Being and Reality Are One, May 12, 2024

Participant 1: I’m going to try again at what I started with. I’m not asking advice, but more asking for you to share some of your direct experience. I just sat a fifty-four-day silent retreat, and I experienced the entire cosmos inside, and there was only this God consciousness. And I just rested up. That was all there was. I just rested in it.

But I’ve come back to a reality that I had created before I left, and there’s something about the state of that that can never go back to an old way. But, this outer world…, what I’m doing now, I’ve been back about five weeks, what I’m, I’m just being in the state and responding, and then making adjustments, bringing in more support and adjustments so that this outer reality isn’t as busy and doesn’t have as much impact on that state.

It’s not a state, it’s reality. So, to maintain being in reality takes some adjusting to what has been created before. And I am asking your direct experience of this balance, how to live with this outer reality in that state.

David: There’s no inner and outer. You throw that out, and now there’s just what is. And you’ve gotten rid of your ideas, even of cosmic awareness, going beyond that into a lucidity of illumined, radiant existence, without a separate subject to notice it. As long as there’s an I that notices its liberation, the liberation is limited. It’s conditional, conditional realization.

Once you remove the observer, or the observer disappears, it’s better to say the latter, then only that exists, no matter what the conditions. But that must not be confused with a subjective state of being inside of you. This is the difficult part, is understanding that there’s a complete extirpation of the me in the sense that it is now merely in the foreground as an instrument for action, but wide awake in the background is that, which doesn’t move, which doesn’t change or transform into an enlightened state or a non-enlightened state. There’s only that, which is reality, which is reality itself. Being and reality are one in this case.

And you’re neither open nor closed. You’re neither awake nor ignorant. It’s something very precious. There’s no word for it. You’ve passed through all the stages at that point. There’s no more evolution. There’s the clarity and directness that you are Consciousness, and Consciousness operates. That’s it. So, there’s Shiva, meaning nonoperative Consciousness, witnessing Consciousness, and then there’s Shakti, which is the play of experience. Shiva and Shakti are symbolic of the singleness and the inherent paradoxicalness of this blessed condition.