Welcome – Know Your Self

Spiritual Enlightenment: the simple fact

This site is about the fact of “awakening”, or “enlightenment”, or “liberation” — whatever you want to call it. However there is no promise that reading this material will lead to any awakening.

That’s for several reasons. These include:

The you that wants to wake up is not the same you that is there after you wake up. That’s what awakening is.
It isn’t something you can get or hold or have. It’s a root and branch change in the self.
It’s not in our hands, it’s a sort of grace, that arrives when it arrives from wherever it comes, and is not gained through any merit.

You will find here some material that may help you to be prepared for awakening, when it inevitably arrives in its own time.

Why would you want to awaken?

After all, you won’t get anything out of it. You’ll get nothing at all — really, Nothing.

Some possible reasons:

This enlightenment results in experiencing life completely instead of being asleep
This awakening is an awakening from the dream of life lived at second-hand into the delightful freshness of the present dream moment
This liberation is the high point of life, and unlike other high points it is not high but low and does not end but is continuous, right now.

Yes, it is paradoxical. And enlightenment is not sainthood; life still serves up interesting situations to keep one engaged…

There’s no road to truth

The ideas held of it before it happened were mostly — necessarily — wrong. Jiddu Krishnamurti said,

…Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever…

This is indeed truth: there’s no path for anyone to get here. Nonetheless, it happened, happens and is happening. The change — happens.

We won’t be following J Krishnamurti, UG Krishnamurti, or anyone else. Nor is this religious. There’s nothing to join. It’s not a cult.

There’s no ‘teaching’, no ‘teacher’, and no ‘way’ on offer

The author is not a ‘spiritual teacher’. There’s nothing to pay. (If you buy a book that would help me, but I can’t promise it would help you).

I may however be able to help you see what you already see, but don’t see that you see. That’s what happened here — before the change, with a lot of work done, following guidance. I can’t point you to my guides, they are all dead now.

So why read this, if you can make no promises?

Did the work done here facilitate the change? That’s an unknown and can’t be proved, and if I claimed it did help, you would have no way of verifying that. Do you want to try doing the work and see what happens? Following the process outlined helped me, before I awoke.

But would I still be me if I awakened?

Everyone who awakens is different — they unveil their unique nature. You will be less what you are not and so more what you are; eventually you will no longer believe you are what you are not. That’s liberation.

Here’s a quote about that:

…every soul (is lead) differently, and you will scarcely meet with one spirit which agrees with another in one half of the manner by which it advances

Juan de Yepes y Álvarez: Juan de la Cruz c. 1586
¹

You don’t have to be a believer to get his point: in this, everyone is different — and yet the same.

What next?

What is presented here is for those that might find it useful, as some of what I did was very useful to me even before I got ‘enlightened’.

If you don’t find it useful, then please look elsewhere, with my best wishes.

There are some exercises you can do that can give you increased knowledge of your self, and what you really are — as long as you actually do them. It will probably take time, perhaps a lot of time. They won’t awaken you though. Put it this way: if you want to grow a crop, it’s good to prepare the ground. Doesn’t mean the seed will sprout…

But what else do you have to do that’s more important? If there is something more important, then you’ll be doing that instead. That’s how life works.

There’s an Introduction. Then there is the online version of the Book of Unlikely Clues. For practical action, there is the guide to being Being. And there’s an ongoing Blog and Notes. And now there is an actual book…

So – who wrote this?

The author is of no importance, but if you need to know more then look here.

Work in progress

This site is an experiment in how to make this work for me and for you, so changes or clarifications are likely as time goes on.

Also, it is increasingly clear here that ‘enlightenment’ is the first step, and not the last. Anything can happen 🙂

I have slightly altered the usual translation from the Spanish which in my judgement misses his point