The Journey From Many To One

The other two pages show what I build and how I think. This one is where both come from.

The way of seeing those pages run on reaches its limit here, where the one who sees and what is seen are no longer two. What remains is not something perceived; it is what all of this already is:

I spent five years living in a Hindu monastery (ashram), in the study and practice of yoga and Advaita Vedanta. Yoga is how you prepare and quiet the mind; Vedanta is how you see clearly that the real you is already free, whole, and one with reality. The path of knowledge (jnana) works through inquiry.

There, I learned the practice of self-inquiry, along with the discipline. Over time, the effortful “Who am I?” or “Who is this I that thinks, feels, and acts?” yielded to abiding in awareness. The line between inside and outside, for me, has always been thin, and this inquiry deepened into a more intentional relationship with action, detachment, and discrimination. One in which one learns to act without attachment to the results of that action. To work for change without requiring the change to happen.

This intense inner work brings about, over time, a kind of reversal. Progress turns out not to be a matter of gaining anything, but of removing what limits us, the identifications we had taken to be ourselves.

There is nowhere the Reality lies, and no direction toward it. Not far and then near, not missing and then found. As those identifications fall away, the luminosity that was always there shines forth on its own, lit by nothing outside it. In that light the line we had drawn between inside and outside thins and goes, and what looked like two is one.

In that light, what is true is self-evident. It shows itself, and no longer has to be argued into place. And what is found this way does not stay private; it turns back outward, toward others, and becomes something useful.