Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

life situations where our feelings would be hurt and
our concepts about living would be challenged. Many
people left him and the sangha rather than face these
feelings. Few stayed to participate in their own
deconstruction.
Other teachers, such as Siddharameshwar, focused
only on meditation, on the ‘I-thought’, or ‘I-feeling’,
promoting a progressive penetration through the
concepts of the mind; as well as other levels of mind,
such that they found the void or they found the Self.
Then What? Unless that discovery was applied to
the student’s everyday life, they were still a very
conventional person leading a very conventional life,
and therefore a very unfree life.
Unlike most spiritual teachers, I think it is just as
important to escape from the conceptual
conventionality of everyday life: family, career,
politics, etc., and to go beyond them entirely, as it is
to escape from the "spiritual" beliefs that we are
human beings based in bodies and minds, as opposed
to being something entirely beyond. As long as one has
the conventional belief of being a human, in a body, in
a career, one cannot possibly do the full escape into
the unknown and into the Self.
Those teachers living outside of conventionality are
often referred to as “avadhuts.” One very famous and