Knowing Oneself As Being Home ~C^3

This brief essay left me wordless, speechless and breathless… And it 'made' me hope-full, joy-filled and love-ing for it synthesized in a beautiful, wise and wonder-full way insights, realizations and truth from many years of searching, experiencing and being… THANK YOU Chad, ~C^3, the amazing Resting Sage! What a blessing all this and you are indeed!

"Knowing oneself is a personal experience that leads directly to the source of life, and this immediate experiencing of divinity reveals the impermanence of one’s thoughts and feelings.  It is to these fleeting activities of the mind that an individual clings.  However, the individuality of one who truly knows is discovered as an illusion or appearance of what is real.  What always remains is the eternal and permanent, which is before and beyond the passing life of any self.  What remains is a liberating awareness of the Divine Consciousness, and it just IS.  The knowing or “experiencing” of the Divine Consciousness transcends into total communion of beingness.  Recognizing one is never displaced from the source but that one is already home, shows clearly the full and whole consciousness of being human—being divine.  Without clinging to the fleeting activities or continual distractions of the impermanent self, recognition follows that one is the source.  One IS home.

    The intimate discovery of knowing oneself indicates a redemptive experience.  Neither arrived at intellectually nor by an accumulation of facts, knowing oneself is a mystical insight or an intuitive awareness where self-knowledge meets and, more appropriately, merges with the Absolute Self, (i.e. the Divine Consciousness), as it knows itself.  Individual redemption, rather than an issue of blind faith in an external and separate god, becomes an active pursuit of knowing the divinity within.

    About 2,600 years ago, a Chinese sage named Lao Tzu states in his eternal classic The Tao Te Ching that, “It evolves us all, and makes the whole world one.  Something is there, hidden in the deep!”  Lao Tzu calls “it” the Tao, a word that lacks a precise translation in English or any other language for that matter, including Chinese!  The idea behind the word is indefinable because its nature is limitless and boundless.  It cannot be bounded by a word or limited by a thought.  It is not a human concept that naturally binds and limits, and yet it is something here within us all, surrounding us everywhere.  For lack of a free concept regarding true freedom, it’s something, nothing, and everything too.  It IS the oneness of all.  “All are what they are by virtue of oneness,” Lao Tzu says.

    There is no separation between anything in the universe.  Everything in this world, not only originates from the source of life, but is essentially part of the awareness of itself as well.  Or as Jesus says in The Gospel of Mary, “All natures, all formed things, all creatures exist in and with one another and will be resolved into their roots.  The nature of matter is resolved into its nature alone.”  All things come from the Absolute Self because they naturally exist in the Divine Consciousness of this One Being of creation.  Nothing can be seen as separate from something else because all things in the cosmos are part of the oneness of everything known and unknown.  In other words, humans exist in the Divine Consciousness as parts of the One Being that knows itself in all of its limitless variations and boundless forms.  Humans, like everything else, exist in the Divine Knowing.

    Due to its infinitely vast spiritual essence, there can be no definition, description, distinction, classification, nor measure of it.  This Infinite Spirit—which is just another name I use for the idea exactly like Lao Tzu’s Tao—cannot be fully approached or understood through analytical or empirical methods of inadequate human thoughts and senses.  “Why not be content with simply experiencing it,” Lao Tzu asks in the oral recordings of the Hua Hu Ching.  The Absolute Self exists before and beyond the fragmented and finite nature of matter.  Thus, it is not limited or bounded by form.  Formlessness defines the Divine.

     Fortunately and wonderfully for us as conscious beings, the Infinite Spirit is eternally present, is always here.  “[T]he kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you,” Jesus says to his disciples in The Gospel of Thomas.  “The father’s kingdom is spread out upon the land and people do not see it.”  Contrary to the workings of the mind, divinity is not far away, residing in some distant, abstract heaven.  “What you look for has come but you do not know it.”  Additionally, the Absolute Self is not conceptually near us like an object.  It’s much closer than even that.  It exists with us and in us, and we can experience it simply and directly right now as this existing moment.

