Not everyone becomes Bill Gates if they adopt his life skills. Everyone’s life circumstances are different.+

Everyone has a story of success and failure. Everyone is most interested in sharing their story of success and failure with others.   People think that their success story can be applied to others who are less fortunate in their life to get success. Thus, they try to impose their idea of success on others by propagating their success story.  But they themselves are failures in recognizing the truth, because they are unaware of the fact that, their success story is based on the false self within the false experience.    

Not everyone becomes Bill Gates if they adopt his life skills. Everyone’s life circumstances are different. The circumstances whether they are good or bad come on their own and they disappear on their own.  Positive thinking only helps one to move ahead in time thinking and hallucinating the bright future, but the results may be favorable or unfavorable. Circumstances arise not because, of individual conduct or action.

A recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan affected many successful people. Many successful people lost their dear ones and wealth. All these circumstances of life come and go on their own. When the circumstances are favorable life goes on smoothly. But in unfavorable circumstances,   life becomes very hard and miserable. And there are also mixed circumstances which make us happy and also miserable. 

If a successful person becomes a failure in his dream and a failure person becomes a successful person in his dream, their dream becomes unreal when the waking takes place. In the same way, the waking also becomes unreal when one becomes aware of the fact that, the self is neither the waking entity nor the dream entity.  Whatever one sees, knows, believes, and experiences within the waking or dream experience is a falsehood. Self-Realization is necessary to realize “what is the truth” and “what is untruth”.

Favorable circumstances do not arise because of one’s positivity. And because of positive thinking, the circumstances will not change. Painful experiences of the past and fear of the future make one think negatively. 

Thinking positively it helps to keep away the future fear in the present nothing more. Thus, one has to understand and realize the fact that, these positive and negative circumstances do not depend on his doership because they arise on their own and they disappear on their own.

In life, everything happens on its own. No one can plan it. We did not plan our birth, it just happened. In the same way, our life is a package of unknown circumstances everything is happening on its own, whether they are good or bad.  

In the past, some sages introduced the concept of God to cast the burden of worldly suffering, so that everyone can divert their attention on the imaginary entity by indulging in prayers, worship, and orthodoxy,  and crossing the ocean of this-worldly suffering. Thus, the mass followed it and passed it from one generation to the next. So everyone inherited blind beliefs they imposed on their children, and they themselves indulge in priestcraft without verifying the validity of their own inherited belief system. 

 The truth is hidden by the orthodoxy in the name of protecting their God, and their religion is meant for those who are incapable of thinking deeply about their own existence and also it helps the people to adopt certain discipline, morals,s, and ethics in society with its code of conduct. 

Love was a religious tool it helps society to a certain extent.  Love and co-exist. People talk of love because they are deprived of it. It is impossible to love everyone. It is easy to say but difficult to practice in worldly life because everyone loves their own ego. Thus, this egoic love is temporary because the ego is a false self within the false experience.      

People have the notion that the more and more they gratify their senses for attaining worldly pleasures, the happier they will be is not true at all, because they think the physical self is the real self, therefore they are unaware of the fact that the Self is not physical, but 'Self' is the Spirit, which is present in the form of consciousness. 

Consciousness can stay with or without waking or dream.  Thus, it is time to realize their pleasure and suffering are limited to the waking experience, which is merely an illusion.

It is the illusory sense-pleasure that is responsible for the forgetfulness of the Self, which is in the form of consciousness, which results in one’s sorrows and sufferings.

Suffering is the reminder to search for the remedy to overcome the suffering caused by the ignorance of the true self. Pleasure is the cause of ignorance. But if the real self is realized, then, the illusion will not prevail as a reality.   

Why do mortals then become attached to worldly pleasures in the first place? 

It is the illusion that allures one to enjoy the mundane objects in a futile effort of satisfying the unceasing demands of his senses within the waking or dream. A person within the illusion becomes intoxicated with lust, greed, anger, attachment, false ego, enviousness, stubborn-mindedness, and their numerous variations within the illusion.

