Grace and Surrender, February 27, 2010

David: We think we’re in a position to enlighten ourselves, but just the opposite is true. We’re only in a position to recognize where we are. And then in that recognition, there’s an easy movement that happens, an organic movement that unites us back consciously with who we are.

Obviously, this can only happen through Grace, and by Grace, we mean the adjusting power within your own Consciousness to do this. We don’t mean some mysterious ether-like entity called Grace that descends and then it leaves. That could not possibly be the meaning of Grace, something that comes and goes. It must be an ever-present feature of existence. It must be existence itself. Grace is Being.

We can’t answer the question why we miss it or why we think we miss it if that kind of questioning happens. We say, “Well, if it’s always there then why am I not always feeling free?” There’s no answer to that because that question is posited from the position of waking state awareness where there’s no resolution.

It’s like the lens of a camera saying, “Why can’t I see beyond my lens? Why can’t I see what’s on the outside of my lens?” It’s a self-defeating question. There’s no answer to it. And there’s no answer to why you don’t recognize the movement of existence as Grace, as liberating power. So, given the fact that we can’t answer that question does not mean that we can’t engage that process. It just means we recognize the limitations built into the question-answer mind.

And so what can we do? We just have to just fall silent and just let the questioning mind have its way. “Ok, where you exist mind, the opposites rule.” So be it. Don’t fight with it. Another way of saying this is at some point you just recognize your need to awaken and you do it. You don’t get caught up in all the self-hate involved with “Well, why didn’t I do this before and why was I being punished for so many lives to be born in this body and…. Oh, come on. You can only begin when you begin, and that’s the act of Grace is that you begin.

For me, Grace is synonymous with existence. I can’t conceive of a Grace that’s somewhere. For me, it’s built right into the fabric of Nature which to me is very exciting and thrilling to admit that.

The way in which I work is to simply allow the power of Being to arise without any conjuring, without any practice. And so each person is allowed to greet that in their own way because effortlessness is a kind of pleasantly undefinable experience. Just being effortless it really melds into it, melts into the movement of Consciousness, how Consciousness itself can enlighten.

David: [Addressing a participant] Feeling good? Good.

Participant 1: I am curious about the notion of being saturated with “Shakti” as opposed to what is referred to as “Emptiness” in Buddhism.

David: I like the way you’re thinking through it, which is why it’s nice to converse and go into it like this. So, the saturation aspect is what is most appealing because in that voidness there’s simply a lucidity and that’s it, a quietness, a silence. So, that’s what I call Divine Light, that’s the Divine Light aspect of realization, the Paramatman, the Absolute. All of those words point to that empty condition which is expanded infinitely but extremely silent just like a pond without a single wave in it. And the Shakti has this quality of vibration, ascension, even descension. It can ascend and descend. It has ecstatic reverberation within it. It does something to exhilarate the whole field of awareness.

P 1: Okay, I was just realizing, when you say that, that, in the experience of Awareness, Bliss is part of it, but there is no feeling of saturation in Awareness.

David: Okay, it’s good you’re making these little distinctions and…. What you’re doing now, you’re coming into deeper clarification about your process of tasting and having the additional penetration of that reality, and also into the saturation phase as well. You’re beginning to discern the different textures within this field that we call the Enlightened Field or the Liberated Consciousness, whatever.

David: Yes [David acknowledges Participant 2]

Participant 2: I think you paint a very beautiful picture and vision of surrender here. And if I may, I would like to maybe add a nuance or two from my own experience. I think it’s very valuable for the seeker or yogi to have this idea that he or she is surrendering as they move through the spiritual process. It’s a very useful idea for them. But I’ve noticed from my own experience, if I may talk this way, when one reaches the other shore, one is graced to look back on his sadhana and see something much bigger going on which is that there was surrendering happening but what was really happening was that Consciousness itself was surrendering everything in my mind between it and freedom. And it does this by literally overwhelming and annihilating these things, whatever they are that come between it and freedom. From my point of view….

