Dawn of Duality

[in response to a quesHon from a sangha member] What are you doing to exist right now? Existence is here, how are you holding it up? It’s just here, very natural. Now, when you say, ‘I’, are you looking at yourself as Existence, that which is Aware of Existence or just one set of percepHons within this Existence? [Silence]

And not to the enHrety of percepHons, to separate a set of percepHons and say, ‘this is more me’ than the rest of it, that is the dawn of duality. And with the dawn of duality there is bound to be desire and with desire there is bound to be doership. And I can explain this a bit more, I oeen call the ego a 3D ego. So duality is like the base, once you take yourself to be limited something inside you will feel like, ‘but you’re bigger, you should be bigger’. You see, that is your primal big-ness, calling out to you in a way. So then what happens is that the mind presents a soluHon to you, ‘If you had ‘that’ and if you had ‘that’, and you make sure you never had ‘that’ (some third thing)’ then you feel like you can get bigger, feel more complete, I can have more. So this is the dawn of desire. Now when you take your Self to be limited, that is duality is there, and you say, ‘If I only had this’ or ‘If I always had this’, then the mind presents another thing which says ‘What can I do so it becomes like that?’ So right now when I ask you, ‘What do you have to do?’ You say, ‘nothing’, because right now you’re not desiring anything. The minute you say, ‘I wish I had this’, then ‘Okay, what can I do about this?’ and it becomes a natural progression from there. So first you have to take yourself to be, just a Hny grain of sand, even in this manifest realm of percepHon. And we were taught how to do this, even taking ourselves to be this did not come naturally to us.

Actually it is not, I was just going to say that. Actually when we were born, it was more natural to not take ourselves to be anything. I take this example oeen that we try to teach our children, so when I was trying to teach my son, this is your head, this is your head (poinHng to his son’s head) he would oeen point to my head and I would say, ‘No, no no, your head’. So we were taught in way, condiHoned to take this boundary [points to the body] to be our self. You can check that right now, right now what is natural to you? [Silence] Without thinking about it, is it natural to you to take yourself to be limited? Where would you draw your boundary right now? [Silence]

Even for that you had to think, for a moment I saw you go to your mind [Looks up…help! Chuckling] like that and your answer came. [Chuckling] but don’t worry about this, just from your intuiHon, without even the label intuiHon. Now what is most natural to you? [Silence]

Now in this existence is there a boundary? Is it ‘This is my existence, this is your existence?’ is there a difference between Abhishek and Ananta? [Silence] Just in the label, correct? So what is more natural? [Repeats what Sangha member answers] just to exist. Now what has happened is that we have got used to picking from the mind, like a porter in the airport, got used to picking from the conveyor belt of the mind, it can feel like, ‘Oh, there is a habit like that’ and as long as it feel like that habit is there, it can feel like an effort to sit with your hands folded, not picking up any bags. For a while it can feel like effort because you see a bag coming and you feel, “I can easily lie that. I was good at lieing that, I could achieve mastery in lieing g that!” [Smiling] And the proposals from the bags will be like that.-‘You just do this and you will become so much beZer’, ‘You just understand me and you’re done! Life is sorted.’ So it can feel like there are some magneHc waves coming from the ‘bags’ calling you saying, ‘pull me, pull me’ [Chuckling] And because the habit is to go there so provisionally it can seem like there is some effort in not picking up the bag. As long as it feels like some effort, as long as non-effort feels like effort, we can make that effort Hll we see that actually it is non-effort. But in your natural open and empty, noHonless existence, unborn, whatever you call it, there is no illusion, there is no delusion. There is no limitaHon, there is no ego. There is no me-you, there is no duality, desire, doership. [Snaps his fingers] Just like that. [Snaps his fingers again] Just like that I pointed you to that which is the most natural recogniHon of your Being. But what will trouble you now is when you try to make use of it for ‘me’. Because if you try to use it for ‘me’ then again the ‘me’ comes into focus. The non-existent ‘me’ seems to become the protagonist again. And then we seem to again take ourselves to be limited. All of this, who is playing this game? Consciousness itself. Consciousness playing the game of taking itself to be a limited enHty and Consciousness itself ridding itself of that noHon. And the mind will feed you this idea, ‘It’s so natural, my limitaHon is so natural.’ But it’s really not. That’s why this works. [Snaps his fingers] Before the sound of the click you are free, whatever your mind may say about it later. [Chuckling] [Snaps his fingers] You are free right now, there is nothing you can do about it. Fight it as you may.