The Fourth Step in the Spiritual Journey
How, Why, What, and Where is this Experience?
How does experience happen? Noting much is required to be mentioned about how does an experience happens. We all know through the various objects. All kinds of objects, even mental objects; as mentioned earlier, various categories of Mind such as Intellect, Imagination, Ego, Memory & Reflected Consciousness, are also capable of experiences.
The third step in the Spiritual Journey
What is this ego? It is such a wonder that just thought can create such a powerful illusion, which results in weaving multiple worlds based on this illusionary self. If we dig deep into this topic, we may find many fascinating theories and explaining the ego-self. In this context, I am sure many of us would have come across a popular theory, that there is just one mind - the universal mind and the individual minds are just reflections of that whole.
Side note in the Spiritual Journey
Thousands of books have already been written about the world, mind and body. Therefore, there is not much to say about them here, but mention is necessary.
In the play of Maya, the Spiritual journey is also one of the acts amongst many. But one of the best features of this act is that it shows a way out of this Maya. This game can be played only by Maya's instruments, so it is necessary to know a little about them, but we have to know about these instruments only as much as necessary so that it aids our progression in this journey. Otherwise, the study of these tools is so exciting and fascinating that it can make us fall into a beautiful trap of Maya, which would demand thousands of birth's effort to come out of it.
The second step in the Spiritual Journey
Soon after examining the steps of knowing self, the next step is to contemplate on this Self. If this is not the world, body or mind, what is this?
Before we proceed in contemplating on Self, the foremost and crucial aspect is to nullify the assumption of giving a human image to this Self. Human is one of the varied forms of this Self, so it can be a big spider as well if spiders were to walk in this path of knowing-Self. Maybe that is happening, who knows, anything is possible in this Maya. Many Vedanta scholars may disagree with this; I am not here to bring in a new theory of any sort, my only humble approach is to make it clear that when we mention Self, please do not put a human face to it.
The first step in Spiritual Journey
No wonder why thousands of births are also not sufficient to end this journey. And even after that, if we don't find anything (because chances are high :-)), in dejection, we claim and establish that there is no such thing as Self, and the world outside is the only truth. No one can be blamed for such a claim because we were systematically taught that what cannot be seen doesn't exist.
