One of my duties here is to write the titles to the videos that we post; and in addition to the title, there’s a title within the title—call it a thumbnail. So I wrote a thumbnail for one of the videos that are upcoming, and I got a message back, “Can you change it for something more thought-provoking?” Now, what startled me was that I had thought that that phrase that I had put in there was extremely thought-provoking. But I was clearly, apparently, wrong. Now, I didn’t get upset at this. The startling (I would even call it a pratibha, which may be a bit inflated), but the insight that came with that message was, “Well, you know, this is all a dream; and, therefore, what I am receiving must mean I haven’t thought deeply enough about that phrase.” Then, immediately, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for two days and writing down all the implications of it.
So, anyway, I want to share it with you, since it’s now the theme of the retreat: Becoming Wants Being. Now, it’s probably true, it’s a very boring idea perhaps—or too obvious or too apparent. But then I realized, “Well, wait a minute. It wasn’t all that apparent to me as I thought it was.” First of all, the word “wants”, of course, means both desire and lack, right? So becoming lacks being. What are the implications of that? And what do we mean by becoming? It’s the trajectory through time of the character that you are playing within this dream field that we quaintly call a world. So the first thing I realized was, “Wait a minute, there’s a huge amount to actually understand about what is being and what is becoming that I had not fully thought through to the end.”
So I suddenly fell into a rabbit hole in which a huge number of things came to me. A second thing that came to me (I’ll call it a different pratibha, but the connection between the two then became clearly the focus of the retreat—the relationship of the two), and that was that I suddenly recognized my aim in writing these titles was not to be thought-provoking. That wasn’t my goal—although, indeed, sometimes provoking thought can be an instrument, a medium, to bring about the aim. But what is really the aim is to allay the production of thought constructs, to help someone go beyond thought. And to do that, the goal of all of these presentations (I recognized in that startling moment) was to provide resonance. To provide resonance. I hadn’t really thought that deeply about the concept of resonance either; so I realized that, first, we have to deal with becoming wants being, and then we have to deal with the issue of resonance. I don’t know how much of either of these I will get through tonight, but I think it’s an important relationship that we will discover.
Of course, the title being “Break Through to the Blissful Light”—where is that light? That must be the light of your being, right?—and your becoming—although becoming itself includes being as well as becoming. But the coming is really a going, a running away from the light, and the medium or the motive of that needs to be understood.
So, on the one hand, we can say that becoming is the desire for change, right? If I’m in my becoming mode, which we call the ego, then I’m looking for a “green, green, green they say, on the far side of the hill” place to be able to find what is always elsewhere. And I know I won’t find it on the next hill, but I’ll assume the one after that will contain what I’m looking for. Or I will mourn a past from which I have lost what I wanted and it can never return; it was only a dream. Or I am in total despair and want nothing—not out of vairagya, but out of the activation of the Lower Death Drive. All right, so that was the reason for playing those three songs about green, and I want you to recognize that those are the three major modes of resistance to the light and the themes of most people’s journey through life.
Your becoming is a concealment of your being. So long as you’re identified with a character who is going through time, the light—because the light is eternal, not in time—is not accessible. The question, of course, is how to make it accessible. One of the problems is that, from the perspective of becoming, being is thought of as nothing. Being is boring. The ego likes change; it always wants the new, the novel, the different. But being is changeless, so the ego dreads falling into being (I won’t even say rising into being). And being is something that one deliberately remains ignorant of within the ego.
The problem for the ego in a state of becoming is that, because it lacks being, it is burdened with self-doubt because it’s not real. Your character is fictional: Who are you? Who is that becoming representing? Who is playing you within the dream field? Who are you really? And your becoming doesn’t know it’s lost. It may put up a good bluff and bravado, and one of the defenses of the ego is to pretend that it has certainty. But underneath the façade of certainty is always doubt. That’s why the ego chooses master’s discourse, as we call it—to be a know-it-all, to think, “Well, I’ve already heard all this. I’ve worked through my issues. I’ve done it. I’ve gone through ego death. I’ve realized, God, I don’t need to hear anything more.” Or “I’ll do it my way, and I don’t want to take in any ideas from anyone else. I’ll figure it out.” So there’s a cutting off of the wisdom (both externally and internally) that could come, because the position one has to take out of the fragility of one’s ego is to pretend that it’s anti-fragile and it’s capable of fulfillment—even that it has fulfillment—when, of course, it doesn’t.
So the ego wants freedom, but it also wants control. Now, what freedom is—and the universe is organized according to the principle of freedom—is what in quantum physics they call the uncertainty principle, meaning that even at the level of a subatomic particle, you can’t determine where it’s going to be or how fast it’s going—or at least not both of those at once. You’ll never know; it’s always indeterminate. And that indeterminacy is at every fractal level of the dream field. Now, if you appreciate real freedom, you’re happy about that. But if you’re in the ego, you need to control the freedom of the other because you’re terrified that something will happen that will take away your illusion of freedom. So being that there’s constant change and that change cannot be predicted, the ego is always in a state of anxiety at one level or another, not knowing how to navigate and prepare and cope with all the possible threats to its equilibrium.
When we think about it, every field (let’s say field of science) is a study of change. That’s all you do if you’re a scientist. Some will study the changes at a subatomic particle level, some will study chemical changes; a psychologist will study the changes in the psyche and in the type of cognitive illusions (if one’s a cognitive therapist) that one is embedding in one’s narrative, etc., etc. But at every level, what is being studied is change in order to try to get a handle on—and therefore control of and prediction of—what the next change is going to be. When will the next earthquake happen? When will the next volcano go off? When will the next hurricane or whatever? So there’s an attempt to control everything, but that attempt of science and technology is always flawed because of the very nature of reality. The ego cannot have mastery over the Real.
Right? Does this make sense so far? Yeah? OK. So the ego is in a state of becoming, which is a state of uncertainty. And its doubt in itself grows as it realizes its failure not only to control but to achieve the self-presentation that it wants. In other words, the ego in becoming can become very clever, but it cannot realize its genius. And cleverness is really not a good substitute. Eventually, the ego will use negative defenses against being, like thinking and saying, “But I’m unworthy of it, and therefore I don’t deserve being. I’ll just stay on my trajectory of becoming. I’ve become too sinful, too impure, too flawed a character, etc., etc.” That, too, is a fiction, a delusion. It cannot be true because you are not your becoming. You cannot be anything but your being.
The very fact that you are aware of change requires you to have a changeless awareness, or you wouldn’t know you’re the same person now that you were in childhood and infancy and all of that and have a record of all the changes. Many people even write down the dates when different events happen and different insights and different chapters in their life narrative, etc. So we’re aware of change because we are changeless in our essential nature, so we are in our being. That’s why I say you don’t really have to break through. But there’s a denial, an internal denial of that truth. Yet it cannot be disproven logically. (Does this makes sense to everyone?) You are in your being, and your becoming can only exist within being. Being is the medium in which change takes place. If there weren’t a changeless medium, there could be no space for becoming. There’d be no awareness of change. There’d be no consciousness.
