Realizing the Manifest Self

Robert said, Of course you exist, you are speaking to me arent you?

You can never know what you are objectively, descriptively, with attributes described by
adjectives. You are the witness of everything, including the world, your own mind, your
emotions, your wants and desires, even your sleep and dreams. Yes, you do know your own
sleep. You know what is like. Dark, comfortable, relaxed, even though you do not constantly
witness the state of sleep all night long as if you are awake. You do know what it is like when
you are coming out of it and going into it, and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

In my awakening experience 22 years ago, I looked inside for the 10,000 th time, looking for the
I who is experiencing water flowing from a showerhead.

Who is it that feels this water hitting my back, I asked, and peered deeply into my inner
emptiness in the area of my heart. And what I saw, I had seen 10,000 times before, just an
unending internal emptiness, space, the Void, and entirely subjective thing in the sense that it
was within my experience of self, rather than outside of my skin in the world.

For the first time, after asking that question 10,000 times before over the previous 25 years, I
saw that there was no entity to which the word I referred. There was no I to which the I
thought and I concept referred. That is, the word I referred to an empty set. There was no
I-entity inside of me anywhere, in mind, body, spirit. There Was Just the Void, just emptiness,
and I realized for the first time I was that emptiness. That is, the I-sense was illusory. There
was just emptiness and upon it a superimposed feeling of presence, along with the concept that
there was some core that the word I pointed to.

I was just the Void. There was no Ed Muzika. Ed Muzika was a name associated with form, my
body, but there was no Ed Muzika inside as an entity, a soul, a being. I no longer felt like I had a
sense of presence. There is just crystal-clear emptiness everywhere and my mind was silent. I
felt greatly afraid, because there was no me. It was just emptiness. This was disconcerting I
felt no one was in control. I think this may have been the same fear that Ramana Maharshi felt
before his death experience of his personal self.

I called Robert who had left for Sedona two weeks before. I said, Robert, I do not exist, all
that there is. is emptiness. I am scared!

Robert said, Of course you exist! You are talking to me, arent you? That was it. That was
the solution! I didnt exist as the mythical idea of Ed Muzika, as a soul, as a psychic entity of
any kind whatsoever. But I did exist as a physical entity speaking in real-time to another
physical entity, using terms and words such that we perfectly understood each other.

Really, nothing had changed--much. I no longer believed in Ed Muzika as a discrete

consciousness entity, a soul, so to speak, but instead of being a soul, I now used the word
emptiness, or nothingness as a descriptor of who I was. Yet, mostly I was exactly the same
person, but no longer thinking about myself as having a center, or a soul. I was emptiness, or
emptiness was manifesting itself through this body/mind entity. I had exchanged my apparent
soul, my sense of presence, for the experience of nothingness, which felt like a hard, clear,
vacuum, devoid of a sense of presence. It felt like I did not exist, at least as I had felt myself to
exist before.
But to call this nothingness ParaBhraman or the Absolute was out of the question. At that
time, I just would not have thought of re-engaging mind playing with descriptive terms to
describe my sense of existence, because I had none.

Many years later, I had quite a different experience, a flip-side type of existence, where I did
regain a soul, or a very concrete sense of my own existence, in an explosion of inner energy,
light, and bliss, feeling endless love and internal energies flowing in me upwards from my gut,
explosively through my heart and into my head and beyond. I felt a recognition of the divine
within me, and also as me, as a separate conscious process witnessing the birth of a God
sensation within me, like we were two entities, side-by-side, holding hands working through this
body mind apparatus. Such does time and experience change our ideas of self. I called this
ltter experience the Realization of the Manifest Self.

So many experiences, so many final truths, so many descriptive words.

Then I read Nisargadatta and his teacher Siddharameshwar, who both spoke of the existence of
four bodies that constituted our existence with the totality of our consciousness: the physical
body; the subtle body of energies, bliss, mind, emotions, aspirations, discrimination, touch,
sight, sound etc.; the causal body which was variously called forgetfulness, space, or the Void;
and the supra-causal body, otherwise known as Turiya which underlaid the other three bodies,
which all together constituted the totality of our consciousness.

Variously described, Turiya was the witness of the of the three bodies, the supporting body of
the other three bodies, or as pure knowledge, which itself was described as just being oneself
without knowledge of that self. There is just the knowing that I was the witness of my body, the
external world, the internal energies, bliss, as well as the great void, or emptiness, and myself
was unseen and unseeable because I was the Seer.

Thus, at the basis of Nisargadatta and Siddharameshwars philosophy of being, was a dualistic
assumption, that the self cannot see or know itself. Ultimately, they used many analogies such
as the eye cannot see the eye except by means of a reflection in a mirror. They called this
reflective objective knowledge. But pure knowledge, consciousness without an object, was not
knowable, because by knowing it becomes an object, and not part of the pure knowledge of self.

I thoroughly understand this point of view, but having myself experienced two very different
realizations under two entirely different teachers and systems behind those teachers, it just
became clear that there is nothing at all that one can say about the self, whether this is the
emptiness I identified with the 1995, or the explosive, blissful, powerful, lighted energy that I
experienced as myself, and as God, in 2009, or lastly, the Turiya state which was pure
knowledge without an object, that pervaded all other objects in new all other objects and
bodies such as the physical, subtle, and the Void.

I knew too, that that self that could not know itself, because it was the knower of all other
attributes not associated with the self, had no attributes, and no existence in the world. Thus,
anything that said about it would be wrong. You can call it ParaBhraman, but that would be
wrong. It has none of the attributes associated with that concept ParaBhraman which are listed
as infinite numbers in various Hindu scriptures. You cannot say it is infinite. You cannot say it is
unborn. You cannot say it is eternal. You cannot say it is ephemeral. He cannot say it is
without time or is timeless. You cannot say it is God or anything else because those terms
belong to descriptions within the existing universe that you see, hear, feel, touch, taste, and
think about.

This is the self we meet when we are just absolutely quiet, when we are resting in our chair,
totally relaxed, sinking ever more deeply into our sense of self. All that we can say provisionally
is that self appears to be boundless, it appears to be entirely peaceful, and entirely without
attributes, because any spoken attributes belong to the world of perception, not to the
dimension of the perceiver, the knower, the seer. As soon as Nisargadatta opened his mouth, he
was telling lies. He even says so himself, over and over, because words do not fit the ultimate
reality which is you, when you are totally withdrawn into you. There is no room there for words
or attributes. You are too dense for any word to fit in. You are impervious to having any
attribute whatsoever, whether it be eternality, mortality, or immortality, no terms whatsoever
for you. Only shut the fuck up, and be you!