Dirty Enlightenment

THE INHERENT PERFECTION OF IMPERFECTION         This book is an exploration of our situation.   Most people, if they even care, labor under the mistaken notion that “enlightenment” has something to do with what we DO in our lives; cleaning up our behavior, ratcheting up our compassion, clearing up our obscurations, purifying our bad karma, thinking positive thoughts, thinking NO thoughts, helping little old ladies across the street; in general trying to emulate what we imagine an “enlightened being” acts like - as if the behavior makes the condition.

That’s ALL hogwash. It turns out that “enlightenment” is the inherent condition of Being itself. So it’s already a done deal. Nothing IN being needs to be cleaned up, purified, made more positive, made more compassionate. The mediocre, imperfect victim most of us fear ourselves to be is already God, without needing to lift a finger! Our world as it is is Heaven, our life already a pageant of Divine Celebration. Hallelujah!

The very fact that any particular condition in our experience even EXISTS at ALL, means it has already crossed the finish line. Being equals enlightenment. Period. If any condition IS, it is inherently absolutely perfect. The clouds in the sky, the shit in the toilet. Tag, YOU’RE IT. You may as well sell your mala and trade in your meditation robe for a bikini and go work on your tan, it won’t make the tiniest bit of difference to the ACTUAL condition of anyone or anything whether or not you do.

You’d think that fact would put a lot of people in the “spirituality” industry out of business, wouldn’t you? But I’m afraid they don’t have to worry, and can probably go on selling water to the fish for the foreseeable future. The unfortunate fact, at least for those of us pushing for the dissemination of this truth, is that people are pretty damn absorbed in their dramatic struggle to find what they haven’t lost, and are pretty likely to go on muddling along the “path to being” and the “journey to now” like tired horses with blinders on, even though they ARE, and exactly WHEN does it happen to be?

(How conceptual blindness traps us in a story about ourselves)

OUR SITUATION         Reality is indescribable; yet we each know it intimately, never having known anything else whatsoever.   But we might not KNOW that we know it. We commonly mistake our conceptual misinterpretations and oversimplified understandings of what reality is, arrived at through our programming and early assumptions, to be true. We thereby become blinded to the obvious fact of the way reality is already ACTUALLY functioning in, and as, our experience RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Our only impediment to true self-knowledge is our inaccurate beliefs about what we are and what the world is, which we mistakenly hold to be true. The solution to this impediment is to examine the ACTUALITY of our experience, and using discrimination, logic, and direct seeing, understand for ourselves the inaccuracies of our previously-held modeling of our situation, and let go of erroneous beliefs about “the world”. This is really a very simple process; it is only WE that can complicate it.

We each have accumulated a complex story about what we are and what our lives are, that incorporate many assumptions and conclusions that were arrived at when we were immature and did not have the discriminative capacities to critically examine them. These assumptions may have been learned from the teaching or example of those we perceived around us, our families and immediate culture; and we accepted them as truth, and incorporated them…

We have tended to be seduced by the emotional investment that arises from some beliefs we may have arrived at; for example “I am separate from the universe”, “I am vulnerable and potentially in danger”, “I am needy and might not be able to get what I need”, and so on. Building on these and similar basic beliefs and their elaborations, most of us concoct an elaborate soap opera with ourselves as the star, full of…

Thus most of us find ourselves living in a fantasy, a dream-world, ignoring any actual experience that doesn’t fit in with our oversimplified and…

So what can we do to “wake up” from this internally consistent dream of self-importance based on fantasies?   The fortunate truth is that we ALL have intimate access to Reality; in fact we have never experienced anything ELSE, and ARE nothing but Reality ourselves, inherently.…

The rub is that to do this, we have to be able and willing to at least partially suspend our belief in our accumulated “story”, in order to see through it, to perceive the actual facts of our experience. Once we have done this once, it can be easier to follow through with further investigation of the truth of our situation; but we ultimately need luck (…

So generally only people who have already become somewhat disenchanted with their story have any interest in this investigation (with the exception of those many people who try to use the investigation, “being spiritual”, as…

This book is for YOU. If you are looking at it, you are probably at least starting to be ready for it, beginning to open to the possibility of a “real life” beyond your pretenses, or perhaps are already in the midst of…

(The author’s first awakening and second birth)

AWAKENING         I was 22 years old in the summer of 1973, living in Miami. I was a rock musician, living a typical ex-hippie lifestyle, I suppose. Late nights, late mornings, lots of young friends and parties; pretty hedonistic.   But I was an oddball, an ugly duckling; as long as I could remember as a child, I KNEW that there was “more going on than meets the eye”. There HAD to be; life didn’t make…

But of course as I grew, the world and the many human explanations for it that I encountered seemed to make less and LESS sense, and I began to have the horrifying suspicion that despite my expectations, maybe all these “adults” didn’t have any more of a clue than I did as to what was “going on”, maybe even LESS of one.   I began a steady search on my own, for…

Then one day in 1973 came the most surprising day of my life. I woke up one morning with a very strange experience occurring in my field of awareness. I felt as if the top of my head had opened; there was a huge, open presence at the top portion of my awareness, which seemed to be very intelligent and seemed to be communicating with me on a non-verbal level. It was unlike anything I had experienced previously, and I had no clue what was going on. This was not an idea or a displaced physical sensation, it was a self-validating presence the like of which I had never experienced. I thought I was being visited by angels or something.

And perhaps the most surprising revelation was that I saw that I had ALWAYS been what I was now newly seeing myself to be, I just hadn’t seen it as it is clearly. Astounding! HOW had I not noticed this amazing but wholly obvious state of affairs? ---   That was the turning point in my life, my second birth. But it turned out I had a long second adolescence ahead of me.

But now I was able to see the fallacy of that belief, and it evaporated like the mirage that it was. I saw clearly that BEING IS ONE “THING”, and I AM THAT, as indeed is all “else”. “I” have rested in that certainty since that day in February, 1997.

(Reality as a unified consciousness-energy field)

To bother to differentiate the one from the other is arbitrary. They never appear independently from each other.   We commonly (and actually arbitrarily), differentiate experience into different fields on the basis of their relative qualities; then designate the fields as “vision”, “touch”, “smell”, “taste”,“hearing”, and “thought”, perhaps including others such as emotion, intuition, “vibes”, etc.. (Various theories about “bodies” and “sense organs” are further elaborated based on these common distinctions.)   Within any one of these fields, the flow of energies (apparent “objects”) is spontaneously appearing, constantly changing and non-repeating, and instantaneously disappearing as present conditions are changing; yet nevertheless various degrees of patterning to the energy flows can be differentiated, giving rise to ideas of “objects”. Yet in Reality the patterning might be said to be like a weather system, where continuously varying conditions throughout the whole system interactively give rise to particular phenomena in particular locations.

So we are left with Reality apparently being a wholly mysterious “consciousness/energies field”, consisting of nothing but itself; experienced by nothing but itself; and miraculously appearing in itself as a unified, infinitely complex, ever-changing, never-repeating open-ended whole, within which infinitely complex degrees of

patternings are spontaneously simultaneously appearing/disappearing.

(How entification and fear generate confusion in consciousness)

CONFUSION         The fundamental cause of our problems is that consciousness has the property of being able to fantasize, to hypothesize; in other words, to create imaginary conceptual models in consciousness.

That, along with the evanescent and open-ended nature of appearances, (which renders them susceptible to being easily interpreted in a skewed way, according to any conceptual bias with which they are observed), makes it possible that consciousness can lose its clear understanding of itself and its actual functioning, in a maze of imaginary interpretations; stories about “what’s happening”.   Once this happens, it can be very difficult for consciousness to find its way “back” to a clear perception of what is ACTUALLY happening, unclouded by the imaginary interpretations that have confused it.The erroneous interpretations that consciousness gets muddled in tend to imply further errors in modeling, by the “garbage in, garbage out” principle, thus causing the confusion to proliferate itself. This is apparently the situation for the vast majority of humankind.

