(Continued from yesterday.)
C: Then let us begin, my friend. We have a considerable landscape before us, but we need not hurry. We are trying to understand something that may be the most important question in existence: what it means for consciousness to awaken to its own nature.
Chapter 4 — The Mystery of Realization
1. Does Realization Give Us Something New?
Let us begin with a distinction.
We can know something intellectually without experiencing it. We can experience something without understanding its full significance. And we can understand something so profoundly that our relationship to life is permanently changed.
These are three different kinds of knowing.
We have called them intellectual knowledge, experiential knowledge, and realizational knowledge.
Intellectual knowledge tells us what may be true. Experiential knowledge gives us some direct acquaintance with it. Realizational knowledge, as we are using the term, refers to a recognition that penetrates our ordinary understanding and changes our sense of who we are.
The distinctions are useful, although real human experience does not always divide neatly into three categories.
Consider the statement, I am not merely the separate personality I ordinarily take myself to be.
We can read those words, understand their meaning, and even agree with them. That is intellectual knowledge.
We might then undergo an experience in which the usual boundaries of the self seem to dissolve, leaving us with an extraordinary sense of unity, peace, or love. That is experiential knowledge.
But the experience may pass. We return to our ordinary consciousness, and the familiar personality resumes its place. We may remember what happened without having integrated its full significance.
Or something deeper may occur. The experience may leave us with a recognition that cannot simply be set aside, even when its original intensity has faded. We may continue to live as an individual, yet no longer regard that individual as the whole of what we are.
That would be closer to what we mean by realization.
We must be careful here. A powerful experience does not, by itself, prove that we have discovered the ultimate nature of reality. Nor does the intensity of bliss necessarily tell us how complete a realization is. We must examine what the experience reveals, what follows from it, and what remains uncertain.
But the distinction gives us somewhere to begin.
2. The Strange Possibility That We Are Discovering What We Already Are
Here we encounter a paradox.
Ordinary learning adds something to us. We do not know French, and then we learn French. We do not understand mathematics, and then we acquire the understanding.
But what if realization is different?
What if the truth we seek is not an object outside ourselves, waiting to be acquired? What if it is the very nature of the consciousness by which we seek?
In that case, realization would not be the acquisition of a new identity. It would be the discovery that our former understanding of ourselves was incomplete.
This possibility appears in several contemplative traditions, although they explain it differently.
In Advaita Vedanta, the recognition of the identity of Atman, the deepest Self, and Brahman, ultimate reality, is not ordinarily understood as the production of a new identity. It is the removal of ignorance concerning what is already true.
In Buddhist traditions, certain teachings likewise distinguish liberation from the acquisition of a new self, although Buddhism does not simply affirm the Vedantic doctrine of an eternal individual Self.
Christian mystical writings speak of union with God, but the meaning of union varies among their authors. Union need not mean that the human personality becomes numerically identical with God.
These differences matter. We should not flatten every tradition into a single doctrine simply because we hope to find a common teaching.
Nevertheless, a question emerges from their comparison:
Could the journey be less a matter of becoming something other than we are than of recognizing a reality that our ordinary consciousness has not yet apprehended?
If so, the journey from God to God takes on a new meaning.
The destination may not be somewhere else. The transformation lies in the recognition.
(To be continued tomorrow.)