How does one come to absolute illumination?
Forget about becoming enlightened.
Is there anything I should do instead?
Nothing! When you are doing nothing, looking for nothing, you are enlightened. You are light, you have always been light. You cannot become what you already are. We are all the same light. As long as you believe that you are an individual there might be a practice, but why stick to the notion that you are an individual? Once you jettison the notion that you are an individual, there is no practice.
If I want to drop the concept and be enlightened . . .
Drop both the concept of being an individual and the concept of being enlightened.
Will I not just get lost in the world without any concept of spirituality?
To be happy is to be spiritual. To be unhappy is not to be spiritual. Don’t worry about being happy. Just be happy.
If you were enlightened, would you still be on this earth?
I am not on this earth and neither are you. This earth is in you. I am not this body and you are not that body either. The body seems to be on this earth but the body is, in fact, in consciousness. This earth is also in consciousness. The mind, too, is in consciousness. That is the truth of our experience.
Your body is the form that channels this teaching, that relates.
The channel is not important. It is the origin of the message that is important. The message is that the origin of the message is not the channel, that the receiver of the message is not the receiving channel, and that the origin and the receiver of the message are one and the same.
If everything is God’s will, then whether we are happy or unhappy is not under our will. Likewise, would we have control over dropping concepts or not?
Your question is based upon the assumption that what you call “we” is a body-mind. If that is so, then what you say is true. However, we are much more than a body-mind. We are consciousness. As consciousness we have freedom. We are freedom. The question of free will sometimes seems unclear because there is a confusion of levels. Once the distinction is made between the level of consciousness and the level of body-mind, everything becomes clear. There is no freedom at the level of the body-mind. There is absolute freedom at the level of consciousness. That which is perceived is not free. That which perceives is freedom itself.
So are happiness or unhappiness, enlightenment or unenlightenment, all in the body-mind realm?
They are the body-mind realm. States are irrelevant to consciousness, just as a mirror is completely immune to the images that are reflected in it. They may be pleasant or terrible, but the mirror remains totally unaffected by the reflections. A violent scene reflected in the mirror is not going to destroy the mirror. That is the freedom of the mirror. The mirror is free from the images. This analogy enables us to understand the freedom of consciousness. Consciousness is the invisible, witnessing presence. It witnesses all states without being affected by any of them in any way.
All things ultimately point towards our presence. All states celebrate our presence. All states have the sole purpose of taking us back to our true nature and then, having recognized it, it is for us to celebrate our eternal freedom.
It feels as though it is something within.
If you are invited by the source, just say, “Yes.” Don’t ask questions. If you are not invited, that is fine also. Know that the source is still present even when it seems that you are not invited. Don’t make a distinction at that moment between a state in which you are invited and a state in which you are not. They are both states. Therefore, they are both reflections within the mirror. Don’t worry about states. Know that you are the mirror at all times. There is not one single moment when you are not what you are.
You say that we should just be happy, but it is challenging to be happy all the time.
It is not challenging to be happy. It is challenging to be unhappy. When you say that it is challenging to be happy, it suggests that happiness involves effort, constant vigilance, struggle. If we believe that happiness requires effort and struggle, it only perpetuates misery. Happiness is when we let go and let God. Liberate yourself from the belief that happiness is challenging. Think instead, “Misery is challenging. It requires a constant struggle to fulfill an ego that can never be fulfilled.”
That requires vigilance.
Vigilance sounds challenging to me! What about surrender, abandonment? Surrender your fear. Surrender everything you believe. You have to, sooner or later. You cannot take your belief systems with you when you pass away, so why not surrender them now? Surrender your beliefs from moment to moment. Discover the joy of living without attachment to any belief system. The attachment to beliefs such as, “Happiness requires effort,” or, “It is necessary to suffer in order to be happy,” is very deep. There are people who join monastic orders, renounce all their possessions, become celibate and give up everything except their notion of God. This notion of God becomes their dearest attachment. Human beings are the most attached creatures. In fact, belief systems are nothing. They are quite easy to let go of. They are just paper tigers! It is better to let them go right now and live happily forever after.
It seems as though the root of this sticky substance that makes bliss come and go is seeking some protection from the fear.
I don’t sell fear insurance! When you go on a skiing holiday or buy a Porsche, there is always some danger involved. When you start a relationship with someone, there is potentially big danger! When you eat food, it could be poisonous. Basically, life is dangerous but at the same time it is beautiful, it is interesting. If you travel to an exotic country, it is exciting precisely because it is exotic. There may be inconveniences but there is a thrill about it. Likewise, there is a thrill in this spiritual journey, the thrill of discovering your fear, going beyond it and, on top of that, there is no danger. In fact, it is the only thing in life that is not dangerous. Everything else threatens you at every moment. There is no risk. On the contrary, it will keep you safe! You have got it upside down. It is your current attitude that is dangerous. To take this interesting journey into this exotic land called “fear” is not dangerous.