The basic element of confusion could be called “entification”, belief in the idea that discrete, objectively-existing “entities” exist. Of course in reality nothing actually discrete can be extracted from its milieu, as all aspects of the energy of experience arise, and instantly dissipate, as a continuum in consciousness.   This primary misconception of the supposed existence of entities, opens the door to fantasies of objectively existing environments, worlds, universes; within which myriads of self-existing and discrete entities interact in accordance with various imaginary principles, such as causality and free will. And since such entities can be imagined to both actually exist and to persist, then they might also be vulnerable to destruction…   THUS, the basis for the prime energizer of confusion, FEAR, has been laid.

If consciousness then happens to believe that IT might BE one of these “entities” that it is hypothesizing, and therefore itself might be vulnerable to destruction (death) or partial destruction (pain), the energizing force of FEAR can come into existence. If consciousness strongly identifies itself with a supposed entity (a particular set of sensations as a “body”, the formation of EGO), this fear can be a profound motivation to protect the entity (or entities) that are being identified with. This may motivate possible baroque plots and schemes, oriented around extensive manipulation of the supposed OTHER entities that might be threatening the identified-with entities. If such manipulation is anticipated to be not likely of success, then the emotion of despair might be born.

(Confusion is also exacerbated by the inherent INFINITY and INDEFINABILITY of the energies which appear in consciousness as experience. Not only does that indefinability readily enable easy misidentification of phenomena as entities, but after the onset of confusion, the obvious indefinability of “things” motivates a redoubled effort to find orientation…

The fundamental problem with ego’s all-consuming defensive schemes, is that the basic elements (entities, identification) of which they are made up, of course DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST in the way they are believed to; so the schemes which are predicated UPON their actual existence, won’t ultimately be effective. Therefore frustration…

(Liberation as seeing the natural condition already present)

LIBERATION         When consciousness finds itself in clear experiencing, free from erroneous interpretations of that…

This clear experiencing of experience itself is of course consciousness’ natural condition, Enlightenment, and paradoxically even the state of confusion turns out on…

The thinking, fantasizing, conceptual modeling property of consciousness, that enables and generates confusion, is an inherent function of consciousness; as is the ability of consciousness to consider its imaginings to be actual (as of course they are, but ONLY as  the energy they ACTUALLY consist of, and NOT as the situations they supposedly present in imagination).   So even in the depths of confusion, nothing whatsoever other than the natural, unadulterated being/functioning of the unique, mysteriously self-existing consciousness is happening, EXACTLY as is the case upon “liberation”.  This fact enables the “short path” to liberation; to see that that natural condition is already, and always, achieved, by virtue of the inherent inviolable nature of reality. Even CONFUSION is…

Another way to describe confusion is the apparent existence of a “second layer” in consciousness. The primary layer is consciousness experiencing its own spontaneously-arising energies directly in itself, as is always and unstoppably happening, which includes the fields of energy that can be classified as “thought”. The “second layer” consists of the BELIEF in the objective existence of the conceptual models implied by the functioning of thought-energy in the primary layer.   In other words, the appearance of this “second layer” is created by the belief that thoughts can have real meanings, referring to actual “things”.   Of course “thought” is ACTUALLY nothing more than a spontaneously appearing, instantaneously disappearing, unfathomably mysterious energy that appears IN, and is…

Once the fantasy that ideas can be “about something” takes hold, then ideas about those ideas can proliferate, generating endless apparent complexity to this “second layer”.…

(Why spiritual paths and methods miss the point)

THE PATH         Only the enlightened can truly know what enlightenment actually is.   This fact has enabled the existence of quite a large industry of “spiritual” teachers, books, magazines, and programs, not to mention whole religions and societies, based on the misconception that to find or attain “enlightenment”, one needs to change the way one thinks, feels, and/or behaves.

We are supposed to variously stop our thinking, generate compassion, achieve equanimity, turn the other cheek, “open” our “heart”, calm our energy, “raise” our energy, receive “empowerments”, receive energy transfusions of various kinds from people that supposedly have it to give, be humble, dress in certain ways, go through various rigorous programs of behavior involving sitting in certain ways or moving our bodies in certain ways (meditation, prostrations, yoga postures, tai-chi, etc.), not have “negative” emotions, not have “negative” thoughts, and basically surrender our own viewpoint, and do whatever the teacher, program, or religion tells us to do (generally including handing over significant portions of our money). Well, after all, all that sounds like a small(ish) sacrifice to make, if we can gain the prize, achieve the goal, grab that ring as we go spinning by.   And all this plays wonderfully to our habitual self-loathing and self criticism; it makes perfect sense, that OF COURSE! We are deficient, we need to change, improve, be different than we are; THEN everything will be alright, THEN we can live in bliss, THEN we can achieve union with “God”.  After all, we are “bad”, we are weak, we are intimately acquainted with each of our imperfections and flaws, that in our deepest fears we know make us unlovable.

BUT:  What if you already HAVE and ARE the goal you seek? What if there IS no wonderful pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow that all this elaborate effort is intended to achieve, that isn’t ALREADY the case? What if the “problem” isn’t that we need to be different than we are, but simply that we don’t understand, or notice, what we actually are ALREADY? What if this imperfection that we manifestly include isn’t actually imperfection at all?…

When this is seen, of course, confusion is short-circuited, and is instantaneously seen to be actually consisting of Enlightenment itself, the natural functioning of consciousness: inherently perfect miraculous energies; appearing within, and made up of, inherently perfect miraculous consciousness.

So, THERE IS NO PATH.   This is not to say that the true process of consciousness starting to notice its actual condition, and struggling to free itself from its own self-generated confusion, might not LOOK an awful lot like our efforts, running around pursuing various peculiar activities with our “bodies, energies, and minds”. Reading books, seeking out supposedly useful people to talk with or be in the presence of, sitting, taking drugs, exploring various extreme behaviors; all these activities may be symptoms of consciousness’ struggle to awaken from its confusion.

Does that mean that we SHOULDN’T pursue all these various activities in the hopes of awakening from confusion? Of course not. It simply means that the TRUE process of awakening does itself, and “we’re” just along for the ride. Do these things or not, it will happen when it does, and you won’t be ABLE to NOT do what is needed when the time is ripe.   However, you can rest in the comfort that since you find yourself reading this book, it’s pretty likely that you are either in the midst of awakening, or soon to be swept into the maelstrom…

Aphorisms - Pointing Out…

(What we are, what our world is, is impossible to describe in words. It CAN, however, be seen directly, if looked at without any preconceptions. These aphorisms, while not completely true in themselves, are as true as can be stated in words; and may serve as signposts, indicating “where” to look, to SEE for yourself. Read each one one at a time slowly and reflect on it; try to feel or intuit the way in which it might be true. Look directly into your own…

Being and consciousness are one and the same. There is no such thing as “objective” being without consciousness; all being is subjective, all being occurs to consciousness.   -…

Consciousness is not a “thing”; it is a capacity to perceive, an openness, a clear field of actuality.   -Look in your…

Consciousness has no size, location, or duration. Your awareness does not have a back or sides, top or bottom to it. You can’t say how “long it lasts”.     -Look…

Consciousness spontaneously appears in itself alone; it is not contained by, made of, or existing in the space of, anything but itself. Nothing can be found outside of it.   -…

Consciousness is inseparably one with any experience it has. There is zero distance between any experience and the “perceiver”. When consciousness experiences “something”, it IS that “something”.…

Consciousness always perceives with perfect clarity and unmediated directness, regardless of what is being perceived.   -Look in your…

Consciousness is always exactly the same, regardless of what it is, or isn’t, experiencing.   -Look in your…

All experience exists within, and is made of, consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

There is nothing but consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

There is no “I” but consciousness; consciousness itself is the only one home.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

I AM nothing whatever other than consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

All experience spontaneously appears within consciousness, and never stabilizes or solidifies; it is always constantly changing, never repeating what it has appeared to be already.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

Although experience appears infinitely diversified, not appearing identical with itself at any two places or times, no object can be separated out from the field of experience; and no two objects can be differentiated from each other, except as the inherent differentiation of the field of consciousness within itself.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

The entire “material” universe exists within consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

“Thoughts” and “sense objects” are indistinguishable as experiences of consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

“Self” and “other” are arbitrary differentiations, referring to consciousness itself alone.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

Consciousness is omnipresent and omniscient. It is always here, and it is what knows, experiences, everything.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-   ---

It cannot be definitively known what “anything” is except as an experience of consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

