…Until You Fill the Ego’s Empty Heart

Meditation per se has become impossible to the modern—and even more so to the postmodern—consciousness. At the very moment when meditation is more essential, more urgent than it ever has been, because of the need to be able to respond to the chaotic situation of the world with peace, with intelligence, with coherence, the fragmentation of the ego makes it impossible to meditate.

And it’s only if we recognize that impossibility that we can overcome it. And this is why, in this retreat, we must study what is the nature of meditation, really, because it cannot even be understood coherently by the ego-mind; its purposes to the ego could only be to have less stress, to manage the difficulties of life with more distance, etc., but meditation to the ego is the support of the ego, not the transcendence of the ego.

And so real meditation of the authentic kind, if we want to be in authentic authenticity, is a state of consciousness unavailable to the ego that requires an entire inconceivable shift in the type of consciousness that we have from egoic and egocentric to archetypal and to transcendental, and to the ultimate nonduality of the transcendental and the phenomenal. And that nonduality cannot be understood by the ego-mind for the very reason that its thinking apparatus is based upon the belief that A = A, and A cannot equal non-A.

It is this binary of belief that paradox is incoherent, that there cannot be a union of the opposites, there cannot be a coniunctio, to use the alchemical term, that Carl Jung borrowed and misused for his psychological approach, because the coniunctio is not a conjunction of your conscious with your subconscious, which is all that psychoanalysis can imagine, and even the Jungians think of it as coming from an unconscious that is indigenous to the individual, as images that come from a different dimension of the individual self. But it doesn’t come from the individual—it comes from the Absolute Self in which there are no separate individuals.

But this cannot be understood by the postmodern ego because every thought is based on the I-thought. And a thought in which there is no “I” and no other, and no subject and no object, cannot be retained—cannot even be imagined or conceived—cannot be metabolized, actualized. But that’s what meditation is. So our process of understanding meditation has to be based on the taking in of the Supreme Knowledge at such a level that it creates a new center of consciousness within the ego itself. At the very heart of the ego, a presence that is empty of egoity has to emerge, an emptiness in which consciousness recognizes the relativity of the ego’s thoughts; it recognizes that those thoughts do not have an absolute validity. Every ego in the postmodern period that we are in is skeptical and cynical. It cannot believe in the transcendent. It cannot even believe in the possibility of such teachings having validity. It cannot trust, because of its basic paranoia. But what it cannot even do, which is the real key, is it cannot distrust its distrust. And so it is that development of an emptiness that perceives the subjective thoughts of the ego as mental objects, that finally create a state of super-subjectivity that overcomes duality.

So meditation is the shifting of your focus of consciousness to make your subjectivity the object of your attention. And it’s at that point that you realize that your subjectivity is welded to a projection of objectivity upon its own contents, so that its contents are disowned and projected out, as if they belong to others, as if those contents of consciousness have a reality outside of consciousness.

Is everyone following me so far? And so when one has created this place of Emptiness—we could call it the holy of holies within the secular unholy consciousness, that is wholly committed to belief that it’s an organismic being in a world, and it was born, and it has parents, and it has a cultural attachment, and it has all kinds of connections to a “real world”—in that Emptiness that recognizes that as the classical and medieval forms of consciousness recognize effortlessly, the world is in fact a dream, or a field of dreams: an intersubjective whole in which what seemed to be separate individuals are all really parts of a single whole unified field of consciousness. And the field becomes more important than the objects that appear in the field, or the subjective object that is the I-thought that appears in the field.

And once the field of consciousness itself becomes subjectified, then everything that had previously been considered to be external substances are now recognized as part of one’s subjective, creative intelligence that can no longer be validly conceptualized, because in that Emptiness, that space of egoless presence, every concept is recognized as a construct, a fabrication, a work of one’s own mind to interpret one’s own mind, but the interpretation is based on the belief that you are interpreting that which is not your own mind, and therefore the interpretations must be false. And so, with the withdrawal of one’s automatic interpretations of the world, and of one’s own essence, that had been precluded and occluded but now is recognized as this emptiness, now there is an order that emerges from the realization of presence as completely indefinable.

And it is the ultimate concept that reality is inconceivable, that is realized—not thought—that shifts one from the symbolic to the Real. And this is the state of samadhi. This is the goal of meditation. One has to have reached the ultimate concept of the fact that all concepts are false, and that the Real is inconceivable, and then realize that that itself is a concept, and to go through that concept into what is its referent—that’s the state of nirvikalpa samadhi that will then be able to become sahaja samadhi.

Audio File: …Until You Fill the Ego’s Empty Heart – Audio File.mp3