Bondage To Liberation, July 13, 2025

David: Do you understand that it’s the I-sense that disappears in these great experiences?

Participant 1: Yes, gets out of the way.

David: So, that’s the balancing act, is to accept that. To be without the I, and then come back to the I, because the I is synonymous with bodily functioning. So, if you’re looking for balance, it has to do with the depth of realization. That’s where the balance exists. You can put the word balance in quotation marks. That’s where the balance exists, is in the depth of realization, which over time becomes more and more compatible with everyday living. But to try to maintain some high peak, and to stay there, is not the best approach.

P1: Right, no.

David: But that trap presents itself because of the exhilaration you get in the moment when you think an opening has occurred. There’s a temptation to epitomize that moment and seek after that moment again in memory. So, you can call this bondage to realization. Not bondage to the world of perception and experience, but bondage to realization.

The bondage I’m referring to in the phrase “bondage to realization” is the obsessive-compulsive reaction to believe that realization happened to you, and therefore, you are responsible to either reattain it, maintain it, or whatever else occurs to you around this topic of realization. But bondage is bondage. If you run after something that is outside of yourself, you’ve lost your composure, and that becomes obsessive-compulsive, and probably is going to be a failure. And if you run after something that you think is inside yourself, it’s the same motion. So, to run after samadhi and to run after a Ferrari is essentially the same thing, because it’s based on this knee-jerk reaction and this fear that you’ve lost something, and you have to regain it.

So, to mature in realization is to begin to move through that reaction, to relax it. Now, to relax it won’t produce anything that you can reattach to. The key is to understand that moment of relaxation and release in which the peace overcomes you as being an optimum moment in Being that was spontaneously given, not something that you created through your spiritual brilliance.

And that’s where also humility and surrender come into the process, because humility and surrender, which cannot be cultivated, neither one of them can be cultivated, must be the natural outcome of seeing what is. And not any kind of special development of some spiritual characteristic or ability, such as when we think that a realized being has infinite humility or has surrendered completely, trying to again attribute it to them, rather than seeing it as the natural effluence of their own state of being.

The balance is in living day by day comfortably in what you truly know as yourself. That’s the balance. We can even discard the labels of ignorance and enlightenment, thinking that there are two kinds of selves, an ignorant one and an enlightened one. To relax in the way I’m describing is to bypass that division of thinking there’s a big self and a small self. Just be yourself. And it’s your invitation to yourself to come into deep understanding of what self is, and know your true being.