sentience.

For many, the "true self" is the Witness of the life force, That which is beyond Consciousness or is ontologically prior to Consciousness, and the Manifest Self is illusion.  But for someone who first experiences the Manifest Self, suddenly everything in life becomes clear: there is something within you as you had "thought" you were, that is far greater, far more powerful, yet far more vulnerable and undefended than you had ever been.  There is a 100% openness to al experience, from the greatest joy and bliss, to the deepest sorrow and grief.

And, you know absolutely, positively, who and what you are as an almost infinite spiritual elements within, a core of energy and light that permeates and suffuses every moment of your bodily existence in a radiant energy felt most strongly in your gut and heart.

And when you look within, or feel within, you see and feel a core of life force, or energy every changing in terms of its form and outline, ever interacting with the world through exchanging energy fields and tendrils. The Self reaches out through your heart and gut contacting the world with gentleness, tenderness, lovingness, and yet you are always grounded from within, attached to this core of life-force, which often is experienced as bliss, often as energy patterns, and often as pure tenderness and vulnerability.

The Self is alive and palpable as a physical force, a manifestation within one's subjective field that exists alongside that witness of Self, Parabrahman, the Unmanifest Self existing prior to Consciousness.  Manifest Self and Unmanifest Self coexist in inseparable duality and symbiosis.  Where one is found, so is the other. You are both Manifest and Unmanifest Self known directly.

At first the Manifest Self is experienced as other to you, who until this point had no identity except for ideas given to you by others, by teachers, by family and society.  I am a man; I am a child; I am Caucasian; I am strong, weak, confused, intelligent, stupid, worthless, etc.  All idea about who and what I am.  This is the false self that is destroyed by the initial experience of no-self, of emptiness, of the Void nature of internal existence found in unity experience of no separate self.

But within that emptiness, deeper, Self is found through loving that emptiness and all that emerges from it, such as painful emotions, memories, and emergent vulnerability.  Love is the key to experiencing the Self, for Self is first felt within, then observed with one's inner vision as light and energy patterns.

That inner Self is alive, ebullient, joyful mostly, but with times of grief, sorrow, anger and fear passing through Self, like light passing through a prism, or a cloud passing through the sky, not touching the emptiness that I am, but touching and caressing the energy being that I am--the Manifest Self.  

This Manifest Self can better be described as having found one's soul, one's most secret heart of heart's, heretofore well hidden and protected behind many layers of psychological defenses, but now totally open and exposed to the world.  

Now it announces itself loudly, insistantly, saying, "I am alive!  I have come alive, ready to receive and experience every iota of human experience, joyful or painful, for now I am complete.  Now I am grounded in myself.  Now I am most powerful because I am open and vulnerable, and as such I cannot be fooled any more by all the ignorance hitherto forced on me by teachers, books, scriptures, family or society, because I know who and what I am directly in my heart, as life itself."

I spent the first 27 years of my life learning useless scientific, political, and economic theory--all bullshit.  It was all mindstuff, what my friend Lee Werth calls “convenient fiction.”  Yet all  during this accumulation period, beginning at about age 18, I had extreme doubts about all the scientific, academic, and political “knowledge” I was learning.

Then, from age 27 until age 53, I spent a painful amount of time both learning spiritual bullshit, and then shedding it.

At age 53 I experienced deeply complete emptiness and No-Self; without Self there is no external world, and the rest of knowledge fell away, leaving me pristine without all the bullshit spiritual “truth” one finds on FB and from popular gurus.

Then at age 67 “I” became self-aware of the identity of me, I, God, Self, and the world, simultaneously, and I now live in the Self all the time. That Self-awareness did not come as a result of self-inquiry, knowledge, ideas about infinite mind, thought vortexes, Krishna, chanting affecting DNA strands, spirit drumming, Sahaj Samadhi, Shakti, Kundalini awakening, etc.--those had all been experienced, understood, and dropped long before.

I became Self-Realized simply because I fell in love with a real woman, and my heart opened in a way as never before. I was then able to leave emptiness, the Void, the Absolute, Witness,  and become a human living in the same exciting world that I knew when I was 12 years old: a world of real people, real problems, real responsibilities, real pain, real bliss, real love, real external objects, a real body--and most of all Self-Knowing.

Anything you find in science, in economics, in political theory, must help you in real everyday life otherwise it is just useless junk cluttering up your life.

You need to escape from Ramana-fixation and understanding; escape from Nisargadatta’s disappearance into the Absolute Witness; escape from emptiness and no-self, escape from multidimensional realities, astral worlds, escape from politics; monetary and fiscal theory, escape from special relativity and quantum mechanics, spirit drumming and demon possession and just dwell in your own experience of Self, living lovingly and compassionately, also aware of the pain, suffering, and the ignorance of all others that dwell in teachings and any kind of head knowledge, whether physical or spiritual--it is all bullshit.

Only the experience of Self is real.  Beware even of this statement, because it too is only bullshit, useless knowledge, until you experience your Self for yourself.

Freedom from knowledge is a lifelong affair, whether scientific, spiritual, or political, and when even partially attained, allows for the possibility of true knowing of Self.  Then for the first time, you will experience what knowing truly is: pure knowledge without the coloring of ideas and intellect; it is knowing from the body and heart, and knowing yourself as pure knowing itself.

Of course, if you believe like Buddhists and the neo-Advaitins that there is no self, Self, or separate self, you will never find Self.  You have to be open to experience something within what you had thought to be self, and find something so new, so magnificent and so mind-blowing than you could ever have imagined.