“Objects of experience” appear spontaneously within consciousness because of its own inherent nature, as a dream appears spontaneously in the dreaming consciousness because of its inherently creative nature.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

Consciousness is the absolute mystery; what it actually is cannot be known; it is the Absolute existing in itself.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

There is no consciousness.   -Look in your experience and see if this is true-

(Satsang dialogues on direct experience and what is certain)

EXPERIENCE         -I understand that there’s actually only this one perfect, radiant, beingness everywhere, and yet I still seem to see separate people, with their own separate consciousnesses. You tell me that you exist, and I exist, so now there’re two of us…   Well, what’s YOUR experience? What do YOU know for sure?   -I’m here. I exist.   Do you know anything about me, in terms of my existence? Where does my existence happen as far as you know?   -In the consciousness that I am.   In YOUR experience. In YOUR consciousness. The only thing you can know is your consciousness, your experience. Everything “else” is a guess, a hypothesis. Right?   -So outside of my consciousness, I don’t know that you exist. Nothing is happening outside of my consciousness.   Of course! How could it be? Look for yourself. How could you possibly know anything outside of your consciousness?   -So my thinking other people exist is just a pattern in my consciousness…     Of course. When you go to sleep and you dream, you may think you’re seeing all kinds of people running around doing all kinds of things. When you wake up in the morning, in that context it’s obvious that there was no one there in the dream but you. Right?

All I’m recommending is not to leap to conclusions. To stay with what is the CERTAINTY, what is the bedrock of truth that we can rest on. What is that fact? There IS a fact. There’s definitely a fact. And that fact is the being of the present moment. The “isness” of the present moment, which I subsequently analyze as consisting of energy in consciousness.

What then IS the truth? It can’t be said. The truth is “IS”, “SAT” in Sanskrit, which means being, truth, isness; what actually is. ---   -Our ego isn’t just our identity, it’s the whole construct that we think the world is?

What’s actually existing is pure beingness; that’s the reality. Anything whatsoever that is abstracted from that primal fact as an idea, belief, or supposition, is ego. Any models. And we use those models to create a story, the story of what we are and what our life is. The elements that make up the story are the supposed “things” that we think exist; our bodies, other people, objects, cities, society, the solar system, every ”thing”. The story of all this presupposes that these “things”, the elements that make up the story, actually exist; whereas in reality they are just imaginary concepts that we’ve abstracted out of this infinite, indefinable Being.

Once you see that all the elements that your story is made of don’t actually exist as objective realities in the way you think they do, then your whole story collapses; and where does that leave you? You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you are; but then there’s nothing to trap you, and no you to be trapped. THIS is liberation. THIS is enlightenment; simply seeing that there is in actuality nothing that can possibly trap you, and no separable you that could be trapped.

And all that is the sense in which it’s said in many spiritual traditions that ego is the enemy of realization.   -So those are the invisible bars you talk about, that once you see what they’re made of, they can’t trap you…

Yes. Because the bars are made out of consciousness itself, they’re made out of ideas. The things that we think trap us, they aren’t THINGS. Once we see they’re not things, we see we can’t be trapped by them. They’re made of nothing but consciousness. We’re nothing but consciousness; how can consciousness be trapped by consciousness?

Well, everything you can remember is fundamentally a lie anyways. So if you’re in a state of forgetfulness, you’re actually experiencing the reality of your being. Every instant is new and it hasn’t happened before. Anything you want to remember isn’t really a “thing”.   The bottom line is we don’t have any control. If you remember something you remember it, if you don’t you don’t. You didn’t remember it on purpose, and you didn’t forget it on purpose. If you lose your keys you lose your keys; and if you find them again, then that’s what happens. It’s just the flow of being.   There’s only one thing that’s important to remember; and that’s the ongoing flow of being. IT’S really impossible to forget, since there’s nothing else; but we can forget that we’re seeing it if we get caught up in all sorts of stories and ideas that we think are actual. We haven’t really forgotten it, we’re just misinterpreting it as being all this stuff.

-So how do you know what to pick?   DON’T! Stop picking. Become aware of all your real experience as it is. Experience the full field of your experience, and you’re experiencing your full reality.   -So how do you remove the filters, to experience all our actual experience?   Just notice it. Meditate, contemplate, investigate your experiencing. Meditation is a classic example. When people sit to meditate, not any elaborate meditation but just to sit and watch your thoughts, you start to notice all of a sudden that there’s all this crap there. Notice the crap! Don’t think of the crap as being a problem or something you’re supposed to stop, notice it! Let it grow. Notice the full field of what you’re ACTUALLY experiencing in realtime. It’s really not hard to do, but we’re habituated to NOT noticing. We’re habituated to thinking that only a narrow range of people and objects in our experience matter, and that all this other information is noise and DOESN’T matter. The fact that this particular thread in this rug here, for example, is sort of an off brown, and the one next to it appears to be an extremely similar but different shade doesn’t seem important, so I ignore it. But then I might think you guys matter, because you might think certain things about me and I might want to impress you and be socially acceptable to gain fulfillment for myself.

Yeah, we ALREADY know how to do that, this is an experiment to look and see if we can discover other approaches than that to our reality. To see the aspects of our experience that we’re used to throwing out with the garbage. And the point is, if we open COMPLETELY to the fullness of our experience in realtime as it is, we are seeing reality. Period. There IS nothing more beyond this, this is the absolute. This is God. This is Tao/Teh. This is the Trikaya.

(Spontaneous arising: there is no chooser)

-Then there’s no choosing what’s going to happen next…   Right, there’s no choosing, of course there’s no choosing. What does choosing consist of? When you start to open to the full field of your experience, you start to be able to look at what is REALLY happening as “things” are happening, rather than just defining them, like “I’m making a choice.” What is actually happening when I think I’m making a choice? Urges spontaneously arise in consciousness, thoughts arise, interpretations arise… Where do they arise from? Before they’ve arisen, do you decide that they’re GOING to arise? Do you MAKE them arise? THAT would really be the exercise of choice.

Well yeah, look and see for yourself. For example, I’m thinking of a tree right now. And I can say I’m thinking of a tree because I AM thinking of a tree. But did I think I was going to think about a tree before the thought of the tree appeared in my awareness? Did I decide I was going to have the thought of the tree before I had the thought of the tree? If you look carefully, it’s all just the spontaneous eruption of energy in consciousness, and then we spin doctor it, saying “Oh, I’M thinking about this, I’M thinking about that, I’M deciding this; but the deciding actually happens spontaneously before the fact of our claiming it, in the miraculous, unstoppable bubbling forth of all this energy in consciousness.

But the point is to open to experiencing it AS IT IS, rather than just settling for our accustomed models and labels of what we’re used to thinking it is, because that’s just dumbing ourselves down. You know, I might think “I’m a guy and I’m doing this and that, and my goals are such and such, and I’m sitting here in this place and I’m getting kind of bored, maybe I’ll take off and go have a beer.” All that may be TRUE, on ONE level, but there’s so, so, so much more that’s also in the reality of my experience that I’m ignoring by that storyline. So if I settle for that storyline I’m lying to myself. I’m oversimplifying. I’m taking an infinitely complex situation manifested by absolute universal intelligence and turning it into a simple cartoon.

And maybe, if I open to that infinite complexity, there’s something enormously valuable there that I’m missing. THAT’S the point. When we open to what our consciousness actually IS, by looking at its full expression, we might find out that, “Oh my God! This consciousness is actually everything; and I AM that consciousness. I don’t exist in the WORLD, the world exists IN THIS CONSCIOUSNESS and I am that consciousness.”

It’s an obvious fact, but to see it we have to SEE it. We have to look around the tree trunks of our usual obsessions to see the forest that it actually is.   ---   Desire is the upwelling of the divine force. Literally. Like everything is. Like all sensation is. When you see something, it’s the upwelling of the divine force. When you think something, when you feel something, when you feel a desire. All sensory experience, all mental experience, is pure Shakti, pure divine energy. It’s the spotlight of God shining out of itself. God is radiant by nature. Radiant as well as perceptive. Everything IS this radiance, and this radiance is pure ecstasy, pure energy. It’s like fireworks, you know? It’s the big bang. And it’s always happening, there’s nothing but. It’s pure ecstasy.   -So the radiance is the light on the screen of perception.   Well, yeah, there’s nothing BUT radiance, there’s nothing BUT perception. We can use these two words, but they are one.

