FROM A SITE VISITOR: [Please see the
F.: (The exchange continues): Once Fully Realized, that which is a seemingly “dual life” is understood to involve no duality at all. The Absolute, the Awareness, the Consciousness, and the Void you mention can all be understood. At that point, all seeking ends.
Short of Full Realization, all persons live out a life of seeking…yet few will ever seek Realization via Self-Inquiry. Most seeking, instead, is external...driven by the imagined fears or shallow desires of ego-states. For 6+ billion on the planet, such seeking happens via religious or spiritual systems that promise access to supernatural power and eternal continuity of body-mind-personality.
Those systems urge persons to look outward to find an outward power that can be used to control events in "this world" as well as in some metaphysical "world beyond." They urge people to live according to the dictates of their “holy” writings. The philosophy of Advaita, conversely, urges seekers to discard all of the nonsense they have been taught, to see all non-truths which they believe to be truth, to look within, and to find the truth that cannot be stated but that can be known.
Then all seeking based in the false belief of "need" and "fear" will end and an AS IF, natural existence will happen for the remainder of the manifestation. Once the “True (no attribute) Identity” is understood, all seeking ends because much of all seeking involves the seeking of an identity. People join gangs to get an identity. Some go to bars where “everyone knows their name” to received reinforcement of their identities.
By contrast, understand that the Advaita Teachings will offer you no conceptualized promises, as do religions and other philosophies and “programs” and “movements”; will offer no doctrines or dogmas or concepts; will end searching and seeking; and can end suffering by cutting it off at the root…the “mind.”
But none of that freedom from falsehoods and suffering can happen to those fixated in religious roles or in spiritual roles. Trapped as those personas are at the third of seven steps, they are far from Full Realization. When the awakening begins, persons (who have been sitting in “The Theater of the Lie” and taking the actors and their play to be real) suddenly begin laughing at the crazy drama unfolding on the stage.
But sanity is not restored by the mere witnessing of insanity; persons often witness it for years—in “others”—but seldom recognize their own personality disorders or their own insane-like behavior. Eventually, one must move beyond the witnessing of insanity being displayed in “The Play of the Personas” and must leave the imaginary theater entirely.
As long as you are occupied with the goings-on inside “The Theater of the Lie,” you might think that you can find the True Self from that location. You may think you can stay there and be happy, but the Advaita Teachings invite you to leave that illusion behind and move towards truth. As with Maharaj’s suggestion for the “journey” (that you must go back in exactly the same way you came) so the journey back from the corrupted “mind” to the freedom of the working, natural brain must be accomplished in the exact reverse of the order that resulted in the formation of that corrupted “mind”:
From the thinking mind, the “journey” to a re-purification of the consciousness via a forfeiture of belief in the content of the “mind” moves back—beyond the imagined needs and desires and fears of ego-states that the “mind” takes to be real; beyond the imagined “world” and beyond the imagined “I” in that “world”; beyond the verbal world;
beyond the concepts that replaced an intuitive awareness of the concrete and real; beyond taught abstractions and taught ideas; beyond languages; beyond symbolic thinking; beyond communication; beyond words; beyond memories; and back to a memory-free, concept-free brain that was originally used as a survival tool to facilitate natural living (as opposed to the "mind" which now generates destructive and self-destructive thoughts, words, and deeds during the relative existence).
Best regards if you continue to investigate Advaita and if you allow the pointers offered to inspire the only investigation that is truly worth undertaking. That investigation is not the investigation of "holy" writings or religious dogma or so-called "spiritual principles." That investigation first involves the uncovering of all of your false selves. Then the investigation, via Self-Inquiry, can lead to an understanding of Self and to an understanding of the functioning of the totality...beyond beingness and non-beingness as well. Please enter the silence of contemplation.
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