Don’t Hide Your Self in a Suitcase
The ego is the Self in a suitcase. When people travel and they want to take as much as they can with them, in a small space, they have to fold it up—and so the ego folds up the Self into as tiny a particle as possible, in order to travel through space and time. From a monad, it becomes a nomad, and it travels putting all of its infinity into a tiny divine spark, but then it soon forgets how much that infinitesimal point of light contains.
So we’ve been talking a bit about Gödel, and for those who wanted to know, I thought, OK, there are probably a few scholarly types here, and it may be hard for some to find, so this is a good book that discusses Gödel’s ideas about Leibniz. It’s called The Logical Journey, by Hao Wang, and he is a philosopher of logic and mathematics in his own right, but he was a student and colleague of Gödel for a long time and took notes on their conversations, and they are contained in here. And there are some very brilliant ideas that never got published formally. But the final book on Deleuze—on Leibniz—is by Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze, the French post-structural philosopher, and the title is The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, it’s called. And he has some very interesting and very complex ideas about Leibniz, but it came to me that it could be simplified in a way that perhaps might make things easier to grasp. So let’s see if I can explain it to you.
(Shunyamurti unfolds a piece of paper)
This is the Self, OK? Imagine this paper is the cosmos, alright, it’s written there, so you know it’s true. OK? This is the Self. This is what you are—the entire cosmic consciousness. And then you decide to fold yourself over, and as soon as you fold yourself over in two, you become duality, and you become all of the cosmic dualities, of consciousness and world, and light and awareness, subject/object, all the dualities. And then you decided to fold those, and instead of a universal duality, now you become particularity, OK? Everyone becomes particularity, and then from particularity of course, you fold—which fold is it—you fold once more, and now you become the concrete ego, alright? And that’s not quite enough—the ego then folds its conscious and subconscious so that the censor is now its controlling entity, and now you’re down here in your little suitcase of ignorance, OK? Avidya. And you’ve forgotten how much is inside of you, but it’s all there, the whole cosmos. OK? So there’s proof. So that’s my idea of the fold, not Deleuze’s, but it’s a simpler idea—but it’s fact; so if you unfold yourself completely, you’ll discover the whole cosmos is within you.
So that’s the whole retreat in a nutshell; should’ve just said it the first day and we could have quit. So once you are completely unfolded—because if you think about it, what are ego defenses except folding in to protect your vulnerability—right? It’s simply a refusal to let go and expand. And the more that you let go, the more that you become fearless and de-contract, de-collapse your quantum wave functions, the more you open to the infinite and you realize that you are That. And you let go of identity with the body, which contracts you into an investment into materiality and temporality, and fear and desire, because the body vehicle has needs and insecurities, etc.—but once you disidentify from that, then you realize that you are beyond all needs, desires, fears, wants—you’re complete, you’re whole, you are able to accept whatever is with open arms, and without resistance. You recognize that the whole world that you saw from the ego perspective was a projection—the ego really is a monad, which means consciousness folded in upon itself, and it cannot see outside itself—as Leibniz said: a monad has no windows.
So everything you feel and think about another person is a projection. The ego does not know what the other person thinks or feels about you, but you can project that they are feeling negative, and then within your monad you will send energy to their monad that will produce some kind of an interaction, positive or negative, but it’s based on fantasy, determined by the psychodynamics of the inner figures of the monad projected outward, but there is no actual rapport between individuals—only fantasies are being exchanged, and not even in an accurate way. So there’s no communication, there’s no communion of egos.
So for there to be a Holy Communion, one must be whole, and in the level of Spirit. And then there are no walls, and therefore no need for windows, because all is one. So the unfoldment brings peace. It brings love. There can’t be love if there are walls, if there are defenses, if there’s a feeling of a need to protect oneself, or prove oneself, or have some kind of a relationship of contest and conflict with anyone. One has to be unconditional, unconditioned, and unconditionable. And in that space of total empowerment, one has the luxury of freedom again, and to freely see everyone as a manifestation of the cosmic consciousness, and never leave the state of ecstasy that is the realization of the Self.
So once you have unfolded completely…