How to Build a Bridge to Nirvana
Summary: The ego keeps files on everyone and everything in its life. These files fill the mind. The ego must be de-filed so that the undefiled Self is revealed. In effortless presence redemption is achieved.
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So I was given today a set of teachings that—actually three sets of teachings—to as much as possible, will compress the instructions that we need to have, and compose them in as coherent a way, and to do it for those at different levels of readiness for Self-realization. So I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to all of the notes I was given to transmit, but in general, we have Three Sets of Pontifex Points to Ponder.
Now, you all know pontifex, which is shortened by the Catholics to pontiff, actually comes from the early French. You know, pont is a bridge, right? Sur le pont d’Avignon—everyone knows that one. So the pont is the bridge, the fex is the building of a bridge. So these are the instructions of how to build a bridge to bring your consciousness from samsara to nirvana. And then you can wear a pontiff’s hat when you do that.
So set one is for the top-class students; it’s not for everyone. It’s for those whose hair is on fire, or your heart is on fire, even, I think, more importantly, for union with the Supreme Self, and so this set is for those who are ready to take the instructions straight, in the purest form that they can be, that I can relay them, at least.
So, Set One, these are The Seven Resolutions of the Buddhi. The buddhi is the part of the soul that discerns, and it can be at either high resolution or low resolution. And so this is the points that will hopefully help you shift the resolution. OK?
So for the ego—because I’m assuming that some of us are still in the ego and that’s why the bridge is required—for the ego whose consciousness is in a delusional state, that delusion has caused reality to seem to come in two polarized states of mind: the samsaric state of mind, and the nirvanic state of mind, OK? So samsara and nirvana are not places, they’re not realms, they’re simply states of mind, OK? They are entirely internal, and as you shift your state of mind from one locus to the other, voila, you are in nirvana rather than samsara. So it’s nothing that has any external activity involved, OK? It’s simply a focus on that level of your consciousness that is completely accessible, but that the ego has separated it from its own nirvanic dimension and is determined to stay in the samsaric state of mind. It’s determined, you see, this is the obstacle. In fact, I would go so far as to say the ego forbids you to leave samsara for nirvana. It’s forbidden, because once you leave samsara for nirvana, there’s no ego.
So we could say that for the ego, these will also appear as an egoic type of consciousness, and a non-egoic form of consciousness, OK? If you’re in an ego, if there’s an I-thought, if you believe you are a separate individual acting in a world of bodies and of multiplicity, then you’re in the samsaric state of mind. And if you’re in a non-egoic state, that will not be the case—there will not be a sense of difference, a sense of subject-object duality. So that is how the polarization tends to express itself, and it also expresses itself in terms of the difference between life and death. The ego wants to stay alive; it believes it is alive and that nirvana is death, and it’s trying to prevent its death. It doesn’t want to encourage it, right? It’s doing whatever it can to stay alive, to survive, even though there’s a death drive—let’s leave that part out of it—but nonetheless, there’s a desire on the ego to stay alive. And the ego conceives of nirvana as death—and death, meaning a lack of consciousness.
This is a delusion. It’s not the case, but all of this creates the resistance, and one has to become aware of that polarization and ponder the possibility that, in fact, it is a delusion. You see, the definition of a delusion is something you think is reality, right? The one who is deluded cannot know that they’re deluded, or the delusion comes to an end. And so even though you may have moments of clarity where you get it, the ego will cause you to forget it and to go back into the belief that, “No, no, this is real; that’s the delusion. Believing in God is the delusion! Believing in nirvana is the delusion. No, there’s no way out. This is it!”
And so as long as one has that belief and you believe this is reality, you won’t make contact with what is actually reality. So this is the great trick that has to be overcome. This is the magia of maya. And if we can’t see through the magic trick, then we will be fooled by it, OK?
However, if you move to the nirvanic state of mind, from nirvana you will perceive clearly that there is no samsara, and that there is no nirvana, that nirvana itself was a samsaric delusion. But you have to be in nirvana to recognize that. So it is another state, a non-egoic state, but because that nonegoic state is beyond description, beyond boundary, beyond place, beyond an ability to know it as something that is an object or has any degree of otherness, it does not exist because what exists is only that which is objectifiable, and nirvana is not, right? It’s too subtle to be able to be perceived because it’s nothing other than the most subtle possible level of consciousness that is free, completely, of egoic thoughts, and therefore of any ability for the ego to capture its reality. The ego is gone, you see? And it’s the ego that labels and dreams existences.
And the other aspect of it is the reason why nirvana doesn’t exist is that the nirvana-Self does not keep files. Life for the ego, especially these days, is all about you have to keep files on everything and everyone, and the government is keeping files on you and everyone else. So it’s all about files. And what are files? They’re the past that you can later be blamed and blackmailed and captured, because it was clear that your tendency was, you’ve been radicalized or whatever, you know, all the different scenarios, but everyone is attached to their files, you see? And if to go in nirvana means you burn all your files. Oh my God, that’s terrible! Then how will you know who’s to blame and who did what and how to keep score? You see, all of that is gone. So you are de-filed in another way.
