What Is Dissolution?
The Datta Path involves complete dissolution. To dissolves means that we cease to exist as an individual, as a unit. What dissolves into what? Our illusory sense of individuality, which is generated through our constant ‘I’-based thought activity, is dissolved into the all-pervasive consciousness that is the substratum reality of everything that exists.
Consciousness is never far away. Without consciousness we wouldn’t be able to be conscious of ourselves in any way whatsoever. However, presently our consciousness is mixed with the feeling of limited individuality, which is produced through thinking. When that limited individuality is dissolved, only consciousness remains.
Awakening Is the Beginning
In order to dissolve back into consciousness, we first must re-awaken to the feeling of simply being consciousness. This is the stage of awakening where we realise that we are not what we have always taken ourselves to be. For most of our lives we assume that we are a separate embodied being that is consistently designated, through thinking, by the thought ‘I’. However, awakening happens when we realise that there is no actual ‘I’ sitting within us at all; our ‘I’-based thoughts do not, in actuality, point to anything substantial. What exists is simply consciousness and various thoughts that appear within it.
Stabilisation in the Natural State
Once we have awakened to ourselves as consciousness, ‘I’-based thoughts may still continue. However, our sense of newly awakened consciousness will tend to eclipse these thoughts and make them feel lighter and more illusory. The path of dissolution begins when we start to become more and more stable in our identity as pure consciousness. As this happens, thoughts will become subtler, weaker and more infrequent. In short, through consistently dwelling in the state of pure consciousness, which is a state of mental silence, all of the seeds of our limited ‘I’-based thinking are incinerated.
Breaking Bodily Identification
As is process goes on, our attachment to the body will continue to reduce. Eventually, we will come to see the body as no more than a garment that our consciousness dresses itself in in order to have an earthly experience. As this separation of consciousness from the body advances, we will also cease to be bound to the limited experience of a single physical body. We will merge into very fabric of all-pervasive consciousness and naturally gain the ability to experience ourselves as everything. It in this state of all-pervasiveness that the capacities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence are spontaneously awakened.
The dissolution process is complete when the drop of individuality is completely lost in the ocean of universality. At this point it is impossible to recover that sense of individuality. We have become the ocean.