Moderator: A viewer in the Boston area asks, “What do you mean by Abstract Wholeness?”
David: Invisible, beyond the mind’s ability to grasp as an object. Something that is completely abstract would be universalized. Something that attention when used deliberately can not pinpoint. But, the experience that the participant from Ohio shared, this pleasant radiance being felt in the heart is the doorway into that Abstract Wholeness. This is what’s meant by spiritual initiation, an initiation that leads one into the mystery or the mysteries of the Universe, that is pointing toward progressively deeper levels of non-concreteness or abstraction. When the mind enters into the phase of complete abstraction, it’s the Self.
Abstract simply means away from the sensory toward the mental, through the mental, through the super mental, through the subtlest causal, and then there lies the transcendental, the most abstract possibility that the human mind can come into contact with. That is the infinite itself, the infinite which is no object. It’s no concreteness, no form, formless Being. That is what I mean by abstraction in this context, this discussion.
Moderator: A New York viewer comments, “Last week someone questioned about how to stay in pure Consciousness. I find pure Consciousness is not something to get. It arises naturally.”
David: To be technical, even beyond the point that you’re making, it doesn’t arise at all. In discussing this level of reality in terms of abstraction, it’s simply a phase of understanding which is completely expanded, that somehow the mind has gone behind its ideas and the framework within which ideas happen. There in that descent toward inwardness, you have this knowledge or structure of Consciousness which is nonmaterial.
It’s nonmaterial, it’s nonphysical, but it exists. In fact, it lives on the border between existence and nonexistence. It’s confusing whether we should say that the absolute exists or doesn’t exist. And so you see that there’s a genuine struggle with language at that point. Language simply is too gross to hold this deeper abstract level of Awareness, you could say Awareness itself, that the mind can’t hold onto as an object or even as a subject its own Self, which is essential pure Consciousness.
So, this is quite a tricky subject matter once we begin discussing it. If it’s not discussed and you simply abide and rest in your native Awareness and you have the capacity to recognize what Awareness is then it’s not difficult at all. It’s very simple. So, on the level of direct experience, it is easy to fathom.
But once we begin a dialog, it becomes more sophisticated. The challenge is greater because now we are both in the relative and the Absolute and what we are trying to do is give a sense of both at the same time. And that actually would be a more profound level of sharing. To simply rest in the simpleness of Being is no doubt exquisite, to simply rest in silence and full expansion where all speech flows into silence, but there’s a greater sense of being able to live both in the waking state and in that silence. It seems to be a more comprehensive level of Consciousness.