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Chapter 1: What is 'The Eye of Self Existence' about?
The Eye of Self-Existence That which is beginningless, ever existing and never dying, is the fountainhead and origin of all life and of all life in nature, in all worlds and systems, in all stars, planets, and galaxies. It is the origin of all life during the day of the Great Universe, which is the period of activity for every single being throughout the cosmos.
It is also equally and exactly the same during the night of non-manifestation, in which every being is reabsorbed, without knowing it, into the great bosom of the divine ground. that which includes all and yet itself is no thing, which is everything and nothing. Unthinkable, unspeakable, it is the soundless sound in the eternal silence.
that transcends all sounds and silences in the manifested worlds of nature, both visible and invisible. It encompasses the entire human kingdom and all the lives of all gods, monads and atoms. beings of every kind at whatever degree of awareness or knowledge.
Chapter 2: How does the concept of the Absolute transcend existence?
It is known to the person of meditation and sometimes in speech as that which is no thing or no being. It is no thing in space and time, nothing that is ever manifested, because it is eternally beyond manifest and non-manifest, being and non-being, day and night. It is the attributeless absolute, whose only predication is attributelessness. This, though a paradox of thought and of language,
is a poetical and metaphorical way of conveying what the Mandukya Upanishad calls unthinkable and unspeakable. And of which the Bhagavad Gita declares that which is remoter than the remotest is closer than the closest. Few fitter poetical depictions of it were offered than these lines of William Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
Chapter 3: What insights does Dr. Iyer provide on the nature of life and death?
Here is a way of recognising, revering, honouring and saluting but also conceiving the absolute without attempting to nail it down by leaden attributes. That which is attributeless has as many attributes as there are dainty flowers and diverse trees. The Sanskrit term Sat embraces the concepts of being, beingness and absolute truth.
Sat also encompasses the concept of universal absolute consciousness. Because the absolute, though it has neither consciousness nor desire, neither wish nor thought, is absolute thought, absolute desire, absolute consciousness, absolutely all. It is each of these, and yet it is beyond them all.
Which is why it cannot be limited by any single being or thing in relation to its vast, immemorial, variegated perception or perspective, vital experience or vocal description. It is beyond all of these inexplicable, inexhaustible and impossible of definition. It excludes nothing.
Chapter 4: How does meditation relate to understanding the Absolute?
It wants nothing. It lacks nothing. It needs nothing. It is all complete and it is unfettered. Neither earthquakes nor wars nor the ever-present cycle of destruction can have any mark or trace on it or in any way fetter the absolute. It is unconditional and beyond all conditions and yet it is in all conditions intact
complete, self-sufficient and utterly incapable of being touched or tainted, circumscribed or narrowed. It surpasses the vastest, infinite sum totals of objects and subjects in all possible worlds. It is that which is endlessly at work, behind anything and everything.
Chapter 5: What role does reverence play in recognizing the Absolute?
and therefore to be identified with the ultimate, unknowable mystery of the One Law, ceaselessly operating throughout the cosmos. It is ever behind every single change, every single movement, all the rhythms and patterns of all of nature in its intricate, inexhaustible vastness, on the invisible causal as well as the visible plane.
Therefore, it is ever capable of liberating anything and everything from conditionality. That liberation is known, if indeed we can talk of such knowledge, as the ending of embodied life, as a kind of death. Yet, in the absolute, there is neither birth nor death. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever saved. Nothing is ever begun. And nothing is ever ended.
Chapter 6: How can we cultivate a deeper connection with the cosmic heart?
Because everything that comes to be already exists in the absolute. Everything that ceases to be continues to remain in the absolute. to the highest minds of meditation, the greatest lovers of true wisdom, who have reached the pinnacle and summit of the loftiest conceivable altitude of philosophic thought. It is impossible to think about it except with reverence.
It is unapproachable except by cancelling all divisions between thought, will and feeling, between head and heart and every category of every school. All of them are dim, feeble and at best,
logically limited representations of existence and reality, which is itself only an irrelevant aspect of that which ever is, and therefore, by definition, can never emerge into existence and never cease to be. All of our efforts to cut up, to divide and analyze the absolute will fail. because it is that which can never be divided, can never be cut up.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of dialogue with the Absolute in our lives?
It cannot be extended, contracted, shrunk or swallowed. No spatial metaphor can begin to characterize its essential, indestructible property, rooted in ever-existing self-existence. It is not only the soul self-existent, but it is also inclusive of all that is existent at all levels.
If that is so, all words are merely invocations or petitions to burst the barriers and boundaries of finitude, fragmentation and limitation. To move towards the Absolute is continually to cancel and transcend every possible limit or characterization.
That is why the self-existent is apprehended by human beings more readily in silence than in speech, in states of non-being rather than in what seem to be modes of being in a body. Spatial terms obviously can have no possible reference to the absolute.
And yet, on the visible plane, both in the sky and in the sea, we have two conspicuous, all powerful representations of that which is incapable of limitation. that which is so deep and homogenous that it is incapable of being understood in terms of visible motion, movements and waves. No human being who has ever reflected upon the sky or sea
can fail to have some sense of what the absolute is like. No one who has ever reflected upon all the trees, all the birds upon this earth, all the animals, plants and minerals of every kind All the millions upon millions of elementals that ceaselessly dance in the Three Kingdoms can fail to recognize the immensity and richness of the Absolute even in the realm of the Manifest.
Few human beings make the effort of thought and imagination, which is the privilege and prerogative of being human. And think of the births of all babies on earth, not in numbers, but in terms of monad souls, taking bodies as part of one great pilgrimage. The ceaseless, eternal, endless pilgrimage of all humanity is older than universes and will go on long after this universe has been destroyed.
And yet, these pilgrimages themselves are like the winking of an eye in the ceaseless life of the I of the self-existence of the Absolute. It is only by developing a taste for silence in sound For the unmanifest within the manifest. For the unspoken within the spoken. The unrecorded within a world of frail and fugitive and often false recordings.
That we come closer to the heartbeat that makes us human. The Absolute is characterized as the supreme eternal heart of all existence. Because, although it is ever-present, it is at the same time never fathomable by thought or word. It is closer to us than anything we can ever say or think, just as there is nothing more fundamental than the beating of the heart.
And there is nothing around us that is more palpable, if only we would listen, than the beating of the cosmic heart. Great beings have always shown us how to tune ourselves to the great heart of the cosmos. That is called meditation. They are in ceaseless meditation at all times, in a state of supreme, total spiritual wakefulness known as Turiya.
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