Dear Rupert,
Krishnamurti says, ‘You are the world’ and Ramana Maharshi says to find out who you are through self-enquiry. However we meditate, any answer we receive to that question has to inevitably come as a deliverance of ‘our’ own mind. Is that a correct statement?
So how did the masters arrive at their answer? Krishnamurti is not saying you ‘may’ be the world but that you ‘are’ the world. Where is his certainty coming from? Is it possible to confirm that the unitary experience we have while in meditation is not a delusion but rather a true alignment with cosmic consciousness? Or is it that a spiritual seeker has to take this as authentic at face value and proceed with a way of life that ultimately becomes its own reward?
As you said, love, peace and happiness are wonderful things to experience either way, whether we are non-dual or not. How does this contrast with the peace and love that religious folks experience when they are truly in love or devotion with a personal God?
With love,
Biju
Dear Biju,
Biju: Krishnamurti says, ‘You are the world’ and Ramana Maharshi says to find out who you are through self-enquiry. However we meditate, any answer we receive to that question has to inevitably come as a deliverance of ‘our’ own mind. Is that a correct statement?
Rupert: The answer comes as the true experience of non-duality, which is not in the mind. However, it is the mind that attempts to formulate this answer in words or in some other form.
Krishnamurti is not saying you ‘may’ be the world but that you ‘are’ the world. Where is his certainty coming from?
From his own intimate experience. He looked deeply at his experience and saw clearly that there is never a personal subject nor a separate object, other or world in our actual experience. Rather, there is only experiencing itself, which is seamless and indivisible, made only out of consciousness.
Is it possible to confirm that the unitary experience we have while in meditation is not a delusion but rather a true alignment with cosmic consciousness?
Yes, but not just in meditation. It is quite possible to see, in the midst of an ordinary life, that there is only one substance in experience. That substance may be called consciousness, ‘I’ or, because it knows no otherness, love.
As you said, love, peace and happiness are wonderful things to experience either way, whether we are non-dual or not.
Love, peace and happiness are always non-dual. They are the experience of non-duality.
How does this contrast with the peace and love that religious folks experience when they are truly in love or devotion with a personal God?
Devotion to a personal God, however beautiful, is always tainted with the pain of separation and longing. When this last layer of ‘otherness’ dissolves, that is, when the separate, longing self and the separate, longed-for God dissolve, only the presence of divine consciousness remains. That is love, peace and happiness.
With love,
Rupert
