Participant 1: Can you say something about worshiping the Infinite as the Divine Mother?
David: That’s what we’re doing here. The Divine Mother is not a person. It’s not a deity. It’s spoken of as a deity symbolically, but it refers to an actual reality, which is the reality of nature, of manifested life and its ability to inform a human being about the ultimate reality.
Participant 2: What role does memory play in Self-Realization? Can we realize the Self without remembering certain teachings?
David: You’d have to forget all about those teachings. The Self means reality. Teachings are maps. In that sense, in that context, the map will disappear in realization. That’s where all teachings should go, to their own extinction. So, no, you will not remember the teachings except in the sense in which you remember everything else, that they are objects that you can talk about, but they are not remembered within the realized state, not by Being itself. The mind will probably have a memory of teachings, teachers, if teachings and teachers were involved in the process of awakening, but one lives free from such concerns, such topics, even the topic of whether memory is still existent inside of realization. I’m not sure why you want to know about that. Are you planning for something in the future?
Participant 3: I am connected with the natural beauty and luminous Honey-Love-Bliss of this moment —of you, David —beyond the realms where problems arise—in your Presence.
David: If this is an accurate description, which I hope it is and I appreciate it if it is, it indicates what sadhana looks like, what sadhana feels like. When there is an opening, a connection between us, it should feel something like that. It doesn’t have to be that way every second of every day of every year, but there should be a crescendo. There should be a climax, an apex, an epiphany into what’s happening in relationship, specifically in this relationship that is beyond human form, beyond human dimensions, beyond human limitations, and all of the positive qualities that happen inside that happening, which you know are not happening randomly, and they’re not happening in you. They’re happening between us because of the us. So, naturally, there’s no separate me in that experience.
All gratitude should be given to the teacher. Not that the teacher wants it, but that’s your safest option. Because once your mind begins to become aware of this, it’s going to try to confiscate it, to try to, excuse the poor pun, lockdown on it. Locking down is never good, any kind of lockdown. It doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t feel good, which means it isn’t good to lockdown. So, the opposite of locking down is opening up. The opposite of locking is unlocking. When something is unlocked it is opened, released. The opposite of down is up, up and away. So, when the locks on the heart are unlocked, this is the natural description, the one that this participant offered us, what it can feel like when that takes place. And once that takes place, that should be your primary memory, since that kind of description exceeds anything else your mind can imagine in terms of suffering or joy. When you crack into the unconditioned and feel all of its qualities running over you, running through you, within you, beyond you, to you, away from you, you’re released. That moment of release is liberation. That moment does not happen in time. If you look at it, it can’t possibly happen in time.
Moderator: A comment from a second participant in New Jersey, “My heart chakra feels like it’s being crushed from the back of my spine and from the front.”
David: Good, let’s crush it completely. Let’s demolish it so your spinal column is replaced with the current of Nectar and Bliss, Energy and Light. There’s no use having a human body that doesn’t conduct this kind of realization. It’s living so far beyond your potential, so beyond your actuality, that you’re living inside of a cramped-up condition, locked down. So, when you open up, when you begin to release constriction, contraction, fear, this is what floods in to replace it, a flooding of Light, Bliss, and Energy, or Shakti, inundating, not just peaking inside of you to show itself, to introduce itself but actually immersing itself in and around you, so that liberation, release, moksha happens. Moksha is a Sanskrit word. It means release, liberation, more precisely liberation.
