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Main Index
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are only two alternatives -- escape from the self or awakening to the self. To escape, one needs an outer goal; to awaken, one must be totally disillusioned with everything on the outside.
As long as your God remains external he is your illusion, your hallucination. Man has invented this God to escape from the self. So the first thing I wish to say to you is that there is no need to search for God, for truth, for liberation, for emancipation. You must investigate the investigator himself. That investigation alone will ultimately lead to God, to truth, to liberation. No search, other than the search for the self, can be termed religious.
The terms "self" and "self-realization" are very mis-leading. How can one know one's self? To know something, duality is required. So how can one know something if there are not two separate things involved? How is visualization possible; how is realization possible? Both knowledge and perception belong to the world of duality, and where there is oneness they lose their meanings, their credibility.
As an act, "self-realization" is an impossibility; the term is self-contradictory. And yet I also say to know the self. Socrates said the same thing, and so did Buddha, so did Mahavira, so did Christ, so did Krishna. Even so, you must realize that what it is that can be known is not the self, but the non-self. That can be known. The self is the perceiver, the one who realizes; it can never be the object perceived.
So, you ask, how can the self be known? Since only the object can be known, how can the knower be known? Where there is knowledge there is both subject and object, there is both the knower and the object that is known. And isn't trying to know the knower like trying to see your eye with your eye? Have you ever noticed a dog trying unsuccessfully to catch its own tail? The tail moves away from him as quickly as he tries to grab it. He can never catch it; it is impossible. In the same way, you cannot make the self the object of knowledge. I cannot know myself in the way I can know everything else. Self-knowledge is so simple, and yet it is so complicated, so difficult. Self-knowledge is not the same
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