My Method of Transmission, August 31, 2011

Moderator: A viewer in Sydney says, “This is my first time here, can you tell me more about your method?”

David: Perhaps the topic of spiritual transmission is what you need to hear. Spiritual transmission is another word for grace, it’s another word for or phrase for the self-activating, self-transmissive nature of the Absolute. That’s the foundational notion that embraces my teaching. That’s how this teaching actually succeeds. It does require both of us to participate on an individual level; I come here, I sit here, I talk. You come here, you sit where you are, you study what’s going on, you think about what’s going on. That’s enough to bring your energy into the process of spiritual communion with my own activation, an activation that’s beyond time and space; and that process is called transmission. It doesn’t mean that there’s a deliberate transmission, something that I do — absolutely not. It’s that awakened consciousness itself spreads like a wild fire. You’ve seen a wild fire that’s out of control? It just goes over the hills, and you can’t stop it, it’s runaway. Consciousness also is ‘runaway’ with its own intensity in a realization like my own. There’s no ‘my’ in that realization and I don’t own it, but language itself prohibits a clear and clean discussion of what this is about. It’s inherently egoless. It’s inherent egolessness. The teacher is consciousness. The teaching is consciousness. The method of teaching is consciousness — consciousness meaning the Absolute.

I am not using the word consciousness the way Nisargadatta Maharaj uses it in his writings. And, I’ve been unfortunately, wrongly criticized for this on some of my YouTube clips. People who are ardent believers in the terminology of Nisargadatta Maharaj, they have complained that I equate the word ‘consciousness’ with the Absolute, and my response to them is, “It’s too bad. I am not Nisargadatta Maharaj nor do I bow down to his language. I create my own language fresh out of my own experience and realization — always fresh, always fresh, never stale, never second-hand, never based on something someone else said or what someone else may have written.”

So I’m trying to give you a nice clarification here of my own teaching method; first in talking about it on its own merit and then in virtue of comparison to potential difficulties of trying to mix my teaching with another teaching. So I think that the best method is for you to stay clear about how I present my teaching and also taste the spontaneous nature of awakening as it breathes itself into other beings, as it breathes itself into your experience and we begin to have a genuine and sincere spiritual connection based on realization not based on belief.

Moderator: The viewer comments, “Thank you for the explanation of transmission, it’s exactly what I wanted to hear about.”