Dear akasha,
Many thanks! Your post, while (as always) beautifully expressed, is too long and involved for me at the moment to reproduce and interleaf, answering point by point. Bottom line: I do not know what Tom's consciousness is to himself; I know what he is in me. His descriptions of the actual extinction of the small self, of the death of the witness -- like Peter's -- I can only identify with the extinction of Ahamkara in B.C. -- or if you like, the "real C.C.," though IMO this does a grave injustice to the prior states of C.C., G.C., and U.C., which though impermanent are valuable and in a sense necessary, even if from Brahman's POV still "pretend" and filtered through a previously-unsuspected Ahamkara. Thanks to our dialogue, I am getting a lot clearer on "where" these states of consciousness are in the Purusha-body. They do serve a purpose. Yes, C.C. knows the perfect duality of the Unmanifest and the Relative, but it has no conception of the extinction of the "small self," the Guru-Christ-Self or Ahamkara. What has died? Nothing. We only have the unchanging, unmanifest Self added to all the rest, together with the appreciation that all action is automatic. U.C. knows it's all me, that I embrace all space-time if I care to put my attention there, but again it has no conception of the extinction of the unsuspected intermediating small self which is yet to come. Again, this small self is virtually invisible until its sudden disappearance in B.C., when the rug is totally pulled out and there are no longer any distinctions anywhere; there ONLY is the emptiful Great Immensity. Your mind(s) is/are beautifully refined, and I mean that in all awe and appreciation of your intellect. But at the moment you still appear (to me) to be pretending perhaps to be Ahamkara-bound (this as evidenced by your attempts to distinguish and separate the self- evidently inseparable with logic), and so we really cannot go any further; logic is lovely but utterly useless where the ever-present and non-dual B.C. is concerned. THAT recognizes THAT. That's how I recognize Tom to be speaking the Truth. It's a freakin' paradox only the unselfed heart-belly can comprehend. Even in U.C., the self- bound mind and the self-bound logic simply cannot quite really get it, nor imagine it, nor comprehend it, nor describe it. I am sorry if I implied otherwise. Brahman for me is supremely simple, self-evident, obvious, a priori (all of this is also a lie of course), and it makes sense to me to assume that (every)one is in Brahman unless s/he gives evidence of resisting that. Tom does not; on the contrary he shows every evidence of no-self realization. So for me, right now, Tom is in Brahman, at the very least. You are of course welcome to create your own reality and put him anywhere you like. Being sliced up by logic into *unconnected* neat conic-sections "hurts" the primordial heart of Brahman a little -- you know the thorns around Christ's heart in those Catholic chapels? -- but I guess we can take it. :-) And heck, I think maybe that's what you're actually saying, too. If so, let's hear it for the indescribable THAT! :-) As you say, I yam what I yam, sweet potater pie! Love, R. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
