Advaita Vedanta - Being the Self

The story of my life is nothing more than a long journey, from what I believed myself to be to what I truly am. It is a tale of transcending the personal and the universal, the partial and the total, the illusory and the real, the apparent and the true. My life is a flight beyond the temporal and the eternal, darkness and light, the human and the divine. This story is not public but profoundly private and intimate.

Only what begins, ends; only what starts, finishes. One who lives in the present is neither born nor dies, because what lacks a beginning never ends.

I am the disciple of a seer, an enlightened being, somebody who is nobody. I was initiated in my spiritual childhood by the moonlight. A seagull who loved flying more than anything else in life inspired me. In love with the impossible, I crossed the universe obsessed with a star. I have walked infinite paths, following the footsteps of those who saw.

Like the ocean that longs for water, I sought my home within my own house.

Jnana literally means "knowledge, wisdom, understanding, or cognition," and refers to existential knowledge. The Greeks called this revealing power gnosis. The word yoga means "union." Thus, jñana-yoga is a path that aims to realize the essential unity of the part and the Whole through knowledge. It is one of the four classical yogic methods of development. It leads to the dissolution of ignorance and to the revelation that the world is an illusory projection and our true nature is Brahman.

Jnana-yoga is closely related to Advaita, the branch of Vedanta that recognizes a single reality behind this universe of names and forms. This yogic system is the practical aspect of Vedanta. According to jñana, the Self (Atman) resides in every place and in every being.

This path of wisdom leads you to the discovery that the center of your existence is not only yours, but the center of all that exists; it is the Self, or consciousness. It suggests restructuring the Western concept of consciousness. From our dualist and relativist perspective, we believe consciousness to be a capacity or faculty that we possess. In fact, from the perspective of the Absolute, it is consciousness that possesses us. Consciousness does not belong to us; we belong to it.

**Contents and Sample Pages**