Diamond Heart

Hanging Loose

The process of freeing oneself can be seen from two complementary and interconnected points of view. The first looks at the process as self-realization, which is called self-actualization or essential development. The other point of view sees the process as liberation or freedom. Which perspective you emphasize depends on what you are aware of in yourself. There are two contenders for your attention: essence and personality, your true nature and your acquired identity. From the perspective of essence, self-realization means realizing or developing one’s essence. From the perspective of liberation, the process is seen as becoming free from the personality. In our work, these two developments go on simultaneously; they are actually one process. In the past, different systems have emphasized one or the other to the extent that at first glance they may appear contradictory. Sometimes conflicts arise because of the terminology. Those who are on the path to self-realization say, “Just realize yourself, develop your inner potential. What is this enlightenment business? There’s no such thing.” Those who are seeking liberation or enlightenment say, “What is self-realization? There’s no self to be realized. The concept of self is what you need to get rid of.”

So now we will explore further the perspective of liberation and freedom.

It does not matter what essential state exists in the experience of liberation. If you are free from personality, you are free no matter what the state is. In the state of liberation the content of experience becomes unimportant. It is very ordinary. Nothing specific happens, no huge realization or mind-shattering experience. It is the most natural state.

When your mind is free, not concerned, or worried, or focused on anything in particular, and your heart is not grasping or clinging to anything, then you are free.

Being liberated means there is no clinging to anything; there is no worry, no concern, no heaviness. The mind is not fixated, focused or bound to any particular content; you are aware of whatever arises in the mind, without effort, without even trying to be aware.

But because of our early experiences, our minds become set in a certain direction, so that we fixate on a certain part of reality and reject the rest. This selectivity is the loss of the state. It occurs very early in life, but

the fixation doesn’t usually become dominant until age five to seven.

Essence will be there freely in whatever way your being needs at that moment, but still the presence of essence is not your focus, it’s just who you are, what is present in your experience now.

What are the primary factors that will prepare you for that perception—that subtle, fleeting perception? Ultimately, all the essential aspects and the knowledge and wisdom that comes from them are needed. Here we’ll explore the seven primary ones. First of all, you need energy, energy to work on yourself and work through the personality and its patterns.

“Yes, I can do something. I have strength, I have a spirit, I have potency.” This energy will give you the fuel to look at yourself and understand things.

Another factor is determination. Without determination, the energy will be meaningless. You need steadfast determination and an unwavering will to go on, to continue in the face of discouragement and disappointment. Determination is what pushes you, what makes you persist. It is important to understand the personality issues around will and determination: what the issues are that make you feel castrated, that stop your determination, that block your will, that stop you from feeling, “Yes, I will do it.” You need to discover what stops you from saying, “I’m going to do it.

Whatever happens—disappointment, pain, fear—I’m going to continue. I might die before I do it, but I’m not going to stop. I’ll continue after I die.” With this capacity you know you can act in accordance with the importance of what you are doing.

The delight and the joyfulness are the actual work itself. It is a delight in the truth, delight in seeing and experiencing the truth. It is a little like curiosity—a joyful curiosity about things. If you have only energy and determination, things can get a little heavy, ponderous, and very, very serious. The factor of joyousness is the lightness, the delight that opens things up. You become delighted to be doing whatever you are doing.

The factor of kindness also brings a quality of trust in yourself, trust in the process, a kind of trust in your mind, in your essence. Kindness also brings an unselfish attitude. If you have kindness, you have kindness for everybody, for everything. You have kindness for anything that suffers. You’re doing the work out of kindness because you suffer. You see that you suffer, and out of kindness for yourself you want to do something about it, and that kindness in time extends to others.

This liberation has no fixation, and if you are focusing only on yourself, that is already a fixation, the biggest fixation. “What’s in it for me, what hurts me, what doesn’t hurt me, what’s good for me?”

Another factor necessary in this work is peacefulness: the ability to be silent, the capacity to be still, not always in activity and noise. Stillness of the mind. In order to recognize true liberation you must have this capacity for stillness or peacefulness, because liberation is so fleeting.

The next factor which is needed is the capacity to be absorbed in something, to be totally absorbed with whatever you’re doing, in whatever state happens to be there. You become so one-pointed in your experience that you become completely involved in it, and so involved that you are dissolved in it. This is a certain kind of relationship to experience, a certain capacity, a certain freedom from the personality. The personality usually maintains a kind of separateness from experience. It is afraid of completely dissolving, of becoming one with experience.

The Hindus call this state samadhi, complete absorption. In this state the personality is allowing itself to die, to dissolve, to become totally immersed, totally merged with whatever happens to be the experience. The seventh and last factor of liberation is awakening, the capacity to be awake in your experience. We talked about the capacity to be absorbed in your experience; there is also the capacity to actually be awake, to be aware. You are so aware that you feel as if you have just awakened. There’s a feeling of light all around you. The quality of awakeness is an antidote to sleepiness and to dullness of perception in doing the work. It is needed to understand the issues of your personality, and helps in dealing with attachments. You’re awake to what’s happening, not asleep to it; you’re conscious. You are awake with clarity and light; things become clear and crisp. You see things as they are, what’s there exactly, not what your unconscious sees. It’s clear and light, like an open clear sky, the absence of fog. It’s not as if the sky is clear…

peacefulness, and the awakeness—come together in perfect proportion, and exist as one phenomenon,…

With objectivity you are not influenced by your superego or your unconscious; what you see is what is there. You are not determined by your past experience, by concepts, or by opinions. Your strength is objective, your will is objective, your joy is objective, your kindness is objective, your peace is objective, your capacity to be absorbed, to be dissolved is objective. Objectivity takes the seven factors to another dimension, another level. The seven factors are called the lataif, the seven elements of subtle consciousness. The energy is the red latifa, the determination is the white latifa, the joy is the yellow latifa, the kindness or compassion is the green latifa, peacefulness is the black latifa, the absorption is the blue latifa, the awakeness that can free us from desires is what we call the clear latifa. The lataif are a very subtle kind of presence; some people say it’s like air, a subtle air that produces those qualities in you. The consciousness now is objective because it balances the seven factors, and is exactly what is needed to be free from the attachment and grasping that are the most basic characteristics of the personality. The objective consciousness, what we call the diamond consciousness, allows freedom from these aspects of the personality. The diamond consciousness is a…

To be objective means you must see what role your personality plays. It is this objective consciousness that can perceive the state of liberation, because it doesn’t have any of the clinging attitudes or obscurations that block the perception. These factors are called factors of enlightenment not only because they will lead you to objectivity and liberation, but also because they are present in the state of liberation itself. You are joyful, you are kind, you are energetic, you are determined, you’re clear, you’re awake, you’re completely…

the objective consciousness. When this diamond consciousness finally perceives the state of liberation, it just melts, becomes softer, delicate, liquid, relaxed, and flowing. There is no structure, no fixation, no holding this way or that way, no preference one way or another. It’s not as if you’re objective or not objective, or you’re kind or not kind, it’s none of those. They’re all there in a sort of melted, free-flowing loose way. They’re so loose, they’re so free that you don’t think of yourself as kind, you don’t think of yourself as happy. The moment you say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” it’s gone. You are it and that’s it. You’re not concerned about it, you go about your business, have breakfast, read the paper, go to work, have a fight. It doesn’t matter. There is total freedom. You have learned how to hang loose. You are liberated and you are awake. The…

The seven factors ultimately make the eighth factor, which is all the seven in one, making an octagon. I talked about these qualities because they are the main aspects of essence constituting the lataif, and as you continue, you’ll find that each of the lataif goes on to deeper levels. Each one is like a whole universe of its own. These are the seven primary factors needed for liberation, and are factors of the liberated state. They will help you finally to hang loose. So I think our talk today explains the relationship between the personality and…

