Advaita Post 10 - 17 (October 26, 2009) While the silent openness is present...

Volume 10 No 17 (October 26, 2009)

--- While the silent openness is present, it is your own internal confirmation which makes the openness stable ---

Don't think that you can enlighten yourself

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From a talk in Gouda May 27, 2009 - "Feeling energies as help with liberation"

You keep a border in place and thereby the structure of a focus on other things. There is a desire and a warding off. You know it yourself. With that desire and warding off there is no wholeness. As long as you retain the structure of desire, your experience of self-being is never complete. Isn't that right?

The structure of the desire for something is dualistic: I have here my own being-sphere and I want to add something else to it, expand my territory. That's not so crazy, because you rightly have a notion of whole-being. As long as separation remains, the missing of the rest is a given fact and a desire remains. This goes on forever. If you get a little something, your world becomes a little bit bigger; you have more possessions, more power; you can be more yourself. But if you remain in the sphere of duality, the process continues and you always desire the next thing. If getting your desire has already worked, it often happens at the expense of others. And frequently it doesn't work and you're frustrated. The whole process of lacking and longing, thus duality, means suffering.

There is one way in which desire can work in a good way. If you let desire become infinite. Infinity is already in the desire, desire is infinite. "I want everything." Then you're honest. You have a notion to be everything and that is the foundation of all desires. If that becomes clear and you really go along in that, focus on the infinity of desire - "I want everything, everything; I won't stop, no: infinity, everything" ... Just look at what happens. That is the only way in which desire can be useful.

You don't get stuck in the desire?

You can get stuck in your desire everywhere.  It's about lifting the entire dual structure in which the desire exists. This occurs when the desire becomes one hundred percent. When it becomes infinite, what does that mean? Then doesn't the desire dissolve in infinity?

How can you control that?

You don't need to control that. You focus yourself on your desire to the extent that it has infinity within it. Then you go beyond the objects of your desire, you let your desire naturally break open in all directions, infinitely. In the Tantra that proceeds step by step, via different gods and worlds and such, with help from all sorts of tools. If you really go along into the infinite, they usually disappear as temporarily useful resources. All restrictions dissolve by themselves, when the energy of the desire can develop by itself infinitely. If the energy of the desire - but the same goes for that of disgust - is allowed to develop in all directions, is there anything left of that energy? So go along with what you find really important. Do it totally, one hundred percent, infinitely. Then every duality dissolves.

How is it then with yourself and action?

If you go totally into it, don't all your individual structures dissolve? Then there's no ego any longer as the source of desire. Everything is open. If you love a specific person ... you have to look at what kinds of wars have arisen through this. But if you let that loving become totally open, infinite, then only love is left over.

I get it.

Let it just happen.

If there is an emotion that just won't disappear and which you just can't release, then the emotion gives you a good chance. If the infinite will break open, then going along with the emotional energy that you are identified with is a good opportunity.  The emotion can easily become infinite and precisely because you're identified with it, you experience that you yourself are endless. So you and the energy dissolve.

Everyone has certainly done this. When you are really mad at someone, and go along with the emotion so that it fully develops ..., when you are authentic in your grief... one hundred percent sorrow…, how does it continue? Your whole state becomes universal. At a given moment the energies dissolve and there is a great silence, a blank state.

The point is that when you don't consciously recognize it, then you easily return once again to the duality by creating anew a bodily person and diving back in. Then everything starts back up again, the cycle continues. If you recognize that once, then also through this, the cycle is broken.

Take sleep. You go to sleep and you do that in a complete way. You throw yourself in, one hundred percent. If you don't, then you don't sleep. As long as you do sleep, it means that you're involved in it one hundred percent. And if that is so, then soon there is the blank sphere, because the relaxation lets you infinitely continue.

The important point then is that you become aware of it. If something in your situation becomes one hundred percent, there easily arises a narrowing of consciousness. Just see that with anger, love, or anything else. "I wasn't myself", you say afterwards. "I have to collect myself again." What do you mean by that?  That the individual personality with his limitations and controls is to be restored. "I was out of my mind." But that is exactly the point: if you are internally very aware in that "out of your mind" moment, you can confirm that the structures that were there at first, aren't there any longer, that everything has broken open, that there is silence. You have that also in the dreamless state and in meditation. You are meditating. If on your mental level you start dreaming or you are fighting to stop thinking, the limitation remains. If meditation can continue, you get a release of boundaries.

But you must be aware of yourself, confirm internally, because otherwise often you will not know what is going on. "I was gone", "I had a black-out", you say afterwards, and you want to knit the loose ends back together. The old structures come back, because they are the patterns that unconsciously prevail in ordinary life. Early in the morning when you awaken, most of the reconstruction work is already done. There is a person formed before you are aware of it. But if you can remain aware of the blank sphere, it is clear that you no longer have to go into those patterns. No, if awareness is, there is one hundred percent open-self-being. While it is present, it is the internal confirmation that makes it stable.

Is there anything difficult about that?