Trouble With Spiritual Experiences

Yeah, just forget it. Because the Truth doesn’t have to be remembered. It cannot be forgoZen. So, what is stored up in your repository of experiences or memory, just forget about it. You don't need it. What Is, is greater than any representaHon that can come from memory. It is just a mind’s trick to set you up for failure. It says, ‘But ‘that’ -- I can’t deny that, that happened. This was the best, best experience’. But You are not an experience. Nothing has to repeat itself. Nothing has to become any which way. We are just finding that which always Is. Now you try to find that which always Is, with the burden of comparison against a past experience, then it can seem like forever lost. Forget it. Because, in this way, these spiritual experiences can be (a) big encouragement many Hmes. You feel like, ‘Yeah... like that’. But also, they can become a big burden -- ‘It has to be like that’. But how? Suppose you are meant to have that experience which is the absence of any intellectual chaZer and judgment only for those few moments. Then the rest of your life, you'll keep looking for them? And missing This which just Is? So, that was another experience. You had the absence of some percepHon. It seemed like a lot more openness was there. But that space, that which is aware of even the spaciousness, has remained untouched. There is nothing special inherently in any experience. Even our most sublime ones. Because in trying to chase that… we were talking of the drugs yesterday, so the ones who do drugs can say that… I’ve heard that they call it ‘chasing the dragon’... you got a high from the first Hme you did a drug and it never comes back. You just keep chasing that experience. So, don't let this spiritual experience become that drug where you just had that and then, now you just chasing that experience. Nothing to do with that. You are It. Now. He [a sangha member] said something very useful actually, ‘In that moment, It was eternal’. So you just saw that which is eternal and eternal means here and now also. It is unchanged no maZer what. Only our spiritual materialism gets in the way. Which is saying that ‘In my box of good experiences, mind being empty, just a sense of peace and contentment -- that should be there’. Now, we are changing that, we are demolishing these boxes and then, whatever may be there may be there. And this is when we stop making disHncHon. Advaita means that there are no two. But also, it means that there are no disHncHons. We stop making these disHncHons that these experiences are good and these are bad. Everything is what it is. The problem with that is what? There is no specialness in that. We don't feel like, ‘I got anything special. The experience was nothing special’. This is the mind’s interpretaHon. So that is good. If there is no specialness, it is beZer. There is no chance of special ego. No chance of spiritual ego. If you just keep anchoring for special experiences and keep ge^ng special experiences then they will invent your ego into a very special ego. In what It is, no chance to build up any specialness. It may be very hur{ul actually to some when I say a young child can come and they can quickly see and you can feel like, ‘But what have I been doing the last 20 years’. So what does it hurt? Just our spiritual ego. To say that the experience that you had... like he said [a sangha member] -- the first day he came to the Satsang, he had a beauHful spiritual experience the previous night in a dream. So he told me this story (like that) and I said, ‘Forget it! It’s meaningless. Means nothing’. He said he was very hurt by that way of a strong chop or something. But what did it chop? Did it chop your Truth? Can anything chop your Truth? It can only chop the special altar you’re building around the parHcular experience. And anything in our memory, we will never really know whether it actually happened anyway. Anything in our memory. It is just imagery in this seemingly repository of past experiences but can we really say? And we have taken a view, really deconstructed the concept for a long long Hme. For now, it’s enough to say that we cannot conclude that, give anything that is stored up in any reality. So, don't miss fresh God for some experience of God that you had. Fresh God is si^ng in your room, waiHng in your living room, as I say. But you say when I had darshan of God, three years ago, that God [chuckles]. That was God, this is just God [chuckles]...