The Seer

Many seekers seem to think that there actually is a radical change from seeing the world as separate and dualistic, literally to seeing the ‘oneness in everything’. But it is not quite like this. When we wake up from a dream, we no longer see the dream creation at all and know it for what it was – a creation of our mind. But the world is not a creation of our mind. It is, if you like, a creation of the Cosmic Mind. Just as the sun still appears to rise and set, even after we have acquired the knowledge that this appearance is caused by the rotation of the earth, so the world-appearance continues after enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the acquiring of the Self-knowledge that the non-dual ‘Beingness’ (God?) is the sole reality; that the world is Beingness made manifest and that I am non-other than Beingness. (This is the translation of the sentence that sums up the teaching of the historic Indian sage, Shankara: “Afterwards, the appearance of the world continues but I know, without the shadow of a doubt, that it is all simply name and form of Beingness.”)

This was the always the case – before enlightenment as well as after. Nothing has actually changed. But, as far as my mind is concerned, the outlook has totally changed. It has taken on ‘the form of the whole and I now know that I was never a separate entity in an alien world. I now know that I am ‘everything’.

One might be tempted, then, to say (as some neo-advaitin teachers do) that there is not really any problem at all. After all, it is true that we are ‘already free’. But there is a very real problem, namely that we believe we are ‘bound’. We think we are the aging, ailing body or the mind losing its acuity and memory. We believe that happiness will only be gained through becoming rich, meeting the ideal partner and so on. As it is usually put, we are ‘identified’ with these or with the roles that we happen to be playing in life. Enlightenment entails the realization that I am not ‘a man’, ‘a woman’ or ‘a writer’, not a body or mind but simply ‘I am’.

Here is how the late Jean Klein puts it:

“…it lies beyond duality and cannot be grasped by language. One can however, endeavor to describe it by saying that the realized man is one who has reached a pure and full consciousness of ‘I am’. For the ordinary man, such a consciousness is always confused because it is impure, that is to say, accompanied by qualifications. ‘I am this or that’, ‘I have to deal with this or that’.

In reality this ‘I am’ is ever there, it can’t be otherwise. It accompanies each and every state. To return to the ‘I am’ in its complete purity, there is no other way than the total elimination of everything that accompanies it: objects, states. Then that consciousness which hitherto used to turn to the innumerable companions of the ‘I am’, sees them all to be lifeless, finds itself, and realizes its own everlasting splendor.”

~ by Dennis Waite, Quote from the book: Be Who You Are, by Jean Klein translated Mary Mann,