Download PDF - Stillness Speaks

An actress plays her role so convincingly the audience believes her tobe the character she is portraying, though no confusion concerning heridentity exists in her own mind. Outwardly appearing to suffer the joys andsorrows of the unenlightened, inwardly the awakened one is only pure,perfect, blissful Awareness."When conditionings dissolve, the Enlightenedare absorbed into the all-pervading Realitylike water into water and light into light."(52)Self-absorption is accomplished by destroying ignorance, the cloud ofunknowing that covers the ego and prevents it from realizing its nature asAwareness. Why are the ego and the Self one? The Self is formlessAwareness and the ego Awareness in a form. Awareness in a form isAwareness, in the way a wave is the ocean. Appearing to have a separateexistence, the ego just happens to be a seventy year wave in the eternal oceanof Awareness.Does the Self’s awareness of the total worlds entitle It to more blissand knowledge than an ego who is only aware of it’s individual world? Is themacrocosmic awareness 114 a higher or better state, one worth striving for?One needn’t drink the seven seas to experience salt water. A simple drop willdo."Realize that to be the Self the attainment of whichleaves nothing to be attained, the blessedness of whichleaves no blessings to be desired, the knowledge of whichleaves nothing more to be known.Realize that to be the Self which when seen114 Vedanta terms the macrocosmic awareness Ishwara or God. Iswara is Self apparently conditioned by It’sassociation with the total. Associated with an individual the Self is called jiva, an embodied being. In realitythere is no difference between the total and the individual because they are just concepts created by a mind inignorance of the Self. This concept is only understood by experience of oneself as the Self. Intellectually weassume that to be aware of everything one’s awareness would have to be bigger or better than to be aware ofone thing. But the Self is not big or little. “Larger than the largest, smaller than the smallest” says theUpanishad. To know everything is not superior to knowing one thing because the essence of knowing, chit, isnever modified by what it knows. Total bliss is not better than individual bliss because bliss is unaffected bythe body or bodies it enlivens. And “total” is just a concept applying to a lot of individuals not a bigindividual, just as “individual” is just a concept based on the mistaken belief that one is one’s body.87