Inner longing to know the truth, sharpness to grasp and courage to accept the truth leads one to Self-awareness.+

As we keep digging deeper and deeper, the truth will shine as pure awareness in the midst of the duality (waking).

The Soul, the Self is our ultimate teacher. It is only our inner teacher who will walk with us to the goal, for the soul is the goal. Millions are searching for truth but one in a million will realize it.

Deliberate daily exercise in discrimination between real and unreal and renunciation of the false is real renunciation. 

Truth is One; It is called by different names. All people are seeking the same Truth..... Everyone is going toward the ultimate goal. They will all realize the ultimate truth or Brahman if they have sincerity and longing to realize it.

Bhagavan Buddha:~It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell. 

Inner longing to know the truth, sharpness to grasp, and courage to accept the truth leads one to Advaitic Self-awareness. 

People have immersed themselves in ignorance and experience the illusion or Mayaas a reality, and they do not exert themselves to know the reality of the true existence.  

By clinging to things unreal they think of their experience of birth, life, death, and the world as reality. 

By quoting the scriptures and sacrificing to the gods, performing rituals, and worshiping the deities, there is no freedom without the realization of one’s identity with the Soul, the Self, which is present in the form of consciousness.

There is no hope of immortality through riches.  Action or inaction cannot be the cause of freedom because inaction also is action and action and inaction are part of the duality. 

People think by using lesser words or by keeping silent the truth emerges on its own, but they keep hoping and remain in the prison of duality.

The seeker of truth has to strive his best for freedom from experiencing the illusion as a reality and fix his attention on the formless substance and witness of the three states. 

The formless substance and witness are one in essence. That essence is consciousness. Consciousness alone is real and eternal,  and it is the source of the mind, which rises as the universe and subsides back as consciousness.

Remember:~

A person who declares himself as self-realized is not Self-realized, because, he is unaware of the fact that he is not the Self but the Self is the Soul.

A person who realizes the ultimate truth or Brahman will never declare he is self-realized. If a person says he is Self-realized he is still ignorant.

If you think you are Self-realized, but you still say "I," and if you feel the ‘Self’ is the ‘I’, you are not a Gnani. You are simply ignorant of your accumulated dualistic intellectual knowledge accumulated from here and there.

Upanishad says ~ "He who thinks he knows, does not know." This means that to know anything implies a second, an object of knowledge, hence duality, i.e. no Gnana.

Ashtavakra Samhita: ~ "The man of knowledge (Gnani), though living like an ordinary man, is contrary to him, and only those like him understand his state.

A person who realizes the ultimate truth or Brahman will throw off his religious robe and all religious identity and live like a commoner. He never identifies himself as Gnani nor does he identify himself as superior to others. He only shares his knowledge with fellow seekers.

A Gnani never identifies himself as a Guru or a Yogi or someone disciple. The one who accepts himself as a Guru or someone’s disciple is not a Gnani.

There is no liberation for a person of mere bookish -knowledge, howsoever well-read in the philosophy of Vedanta, so long as one does not give up the false identification with the body, sense organs, etc., which are unreal.

Even friends and family members of a Gnani will not know him as the Gnani. Due to ignorance, people will not be able to recognize a Gnani. Outwardly the Gnani behaves as an ordinary person behaves.

A Gnani talks and jokes like others, but he is not understood as he really is. People may regard him as an exceptional person, but only a few can recognize him as a Gnani.

Sage Sankara himself said: ~ A Gnani "bears no outward mark of a holy man" (Stanza 539).

Thus, it proves that the intellectual pundits who declare themselves they are self-realized, the religious Gurus and yogis are not Gnanis because they identified themselves as holy people. : ~ Santthosh Kumaar