They’re ALL just divine energy; and there’s no individual person to be entrapped anyway. You can’t entrap God; it ain’t gonna happen. Only God can do that. (Laughter)

But what does that have to do with YOU? And what relationship to all that does the fact that you are the disembodied consciousness that’s EXPERIENCING it have? Look and see, look at that. What’s experiencing you, WHAT’S looking through your eyes RIGHT NOW? It’s what you ARE, isn’t it?   -Yeah, and it’s aware of everything (laughs)   Yes, it’s aware of it all. Look and see what your relationship to “things” is. If you are the consciousness that experiences your experience, everything you experience must be in you, or how could you experience it? In other words, what you’re experiencing has to be IN your consciousness for you to experience it. Right? And if you ARE that consciousness, then everything is IN YOU. The universe is IN YOU. So, you are everything. Just exactly like in a dream. In a dream, everything that happens, including the environments, the characters, your embodiment in the dream, everything, is appearing WITHIN the dreaming consciousness that you actually are; the dreamer. Right? And the dreamer itself is not affected by what appears to happen in the dream. But what happens in the dream is CLEARLY the dreamer and nothing but. You know?   But exactly the same relationship exists, I suggest, between you and your experience now in the “waking” state, and actually in ALL states, as in a dream. It’s easy to see it in the dream from the waking state since you’re looking at it from outside the dream now, and you can see it from an outside perspective and notice “Oh! It was a dream!” But it’s harder to see from outside of THIS dream, because we don’t have an immediate and obvious experience from outside of it.

But you CAN see from outside; you ARE now and always do. You just have to come to KNOW that you can, and not be hypnotized into thinking that you CAN’T by your belief that you’re IN it.   -But there is no outside…   Right. Outside is just a turn of phrase. Outside as opposed to not trapped within it. Experience happens WITHIN consciousness. Consciousness is not stuck within the experience. The details of experience depend on consciousness, consciousness does not depend on the details of experience. When the experience changes, the consciousness doesn’t change.

-So what about when an event happens, and it shifts my state, like from being very happy to being unhappy…   Of course. It happens all the time, nonstop. But that’s just ONE possible description of experience, right? We’re constantly being moved through various mental states and emotional states as a reaction to our interpretation of experiences as they arise. The experiences arise mysteriously; we can’t determine what they’re made of or where they come from, or even where they ARE.

consciousness. So what do you do with that? What do you do with that… Anything you want! (laughter) Because whatever you DO do, will just be more of THAT. It’s nonstop.   -Sounds like a lot of movement.

On the other hand, we can know NOTHING OTHER than what it IS, in terms of experiencing it. Because our experience IS it. It’s in our face, 24/7.

• So, there’s consciousness that’s not dependent on phenomena, but you’re saying that the energy that is the phenomena is also that consciousness? So the observer IS the observed?   Yeah. Look at a dream. What are the “things” in a dream made of? You can have really elaborate dreams that seem totally real. I don’t know if you’ve had lucid dreams to verify this clearly, but you can have dreams that are exactly as real-seeming and detailed as this experience we’re having right here. Then what’s it all made of? When you wake up, it’s gone, and turns out never to have existed in actuality. Where did it go? Where did it come from when it appeared? What was it made of while it was there? Clearly it was made of the consciousness, projected by consciousness, made of the dreaming itself.

No, “energy in consciousness” is a close description of the actual fact; that there’s anything ELSE is speculation. So everything whatsoever boils down to just being energy in consciousness as far as we’re concerned.   -But then those two things are one, right?

-So if you were to summarize in one statement what is true…   SAT, period. IS.   -But “you” is, or just “is” is?   IS is. The idea that “I am” is an assumption derived after the fact, which is the naked and primal fact that BEING IS. This is an important point. But I AM that “isness” in actuality. I AM THAT. What else could I be? What else is there? ANYTHING that “is”, is

that. Because any “thing” is BEING, so consists of THAT itself in terms of what it actually is.

Yeah. Exactly. And even saying that it’s “you” experiencing is a construct of language. What you really know is that EXPERIENCE IS. And because experience is, we can abstract out or derive the idea that, “Well, there’s a me that’s experiencing it”; but that “me” is just a mental idea. Because the primary fact is that experience is happening; and it’s from THAT fact that we derive the idea that there’s a “me” experiencing it. And then if there’s a “me” that’s experiencing, there might be a “something” that I’m experiencing, and the idea of “the world” is born.   But both “me” and “the world” have been abstracted in the imagination by consciousness out of the fundamental naked fact of ISNESS, which alone is NOT imaginary.   -Which goes back to the idea that reality is really one system, which the appearance of all “things” and “actions” are produced by, and can’t be separated out from…

(Desire, embodiment, and the bardo as teaching for the living)

-I seem to feel a strong urge to serve others…   If the urge to serve arises in you, then that’s part of what you ARE. And it’s the universal expression manifesting as you, as that in those circumstances. The urge for

it actually comes from the mystery. What’s the source of it? Where does it come from? You can’t trace it back to a fixed location. So, again, it’s an expression of the universe. It’s an expression of what you ACTUALLY are. Different people have different urges that show up in different ways at different points in their lives, and on and on. But NONE of it is ours. There’s NO entity that’s us that’s separable from the stream of our manifestation, which DOESN’T come FROM us. WE aren’t making our manifestation. Manifestation is upwelling and we are that upwelling! And the whole universe is that upwelling. It’s all an absolutely direct expression of God, the Divine Being.

Go into your experience; you ARE your experience. Embrace it, texturally. Hug it. Feel it. Your experience is like a tub of warm jello. Feel it, go into it. Don’t model it or pick it apart or analyze it. Just BE it. Feel what it feels like. What does time feel like? The passage of time has a texture. It’s amazing! FEEL it. We usually don’t notice what it actually is because we’re thinking of our models. Space has a texture, being itself has a texture.

Simplistically put, the bardo teachings (of Tibetan Buddhism) state that once you die, first of all a state of darkness is experienced, of nescience. Then a state of “clear light” is experienced, pure unqualified awareness itself; then you will progressively experience states where various visions are experienced. And the bardo teachings state that if you get sucked in to believing in the independent reality of the visions you’re experiencing, having emotional reactions of hope and fear with regard to them, you’re screwed. The antidote to this entrapment is to either stay with the clear light, or to see that the visions are themselves the clear light. Which is exactly what you hear me recommending here; to see what our experience is made of. What is it?

If you see the truth of that, then what can trap you? You’d be being trapped by what is essentially light. If some circumstance seems to trap you, you’re being trapped by pure energy in divine consciousness. So how trapped can you be?   The full bardo teachings are that EVERY state of experience is a bardo state, so ultimately the same recommendations as to how to deal with them apply across the board. So the teaching is not just applying to what happens after you die, it’s about what’s happening RIGHT NOW.

It’s just you interacting with your karma, the play of the energies that you ARE. Everything and everyone that you experience is a convenient enactment of your karma, like in a dream. Everyone shows up in your life as a convenient extra on the set of the “You Show”, and they are all fulfilling exactly the role you need them to, for the “You Show” to be what it is. As the plot of the “You Show” develops, the characters in the show develop or drop out and new ones will come in. It’s all subjective. You’re not “moving through” because there’s nothing there to move through. It moves through YOU if anything. It’s you moving through you. It’s your pattern of yourself, your karma moving through your consciousness. And everything that you see is just a depiction of that, exactly like a dream.

(The body is in consciousness, not consciousness in the body)

EMBODIMENT         We are not in our bodies, our bodies are in us.   -Our bodies are in us?   Yeah. I’ll give you an example. I’ll explain the perspective. Suppose you’re dreaming at night, and you’re dreaming that you’re walking down the street. Now you aren’t actually IN the body that’s walking down the street, are you? The body that’s walking down the street is in you, which is the you that actually exists as the dreaming consciousness.   And exactly the same relationship exists between our bodies NOW and consciousness. Our consciousness is the field of our experience in which our bodies, and everything, appears. For example if you cut off you hand, you haven’t lost a piece of your consciousness. It may be more subtle to see, but even if you’re anesthetized you don’t lose a piece of your consciousness.

