Coherent Thought is a Bridge to Liberation
The real issue is that one is split off from one’s Real Self; one is unable to break through this split mind because one doesn’t know who one is if one eliminates the—you can’t eliminate Hyde without eliminating Jekyll, you can’t eliminate an upset child without eliminating the adult who is neglecting that child and suppressing her, or him. It’s both polarities that have to be overcome, not just one. You can’t just kill your superego and think, “OK I’m done and now I’m free.” No, you have to deal with the ego and the superego. You have to deal with, in some cases, a number of different superegos and a number of different ego fragments, right, that are all in a state of conflicting driven-ness to act out certain intentions. And this is why I have been emphasizing lately the need to overcome intention and attitude because each one of them has a certain attitude that’s based on a delusion, a fantasy, but because it’s in a state of lack and it’s in a state of illusion, because it doesn’t really even exist, the drive is to prove that it exists by getting what it wants, that it thinks will fill it and make it whole. But of course it never will. Even if the sense of, “If I could only do this without feeling bad, then everything would be OK.” It won’t be OK. One will always feel, “No, that wasn’t it. I have to do more. I have to do more.: And one will be driven to an impossible point of pressure on oneself without having achieved the wholeness or the sense of peace with oneself because it’s not a Real Self, it’s a robotic operating system that cannot stop its drive for something that can never be attained.
So, to the ego, what it wants is unattainable, and its Real Self—that doesn’t even want any of that—is unattainable because it has to go through a state of depersonalization to get there. The ego cannot get to its Real Self. It has to die so that the Real Self can emerge from behind that screen of mental chatter, emotion, drive, demand, projection—all of that takes up the entire mental space. And all that the Real Self is, is an empty background—it doesn’t even have any existence to the ego. It’s not a Real Self. It’s not real at all to the ego that’s in a fantasy mode and believes it is a real person in a real world.
So the unreality of the belief system of the ego has to be completely dissolved before the vast Emptiness behind it can be realized, as actually not simply emptiness, but intelligence without limitation, without narrative, without preconception, without a context and a paradigm and a formula, and a certain type of relationality that is projected and that is reflexively organized as one’s way of being in the world. One has to have completely eliminated all of that, literally to the point where one knows nothing and is nothing, except for just pure Presence, so that the unborn intelligence can emerge, and then operate the body from that place of Emptiness—without desire, without fear, without identity with a body, without a belief in an external world—but in a capacity to function perfectly, because all of it is functioning from the intelligence that is producing the illusion of a world.
So everything will happen perfectly, without resistance, without obstacles, without glitches. And if there are apparent obstacles and glitches, they are simply points in which there is still a residue of a sanskara, a tendency to produce a positive self-image. “Positive”, I mean just it exists as a mental object, and one has to negativize that; bring it back into the Emptiness, bring it back into the Nothingness, so that there are no longer any preconceptions that are superimposed upon your reality in your life that actually act instead of your Real Self.
OK, I hope that makes sense, but it requires a complete reprogramming that cannot happen from within the ego. It cannot happen by the mind, even though the mind may get it, and even being able to get it and retain it will only happen at the Viveka point. You have to get to that point of discernment. If there is any—the first three we call Clinging—any desire to cling and to get attention—or any desire at the second assemblage point of anger, fury, wanting to get even, wanting to control, wanting to dominate, wanting to just have its way with the other—or at the third assemblage point, wanting to produce something that will give a sense of its value and offer it a way to feel cultured and to feel superior, and all of that. The first three assemblage points are all there to give the illusory ego self an identity, and a way to have a safety valve upon its otherwise explosive energies that will be turned either into “I want to die” or “I want to kill.”
That’s the fate of the ego, the Death Drive. And so there are sublimation channels at the third assemblage point where one can decide, “OK, I’ll put all that energy into music, or I’ll become an actor, or I’ll become a singer, or I’ll become a poet, or I’ll become a mathematician” or whatever, a boxer, right? Any of those ways are partial sublimations of the energies, but they’re not going to get you free of them. They will help express them, but they will continue to be produced so that you are still stuck having to continually let out energies that are self-destructive and destructive of one’s life, karmically.
And the first three assemblage points have an exhaust—they have to produce negative karma, just like a car engine is going to produce CO2 and other poisons are going to come out of the exhaust pipe—the first three assemblage points, because they’re dependent on the other and they’re not happy with the other; they’re never contented with the other, or with themselves, or with life. They’re producing negative energies that will either build up and explode or have to be released constantly by kicking the dog or giving somebody an insult, or just acting in some way to produce letting out of those energies and attitudes. They’ll come out, perhaps subtly and perhaps in dreams, if one has them really well shackled—but they will come out.
So the only way to deal with this is to sublimate the energies so that they are no longer producing a negative exhaust, and that can only be done at Real 2. It can’t be done at Real 1. At Real 1, everything feels very physically real and resistant, and there’s neediness, and there’s lack and all of that. At Real 2, there’s at least the experience of love; there’s a sense of the possibility of realizing oneness with each other, with all that is. There’s a possibility of symbolically thinking oneself out of the box, out of the shackles, out of the split mind, and realizing the soul. But that has to be thought out at a level of symbolic coherence and clarity that can’t be reached from the first three assemblage points—it’s not possible. And it’s only when you’ve gotten to the soul level by realizing that’s all you are is a thinking capacity, that’s really all you are. You can think, you can feel, you can process reality. But from within the lower three assemblage points, all of your thoughts are tied to the imaginary register; they’re not truly symbolic thinking. They produce only emotional charges and reactions and fears and desires to act out. They don’t produce a capacity to sublimate one’s consciousness to the Source of the intellect, and the ability to think clearly. Only when you have the ability to think clearly can the thinking capacity realize there is a higher power from which the mind and the capacity for love, and for joy, and for bliss, must come. And then one can focus on the Real Self.