Rick Archer: And I’m just going to briefly introduce my good friend David Buckland. David’s been on Buddha at the Gas Pump and I derive great inspiration from his blog, Davidya.ca, right? He’s Canadian.
In any case, I always learn something from it and there are like over 1400 posts on there,
I believe.
Over 17.
Over 1700.
I haven’t read them all but I started reading them a few years ago and I think David is somebody who embodies not only a really comprehensive, clear understanding of the whole range of potential spiritual development, but the experiential foundation to correlate with that understanding.
In other words, he’s living what he speaks of.
So, David.
David: Thanks. Good morning, and welcome.
So how many here think they know what non-duality is?
Well, it’s actually kind of a trick question,
Because the mind can’t know what non-duality is.
It’s non-duality or oneness or unity
happens within consciousness itself
and then even deeper beyond consciousness in what is historically being called things like Brahman.
I’ll get into that a little bit more shortly.
Another aspect is that you’ll hear a lot of talk here, you’ll hear a lot of concepts, even from this talk, but that’s not non-duality.
Non-duality is something that’s lived.
And you’ll also hear people talking about self-realization and non-duality, where actually that’s not the same thing either.
Self-realization, the way I’m defining it here is the realization of the self, Atman, …there’s a shift from being
a person experiencing consciousness to being consciousness
experiencing a person. But that’s only waking up the observer aspect.
And that’s not non-duality. You’ll often hear people talk about
the world as a separate illusion or a mirage, that kind of thing. But that’s two things. A separate world and the inner awakening.
So it’s still actually, in a traditional Vedic context from which advaita, non-duality comes, That’s actually dvaita, duality.
Non-duality comes a little further along.
But to understand that,
I need a handy clicker here.
First we need to understand a little bit more about consciousness itself.
Consciousness begins at a very subtle level, kind of with two meta qualities, you could call it.
Alertness and liveliness.
Liveliness stirs alertness and it becomes aware.
And then it further stirs that awareness and it begins to move within itself.
So you get this flowing sense, curves back on itself, and then it curves right on itself and sees itself.
So you have a triple dynamic, three aspects there, going on.
The observer, at point A on the left, which is what wakes up at first,
the object of experience, what we’re experiencing out here,
and the process of experience, the relationship between the two,
the recognition and the response consciousness has to recognizing itself.
Now that might seem kind of bizarrely abstract and not very meaningful, but it’s important to get a general idea of this
because that’s how we understand non-duality further along.
So, there is, from perspective, I present, this comes from the Yog Vasishtha, the Ramayana.
It’s a very ancient approach, and I’ve updated it into modern language to make it easier to understand.
So from this model, there’s seven stages in enlightenment.
There’s stages in consciousness and stages in clarity.
Some might describe this as the masculine and feminine aspects, or Shiva and Shakti, or the Atman and Sattva.
So the first stage, as I talked about briefly,
is known as Self-Realization or Cosmic Consciousness.
And again, that’s where we shift from being a person experiencing consciousness to being consciousness experiencing a person.
We step back into that “A” aspect, the observer or experiencer mode.
There’s a sense of witness. We’re detached from our experience.
It’s separate. There’s two things going on there.
As we experience and live that, there’s a gradual process that happens until…
We recognize, there’s a number of ways of talking about this, but at a certain point we recognize the screen that’s behind the appearance of the world.
We’re seeing this world around us, we may see it as illusory, we may see it as the play of the divine, we may see it as very solid and real.
That actually is informed by the dominant guna, not by the stage of development.
To explain that briefly in a Vedic context, all of appearance arises from three fundamental qualities known as gunas.
Tamas is essentially what we would describe as inertia.
What keeps things sticking around, I could say.
Rajas is fire or movement.
And sattva is purity or clarity.
There’s not great words, English words for them, but there’s basically this balance.
And if Tamas is dominant when we wake up, we’re going to tend to be more rigid, fundamentalist, black and white about the process. Well, that’s less common.
Much more common is people wake up when Rajas has become dominant and Rajas is transformative.
It helps process the change and shift us from inertia to clarity.
And then when sattva becomes dominant, then clarity dominates.
When rajas is dominant, we’re kind of in that place of world as illusion.
And then when sattva becomes dominant, then we experience the world as divine play.
So that’s actually the clarity, the development of clarity that’s informing how we experience the first stage rather than the shift in consciousness itself.
So at a certain point, we recognize that screen, and this could be experienced in a number of different ways, but there’s kind of like a sense of a screen behind the appearance of the world.
And then we recognize that that screen is consciousness also, that everything we see is arising from consciousness.
And then we recognize it’s the same consciousness as we woke up to it at first.
So there’s a shift, the subtle intellect makes that recognition, and there’s a switch.
And this is known as Unity Consciousness, oneness, and the beginnings of non-duality.