When you are awake you are watchful without being watchful. When you’re a light bulb, you don’t need to look. So awakening is called the perfection of non-watching. You watch and you watch and you watch until you become the watchfulness. Then you don’t put any effort into watching, you’re just awake. You don’t have to look in order to see, just by being there you see. Then you don’t watch any more.…

Ridhwan is a kind of contentment which arises when you’re liberated. Your personality becomes contented when you’re free. Your personality itself is free from its suffering and conflict. Christ said you need to become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. Ridhwan, contentment, is the entrance into the kingdom of heaven. It is an aspect of essence. Liberation is really nothing but the personality becoming free in the moment; the personality…

In fact, describing how wonderful it is, describing heaven, can increase the misery and stuckness. This is why many systems just talk about learning how to hang loose. You might be in paradise, but if…

Two: Mind and…

It is of course a common word, and we use it often in our work. In common use “mind” is an imprecise expression; not everyone uses it in the same way. There are cultural differences: in this country when we use the word “mind” it is not the same as what the Tibetans, for instance, mean when they say “mind.” What we call “heart” in the west, people in the Far East call “mind.” One thing we encounter is that the words “mind” and “heart” have…

The most common notion is that “mind” consists of your thoughts and thinking apparatus, and is connected with your brain. Generally speaking when people use the word “mind” in our culture they are referring to thoughts and images, things that pass through their heads, thought processes. So, usually it is understood to mean…

A further distinction can be made between that content and the container or apparatus that is concerned with these things. Either the content itself, or the receptacle or the perceiver of the content is considered the mind.

What happens when the mind becomes quiet? When the activity is still, what will be left? It is reported that when you really go all the way through that investigation to its logical end, you find nothing. When all the thoughts, sensations, and feelings subside, and the whole content of experience is gone, you don’t find the thinker, or the experience, or the container, or an apparatus. You don’t find anything. This is labeled “the nature of the mind.” In most Eastern thought there is general consensus that the nature of the mind is the void, a complete absence of anything. In this model, the thoughts don’t come from anywhere and they don’t go anywhere; they come from nothingness and go back to nothingness. The mind ultimately is a vast, boundless, limitless emptiness. There is such emptiness that it is not something which is there that is emptiness. The nature of mind is seen as space, but even the notion of space must be transcended to deeply understand the nature of mind. As long as there is space, there is someone there experiencing something and calling it space. But completely experiencing the nature of the mind involves complete openness, or complete nothingness; when you really experience the nature of the mind, there is utter stillness with no observer observing anything, no experience, thought or label. Any experiencer would be just one of those contents, just a thought or feeling or constellation of thoughts or feelings. You continue finding nothing, you don’t even find space; there will be space but no one to find it. This is sometimes called the ground of existence. In this perspective, then, the mind is taken to be everything, and the ground for everything. Everything is the mind because the mind is known in its most absolute nature as nothingness, as the absence of anything, which is seen as the ground for everything. Nothing exists without that nothingness. Anything that exists needs some sort of space in which to exist. So, not only is it the ground of all experience, it is the ground of everything. It is seen as the basic nature of reality, as the deepest nature of reality.

There is simply no entity there producing, perceiving, or organizing these impressions, beyond the impressions themselves. There are simply the impressions that come and go; they come from nowhere and go nowhere. And then all impressions can cease, revealing complete emptiness.

So, nothingness as a space goes so deep that after a while it eliminates the consciousness of itself.

The only way we can experience complete nothingness is for the usual consciousness to go. When it is gone, it is experienced as its absence, and its absence is seen as the absence of everything. It is not seen only as the absence of everything, but is also the absence of the absence of everything. This experience is called cessation or extinction: complete death. It is what people usually think of as death. It is exactly how death is. You don’t have to die physically to experience it. This does not mean necessarily that if you die physically you’ll experience this kind of death. It is the complete cessation and absence of everything.

With your own consciousness, you cannot experience real unboundedness, real limitlessness. In the experience of the actual, unbounded, complete infinity of nothingness, your consciousness itself is unbounded, limitless, and infinite, which means not individual, not restricted, and not separate from what is experienced. When that kind of consciousness manifests, it is what is called cosmic consciousness, or universal consciousness, or primordial mind. So we’re seeing here another meaning of mind, which is pure consciousness. There is perception, but that perception is not of anything but the perceptivity itself.

To see consciousness in its purity is to experience what is called universal consciousness, to experience the mind as pure consciousness. When you experience the mind as consciousness, it is also knowingness, the very element of knowing. Either the individual consciousness has to go through the ego dying and then be reborn as universal consciousness as we described, or individual consciousness must expand to become universal consciousness. It’s as if space experiences space, rather than someone experiencing space, and it is limitless. It is difficult to describe what universal consciousness or what the mind as consciousness means, because there are no thoughts in it. The moment there are thoughts, the content separates you from the consciousness. There are no thoughts; your head feels expanded, your consciousness spreads out infinitely. It has no boundaries and no center. There is not a somebody here looking at something there. The looking is everywhere. Everything is consciousness existing as a universe of consciousness, boundless and infinite.

There is no consciousness of anything in particular. This is a foreign experience for most of us, because we know consciousness only in terms of consciousness of something. In the pure experience of consciousness there is no experience of body or thoughts; there is no experience, no experiencer, no self. Hence springs the Buddhist notion of no self. The Buddhists say that ultimately there is no self because in that aspect, universal consciousness, you cannot experience a self. Any entity-ness stops you from experiencing this vastness which is the elimination of separateness, the elimination of discrimination. There is complete non-differentiation. There is no separation, no two, and no thought that there is one. Ordinary, individual consciousness is actually based on this non-differentiated consciousness. We use it continually, but we restrict it. This element of consciousness, which is often experienced as a blue space or a blue light, the most primordial element of knowingness, is also called the origin of consciousness, the origin of knowledge; without it there is no consciousness or knowledge. This is the closest that experience can come to seeing knowingness as it is. This primordial consciousness is taken by Hindus and some of the Buddhists to be the nature of mind.

When we relax the hold of the ego, our individuality, we can have a sense of non-differentiated consciousness in daily life. The discrimination and differentiation will return without the rigid separateness of the personality. At this stage of unfoldment we encounter another aspect of essence, that is sometimes taken to be the nature of mind: clear discriminating consciousness, or seeing things as they are. We need this clear consciousness to function in the world. We cannot operate with only the level of cosmic consciousness; if there is nothing but “not two” you cannot even walk, or do any normal human functioning. But this perception can free your experience to incorporate the basic quality of non-separateness into your experience. This development is called discriminating mirror-like consciousness. Everyone and everything is seen as it is. This is the realm of the mind in which it is seen that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Your mind is spacious and empty; your consciousness is released so that everything is seen as it is. All the content of experience is seen exactly as it is, without a wish to manipulate, or label, or value things according to the unconscious. This is also experienced as clear mind, a sense of clarity and precision. Forms are exactly themselves, thoughts are just thoughts, feelings arise without impression or response, things are seen without the subjective filter. It is seeing things without the past, completely fresh and new. Cosmic consciousness is more primordial than this quality. Cosmic consciousness is the knowingness itself, the capacity to be conscious. In the mirror-like consciousness, the fundamental capacity for consciousness is functioning to simply reflect back what is there without distortions. Primordial consciousness, the non-differentiated…

the clear mind so that it is experienced as pure clarity, pure transparency,…

When you as a separate person, as an individual, are completely absorbed into the universality of cosmic consciousness, then the mirror consciousness, the clarity, experiences the void completely and boundlessly. In the last chapter we referred to pure consciousness when we discussed the capacity for absorption, and to the mirror consciousness when we discussed the awakened state. The void has been experienced and described in all these ways: as space, as blue consciousness, and as clear mind. As clear mind, it is then complete, transparent clarity that is aware of everything as it is, not as an undifferentiated medium that is cosmic consciousness, but as everything that exists as it is. It exists as that translucency. Everything comes back after it has been eliminated, and the emptiness is not touched, not eliminated by…

