Date: February_10_2002
Title: Realizing the Self
Category: The Ultimate Goals of Life
Duration: 2 min., 51 seconds
Date Given: January 31, 2002
Given by: Bodhinatha

Thinking this morning a little about the Moksha ritau, the concept of realizing the Self and the perspectives related to that.

To draw an analogy - you know I love analogies - when you are travelling a lot, you come home and you are dreaming. What do you do? Quite often you dream about traveling. Right? You dream you are traveling and you are not home yet.
You are dreaming and dreaming and dreaming and dreaming. Then you wake up and say, "Oh, I was home the whole time. I was just dreaming that I was not home."

It is like realization. You are going along in the conscious mind, in this case. Dream is in the subconscious mind, of course. When we wake up, we are in the conscious mind. So in this case, we are in the conscious mind and we are thinking, "We are not realized, we are not realized, we are not realized, we are not realized, we are not home and then all of a sudden we wake up and say, "Oh, you know, I've been home the whole time!"

What does that mean? It means there is more than one sense of reality. When we are dreaming, our dream is real. Right? Totally real, we are certain that we are traveling and then as we get near waking up we start to doubt the reality of our dream, "Wait a minute, I think I have to go to work soon. Maybe I am dreaming."

We start to doubt the reality of what we have been experiencing as we start to come out of this. Then, we wake up and we are in a different reality in the conscious plane and say, "Oh, I was home all the time and I have to go to work. Glad I woke up."

We are used to dealing with two different realities all the time, our dream state and our waking state. If we take the waking state as the dream and the realization of Parasiva as waking up, that is the analogy. We are going along in the conscious mind, we are going, we are going, we are going, we are going, and we are moving closer and closer to the Self. Then one day, we are going to get there. It is like we are going to get home. When you wake up by realizing it, you say, "Oh, you know, I was there all the time."

That is the thought for the morning on moksha. We are there all the time.