HUANG PO:


"The only truth s that there is no truth; beware even of this truth."

ROBERT ADAMS

"You have created a teacher to wake you up. The teacher would not be here if you were not dreaming about the teacher. You have created a teacher out of your mind in order to awaken, to see that there is no teacher, no world - nothing. You've done this all by yourself."

MY RESPONSE:

This is convenient bullshit that sounds very profound, but in fact is just another theory that had an origin in time and space, and will pass away like all others.

Yes, emptiness is everywhere, inside and out, as well as objects, and ideas. Robert stated all were unreal because they were impermanent and that only the subject that was permanent. This is just another theory--one among thousands.

Don't limit yourself to this one "thuth," nor any others. But your own light, but don't go it alone until you have awakened. After awakening you can be your own light. Before that all is confusion, mystery, darkness.

SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I recently stated I have dropped the pursuit of finding a science that embraces an understaning of the inner and outer worlds together.  I stated that both share certain observables like a sense of space and objects in them, but inner space is not measurable, and inner objects are fleeting and unstable.  I further stated that any commonality that would explain features common to both would likely reside in the Witness who existentially stands prior to both. 

That is, to understand commonality between the inner and outer worlds, it would be necessary to investigate the witness itself.
This can be done in many ways and is being done in many ways, such as neurologists investigating brain functions and identify areas of the brain associated with different processes in consciousness.  Other THEORIZE that consciousness is an artifact of quantum level processes.

But both approaches are external to consciousness itself.

Science of the external world is all theories, mathematical equations, assumptions about causality, etc.  Theories come and go.  They are like clothing fads.  In large scale physics, the models and theories have changed wildly over time, and many scientists over the last three centuries have felt we were on the verge of understanding everything.  Then something happens....

New experimental data comes in that harms that understanding, or a new Einstein or Newton comes along with new ideas that seem to explain that which hitherto has not been expalinable.  Scientific theories come and go and are based on underlying assumptions and the mathematics that describe this understanding, which themselves predict new results that need to be checked, and if confirmed, becomes the newest and latest "truth" about the world.  But these truths constantly change, and we are forced to make more and more absurd and anti-intuitive assumptions about the nature of the universe and the nature of the elements that compose it--atoms, quarks, bosons, etc.

There is no stability in science.  There are no invariant truths in science.  

Science consists of assumptions and matheatics, and checking against obseravbles, which themselves have become increasingly distant from the observables of everyday life.
However, there are many other ways of exploring consciousness.  Meditation, self-inquiry, Kundalini Yoga, Zen, Buddhism, etc., are all about ways to understand the world from the inside, using consciousness to explore consciousness.

Also, psychotherapy has its roots in many differnt disciplines, from developmental psychology investigating the evolution of the ego and self from infancy through adulthood, and the consequences of various failures to reach developmental milestones.  Then there are various theories of dreams and archetypes, and various attemtps to understand consciousness through brain functions, medications, and even hallucinagines. 

I propose a different way.  My way is just a constant focus on the self within, in all its many aspects, from the self as body feelings, self as emotionsor experiencing emotions, self as one's sense of presence, the energy field that fills the body and extends into space, various internal energies and images, the experiences of actually knowing something, and what that feels like.  Then, actually finding for oneself, who you are as a totality: knowing both your human self from inside, but also the Self of all--the basic sentience that allows you to know, experience, and understand in the first place.

I don't like Ken Wilber's theoretic approach and never have.  It is all mind and bending other people's theories to fit his concepts.
The exploration must come from within each of us exploring our own awareness of both our inner and outer worlds.

What I find the biggest barrier to understanding who and what we are are the concepts we have beforehand as to who and what we are.  

Most people cannot just observe what is going on in themselves, or even feel what isgoing on in themselves, because they are constantly talking to themselves about what they see,feel,hear, touch, or smell.  Their inner world is filled with self-talk, ideas fostered by reading about Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Osho, Jesus, the Bible, Jan Esmann, and others who purportedly tell us about the nature of our inner and outer worlds.

I find few willing to abandon self-talk and all these theories and fantasies, and feely look and feel inside without stories, which requires great openness, courage, and an ignoring of self-talk by having an attitude of: What is really within me? I want to know for myself, firsthand, who and what I am.

Yes, you can have guides that supply methods, helpful hints gained from their own explorations of their own consciousness, but the center of your exploration has to be you and you alone.
Doing this kind of exploration in groups can be very valuable as you relate to others what you have found and what you think that experience means. Others tell you of their explorations and each bounce off ideas about tactics to explore within.  In addition, as a person within a group, you naturally develop ideas about othersand develop emotions and feelings about others that need to be shared/  This helps develop intimacy and vulnerability which enhances one's ability to explore unconscious areas.

I have tried over the years to form such a group but it really requires physical and emotional closeness.  An ashram-like, or community-like situation that allows immediate feedback in real time as opposed to strangers giving feedback on Facebook.  The group has to slowly grow together, gradually get to know each other, and develop a closeness and trust that all exposures will be accepted if not criticized at some point, or denied by others.  

This group effort really provides a supportive network to do deep self-exploration with all working together, helping one's own self and the other.

I did this for many years at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in the early 1970s with Ed Wortz, a Geestalt therapist and Zen student, with Song Ryong Hearn, Thich Thien An, Maezumi Roshi, and then with Swami Shankarananda and Muktananda ashrams in the late 70s, then into individual psychotherapy for six years with a genius psychotherapist, Eric Reitz, now living in Northern California.