Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

entity in us, like a soul that ate rice. We are saying the
collective of our body: all its processes, our mind, the
personality that is us, our behaviors, all our abilities,
for a moment yesterday, sat down and ate food.
As Ramesh Balsekar stated, we are a body/mind
mechanism, or entity, not just an ‘I-thought’ or ‘I-
sense’ although they are part of it. It is this totality
that falls in love, marries and has children, gets up at
7:00 am and goes to work, and struggles all day to
meet deadlines, then comes home to pay bills and
watch television. It is not an ‘I-thought’ or ‘I-object’
that does all of this.
Now we can say that the world is an illusion
because we found no entity to which the ‘I-thought’
pointed to; therefore there was no dichotomy between
the inner and the outer, and we realize that all of us
impose patterns of order, of thought and concepts onto
the external world that we have learned to survive.
This does not remove our experience of an ever-
changing presence or substance, which may no longer
have an interpretive map of thought, but certainly
exists in the sense that there is always some
appearance or another in front of us.
Robert Adams referred to this appearance as
illusion because none of it was permanent and is
dependent upon us, our sentience and our ability to