Participant 1: Praying for help to God doesn’t feel real anymore. I feel stuck in my patterns. Oneness has disappeared.
David: You can feel your patterns without feeling stuck in them.
P1: I definitely feel my patterns.
David: Okay, but I just wanted to draw up an important distinction because those two things don’t necessarily have to go together. I understand what you’re saying about the patterns being there, and then being primary now, and that all that other great stuff that was so engrossing and so liberating has evaporated. That’s a good sign. I didn’t say it felt good. I know the distinction. That’s a good sign from a spiritual point of view because every realization must melt down into nothingness.
You can’t get hooked on realizations. You only experience realizations in the process of waking up. That’s when you are awarded those great silences, expansive feelings, high devotional states, oneness, profound equanimity, Bliss the sense of being unlimited Being. All of those things happen in the context of separation. When separation itself begins to dissolve there’s no more room for these experiences either. So, you’re going beyond realization. You are going beyond realization and there’s no feeling to that. It’s just the direct knowledge of the Universe, the state of the Universe itself. It’s not something that is self-reverent. It no longer strokes you back.
You’ll see that you haven’t lost anything. Nothing is ever lost. It’s just that you become more and more and more until you are the most. So, as deeply upsetting as this can be on the emotional body and the mind, it’s actually very good. It’s very good news to be this unhappy. I hope it wasn’t my presentation last week that destroyed everyone’s notion of the separate God. As you can see no one came back. I took everyone’s illusions away and they all ran away. You know Santa Claus gives all the gifts, but someday Santa Claus might show up and say, “I want them all back.” So, you shouldn’t get attached to Santa Claus’s gifts.
You should want to go beyond everything, and your attitude is good because you’re not playing games. You would never have, in my view, voiced that concern unless you were feeling daring inside because it’s risky and it’s precarious to express the disillusionment aspect of the waking up process. No one wants to go there, and that is in fact why so few people are here tonight. I think I took God away from everyone last week, and it makes me want to cry to think that their conceptual God that I took away and that they’re all angry at me for is more important than me, actual me.
So, here’s where you separate the men from the boys and the ladies from the girls in spiritual education. Those who are around for the quick thrill and the confirmation of their belief structures, you can’t count on them for a lasting committed relationship. But people who are in it to go to the end, to go off the end, those are the people who will come back ravenous again and again and again, never ever being able to be filled and yet always living in that fullness.
P1: May I ask one more question?
David: Of course, you can ask as many questions as you want to.
P1: Is there anything that eases going through the darkness?
David: Yes, being with me, being in the company, the feeling company of those who are in love with that which you are in love with. Just because your experience will diminish in a sense, in terms of being impacted by the Oneness doesn’t mean that your love, your Bhakti goes away. That’s where the pain is in fact. The pain is that you’re not feeling the connection. That’s what gives rise to the feeling of streaming Bliss which we all want because it’s happiness, it’s love, it’s a thrill, it’s being loved to the extreme, and that is what we can share here. That will resurrect here all by itself when the time is right.
But that we go into this deep nothingness is of utter significance and that you lose everything. You lose track of your own process. You lose track of your own realization. You lose your realization. And when you go through this massive process of being uprooted again and again and again until you can’t keep track anymore, ’til you can’t measure, ’til you’re so confounded that you don’t know what is up and what is down, you’re then confounded into the liberated condition.
You get there through confoundedness, not through self-certainty. And this is really the pain of it. The pain is having all that certainty extracted from you piece by piece because you can only go through so much yogic experience, so much illumination and then the whole thing begins to collapse on itself which is really when it becomes very serious and very interesting. You’re ready for everything. Everything’s going to show its fact to you.