It’s still not fully non-duality, I’ll get into that in a sec.
And so essentially, the aspect of A and B there on the screen, the subject and object, they’re recognized to be the same thing,
and they fall together into one wholeness.
There’s then a progressive series of essentially living life in that stage where you experience something and recognize, “Oh, that is myself as well, and that is myself, and that is myself.”
And it kind of creates what the Brahma Sutra calls the aggregate or wholeness, a completeness.
And it gradually infiltrates all the levels of our experience, our memories, the different levels of perceptual and sensory input and all the different parts of our life.
And it moves through the layers of intellect and ego and so on like that.
So for example, when it reaches into the senses, when you touch an object, you feel the object as before, but you also recognize yourself as the object also.
So you experience being touched simultaneously.
‘Cause you’re both.
It’s not just a conceptual, philosophical, or belief kind of a thing.
It’s directly experienced right in your day-to-day life.
And after a while in that process, you come to the point where you recognize the totality or the global nature of consciousness.
And as the Upanishads talk about it, being able, you know yourself as beyond perception, as all of the universe beyond perception.
And then there’s an interesting thing that can happen in that self-aware wholeness of consciousness.
It actually, when it knows itself fully and at every point within itself, it’s done that part.
And it actually can kind of open up a little bit and look beyond itself.
Now for someone in Self-Realization or Unity, that’s kind of a bizarre statement because they’ve experienced consciousness as infinite and eternal and boundless, everywhere.
Nothing but consciousness. But when that happens there’s this recognition that there’s something more and then you can actually experience the origin of consciousness itself, that aspect of alertness and liveliness before they actually become consciousness.
And there’s a couple of ways that might happen and the shift may happen when we draw it through, but there’s a third shift into what’s known as Brahman consciousness or Beyond consciousness.
You step beyond consciousness itself into Brahman.
It’s not an easy thing to describe because if you’re beyond consciousness, you’re beyond the process of experience.
You’re beyond sensory input, anything like that.
And so it creates a challenging thing to describe, and yet it’s very normal to live it.
And just in my town, in a small town on Vancouver Island in Canada, there’s about five people I’m aware of that are living in some level of that stage.
So it’s a dramatic change over even a few years ago.
And that kind of actually completes the process in consciousness.
The consciousness has recognized itself totally and you’ve now gone beyond consciousness.
There’s no further stages in consciousness. You’ve gotten as far as that goes.
But there’s a whole other aspect, the feminine.
And you hear people talk about that, like last night, Adyashanti and…
I forget her name, the woman before him, that spoke of the heart and the awakening heart.
– Cynthia. – Yeah, Cynthia.
Yeah, and that leads to this whole secondary process of clarity.
So the first stage of that is commonly known as Refined Cosmic Consciousness or God Consciousness.
We become aware of, so we’ve always been aware some degree of our physical reality or whatever, and our body and that.
And then we’ve woken up to consciousness itself.
But between the two, there’s all these other layers.
And the emotional layer doesn’t just have a reality inside, it also has a reality in the world around us, and so on.
Some people talk about the three worlds model, where there’s sort of the physical, the subtle, and the divine.
And I prefer the seven kosha model, which basically talks about seven layers in there.
But it’s like a rainbow. How many colors are there in a rainbow?
It depends on how many you count.
So it’s a flexible thing.
But the idea is that there’s other layers in there and you, through refinement of perception and increased clarity, you become aware of those more subtle levels in various kinds of ways.
And there are several people that I know of here at the conference who are talking about that stuff.
As that is lived, it’s actually a process too.
It can start prior to awakening.
Some people you meet have all kinds of refined perception and kind of flashy and interesting experiences that can have, ’cause that clarity is already in development.
In fact, Ayurveda tells us that both the development of consciousness and the development of sattva or clarity are cumulative through lifetimes.
So any development of either of those, or both, through one lifetime, we’ll pick up where we left off in the next lifetime.
So there’s that, that’s why you see somebody like Eckhart Tolle, for example, waking up for no apparent reason.
Or you see people who are just kind of born with it, or whatever, with subtle perception, or they’re just very aware from a young age.
So that process can start earlier on, it may start much later, it may start even after Brahman.
But this is kind of the ideal, the stages coming in the ideal sequence.
So that process that began here, refinement, continues into Refined Unity.
But because the stage of consciousness has changed, the context has changed.
So it’s the same refinement process, but now in the context of Unity, of oneness.
And the peak of that is God-Realization, where we recognize in that progression of unification with all levels of experience, there’s also unification with Divine in form.
However you relate to that. And in this very many ways.
And that’s one of the ways that sometimes people make the shift into Brahman as well, by becoming one with Divine in form.
Now the interesting thing to note about the difference here too, Self-Realization starts with realization of Self.
Unity starts with realization of oneness, of the same self as behind all the objects of experience.
