Participant 1: Is there such a thing as being invited into higher levels of Consciousness?
David: Yes, that’s what this meeting is. It’s an invitation to do exactly that. It’s an invitation. Anybody can walk through that door and take up the invitation.
P1: Oh, yeah, yeah.
David: I know you mean it metaphysically, but I’m not going to answer that.
P1: Okay.
David: I’m going to answer it metaphorically. So, anybody can walk through that door, and they can taste the Bliss of the Self. And unless they’ve already achieved good spiritual understanding, they won’t appreciate it, because it’s the matching of understanding with experience that gives the fullness of spiritual awakening.
It’s a marriage of understanding, correct understanding, precise understanding, and also general understanding, both of those rolled into one, along with direct spiritual experience and experiences. When you put those together, you get a marriage, so that the understanding or the mind, what’s in the mind, begins to reflect what’s inside of experience, which is not in the mind.
If you have just understanding, it’s merely intellectualizing. If you have just experience, it’s just a form of sensationalism, sensation. And those two things remain separate from one another because they’re two different compartments, so to speak, inside the human being, which functioning independently, even if juxtaposed, still create separation.
Even if you try to draw a harmonious relationship between them, that’s what I mean by juxtaposed, you still have really a bifurcated experience, a dualistic experience as a human being. Therefore, I talk more in terms about the union of understanding and experience, where each one forfeits itself into the other, where each one, you could say, dissolves and allows for an invisible union since they both dissolve.
They don’t remain intact. They dissolve, but both on equal footing, so that you fall into an indescribable something. The indescribable refers to the understanding of it, and the something refers to the sensational aspect of it or the direct experience of it. So, this is what spiritual life truly is. It’s the experiential, tangible, and yet fully understood affirmation of unity, of this kind of unity that I’m speaking about.
Reflecting a little more deeply on this, you can also see how understanding and experience, before dissolving, exist in a tension with each other, a tension, a natural tension, a positive tension, because understanding is always needing time. Understanding, the act of understanding, requires piecemeal steps that are put together in terms of time, linear time, which then allow you to move deeply into something. Whereas direct experience allows for no such time factor.
And so you can see these are two contrary processes again in a creative tension with one another, since they represent opposite directions of knowing. So, it’s in this sense we are taken beyond the self. We are taken beyond the self. It’s in this sense in which neither knowing nor experiencing now have any domination inside this thing we call a person. Because now there’s no precise knowing, no precise experience, and yet experience and knowing have been engaged, there can be a fruitful surplus, a fruitful abundance in Being.
And that fruitful abundance brings satisfaction, Bliss, contentment, the fulfillment of all desires, and a radicalized form of attention, a radicalized experience in Being set apart from conventional modes of functioning. We’re talking about human beings here. And in this development, there’s the possibility for ongoing ecstasy and liberation, endless ecstasy, endless liberation. Liberation that does not begin or end.