The End Of Knowing, April 3, 2010

David: So, what would that transition be like between bodily consciousness and Absolute Awareness? It would require an expansion. Something would have to be felt within to be expanding.

Participant 1: You would perceive yourself as not what you physically thought you were.

David: You would feel that the container of your own identity would actually be enlarging and that you would be growing in size, not physical size. You would feel the dissolution of boundaries in attention, of every boundary, and find yourself, without knowing how it occurred, going beyond the strict definition of bodily consciousness.

So, this would just have to be innocently noticed, not accomplished by you through your intellect, unless you mean a surrendered intellect. It’s just undergoing this process, not trying to figure out how to undergo it. Forget that. See, that’s all waking state stuff. Analysis is in the waking state. Logic is in the waking state, the use of reason.

P1: It’s true because every time these things happen, it’s not, they just happen, in a sense.

David: There’s this expansion going out which can be accompanied by a sensation of floating, ballooning, floatation, lightness, lightness in being, light in awareness, light coming into awareness, and lightness of awareness. That occurs and keeps occurring until the mind itself enlarges to the point where no more enlargement can take place, and you should register that as the end of knowing. That should be registered in your awareness as the meeting of awareness with awareness but in an infinite sense, not merely two things meeting, but one remaining, only one. In which case, there’s no more room for expansion. All of that expansion will cease because you can only awaken into more expansion as long as you are in the waking state.

So, this is simply taken to the end. Attention is allowed to float in that expanded territory until the loss of awareness occurs, until there is a complete cessation of thought. There’s samadhi or realization. You are now above the whole process of knowing. You’re not even part of expansion at that point, and that must be understood at that point, that there’s nothing more happening to the me. The me prior to that was feeling expanded, intoxicated, overjoyed, witnessing. All these attributes or perhaps aspects of Being itself were encountered, or the mind’s relationship with Being was registering with all of those sorts of noticings. But when the full ascension takes place, when the mind spontaneously slips beyond its total wakeful functioning into eternal continuum in Consciousness then there’s no more knowing. So, you’re outside completely even the awakening process at that point.

Now, when the waking state takes over again, which it is going to do if you’re going to keep eating and sleeping and having a relationship with your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, dog or cat, you’ve got to come back in the waking state to find them. So, you’re back in the world again. So, now there could be a kind of descent back into relativity and the bondage and entanglements that are all present waiting for you, the unending synchronistic interplay of relationships. The deeper you go into the oneness the more you will find yourself at ease in the play of relativity because all of relativity will begin to float there. Just as your mind once floated toward the Absolute, you’ll begin to grab the perception of the world and make that float in there too, until you go beyond that also, in which case there’s just a total equality between the absolute and the world. It’s found in both places. Then you’re in reality. Then you’re just in reality.

You may still continue to experience waves of intoxication and expansion, but now they’re seen as properties of just living. They’re no longer indicative of any particular truth. You won’t point to the truth and say the truth witnesses or the truth is intoxication, the truth is expansion, the truth is freedom. You will just live in a nondescript reality where everything is for lack of a better word one. Not that you see the oneness though, but that something has happened so that let’s say you only live in reality rather than say you’re in oneness, which carries the connotation of some kind of mystical ascension. We just say there’s only reality. So, the life of realization is over then. You’ve done it. It’s done you.

Again, I’ll repeat this point, at one point the mind was expanding and feeling its own expansion. Then you even felt like the world was expanding in this or that you were expanding in the world or the world was expanding into the Self or however it construed itself to you, and then that too will fall away. So, there’s no relationship at all in terms of some apparent separative subject noticing something. Now, when you talk about the end of all noticing now you’re talking about fully established samadhi, the end of all noticing of anything expanding subjective or objective. Then only reality reigns. But you have got to go through those mystical flights of expansion to some degree. You’ve got to notice how the waking state pushes out of itself and enters into a transcendental area, a transcendental horizon. You can’t help but notice and continue to feel these waves taking you and establishing you in that until there’s no more to realize, until realization dies off.

For all of this to happen the outer eyes must turn back into the single eye and go down into Being. There must be a singularity that sees, and knows, and finally learns what this entire voyage is about, which includes mystical ascent but the going beyond of mystical ascent. It will seem like mystical ascent as long as it is temporary. As long as you keep losing it you have to keep on expanding back into it. There’s the life of mystical ascent that is talked about in the Christian tradition and other traditions. Even in Buddhism, there are expanded samadhis that are described. In Hinduism and Patanjali there is a menu of samadhis in Patanjali, a whole slew of samadhis, but those are only really phases of the dissipation of ignorance. The positive thing you cannot talk about. You’re just left mute, speechless before that.

So, as long as you have something to say, unless you speak from the fullness and not from some fragment, even of mystical ascent, then you’ve not seen it completely. If you try to talk about it like this, just do as good a job as you can. Not to say that talking is going to help anyone because eyes have to go back in and see this themselves.