Moderator: From a participant in India, “Namaste. Thank you for the blissful transmission. What role does morality, ethics, and being a good person have on the spiritual path, or is that an ego trap?”
David: It can be relevant or it can be a trap. It can be either, based on the individual. Just like if I put a knife in your hand it can be very useful. You can cut fruits and vegetables, or you can stab someone. You can kill someone or something. So, it’s all based on the user, to use an ugly computer term. It’s all based on the user and what the user is up to.
Moderator: From a participant in Vancouver, “The Shakti is potent today and touching places within my being that go into shock when things get intense. As I go to ask this question I can feel the light dissolving it. Thank you for your Grace.”
David: It’s good to remain attentive in the way that you’re describing. This is what must be done, to understand where you are when you’re with me, to experience what’s happening when you’re with me, and to then see it subjectively as you just described nicely, to see the effect of Darshan and how it helps you release your difficulties and acknowledge that a higher process or activity is at work here, a higher process or activity. An intensification is at work here, is available. And it may seem on one occasion that the Shakti is especially powerful because you experience it that way. The truth is that once we sit together it’s infinitely available in all kinds of ways and on all levels of consciousness.
Moderator: “Namaste David. I saw your interview on Buddha at the Gas Pump, YouTube channel. You talked about shakti, samadhi, and nirvikalpa. Are these different or the same?
David: That’s a very big question. They are the same and they are also differentiated from each other. That’s all that can be said. Please watch my videos and listen to each video and then try to synthesize my messages in different videos where I talk about these different things, and see if you can come up with a synthetic answer, an answer which synthesizes, which synthesizes these issues, Samadhi, Shakti, Devotion, Ecstasy. I talk about all of these things with different nuances but as part of a Single Reality. So, they are distinct from one another but on another level, they are all emerging simultaneously out of Being.
But aside from my videos, when I’m here with you, we are undergoing that Divine event where these different realities are coming into play in your experience. When I say in your experience, I mean not theoretically, as experience. So, that’s where you get the direct knowledge. When you want to have objective knowledge about that immediacy, then you can consult the videos to try to put together an understanding in time. Both are necessary, the immediate understanding which arises as you grasp it, and the reflective understanding after the fact, since we are both in and out of time and must be held responsible for those two considerations, what enlightenment is once you reflect on it, and what it is in its purity, in its immediacy.
In its immediacy it seems to deny everything, all explanations, coming up as a sensation, an understanding, a direct cognition. In the mind, it comes up as a piece of discriminatory knowledge. It comes up as knowledge where the knowing process now is dealing with meaning. In the former, there’s no meaning or it’s too quick for meaning. In the latter there is room to deliberate, consider, critically understand, and therefore the mind can become a part of that process. In the immediacy, the mind is not allowed in, not critically.
Imagine being on a boat crossing the ocean. The first aspect of that journey is immediate. You’re actually being carried across the ocean. That’s literally your experience. It happens from moment to moment and is independent of your analysis of the situation. Even if you imagine you’re somewhere else, you’re still being carried across the ocean literally. But, you can also walk out on the deck, look around while you are on that boat, and make all kinds of notations to yourself. In other words, your mind can engage that journey as an objective voyage, not a literal one.
So, it can make all kinds of commentary as it looks off the deck through the eyes of a human being, comments about the water, its depth, its color, how much light is being reflected, the size of the waves, the lighthouse it sees from a distance many miles away, the sky, the clouds, the sun. There are many things the mind can notice as an objective voyager, as someone standing on the deck apart from or apparently apart from the actual literal voyage. So, you have both of these components simultaneously. One is immediate and the other is self-reflective and analytical. Both are critical. Both are necessary.
I hope this begins to open up this topic in a deeper way, in a way where you can understand it in terms of a voyage, a journey, a journey that you take, and a journey that you can observe. The most important thing is that you do each of those activities at the right time. When you want to experience just the immediacy of being taken over the ocean in that boat, you don’t really analyze anything. You’re just looking out of innocence, observing without comment or commentary. And when you are commenting, you’ve taken yourself out of the direct experience of feeling transported, transported from one location to another because you’ve entered into your mind, its meanings, its images, and also into the emotions, its feelings, its reactions, and so on. So, you can begin to get a fuller picture now of the complexity and the simplicity of being on this voyage toward liberation.
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