When does ANY experience always happen? Now. It’s already a done deal. Just look and see what it IS. What it is, where it is… And it turns out to be what WE are, because all our ideas of ourselves are derived from IT. Our ideas of ourselves are abstract concepts and imaginary modelings which are derived from this completely mysterious being that is happening right here right now.

Yes. Pure and simple. If we have a self image which accurately reflects what our ACTUAL self is, we would see that we are complete, we are inviolable, we lack nothing, we are eternal, we can’t die, we can’t be born; so in that context, the concept of “a problem” can’t exist meaningfully.

And to look at it in terms of judging any of it with regard to our ideas of success or failure, of relative values, is puerile; because what can be our yardstick for success and failure? By what standard can we say success happens from the viewpoint of reality?       Well, we say “success is if you’re rich, success is if you’re healthy, success is if you’re a good person, blah blah blah”. Says who??? The universe obviously thinks otherwise. The universe makes what it makes, as it makes it; OBVIOUSLY it wants things to be exactly what they are. Warts and all. So who are we to say that warts are undesirable? We can SAY it all we want, but again forensically as a scientist we have to ask, “Is that true?”  The universe shows up in all these ways, and the universe IS reality itself, so maybe it’s our YARDSTICK for assessing things that’s a little off, rather than the universe that’s a little off.

And of course it’s the same in our experience personally; when we open to the “noise” in experience instead of just the thoughts, the thoughts are about “this and that”, divided, but the noise bridges the thoughts. All these thoughts are discrete aspects of the noise which is inherently inclusive and non-discrete. The noise is a field of vibration, and everything’s there, all the possibilities are there. It’s not just “this verses that” like we’re used to thinking, it’s everything in between too; all the maybes, all the could be’s and might be’s and all the what if’s are all there, floating around nebulously and implicitly.   And when we open to those, all of a sudden our train of thought can become a lot less linear, can become a lot less divisive, a lot less either/or, and we can get into a both/and inclusive mode of thought, which is functionally a lot more like the way reality really is.

-It gives a new perspective on the first commandment, “Thou shall have no false gods”. Our identity as a partial being is a false god. We’re worshipping ourselves.   Yes, YES. And if we can manage to see for ourselves, directly, what we TRULY are, that we ARE consciousness, that we ARE god, that’s the end of the search, that’s the solution to the puzzle, that’s enlightenment itself. Your cup runneth over. What else is worth looking for?

What is experiencing your experience right now is what always experiences everything. It’s inviolable, it can’t be broken or damaged. The Tibetans call it Dorje, which means diamond; referring to it as the hardest, most impervious, precious thing they knew. Disharmony is a fantasy, it’s inconceivable, it can’t exist, as everything whatsoever boils down to being nothing other than this one, perfect, transcendental essence, and how can THAT be actually out of harmony with itself?

And your body is NOT the vessel of “your spirit”. Everything whatsoever, including “your body”, is divine energy spontaneously appearing in divine consciousness. “Spirit” is not IN your body; your body is IN, and wholly MADE OF, “spirit”, if we’re using the word spirit to mean God, reality. And this “spirit” is not YOURS, what you call you IS nothing other than IT. You ARE THAT, and so are all of its expressions as the forms in consciousness.

Of COURSE there’s no failure. Or success. It’s all just beauty. Or ugliness if you prefer, doesn’t matter. Or the ecstasy of energy cascading through consciousness. But the point is to be with what it IS, rather than trying to capture it with labels. THAT’S our downfall; we keep trying to capture things with labels, saying “It’s THIS!”. And as soon as you say “It’s this”, then what about “that”? It’s ALL, it’s being, it’s what we are. It’s the flow of events, the flow of experience.

(Every experience as a fractal of the whole; karma as the You Show)

In a fractal sense, every experience is an encapsulated version of the whole. Like a hologram; if you take a hologram and you cut it into pieces, each piece will contain the entire hologram. Exactly like that, every so-called limited thing actually contains and reflects the unlimited whole; it’s the net of Indra. So the equation of reality can be found in anything, anywhere.     But the catch is, you have to have an understanding of the nature of reality to read it. But the equation of reality is simple. Just look at anything, and you’re seeing it and nothing but; you have energy in consciousness, and the interwoven relationship of the two is plain to see.

We may have a nuclear war and completely poison the environment, and cockroaches or something are going to come along and go, “Thank you! Praise God for providing us with what we need!” And then THEY’LL trash the environment for themselves, but create conditions that are great for another life form, and so on. The cycle just keeps going forever.   -And that’s why you say “unless you know everything, you don’t know anything”…   Yes.   ---   -You’re in a relationship with someone and you think they’re telling the truth and it turns out they’re lying to you…   Look at it this way. Anything’s sole responsibility is to be what it is. You caring about truthfulness is you being who you are.

But then you’re criticizing that intelligence that makes you, that makes EVERYTHING what it is. You’re criticizing God, saying “You’re not supposed to be like that.” Says who? Look into it. Look into the whole thing. Try and take the true perspective as best you can. See the facts of the case as best you can. If you get to the point where you’re even LOOKING at it, you’re home free. Keep looking, keep sorting it out. And you’ll get a clearer and clearer picture of what’s going on. It does itself. Consciousness gets to a point where it wants clarity for itself; that’s why we’re all here.

The onus is on YOU to demonstrate that they’re applicable at all to this intangible infinite being that is reality. In my observation, it’s impossible to build a meaningful bridge between any model of reality and reality itself. Anything you can say about it, any picture of what’s going on, diverges infinitely from reality itself. Because reality is infinitely infinite. Infinitely unknowable, mysterious, miraculous. It exists only in itself. There are NO reference points from which to assess it, or to get any point of view on it at all. It exists inside itself alone. You can’t get perspective on reality, no perspective but IT itself. It’s all totally self referential and infinite, so what do you do with THAT?

(How language and concepts fabricate a world of false entities)

CONCEPTS         -So are you saying that conceptualizing about what IS, is basically pointless?   Of course. It’s exactly that; it’s pointless. But there’s no reason NOT to do it, either. You can have fun; it’s play, and might be useful in some regards. But if you BELIEVE it, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Nouns imply separate entities, discretely existing things. Like “person”, “floor”, ”rug”, “candy”. It presupposes that there is a person that is separable from the floor, and from the rug and the candy. But actually there’s only the one mysterious system of being, that shows up as what we name person, floor, rug and candy simultaneously. But the words belie that. The words suggest that there actually ARE separate things.   -We embrace these separate words, like “peace”, then have emotional associations with them, thinking they’re good or bad, instead of embracing the whole as it actually is…   Yes. Well, the Buddha put it very well; if you start having preferences, start choosing this or rejecting that, you’re bound to get frustrated, to suffer dissatisfaction sooner or later. Because the world comes as a whole; we inevitably get the one WITH the other, you can’t separate things out. If you want peace, what are you going to do about war? If you want happiness, what are you going to do about sadness? Whereas if you just “go with the flow” so to speak, work with reality as it presents itself, then it’s all there, and what’s the problem? Because then you’re not defining things as being problems.

That reminds me of the Bardo teachings, getting caught in a “god realm”.     Precisely. Getting caught in ANY apparitions, believing they are “real”, are actual, is ultimately a “hell realm”; because this “getting caught” is what hell consists of. Whatever anything IS, we always THINK it looks like a god realm, don’t we? When you’re a hungry ghost you think “Oh, man, look at that! If I JUST can get that, everything will be fine!” And that attachment IS hell. Whatever it looks like; getting sucked in is hell.

Spiritual teachers are all liars. (laughter) Because more than anyone, they’re the ones who KNOW that it’s actually impossible to tell the truth as it is. They KNOW they’re lying. The rest of us can actually have a sincere belief that we’re telling the truth. A genuine spiritual teacher KNOWS for a FACT that he’s lying. So if he’s a genuine spiritual teacher, he’s a liar.   It’s all artifice, you know. Trying to give spiritual teachings boils down to manipulation, magic tricks, and artifice. Because if you’re genuine you know that you HAVE to do that, it’s the only way to try to communicate the incommunicable; You’re playing tricks on people, to try to trick them out from under the tricks they play on themselves, by which they get themselves stuck.   And you do it under the guise of showing them something valuable. Whereas actually you’re showing them something of little actual value that will hopefully do the trick in snapping them out of what they’re hung up on. Because there isn’t actually ANYTHING that’s valuable, except Being itself, which can’t be communicated. Everything “else” is equally valueless. THAT’S the truth.       -It’s like a sleight of hand; “Look over HERE”…   Yeah, it’s totally that. It’s magic. It’s magic tricks.

