Today’s the day to take our medicine. What is the medicine by the way, that is so hard to take?
Student: Love.
You got it. That means you’re taking the medicine.
The ego can’t handle love. Most egos simply cannot love themselves or accept the love of God. Some egos can’t even love God because they’re angry—they’re too angry about their karma, as if it’s not their own responsibility for their karma—they blame God. But if you blame yourself, it’s just as bad, because you will feel unworthy, and you won’t be able to handle the Love of God because it will dissolve your ego. And the ego wants to survive, even though it hates itself—it wants to survive in that hatred because it has desire. It doesn’t have love, but it has desire, and it wants to satisfy its desires.
So it can’t take the medicine because the medicine will kill the ego—because the ego is the illness. If you want to be healed, what are you healed of except the ego?
So the medicine kills a parasite that unfortunately people are identified with. That’s how the parasite gained its power, and nobody understands that in the world today. There’s a discipline of parapsychology but there’s no discipline of parasitology, which is what we really need.
But instead the field of psychology just supports the ego—it doesn’t recognize that the ego is a false self that not only impersonates the Real Self, but degrades it, drains it of energy; it’s a vampire that takes over and usurps your consciousness. And the only medicine to heal that is love.
Now the love is what creates the divine intoxication. If you want to be divinely intoxicated, what are you intoxicated with except love? Right? So the ego that can’t love can’t have divine intoxication either. And it’s that divine intoxication that creates the devotion to God, because God is love. But if you can’t love love, you can’t be intoxicated about the fact that love is in you. You are it—it is your real nature. But the ego that was too wounded can’t accept the love. The wounds act as a barrier, a scar tissue, and the ego won’t allow the love in to heal the very wounds that it suffers from.
So this is the catch-22 of the ego. The very medicine that it yearns for, it can’t accept.
So the solution, of course, is with whatever margin you have of recognition that you’re not the ego, to whatever extent there remains a free sector of consciousness that hasn’t been taken over by the mind control complex of the ego, you have to join with that healthy part—put all your attention there and that healthy part will then unite with God-Consciousness, and bring in the love.
It’s like a guerilla war that you have to fight. You have to be Shiv Guevara, and finally come in from the Mountains of God and take over Havana, and remove all of the brothels and bring about a new regime of love and divine law. But this has to be accomplished through the accurate understanding that love is not a subject-object duality. It’s not about loving another. Because for the ego, when it says, “I love another”, whatever it might be—a person or a drug or whatever—it’s desire, it is not the purity of divine love—and it’s Divine Love that’s the medicine.
And that medicine heals us from not only the malady of the ego but of the ego’s projections of a world that is a miserable place to have to hang out. And it allows your energy to be extracted from that illusion to discover the Real that has the power to change that environment that is the ego’s own dream, and turn it into God’s Dream, which is a love-full dream, a beautiful dream, and to be the Dreamer. So this is what we want to go into today and to explore in some depth.
As I said to you last night, the Kashmir tradition is unique in a number of ways, but one is that every book written has an entirely different vocabulary, and a different relationship to the ultimate Reality. The Doctrine of Recognition, for example, this is a commentary by Kṣemarāja of a book by Utpaladeva—its first sutra is:
“The absolute Chitti…” Chitti is the feminine form of Chit, OK? So the book is not dedicated to Shiva but to Shakti. “The absolute Chitti of her own free will is the cause of the siddhi of the universe.”
Siddhi means the power—She has created this out of her own power, and She, it is Her own projection on Her own internal screen of consciousness. It is a hologram occurring within Her consciousness, and She creates it out of Her own free will. So this book is entirely about the dynamics of Shakti, not of Shiva. And yet the same person, Utpaladeva, if you read his devotional poems to God, they are to Shiva, not to Shakti.
OK, so it’s very interesting. We have to understand Shakti, but we can’t understand Shiva. But we can adore Shiva. So that’s how the gyana and the bhakti are related. For Shiva, you can only be devoted and surrender in love because Shiva is beyond the capacity of our intelligence to understand. But Shakti is not. And so we can understand the whole dynamic of the pulsation of reality, from the creation out of the Singularity to the withdrawal back into it. It’s all there now in quantum physics, the pieces of the puzzle have been put together. It’s no longer a mystery in that sense. The mystery is why we don’t get it. But that’s also part of the plan of it.
So there are three types of time that we have talked about before in other retreats. If we think of time as a circle, chronological time, Chronos time, is the circumference of that circle.
And then there’s the absolute time, the Aion, which is the center of the circle. That’s the Zero Point. That’s where Shiva hangs out. Shakti is the circumference, and She produces all of the changes in the time-space continuum. But there’s a third kind of time that is called Kairos time.
K-A-I-R-O-S. And this time is the radius between the circumference and the center.
Now, that radius is not always open—because it is, in a way, the gateway from Chronos to the Aion. It produces an immediate ascension. If that gateway opens for you, your consciousness will be able to ascend to the Absolute. If it doesn’t open, forget it, you can’t get there. The opening of that gate of the radius is grace.
During most of the cycle, or at least of the of Kali Yuga, this last age of time, the Kairos gate has been shut, except to a very, very few, like Sri Ramana—like those beings who have photos on the wall. There’s a few more we could add, but there aren’t very many who have taken that Kairos gate and flown to the Absolute, or been invited to do so. But as we get to the end of the cycle, two things happen. One is the gates of hell open. And that’s the point we are at right now in the world. The gates of hell are opening on this planet, OK? And every day they open wider, which means more war, more famine, more disease, more oppression, more war, more everything of a cataclysmic and catastrophic nature. Even the fire and brimstone of volcanoes is increasing. Look at the Canary Islands, look at the Aleutian Islands. Look at Japan. Look at all over—they’re increasing—the earthquakes are increasing—God is shaking the world!
But at the same time that the gates of hell open, God provides that the gates of Heaven shall also open. So that means that we are now again in the Kairos time in which the grace of ascension is possible for all, in the same way that hell is possible for all. And you can choose hell or Shiva, which is the reason for the title of this retreat. If you want to get out of hell, don’t take the gate down into that level of consciousness—take the upper gate, the Shakti Gate, the gate of Divine Love, and you will be free.
