The World Ends When You Realize It Never Began
Summary: Consciousness is Beauty, Beatitude, and Bliss. But once the desire to possess that beauty arises, it becomes perceived as an external world, and the perceiving mind is afflicted by lack and separation. The more one complains, the more ugly and antagonistic one’s world becomes. And one is then trapped on the wheel of karma. The Truth is that all is forever perfect! The kingdom of heaven arrives when one sees that. This is the deep insight of Dzogchen and the deepest teaching of all authentic spiritual traditions.
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The delusion of the world is created by a consciousness that no longer feels at home within itself. And this is what the Buddhists refer to as “affliction”. There is some kind of suffering within the self, and that suffering gets projected as a world to rationalize and justify the suffering. And so all the ego is, is a set of complaints, and for the ego, the Cartesian formula, “I complain, therefore I am”, is actually the bottom line for its illusion of existence. And this is why, again, in the Buddhist tradition, the ultimate teaching is that of Dzogchen, which means the Great Perfection; as soon as you realize that all is perfect and there is nothing to complain about, the world ends, and you realize there’s only God, because that perfection is God, and that God is the Self. One’s own perfection releases the consciousness from its affliction, not something that needs to be fixed in the world. It’s the projection of a world that needs to be fixed that paved the road to hell—good intentions, “let’s make things better”—that’s how the world became a hell realm.
And so whatever complaints you have are the character’s complaints. The Self is not complaining. The Self is always in total bliss because the Self never loses touch with the perfection. And the perfection never changes, regardless of how the samsaric plane is perceived by those complaining entities within it. But it is the end of your complaints that will end the world. Nothing, not anything that happens in the samsaric state, because it’s a state of mind. And it’s a state of mind in which there is a complaint about an affliction that is internal but usually projected to be external, or at least caused by something external. And then all the narratives of that suffering that continue it, that build it, that add to it, that lead to a life devoted to that complaint, or that series of complaints, that will be consequential upon an initial complaint; this is what the ego is made of.
How many can relate to that? Not everyone?
And one has to be very honest and come to terms with that: the complaint that the character has is the obstacle that prevents its own liberation. And as soon as it is in a state of acceptance, the realization of the perfection will end the ego’s suffering, and the ego itself. And what will remain is the pure blissful Presence of the Real Self that will no longer be identified with a suffering body or a suffering mind or any of that. And then what will emanate is simply that state of perfection that will be adored. The perfection and the adoration of the perfection are the same.
And then what was a world of Kali Yuga will be recognized as divine Light, but that Light that will recognize itself as the perfect potentiality and creative Intelligence to manifest the life as a perfect dream in which there could be no complaints—which is the definition of Sat Yuga—will ensue. The Buddhists, again, some of the Buddhists, call that Sukhavati, the land of total happiness where everyone’s in Maha Sukha, the great happiness, the great joy.
But you can be in Maha Sukha now; this was the teaching of Christ, the original teaching. If you go back to the Gnostic Gospels, “The Kingdom of Heaven is here now, but you don’t see it” because you’re not seeing through the Eye of God. You’re seeing through the two complaining eyes of the ego. And because it’s always seeing everything in duality, good and evil, there’s always something evil, always something bad that needs to be dealt with, and always an imperfection.
But this is the delusion of the ego that creates the kind of illusory samsara that the ego then inhabits. And so it’s always putting the cart before the horse to try to treat the symptom rather than the cause of the disease, and if you treat the symptom, you’ll actually only create another symptom. You can cure one complaint, and it will be replaced by ten others—there is no way to achieve perfection on this plane because every act of getting something that you want is actually the loss, the further loss of what you are. You are getting further away from the Self that is the state of perfection. And the more that you try to get it by doing something, the more that you lose your being in that becoming in which you have disconnected from the perfection of your being—and now all you can see is that you’re lost in a world where things are not right.
And so it is the shifting of this gestalt that is the key, and all it requires is the dropping of all complaints and all attitudes, and all the projections that the ego has on the world, and on specific people who are your nemesis, and the people who cause you to have mental duels in your mind and not be able to sleep because of an argument you had, or because of some kind of a glitch, and there’s always this complaint and blame and sense of “it should be different”. And as long as that sense of “it should be different” is there, then that inherent perfection of what is will be obscured and can never fully emerge.
And the problem is that for the character this produces a kind of self -righteous enjoyment. The jouissance of having something to complain about, and someone to complain about and be angry at, is what gives the ego fuel to continue its narratives and its path of revenge, and of attempting to fix something that isn’t broken, and in the process breaking many other things, many other possible recognitions of perfection by rejecting. And so the ego is always in a state of questioning, “Do I accept this, or do I reject it?” And it usually chooses rejection because to accept, for the ego, is to submit, so “I’m not going to submit to anything that exists, or any belief that someone tells me, no, I’m going to reject it because then I’m protecting my space of illusory sovereignty. I want it to be this way—my way or the highway, not their way!”
And so there is always this mutiny machine activity going on, and a state of disharmony with the world, with others, but with one’s own soul, and one is not at peace in one’s skin. And this is why the body’s nervousness can actually increase in meditative states because you’re more aware that it’s always there. That the contraction and the anxiety and the sense of lack and the sense that “Others didn’t find me to be enough, and I don’t think they’re enough, and everybody’s not good enough, and I want to kill! I want to die!” The whole fate of the ego that’s constantly latent, if not emerged from the subconscious, is always creating the conditions for a new symptom of disease to emerge, and a new karmic event to prove, “See, I knew it was going to be like that!” and to justify the complaints. And because the ego is getting what it is imagining, its dream is coming about, its self-fulfilling prophecy is being perceived. It gives it ever more fuel to keep rolling on the wheel of life and death.
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David Bentley
12 Jul 2023Thank you for this enlightening talk brother Shunya…Divine Love is the answer that leads us back to the self!