Ram,

I agree with you that self-knowledge is imperative...but self-knowledge is not just a mental task, it's also an emotional one and this is precisely where most of us are bent out of shape and don't realize it. It's IQ + EQ.

Ram: That sounds right.

Tomas: Your: "...just do it" sounds like a naive Nike commercial. For me just doing it is a process and usually a lengthy and challenging one in this physical reality that I am, in fact, existing right now. You make ‘doing it’ seem simplistic and that is why folks like Cindy continue to go down hill (looking for the simplistic Vedantic solution: you are God so just do it like God does it: poof and there it is!). How many holy people have to die of cancer before we see how insanely simplistic and limited Vedantic teachings are? Like the bible, they are not the whole answer to the mystery and challenge of physical life.”

Ram: Well, Tom, you can’t ‘do’ God. You can only see that everything is God…including your self. It’s a vision that comes as you mature, usually incrementally, sometimes all at once.

It’s probably best to leave Cindy out of it since she’s not here to participate. I don’t think she would agree with your view that she is going downhill. And her frequent e-mails reveal a pretty happy well-adjusted person with a lot of understanding and compassion. True, she has her problems but that does not mean that she’s going downhill. Perhaps you’re piqued that she wrote you off.

Thomas: I experience your mind as loving to work in Absolutes. In case you don't realize it, this is crazy-making since we, factually, exist in a relative realm whose very nature is dualistic, not absolutist.

Ram: I guess you really have missed what I’ve been saying all along. I don’t live in a relative realm. The relative lives in me. It does not affect me. It does what it does and I enjoy the play of light and shadow but it has no teeth, like a paper tiger. I’m not working in Absolutes, I am absolute…as God. People who have realized their identity with God are always thought to be crazy by those who don’t understand. “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And we are crazy from their point of view. But I couldn’t be happier in my divine madness.
What you define as sanity, taking yourself to be a limited creature and shunting God off to some imaginary Heaven, is madness.

Thomas: Longing for love is aka Divine Discontent. It is a feeling, feeling, feeling that God hard-wired into us. If you don't feel it, well, what can I say?

Ram: I felt it once upon a time but I discovered that I am love and that ended the longing.

Thomas: ‘"Inert and insentient’ is still Divine Stuff and Divine Stuff is embodied with Divine Intelligence and Life. You seem, inadvertently, to have separated your God from ‘inert and insentient’ and made It lifeless…which I don't think it is.

Ram: Sentiency and insentience are only possible because of God. Simple observation shows that some things are living and sentient and others dead and insentient. That God is omnipotent means that It has to have all powers, including the power to be what it isn’t. Or better yet, SEEM to be what it isn’t. Yes, it’s true when you break down insentient objects you find energy and when you break down energy you find Consciousness/Awareness so ultimately there is no such thing as insentient God. But from the level of the senses it seems that way.

Thomas: I get the distinct impression you just don't grasp that the body is, of itself, supremely intelligent.

Ram: Well, it depends on what the body is, how we define it. If we define it as Awareness, God, then it is intelligent. But if we define it as matter, then it is insentient unintelligent God. In fact, since this is a non-dual reality and reality is Awareness, all the forms must necessarily enjoy the nature of Awareness, Intelligence. The problem spiritually, I believe, lies in the fact that waking up to the Truth is an incremental journey. When we start out we don’t know God. But certain things happen to make us suspect the existence of God. At this stage we are of two minds. The old views are sitting side by side with the new. And if we are going to go all the way and make our knowledge of God perfect we need to see God in essence, as It is without the relative decaying forms. When it’s abundantly clear what God is without the creation we can add the creation back, not as something other than God but as God in form. In the beginning stage the body is usually worshipped as if it had a special existence apart from God. This view causes a lot of problems because there are a lot of things the soul needs to know that the body doesn’t know and will never know. But in the end, when God is clearly known, the body is known as God’s body and is seen as supremely intelligent. At this point, however, it is not actually differentiated from God so there is no reason to use the word ‘body’ to refer to it.

Thomas: If you say, that of itself, it is not intelligent, that it is just the Spirit that moves it, then by logical deduction, you must say that about ALL that exists: that everything is inert and insentient but for Spirit (and this, of course, includes you and me).

I agree. But it is only seen as inert and insentient until you have gone all the way into God and understood the relationship between the relative and the absolute. People who don’t understand Vedanta often criticize this process of negation of the body, mind and ego. The distinction between God and Its forms is not absolute, it is not a statement of ultimate fact. It is a temporary understanding that is useful in helping disentangle oneself from the world. Once one is disentangled the Self is realized by default as it were and, as I said above, the forms are reabsorbed in the vision of non-duality. Most people intellectually understand that it is all God but this understanding does not liberate them from their attachment to forms - so their lives are unfulfilling. You can’t cut corners in spiritual life. You really need to disengage (no matter how painful it is) before you see yourself as whole and complete, independent of everything. This is not a very popular idea and it accounts for the popularity of the idea that you can pursue your worldly wants and find God at the same time. This path only works if your most pressing want is God. Then slowly you will fold the less valuable wants into the more pressing one. If God isn’t your most pressing want you get mired down in trying to make life give you what you can only get from God and in doing so you reinforce the tendencies that take you away from God.

Ram