Participant 1: Every time I try to meditate there is another being that arises. I experience powerful vibrations and am not able to meditate.
David: Why do you call it another being? You also referred to it as a vibration. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Moderator: The viewer comments, “I feel there is another being which expresses itself.”
David: If it’s a vibration how do you know it’s not the impersonal Shakti? The Shakti is a level of being, it’s just that it’s not an individual being.
Moderator: The viewer says, “It is Shakti.”
David: Okay, then I would not call it a separate being and I would not think of it as a nuisance, as something that is distracting you from meditation.
Moderator: The viewer thanks you. A New York participant comments, “Your video clips on attention have been very useful. Attention comes out as an I thought for an instance and then blends back into the pure awareness.”
David: One aspect of this viewer’s comment or at least one implication here is that you also need knowledge. If you want liberation to be eternal, the correct knowledge needs to be combined with a deep experience. Because all bondage originates in the mind, it also exits through the mind. Bondage is created in the mind. It’s a mind-based phenomenon, and therefore liberation happens also in the mind. Now, there are two components to the mind. There’s the experiential or phenomenological component, which has to do with subjective experience of consciousness, and then there is the objective correlate in the field of knowledge, that which succinctly describes that experience. I’m talking here about the experience of liberation.
So, when you are able to piece these two seemingly disparate elements together at the right moment, very powerful liberation ensues, one that is brought about through the union of knowledge and experience, knowledge together with experience. That way the mind learns how to describe its own process of realization, and knowledge has a liberating effect on that part of the mind that can stay deluded. So, knowledge will help extricate the part of your mind that’s gripped by incorrect knowledge or knowledge based on non-experience of the Self. And this is all very important to know, what I’m sharing with you now, that knowledge and experience go hand in hand. And that’s why I create videos. It’s not because I don’t have anything better to do or because I want to advertise myself. It’s so that those people who are on my path can acquire my knowledge. Because if you are receiving transmission from me, if you are in divine relationship with me as a spiritual teacher, the kind of knowledge I give you will be that which will easily match your experience. And so, you can see the crucialness, you can see the power, the potential power in putting these together, putting these two things together knowledge and experience in the full context of my teaching. So, I hope you remember this. I hope you can recollect what I’m saying to you now in a future time so that when you need knowledge you can watch these videos, especially if you’ve had deep experiences with me, and you know they’re due to us being together. Let your mind be fed by the knowledge that I also give.
Moderator: The viewer has commented David that, “That’s why I wrote because last week the viewer wanted you to destroy his ego, which I knew was just a misunderstanding of I attention and identification. Your free video was posted on the internet on attention really cleared that up.”
David: That’s very good, these are very astute comments, and I do appreciate them being made in this context. This is very right. In other words, what we are talking about here is that the notion that the I for example, as was just mentioned, has to be exterminated or killed, comes about from not understanding that it’s a kind of knowledge that will erase that difficulty. No doubt there is an experiential component. You do need to go beyond ego consciousness, but we do that quite easily here, and we do it regularly. When you report for example, as someone earlier did this evening experiences of deep peace, well, that deep peace doesn’t come about through the mind or the body-mind. It comes about as the mind is relinquished into being. The symptom is that tremendous feeling of calmness and peace, even thoughtlessness that overcomes you. It’s the taste of the non-dual. But the culmination of that will not necessarily be only continued tasting of the non-dual but the addition of the correct understanding at the right moment. And for that purpose my videos that deal with the subject matter of attention could be crucial. In the right moment, to the right intelligence, to the right person they could be magnificent additions to their experience and help to solidify what can only be solidified through both the knowledge aspect and the experience aspect.
Otherwise you’ll think that all you need is more and more experience. So, you‘ll get caught in the trap of craving more and more divine experiences. You may have already had a sufficient amount of divine experience to produce great liberation. All you need do is know that. You need to attach the right knowledge. And you can really dissolve the whole movement of seeking simply by knowing your experience, really coming to an understanding of it. You have to read or listen, for example, if you read a text, say Ramana Maharshi’s dialogues or monologues, conversations, whatever, if you use that as a text, you really need to read it with your heart. You can’t just process the words. Even when you’re listening to my videos, you can’t just listen with your ears. You really have to drop it back into that place where you reside. If you can drop and fall there and listen at the same time, you’ll begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and you’ll realize that real enlightenment is both experiential and born of knowledge, of purifying knowledge. You could say pure knowledge. Pure because it strikes that place of realization in the heart.
