An edited talk, by David Spero
It’s somewhat anti-climactic to speak after the eloquence and translucence of pure Silence. But in a sense, isn’t that what the creation is? It really has ruined everything!
So, I’ll go ahead and speak knowing that for some it will ruin the beautiful atmosphere of Awakened Silence. We come here with a certain vibration, with a certain feeling-tone, which is being radiated by our body. It’s being radiated by our emotions. It’s being radiated through our mind and finally it’s the sum total and more than the sum total of all that we are as a living presence. All of that is welcome in this room. This meeting is not about changing anyone into anything. It’s about coming into this sense of wholeness that already is vibrating with the Supreme Frequency.
You can feel the fire of this Pitch and Energy. If you can’t feel the Fire stick around and breathe and feel in this Atmosphere of Divine Light. Let it come into you completely through osmosis by letting yourself be absorbed by it so that at some point there’s no more inner and outer, no more up and down. There’s just this Wholeness of Love and Feeling. It’s exquisite just to sit and feel each other like this, to feel everybody in the room, to feel our togetherness.
You could be in a very high state of Enlightenment and still be very obstructed in the field of feeling. If you experience the fullness of what is described in Advaita Vedanta, Self-Realization, you come to realize that the mind is Nothing; it’s empty and that That Emptiness is Light.
In addition to this: if your Feeling-Nature is unobstructed it means that you feel everything, every single thing. So, the issue of vulnerability begins to come up in such a state: knowing the nature of vulnerability. You’ll know that you’re in this unobstructed state of Total Feeling when everybody runs away from you! It’s as if everywhere you are, you’re saying, “I’m ready for everything, come on!” And everybody turns around and flees.
Don’t get me wrong; what I’m describing as this unobstructed ability to relate on the level of Feeling is not different than the Consciousness of Non-separation. So this is not a dualistic teaching: whatever this is. It’s not really a teaching, whatever it is, whatever is being shared. It’s something that you can actually feel gripping your body. It’s something that is holding you, something that is making love to you, this ability to feel this Mother-ness, this quality of Divine Mother, Kali, whatever you want to call it, Shakti. It’s something that is felt and known throughout the body. It’s not just for the mind to think it has “realized something” and then proclaim some kind of subjective enlightenment–that’s so petty.
I remember once that I was sitting with this Jnani (an enlightened teacher who teaches through the Mind or through Consciousness only) and he was banging his arm on a table saying “I don’t feel anything! I don’t feel anything!” I said to myself, “You’ve awoken to the Self only and look where it has led. Here you are professing numbness.”
You can feel everything, not just see into your Self’s Emptiness. You may not fit comfortably into any psychological definition of normality at that point, but who does anyway? When you feel everything, all the time it gives rise to a very unique kind of life, a life that doesn’t prize dissociation or mere emptiness.
