. . . the postmodern ego structure of this particular kind of a Möbius strip, which has been produced by the late postmodern social system, is a system that valorizes the Möbius strip. That’s called individualism. We have an individualistic social order, and if you do not valorize your own ego, then you’re not with it. You’re—I would use the word “fuddy-duddy,” but that no longer exists, and I don’t know what the equivalent of that is in current slang. In any case, it’s definitely not possible to avoid narcissism and being a puer who never wants to grow up and wants freedom for his ego not from it, who doesn’t want to serve anybody, and who wants to resist and oppose and do it his own way—always sabotaging, but with plausible deniability, to enjoy a constant state of rebellion against the status quo.
So there’s a resistant factor in the postmodern ego that no longer has a countervailing aspiration to overcome its baseline of cynicism and nihilism and complete interest or absorption only in its own biography. All it’s really concerned with is its own life and all its tragedies and traumas. That’s the important thing, not the infinite ocean of consciousness. There’s no room for God—maybe as an icon, to give the ego status as a devout religious person or something like that, or becoming a monk or a sannyasi. You know, big egos can form out of the illusory forms of renunciation that do not renounce the ego. It’s very easy to renounce aspects of the world that were unsatisfying anyway, but to renounce the ego—no, there are very few who want to do that.
So the secret of instant illumination is simply wanting the illumination. As soon as you want illumination, you will realize that that’s your natural state because all there is is the light of consciousness. There’s nothing else. Even this [Möbius strip] is just made of the light of consciousness. It’s just the light that has now been stuck in a short circuit. It’s still the flow of the same energy, but a very limited repertoire of energy.
Now the ego is controlled by a subconscious equivalent of what we think of in the political sphere as the deep state—in the U.S., the CIA or whoever controls the deepest secrets, right? Because this is about the secret. So the secret is controlled by your Censor, not by your conscious mind; and this is part of the problem. Your conscious mind can want illumination all that it wants to want it, and it won’t get it. Because your conscious mind is not in control. It’s clueless because it’s made of only one side of this thing. It denies the energy that it projects as Other. Because of an installed dissociation barrier, it denies because it cannot perceive the wholeness of its consciousness.
Perhaps the main way to understand this—and this came to me as I realized that the models that have been used in the past to explain illumination are what I would call inflationary models. In other words, you have to believe in God, or you have to believe in the Buddha Mind or Brahman or some higher power. But the postmodern ego is generally very cynical. If it does believe in those things, it’s in an imaginary version where you can call up fantasies of visions and paranormal experiences and remote viewing—those kinds of things—but they’re all simply egoic developments that tie you even more to the belief in the reality of the self as a bodily being in a world of bodily beings that is simply a projection—a projection of your own mind, but not the mind that identifies as this. This is the projection.
To give a deflationary model, let’s just put it this way: if you observe your life, it is a succession of changes of states of consciousness. All that happens is that you go from one state of consciousness to another. Now, the ancient yogis divided it very simply into three states: waking, dream, and deep sleep. And in the life of the ego, it’s a linear succession of “I’m awake, I fall asleep, I have a dream, I wake up from the dream and I’m back in the waking state, but then I fall asleep.” It’s a constant cycle of repeating changes from one of those states to another. Now, there can be certain modifications created by substances that are ingested that can bleed a little bit of the dream state into the waking state and that kind of thing, producing hallucinatory visions that will be mistaken for spiritual insights and revelations, etc. That is not entirely untrue, but it’s also within the imaginary context of an occurrence to a being who really believes it exists in a world and that these visions are then something to talk about with others and to share and use to help people and rescue them, etc.
All kinds of fantasies and narratives get developed out of this; but, generally—for most people—you go from one state to another, sometimes relatively quickly. You could be meditating and in a state that’s almost like deep sleep. Then, suddenly, a reverie comes—images—and you’re in a dream state, and then suddenly you get an itch, and then you’re awake and you wonder what happened and you pretend you were meditating. But you had been spaced out and not there, right?
