Moderator: From Perth, Australia: I have strong energy rising up through the center of my head. Do you have any comments?
David: Let it happen. And get rid of the idea that it’s your head. It’s what’s in back of these experiences, what’s ahead of them or within them that is important. Experiences will happen, especially around me. They will definitely happen. They will be triggered spontaneously. I suggest receiving them with love, innocence and appreciation, observing how they deepen your consciousness as a whole, rather than focus just on the experience itself as though it is something important in its own right. The experience is not that important, even the most flashy experience. It should be just accepted, understood and then relinquished, for enlightenment or realization is not an experience. It’s not a specific experience. It’s not a special experience that is ongoing. Enlightenment is the penetration of the illusion of subjectivity, of exclusive, bound subjectivity. And what that means is that it yields openness, the capacity to understand freshly, the capacity to feel freshly, and the ability to comprehend what goes on in that kind of condition where the openness is interfacing with day to day experience or any experience, even mystical experiences, experiences of expanded consciousness, experiences of suffering. All experiences fit into realization, but realization does not fit into any experience.
Realization here is quite an empty word. It doesn’t really have any meaning other than what it correlates to in experience, in a human being’s experience. There’s no enlightenment topic. It’s not an academic subject. It’s not an intellectual topic. Enlightenment only comes to be as it is understood directly in one’s life. That’s why it’s a tricky topic. Many people believe there is this area or field called enlightenment, realization, but there is no such field. There’s no such topic or rubric. The reason why this is tricky and confounding is that experience and its dissolution are being considered. When experience is present, we have a language to go with it, but when dissolution happens, language disappears. Now when you put both of those things together, when you’re talking about a topic that simultaneously arises to some extent in experience and then also transcends itself, what do you do? You have to come up with a way of dealing with the whole thing directly and through the aid of a teacher. The teacher can help you penetrate this whole topic, but you’ll have to give yourself to it, to the topic, and genuinely to the teacher’s instructions, words, transmission, again putting it all together into something that now begins to make mega-sense, super-sense, which has nonsense in it, which has no sense in it.
So, we can’t construct a utilitarian language around this as much as the profit seeking gurus try to do. You don’t get anything from this voyage. What you get is you, not something objectified, not the capacity to make more money, or to have more sex, or to have more personal power. Personal power is eradicated in real realization. You don’t become powerful. You are filled with knowledge, clarity, bliss, all of which reference themselves as a state to be spoken about and lived, shared and lived. Not necessarily spoken about literally but lived, moment to moment, shared, however that comes to be. You can’t share it deliberately. You can’t share yourself deliberately and say, “Look what a great being I’ve become. Let me share it with you.” You have to share it in a nonchalant way, in an easy way, in a sincere way, in a human way. And inside that human sharing there will be a great potency of self-understanding along with a transcendental appreciation, an appreciation of what goes on, we could say, outside of time and space, a supra-causal comprehension of one’s own immediacy in time and space, all of that.
And, while I mentioned nonchalant sharing of self-understanding, self-realization, there can also come about moments of poignant and direct sharing of that topic itself apart from the contents of human relationships. So, in this way, this process can in fact become a subject of itself, typically in a circumstance where the teaching of it is given, or there is a movement toward specifying and isolating this topic for some purpose, usually for the benefit of someone’s realizing it. So, while the sharing is spontaneous, human, ordinary, it quickly and without preparation can become like a steep precipice, which means that we are just talking about consciousness itself and no longer about how it appears from one person to another. In this way you can begin to appreciate the ascent, the ascending nature, or the ascending quality of this kind of comprehension. Ascending in the sense that it begins to isolate itself spontaneously as a topic and not just remain in the sphere of dualistic conversation where one is always talking about it. Talking in it, one can then reveal it in still a better way, a way in which there can be no political correctness. There can be no premeditation, no thought beforehand, no plan to show it, which means it’s given graciously, however it is perceived. So, in a given moment it can be what we would call a socially acceptable reality. In the next moment it can become a profoundly esoteric, precipitous, sudden, unpremeditated offering. There are no examples I can give you to suggest what that might be because of its genuinely operating at that point. It’s going to be something sacrosanct, something sacred that happens for a moment or several moments between two hearts that are open and ready to share that.
