Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

on me. I was barely aware of the world. Everything
was only the deadness inside.
One may ask, “How can anyone be depressed if no
Self was experienced?” To that I can only answer that
even if there were no Self experienced, there was just
the experience of deadness of emotion, the absence of
any emotion except grief, and that the experiential
world had become very dark, as if wearing perpetual
sunglasses everywhere.
In any event, in 2000, I entered a UCLA medication
study of the effectiveness of a new drug for the
treatment of depression, and the depression was gone
within six weeks. The darkness lifted; light returned
to my world and heart.
This all goes to prove that you can have realized
no-self, oneness, and even realize that oneness is not
real, but the darkness and heaviness of depression can
still pervade the body-mind. Emotions and moods
continued to manifest, spread, and then pass away.
They happened to consciousness, not to Ed, in the
same way that cancer or heart disease is not cured by
awakening.
By 2003, for the first time, I felt a movement to
share Robert’s teachings with the world and put up the
website http://www.itisnotreal.com , which eventually grew