***
You said that every state, inner and outer . . .
They are all inner, in consciousness.
. . . that every state is a celebration of happiness. However, if I met someone who is harming someone else in front of me, it seems anti-happiness.
Maybe it will touch a place of love in you, of compassion. Out of this compassion, some action will flow.
Is the harmful act itself love?
Yes, if the harmful act was necessary to ignite love and compassion in you. Ultimately, even hostility comes from love.
It hurts me to witness a harmful act.
You want the world to be different. Let us assume that you were given the power to erase the world as it is and reconstruct it as you would like it to be: no wars, no tyrants, no mosquitoes, no cancer, no pain, and everybody smiles. You would end up with something that is very boring, something with no flavor. Then you start adding a bit of salt and pepper and, at the end, you would be back where you started, having realized that it was perfect the way it was! The only reason that the world seems imperfect is because of death. As long as you believe in the reality of death, the world will be a problem. It will never be perfect. The problem is not suffering or misery, it is the belief that you are a body-mind and are therefore going to die. If you realize that death is not real then, somehow, the world will appear in a totally different light.
This doesn’t mean that you are going to go out and kill people, nor does it prevent you from taking part in any action that by common standards would be compassionate, such as finding a cure for cancer. The chances are that most of your behavior would be compassionate, but there will be no inner fear, no inner burden, no inner misery.
I am still having trouble imagining how a person actually harming someone else could be a bit of spice in life.
That is because you believe in persons. In order to find the possible explanation for such an event, look at the events that have taken place in your own life. You have been subjected to harm by other people, by nature, illnesses, situations, loved ones having problems. If you think about it, you will see that the outcome of all these events was to take you to the inquiry that you are conducting now, to give you the maturity to investigate your true nature. If you look at things that way, you understand that all events in your own life were necessary to make you grow, to take you closer to happiness. Once you understand that in your own case, you don’t have the same judgment about what you see happening around you, because what is true for you is true for all of us. There are two ways to interpret events. One is at face value, as you have been doing, and this is the perspective of the individual, based upon the existence of personal entities, personal doers. The other way is that there is only one doer, which is God, and that everything is God unfolding. God apparently doing harm to another person is only this movement towards light, towards happiness. It doesn’t mean that when facing a situation involving another person, we are going to remain passive. On the contrary, we may take remedial action but, deep inside, we are not affected. It is precisely this which enables us to take the right action, because our interpretation is not colored by the sense of being a separate individual. As a result, we are not angry with the one who is violent because he is in fact also a victim, just like the victim of the violence. They are both learning and we are also learning. There is only learning.
If there is no one here, why should there be an individual who has to go through a process of achieving anything?
Ultimately, there is no individual. There is only the appearance of an individual. It is a play. There is no King Lear and no Hamlet in reality but, for the purpose of the play, there is King Lear or Hamlet. We are talking about two different levels and we shouldn’t confuse them.
How do I face the fear of death?
Start with any feeling of fear and welcome it completely, without naming it. If a fear comes with a particular association, for example, “I am afraid of elevators,” and we inquire into the origin of this fear, we soon realize that the idea of elevators is merely an attribute that is superimposed onto the essential fear. The fear itself stands on its own, independent of any cause. It is a fundamental feeling. This unnamed root fear is the pure fear of disappearance, fear of death. As we go more profoundly into this welcoming, we realize that this fear is very deeply rooted in the body, and it can reveal itself intensely as panic. It is based on the I-thought and the I-feeling, such as, “I am separate” or, “I don’t want to disappear.” “I” as a personal entity doesn’t exist. Its sole existence is the I-thought or the I-feeling in the body. Apart from thinking and feeling “I,” along with all the adjuncts such as, “I am a woman,” “I am happy,” “I am unhappy,” “I am afraid,” “I” as a separate entity has no real existence.
We have surrounded ourselves with all these adjuncts and activities in order to perpetuate ignorance, to perpetuate the illusion that we are separate. The moment that we start looking at this bundle of thoughts and feelings, which we call the ego or the person, from an impersonal perspective, just facing it without any attachment, with loving, benevolent curiosity, it starts unfolding. It starts going back to peace, layer after layer, until we reach the ultimate level of fear, the root fear. Then, beyond that, there is the “I,” a little thing, a poor thing, the crying child, the basic mistake. This is the mistake from which all other mistakes arise: the identification of consciousness, which is understanding these words right this moment, with a perceived object, with the I-thought or the I-feeling. The mind cannot go to that root because it is itself a perceived object made of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The mind is perceived. That which perceives it is beyond it. That is free forever. That is our true nature, our true identity.
I am very lazy. I love the idea that I don’t have to do anything, and yet if I don’t do anything and just sit at home . . .