It gets back to addiction to states. EVERYTHING is part of the same process, the unfolding of the one reality, so nothing has a superior status to something else just because it’s in a different point in that process. Butterflies aren’t better than caterpillars. Teachers aren’t better than students. Nice people aren’t better than jerks.

-I guess it’s important to try to be truthful and not lie…   All that is predicated on the idea that there is a truth that CAN be told, and that there are lies that can be told. The truth is as much a lie as a lie is a lie, verbally. Since the ACTUAL true nature of being CAN’T be told as it is, ANY words are basically lies; so what difference does it make what you say? Both our words and our motivations for saying them, are themselves uncontrollable spontaneous expressions of universal being, after all…

EVERYTHING else is a lie. Being equals truth. Being equals our identity, what we are. That’s what being self realized is, directly seeing the truth of THAT. Self knowledge. Seeing being as it is, which is seeing MYSELF as I am; which could be called seeing consciousness as it is. Seeing awareness as it is. Seeing God as it is. Realizing God. Realizing Reality. That’s the only place where true spirituality really exists, and where the idea of “truth” has any validity at all.   -So you can lie all you want.

That’s Buddhism for you. All the rest, the mindfulness, compassion and loving kindness is an addition later on that was included for crowd control and politics. If there are no entities, the MOST basic tenet of Buddhism, then WHO is supposed to have compassion, and for WHOM? If you get the essence of the teaching, all the details become moot.   Christianity is the same deal. Christ would roll over in his grave, if he had a grave, if he saw what modern Christianity was. Modern Christianity bears no relationship to the original teaching of Christ. The same with Buddhism. Most spirituality, most spiritual teachings, especially the formulaic ones, boil down to wish fulfillment and public crowd control.

We dumb ourselves down. We oversimplify our own experience by not noticing what it really IS, largely through this semantic mechanism of labeling. We’re addicted to it. But the antidote is to SEE what it really is. Let ourselves see. We’re hypnotized, we don’t allow ourselves to really look at it.   ---

(Suffering arises from believing hypothetical interpretations)

So thinking of things as problems, “bad”, OR sacred and holy is just spin-doctoring, making up stories about this whole unfathomable system that reality inalienably IS. The spin-doctoring, positive or negative, CAN’T change the fundamental nature and ongoing functioning of the system of reality, being. It’s all already happening, and is NOT amenable to oversimplified explanations.   The “isness” of things as they are is their divine aspect, NOT our take on them. The isness of ourselves is OUR divine aspect. The fact that I exist (as I do) means that I am God; done deal. Just THAT very fact alone, means I’ve crossed the finish line. I am one with the full system of reality. And of course that applies to “everything else” that exists, too.

-We suffer.   Yes, we suffer, as a result of BELIEVING in our hypothetical interpretation of our experience. We’re free to try out all the stories and interpretations we want; as long as we remember they’re hypothetical, we won’t get trapped by them. Then it just becomes a play, or an exploration of possibilities.   The bottom line is, we can’t know where we are, we can’t know what we are, we can’t know what’s happening, other than to experience it as it is. But that opens the door to celebration; that opens the door to letting go; that opens the door to freedom. When we can’t know anything, where does that leave us? With a smile on our face and a song in our hearts! (laughter)

-There seems to be so many hard-wired urges to satisfy ourselves, and to survive…   Yeah. But that’s not YOU, so it’s not a problem; it doesn’t matter. Whether our minds are driven, or doing our games or whatever, or caught up in some psychological neurosis, is completely irrelevant. The human being, the character that appears as the lead character in my experience, doesn’t need to win or lose; it’s irrelevant, because it’s NOT ME. If it WAS me, then it would matter; but it’s not. I’m the perfectly clear, independent, unchanging consciousness that’s experiencing all that. And it doesn’t matter if this is a comedy or a tragedy, it doesn’t affect the experiencer.   The fallacy is identifying with the character. If you’re watching a Mel Gibson movie on the screen and you think you ARE Mel Gibson, then you’re crazy. You’re EXPERIENCING everything that seems to be going on, and you can even have a certain empathy or sympathy with the hypothetical characters that seem to be trapped in the plot, but there’s a certainty that YOU’RE NOT ON THAT SCREEN.   Look and see. Look and see if the consciousness that’s experiencing your fields of awareness, your life, IS those things, or if those things are IN that consciousness, and it’s independent.

-It’s hard to do that with pain as an experience, because I just want it to go away.   That’s fine; but the “you” that wants it to go away is not the pure perceiving consciousness that’s experiencing both the pain, and the desire to avoid it. Those are both energy-objects, that appear within the pure consciousness. That’s the thing to look at; look at what’s actually experiencing the pain. Then you’ll see there’s a perfectly clear, totally honest, completely unbiassed, absolutely infinite consciousness, that’s experiencing ALL the energy that shows up in it as your experience, with absolute intimacy.   Whether they’re painful or pleasurable, our experiences are being experienced with equal clarity. You experience the pain with exactly as much clarity as you experience sitting here talking now. Our true, actual BEING is that clarity, which is NOT the pain; that clarity is not affected by the pain. The pain appears there, within the clarity, but the clarity does not hurt.

It’s just like if you dream that someone’s sticking you with a knife, you know? You have the EXPERIENCE of a body being stuck with a knife, but if you know it’s a dream, it’s not really happening to YOU. It’s a dream and you can laugh at it; because it’s not YOU. YOU’RE not being threatened, YOU’RE not being damaged or hurt, it’s just imagery made of energy appearing in your consciousness.   -So what’s EXPERIENCING the pain is what we actually are…

-We identify ourselves with the incompleteness, but not with the other things in our awareness. How CAN you be incomplete, since you’re everything?   Right - but you have to SEE this for yourself, that you’re not incomplete. You have to see that there’s no such THING as incompleteness. That’s the only final antidote for a sense of incompleteness.

That confusion itself is actually experienced by perfectly clear consciousness with perfect, absolute clarity. When you’re confused, you know it with absolute clarity. WHAT knows it? HOW do you know you’re confused? THAT’S you; THAT knowing clarity is you, and it never changes, it never fades. Murkiness and confusion happen IN experience, but the consciousness that EXPERIENCES those conditions is always absolutely clear and perfect, like a dust-free mirror, that all this is reflected in.   When you’re confused, you know it for a fact. When you’re in joy, you know it for a fact. When you’re sick, you know it for a fact. When you’re asleep, you know that for a fact, whether or not you know you know it. But you DO. The knower that’s experiencing it is experiencing it. If you DIDN’T experience it, you wouldn’t feel “I slept last night”, you’d feel “I didn’t exist last night”. Everything happens IN experience; you are the experiencER.

reality. We just have to see beyond them and see what they actually ARE, what they’re made of. All our quirks, our neuroses, the imperfections of our natures that were beaten into us and drilled into us as we grew up, don’t need to be fixed. They aren’t the problem. They may be a distraction, but they aren’t the problem.   And when you see reality, you see WHAT those things are, how they exist in their own context. They are the history of our manifestations, like scars. They exist as echoes of events having been experienced, but they don’t block or impede your being, even if they contribute shape to your experience. If I lost a hand or something, that would inhibit some of my activities, but it wouldn’t stop me from BEING me. Likewise, our psychological quirks aren’t an impediment to seeing what we already are, and have always been, or to BEING that.

Reality is always itself. Reality is always real. And THAT’S what spirituality is. It’s reality; it’s already accomplished, we don’t have to do anything to make it more perfect or complete. It IS perfect and complete in its very nature; and we are one with it, also perfect and complete. If you don’t know that intimately, you can investigate further to see if it’s indeed so.   -It’s like a bunch of fish thinking they have to search for water…   It’s exactly like that. We feel we need to search only because we don’t know that we already have it, already ARE it. It’s amazing.   But this mechanism of devaluing being itself, which comes as a reaction to OVER valuing certain aspects of experience, successes and achievements, is the culprit. We devalue what we ARE. We devalue consciousness. It’s obvious, if you look closely, that you ARE consciousness. You are what is experiencing your experience, which is what we’re calling consciousness.

