I think of James Carse in his most recent book, “The Religious Case Against Belief,” and he said we’re being torn apart on this Earth by belief structures.  Underneath it all there’s this religious experience which can’t be achieved through any of these belief systems.  And so he divides it up between knowers and believers.  If you know you’ve experienced it, but if it’s knowledge you think you can accrue to believe, you see, if it’s knowledge which bolsters your belief, you’re at stalemate again. 

Who we really are is probably unattainable, that is like God the horizon to of which we’re always moving and that being the unknown.  So this is another one of those questions. Were we to arrive at a final conclusion the whole process might grind to a halt. So that enigma, that puzzle, that asking of myself who am I like Ramana Marharshi who am I and suddenly he finally gets his answer.  But now his answer is a direct result of his questioning for year after year after year.  This falls into Marghanita Laski’s the last category of the Eureka. The Eureka defined a breakthrough for him was to discover who he was. The only thing is this leads to facing again enigmas and puzzles and problems. 

As with the definition of God, who we are is equally unanswerable but trying to answer it goads us on into this journey into the unknown or journey into God which is who we are. We’re not God, we’re the journey into God. To equate ourselves with God is a profound error. To not recognize that the journey that we’re involved in that journey is likewise an error. Again, with Eckhart and no being except in the mode of being, but the being, the mode of being is never deemed being. According to that one of the errors in the general Hindu Yogic tradition Tat Tvam Asi  thou art that. We’re saying to one’s self a humpsa, whatever it, I’ve forgotten what it is, there’s the meditation mantra, I am that. That’s it. I am that, meaning I am God, I am that God I’m searching for. And of course, within the rest of the religious world that is a terrible sacrilege. 

Let me just give a quick illustration though of the horns of the dilemma and that is I was given that mantra of course in Siddha Yoga and practiced it for months and months and we were home in Virginia around the little light and the lamp that gives about 40 watts, my daughter was doing her homework, my wife over here and I’m here, and this business came up of that mantra which is saying I am God and I thought it’s impossible for me to say that. I could not make even in my inner image making or inner chatter I couldn’t manage to make myself I am God.  I would jam up on that word.  And this dialogue with myself, my other part of self began to say look, these are just words, go ahead and say the word and get it over with and then you’re over a block, but I couldn’t do it. And this argument went on inside myself. I was arguing between these two split selves I have in me about this just say it and finally I really heard myself say inside to myself, “Damn it all, just say the words” and I said all right, “I am God” and I went right out of my body. In one, two or three occasions of doing this in a perfectly wide awake ordinary state with no transition and I wrote this up one time as the feeling that I was being pulled out of my body like a Velcro fastener, peeling something off it and coming out not the top of my head, but the back of my neck came out very clearly, saw myself, daughter and wife sitting at this table as I was retreating at the speed of light from them and off into that state.  It is a sheer un-nameable ineffable joy in it, etc., etc. And the odd thing is when I came back I came in the same way I’d gone out. Now that struck me even as it was happening. I was coming in my neck and spreading throughout my body.  It happened to me again. So I thought of that as ludicrous, it was so funny and yet this had been my experience. 

Robert Sardello said we must rediscover phenomenology.  It isn’t the abstract theories, the abstract con…, what is our phenomenon?  What is our literal experience?  And this was my literal experience of that mantra, and in a way it was my literal leaving deep experience of God, who again then at that point, that experience whisked me off into marvelous realms and then brought me back the very same way, which was typical of a number of, oh I would say, a whole number of experiences like that that happened in that setting.  Now, that happened at home but I have brought home from a long stay at the Ashram that very dilemma and enigma and it spelled itself out there, and lots and lots of other  occasions in which my experience couldn’t be codified.  It was beyond any of my ordinary frames of reference. 

I think of James Carse in his most recent book, “The Religious Case Against Belief,” and he said we’re being torn apart on this Earth by belief structures.  Underneath it all there’s this religious experience which can’t be achieved through any of these belief systems.  And so he divides it up between knowers and believers.  If you know you’ve experienced it, but if it’s knowledge you think you can accrue to believe, you see, if it’s knowledge which bolsters your belief, you’re at stalemate again.  So they were screaming believers and knower’s is critical. Once an experience like that business of saying the word, whisked out, we can draw conclusions and hypothetical, etc., for the rest of our life but the knowledge is always there, just as the imagery and experience, dramatic that I had that led me to Mukananda in the beginning.