Don’t Fall Into Absurdities

Freedom means everything can come and go. So you realize now that there is no ‘how’ of it. Is it clear to you? The discovery will not be made through a ‘how?’ There will not be a mechanism to get to the Self. You cannot try hard enough, and then, okay, so digging. What is the tool you have? You have the tool of attention. How far can you send it? You can send it outside, seeming outside, what is the most distant voice I can hear, most distant sound, you can send it outside, most distant ‘apparent’ outside but still inside your Being [laughs] anyway that’s a digression. Outside, outside, maximum outside. But outside not to be found. Okay, let’s go on the inside. All the Masters have said, ’You can’t find it outside’. Okay, then let’s go on the inside. Where will you take it? You will take it to your thoughts; you take it to your emotions; you take it to your pain; to pleasure; take it to your sense of Being, even. Aeer that? Is there anything else lee that we call attention? Where will we take it? Will we take it to a dark, empty space? Is that what you are? Are you dark, empty space? Where will you take it? You cannot through your attention. And yet independent of this outer attention, or seeming inner attention, there is some pristine clarity which remains untouched by any of this. And that is the Self that you cannot lose. Because if it was a product of your attention, you would lose it, the attention can never be stable. And who would want to live like that anyway, where my attention is fixated on some idea I have about myself. Then how would the sages operate in this world. There are videos of Bhagwan reading the newspaper, is he reading the newspaper without attention? So don’t fall into any sort of absurdity like that that I have to keep my attention this way or that way. Then what are the other tool do you have? Think. Think. Think [laughs] Self…Self…I want the Self…And you are waiting for the perfect thought to come… E=MC2…Ah, that’s it! It’s not going to be like that. It is written in the great Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, “Soche soch na hove, jo soche lakh vaar.” Means you may think and think and think a 100,000 times, but through your thinking you will never find the Self. So with your attention you cannot find it; with your thinking you cannot find it; what else do you have? You have something, but we’ve never used it, because in the world we are never taught to practice that. So when you could not lose yourself, were you just thinking you could lose yourself? No! Were you having a perception of yourself that was steady and just sitting there? No! So that knowledge is your intuitive insight. On the spiritual path, many years were spent here, many years were spent here, looking for something, but I didn’t know how I was looking. I just felt like “I have to find it!” And then I was grasping, so when I... So when I speak, it’s the same thing, it’s from all these experiences. I had some experiences, and I was saying- those have to remain and that would be the true freedom. Freedom means everything can come and go. It’s so full of absurdity as a spiritual seeker, we are trying to make something constant, and we call that freedom. So how is that freedom? Freedom would mean anything can come and go. So we are looking at staleness as freedom. Then what are the other confusions? Like you feel like if you fill…stuff your head enough with spiritual concepts…Read ‘I Am That’ twice; Read ‘The Power Of Now!’; Read ‘Be As You Are.’.. and you feel like if you can just get it, understand the material deeply enough …then you really might become a spiritual professor.[Laughs] That is not freedom. You can mug up the entire Vedanta library, you can quote the concepts, or the Upanishads. You may feel like that is…like I felt that if I just know this material well enough then I will be free, because that is how you learn things in this world. But that is not it. So when I came to the feet of Guruji, what was the discovery? When I sat on the hot seat with him, was it something new that was found? No, it wasn’t. And yet it blew my mind. What does that mean? That looking into his eyes, I was no longer able to make a reference to myself. When we say we lose the ‘me’, what happens? We lose only the references, no? We are no longer taking a sensation to be a boundary of ‘me’. We are no longer taking a notion to be a boundary of ‘me’. That is the loss of the personal identity, the limited self. And many have these experiences very spontaneously. Like there are many also in Western philosophy. Like you read, ‘The Stranger’ by Camus, or you read ‘Nausea’ by Sartre. You will have the protagonists who have clearly lost the sense of personal self mostly. Except that they have not lost the evaluative tendency. They are saying ‘What happened to me? I can no longer find any difference between the rock and myself’. And when I read these books first, I just felt that “this could be a book written about me aeer I met Guruji. It could be a book written except for one difference, I realized a difference, I realized that they are not realizing that they are coming to the discovery of the Self- the loss of the personal limited individual identity, and they cannot see it. tiow can they not see it?” That was the feeling. Then I realized that there was one subtle difference, subtle but very important, that the self-evaluative tendency or the self-consciousness, as you call it, was not there by Guruji’s Grace here. But it was there in those protagonists. So they were say, ‘What’s happening to me? I don’t have this…’ As kind of always evaluating, and who are they evaluating? Again back to the limited. So although you may have these spontaneous experiences, and it’s all over the world, the presence of the Master is really helpful because he will rid you of even that sort of self-consciousness. As we define it, it’s like being photographed or filmed. So you move from that limited identity to this, “What’s happened to me? Am I doing this right?” So if you think that your discovery of yourself is going to be ever more apparent to you now in terms of what you are, then that can make a journey out of this. Whatever you may think of this will make a journey out of it. [Laughs] What do you think about yourself? Forget it! What do you think about yourself? Forget it! And what do you know about yourself? Definitely forget about it. Now do you want me to look at the questions? Are they still worthy of you? You can type again if you want me to look at your questions, you can type again, it’s still real for you, and I’ll go back to the question and read it out. tiow do you know you are not free already? What is the bondage that you find?