-When we think of consciousness as our spiritual goal, we think it’s a specific thing we have to focus on…   We fixate on one thing and think, “Oh, THAT’S consciousness, let me focus on it and go after it”; but we’re ignoring the fact that everything ELSE is consciousness, too. And if we can notice what we already have, what we already ARE, maybe we’d notice that we don’t have to go after anything, we already HAVE it inalienably. It spontaneously appears continuously, unstoppably, intimately; we don’t need to go get it.

-Can you talk about the certainty?   Not really… It consists of the OBVIOUSNESS of the nature of being, directly perceived. It’s not a theory or a faith or a hope or a conviction, just the obvious, immediate fact of WHAT IS. Being is a fact, and I AM that fact. It’s what I am, entirely, and that is immediately obvious to me. It’s what all things, this entire universe, is.

That’s what I mean by certainty; knowing what’s valuable. What’s valuable is BEING; what’s valuable is what we already are, what everything already is; the “isness” of the present moment, right here, right now. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

-Was there a moment, or moments, when you especially realized the nature of reality?   Sure. I’ve been seeing it all my life, but I didn’t REALIZE I was seeing it; that’s the case with all of us. What blinds us to its true nature is our frames of reference, of beliefs, which trap us into experiencing our experience from within them conceptually. But reality is actually WITHOUT a frame of reference; and to see it as it IS, you have to drop ALL frames of reference. When I was with my teacher, on one particular occasion I SAW what he actually was, and I saw that he KNEW what he was. And when I saw that, I saw what I was, and I saw that HE knew what I was. It was relationship and communion beyond anything I had ever experienced previously, a self-validating open view of being in reality.

(Beliefs as our only impediment; the universe as sole causal agent)

WE are our own impediments. The structures of our beliefs, regarding what we think we are and what the world is, are our impediments; because they’re unconscious and we don’t know they’re there, but we believe they’re REAL. They trip us up by making us goal oriented.

We’re either pushing towards a goal, or avoiding one; Buddha nailed that one. Second noble truth, bang! “The cause of suffering is attraction and aversion.” Wanting some “things” and not wanting other “things”.   Basically what it means is you’re imaginarily separating supposed entities out of non-entifiable, continuous reality. Which points to another cardinal tenet of Buddhism, annata, “no-self”. No entities. No “things”. There are no entities, there are no selves.

The universe is doing it; the universe is the causal agent and the substance which is doing it, it’s just showing up as “you”, and you’re interpreting it as YOUR effort, or YOUR struggle.

So the onus is not on you to struggle or not struggle, to have focus or NOT to have focus; all that will inevitably take care of itself. And how could you stop it? If you COULD stop it that would also be an expression of the universe doing it. In other words, the universe is doing everything. Everything that’s being done is being done by IT. We’re not doing anything; we’re off the hook, we’re out of the loop.   -It’s being done through us?   Of course. And there’s no “us” that it’s being done “through”, there’s no “us”, it’s just being done, period. We interpret it as being done through us because we think “we’re” the owners of our experience; but actually there is no “we” who own it, experience just IS.

(Nonresistance reveals reality; reference points create the world)

Yeah, no resistance. If there’s no resistance then we can begin seeing reality happening as it is, because we’re not invested in the outcome of doership. It’s like if you’re at a horserace and you have a lot of money bet on one horse, then you’re distracted by that investment, obsessed with following that one horse, excited when it seems to be ahead, and worried when it seems to lag behind. But if you don’t have any money on it, don’t have a preference, you can just sit back and watch the event unfold impartially, admire ALL the horses without worry; you get to see the big picture.   And it’s the same in our lives. If we’re fixated on specific things, it causes us to have tunnel vision. But if we’re in nonresistance, basically letting events flow as they ARE, then our perspective broadens naturally and we can see the whole pattern of events, the nonlinear interactions that shape and indeed constitute all “things”.

So the difference between being sober and being blasted on LSD is essentially nonexistent, for a person who’s experiencing the reality of their sensation. Because you’re ALWAYS experiencing flashing lights and changing colors and shapes moving and all this; always! But we ignore it, we dumb ourselves down and fixate on our story. “Oh, I’m in a room, talking with other people, no more than that, and that’s all that’s happening.”   -Is that what you mean by reference?   Yes. Exactly. The reference point is definitions. If I’m not defining what’s going on, then what IS going on? This field of crazy lights and sounds and energies in consciousness. You know, and when you take LSD you get a field of crazy lights and sounds and energies in consciousness. How is THAT any different? (laughter)   -Years ago I got on “Magic Mountain” at Disneyland, because I heard the monks would meditate on that ride. I sat in the front and had no expectations about what I would experience, so it was as if nothing happened. If there’s no expectation, frame of reference, or resistance, there’s no ride.

Exactly. Resistance creates the world, creates concrete reality. Nonresistance reveals true reality. Nonresistance allows us to see God. Because then you don’t have a reference point, you’re wide open to what IS. That’s the Dzogchen view; no resistance, no reference point. It’s just open being. WHAT IS it? What is it? You don’t even ASK the question let alone answer it, as the answer is obvious and unsayable.

The way the truth of “spirituality” solves the problems of our life, is to show us that the way our life has ALWAYS been, is in actuality NOT a problem. The problem is us defining certain states or conditions as “problems”. And we define problems because of attachment and aversion. True spiritual realization is seeing for a fact that the way things are is not a problem - once you see nakedly the way they, and YOU, ACTUALLY are. You see that there’s no one for it to be a problem FOR in actuality.   So when you see that there’s no problem, of course that solves your problems. But it doesn’t solve them by SOLVING them; it solves them by showing you that there never were any in the first place.

(Seeing reality as a trick of perspective, not attainment)

-You can’t have a judgment about anyone else’s state of spiritual unfoldment…   Of course not, how could you? You CAN’T know. You can’t even have a clear understanding of whatever “level” YOU’RE at, let alone have a clear understanding of where anyone else is at. But that’s very superficial; because in actuality there are no “levels”, only mystery.   ---   -There does seem to be a myth that with spiritual realization, there are no more difficult experiences, it’ll be all butterflies and rainbows…   Well, sometimes it’s butterflies and rainbows, and sometimes it isn’t. But it’s NEVER anything other than the divine. And seeing THAT fact is realization. Being attached to pretty states is an immature understanding.

There’s a lot of history of criticizing spiritual teachers for being a certain way or for NOT being a certain way; behaviors, sex, money, etc., and all that’s an absurdity; because the genuineness of their realization and the effectiveness of their functioning as spiritual teachers is independent of their behavior in human terms. They may be incompetent in other areas, but still have a genuine realization. And vice-versa, you may have a really effective teacher that doesn’t have a genuine realization, but they gather many followers. Look at the Jim Jones effect, and so on.

Life becomes like walking through a museum; seeing myriads of different kinds of beauty, in different aspects of things, which are all miraculously beautiful and amazing and profoundly meaningful. Some may resonate with you more than others, but you don’t need anything from them, or to avoid them either. They’re there, they have their beauty as expressions of Pure Being. You get to enjoy that beauty and move on, and there’s more beauty, nothing but beauty. It’s a continual cascade of different textures of amazement.   BUT, you have to see that fundamental miracle first for yourself.   You have to see the miraculous nature of your being. It’s not hard to see; the only thing keeping us from seeing it is our own cussedness in getting caught up and invested in all of our bullshit, believing our own lies.   Seeing it can be like a trick. You know those computer-generated pictures that look like fuzzy abstract patterns, but then once you “get” the way to look at them, you can see the 3d image hidden inside? It’s actually plain to see, but you won’t be ABLE to see it until you stumble on the WAY to see it; then it’s easy. That’s a perfect analogy for seeing reality as it actually is; because after all, you’re looking at it right now, but maybe you just don’t see it. Right? Then suddenly you stumble on the right way to view it, then all of a sudden, BANG! There it is!

