The reason I created this website is because I noticed something in the early 2000s that shocked me. It was and is the most surprising thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t find a clear, unequivocal mention of it in any published book (it was harder to do literature searches in those days because the Internet was less developed) so I wrote an article about it and published it. That article became the home page of this website. If I remember correctly, for about eight years, until I added this blog to the site, it was the only page on the site. It’s still the home page.
(1) The discovery was the fact that I had been unconscious for nearly every minute of my life.
(2) I discovered this by contrast during moments when I was less unconscious. I thought those moments were very significant. I thought they were the gateway to liberation. I called that gateway “the aware state”.
I numbered those points so I can refer to them. It’s been clear to me for several years that (1) is true but (2) is false.
I should have rewritten or removed that page years ago but I procrastinated because I wasn’t sure what to replace it with.
I’m still not sure what to replace it with. At the moment, the bottom third of the article is crossed out to indicate that it’s wrong but the article is still there. The article is still useful for helping people realize they are unconscious, but the implication that this by itself leads to Self-realization is wrong.
There are many spiritual teachers who make the same mistake, including some well-known ones.
Since I started this blog I’ve tried to stick to a rule of not describing my experiences until long after they happen to ensure that I’m not overreacting. But I followed that rule with “the aware state” (I noticed it around 2002 and published the article in 2007) and it didn’t stop me from making a mistake.
So I’m going to break the rule now and tell you where I am today to give you an idea why I’m retracting the article part of the article. Here’s an email I just sent to a friend.
Since December I recognize something which is completely apart from the aware state.
I can’t think of a good way to describe it. “Knowing, nothing but knowing.” I’m trying to avoid cliches like “pure consciousness” and “consciousness without an object.” It’s like a very clear sense of “I know” except there’s no “I”, only the verb, and there’s nothing else besides the knowing.
Compared to this “knowing”, the aware state is an object like any other object.
This knowing is completely “subtle.” It is absolutely subtle, so to speak, because it has no extension in the ordinary dimensions where we expect to find things that exist. Maybe this leads people to describe it as nothingness.
I think the possibility of attending to this “knowing” exists only when all objects are disregarded including the awareness of the aware state.
It’s at another level from the aware state (which is really a family of objects).
This “knowing” seems much more promising than the aware state as a gateway to liberation. Closer to whatever Ramana meant when he said “find the source.” This is probably the real reason why I’m not disappointed by the lack of results with the aware state.
Can we say “congratulations on your Brahman consciousness”?
Oh, just noticed all the happy emojis were removed from my comment above 🙂
I get congratulated so seldom that this is gonna hurt but — with thanks and regret I must decline. 🙂
I’m surprised to see that you still think that you were wrong in that article, and so wrong in fact that you are now retracting it.
Up until this moment I have been of the opinion that that was “the way”. Now I’m confused.
Don’t you think that method made a great contribution, if not the greatest, to where you’re today, which is indeed a great milestone for reaching full liberation? (Assuming that it’s Brahman consciousness)
I’m only retracting what I called “(2)” above.
You got further with it than I did, right? Do I remember correctly that you stabilized in it? (I was planning to write to you and ask you that question.)
Maybe we looked at different “things” with that method? It seems now to me that the aware “state” isn’t a single state but a variety of mental activities all of which bring with them an intensified sense of consciousness.
Yes but I’m not sure whether it helped in the obvious way, by getting me in the habit of being in intensified consciousness. Maybe it did, I don’t know.
What I can say for sure is that it helped in a different way that might surprise some people. Over the years I became so familiar with intensified consciousness, that “awareness of awareness”, that eventually I realized it’s mental activity. Then almost automatically I began to disregard it and was left as something prior to it. (That wasn’t the only thing that led to noticing something prior.)
Incidentally that prior is not a big deal. I think it’s really truly always present for everyone. Learning to notice it by itself, on its own, is a bit of a trick, that’s all.
Even to talk about it at length like I just did here seems silly. Almost embarrassing. 🙂 But it did take me 24 years to
noticerecognize it so… welcome to Freddie Yam’s clown show! 🙂P.S.
As far as I can tell, the thing that made the biggest contribution was that late last year, for the first time, I took the following remark of Ramana’s very seriously and applied it. In Michael James’s hyper-literal translation:
The “place” is the source of the mind. Taken in isolation, out of context, this sentence seems to recommend japa but that’s not what it means. It means, “When you say ‘I’, you refer to something. Pay attention to that.”
Ramana made a point of describing his method in various ways. This may be the simplest version of all. You could rephrase this so a six-year-old can understand it. Maybe it’s so simple that for a quarter century I didn’t take it seriously.
Well I finally took it seriously.
It also seems to me that there are different levels or thickness of awareness.
There is a thicker awareness than presence like choiceless awareness, which eventually will be led to absolute like ajata vada.
I am not there yet but am finding out that awareness itself does not lead to Self-realization. Love in addition to awareness at the same time accelerate the process of vasana dissolution 100 times.
Hi Pema Devi. Nice to see you again. I often talk with a friend about this. She thinks we can reach the Absolute by experiencing purer and purer forms of awareness. I disagree because I think that the Awareness that comes in thicker and thinner forms is not the same kind of thing as the Absolute. Advaita Vedanta has a name for the kind of Awareness that comes in thicker and thinner forms: chidabhasa, reflected consciousness. It only ever shows us mental activity. It’s called reflected because it illuminates (reflects off) mental activity. I think that to get from chidabhasa to the real thing takes a jump in a different direction.