The Empowering Secrets of our Paradoxical Reality
Summary: The Buddha Mind loves paradox. Once you are energized by the recognition that the world is Nirvana, and that Nirvana is not other than the apparent world, all the predispositions of the linear mind that produce the bondage of reification drop away spontaneously. In the revelation of the Self as naked Presence, all is perceived as miraculous and awesomely beautiful. Attainment of Liberation is the result of dropping all fear and desire, all thought constructs, and all judgments.
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. . . the world is like a film that has already been shot. It’s finished, it’s complete. You’re watching a finished product. We’re beyond post-production here. There’s no way to fix or change anything. OK? It’s done. That’s truth. But there’s another truth: it’s fixed only within Chronos time, you see? But if you get to the Aion, which is that level of the Real that is eternal and timeless, then every moment is the first moment, and it is the moment from which everything becomes determined. So there’s absolute predetermination, but because there’s really no time, there’s nothing pre—there’s nothing prior to the present moment, nor nothing after—presence is eternal, and in that presence, there is absolute freedom. It’s the only place in which there is freedom of will to change what seems to be already fixed. Because in eternity nothing is fixed, and yet if you enter that place of the Absolute Self and say, “I want to change the script,” you will realize there’s nothing to change because it’s perfect already, and anything you want to change has already been changed because you have already done it, because everything that could occur has already occurred. And in the absolute present that is realized, the perfection is also eternal, could not be improved upon, but for the ego running through the rat maze of Chronos time, it’s very imperfect, and there’s no free will to change anything, even though there seems to be.
But what there seems to be, it turns out, only to be the soundtrack of the mental apparatus of the ego. And that soundtrack which says, “I want to change things, I want to do something different. I want to do this, this, or this”—that’s already what has been predetermined and can’t be changed; that’s the character, that’s the script. So if you want to make a change in the script, you have to shift from being the character in the movie that’s already shot, to being the playwright and the cinematographer that is shooting it at this moment in eternity. Otherwise, the narrative of the ego will always be one of lack, one of unhappiness, one of wishing things were different, one of hating the situation, blaming the other for one’s unhappiness, etc., etc.—and one cannot change that, no matter how things change in the physical plane, that narrative will always remain. It’s inherent to an ego because what the ego is really complaining about is its own lack of being; It has no essence, and so it wants power, it wants glory, it wants agency, it wants dominance, it wants possessiveness, it wants all of the things that it can never get enough of—even the billionaires can’t get enough power to actually achieve what they want to achieve—no one gets satisfaction at the ego level, and yet, if, and only if, you cut the soundtrack, you stop the narrative of the ego, in the stillness of the mind you enter into eternity and you change that narrative, not by creating a new ego narrative, actually, but by downloading the Mind of God into the character, that is in the eternal present in which everything is already perfect, and the narrative then of imperfection can never return. And that magically changes the unfoldment of the drama from what it would have been if you had remained in the character with a narrative of unhappiness—because the unhappiness within creates a situation where it will be reflected from outside.
And so the ego strategy of being angry at the other and wanting to change things in the phenomenal plane instead of within is a very stupid strategy. It cannot lead to success. It can only bring further bondage. It can only create more karma because it’s an act of running away from oneself rather than accepting what is and turning within to recognizing its perfection, and then seeing that there is an opening in the present for a complete transformation, a complete self-empowerment, a complete, total expansion into the divine nature, that will change things miraculously—not only in the immediacy of the environment but through the magic of synchronicity—will change the unfoldment of unpredictable events that will bring blessings and good fortune that could not have been even imagined by the limited intelligence of the ego-mind.
And so you’re cheating yourself of the real power, the real intelligence, and the real option for bringing grace into your life, by holding on to the soundtrack instead of leaving that on the cutting room floor in your own post-production process of creating a free space for new creative intelligence to shift the way that your character perceives reality, by opening the third eye and perceiving with the vision of the intelligence of God.
But that intelligence can only open up when the heart is in a state of love, of adoration. The problem here is another paradox: who is it that loves God? Since God is yourself, your Real Self, who is it? Do you have two selves? One that loves the other, or should love the other? No, there’s only one Self. You may have many voices in your ego-mind, yes, that’s true—different fragments, different ego self-images, and self-concepts, and different superego voices, and different fantasies, etc., etc.—but there’s only one awareness that perceives all of that. But that awareness is not the ego. And once that awareness locates itself in a dimension of presence that is no longer immanent, but is in a kind of virtual reality dimension to the actual reality of the unfoldment of the phenomenal activity of the body, then from that dimension, which we can call soul, one is able to connect with the Absolute Self in that eternal space that we have tonight called the Aion but which you could call by any names—it’s the Param Dama, it’s the Buddha Nature, it’s the Tathagatagarbha—it doesn’t matter what your terminology is, but it’s that space of I Am-ness which has no other, and which is no longer perceiving in subject-object duality.
So the “I” of the Real Self can never be reduced to a signifier, can never be reduced to a thought, can never be reduced to an image or a concept. Literally, your Self is inconceivable because the Self is the perceiver of all but cannot be perceived by any of the entities that it, “I”, is dreaming. It’s “it” if you’re in the character, and its “I” if you realize the truth. But because it can’t be conceived of, and the ego can only use thought to try to grasp reality, the ego is useless. But the ego can’t silence its own mind; it’s an automaton, the ego is an artifact of the mind—it itself is a signifier that rises and sets in the mind. So the only agency that can make a change by silencing that narrative that is going on by its own power, is the state of pure presence. That presence is what is aware of the mind, and of the body, and of the game that the ego is playing. But somehow you forget that you are that presence, and you fall into identification with the mental object of the automatic narrative that’s playing in the inner soundtrack, and then that identifies you with the physical body, and now your freedom that your awareness has in its own inherent nature is lost by identification with a character that has no free will.
So it’s a matter of remembering, of coming out of forgetfulness, of the fact that you are aware—your primary nature is awareness—not thinking, not sensing, not acting as a body, but the awareness thereof of all of those levels of the instruments that are dreamed, manifested, produced, by the creative imagination of the awareness that derives its capacity to perceive from the Godself. And from that place in the virtual reality there is a power sufficient because of the nature of the soul as love, divine love, for that Real Self, that though it cannot be conceived it can be palpably felt at the soul level, as God’s love of you, as the soul. And it’s that adoration, that mutuality of adoration of soul and God, that lifts you into the ascended state of the Holy Spirit and you become one with the Godhead. That is the way to ascend immediately from all the bondages that the narrative of the ego is producing.