The difficulty that some people have meditating is that they mistakenly think they already know who they are—and meditation is essentially the act of discovering who you are and what you are. But if you think you already know who you are, you’re not going to have any interest in meditating, nor any ability, then, to change who you manifest as with what capacities, with what activated potentialities.
So, the key discovery of the ancient sages was that consciousness in its essential essence—its essential nature and Being—is impersonal. Consciousness learns to act as a person—when the consciousness enters the physical organism in the intrauterine state, but later after birth—it has to take a lot of time to learn how to use the body, how to master the motor capacities of the organism, and then the capacities of language, and then apply those capacities toward adapting itself to the family and then society.
But the consciousness in its true nature is not personal. It adopts the illusion of being a person in order to satisfy the demands of other beings who think they are persons. And so, we take on that role because the consciousness is given a name, and it’s told to look in the mirror and see a form, and say, “That’s you!”—and it learns to identify with this object that it sees in the mirror. And it learns to identify language with that object, and thus the subconscious thought, underlying all the other thoughts that appear in the mind, is the thought that is “I am the body.”
And then it’s that “I” that precipitates out of the impersonal field of consciousness and functions to satisfy the demands of others, and make demands on others, and act as if it were really a person. And then, eventually, that precipitated-out complex becomes rigidified and habitual, and the consciousness becomes addicted to that identification, with its particularities of style, and of humor, and of jouissance, and of particular relationships to another figure that precipitates out of the impersonal field, which is—was called by Freud—the “superego”.
And so, once the ego-complex precipitates out of the impersonal field, the superego always precipitates out along with it. So, you have a child, and an—originally mother, and then father—superego figures that all precipitate out simultaneously, but subconsciously, and the problem is that the superego figures are always constantly judging the ego figure. And this is the reason why the ego believes it lives in a moral universe—in which it is guilty—because it can never satisfy those superego figures that consciousness has created as gods, as judges, and as objects of desire.
So, the ancient sages said the way to avoid this sense of sin and guilt, and of, therefore, dependence, and the need to prove oneself, and the need to escape from judgement, and the need to satisfy the lack of the sense of goodness and realness that comes with being an artificial precipitate that has been created in the image of the desire of the parents—and to escape that one must come to realize, again, that, indeed, the ego is an artificial construct that has emerged from the base consciousness—which is simply an impersonal field of intelligence—without form, without identification, without conceptualization—pure potentiality.
This field of consciousness, which they call Brahman, is the essential nature to which we return in deep sleep—which is why we are revived and refreshed when we awaken from sleep—because it’s that field of consciousness that is the Source of our life energy—and that precipitate of the ego does not contain that life energy once it’s precipitated out—it’s like a battery; it will go dead. And, therefore, sleep is essential. And if one doesn’t sleep for a long enough period—and lose the identification with the ego—one can actually die.
So, the Real consciousness, the Real Self, is an impersonal field, and that field was never born, and never dies, and has no interest in becoming a person. But it has the capacity to personalize itself when necessary, and it also has the wisdom to dissolve that personal projection that is created, contingently, out of the field. But the field is the Real.
And the more that we can stay in the field, the more that we are detached from any construct of a person that automatically comes with a sense of lack and fear of judgement, and therefore of its own compensatory mechanisms of judging the other—but because that construct accumulates a history, accumulates karma, accumulates a record—it begins to carry a tremendous amount of negative baggage about itself. And because it has no reality, it needs to get the affirmation and validation of others—constantly—in order to feel good about itself.
And so, it becomes very psychologically fragile—very easily destabilized—and very rigid in its manner of thinking and responding to events in reality. And once it has become rigidified into a certain form, it can no longer grow, it can no longer evolve—it’s stuck with itself and with its past record, which it considers, at some level at least, a criminal record. But it can never absolve itself of its own past. It can never forgive itself. It can never have mercy upon itself. And thus, it must continue to run away from itself, and to try to alter its consciousness to forget its anguish, because it cannot stop blaming itself for its unhappiness.
And so, the sages said that the way to escape this hell realm is simply to realize that the ego never existed in the first place—it’s an artificial construct. What you are is a field of impersonal consciousness, and that field is a microcosm of the infinite impersonal cosmic field of consciousness—the field of consciousness out of which the whole universe emerges as a dream of itself. The cosmos is to the universal quantum unified field, as the individual “Atmic” field—or as the ego is to the individual Atmic field. So, therefore, the equivalent, the formula was Atman = Brahman. The individual, impersonal consciousness is actually one with the universal impersonal consciousness, and the universal dream emerges in the same way as the individual dream.
And, at some point, that dream, at all the different levels—whether cosmic or planetary or national or familial or individual—the dream becomes a nightmare, because of its increasing rigidification and inability to change and adapt once it has created an identification. And once there has been lost the ability to grow, and the inability to dissolve one’s illusory construct into the impersonal Self again, in a conscious way—while awake, not while in deep sleep—because if you do it in deep sleep, as soon as you wake up, the organism will find itself back in the same construct and nothing changes.
