Disidentify.......Transcend....

Disidentify.
Transcend.

Either of these will help you to realize your true invulnerability to
anything that can happen, from guilt to shame to hate to injury to sickness
to death. You can use them to disidentify from anything, whether "internal"
or "external", whether it is a judgmental thought, a consuming emotion, or
an intense pain. This does not mean that they disappear--it means only that
they are not yours. As you disidentify, you will see that neither the world
nor the mind is your home. You will never find what you are looking for
there. Your home is your true Self which is nowhere and nowhen because it
transcends all locations in space and time.

The questions and examples given above are only suggestions. Your intuition
will suggest
other questions or applications that are effective for you.

Some loose ends gathered

Enquiry, especially in activity, plus a deepening understanding of the
metaphysics of
nonduality, will alleviate suffering, bring peace, and may ultimately allow
awakening or enlightenment to happen. We must remember, however, that
awakening is a purely spontaneous event, which cannot be brought about by
any efforts of the "I" or "me", since they themselves are the problem.
Enquiry merely establishes the conditions whereby understanding can
spontaneously deepen from the intellectual level to the intuitive level and
become enlightenment.

As we have seen, every object whether we consider it to be external or
internal, is a mental object. The world, the guru, the saint, the sinner,
the feeling of bondage or liberation, the hallucination, the dream, all are
mental objects. However, there is a difference between the guru and most
other thoughts. The function of the guru or spiritual teacher is to turn the
mind towards its Source, the unmanifest Background, and away from the guru
itself. If a teacher does not do this, he/she is a false teacher because the
mind must find its Source before awakening can occur. The teacher is
dispensable after fulfilling this function. Indeed, we might say that the
function of the teacher is to make him/herself dispensable.

Some people seek answers to questions like, "Why is all of this happening?"
or "Why is there so much suffering in the world?" Such questions always come
from the viewpoint of the individual. The best way to answer them is to
adopt the viewpoint of impersonal, unmanifest Awareness, which is what you
are, rather than the individual, which is what you are not. The questions
then do not arise.

Ramana Maharshi termed the state of enlightenment brought about through
enquiry as sahaja samadhi. He also called this the natural state, in which
there is complete absorption in the Self, so there is no ego but there is
still awareness of the world, which is seen to be identical with the Self.
For comparison, the ultimate state of transcendence through yoga is called
nirvikalpa samadhi. In that state, there is no ego and no awareness of the
world, but there is awareness of pure Peace. The difficulty with it is that,
on coming out of it, the ego or thinking mind have not always been
dissolved, but tend to arise again. A third form of samadhi is savikalpa
samadhi, in which there is no I-entity, and the mind is totally absorbed in
an object. This can occur when there is intense focus on some consuming
activity, such as art, music, athletics, or science. Again, the difficulty
is that the ego usually returns when the focus ends.



Stanley Sobottka
Emeritus Professor of Physics

University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4714

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