Emptiness is not perceived by a separate individual; emptiness is perceived by universal clarity. The awake, clear mind can go to sleep and still stay conscious. It has its night beside its day; its day is awakeness, its sleep is peace. It remains the nature of the mind, not as awakeness perceiving emptiness, but as peace, universal, unbounded, black peace, perceiving emptiness. Different systems emphasize one of three descriptions: the primordial non-differentiated consciousness; the awakened state of mind which is also universal; or the peaceful state of mind which is at rest, in complete peace. The nature of mind then can be experienced as blue, clear, or black…

We have examined the understanding of “mind” from being seen as thoughts and thinking, to the bigger mind which is all impressions, to the nature of that mind as a whole as emptiness, and complete emptiness through the stages of universal consciousness, the awakened mind, and the peaceful mind. The non-differentiated mind is usually, but not exclusively, the emphasis of Hinduism. The awakened mind is usually, but not exclusively, the emphasis of Buddhism. The peaceful mind is usually, also not exclusively, the emphasis of Islam. Black peace is emphasized by the tradition of Islam. The center of the Kaaba to which prayers are directed is a black stone, a black block of peace. The word Islam comes from “salaam” which means peace. Mohammed’s flag was black. Understanding of the mind as emptiness and these basic kinds of consciousness, the primordial, the awakened, and the peaceful, are not metaphysical, or only of metaphysical interest. Without this understanding, there is no freedom for human…

The heart is seen as the sensitive organ, the knowing organ. It is conscious and perceptive. The heart is sometimes called the mind because the heart is the source of the heart of the mind.

At the level of understanding the mind as a subtle consciousness, as an aspect of essence, there is no heart and no mind, there is only one thing. It is experienced as one consciousness with no separation of the centers. Seeing things as the clear mind comes from looking at things as mind, and seeing things as the clear nectar is taken from looking at things as heart; but it is the same substance. Taken as mind, we see it as awareness, as light, as consciousness. Taken as heart, we see it as love or joy. The awakened mind is clear joy when experienced in the physical heart.

What we call love is the same as consciousness, but it is experienced in the heart rather than in the mind, in the chest rather than in the head. It is also the same thing as will, which is experienced in the belly. Essential presence in the mind is often felt as a diamond, and in the heart is often experienced as a pearl. It is the same consciousness, seen from an objective, clear conscious level or from a personal heart level. If it is perceived at a universal, objective level it is seen as diamond consciousness. In the heart it becomes personal presence, the pearl beyond price, and rather than being seen as consciousness it will be seen as love.

The diamond form is experienced as consciousness or clarity. The pearl in the heart is experienced as true personal conscious presence. You can experience both at the same time, since they are one; however, within different traditions different perspectives are emphasized. In the Far East the spiritual systems emphasize looking at things in terms of the perspective of the head, of consciousness, and the result is enlightenment. In the Middle Eastern theistic tradition the perspective of the heart is emphasized so it is viewed more as a love affair. It is the same thing.

We can see the unity of unities by understanding the secret of “Hu.” Unity is called “Hu” in Arabic. So we understand the complete unity if we understand “Hu.” As we follow the unfolding of our understanding and experience we have noticed a movement toward unification. Where is this coming from? Is there a force pushing us toward unification? Is there still a deeper nature of the mind we haven’t yet fathomed? There is that which creates space. That is “Hu,” that is the ground of the ground, the source of the ground. The biggest unity must be what includes the nothingness and the thingness, non-being and being, space and creation, non-existence and existence. That is “Hu.”

We do see the mind as a kind of diamond clear expansive consciousness and the heart more like running rivers and nectars. There is differentiation, but we do see a movement toward unification. Our deepest, truest, most inner nature is that of unity, of complete unification with no discrimination or differentiation, and this deepest innermost nature must manifest as the transforming agent. This is what is called the elixir of the mind, or the elixir of enlightenment. It reveals itself in whatever form you need in order to learn about unity. If you are interested in the mind, it will reveal itself as mind. If you are more heart-oriented, it will reveal itself as heart. If you are action oriented, it will reveal itself as will. It loves you so much it is willing to be less than itself so that you will learn about it.

unification. Every living being has some intelligence, an intelligence that is pure brilliance. It is no longer a differentiated color; it is the brilliance of all colors. It is no longer a differentiated quality; it is the brilliance of all qualities. All qualities, all aspects, all things become radiant, luminous, brilliant—become their truest nature, brilliance itself. It is light upon light. The innermost nature of everything which exists is this source and agent of unity. Without it, we wouldn’t be human beings; we wouldn’t be alive. It is the innermost nature of our being; and it is not something vague, but something actually substantial. You might not be aware of it, but without it you cannot read this or understand me right now. You can perceive it.

“Hu” becomes, through the brilliance, that which is you. You are learning what is you at that moment. If what you need is enlightenment, it becomes clear light. It teaches first by unifying, by directing your experiences toward more unity. In time it will lead to the inner experience in which it manifests as the agent of transformation itself, the elixir. It is also called the philosopher’s stone and the water of life. The moment your personality allows it to function, it starts unfolding by transforming you from the inside out, including the impetus to work through your issues. It transforms you by showing you one facet after another. You need simply to allow yourself the experience, and see. It is the agent that moves transformation toward unification.

It is all the qualities of fulfillment of mind, heart and will, and more. It is sometimes called the “Father,” in the sense that it is the overseer, the umbrella, or source of all aspects, the all-protector, the all-knower. And it is no longer light or love or substance or space or existence—there is no analogy for it in physical reality. In physical reality we see differentiation only. We see qualities only in their differentiated form. We can see green representing compassion and aliveness. We can see red representing energy and strength. We can see clear space representing clarity. We can see yellow representing joy, and gold as truth. However, we can see further that each color, when it becomes very shiny, has luminosity; even black has luminosity. Space itself can have luminosity. Imagine that all these qualities shine even more, until there is only luminosity. The elixir of enlightenment is the luminosity itself. It is not the luminosity of something; the luminosity itself is the source of everything. Usually we think of luminosity or brilliance as a quality of something, as an intensity of a color or quality. You don’t usually perceive it as self-existing. But in…

As you look at it from outside, before you attain the cosmic consciousness, you see it as brilliance in this or that. But when the separateness is effaced, then you are it, there is nothing else. Then all of existence is just that, and that is the brilliance of “Hu.” When it is in the head you are drunk with sparkling brilliance. Completely drunk and completely awake. Your heart can only sing, can only be transported with the lightness of complete delight. The joy is in praising of Him. You realize, when the brilliance takes you to the unity which is the beginning of everything, that it was always there as you, your deepest nature from the beginning. Even if you look at yourself from the perspective of evolution, even as the amoeba, your innermost nature is “Hu.” It has not only transformed you so that you know it, it has created you so that you know it. It has created you so that you sing its praise. It is beyond experience and non-experience. The question of observer and observed is completely erased. There is only dancing; the universe as a whole, including its deepest torture, is dancing. These thoughts can’t reach it; it shatters thoughts. Personality is shattered. People glimpse it and faint, disappear. That innermost nature…

There can be no experience of unity if it isn’t…

The Absolute is the unity before manifestation, while the brilliance is the manifest unity. We can say that the first manifestation of the Absolute is…

Implicit…

But the real cause of most of your suffering and pain and misery is ignorance. You don’t know the nature of emotions and inner forces or how your mind operates; you act out of a lack of knowledge.

As long as your perspective is to seek to feel good and not bad, to feel pleasure and not pain, you will reinforce your pain. Now everyone is wondering, “Well, what are we going to do then?” But even this question is coming from the perspective of wanting to feel good.

“Implicit” is not what you are thinking about or trying to act upon, but refers to something in your very beingness. “Implicit” means the understanding is so much a part of you that it’s in the marrow of your bones; it is part of the way you are, the way you feel, the way you think, the way you interact with people.

