That’s a special phrase now, “the potency in understanding,” which is the potency of realization itself as you become conscious of it. So, you know that you know. You know that you know, not in an arrogant way but in a confident way, in the sense of having great resolution and clarity. Believe me, realization is very rare. There are people who are out there teaching as gurus who I don’t even consider fully realized, and they could have a hundred thousand followers. That’s how demanding I am in my own teaching of understanding and living into realization. I can see how sloppy and how disgraceful many teachers are. They have unpolished political views. They can’t discern one thing from another, talking in cliches all the time, relying on the language of traditions, advising people like authorities, never talking about the importance of true self-understanding. You can find a bunch of teachers on YouTube doing this, and it’s disgraceful. It’s a disgrace to this topic. So, it’s very rare to actually find someone who’s gone into this with a burning clarity, a burning desire, every aspect of realization, every aspect of ignorance in terms of realization. Otherwise, this topic degenerates into a religious topic. Here’s the danger, that this beautiful topic of self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-realization, living in real unity can degenerate into a faith-based conversation, one in which true believers are now all discussing among themselves what they already naively accept. Therefore, finally, there has to be a great skepticism, a great cynicism that you possess so that you don’t move into a naive understanding based on faith. Faith is a degenerate word. That’s why it’s so precious to the religions, the religions which are often racist, nationalistic, misogynist, homophobic, ugly in a word, ugly.
So, if you want to move into beauty, grace, real realization it takes a special form of discrimination. That’s what I’m going to engage with you, not just this massive transmission process that itself is rare but then the necessary discussions to make sure we don’t fall down into some degenerate perspective which then forces this topic into casual discussion. It shuts down the beauty of the discussion into a casual, faith-based, idiotic conversation. So, we watch out for that. I watch out for that, that’s my role. Soon, if you persist in this kind of understanding you will come up into profound spiritual fire because you have never been satisfied with anything cheap and tawdry, anything religious in nature. Your realization will become pristinely existential, not religious. The word religion from the latin religara, means to bind back. We are not binding back into anything. We are not reattaching ourselves into something distinct from ourself thereby making a connection. Our realizations are existential, having to do with the nature of existence as in present existing, knowledge of that, not binding back into something that is more primary than our own force of recognition which is always in this moment.
