NTL V TATA
HATERS AND LOSERS
GD THST I DNT BELV IN , GV SLF STRENGTHS- SN CNMA THE PATH 2018
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Self, the subject, is not an object of knowledge. You cannot know the Self because you are it. The observer cannot be an object of knowledge. Self is the knower himself. So, the word self-knowledge doesn’t mean that there is a special kind of knowledge about the world which is acquired after liberation. Self-knowledge is a term given to the removal of the superimposition. Once you experientially realize that you are not separate from existence, once you no longer consider yourself as a body or mind, you have got Self-knowledge.
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STVNSN TCKR SERIES
No people get reborn, enlightened or not. The person you think you are, that “you,” will never be reborn again in another body, nor will it’s ‘essence’ or it’s ‘soul.’ The flow of life will go on, and within that flow, someone may be born in the ‘future’ (or the ‘past!’) who has many of the same attributes your body-mind-ego had, and therefore could seem like a ‘continuation’ of the person you were in this life, but it will absolutely not be “you,” or your spirit transmigrated into that body.
Reincarnation is an illusion and enlightenment a concept. Living totally in the flow, in this body, till your done, is real.
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NETI NETI
The whole spiritual practice is about observing and then keep negating that you are not what that is observed. You keep discarding everything that arises and passes away as ‘not this, not this’. This is called ‘neti neti’ in Vedanta. (The word ‘Neti’ can be split as ‘na iti’: which means : ‘ not!’, thus… It explains the procedure of how you go about it).
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BBTBR - DANCE OF BEINGNESS- NOB NOM NOT NOF
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The book “Awareness” by the Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony De Mello, brought it all together for me. At the precise moment of my initial true spiritual awakening, which occurred on 2 July 2019 when I was 49, the entire meaning of this book, which I had re-read innumerable times over the preceding 28 years, first discovered at age 21, became crystal clear, all at once.
On the other hand, the book that triggered my spiritual awakening on 2 July 2019, was “Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond”, by the Theravadin Buddhist meditation master, Ajahn Brahm. By that time, thanks to 24 years of daily formal sitting meditation, my personality had been utterly transformed. I had formed totally different beliefs, values and a radically different understanding from the one I had been born into 49 years earlier. I was so radically different from the person I had been brought up as, I may as well have been born on the other side of the world to a radically different kind of family. Despite this massive change of heart, true enlightenment however still eluded me.
Ajahn Brahm's immensely perspicacious book on learning the meditative absorptions (jhanas, also known as samādhi), made me unusually reflective at the time, in 2019. I was reviewing what I had learned in the preceding 24 years of daily sitting meditation, realising how far I still was from the goal, which was to be genuinely enlightened, finding genuine freedom from all suffering.
When I read in the Ajahn's book that craving is the ONLY cause of all suffering according to the historical Buddha, I contemplated more. It suddenly struck me with great force what a chasm existed between my own experiences of the apparently thousands of different reasons for suffering, and what the Buddha actually taught. This realisation was so strange that it galvanized me into action.
Firstly, I saw very clearly that I had been a hypocrite. For all these years I had fervently believed the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, but I had never actually experienced that craving is the SOLE cause of all suffering. Quite the contrary.
I then determined to observe myself. Specifically, what I wanted to observe, were the movements of these famous cravings that the Buddha taught is the SOLE cause of all suffering. I wanted to observe directly how each movement of craving caused a specific unpleasant feeling (suffering)!
To observe this way, I realized I had to shift my attention away from what I understood, thought, felt and experienced (apparent objects), to I (apparent subject). I endeavored to observe whatever emerged from I (subject) who apparently experiences everything.
A strange thing then happened. I noticed that whenever I shifted my attention this way, the world (reality as I heretofore understood it, as comprised of individual material things, existing quite independently of each other), disappeared. In its place only I seemed to exist. I now appeared to be Reality itself. Nothing and nobody were separate anymore!
Therefore, I realized that self-observation is a tool, a skillful means, to henceforth walk a different spiritual path from the one I had been walking for the 28 years I could never understand De Mello's amazing book. The essence of De Mello's book is self-observation, which leads to awareness of and disidentifcation from the ego: who or what I know I am. So right there, I realized the essence of De Mello's book, all at once!
Very strangely, my spiritual awakening on 2 July 2019 had been revealed to me 12 years earlier, in a dream vision, while asleep at night, in October 2007. The next morning, when I woke up, the highly symbolic dream I had experienced, was so ultra-real that I immediately recognized this dream was prophetic and the rest of my life had just been revealed to me! At the end of the Path, of self-observation, discovered on 2 July 2019, lies complete awakening. I am now still walking along the clear-cut mountain trail that I saw in my dream vision, to reach the final destination: the mountain top of perfect enlightenment.
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