Buddha says, “You are not your self-image.” “Oh wonderful,” you think, “That’s true, I’m not my self-image. So my big nose really has nothing much to do with who I am. Good. From now on I’ll forget about my nose!” You forget for two hours. Then when somebody is looking at you the only thing you can think is, “Oh God, he thinks my nose is too big!” This person might be completely in love with you and think you’re beautiful, but all you can think about is your nose. So it doesn’t matter what you read, or what Buddha says or what anybody says, if you don’t have the understanding that will eliminate the preoccupation with self-image. The real understanding is something you cannot get from outside. Nobody can give it to you. This is where essence is valuable; it will give you the knowledge and understanding that no one else can. If you deeply investigate the issue of self-image, you’ll come to the essential aspect that corresponds to self-image. When this happens, you will experience essence in a way that has no self-image; instead there will be space, openness, inner spaciousness. This is the essential aspect that was lost when you developed a self-image and believed that the self-image was who you truly are. The self-image always has a boundary—physical, emotional or conceptual. When you experience space, you experience yourself as being without boundaries, without definition, just openness.

This essential aspect is itself the knowledge, is itself the understanding that your self-image is not really you. But until you experience yourself without self-image, there is no way for you to know that such a possibility exists, and you will continue to think of yourself in terms of your self-image.

If you continue observing and exploring your feelings around the issue of love, you’ll discover a certain deficiency. You’ll find that the need for love is an expression of a part of you that feels deficient and empty. It is always wanting to be filled from the outside. If you stay with that wanting, allow yourself to feel the desire for love deeply, you’ll feel the deficiency, the hole of love, and you’ll experience the hole as the result of the loss of your own love when you were a child. This will bring up the hurt of not being loved, the deep wound; if you allow yourself to experience this wound fully, it will become like a fountain, a fountain from which love flows. You will experience the aspect of essence that is love. This was the missing piece that had to do with the issue of love. Now you have love—not from the outside, but from your own essence. Experiencing this essential aspect of love erases the need to fill that emptiness from the outside just as space or the void resolved the issue around self-image. However, this experience is not enough to resolve the issue completely. Many of you are aware of this. The desire for love, and the manipulations around it, may get subtler, but they don’t disappear. This is because you do not have the implicit understanding. You have not approached your experience of love or space or any other essential aspect—will, compassion, pleasure—from the perspective of implicit understanding. You experience essential love, which is sweet, intense, and fulfilling, and you say, “This sweet feeling of love is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt. If it goes away, I won’t have it. I want to hold on to it forever.” Who’s talking here? What have you learned? You have had an experience of love, but that love has not transformed you. You have treated it exactly like any other object your personality wants. “If I have all this wonderful love, then people will see how radiant and loving I am and they’ll think I’m wonderful and they’ll fall in love with me and I’ll live happily ever after.” Nothing has changed. What you wanted from the outside, now you want from the inside, in order to get it from the outside! This is not implicit understanding. This is materialism. Before, you wanted outer material; now you want inner material. It’s all the same, all material. Before, you wanted to collect money, clothes, lovers; now you want to collect essential aspects: love, joy, will, strength. “Look at all these wonderful things I have! Now I can go and show them to my mommy and she’ll finally see who I am and she’ll have to really love me and then I’ll be happy.” It’s the same thing. We didn’t really go anywhere. That’s where we started.

You might realize that your love has always been conditional. But love is not conditional. Love has nothing to do with the conditions of your personality. Love is who you are. Who cares whether somebody is nice to you or not? Are you going to stop loving because somebody happens not to be nice to you? The next morning you wake up and you feel the love. Then you remember your friend who bad-mouthed you. “That bastard! Who the hell does he think he is, saying stuff like that about me!” Your girlfriend serves you breakfast and the eggs are over-easy, not sunny-side-up. “How come you can’t remember that I like my eggs sunny-side-up? How come after all these months you still can’t remember a simple thing like that? Obviously you don’t really love me if you can’t even remember how I like my eggs.” And you stomp out of the house. It’s okay for this to happen. However, if you had learned from your experience of essence the day before, you would think, “Wait a minute, what happened? Yesterday all I felt was love toward my girlfriend and right now I want her to drop dead. That’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on?”

If you related to this experience from the perspective of essence, you were looking, listening, questioning. You might understand what’s making you feel the way you do, what’s blocking your love, why it was there and then why it isn’t there. You learn to allow your feelings to be there without necessarily believing them or acting on them, because you know there’s just something going on you don’t understand. You’re aware that there’s a lack of knowledge, there’s ignorance. Otherwise you would not feel the way you do. In time, this attitude of openness and allowing becomes a part of your daily life. You acquire an overall understanding of how feelings and events relate to each other, how things work, what makes you feel love at some times and not at other times. This understanding isn’t just in your mind; it becomes part of how you act, part of how

you are. You are not identified with your personality; you are open to understanding what your feelings are about, whether they bring you pleasure or pain.

Lacking some essential quality, not having something like love or value or joy, is not the problem. The continual presence of the personality with its patterns is the problem. And that can change only if you learn from essence, if you allow your personality to be transparent to essence, regardless of what feeling is there. From this perspective of implicit understanding you see the work going through several stages. First there is the personality without an understanding of essence; then as you see the patterns of the personality you can disengage from those patterns and realize essence. This second step allows essence to act on the personality to transform it. Then there is the final transformation of the personality—the implicit understanding. Even when there is no particular essence manifesting, the personality is exactly like essence, completely empty of its patterns. It is then a transformed soul. First you realize your essence and then you let go of your attachment to essence. This is the only way the personality can learn. Eventually, there is only implicit understanding, the understanding of how things really are. At first you think love means such and such. But when love is completely embodied and integrated, being a loving fullness or being a nothing becomes the same thing. The attitude toward feeling loving or feeling empty is the same. It is true that we need to realize essence, to free and establish all its aspects. But this is not to make the personality better. It is not so that the personality can say, “Oh great, now I’m enlightened. Now I have this and this and this which I can use to get what I want!” No, the point is that the personality itself finally realizes its own bankruptcy and that its very existence is the problem.

You can’t know what compassion is unless compassion is there. The quality itself, the aspect itself, and its wisdom and understanding need to become a part of your fabric. Then you’ll be compassionate without feeling compassionate, you’ll be loving without feeling loving, you’ll be precious without feeling precious, you’ll be all the essential qualities without feeling that any of them are there. The personality itself will become the implicit understanding. There will be no issue around wanting one thing and not another. What you do, how you live your life, is then simply according to reality.

Essence does not disappear; it will remain with you, as you, but without concern about it. Where there is concern, it is the personality which is…

I can put this in a few words. Personality without essence is suffering. Personality with attachment to essence is a disaster. Personality can become simply a transparent vehicle for essence. This transformation occurs through the knowledge of one’s true nature—essence, the preciousness of Being—becoming so integrated…

Four: Attachment and…

Everyone’s favorite thing is attachment. If you look at yourself, your personality, mind, feelings, relationships, you’ll find that attachment is omnipresent in all these aspects of your life. You try to fill your life with…

If you look at yourself at any moment you will see your attachment. You might be attached to your present feeling, or to a thought, a dream, an experience, or to a certain kind of consciousness, but it is all attachment. The attachment is really much bigger than any of the objects of the attachment. It is omnipresent, and omnipotent in your life. It is what runs you. To accumulate attachments is very easy, and you continue to accumulate them all your life.

Of course, you don’t experience attachment itself, because you are focused on the object of attachment.

If you could experience directly what attachment is, and feel just how it feels, then you would stop being so enamored of it. You would understand why your life is full of pain and suffering. What do you think you’re going to get from attachment? First we’ll look at what you believe attachment is, then we’ll look at what attachment actually is, and the levels of attachment and how to be free from them.

