The ego lives in the rear-view mirror, and all it can see is the past. And it keeps on living out and holding on to the feelings and attitudes of the past. And tries to forcibly impose them on the present. Or project them, or react as if they’re there, even though it’s delusional. Because they can only see the past because it’s looking behind. It’s not looking forward.
Now, when the soul awakens, it begins to look forward. And what does the soul see when it looks forward? It sees its own future death. It sees the death of the body and of the ego. The ego doesn’t want to see it, so it’ll keep looking back. It’s not going to want to see its death. So that’s the moment of the beginning of the transformation and overcoming of ego identification.
And then in a certain moment, one not only sees one’s death ahead, but one realizes that death is calling you. And that’s the moment when your soul will have to respond. And if it responds accurately, without resistance to that call, then it will move into a state where it can have a relationship with one’s own death. And at some point, your death will ask you, will ask your soul, about its life within that character, playing that character in the world. And it will ask you, “Well, once you have died, will you look back on your life and wish you had lived it differently?” Or will you be satisfied that you led the most fulfilling life possible?
Or would you want, if death said, “Well, you know what if I let you live it again, how would you change it? How would you change your persona so that you could die happily when that moment comes without feeling like you failed yourself?”
And then, as what happens in a near-death experience if the soul comes back into the body having realized that it’s actually rather important to change the way my character is functioning in the world. So I won’t have any regret or remorse or feeling of having failed to burn the sanskaras of my own suffering. Because then I will have to live it out again in another life and solve the problem that I didn’t solve in this one. Because every equation has to be solved by reaching the Zero Point.
So, it’s this facing of one’s mortality that alone can bring one to the realization of immortality. Because once you start talking to your death, you realize you are talking to your Self. And your Self is the death of the ego. And so it’s this, the death of the ego, that is what really brings repose. And that’s why the renunciation of the ego, as you said, Purusha, is the path. But renunciation not of one habit of jouissance after another or that kind of a thing, but the entirety of the identification. So that one is free to live without a particularity of attitudinal fixation. That’s really what creates the suffering. Because as conditions change, they bring contradictions. What you could have said yes to yesterday, you may have to say no to today. Conditions evolve and that brings contradictory feelings. What you believed one day you disbelieve another day. What you felt was the right thing to want you might in another day realize was worthless and there’s something else much more important in life. So there will be a constant negation or dialectical self-contradiction as you lead your consciousness to ever higher levels of wisdom and self-refinement. And see that whatever you thought or believed in the past was too gross, or too vague, or too fuzzy, or too immature, or just wasn’t an adequate way of understanding the Real. Because to understand the Real, because it’s infinite, you have to be in such a zero-identification that you can truly recognize the all-pervading nature of Nothingness. Because everything is really empty of any somethingness. All it is is a projection of consciousness, a dream and a symbolic representation of the Self that you are. That when you go from representation to pure presence, the world disappears. All its fixations become liquid and become even like a mirage, or a work of art that can then be changed. What can be seen with different eyes.
In a way this, I think, is the secret of being a bodhisattva. One can really only have compassion for others, especially when their attitudes are say, in polar opposite value systems to your own persona’s values, or style even. But you can recognize your Self as the Zero Point within each being. And feel how, from their relative conditions and standpoints, the logic is valid. But it’s just a bad infinity. And there’s an infinity of infinities. But the bad infinities are included. And once they are included and recognized as being perfectly necessary for the structure of the whole, then there is a complete recognition of the sameness and the beauty and the perfection of what would seem from a dualistic position to be wrong, or evil, or hypocritical, or false, or incoherent. But there’s a coherence. And there’s an internal, subjective love that is motivating everyone always, even though it’s a finite love. And a love that requires hatred of those who do not share that love.
