Advaita Post - Volume 14 No. 22

December 15, 2013

Text Satsang

From an Advaita talk with Douwe Tiemersma, Hoorneboeg, October 9, 2005

You are the original light (1)

Go deeper within, deeper within, deeper within. Do you see that the light of consciousness is going to coincide with the light of the heart? If you just go far enough within then you'll see that these lights come towards each other and are going to coincide. When you can really experience that, then you also experience that it's a type of nuclear fusion. Then you experience that it's an incredibly strong energy, an incredibly sharp, white light. The white light of lightning; the white light of nuclear fusion.

Do you experience it such that everything is blown away by that white light of a thousand suns? Do you experience that no little piece of the 'me' is left over? Even that you're absorbed in the light? Everything that doesn't have the same quality as that light evaporates in the heat. So the self-being also evaporates in that Great.

You are that original light, this first energy of the big bang. Everything comes out of it, everything returns to it. What's left over? Perhaps a cosmos in which things clump together now and then; but it's just images which compose themselves and disintegrate once again. The original light remains present in the foreground and you remain as that: all penetrating. What arises there, arises out of that original light. And through it, is destroyed once again. That light of Shiva, you are that. That intense, all-consuming fire, you are that too. You might at first have the notion that you have entered into the flames, that you are in that fire, but then comes the dissolution. The last forms of yourself dissolve. Then everything becomes blank which still there is an internal knowing of. It is an internal presence in the light of the dreamless sleep, this light realm of the dreamless sleep. Is that clear? An infinity of empty light that you are, nothing more. Let this dimension stay open. Let it remain present. Also when forms reappear.

That primordial light doesn't have any properties?

No, except that it's light and that it's very intense.

But isn't it still energy?

As light it still has energy, but it's very refined and it's empty.

But that word intense ...

In a certain phase it should be very clear that that original light has an incredibly great intensity, something like a nuclear explosion.

Your body must be able to handle that.

I can't handle it. It amazes me that I'm still able to see things. You know how it went in Hiroshima: there are images, people and suddenly: bang, gone. This intense heat, that light.

Douwe, I don't find the comparison with Hiroshima very appealing. Don't you also hear in the different yoga traditions that it proceeds very slowly via the light in the different chakras and then gradually ascends.

That's more attractive to you ...

Yes, building up very gently.

That's clear.

Can you just say something more about the difference: the gradual way which I find more attractive and that sudden one that you promote (laughter)?

It's a different method of approach, that's obvious. That it's partly the same is also clear. With Advaita the point is not so much about a gradual development through all the chakras. Rather, it's much more about a recognition of a depth of the individual self-being. That's the Advaita approach. This chakra approach is something like: I'm here and I have the idea that enlightenment is there at that highest level, and so I start climbing gradually, something gets purified, and then maybe you can make the next step, etc... But it doesn't work. At most, it can serve to make things more open, more relaxed. Sooner or later, something will really need to happen and if you want to use the chakra terminology then it's something on the level of the Sahasrara-level (the crown chakra). And then it's the same.

It seems plausible to me that you still need to have a kind of preparation of a few or maybe ten thousand lives.

Apparently, the people who come here have already had all of that preparation.

(to be continued...)

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