Attachment to that person or that body is not the same thing as liking the person, or enjoying the body or person; not the same as loving the person. We sometimes say we are attached because we love someone. But the attachment is a posture or an attitude of holding on to a person, an inner posture of grabbing, not wanting to let go. Attachment is the opposite of separateness; it is wanting not to separate, wanting to cling, to possess. When you’re attached to something or somebody, you behave like glue, you are sticky.

You can be attached to anything that you think gives you pleasure or security: a dream, an idea, a thought, a feeling, a person, a car, a house, etc. Some are even attached to hate. A deep root of attachment is the desire for complete unity. On the surface you might just feel that you want something in a casual way, but if you look inside you, at the movement of attachment itself, you’ll see that you really want to be one with it, and you try to get that by grabbing. Sometimes it’s called the octopus state, and that’s exactly what attachment is—“I love you, you’re so yummy”—wanting to consume someone. It looks like a sticky mechanism which is holding on, or eating the object. A love attachment is often motivated by a desire for merging or union or connection, and you might even believe that you’re getting them. But what you

get instead is attachment, because real merging, union or connection doesn’t happen with that attitude of grasping. Attachment involves one thing attaching to another, a subject attaching to an object. The desire is for loss of the boundaries, but in attachment boundaries are created, because you make two, one attached to another. “I” want to have “this.” So there is an “I,” there is “this,” and the “I” wants “this” forever. This is a misunderstanding of what union or connection is. Real merging means the boundaries between the two are gone completely. Then there is no one attached to another, no one holding onto someone else, no octopus with its prey; there is only one thing.

If you examine fear and desire you will see that fear itself is based on desire, fear of death is desire for life, and that its opposite, fear of life, is desire for death. Desire is there because of the absence of understanding. What will free us from attachment is understanding, or knowledge of how things really are. So we could say that attachment is based on fear and desire, fear is based on desire, and desire is based on lack of understanding or ignorance.

When you go through the levels and see what the object of your desire is, your final object of desire, then you’ll understand completely this dichotomy between “the one” and “the two.” But now, if you want a car, it’s hard to imagine that you want to be one with a car. At the deepest level, that is what you really want if you are attached to a car. So what do you want from the car? You want a good feeling, right? You want somebody to think you’re wonderful, that you’re rich and you think well of yourself. Why do you want that? You want pleasure and approval. And why do you want that? So that you’ll feel harmony; for approval will bring a feeling of harmony which is a certain kind of free existence without limitations. All attachments are in the end attachments to one thing. All our objects of desire are ultimately transferences, displacements from the original object of desire.

Attachment is a misguided attempt to get to this oneness.

Attachments necessitate objectification; there has to be an object to be attached to, and by its very definition there is a loss of the oneness. When we see this we can see that even God becomes objectified and an object of attachment. If you look at your usual experience, everything in it is an object, and you are attached whether you like it or not. If you like something, it’s a positive attachment,…

Most people can only focus on the object of attachment; if they really saw the attachment itself they would start falling out of love. So we can ask now, what is attachment itself? First of all, you’ll need to see that all of your suffering, especially emotional suffering, is because of these…

It is the source of suffering because it is pure frustration, pure pain, pure dissatisfaction, pure nongratification, pure anguish. We have called this state negative merging because though what you want is true merging, what you get is negative merging. Negative merging is not really merging; rather, it is two trying to be one while still maintaining twoness. Since this can never happen, there is always frustration. When I say that the negative merging, or the attachment, is hell, it doesn’t mean that freedom from it is heaven. We think of heaven as pure nonsuffering, peace, rest, comfort, gratification, fulfillment. All of these things are what we call essence. However, if you are attached to essence, what do you increase? Not heaven—you accumulate hell. We cannot try to…

We normally avoid this experience by not focusing on it; whenever you are attached you are in this suffering but you don’t know it. So the obvious question arises: what can we do about it? But where is this question coming from? From our attachment to pleasure, our wanting to avoid pain and frustration. But this is the very nature of attachment, the very source of all desires, the Ouroboros eating its tail. It is not easy to grasp this whole picture. And it is not easy to be free from this cycle. You must completely understand your situation, everything must be understood and felt, so that you finally see what the whole picture is all about. Then you finally understand what attachment is. But even now that you have heard this, you will continue living your life being in love with attachment,…

How does attachment manifest throughout our lives? It manifests in all areas, in all corners, at all levels, in all its gradations. One of our deepest attachments is to our self-image, both how we see ourselves and how others see us. Our self-image is who we think we are, how we want to be, what we want to have in our life—whether it’s a house that looks a certain way, a certain lover or mate who fills certain criteria. “I’m a good person and deserve this,” or “I’m a bad person.” The self-image we are attached to is often negative. Everyone has some negative self-image. If you’re attached to being good, then you’re always finding proof that you’re a good person. You might be attached to a self-image of being good, strong, powerful, rich, beautiful, popular, being married, single, etc. This is the most superficial layer; and it’s where most people live. The most common level of consciousness is focused on this superficial image level. We usually identify with our self-image; we think that’s who we are. This question of identity with what we think we are is at the…

Your identity is very much invested in the image, how things look on the outside, and that’s what you’re attached to. The self-image gets fed by myriad attachments, from your earrings to your friends, from your interests, likes and dislikes to your ideas and feelings, your philosophies, all of your conscious awareness at any particular time. The work we do here, on the other hand, is on the dissolution of the self-image. What we mean here by dissolution is simply seeing that it isn’t actually there. The dissolution of a certain identity is finally seeing that it is not really who you are, that the life that you have created around you is not really you. You believe that you…

At the next level of attachment, the core of the self-image is the body image. At the deepest level, your self-image is based on physical reality, the body image. When I say “body image,” I include in that the shape of your body, how you feel about it, everything about your body, the organs of your body and the functions of your body. When you let go of the external card-holder identity, you find that then your identity is based on your body image, so you sense yourself, feel yourself, pay attention to yourself and feel that you know yourself more intimately.

Understanding the body image, seeing your unconscious body image, contrasting it with what is actually there, corrects the misunderstanding. It will also eliminate the attachments, because the attachments arise from this misunderstanding. And this will bring in the next level of the void, what we call the dense space, because the body is dense compared to the self, and it is felt or sensed in this way. So another level of space will come that will erase or correct the body image by understanding the body image, which will itself eliminate the attachments to the body image, attachments on the level of the physical image. Now the truth emerges that I am not my physical image. First we free our identity, our external self-image, then we free ourselves from the external body image. It’s not a matter of whether I’m ugly or beautiful, tall or short, graceful or gawky. It’s not that I have a big penis and that’s why everybody likes me, or a small penis and that’s why nobody loves me, it’s not that you have or haven’t got something. The way my body appears does not define who I am.

The next layer of identity is what we call the internal body image, or identification with the body regardless of the image, attachment to the body itself. Internal body image forms the core of the identity at this level, because of identification with the actual sensation of the body, the actual feelings in the body. It forms the core of both the body image and the self-image, and you’re in touch with it most of your life. The inner sensations of the body—how it feels, the warmth or cold, harshness or softness,

pleasure or pain, the flow and rigidity, the tension and relaxation—all become part of the identity. This identity with the internal body image creates attachment to the…

You find out at some point when you’re studying your attachment to your body, that you believe you have to hold on to your body to have it. You believe you need tensions in order to feel your body. If you were to completely relax, you would feel you were going to lose it, float away, so you grab on! That grabbing is the tension, and going…

This level includes all the attachments to all the bodily pleasures, and the negative attachments to all the physical pains. It includes sexual pleasure, physical contact pleasure, movement pleasure, stillness pleasure, all the realms of bodily attachment to pleasure and lack of it. Attachment to the body then is not just attachment to the physical body, but also to what the physical body means to you, all the pleasures and the comforts and the safety you believe it gives you. There is nothing wrong with these things, it’s the attachment to them that creates the misunderstanding that is experienced as frustration…

