The fruition of your spirituality is to fully understand your own true nature, to stabilize in your true identity. Ultimately, everything merges in the Self. You will transcend that beingness, and you, the Absolute, will know that you are also not that beingness, that consciousness. Beingness is transcended, but beingness will still be available. In the deep sleep state the beingness, the 'I amness' goes into oblivion, you forget yourself. The 'I amness' comes and goes in the waking and deep sleep states, but the Absolute remains unaffected by that. The true state, which is whole, undifferentiated, is beyond birth and death. Be friendly with your undifferentiated state, your true Self. There was never any division, but you are under the delusion that you are not one with it. You are never bound by body and mind. You are limitless. You, the Absolute are aloof, you are beyond any experience. In the absence of the basic concept 'I am' there is no thought, there is ...
Now, the perception of this truth must happen suddenly with the deepest conviction and the most urgent immediacy. It is not a matter of developing understanding through reasoning over a period of time, but it is a sudden shock of timeless apprehension, an instantaneous cessation of the mind process in which thinking is suspended and intuitive awareness dawns. Then, after this seed of apprehension has been planted and has taken root, the deliverance from the imagined bondage will proceed on its own course, in its own time. Once you are thoroughly convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the object with which you had identified yourself all this time is really only a phenomenon, having neither independence nor autonomy... that it is merely a dreamed figure, an appearance without substance, seen as a phenomenal object through the dualistic minds of other sentient objects regarding themselves as subjects... and that this shadow can have neither bondage nor liberation... then you as cons...
Though it is true that the world is a figment of our imagination, like the snake, and that brahman is the reality underlying its false appearance, just as the rope is the reality underlying the false appearance of the snake, this application of this analogy fails if we try to extend it further by inferring that just as the snake will be found to be a rope if we look at it carefully, the world will be found to be brahman if we look at it carefully. No matter how carefully we scrutinise the world or any other second or third person object, their illusory nature and the true nature of their underlying reality will not be revealed, because by attending to them we are sustaining and perpetuating their seeming reality. Their unreality will be revealed only if we scrutinise the first person, the ego, which is the false foundation upon which their seeming existence rests. – Michael James Happiness of Being Note: In this explanation...