And it’s a trick that you can learn, it’s a trick of perspective you can have pointed out to you, and you can explore it and wrestle with it, and then one day suddenly you GET it, and you SEE. It’s definitely a trick, and the more you explore it and the more you familiarize yourself with it, you can do it easier, deeper, faster, etc. Once you SEE it, everything becomes infinitely interesting and you no longer have a need for things to come out one way or another, so it’s like watching an amusing show. You’re interested in where the plot’s going to go, but you don’t really need it to go this way rather than that way.

-Ego isn’t what is propelling and motivating our behavior?   No, of course not. Motivation arises from what we ARE. And ego is just a superstructure that we spin around those urges that come up spontaneously from our being. It may subvert some of the energy, but it doesn’t have any motivations of its own. It claims them and tries to own them; it says “I decided this” and I’M doing that”. But that’s a lie, because the actual doing, the actual urge, comes out of the essence of our being, which is one with the being of the universe.

Yes. But it’s not a CONSCIOUS story, that’s the problem. So we believe in it because we have all sorts of little unconscious assumptions which we assume are true.

(The inquiry into what is actually happening and trusting the process)

---   -So it goes back to Ramana, and who is it that is thinking that?   Yeah! Who’s thinking it, what’s it made of, where is it happening… The point is to ask any question that makes you investigate WHAT’S ACTUALLY GOING ON in this being of the present moment, to try to see it as it ACTUALLY is, and not just through the haze of our suppositions. What IS it? What’s going on here, right now? Who’s experiencing it? What’s it made of? Look at any of those questions, and you’ll be looking at reality.

THAT’S the place to be. That’s good. Just stay with it, and open to that not-knowing; and it will teach you, it’ll reveal itself to you as it is. Gradually, almost by osmosis. Be with it as openly and as unconditionally as you can, and it will reveal itself. But the less you think you know about it, the fewer expectations you bring to it, the more you’ll be able to see it as it is. It will teach you, it will show you.

All this crap I spew out here in Satsang, I don’t sit at home thinking about what to say. (laughter) What happens is IT teaches me what it is; I look at it, and it expresses itself through the words I use. It’s self-revealing; it teaches what it is.

-I love how you say we’ve got the power of the universe backing us up…   Yeah. Every occurrence whatsoever, it IS the power of the universe that’s doing it, backing it up. Everything. We’re off the hook. We’re totally not responsible. The universe is doing it.

-The more I say I don’t know, the more clear things are becoming…   Letting go of knowing is actually very empowering. We’re left with the truth of being. Even in the midst of our illusion of stories, we have a certainty that we’re faking it… “I’ve built up all this status and I’m this smart guy. I’ve got all these tricks I can pull out of my hat; but, in the back of my mind I know I’m faking it. In the back of my mind I know it’s all bullshit. I’m just trying to impress people because I’m afraid that I’m only a stupid little boy.” So, when you say “I don’t know” and mean it, you’re bypassing that whole neurosis. You’re bypassing that whole identification with yourself as a defined entity, and resting in the openness of Being itself. It’s ultimately freeing. It’s empowering; and all of the posturing is ultimately unempowering because it’s based on the unconsciously-known certainty that it’s a lie.

it. But when we’re invested in trying to MAKE something of things, that’s what blinds us to what things really are. It’s like you’re watching TV and some show comes on, and you start getting really invested in the characters and the plot and all that. You forget that you’re just watching little flickers of light that are showing up on the TV screen. There IS no plot. There ARE no people, just flashes of light; but the seduction of the investment in those so called interesting things, draws our attention. It sucks us in, draws our attention away from being able to step away and see things as they ACTUALLY are.   It’s a natural process. We eventually weary of it and begin to change our focus. It’s a spiritual maturity.

(Enlightenment as completion already present, stages as the one process)

Enlightenment has NOTHING to do with action. Maybe that person was a child murderer in their last life and they’ve improved to the point where they’re just a con man. It’s a big move in the right direction. (laughter) Look at the bright side.

You never have to wait, really, because there’s nothing BUT luck. Luck’s happening right now. There’s nothing but luck, there’s nothing but chance. How did you happen to come here? How do you happen to be thinking these thoughts? It’s ALL luck! It’s all chance and it’s all a part of the process of your unfolding, which will look the way it will look.

Sometimes it looks like wanting, sometimes it looks like despair, some times it looks like “Oh fuck it, I’m going to go out and party”. Sometimes it looks like finding. But each stage is not lesser than any other. The stage of finding isn’t any better than the stage of wanting, or any better than the stage of saying “Screw it”.   They are all stages in exactly the same process, the same trajectory. To say THIS part of the trajectory is better than THAT part of the trajectory is foolish.

It only APPEARS to take time. There’s no such thing as time actually. Time is the essence of the mystery. Look at what time is and you’ll have the solution to everything; because if you see where time is, you’ll see where reality is. It’s an infinite mystery. Time is an infinite mystery, space is an infinite mystery, being itself is an infinite mystery. Identity is an infinite mystery.

We don’t need to FIX our personality to be free of our personality. We just need to see what it is. We don’t need to fix or stop our ego to be free of our ego. We just need to see what it is. All those things are just modes of energy, and we just need to see the truth of that. It’s like a TV that’s on in the corner of the room. We don’t have to pay attention to it. We don’t even need to turn it off. We just need to see that it’s just a TV.

It’s our state to be in that position at certain points of our evolution. It’s not a BAD thing. It’s just what it looks like. It’s like a chicken in an eggshell. The chick being in the eggshell is not a bad thing, and the chick’s breaking out of the eggshell is not a good thing; they just LOOK different, they’re just different phases of the same process.

Surfing is a good analogy. Surf your own energy. Get to know your own energy. That’s what Tantra is. Learn all the energies in your reality. They’re all you. Own them. Go with them, travel them.   It’s all a matter of acquiring perspective. NOTHING needs to be different than it is. You just need to see what it ACTUALLY is from the broadest possible perspective. Navigating our energy is a process of exploring perspectives. What does my reality look like from this perspective… what does my reality look like from THIS perspective. And if you do that with enough abandon and enough depth of experience, you ultimately can stumble on the TRUE perspective of what we really are. From the point of view of what we really are, everything clicks. Everything falls into place, clarity is there.

Get drunk every now and then. Take drugs, meditate. Do different things. Let yourself navigate your experience in new ways, and see the different pieces of it. Push the boundaries. Sensually. Don’t think about it, BE it. See what it feels like, drink it in with its texture. And as you do that, you’re actually seeing the universe in different perspectives. You may stumble on a perspective that opens into the perspective of Being itself…   You don’t need to change anything, you just need to see what it IS in its true perspective, because it’s ALL just energy in consciousness. It’s self-originating. You

The bottom line is that we need to trust the process, trust being itself. Being is already BEING being, so who are WE to second guess it? Trust the process that is already going on. The process is us, we ARE that process, it’s already happening; so, what’s the problem? And having it LOOK like a problem is itself in THAT instant the process. It IS us. It is what we are. It’s what we’re being in that period of time.   Again, we just have to trust the process, open to our being. Open to the reality of our experience. Trust our experience, trust our experience itself.

Enlightenment is seeing that there is absolutely nothing you can do or not do, or need to do. So at that point, ABSOLUTELY nothing matters. It’s a totally done deal. And it’s ALL there.   It’s freedom from importance. Importance is a really good measure of our liberation, because importance is always SELF importance.

Looking for fulfillment… What fulfillment actually is, is reality itself; reality is nothing BUT fulfillment. It’s fullness, it’s completeness, it’s nourishment, it’s release. In Tibetan they call it Dzogchen, which means “great completion”, great perfection. Because it’s a sea of fullness… and you know, how yummy is that?   Anytime we find a partial satisfaction in an experience, we’re just seeing a small aspect or echo of THAT; but THAT is actually our very nature, and the inherent nature of experience itself. We have it, ARE it, all the time. It’s the very nature of every object, of every subject, the very nature of the fact that we’re experiencing.

-So what about the enlightened guy who got up to get a beer because he was bored?   That’s fine, you get up, and go get your beer; but there’s no interpretation of boredom, because you know that it’s ALL the ultimate flow of your reality. And even if there WAS still a feeling of boredom, THAT’S the flow, too. Within the context of the complete fullness of infinite presence, boredom is appearing, beer is appearing, getting up is appearing. But there’s no problem, no issue, no strategy leading to something else, leading to some imaginary cornucopia in the sky.