Your understanding of “doing nothing” is incomplete. “Doing nothing” doesn’t mean not doing anything that your ego dislikes. For instance, “not making any effort” means to understand that thinking in most cases is an effort, that everything, any action, thought, or feeling that comes from the notion that you are separate, is an effort. To stop all effort means to stop all action, thought, or feeling that comes from conflict, from a fragment, from fragmentation. The only way it can be stopped is by understanding that such a thought, activity, or feeling cannot take you to happiness. As long as you have the slightest belief that personal activity can take you to happiness, you will keep generating such activities. You have to be totally convinced, and then you will find yourself in a state that is very innocent, that could almost be described as a state of stupidity, because when the mind goes silent it feels stupid. However, in this case, the stupidity has been brought about by the highest understanding. You just stay there and from there, magically, you know all you need to know, you receive all you need to receive and you give all you need to give. In this knowing, receiving, and giving, there is great happiness, living from moment to moment in unknowing.
Immense effort that comes from love and that creates suffering may not be personal. Is that all right?
That which comes from love is surrender, not effort. It is the surrender of resistance. It may seem from the vantage point of an external observer that it requires immense effort, but the inner experience is one of flowing with love. When you fly on the wings of love there is no effort. You soar.
Peace, the Universal Container
Is meditation an activity?
Although in this perspective, meditation is understood as that which we are at all times, it is sometimes referred to, in a more relative sense, as a period of time during which we sit in silence and are present without intention to whatever appears in our awareness. However, it would be wrong to construe this as a practice, as an activity motivated towards a goal. On the contrary, it is the complete lack of any motivation in this experiment that enables us to become aware of the motivated activities of the body and mind, of which we are normally unaware. All kinds of subliminal efforts and tensions may come to the surface in this silence. However, when these efforts and tensions appear, they are of course felt as our present experience. Therefore, they may fool us into thinking that sitting in silence in this way is actually an effort or a tension that we are doing or creating in that moment. In fact, the opposite is true: we are not making any effort, and it is precisely because of this, that efforts and tensions of which we were previously unaware, come into the light of our awareness.
That is all that needs to happen. If we were to do anything about these efforts and tensions, then that would indeed be an effort! We would be adding another layer of effort.
Is this why it is said that there is nothing to do?
It is true that there is nothing to do but, as a person, we do not have a choice to do or not to do. It is important to understand clearly what is meant by, “There is nothing to do.” We have to be careful of thinking that, as a person, there is nothing we can do, because the person is already an activity, a contraction within consciousness. The person is not an entity. It is an activity. Therefore, to say in this case, “I have nothing to do,” betrays the fact that we have not yet understood that we are already doing something. This insistence that there is nothing to do as a person, yet at the same time feeling that one is a person, is one of the subtler ways in which the ego, the activity of thinking and feeling oneself to be person, a separate entity, maintains itself.
Of course, when we understand that the person is a thought or a feeling with no independent volition or capacity for action, then the question of doing or not doing doesn’t arise. The person can never do or not do anything, because it is a perceived object. If we think and feel that we are a person, we cannot say at the same time that we are not doing anything. The person is an activity, the activity of t
hinking and feeling that we are separate, limited entities. It is not an entity. Of course, it is important not to add any further activity to this activity of thinking and feeling that we are a separate entity, and this is what is meant by “not doing.” In this case, in our welcoming presence, all these subtle activities of which we were previously unaware will come to the surface layer after layer, and gradually the system will go back to normal.
What do you mean by transparency?
Sometimes during meditation, it is suggested that you make simple movements of the body and, in this case, “transparency” is a term that is used to indicate a movement that is free from volition and resistance. When we want something, we often maintain its opposite. We reject, we resist what is. For instance, if we want something new to happen, it is often because we don’t want what is currently happening, so the desire and the resistance are part of the same movement. Wherever there is this sort of volition, there is also resistance. Therefore volition is violent in some way, because it has to overcome this resistance. A motion that doesn’t have volition is organic. If we want something and thereby maintain its opposite, there is some waste of energy in this movement. It is not functional. It is not organic. At the level of feelings, we are aware of the resistance as well as the effort necessary to overcome it. We are so used to feeling resistance and to overcoming it without noticing it, that it feels natural. It is the presence of this resistance that generates a lack of transparency. If, during any activity, we are completely present at every moment, any resistance that we encounter is unable to become established and is therefore dissolved.
It is a gradual process in which the body is purified of tensions, and this in turn dissolves the impression that there is a doer of our movements. The resistance and the effort to overcome it, create the impression of a doer. When the movement is transparent, there is no longer an apparent doer. It is enough to be aware of the resistance without having to get rid of it. In order to become aware of the resistance, it is suggested that you make the movement as transparent as possible.
The Perfume of Silence Page 19
