Believe omniscient, omnipotent, pervading.
- The practice: sit with eyes closed; FEEL — not just think — that you are not the body; let it melt and dissolve. Only with the bodily limitation gone does the feeling of all-pervadingness become accessible. From that felt ground, the belief ‘omniscient, omnipotent, pervading’ finds its footing.
- ‘Omniscient’ does not mean knowing all facts (Jesus did not know the earth was round; Mahavir’s cosmology contradicts science — neither were omniscient in that sense, and it is irrelevant). It means all questions have dropped, all curiosity gone: inner silence filled with inner light. Subjective awakening, pure quality of knowing — not accumulation of objective knowledge. [Q&A fold-in] Science deals in facts (objects), religion in truth (your consciousness); the enlightened freely use the prevalent — even mistaken — factual knowledge of their day and are to be judged only by what they say of inner truth.
- ‘Belief’ here is NOT rational conviction (backed by proof, won in argument). Belief = absence of doubt — felt, not proven. Like placebo medicine: 30% of patients heal on pure belief regardless of which treatment is used. Those who CAN believe are condemned by rationalist culture as naive, but they are the most transformable. Doubt-based intellectuals who run universities are, in the realm of inner being, impotent.
- Fire-walking: Buddhist monks spend one full year hammering ‘I am not the body’ until it reaches the core of their cells — then they dance on fire for hours unhurt. The Oxford professor of logic walked without hesitation when the reality of it gripped him ecstatically — also unhurt. The Christian missionary hesitated, half-believed in Jesus but half-doubted — was badly burned and hospitalized for six months. The burning was the exact measure of the doubt.
- The key is zero hesitation. The disciple walking on water toward Jesus: the moment he asked ‘How is this happening?’ he sank. The ‘How?’ is doubt; doubt rebuilds the bridge between mind and limitation. Faith drops all questions — not because it has answers, but because it no longer needs them.
- [Q&A fold-in] ‘If faith can move mountains, why can’t you heal your own body?’ misunderstands what omnipotence means here. The enlightened person is a pure witness to the body; the body belongs to the universe and takes its own course. Illness and health are not in their domain. The real mountain that faith moves is identification with the body — that is far harder than the Himalayas. After enlightenment, the co-operation between consciousness and body is broken; the body runs on past momentum alone, and may become more illness-prone, not less. This last life must also burn all karmic accounts at condensed intensity. Ramakrishna died of cancer; Raman died of cancer — not failure, but natural completion. Witnessing one’s own death without identification is the true miracle.