Ultimately, it gives you comfort. When you see this identification for what it is, it also will dissolve, because it isn’t any more real than your driver’s license identity. This realization in turn brings in a new space, a new awareness of the void, what we call “death space.” At this point a person experiences what is called death. It is what happens when somebody dies physically; they actually disconnect from the body. Death is a deep dark black emptiness; of course, this death space can be experienced in life.…

there. You will know what death is, you will know that you are not the body, and then the identification…

There is consciousness, but the body is gone. Then you know that death is just a transition. It can happen in normal life without physical death. It simply means the loss of the physical attachment to the identity with the body. When you know that your identity is not the body then a new level of the void emerges, the black emptiness. Each level of dissolution brings in different experiences of the void, different grades of space. When the attachment to the body is understood, all the attachments begin to dissolve; you know that it is not you. You know you would exist without it. The need for the attachment is gone. Then there is no fear and desire that will lead to the attachment to that particular body, to that particular level of identification. When the attachment to the body is understood, and you go through the death experience, you know you are not any of these things, images or sensations, and you see the true…

So the death experience we have just described, the dissolution of the identity with the body, does not necessarily mean the death of the ego. The death of the ego itself is a deeper thing. You may know that you aren’t your body, but you still have a mind, an ego. You are now attached to your inner experience, experienced as somewhat disembodied. You’re attached to your psychological identity, your psychological makeup, to all your thoughts and feelings. This is the source of all the other identities. The self-image,

image, the body image, the body identification all emanate from this kernel, this pea of identity. This finally is the ego. This is why people who die are not necessarily free from the personality, the ego identity, because even when they die consciously they are not free from the mental configuration, mental existence, their personality. This means that a person can experience ego without a body before he dies.

These attachments are there all the time; we see each one under the last one but they all exist simultaneously. The deeper attachments are the strongest. We aren’t usually aware of them, because we can see only what we allow to be conscious. Of course, the ego identity, the “I,” is still not truly who you are. You can identify a certain interaction between the true self and the false self, and this will help you to see what is really you and what is not you, what is your personality. In our work, we use the true self to expose the false self. But there is always the danger of trying to hold on to an identity. The Buddhists, for instance, don’t talk about a true self, because they see this danger. They say there is no such thing as a true self, because your belief in a true self might enhance or substantiate an experience of ego. Here, then, we see the need for the dissolution of identity itself, whether true or false. We are attached to identity itself, and any attachment to identity, even to an experience of true self, becomes the false identity. We want to hold on to identity because we assume that we need a center. “Now I have a true center,” says ego, “finally I’m self-realized.” The ego is gloating over its victory, “I have slain the ego,” says ego. “Now I am a star, I’m no longer a human being,” says ego. Then the next level of the void needs to arise, the level of the dissolution of identity. We need to see that the attachment to identity itself is also hell and frustration. At this point you begin to see hell more clearly, more palpably. You start burning. The more attached you are to that identity, the more the burning and frustration. Then the dissolution of self, or the dissolution of identity, is what we call extinction, annihilation or nonexistence, which is a new level of the void. Not only your body is gone, but also your identity, your ego is gone.

The boundaries need to be lost, and the boundaries can only be lost by the loss of identity itself, by the loss of the separate self. When that goes, then it is possible to see that you are not separate from the original consciousness, that there is

only one consciousness, one existence. That is what we call the cosmic level. At this cosmic level you understand that true merging is a loss of your boundaries, so you are One. If…

When there is no individual identity, no boundaries, you will know that what you have always wanted is this dissolution, merging into One. To merge means to lose your self, without holding onto something; you have to lose yourself completely, even your desire, your wanting. After ego extinction there is cosmic identity or cosmic consciousness. Now the identity, the ego is gone, but there might still be attachment. We have dissolved the roots of attachment, fear, and desire but the process of attachment itself, the actual activity of attachment can exist without a center. One can have a very subtle attachment to the cosmic identity. It doesn’t even feel like attachment. You can experience God, which is what’s called the cosmic identity, but as long as you want only that there is still some preference, some…

Now there is need of another level of the void to eliminate the final attachment, and we need to do nothing but see and understand this attachment to the wonderful cosmic existence, the all powerful, our truest nature. It is your truest nature, but the issue of attachment is not whether the object you want is good or bad, but that the movement of attachment itself creates separation and suffering. As on all the levels we have described, nothing needs to be done or can be done except to understand. True understanding will spontaneously bring in the deeper level of the void, which is complete, utter emptiness. There is no question of attachment to anything because…

What is needed now is to understand the attitude of attachment itself, regardless of object, even if there is nothing to attach to. Attachment can exist at the level of the cosmic existence as a remnant of…

If you can disidentify from something then you can be attached to it. It means there is some object or way of objectifying an experience…

At this level, the question of the cosmic identity versus the big void delineates the difference between the world’s theistic and non-theistic religions. The theistic religions believe in God. The non-theistic religions adhere to the emptiness, the cosmic nothingness. Each one says “I am higher.” It is not a matter of which is higher; in a sense, the cosmic consciousness or the universal essence, experiencing essence without an ego identity, is the other pole of non-existence, complete nothingness. The reality exists in two poles, existence and non-existence. Fullness that is love, and complete, utter emptiness or nothingness, are just the two poles of reality. Attachment to any of these is attachment. So the final attachment that must be resolved is the attachment to either existence or non-existence—God or nothing. This resolution results in the big void, which eliminates identity itself—small or big, true or not true. There is no…

Of course, with that freedom, there will come everything. Everything will be freed—the cosmic consciousness, the guidance, the true identity, the personal essence—all essence in its various aspects will be there with no one experiencing it. It’s just there. The cosmic existence is in the end seen as heaven, it is what is called heaven, even beyond heaven, the creator of heaven…

To summarize, this process is a matter of investigating your identity, at any level of identification, and your attachments to it. That’s why one of the most powerful techniques in spiritual traditions is to ask yourself, “Who am I?” and to keep asking. Every time you say, “That’s me,” investigate and continue asking, “Who am I?” until there is no one left to say it. It’s not a matter of trying to push or do something. There’s no need to do anything at all, all you need to do is understand what’s there. The moment you want to do anything your motivation is attachment. The awareness of exactly what’s there, whatever it is, without wanting or not wanting, is finally the void. So you can take this attitude from the…

The Teaching of No Hope

This gives you great hope, and strengthens your desire. Your desire gets even stronger: “Oh, I really want my essence, I want to be free.” But at every level, every stage of the work, that desire itself is what steps between you and freedom.

The more you see a method or a way that is effective, the more your hopes will rise, and the more your desire will be strengthened. Maybe the best method is an ineffective one, so that you give up from the beginning! Effective or powerful methods lead to more desire and hence, the freedom recedes even further.

There is what is, and there is a part that says, “I want something other than what is.” Doesn’t that mean you’re divided? Doesn’t that mean you are in conflict with yourself?

This is what is called spiritual materialism, which is a dualistic, split perspective. There is a split in your mind, in yourself. There is what is there, and there is the part that doesn’t like what is there, that wants something else. How are you going to arrive at harmony, integration, happiness, and freedom when there is a war inside you, when you are acting according to division and conflict?

It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s bad or good. That’s not the point. The point here is the movement of the attitude of rejection, the attitude of wanting and desiring.

you have experienced your essence, or moments of freedom and release, you will see that in those moments of happiness—moments of being your essence—there is no judgment, no conflict, no wanting. Essence does not operate that way. Essence has no judgmental attitude at all, even towards personality. Essence is a presence, something that is there. It can be loving, compassionate, or any other quality, but it is not rejection of one thing and acceptance of another.

Whenever you find yourself identified with a part of you opposing and fighting another part, you are being the ego personality. As you can see, it is quite hopeless to try to achieve freedom through rejection of any part of your experience. It is hopeless to try to get rid of something in order to gain freedom.