But if you do it while awake—consciously dissolve the ego—you literally can be liberated from the past—from the whole criminal record about the sins you committed or the anger about the sins committed against you. And the whole point of religions is simply that: to dissolve in that impersonal Self—although it got personalized in “God the Father”, or the Goddess, or some other form, and then once you believe that that ultimate reality is a person, then it’s very difficult to get out of thinking you are a person—which is why it’s extremely important to understand scientifically, and not simply mythologically, and not in the imaginary register of consciousness, which is that register in which you believe you are who you think you are. It’s only when there is a recognition that none of the ego’s beliefs have any reality whatsoever. The ego is literally insane, literally psychotic, because it believes in a complete unreality that’s artificial, that’s based on particular insanities of the family system and the social system, and the religious system one’s been brought up in, and all of the various other systemic insanities that one has been indoctrinated into believing—through the various media that one becomes addicted to ingesting. And that disinformation then creates further incoherence within the ego-system.
But the simple solution is the absolution, the dissolution into the Absolute, the impersonal field out of which your ego arose, into which it returns every night in deep sleep, but which you can live in while awake—and if you choose to live in the impersonal while awake, you can precipitate out a personal consciousness that can respond accurately, in real time, to everything, but isn’t carrying any baggage, because it knows it’s not real. And, therefore, it is absolved of all moral failings, and has no interest in committing any moral failings because it doesn’t feel any lack—because it never loses its connection to the impersonal Source of Being.
And so, this was the original meaning of “Shiva”—it was Shivam—that point that emerges out of the field without losing its realization that it is still the field. The field can speak when the field is conscious of itself. But as soon as it loses consciousness of itself, that unconsciousness, the forgetfulness that’s called the dwarf in that picture—when you forget that you’re the impersonal field and think that you’re just that drop of consciousness that’s operating the body, with the history of all of its failures, then there is misery—there is neurosis or psychosis in a very literal sense, and an inability to escape the constant fury of the mind—the constant emission of thoughts over which one has no control but which determines one’s destiny.
And the ego has no free will to change its thought patterns or to disidentify from them, and thus becomes a robotic artifact of artificial intelligence—but an artificial lack of intelligence, because it has lost touch with the real intelligence out of which it has emerged. Because, originally, it emerged at the will of the parents, who conjured up the original identity through their fantasies of who you would be for them. And so, until we’re willing to let go of the desire to be for them who they wanted us to be—and that we could never fulfill because they wanted us to be the rescuers of their own moral failings and lack of love and lack of intelligence and lack of knowledge of who they really were.
And so, the history, the ancestry, the relationship to the family system that goes back generation after generation, functions like a curse—because it functions as a demand that you continue the same neurotic ideas and ideals and conceptualizations of what life is about—when none of that has any reality, nor can respond accurately, then, to the events and challenges one faces. And one’s ability then to call upon one’s natural intelligence, and one’s natural capacity for creativity, for feeling, for love, for compassion, and to call in the wisdom of that infinite cosmic field of intelligence, out of which the individuals are born.
Once we are reconnected to that Source, then life changes. And the individual life then becomes an expression of cosmic life, of cosmic intelligence—and that cosmic intelligence is completely indifferent to the concerns of the ego—it’s indifferent to the life or the death of the body, or the condition of the body—and it’s not influenced by the advertising and by the demands of the social system that you look a certain way and talk a certain way, and buy certain products and have certain kinds of experiences and think certain things are cool and others are not—the whole value-system that one is trapped in and that one usually takes for granted as some reality, has become more and more psychotic, narcissistic, psychopathic.
And so, we have been trained to have egos that will produce ever more bad karma, without the intelligence of getting out of the labyrinth in which we have found ourselves placed in this social experiment, in which we are the rats in the cage. And only if you get out of that cage—through realizing you have caged yourself, through the self-identification with the body, but that you have, inherently, the freedom to dissolve that rat-ego, and to return to the True Self, in the ratri, the night of pure consciousness that is beyond the light of the sun, beyond time and space, to find that inner light of the Real Self, that is never born, and that never separates from the infinite absolute potentiality. To find that is to be reborn, the be resurrected, to be redeemed, to be saved from one’s own hell realm, that is one’s own mind—one’s ego’s mind.
And it’s only by disowning that mind through realizing it was imposed upon you but is not you, that gives you the right and the authority and the power to dissolve the ego with all of its hellish attributes and ways of dysfunctioning, and arise again out of the infinite as a being of purity, of truth, of wisdom, of love, of clarity and coherence—who can live can live a life of nobility, and a life of intelligence, and a life of compassion, and bring about a change, a liberation of the entire world from its enslavement to the artificial lack of intelligence of the human ego, and can dream the power to emerge a new world out of the planetary noosphere, and bring to birth a world filled with beings who have that clarity of who we really are—and thus treat each other with love, with respect, with honoring, with joy, and with giving each other the gift of freedom, in the recognition that freedom and infinite Presence is our true nature. Infinite Presence that manifests as infinite love. Infinite love without desire and without fear.
Namaste, Shunyamurti
