See Yourself For What You Are (Ashtavakra Gita 5.4) - 1st November 2016

Verse four: You are perfect, changeless through misery and happiness, hope and despair, life and death. This is the state of dissolution. To see that you are perfect and changeless through these vicissitudes of life—misery and happiness, hope and despair, life and death—is to see that there is no individual sufferer of any of these events that happen in this changeful realm. To find that none of this is truly happening to you. There is no individual experiencer, individual doer, individual sufferer, individual enjoyer. This is openness.

To see that you are untouched, you remain perfect and changeless, is to be open to whatever might come in life. Misery might come, happiness might come; nobody can predict in this realm what will happen in the next moment. But to see that there is no one here who is touched by this, who is affected by this, makes us open. This is surrender. We are no longer concerned by what is going to happen. We are not going to 'next' all the time. And in this surrender arises great wonder.

This movie can truly be enjoyed once we see that we are changeless, unaffected by anything that might happen in this realm. As Consciousness, we are just being, and in this space of being is infinite. All time and space take birth here and dissolve here. That which is the light of time and space cannot be hurt by appearances within time and space. See yourself for what you are. Don't just believe what the mind is saying. Check for yourself: Is your existence finite or infinite? Is this body truly your boundary, or this body is just a cloud within the sky that you are?

Your being is what can contain you; this body cannot be your container. You contain all there is, and you in reality cannot suffer from these appearances. And knowing that you cannot suffer, you allow them to play. That's why the sage said you are perfect, changeless through misery and happiness, hope and despair, life and death. Even this appearance of this life and the dissolution of this being do not affect you. To see this, this surrender, this openness, is to enter the state of dissolution.