Only when you completely understand from your own observation of your mind and reality that it is hopeless, only then will you give up. When there’s complete hopelessness and you give up, not out of despair, but out of understanding, then the freedom will be there. The freedom will not come as a result of your achieving anything. The freedom will arise only as a result of understanding the situation. In fact, the freedom is not a result of understanding the situation, the freedom is the understanding of the situation.

When you are not engaged in the hope, in the rejection, then there’s no opposition and no conflict. There is harmony, happiness and freedom. This is the birth of love.

The only thing you can do is accept unconditionally what is. What’s left is an unconditional awareness of what is there, an unconditional and motiveless understanding of the truth of the situation. This is the attitude of essence, of reality, and not of the personality. That is the hope, but it is the hope that cannot be felt as hope. There is no goal in it, no division or struggle in it. There is the pure, motiveless, love of the truth, which is what is there. If you love truth for its own sake, the truth will free you. But if you hope the truth will free you, you cannot be free. You must love the truth for its own sake, without hope. Then there’s no question of freedom/no freedom, no question of essence/no essence, no question of enlightenment/no enlightenment. It’s just love of truth, and that’s it. Nothing else is there. Anything else will bring discord. Accepting what is, understanding what is there, loving the truth that is happening at every second is the natural state, the state without personality, the state of no-mind, is the state of no-division. It is the state of hanging loose.

The truth of the situation is the freedom. Awareness does not need to be motivated. It is what is there. We’re always aware of something. As long as there is motivation for anything, awareness is restricted away from one thing and toward another.

The correct perspective from which you can do this work is always to be aware of whether you are interested in the truth of what is happening right now, or whether you are trying to achieve something.

If you accept your experience, you take the side of essence. That’s how it is. It’s not a matter of what you get, or what you have. It’s where you come from, your attitude. Do you operate from personality or from essence? That’s the real transformation. We must understand here that when I speak of acceptance, I’m not referring to an active attitude, holding on to or being attached to something. I mean merely being there with the experience, without judgment. It is presence with openness to whatever is manifesting in your consciousness.

When you’re sad, why are you sad? You are sad because you lost something, or because something is not happening the way you want it to happen, or something you want is not there. So sadness is based on rejection. All emotions are based on the rejection of what is now, and your thoughts are the same way. Complete freedom means no personality at all. Complete freedom means essence—no mind and no emotions. This doesn’t mean you should reject your sadness and anger. We’re trying to understand things. We’re not trying to get anywhere. The work is not about getting freedom or happiness. The work is not there to get rid of your suffering. The work is there to help you see things as they are. The work is there to help you finally realize how things actually are. The work is there so that, in time, you’ll be aligned with truth, you’ll be on the side of reality. When you are aligned with reality, there’s no concern about whether there’s pain or no pain. Reality is what is there right at this moment.

The ultimate truth is “what is.”

The personality is a point of view. Enlightenment, or reality, is also a point of view—nothing else. It is not a certain state. Personality is the point of view that there is something we need to get, somewhere we need to go. Enlightenment or freedom or reality is a point of view, that “what is” is what is. That is what is there and there is no hope for anything else. When I say, “accepting what is,” I do not mean accepting unconsciousness in yourself. Accepting what is means complete consciousness, means complete awareness of what is. When one is unconscious of what is, there is a rejection of what is.

Essence is needed in all its aspects for us in time to be able to tolerate seeing and accepting what is there.

The truth is now, and your life is now.

The way you experience it, hope is a rejection of the present.

S: I’m afraid I won’t be able to function if I give up hoping. How will I be motivated to do anything? AH: That’s understandable. I was working with someone recently and after a while she got into the space of no mind, no thoughts, no hope, nothing. She didn’t know what she was going to do. She was a little scared. “How am I going to drive my car?” And she didn’t know what she was going to do because she had no motivation to do anything. But, at the end of the session, she said, “Where’s the bathroom?” She didn’t need her mind to be functioning in order to know she wanted to use the bathroom. If you’re hungry, you get something to eat. If you’re tired, you sleep. If you need to use the bathroom, you’ll know it. It’s not a question of desire or hope. When hopefulness ceases, essence begins to flow and functioning becomes the motiveless flow of selfless love.

In essence, there is a movement towards what is good, but what is good is now, and the movement of essence is towards the now. It is not towards something else in the future. You might experience it as a movement in the future because that’s how your mind functions. However, the greater the presence of essence, the more you are in the now. Essence is presence so it can only be in the now. Your mind can function only according to what happened to you in the past; but “what is” has nothing to do with what happened in the past. What is is what is. But you want to condition “what is” according to what was.

Will in the service of the personality is effort. I’m not saying desires are bad and you shouldn’t have them. There is no judgment in what I’m saying. I’m saying that understanding is the point of view of reality. Effort is always based on rejection, isn’t it? Effort is always aimed at getting somewhere. At the beginning you use effort, and that is fine. You will continue using effort until you understand at some point that effort is a problem. You’ll see that it’s not a matter of stopping the effort. You cannot stop effort and you cannot stop desire. If you want to stop effort or desire, what are you doing? You’re engaging in the personality’s point of view. The only thing you can do is to understand the movement of effort. What we’re doing here is activating a flame, a flame which loves the truth.

there is no pleasure. If there is a desire for pleasure, then that by itself will reduce the pleasure. There is only what is at any second, not just when you are doing the work, but when you are driving your car, making a sale, talking to your friend, taking a shit, eating, going to sleep, washing your face, brushing your teeth, punching somebody, it’s always the same. At some point all of that becomes channeled, concentrated and focused on the work. All desire, all efforts, all hoping, all seeking become one desire, one hope, one seeking, and that is the work.

Fear exists as long as you want something and don’t want something else. If you want something, then you’re afraid you won’t get it. If you don’t want something, you’re afraid you will get it. Fear is the same thing as desire.

Acceptance

Even when the personality is saying “yes” to something in you, it is usually saying “no” to something else in the same breath. You can see this happening minute by minute; it is not something that happens once in a while. Without the “no,” the personality would not exist as we know it.

Actually, the attitude of rejection is a much deeper and more primitive mechanism than just the identification with the parents. There is something that precedes the identification with the parents. It is already there before you identify with the parents, before you even know there are parents. It is one of the earliest movements in the organism. It happens, in the first few months of life, when the baby still isn’t even aware that he is separate from the parent. Let’s look at the experience of a very young baby. When the baby is not asleep or content he will experience some kind of disturbance: gas, full bowels, full bladder, hunger, cold, etc. If the bowels are full, automatically there is an elimination of the contents. If the bladder is full, just relaxing lets it flow out. If the baby is hungry, it cries and the mother puts food in its mouth and

everything returns to normal. This movement is called a charge and discharge cycle. There is a tension that creates a charge, an increase of energy and activity, which is released through the defecation, the feeding, the comforting; this is the discharge. The child returns to the contented, relaxed, peaceful state. In this cycle there is not yet an action of rejection. It is the organism spontaneously contracting and expanding, charging and discharging. It is a natural movement to bring about the state of rest and relaxation. The mother helps the child in this regulation because the child is still unable to feed and take care of itself. If everything continues in this way, under the best and most balanced circumstances, the child will grow up to do for itself what its mother did. When there is a disturbance the child can take care of it naturally without even thinking about discharging it. This is what we call autonomic regulation. Hungry, you eat; tired, you go to sleep; bladder’s full, go to the bathroom. So, the rejection isn’t there. If that happens consistently, then the child grows up to be an adult who can do these things naturally and spontaneously. Then there is no neurosis, no conflict, and the personality will not have an attitude of rejection and defensiveness. However, for many reasons, things don’t generally go that well. Sometimes the child has gas or pain and the mother doesn’t come in time, so the pain or tension is not released. The baby is still dependent on the mother and the environment to help release these charges or tensions. Sometimes it is not that the mother isn’t there, but that the baby gets sick or constipated or can’t keep food down. Then there is pain that is not discharged when it needs to be. Things are in fact much worse than that; if this were the whole story, it would be wonderful. However, the truth is that the baby usually lives in an environment in which the parents are not the most wonderful beings on earth. The child is very open, and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity, and pain in the mother’s body or anyone else it is with. If the parents are suffering, the child feels it. If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers too. The pain never gets discharged. We are not even considering the acts of cruelty that so many babies endure. Some parents take their own conflicts out on the child in physical abuse, neglect, or emotional rejection. All these things affect the child in the same negative way—there remains pain that is not discharged. So the natural movement is impeded, and the child doesn’t return to its natural harmony.