So as I mentioned before, it is forbidden to leave samsara, if you’re in samsara and you’re the ego, it’s a command, you don’t have the option. It’s a command that outranks the ego because it comes as a superego, but it’s coming really from the censor, and you don’t even have access to be able to argue with the one who is forbidding this, but that creates a very difficult obstacle to surmount. As long as you’re under the jurisdiction of the ego’s legal system, you do not have the right or the power to escape. OK? This is a prison, literally, and until you pay your dues, you can’t get out. But there is no way to pay those dues. And that’s the trick, because every time you try to improve yourself, you’re making more karma. You’re simply ratifying the samsara itself and you’re actually putting another layer of bars on the prison window.
So one has to come to terms with that fact and with the implication: all effort is futile—but so is counter-effort. So these are two important points to keep in mind. You can’t get out of samsara by trying to make effort to do so. However, the counter-effort that your ego is making to stop you from leaving samsara is also futile because samsara doesn’t really exist. So the ego is programmed to want to do something, right? Its question is always, “How do I do it? How do I do it?” Well, that “I” can’t do anything. That “I” is the problem. It has to be eliminated. It can’t do anything to get anywhere. It is delusional in its very nature, and it cannot leave doing for being. It’s always in a state of becoming which requires more effort, more doing and all effort being futile. The ego is on a treadmill and getting nowhere, even if it tries to convince itself it’s making progress, that progress will never lead to actual liberation.
OK, that’s mostly the bad news of the situation. Now we can get to some of the good news of it.
(Shunyamurti writes on whiteboard)
Do I have another adjective? I think I put another one in there. OK. Refer to it as Emptiness.
So in effortless immediate Emptiness, the Real is revealed. OK? So these three are important. It’s effortless, you have stopped all doing and have come to your being. It’s immediate, meaning both without a time lag but also unmediated. There is no medium in which this appears; it doesn’t happen to anyone, and that’s why it is Emptiness. It is an effortless immediate state of Emptiness of ego, and that state is also timeless. So there’s an immediate shift from time to eternity, from samsara to nirvana, and it can happen at any moment, and it is unconditional—this is available to anyone just by stopping making all effort.
But the paradox is there has to be such a yearning to make no effort that that effort of reaching effortlessness burns up the karma of the ego. So there’s a paradoxical relationship with effort and effortlessness. But the effort is an effort to purify the heart, to open the heart. But in that effort, a moment will come when you realize your heart has always been open. You haven’t been in it, but it’s always been open, and that is who you really are, and so the effort immediately becomes effortlessness.
I hope you can read my ragged handwriting.
Effortless Emptiness has neither a past nor a future. That’s what presence means, right? Emptiness is presence. And presence means exactly what it says: you are fully present; so fully present in the now that no trace of past or future remains. That’s why there are no files, because they belong to the past, and therefore all attachments can no longer exist in the present. Attachments exist only in the past as memories and as a longing to return to that memory and bring it into a future, right? So the past and the future are two modes of yearning for not being present, for staying in samsara, because all samsara is, is a past and a future without a present. And past and future, neither of them exist, and so of course the ego is living in a fantasy, it’s living in its mind that has memory traces of the past that it’s still angry about, and projecting onto what’s happening now, creating a future that repeats the past, etc., but it’s never present. It’s always shifting from the past to another edition called “the future”, but of the same, having the same signature sanskaras and scenarios. And these patterns are what make the ego believe it actually exists through time, because it’s perpetuating the past into the future, but it can never be present. And so it’s always in a lack of being because it’s too busy becoming and trying to repeat what has been, to be able to simply be.
And some of the fear of the ego in letting go of past and future is a fear of disorientation. “But I have to make plans! I have to make sure my investments are taken care of! And I have to make sure of this and that, and I need to calculate and strategize,” and all of that. So the mind has to jump from past to future. Well, no it doesn’t.
And that’s the seventh one: in Effortless Emptiness—let’s say EE—in Effortless Emptiness the Self-arising wisdom that comes from that Supreme Self takes over and life becomes spontaneous, and it’s in accord with the Dao, inherently. It’s in accord with the Will of God and everything works out optimally, but it works out optimally for the whole because one is no longer identified with the part, and so it works out with a different optimal than the ego would have. It’s the optimal of the whole intelligence of the Real, not the ideas, beliefs, preconceptions, and wishes of the ego-mind.
And the more we have faith and trust in that Self-arising wisdom which replaces ego chatter, you will receive whatever downloads of information or of energy and spontaneous behavior, that is necessary in any situation, but without leaving that state of total presence. This is the secret of great martial artists and athletes of all kinds, but it’s the secret of anyone who attains genius level performance in any arts or sciences or any field. That’s it. It’s a state of effortless presence in total relaxation, and in total trust and faith and awareness, that is able to slow down time, even stop it or speed it up, or be able to recognize larger chunks of time as all being present until one can actually expand into the entirety of the explicate order being present as the implicate order, as a single thought, a single understanding. But that Self-arising wisdom, to whatever level you have achieved constancy in the Effortless Emptiness, it is filled with wisdom and power and accuracy. So this is the secret of great archery, and you hit the bullseye of Brahman as soon as you are in that Effortless Emptiness.
So that’s the first set. If you get that…
This Post Has One Comment
Antonio
27 Jun 2023I love your videos , listening to you I stopped drinking , I was drinking because of fear that the demonic forces would come to get me and jab the needle in my arm ,so I was drunk all the time ,but now I’m thinking that’s better to stay sober ,and anchor in the real god perhaps I’ll be protected when the demon comes.
Thank you.