Illumination, April 23, 2010

David: There’s a certain kind of identity that is constructed around activity, a certain feeling. When the wave is rising out of the ocean, it forgets its connection with the ocean. It’s only when it goes back in, that it realizes what it is, when it flattens out and then just dissolves. It comes up again, and it’s a wave again. It asserts itself in relativity as a form, as a name, and then it reverts back into its primal condition.

The rising up into form and name is not a problem because it happens involuntarily. It’s not a byproduct of the ego, it’s a byproduct of existence and life. Life forces you into a position where you manifest an ego, or an apparent ego, where you think you’re someone, where you have to take on an identity. The bus driver takes on the identity of a bus driver. The baseball player takes on the identity of being a baseball player. The dancer takes on the identity of being a dancer. There’s a whole state of mind that goes along with dancing. It’s not just a bunch of spontaneous movements with a body empty of psyche. The same is true of any other activity, and so that disposition causes an apparent identity to arise.

That identity is in time and space, or it seems that it is. Whether it is, or seems that it is, is a philosophical question, that’s not a question of practicality. It feels for all intents and purposes, if you’re a mailman you feel like you’re a mailman. You don’t feel like you’re a baseball player. That’s the natural consequence of arising action, the formation of an identity around the theme of whatever you’re doing. And it’s as if there are two separate identities in life, the one that you are in, in the relative, whereby your form and your name is attached to a certain piece of content, and then there is that Absolute, unconditioned spaciousness within, which nothing enters, not even that identity of yours.

In enlightenment you become radically convinced that your true relative identity is that. So, that particular form of bondage that happens typically in a so-called human being no longer happens in the enlightened condition, because that other impersonal has been somehow set free. It was clouded out by something and now it has been set free, radically. Your mind understands that it is that and that alone. You might even in that condition still go shopping for apples and feel like you’re an apple shopper for a little while. You may run into someone in the market. They’ll say, “Hey, how ya doin?” “I’m fine. I’m great in fact. Glad that you asked.” “What are you doing here?” “Oh, shopping for apples.” Now, you don’t want them to say, “Is it really you who’s shopping for apples?” You don’t want to get into that. So, you just leave it alone. You know, I’m an apple shopper for the time being with a sense of humor about the whole thing.

So, even if a little bit of identity accrues in the field of action, it’s no big deal. It’s when you feel as though there’s an obstruction, some essential or real obstruction to who you are. Now, that becomes a problem, because now the rest of your being begins to feel deprived at that non-connection with Being. That becomes problematic, because now it appears that half of yourself is starved or deprived of the true half of itself, and that’s no fun, that’s agony. That’s what begins the spiritual search is that sense of disconnect from who you are. And then you enter into a spiritual atmosphere, or practice, or satsang, whatever you want to call it, in which you are then directly attuning back into your impersonal Consciousness. You begin to engage that unique human process. You become liberated. You start to engage in liberation teachings. [A participant takes a deep breathe.] And that’s what happens. You go, [David takes a deep breath]. You really start to say, “Ok, everything’s going to be okay because it has begun now. My reconnection back towards the vastness has reasserted itself.” And in the Gita, Krishna says, “Even a little bit of this dharma relieves you of great fear.” That’s what he says to Arjuna. He doesn’t say, “Even a lot of this.” He says, “Even a little of this will alleviate great fear.”

Sometimes people come and they say, “I can feel my consciousness radically changing within the course of an hour and a half with you, David.” You come in one way… I don’t know how many times this has happened. You see people’s faces, or you see that person’s face and they’re drawn, and they’re tired, and they’re defeated, and they’re disgusted, and then at the end they’re like this [David’s face lights up with a smile], and you know something else has illumined. There’s something else, it’s like a bulb going off inside, because that’s not the same person that came in. That’s a liberation of sorts, and there are many degrees of that, until you pop the whole subjectivity and then you’re eternally lit up.

That’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we’re after, nothing short of that. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many ups and downs are involved. You’ll get discouraged. You’ll feel defeated. You’ll be bombarded by your own negativity. You’ll be assaulted by your own mind and its thinking process, the kinds of conclusions that it draws, the frustrations that it endures. There’s no end to it. It’s just that at some point there’s a pure burning through and there is delivery, deliverance. I’m happy to say.

It doesn’t mean that you’re saved in any conventional sense, you’re shielded or protected in some kind of invulnerability, or cocoon of hardness. No, it’s just the opposite. It’s by being radically opened, wedged open, cracked open, shot open with Being, that you are somehow delivered from even the apparent future formations of individuality. Individuality will be defeated a priori. Even if it tries to form, that will deconstruct the bondage of it. So, you can go be an apple shopper. You can go play tennis and be a tennis player. You can still call someone up on the phone and have a nice, human, heart-to-heart conversation without feeling defeated by the whole thing.