At the beginning, there is an innate confidence that there will be a discharge. It is like an instinct; it does not need to be learned. This innate confidence is like the contraction and expansion of an amoeba, which just releases itself. There is no hope or desire or fear. If the environment is supportive and the body is normal, then that confidence is not disturbed and the child grows up with…

But what happens when the tensions don’t get discharged? What happens to that confidence in who we are, in our organism, in the…

There is no longer confidence that the harmony will remain, because the child feels pain and it doesn’t go away. And what does the child do to get rid of its pain, when it doesn’t just naturally get discharged? First of all, there will be an awareness, an increasing awareness that there are things that are painful. If they remain, there is a fixation of the organism, the mind, on those painful things. Then, those are differentiated from and contrasted with the good feelings we have at other times. Before the undischarged pain happened, there was no need for the differentiation. Only when things are not being smoothly regulated does the child begin to notice that this is painful and this is pleasurable. A differentiation arises in the mind, which increases the more there is pain, suffering and frustration. And when the child also sees that the pain isn’t eliminated, it becomes afraid for its existence. If the pain and frustration continue, the child cannot tolerate it. Its system is not mature enough to tolerate the frustration or to discharge it by itself. If the pain and the frustration continue, they will have a disintegrating effect on the organism, and the child will begin to experience organismic fear for its very survival. The presence of the frustration and pain…

body as a whole. So the child turns to a very primitive mechanism that the body has in order to…

The child throws up things that come from the outside, the sour milk or whatever food the child cannot handle. However, the child at that time has no conception of inside and outside, so when there is any pain or disturbance he will try to throw it up, spit it out. How does a child throw up bad feelings or frustration that he cannot deal with and that he fears will destroy him? The first defense mechanism is an extension of the body’s defense of spitting out; it is projection. The child tries to believe it is not in him, it is outside. He tries to pretend to himself that he isn’t feeling bad, it is that Mommy is terrible. It may be true that the mother is in pain or is frustrating or hurting the…

The mechanism of projection necessitates the erection of boundaries around oneself, which result in the sense that we are separate from our environment. Projection and the erection of boundaries happen at the same time, and are interdependent. This then is the process through which we split ourselves off from a sense of unity with everything, which is the perspective of the true…

So first there is a projection which necessitates the erection of boundaries, of separateness from the energetic field, from all existence. But in order for the child to project successfully, to feel that this feeling isn’t his, he has to stop feeling it. This means he must dull the feelings, or repress them or split them off. In order to project, we must suppress something in ourselves, we have to not feel a part of us. The…

is modeled on the spitting-out mechanism. This rejection, of course, creates disharmony. As you see, the attitude of rejection happens very early, usually within the first few weeks or months of life. There is an organismic necessity for this attitude because of the imperfect environment. The child is trying to reject his pain, suffering, and contraction. On that base of rejection of pain is built all the identification that comes from the parents and becomes the superego. The superego’s attitude of rejection and putting oneself down and…

Personality is nothing but a boundary that separates us from other people so that we can protect ourselves from what we think is noxious to us. But when you block part of yourself, you create tensions and armoring in the body. Not only do you have a pain that cannot be discharged, now you’re suppressing it, or pushing it away. This creates an increasing tension which in turn…

We become increasingly dependent on external agents to release our tensions, which gives even more power to the rejecting attitude of the superego—“If I’m good enough my mother will love me and help me discharge.” When you were dependent on her, it was true that if there had been enough love, enough acceptance, enough support it wouldn’t have been so bad. But we grow up always wanting that love and support, and have no confidence that we can do it for ourselves. Then we proceed to project mother onto others, and try to get their approval so they will love us and help us. That is one of the main motivations for sex, for example. Sex is a physical discharge. We charge up and then discharge; so sex mostly becomes an attempt to discharge our tensions and pain.

So, it’s always, “If I can just find Prince/Princess Charming, then I can discharge all my tensions and everything will be fine.” In most relationships, the other person is someone to make you feel good. If they make you feel good, you love them. If they make you feel bad, you reject them.

When you build up tension, you say, “I love you, let’s make love.” It doesn’t mean that sex can’t have other motivations like true love and appreciation, but most often there is a compulsion from accumulated tension and a desire for discharge. Now that we know what the situation is, and how it started, how do we go about dealing with it? How can we regain our original innocence and…

If we can regain the capacity to spontaneously charge and discharge, if we can change the rejection pattern and reconnect with our natural confidence and trust, we call that self-realization. Obviously…

Even the presence of personality is rejection, it is saying “no” to your being. What you think is you, your personality, is covering up your truth even when you are not actively rejecting your experience. Personality came into being in order to cover up the real experience, to avoid pain and frustration. The personality is a “no”; it can’t say “yes.” So how can we learn to accept? When you say, “I should learn to accept my anger,” aren’t you rejecting your rejection of your anger? Aren’t you rejecting the resistance? If you have a desire to be free from the personality, isn’t that a rejection of…

But if we look back to the beginning of the rejection, what was it we rejected? What we rejected was pain and suffering. First we said, “I don’t want to feel this, it hurts, it’s dangerous,” but over time it became, “I don’t want to feel this because I want something better, I want to improve myself…

Whenever you want to change what you’re feeling, you’re rejecting your experience. You…

In the beginning the rejection was an attempt to get rid of the pain, but we didn’t get rid of it, we simply stopped seeing it. We weren’t able to throw it up or otherwise discharge it, so we numbed our sensitivity. Now we can allow ourselves to be sensitive, to experience without judgment, without saying a “no,” without saying “I’m seeing it so that it will go away.” We can do this when we are interested in the truth for its own sake: to see, to be aware, to be conscious, to be with, and to feel what is there in your experience with no rejection, what is now. It gets very subtle; it is difficult not to reject your experience. When you sit to meditate, why are you meditating? You cannot help but do it because you want to reject yourself; this is a fact and it too needs to be allowed. Don’t tell yourself, “No, I’m really accepting it.” Admit the truth, that you are sitting because you want to be different. Just be aware of the rejection. Meditation can be seen as nothing but the spontaneous and passive awareness of the movement of rejection and desire. The…

We can only see the truth, we can only understand. If we see the movement of the mind, we will realize that even our understanding, even our awareness at the beginning is motivated by desire, hope and rejection. It cannot be helped. But what we can do is to be aware of that, and not pretend otherwise. The whole thing is to see the truth, admit the truth, because…

Acceptance will not be the personality accepting. Acceptance will be essence coming; it will be like a benediction, a blessing, a gentle rain. The personality cannot accept. It can surrender to the truth of the moment—which is the same as the stopping of rejection—surrender and allow what is there to be there without preference and judgment.

Essence is acceptance, not as approval but as a healing agent. It is the spontaneous inner charge and discharge; the cleansing without rejection.

Your personality and essence have the same understanding at that moment so they operate together; personality is not rejected but understood with compassion and love. Acceptance is actually an aspect of essence; it is not an activity. Our work is to see the truth. It is to be in harmony with the truth, to be steadfast in the truth. Ultimately you will regain your trust and confidence in the truth. That confidence is regained just by seeing the truth; that is a miracle by itself. It becomes as implicit as it was when you were a trusting infant.

When the confidence in ourselves and our organism is implicit there is everlasting happiness. We aren’t trying to be confident or self-conscious about it.

Change and Truth