Innocence and No-Desire, March 23, 2010

David: You can’t think about something that’s beyond thought. Even a person who’s fully enlightened if they come out and speak it’s all dualistic. There’s nothing sublime about it. It’s very odd.

Let’s see if a discussion can create itself with us. Let’s just sit back, not feel any anxiety over anything even whether you can talk about nothingness or you can’t talk about nothingness. Let’s get rid of that rule. And let’s get rid of any anxiety we have about whether life is dualistic or nondualistic. We’ll relieve ourselves of that trip. And let’s just relax into what’s going on now without any motive to be free, to get liberated, to understand what’s prior to it all.

Because if this is in fact present here, it’s going to instruct you in its own way. You’re going to be instructed outside of the gateway of the five senses. You’re going to be instructed outside the corridor of attention, outside the linear mind, outside the emotional structure. If That is, then That is. And it’s only by deferring to innocence and no desire to hold on to this that arises the very possibility that you might taste it, that you might taste what is underlying or previous to or permeating all of experience.

When I come up here I often feel very vulnerable because I have nothing but me. I don’t even have that. But there’s an apparent body that walks in with me or that walks me in or that just walks in, and that itself is a kind of deception about what’s going to happen on the evening when I walk in. And who actually and what actually does walk in?

What strikes me as more important to all of this spiritual discussion is you. Talking to you supersedes all my accumulated spiritual ideas, Vedic, Buddhist, Taoist, Heideggarian, Hegelian, Platonic, Heraclitic.

Participant 1: So, normally when somebody talks to you they talk to your identity.

David: Right.

P1: But, you’re actually talking to the space where personal identity….

David: I’m not thinking about it in any way like that. I’m more interested in not whether you’re real or not real. I’m just interested in you, however you experience yourself. I’m not going to get involved with that. You see my point?

P1: Mm-hm.

David: Like I’m not going to see you through any filter. I’m not interested in whether you’re ignorant, whether you’re awakened, whether you’re, you know, some closet Buddha who came in here and is testing me, whether you’re a fundamentalist Christian bating me. I don’t know.

P1: I guess I’m just kind of a miserable person.

David: Wonderful. Misery meets misery. How do you do? Beautiful. You read in my book how I have an unlimited appetite for unfulfilled existences?

P1: Unfulfilled…?

David: Existences.

P1: I think I looked at it years ago. I’ll look at it again.

David: If I didn’t write that it wouldn’t have been true. But I did write it and I didn’t lie in the book. And what was writing that was That, that has that kind of feeling, that I really enjoy the field of bondage. I actually pay homage to all the negativity in existence.

I’m not in some positive state. But, that you are willing to be as you are and not play a game about it, it’s like opening a shade in a room where the sun is in back of that window. See? All of a sudden just that admission that you don’t want to play games, you’re not here to accomplish something super normal in your spiritual awareness. You’re not here to go into superconsciousness. You’re basically a very chronically miserable human being. That gives me great joy.

P1: I’ll trade places with you.

David: We are going to trade places. Let it happen.

P1: Yeah, it’s kind of just an attraction to negativity.

David: It’s beautiful. Love it, totally. Don’t be a phony with yourself. And also you have to look into whether your negativity is relative negativity or absolute negativity. In other words, if it’s caused negativity or if it’s uncaused negativity. Meaning it has to do with the sensation of being a separate I, a separate me. That’s the deepest form of negativity. That’s the friction upon which all other forms of suffering are based.