You Contain the Entire Universe
Summary: Our true nature is freedom—and that can never be lost. All our desires emerge from the temporary forgetfulness of that reality. Desire is always for the Real Self. We must desire more intensely if we wish to realize our sublime, infinite, ecstatic essence.
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And so in what we quaintly call the Middle Ages—which is really simply the earlier phase of this final age—all of the religions, especially the East, but even in the West, they were focused on a particular practice, and the serious yogis enacted the practice, which was to actually stay, to live, in cremation grounds. But even those who didn’t actually stay there and participate in the funerary rituals, the burning ghats in which the bodies were cremated, and became naked and covered themselves with the ashes of those fires—but even those who didn’t do that were told to have mental exercises, spiritual exercises, of just recognizing that the whole world is nothing but a cremation ground: it’s a world of death. And that death is caused by our desire, which turns our immortal being into mortal mind, and mortal representation as body.
And so all of the religions teach return to freedom—don’t want anything from this illusory world and don’t focus on it. And that actually has the effect of de-collapsing the quantum wave function, and allowing the spanda to return to the Source, because all you now want is the energy of your own Self liberated from that world of death.
And so the axioms, the principles of yoga, is simply: don’t want money, don’t even want love, don’t want your life to have been different than it was, don’t want other people to be different than what they are, don’t want your conditions to improve, don’t even want comfort. The less you want, the more free you are. But don’t flee from comfort, love, cooperation, good environments either—accept what is given, and what one’s karma spontaneously draws one toward, but without desire or fear, and without believing the grass is greener on the next hill, and without creating narratives of blaming others because the grass isn’t green enough here, but remembering that all of this is your dream and by letting go of all intentionality toward the dream, one escapes from the bondage of the dream, and realizes again one’s freedom as the Dreamer.
And so the third phase of the Kashmir Shaivite Wisdom schools was the Pratyabhijna phase when the Doctrine of Recognition was installed. All you have to do, all, your only sadhana, is to recognize the truth of what you are, the truth of reality itself—Chaitanyam Atma—all of reality is simply consciousness, your consciousness, but your consciousness freed from all the collapsed wave functions that are produced by your own conceptualizations, your own narratives, your own paradigms, your frames of reference, your projections, your beliefs about the world, about others, about yourself—all of that must be cremated in the fire, the sacrificial fire in which the burning of the ego, through the recognition of the free Self that does not want the bondage of an ego, eliminates the illusion that one has lost one’s freedom instantaneously, effortlessly—because we have only dreamed we have lost our freedom.
And once awakened from the dream we know that nothing can be lost, nor can anything be gained, because we are always already complete and whole, and need nothing and want nothing from the world.
But when we no longer want anything from the world, the world also can no longer hurt us, it cannot traumatize us, and suddenly the separation between Real 1, a world of alienating and destructive entities—impinging, dominating entities—suddenly that is collapsed into Real 2, the Real of Divine Love, and from a sense of being oppressed and traumatized and dominated, one reaches a state of perfection of acceptance, because the product of all of this is the wisdom to return to freedom.
And that brings the superimposition of Real 3, the vision of nonduality, the perception that all of this is yourself—self-created, self-inflicted, and self-revealed, and self-redeemed—and you have all the power—all the power—to redeem yourself from any bondages, from any sense of indebtedness, from any sense of guilt or shame, or of attachment, from any sense of having failed yourself or others, or having been unfairly treated and unable to let go of one’s desire for vengeance, for recognition by the other of their need to make amends. When you are free of the belief that there is any other, then all of those collapsed wave functions that had created suffering become once more total bliss.
The Ananda is reached through that process of completely letting go. And this is not a process that requires time—it requires only the knowledge that this is all that matters…
Audio File: You Contain the Entire Universe – Audio File.mp3