And it’s that that is, of course, creating war and conflict. But if there can be a kind of an omnicentric recognition and acceptance of all of these nodes of consciousness, despite their apparent contradictory attitudes—because none of them will survive death. All of them are simply the momentary “flowers of evil” as Baudelaire put it in his famous book of poetry at the end of Kali Yuga. Or the flowers of the next springtime of Sat Yuga. But they’re all flowers. Some have thorns and some have wasps around them that will be attracted to you if you’re attracted to those flowers. But all of them have their beauty. And so it’s that love of beauty and all of its infinite varieties and idioms that becomes, what I would consider, the essence of dharma. Our dharma is to recognize the beauty of every being and of every moment and its divine nature, without judgment. And yet without losing our perspective on the need to overcome every particularity in order to be able to appreciate that beauty. And that itself brings a new kind of beauty into the world that doesn’t require hatred to accompany love. And so that duality of light and dark. Which is always the duality of self and other, comes into play.
The ego’s problem is it does not and cannot play. It takes everything seriously. That’s what maya is. When you no longer take it seriously, but you can play with duality—you can play with your own fate—you can play with the other and not be in conflict with the other. Play is the fruit of liberation. The Lila.
And every kind of soul gets its own season in which to play in the limelight. Although it’s probably, let’s say, what would I say, “strawberry light” maybe, in an earlier yuga. Or it’s the light of—what’s a very sweet fruit that everyone loves?
Student: Mango.
Shunyamurti: Mango! There you go! There’s the amrita that we will be drinking and playing in. So in that light is how we should live. We should be in the “mango light” of the golden age right now. And that will bring it into being. And so, it is learning to play which requires you to be carefree and in a state of Dila Ram. Because otherwise it’s work. And it’s suffering that brings you from Dukkha to Sukha. Brings you from some-sorrow to nerve-Allah. Because you need the nerve to reach Allah and trust and have the faith that enables you to be carefree. So, it’s this transformation that has to come at the end, you see. And so in the Sat Yuga, the gods and the goddesses play. And in the Treta Yuga, the semi-gods, the demigods play. And then you have the archons and the titans playing in Dwapar Yuga.
And then in Kali Yuga, of course, it’s the time for the demons to play. And they get to be in the limelight and get their moment of hegemony, you know. But then, of course, that ends in a very short time. And so, let them have their day. They only get one or two lifetimes, so let them be billionaires and presidents and whatever else they want to be. Movie stars and who knows what else they enjoy. But it’s usually a very perverse kind of jouissance. We mustn’t have any judgment of it. You know, it has to balance. And, you know, in every yuga, but particularly in Sat Yuga, the Earth becomes known throughout the cosmos as the “party planet”. You know, this is where you go to really have a great party with the gods and the goddesses, you know. In the end, a different set of aliens come because they want to play with the demons, you know, and they enjoy that kind of party. But everybody gets the party they want. You know? So what party do you belong to? None of the political parties today are the right party, you know. But there’s no divine party. We have to create the divine party in which that sovereignty, the only real sovereignty of Maha Sukha, is attained. So this ashram must be vibrating at the level of the goal of the mantra of Namu Amida Butsu. Right? The desire to be reborn in the western paradise as Sukhavati is known in Pure Land Buddhism. To be born within a lotus within a lake of bliss within the paradise at the end of time that brings a new beginning.
And all you have to do is salute Amitabha who is, whether you want to call him the God or the Buddha of infinite light and life, that’s who is our real Self. And if you will actually adore your real Self and become loyal to that Self, you find that you are already in the western paradise and your journey throughout all of the party yugas that we’ve been in. Now that it’s closing time and now that as Lenny said, it’s come to this, and isn’t it a long way down and isn’t it a strange way down. And yet it’s so down that it looks like up to us. That’s a Sat Yogi.
And we understand that this is the most auspicious moment in the entire history of reality because it is the return of play to the world. The divine play of the will of God moving through our vehicles without resistance, bringing the bliss and the light and the wisdom and the power of God into the morphogenic field that will produce an immediate upliftment of the vibrational frequency into that of pure mango colored light.
And that’s how the world ends.
