We are still in the moment that God calls the moment of safe passage. OK, now what is that moment? In the Old Testament, it was the moment when the Red Sea opened and the Israelites could get out of Egypt safely. But there was a time limit and the waters would close back in, and if you hadn’t made it across, OK too bad. But it stays open long enough for those who are awakened to the fact that they have to complete the passage in a timely manner before the environmental conditions change and make it much more difficult to achieve that passage out of the ego into the Real Self.
This is that moment—because when the situation in the world becomes more chaotic even than it is now—and it will, and it will accelerate massively, violently, and equally in every fractal of its own manifestation, it will affect every neuron in the network—and at that moment it produces what in Indian mythology is remembered as the tug of war between the Devas and the Asuras. Right? They wrap the snake of infinity around Mount Meru, make it like a washing machine in the Ocean of Consciousness, and in this tug of war archetypal energies emerge—some very helpful and some very demonic and resistant, oppositional, to transcendence of the ego.
And so as this tug of war increases in intensity for each individual psyche, you will start to feel the nigredo coming out of the Ocean of Consciousness, and you’ll also begin to get the jewels of the species of the Philosopher’s Stone, let’s say—the Diamond Mind capacities—both will emerge, but which one will you be able to obtain and attain?
And this depends on the vibrational frequency that either attracts or repels certain other frequencies with which you are in complementarity.
And so, as the resonance factor shifts, which takes place as you rise or fall from one assemblage point to another, hopefully up the kundalini ladder, then the vibrational frequency that your intelligence is able to open up to, is more and more that of the infinite Self and less and less of the finite.
This is the washing machinery, if you will, that was talked about by the sixth Zen patriarch when he refuted or overturned the previous chief disciple, who said, “Zen is cleaning the mirror. Get all the dust off the mirror, clean it, get all the sanskaras out of the mind. Silence the mind, learn to make it still. Do whatever you have to do to be able to sustain a silent mind empty of thought.” And of course Huineng came with a dialectical reasoning overthrow of that position by saying, “What are you talking about? There’s no mirror, there’s no dust, nothing real ever was, including you.”
Therefore, if you don’t exist, what is there to do? If you’re a fictional character, all there is to do is to wake up to who you really are. You don’t have to change the fictional character, just get out of was never you in the first place.
So last night you heard about the firebird, but it’s clear from the report I read that nobody gets the real understanding of the symbolism of the firebird. So let’s go through—let’s see, I better put on my glasses.
OK, the firebird is an archetype, and every archetype is universal, and it is both a truth and a process. OK, so let’s look at it as a process.
Those of you who have read a lot of Sri Ramana Maharishi know that he talks a lot, especially in Padamalai, about dead mind. Right? The goal of yoga is to reach a state of flatlining the mind. Dead mind, OK. In other words, your mind no longer produces thoughts. OK? That’s the state the Buddhists will call Shunyata, also. Shunya is the first emptiness in that sense. Right? A mind empty of thoughts—how many have reached the dead mind state?
The reason you haven’t reached the dead mind is you haven’t gone through ego death. And that’s why an ashram exists, is to get you through ego death. But you’ve got to, in ego-mind, want to go through ego death—nobody’s going to force you. Physical death might be forced on you, but ego death, no. So Ramana talks about the dead mind, but what he doesn’t talk about so much which I want to focus on, is what comes after that: the resurrected mind.
Yes, you have to go through ego death, but you don’t stay dead. Right? After the crucifixion and death of the Christ symbol that is so highly worshiped, there was resurrection, right? The resurrected mind is the firebird. So the firebird is your potential state, but you can’t get resurrected without going through the rite of passage of death.
The first emptiness is the prerequisite for the second emptiness, which is the fullness of the light, the intelligence, and the bliss of the Self, the absolute Self, the ecstasy, Sat Chit Ananda. The Ananda is real. The Ananda is the grand prize.
Now the Ananda is not separate from the Chit; And you could say the Chit-Ananda together make up the Sat. Like the Kashmir Shaivites would say the Sat or Shiva-Consciousness is Prakasha and Vimarsha, Light and Self-aware Intelligence. But they are not different—they are simply ways that the energy expresses itself.
So once you’ve gone through ego death—and remember how easy it was for Ramana at the age of 16. What did Ramana do? This is really important, and I think most people don’t focus enough on what he actually did, because he had no training, right, in yoga or anything—as far as we know, at least. He wondered what it would be like to be dead. And he got very—he got a panic attack, he got death anxiety. And for a moment he was taken over by an anxiety that he could not shake of terror of death. He didn’t run for a tranquilizer, or a shot of whiskey, or anything else—he said, “All right then, if this is my time to die, then I’m going to voluntarily die. I’m not going to wait to for the body to expire. I’m going to find out” by making the body feel total rigor mortis. He tightened up everything and he stopped his breathing. He did a very advanced pranayama and a shavasana, or an anti-shavasana, of total willpower to reach that point of a dead mind.
And he went so deeply into the dead mind, he never came back—it never popped back into life. But the dead mind got resurrected, and the story, then, is history.
So the firebird, which is known among the ancient Greeks as the phoenix, you could say, has two aspects: the phoenix is the bird before it dies, and it’s only after it dies that it catches fire. It’s like the Tibetan rainbow body—it catches fire after ego death, not before. However, how does it catch fire? It is an act of grace. It’s not achievement. It’s not, “Oh, I’m rubbing two sticks together and I’m going to be on fire” or “I will do it only through willpower.” No, it won’t be done that way.
It has to be done paradoxically, through willpower combined with surrender. Bhakti and Gyana. So long as there is a trace of belief that you are a separate consciousness from the infinite Absolute Self, there has to be a total surrender to the infinite Self—surrender of love. Because love is what creates a resonance with bliss. You could say Ananda is love in nonduality, and love is the essence of consciousness. I was asked today by someone, “Even in an ego state, is love the essence?” Yes. In every state of consciousness, it’s simply a manifestation of the love that consciousness is. But at lower levels it could be love of money, it could be love of country, it could be love of power, it could be some form of love that makes you willing to commit mass murder—but it’s still love, right? Always. But it’s love that gets filtered through a fictional story, and then it becomes anger and frustration and self-hatred, because in the story you are hated by those who you wish loved you, and vice versa.
And so as long as love gets filtered through an ego story then the bliss cannot appear. That story is what has to die. Because that’s all the ego is, is a story that tells itself again and again and again. And when that story stops, the suffering created by the story that one is so attached to and treasures as one’s identity, also disappears, and never actually was—because the story was fictional. The story wasn’t real, but the love is. And when the love is free from the story, it becomes Sat Chit Ananda…