    “Learn to know thyself,” Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, declares in the oral recordings of the Hadith.  “He who knoweth his own self, knoweth God.”  Knowing oneself is the experiencing of the Absolute Self, and when met honestly and courageously by the individual, this re-union reveals an awareness of the Divine Consciousness.  Knowing oneself, however, is not a psychological examination or a personal case history into one’s past memories.  Instead, knowing oneself focuses on “that” which is permanent, “that” which is eternally present, “that” which is real.  The focus is upon the Infinite Spirit within the impermanence and transience of the individual.

    Last century in India, Ramana Maharshi was eloquently describing the path of self-enquiry, which makes one aware of the non-dual reality and eternal essence of the Absolute Self.  “The Self alone, the Sole Reality, Exists forever.”  The only reality is That, which is permanent: the Absolute Self.  Everything else is dualistic and can be considered an illusion or an appearance of reality.  “To know the Self is but to be the Self/For It is non-dual/In such knowledge/One abides as That.”  When an individual knows oneself through the path of self-enquiry, the transience of one’s nature becomes apparent.  The discovery leads to the re-cognition that the body, including all thoughts and feelings, is a duality that does not and cannot exist due to its impermanence.  In experiencing the non-dual reality, the individual self vanishes, leaving only the One Being and its eternal oneness.

    Following the lineage of Maharshi’s teaching, Gangaji (via H.W.L. Poonja, “Papaji”) points to That, which IS.  Gangaji, a modern-day guru from the U.S., invites everyone to discover who he or she really is by directly experiencing the unchanging presence of the Absolute Self.  In her revealing book, Freedom & Resolve: The Living Edge of Surrender, Gangaji asks the individual to simply be vigilant of one’s thoughts and feelings in order to see their passing nature.  “‘Me’ does not exist.  ‘Me’ has been made up for at least as many years as the particular body that is identified as ‘mine’ has existed on this planet.”  The individual self arises and passes away.  Thoughts, feelings, and external situations make up who we think we are, but the vigilance of self-enquiry discovers their true nature: transience.

    Vigilance here is a witnessing of the impermanence of all things, especially of the mind and its fleeting activities, so that one can experience the eternal permanence of That, which IS.  Nevertheless, vigilance is not the superego attempting to judge or fix thoughts and feelings.  “Just remain in the center [of oneself], watching,” Lao Tzu instructs.  Vigilance is a nonjudgmental awareness, a witnessing where nothing ever needs to be changed.  It’s not a doing but a being.  Gangaji aptly uses a metaphor of passing weather to reveal the impermanence of all things: “There will be objects passing by the altar of vigilance.  Let them pass like clouds.  Clouds are no problem, certainly no problem from the sky’s point of view.  You are the sky.”  Vigilance is a knowing of oneself, recognizing the impermanence of that self, and a subsequent experiencing of the Absolute Self.

    When the impermanence of self is experienced by one who knows, what remains—always—is recognition of the perfectly complete wholeness or completely perfect fullness of the One Being.  One who truly knows is liberated from the limitation of self in order to soar within the unbounded freedom of the Infinite Spirit.  “Freedom is free,” Gangaji says.  The one who knows oneself, fully and wholly, transcends self to participate in the Absolute Self.  One who knows oneself, honestly and courageously, experiences the Divine Consciousness as it knows or experiences itself in all its totality.  One transcends limited understanding of duality to be limitlessly aware of the permanent and eternal.  One transcends bondage of separation to be free.  Freedom is also full and whole.

    The non-divided relationship between individual self and the Absolute Self merges into oneness of being.  “Today I speak in this fashion, tomorrow in another, but always the Integral Way [Tao] is beyond words and beyond mind.  Simply be aware of the oneness of things,” Lao Tzu says 2,600 years ago.  This vigilance is the pursuit of self-enquiry, which liberates the self.  Liberation is the redemptive recognition one is already home in the Absolute Self.  Knowing oneself is that immediate experiencing of being home.  And it all relates to the personal discovery that we have never even left—that the kingdom of heaven is here and now—that we are That…and it wonderfully IS."