Full Self-realization contains both the inner Being as the Absolute, as well as the world in which all of that relativeness sits. If there is mere Self-realization that is the state of someone who has not completed the spiritual process. The spiritual process is only completed upon the recognition that everything relative and Absolute together comprise the Self. It’s a state of Divine Upanishadic unity Consciousness, the kind of unity Consciousness that is described in several of the Upanishads. Both relative and Absolute arise within the same foundational framework of Absolute Consciousness.
Most questions about Self-realization proceed from this basic misunderstanding that there is a separation between the Self and the world. When you first attain the Self you go beyond the world, but that first attainment is not the end attainment. The end attainment is when the Self swallows the world in grand unity, when both subject and object are immersed in the transcendental reality while maintaining their distinctness and their individual expression. The world continues. The changing relative creation continues by virtue of the Shakti that creates and maintains it while at the same time the attention is immersed in the transcendental Absolute that goes beyond the world.
The only time the transcendental Absolute becomes pronounced and overwhelming is in the initial stages, in the first recognition or recognitions. Eventually, it falls away. It falls away out of the primacy of attention and enters into the background mind, not the foreground mind. The background mind becomes identified completely with the Absolute. That’s what’s meant by absorbing that ‘I’ thought once and forever. That’s what that metaphor points to, that the ‘I’ thought is gravitationally submerged in the Self. The Self eats that individual feeling at a distinctly subtle level of the mind. But, what needs to still happen is that the Absolute non-dual core begin to radiate like a sun and consume everything, the body, the attention, the relative thinking mind, the emotions, everything. Everything must be swallowed in that. Then there will be only perfect unity, the unity which tolerates the imperfection of change. It can’t be perfect until it’s paradoxical.
