Am I Willing to Throw Away My Checklist of What Freedom should be? (Silent Retreat) - 14th Oct. 2015

The silence is preparing us to receive this. It is a habit that we have gone from place to place since we were children, preparing through school, expecting some conceptual answers. It will explain what will, what is going on. Everyone is looking for some sort of an answer. You reach a point where we see that no concept will do. It is something much deeper, something much broader, something here which is the essence of existence, which I find that no word can truly get to. And in this silence, we are losing this reliance on words. And as we go along over the next few days, we will see that these words were given much more importance than they deserve, and nothing came to a standstill just because of silence. We are preparing to come face-to-face with all non-conceptual reality, the non-phenomenal itself.

How does one convince a drop of water that it is actually the infinite ocean? This leap seems too much for a drop to understand. There's something that shifts where we drop the personal perspective, the idea that 'I am just this drop.' Everything is on our side for this dropping. All the ground has been prepared for this unfolding. There is complete trust here that the voice which speaks these words is the same voice which got this one towards unfolding and now uses this body to share these words. So if it was possible here, then it is completely possible for all imagined drops to see for themselves that they are just one infinite ocean.

If you notice that your conversation is exactly like that, you come and say, 'I'm just this mere drop.' I say, 'Can you check and look and tell me where is this mere drop?' And you say, 'I can't find the boundaries.' Then what makes you think you're a drop? 'Okay, I see I'm not the drop, I'm the ocean.' So now, which way should the drop go? 'Oh yeah, what was it? Yes, I see I'm not the drop. I find no boundaries to myself. All appearances are appearing inside me. They're going inside, and yet I am not convinced because I was promised that I will become a super drop with a halo. I don't see the halo. And these dust particles which are inside me are still there. I was promised that they will not be there, these feelings, these thoughts.' The best one of them all is, 'Okay, I see I am the ocean, but...' and so on. Or the 'but' is, 'I cannot abide in that.' As I have been saying all morning, it is not true that the ocean became a drop and then now the drop has to become the ocean again. It is just that the ocean itself is pretending. It has the power to pretend.

The switch is much simpler than we can imagine. I'm just in the seeing that I cannot find this individual identity. It was always just an idea; it never really happened. Then it cannot survive. The false cannot survive. And sometimes it survives without permission. 'I want to play as a drop some more. I'm not done here.' Or some deluded idea that there might still be some hope for that halo, in order to give this enlightened person thing one last run. Because I heard such good things about these enlightened ones: they could be at multiple places at the same time, they had all kinds of siddhis and powers, they were just in bliss all the time, needed no sleep, and whatever they wished for would appear in front of them. We are still waiting for those miniscule gifts that a drop can get. Are we open now to just looking openly and coming to the realization that this individual I cannot find?

And one important resistance also that comes up is that the same mind says it cannot be true like this because you could not have been so stupid. You have believed yourself to be this for so long, there must be something wrong with this picture. Maybe there is a way that the ocean became a drop and it happened to you, and now you're getting back to becoming the ocean. It's a much more glorious story. Then we want that kind of story. You're not willing to admit that it was just a belief, just an idea. It is nothing at all. Because what kind of biography is that? Even now, some of us might be waiting for some explosive experience because we are not happy if this story was to end so neatly now. 'I searched and I searched for so many years, then one day I was just sitting in this hall in Tiruvannamalai and it occurred to me I am not this ego, and I could see that only Being is here and I am the witness of even this Being.' End of story. Goodbye. This book tour gone. For we want some explosion. 'Then I came up on the hot seat and just looking at the Master's eyes, something just exploded and everyone said, "Ah!"' That's what we want. Story.