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- You’re only as happy as your least happy child.
Lots. Psychotropic drugs, near-death experiences, mind-stopping-world-rocking accidents, mind-altering serious illnesses, take your pick. But it’s not “self-dissolution,” it’s Self-revelation. Apperceiving, directly, the Primordial Self-Substratum, revealing that the “little self” was always just a phantom.
Suzanne Segal, one of my favorite Western ‘apperceivers’ of this, relates in her book “Collision With The Infinite” how she meditated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for about 10 years, and although she experienced sweet calm and enhanced peace, her sense of ‘self’ remained firmly rooted in the illusory ‘separate ego.’ She stopped meditating, got married, moved to Paris with her husband, had kids, and pretty much stopped thinking about meditation or Self-realization.
One day she was standing at a bus stop in Paris, and when the bus came and she lifted her foot to board, for no discernible reason, her entire sense of the personal ‘self’ completely and utterly collapsed. For the next many years, she found she was somehow able to accomplish all the day-to-day functions of a worker, wife and mother, but could not locate her ‘self;’ she literally could not experience there was a self-contained, enclosed location called Suzanne who was doing any of these things. Prior, she had done all that meditation, and later in life, she developed a brain tumor, and so some might conclude it was due to one of these that her sense of self was annihilated.
But she had stopped doing meditation or any other practices long before this incident, and the brain tumor came much after. More importantly, the dissolution of the false self/revelation of Your Tue Self is never cause & effect. As Buddha once said, “If through practices or cause-&-effect, you have an experience, it is ‘yours,’ so it cannot be You.” In other words, if “you” did the practices, and “you” are still around after this cause-&-effect Self-realization to ‘enjoy’ it, it’s not Self-realization…not yet.
That ‘not being around to still enjoy “my” Self-realization‘ is the deal-breaker for most people, and why true Self-realization and ‘enlightenment’ is so rare. Nobody really wants to ‘dissolve the self.’
That’s why meditation is often the most-recommended. Because you can meditate only as much as you want, dissolve only as much as you want and Realize only as much as you want. If you come up to a place, in the Silence, beyond which you do not wish to proceed, you can just open your eyes and stop meditating. And even going as far as you did, probably conveys new peace & contentment you didn’t feel before…so it was worth it.
You can’t always do that with drugs, NDEs, illnesses and accidents. You might get your ‘mind’ irrevocably ‘blown.’:-)
But no matter. “We” are not the Doer here, “We” do not control where we’re born, how long we’ll live, and virtually anything that happens in between - certainly not uncausable Sepf-Realization. So just pick the ‘path’ that you enjoy most, the one that ‘calls’ to you the most, and have fun.
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