In a comment on an earlier article, Happiness and the Art of Being is now available on Amazon and other sites, Anonymous wrote:
I’ve been reading your book. I think most people would find it difficult to sink into the Self transcending body consciousness because they have to do some work everyday and hence their identification with the body remains and so do the vasanas. Holding onto a tenuous current of the Self doesn’t really help because it’s often lost when the mind is deeply immersed in work. My question is: What does it take to transcend body consciousness and ahamkara? Is it wanting or desiring self-realization to the exclusion of everything else until the goal is achieved (which would mean leading a meditative life)? Is it being in the presence of a guru who can be seen with the eye? I guess you had the fortune of spending time with Sadhu Om. Are you or do you know a guru who is established in the natural state?
The following is a reply to these questions:
The key to transcending our
ahamkara or false ego and the body-consciousness that always accompanies it is, as Anonymous says, “desiring self-realization to the exclusion of everything else until the goal is achieved”.
However, rather than describing such whole-hearted self-love or
svatma-bhakti as a ‘desire’, it would be more appropriate to describe it as true ‘love’, because the state of ‘self-realization’ or true non-dual self-knowledge is not a state that our mind or ego can achieve for itself, but is the state in which it itself will be wholly consumed and lost forever. In other words, self-knowledge is not something that our mind can add to itself, thereby enhancing itself and helping it to satisfy its desire for self-preservation, which is its most basic desire. On the contrary, self-knowledge is the state in which our mind will lose itself entirely.