Participant 1: At the start of the meditation, my heart area and my solar plexus got very warm. It was very Blissful.
David: You are feeling the self-activating, naturally transmissive Bliss of the Self, the way it affects the body, in terms of opening up energy centers and saturating Consciousness with expanded Bliss. It’s in the body, the mind, and in Consciousness itself where realization registers in the way that you described, Bliss and Energy, warmth. So, it’s a physiological transformation as well as a psychological, and mental, and spiritual activation.
The spiritual aspect is the aspect of Consciousness itself. The other aspects are the mind, the body, the emotions, even the ego, which possesses the “I” sense. It’s ego that says “I.” When you say, “I am going to the store,” that’s referencing the ego, the autonomy that you feel about your own actions, that they are somewhat deliberate, and you execute them. So, that “I” can expand beyond itself into Consciousness and become something very different than what it is in ordinary activity, where it feels itself just to be a relative agent of action.
When the ego is fathomed alongside spiritual experiences, its character changes into Consciousness itself. It’s the “I” sense that changes into Consciousness, what you call a me. If there’s no spiritual impact on the ego, it just stays small. It stays tiny, driven by its own action, its own choices. So, the sense in which you go beyond the ego in realization is the enlargement that takes place spontaneously within it, as it interacts with something else, something that is larger than it. Like a wave interacting inside the ocean, settling down on top of the ocean, which is itself, its character changes.
It wasn’t false when it was an individual wave. It was just an active small element of the ocean, but its character changes as soon as it impacts against its origin, so too with the ego, what we call the ego, the “I” sense. It dissolves into the ocean of itself, of Consciousness, and in that way it’s liberated. It attains muksha, liberation. So, if you’re struggling with the ego to transcend it, to go beyond it, you haven’t really understood the real principle of the spiritual path, which is to merge the ego into its source, not to erase it. Not to have an arm wrestling match with it, because there’s only one ego, so it’s just the “I” sense fractioned against itself, set off against itself fighting, having a fight, usually following imagined spiritual ideas wrongly given, which were meant to liberate it.
So, the Bliss you describe, the warmth, the Energy that suffuses you, that comes right into you, is part of the phenomenology of awakening, meaning the direct experience of awakening. It’s part of that direct experience. It’s in the body, the mind, the ego that you acquire and experience something of a spiritual nature. And when it becomes really distilled and refined, it’s the ego merging back into the Self. When the ego sees something higher than itself, it surrenders immediately, spontaneously, because it recognizes the greatness of where it comes from, the source of the mind, the source of Being. That’s meditation, that’s transcending, that’s opening into the Divine, recognizing what is prior. And the more you do that spontaneously, so you can’t really do it, but spontaneously, the more an overall transformation in the ego’s place, in the structure of a human being’s existence, occurs.
So, what I’m saying is that the ego can permanently dissolve into Consciousness. It can permanently shift itself into the Self, until the ego finds itself forfeited to Consciousness. It merges or dissolves into Consciousness spontaneously. So, now it has a right relationship with Consciousness. Right meaning true, not morally right. Now it has its truthful place inside the human structure. And what follows from that is the unspeakable joy and Bliss and evenness from pure recognition of the Self, ongoing recognition of the Self. And out of that location emerges the Shakti, the Kundalini-shakti as transmission, out of that unfathomable state of Being. The Shakti emerges out of the abyss within Consciousness, so as to make itself known to others, and the world, and the universe, just the way the sun shines from within itself outwardly in all directions.
Another way to say the same thing is that the ego is transformed into sat-chit-ananda, Absolute-Consciousness-Bliss. That’s the fabric of its source. Just so you don’t think that source is nothing, or some kind of nothingness. It’s an actual radiant field, world, or location. So, that life now is going to be suffused completely in that Divine element, that radiant, Blissful, transcendent Consciousness, the Self, without lapse. It’s very important to understand that we’re talking at this point about lapse-free realization. It means perpetual realization, nitya samadhi, perpetual realization, not sporadic realization. And the longer you spend time in that state of perpetual samadhi, the body changes, the body itself now. The physical body becomes transformed due to this long impact of Bliss upon it, in which the actual cells, the DNA of the body, undergo a revolutionary change, in which Energy houses itself in every single molecule of that body and can be released at any moment. It can be shared. It can just spill over.