Self-Realization

Our own Self-realization is the greatest service we can render the world.
-Ramani Marharshi (https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/self-realization)

So the best thing we can offer the world is our own realization of Self which in a sense is enlightenment, waking up and finally becoming aware. 

What is Self -realization?

Yet what is this thing we call self realization or awareness of Self?  We can't seek it or ever get "there".  We can't define it with words or concepts?  We can't understand it with the mind?

WTF (front door)?

How are we going to realize Self when we don't even "know" what  Self-realization  is?

The Mind that Wants an Answer

Ahhh!  But it is the mind that poses that question.  It is the mind that wonders what it is. It is the  mind that occasionally slips beneath ego's veil for just a second to attempt to curiously peek at the this "consciousness thing." It is the mind that needs to seek, attain and then  describe and explain awareness.  Isn't it?

It is also the mind that personalizes everything, the mind that needs to create images and stories about who we are.  It creates an idea of self  in lieu of knowing Self. That idea of self is wrapped in "I" and "me" and "mine".  It is wrapped in a need to do, achieve, attain, cling, defend and attack for anything it perceives as belonging to the "my story"... including awareness.  It is the mind that has to narrate, explain and conceptualize our living. It is the mind that has to conceptualize self.

Yet by conceptualizing self it fails to realize Self.  The self it explains is not the Self we need to live in order to serve the world. Anything that can be explained by the mind is not truly realized.

A name that can be named is not a lasting name. (translation of Tao Te Ching by P.J. McLaggan, 1898....http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm.)

The self we think we are is not the Self we are.  We are so much more than that story we use to define and explain our limited versions of "me".

So what do we do to become Self - realized?

We get beyond the mind.  We put away our need to explain and use concepts to understand.  We accept that this thing we may call enlightenment  cannot be explained...it cannot be sought after...it cannot be found somewhere in the future.  It just is.  So we simply open up and allow  this "isness" which is simply the here and now to be.

We recognize the mind and what the mind does.  We understand its 'crazy' nature. We do not try to stop the thinking or necessarily control it.  We just look beneath it to what is there. We sit in stillness and silence with it,  knowing that we cannot narrate our way through what we may find.  It is beyond words, beyond explanations and the limited ability of the mind to understand.

Self is here where it always was and always will be.  It isn't going anywhere. All we can do is live it, experience it, feel it and be it...We simply be what we always were and will always be.  The mind can't take us there but we can be here.

That is self-realization.

All is well.