David: We have the same point of view on it,

P2: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

David: that Consciousness is performing the entire process from beginning to end. Not an individual practicing in Consciousness who achieves this.

P2: Right. I agree one hundred percent, but I still think that the seeker in a way has no choice until this bigger vision begins to emerge somehow, to think of it as anything else other than, “I am surrendering whatever is in my way.” It’s really not true. That’s the way it has to be until something….

David: Yes, as long as there’s an individual viewpoint it’s going to be felt as that dissolution of the individual, even though that’s not actually what’s happening.

P2: Right, exactly.

David: What’s happening is that the absolute field as a magnet is drawing you in. Not that you are walking into it and succeeding at some practice. Right?

P2: Right, exactly.

David: And yet a kind of story unravels from the individual’s point of view that there’s this journey happening and he is changing and that he is becoming enlightened, and that his viewpoint is changing, but that’s all through the lens of limitation. It’s like if you put red glasses on everything becomes red. If you look through the eyes of limitation you can only conjure limitation-based understandings to describe even that unlimited process that has no beginning and end.

P2: Right, exactly.

David: That’s beautifully put. I’m glad you’ve come to this understanding. The individual can never think freedom even though he might be obsessed with it or she might be obsessed with it as a process and as a topic and as the very substance of one’s life. There’s no surrender going on from the point of view of the individual, but this field causes surrender to happen. That Bliss magnet will create the whole phenomenon of surrender in you and render you completely like a baby in the arms of its mother.

P2: Right.

David: You’ll be taken care of by that. You’ll be realized by that. That will realize itself. What is this individual thing that’s there in the meantime? It’s funny, isn’t it? That’s part of what I was alluding to earlier about we just don’t have answers to certain questions. The mind sees this reality and then how can we ever explain how a so-called individual acquires unlimited Consciousness? It’s just an ass-backward question, and yet it’s all the mind can dream up.

P2: The individual really doesn’t acquire this Consciousness, right? When you look back you can see it’s not the way it really happened. What happened is that Consciousness just begins to announce its own Presence and that takes care of everything.

David: Right, it initiates over and over again is what it does. It takes you. It’s a devotional process. It’s being taken.

P2: Right.

David: You just have to do it. You just have to be done by it it’s better to say. It’s happening now, that surrender is all happening now.

P2: I can actually feel it in the room.

David: Of course, you can. You’d be a rock not to feel it. It’s the performance of the Bliss Consciousness. It’s what it loves to do. It loves to set itself up in waves and undulate. It’s just like the ocean. You don’t see an eternally flat, waveless ocean. Only in a picture book would you see such an ocean. You open the page and the ocean is completely dead and static.

And also in Consciousness there’s no such thing as eternal quietude in the way that you see in conventional Buddhist understanding. Rather reality is a wave-like phenomenon. It’s ecstatic. It’s full of ecstasy, Bliss, movement. It churns within itself. It enjoys the disturbance that we call manifestation. We get broken up into billions of fragments. This whole world appears to be trillions of fragments of objects and processes, but that’s what Consciousness is. It sacrifices itself into manifestation both in the pleasure and the pain of it.

You can feel the Bliss force now. I mean it’s really potent. It’s really gaining a momentum as we talk and we just relax with each other. We’re not trying to do anything. It’s just Darshan. The reason why it’s good to feel that something is happening is because you acquire knowledge of this process. If you just felt nothing from beginning to end how would you know you had awakened? How would you know that there is any distinction between the waking state and that vast ocean of Bliss? So, you have experiences in the meantime as a way to convince the mind that this has happened. Otherwise, the mind has no basis for recognition. So, spiritual experiences even though they’re not the whole thing are extremely valuable.

When you have big breakthroughs that’s how the mind gets taught. That’s how it is taught to release its point of view, its tiny self-defeating point of view, and then enter into this larger understanding that can only be given through Grace, through Transmission, through Initiation, through Divine Love.