So these states occur without being under your control. You are simply the effect of them. But the truth that you will discover, if you can abide in a constant state of awareness for long enough, is that all three states are always present. You’re always in deep sleep, you’re always dreaming, and you’re always awake; but you’re not aware of it. And because, when you’re in deep sleep you’re not aware that you’re awake, there is no consciousness of what actually occurs in deep sleep. We all know that deep sleep is important, right? If you don’t have enough of it, you will go into sleep debt and soon you won’t function. You can even die from a lack of sleep—and deep sleep, not just anxiety-dream-filled sleep. If you’re in deep sleep, that’s when you’re recharging the battery of your soul because that’s when the light of consciousness is not veiled. The light of consciousness is shining in deep sleep. The problem is, you’re not aware of it as a conscious ego, so it never is perceived. When you awake, you can say, “Oh, that was a very refreshing sleep,” but you don’t realize the state you were actually in.
However, you do know this much about deep sleep. When you’re in it, you have no body, there is no world, there is no ego, there is no identity. There is literally nothing in deep sleep—literally nothing but naked awareness. That’s there in deep sleep, but because the waking is dissociated, you’re not aware of what that naked awareness is. In the waking state, you’re covered by a mental veil made by the ego Möbius strip show that shows you only the information in that veil and no longer reveals pure awareness. So the waking state is the state in which you perceive what is real. And while in the waking state a dream may appear, you’re actually still in the deep sleep state. When you’re in deep sleep and you suddenly have a dream, you’re still in deep sleep; but the deep sleep awareness is now emitting this dream.
And what is the dream? It is symbolic information. That’s what it contains. If you can read the language of the dream, it is symbols that are put in the form of a narrative that can be decoded by someone who has learned that language. It can take years of study and the need to be in the state of the intelligence that produces dreams to be able to speak that language fluently. But that language is a symbolic language that comments upon and is, in effect, a dream within a dream, because you wake up from the night dream into a waking state believing now you’re in reality, when actually now you’re in another level of the dream—a denser level of the dream that is no longer purely symbolic but is mostly imaginary. It’s made of images, objects, plots, and dramatic interactions of every genre of suspense, action, adventure, and romance and every genre of cinema that you might be interested in. You are in this cinema as a character showing up on the screen, this holographic screen that we are now in as characters. But if you falsely believe you are the character in the screen that your own mind is projecting while you’re actually still in a deep sleep state in which you have no body, no identity, and there is no world at all, then you don’t realize that you’re creating all of this with your own mind—that this is just your own mind at play.
The play is filtered by the possibilities allowed to it by the Möbius strip, while in deep sleep there is no such filter—it disappears and there is freedom. So you have more freedom in your dreams than you do in the waking state. But total freedom is only in the deep sleep state. So yoga has classically been defined simply as jagrat sushupti. Jagrat is the waking state, sushupti is the Sanskrit word for deep sleep. Combine the two. That’s what meditation is, that simple. Be in deep sleep, but be fully awake in deep sleep and realize that you’re never out of deep sleep. And in deep sleep you are no one, no one at all. There’s no world, no time, no space, but there’s perfect peace. And the total light of consciousness is present.
So in meditation you become absorbed into the light of your consciousness. That light of consciousness is always present, and as soon as you recognize it—instantly, immediately (without any mediation)—you are the light. There is only the light. The light is self-aware; there’s nothing other than the light, but the light is intelligence. It contains energy, information, power, shakti—it is shakti—and, therefore, will that can be applied to the character that appears and create action.
So will, knowledge, intelligence, action (the power of action) are all present in their highest degree of potency in deep sleep. They get actualized and limited in the dream state; and then, in the waking dream (which is denser) they have a lesser degree of freedom—but still some. And it’s that margin of freedom that must be used to recognize and integrate the three avastas (the jagrat, the sushupti, and the swapna, the dreaming), because you are dreaming this world, you are in deep sleep, and you’re a character that thinks it’s awake.
