There Is Only One

Of course my dear, of course. Most of us experience the waking state along with the body. Why should we try driving it away? It’s a very natural aspect of existence and if there is pain in the body then in the ouch we feel very natural, so there is nothing wrong with any of that. But to say that ‘I am just that’ is too limiting no (just like the previous conversation). Even if we consider it to be an aspect of us, the trouble usually with that sort of statement is that we don’t consider the rest of the manifest experience as an aspect of ourselves. We only pick and choose between, in the realm of perception, between some sensations and we have been taught that way. In this life we have been taught by our parents in this way that ‘this is your head, this is not you’ these kinds of things. So we have got attached to that sort of conditioning and so if we have to look at the manifest as the aspect of ourselves there is nothing wrong with that. Sensations can seem pretty central to the experience of the manifest.

Okay define ‘consuming’, what does it consume?

Yes, I understand what you are saying, I understand because I don’t know you have heard this but very oeen I have said that - if there was a beautiful big white wall and I made a small black dot on it and if I ask you ‘What do you see?’ most will say ‘I see a black dot.’

So that is the nature of the mind to do that. Now, I will give you some advice. Let your attention be fixated with whatever it wants to be fixated with. You apply what I am saying to your belief. You apply what I am saying to your identification. So attention can be fixated like that [Looking at one hand raised in front of the face] but you are not buying any story about that. Then what will happen is that (but I don’t want you to use this as benchmark) as you let go of your identification and your belief about yourself as the body or the body should change or it should not be like this or this is what it should be doing or not doing, then you will find that attention is naturally loosening up a bit and you will find that your attention seems to become more universal. But this is something that you don’t have to be concerned with. You remain concerned with not identifying whatever attention also maybe on, then you see how it changes. Much more tricky to handle… because right now if I tell you ‘Okay, what else is in your perception, what else is in your Being and how much space do these body sensations take up?’ Because you are in Satsang, because you are here, you will have that spaciousness to be able to check. Many times it happens in life when we go through what we call our day-to-day life we don’t seem to have that openness. So, so I don’t want to force attention in that way and as we experimented earlier when we try to make sure that attention doesn’t go on something it seems to go more on that. Like that famous example that ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant’ (it’s a very famous spiritual) so it seems to go more than that. So let your attention go wherever it wants. Everything is God, everything that shows up in your perception is God. Nothing is separate from it so we don’t have to distinguish so much in that way. But you just don’t identify. For identification you need belief. You need to say that ‘This is me, this is true, this applies to me, this is my Reality.’ Don’t make any of those conclusions.

It’s very much the same thing my dear. It’s exactly that. So it’s like sometimes they have this independent movie like the Oscar-winning ones, I saw one called ‘Roma’ maybe three years ago. So what the director did is he spend the first two three minutes of the movie (if I am remembering correctly) just the camera was on the puddle of water, that’s all, was just looking at that. So if you go to the mind and try to watch a movie like that it just becomes very difficult. Because the mind will say ‘What is this, what are they doing, this is so boring, there is nothing I can relate with, what is the story?’ none of that. But if you just don’t care about what is the content of your attention; not in a negative way but you are just open to whatever the content of your attention or perception may be, (that doesn’t matter) whatever is on the screen is on the screen it’s fine.