Consequently, the individual 'Self' gets caught in the illusory cycle of birth, old age, disease, and death within the illusion. This is an illusion, by which the consciousness is forgotten; emotional attachment and love of duality are born.

The ignorance of the true self is the cause of duality. The duality is the cause of illusion. The illusion is the cause of experiencing unreality as reality. Because of these pluralistic phenomena of illusory -vision, material happiness appears to be followed by sorrow. If there is laughter, there is a cry; if there is a birth, there is a death; if there is a rich, there is a poor; so on and so forth.

Everything in the waking or dream experience is in a state of constant flux; there can be found no everlasting happiness. The ego is in control of evil passions, evil intent, and duality.

Everyone wishes for happiness, pleasures, joy, peace, etc., and none asks for suffering, misery, etc. But in the wake of pleasure, there comes suffering. The pleasure and pain co-exist within the illusion. People do not understand this.  Therefore, there is necessary to realize the fact that the mind, which appears as a waking or dream is merely an illusion.

It is the attachment to the form of separate objects which keeps one from apprehending their unity, not the seeing of them. One has to think of both form and essence, by practice he must get to the stage where he can think of both simultaneously. This is done by knowing that the form is made of consciousness, which is the true Self. This requires sharp intelligence and constant repetition of practices of seeing both form and essence at the same time.

False and true knowledge exists only when one talks on the base of the ‘ego’: when one knows the truth, however, such classifications cannot arise because everything is then known to be the consciousness, and no questions of where and how or why can arise.

One must make an effort to know consciousness as self. Consciousness is there always. One has got it, there is nothing new to be acquired, only have the sharpness to grasp and understand it, when told about it. But there is a difference between understanding and realization.

An effort is required for this understanding only, whereas once understood no special effort is needed to remember one understands.  

Until then he only has an idea of the soul, which is in the form of consciousness he only partially understands. But once he thoroughly grasps what it is and that all these things are consciousness, he will then constantly find it present everywhere without further effort, because he will perceive consciousness by understanding, even in the midst of the waking experience.

When there is only one thing (consciousness) known, there is nothing to change, nothing to appear or disappear; when one speaks of remembering or forgetting Consciousness that implies he believes in the existence of something else, i.e. a second thing, which is to be remembered. That would show you have not known that all is one. But knowing it, there is no second, consequently no intermittent perception of consciousness, but a permanent effortless understanding that it alone is.

When one gets a glimpse of truth mentally try to repeat it a number of times to establish it. The self must raise itself by the Self."

Beginners and intermediates must indulge in listening, reading, writing and discussing, and constantly reflecting on the subject. Discussing other than the “Self” is a waste of time. Discussion of accumulated knowledge and intellectual speculation satisfies only those who want to exhibit their skills of playing with the words.  Thus, it is better to avoid such a discussion about who is more interested in exhibiting their accumulated dross and less interested in moving forward in their pursuit of truth.    Only through deeper self–search on his own, does one becomes receptive to Self-knowledge or Brahma Gnana or Atma Gnana. 

The seeker has to realize the fact that, the imagination is cannot transport him or her to the non-dual destination. He has to attain a state where he can negate all ideas and imagination, which are part of the duality [waking/dream]. Therefore, he has to know and grasp mentally the  Soul, the Self is the witness of the three states. 

When this new idea of the Soul, the Self, which is the witness is formed in the subconscious, it will help to replace the old idea of the physical witness, the same way as --One thorn pulling out the other thorn and both thrown away--that is the only way.  and hence seeker of truth has to “think deeply and discriminate between the base of ego and base of the soul to get un- contactable truth “as a tip against getting misled by others.

One has to differentiate between understanding the spiritual truth and realizing the spiritual truth. The former makes to know with certainty; the latter is ultimate realizing and final with firm conviction.:~Santthosh Kumaar