Whereas with the stages of clarity, there’s a progressive building up to a climactic realization, and a similar thing happens further along.
So the process is somewhat different, but they’re very tightly intertwined, and the clarity stages will greatly influence the nature of the consciousness stages.
And then after Brahman, there’s also the continuation into the refined Brahman, but it’s kind of almost a meaningless statement, because Brahman doesn’t refine.
It’s beyond any thing, and so there’s nothing there to refine.
But, one of the key features to understand about Brahman
is you can’t know it by experiencing it, because you’re beyond the process of experience, beyond consciousness.
So you know it by being it.
Because you are it, you can know it, but you can’t know it until then.
And refined Brahman works the same way.
It’s like a refined knowing.
And then finally, in a way, what brings everything together is the Parabrahman stage.
Now, Brahman means the great, and is sometimes referred to as the Great Awakening or the Supreme Awakening,
whereas Parabrahman means greater or beyond, so beyond the great, beyond the greater.
And it’s essentially, when we’re first, we learn to meditate,
we experience some value of pure consciousness, consciousness without content.
During this, and it’s the same kind of thing with divinity,
During this whole process in here, we experience divinity through experience.
So there’s some qualities of form, some qualities of qualities.
There’s something there.
Whereas Parabrahman is pure Divinity, just Divinity itself.
And it’s also called the source of the source.
Because you’ve experienced here in Brahman, it’s the source of consciousness, which is the source of all experience and your sense of self.
And here, it’s the source of that.
So it’s just kind of the ultimate source and the most inclusive.
And it kind of brings together, you know, climactic, again, another climactic realization.
And again, you can’t know it unless you are it.
Which is kind of an interesting process because you have to be able to actually physically embody it to some degree before it can be known.
Because it’s not experienced, again, it’s known by being.
So that’s kind of a really big overview of the seven stages.
I recently, actually last week, released a book that goes into it in a lot more detail.
They’ve got copies in the bookstore and I’ll be doing a book signing at 1:30, I think it is.
And this is my website.
Lots and lots to read there.
Lots of concepts.
The primary purpose of the book, by the way, is to support people who are on the path.
Because what’s been happening a lot is there’s people who are making shifts outside of any tradition.
They don’t have a context for what’s unfolding, or there are people that are in a tradition, but their unfolding is happening differently than the teaching teaches.
So I talk a lot, for example, about the five ways that Self-Realization shift happens, the primary ways it’s experienced subjectively.
Because, for example, some people may have a sense of dropping the ego into cosmic Self and fullness,
and some people may describe it as dropping the ego self into an emptiness, a no-self.
It’s the same thing, but it’s being experienced from a slightly different context.
Whereas there’s other things, like people talk about emptiness and they talk about nothing in some parts of the old texts,
they’re actually talking about things that are several stages apart.
So it’s kind of like an overview of the process and allows you to put some things in context.
A lot of teachers, for example, are speaking at different times from different places, like Buddha, for example.
If you read the Buddha’s teaching at different times, he says things which appear to contradict what he said at other times.
But it’s actually because he’s talking to different stages,
depending on the questions being asked.
And so if you understand the broad overview of the stages,
then you can get a sense of where they’re speaking from
or what they’re speaking to, who’s asking the question or whatever.
And also, you know, the people are doing scientific research on these things nowadays and the models are somewhat insufficient.
A lot of it’s driven on the basis of experiences because experiences are something you can categorize and you can say, well, this kind of experience is this and this kind of experience is that.
But none of this is really experiences.
It produces experiences.
And it can vary.
Some people will have a really flashy, noisy shift, and some people will have a really quiet, almost really gentle shift,
and they’re not even sure for a while.
It might take several years before they’re actually confident
that it actually did happen.
You know, there’s always these mind concepts you have to work your way through.
But anyways, I’m talking more.
Anybody have any questions?
Question: show the slide…
(inaudible, organizing)
Question: So my question is, you’re taller than me.
It’s fine, it’s fine.
My question is, my sense is that all these stages of realization are self-validating?
– To some extent.
Rick: You can do your answer on the mic, if you’d like.
And if I can just complete the question.
So the question is, when somebody arrives at, sorry, horrible language, but at self-realization or cosmic consciousness, what is the motivation or impetus that would take them beyond that when relative to where they came from, it’s like night and day?
David: Yes.
So the first part of your question?
Self-validating.
Yes, self-validating. That partly depends on clarity.
How clear the shift was.
Because if it’s a very gentle shift and there’s doubts,
then some other support can be really useful.
But also with the first shift, because it’s completely new and different, and because it’s beyond the mind
where this is happening, it’s happening in consciousness,
the mind won’t understand what it is at first.
It’s not, even if you’ve studied this for years and you have all your ideas about what it’s supposed to look like, it’ll
never be that, because it’s not a concept, it’s lived directly. So it can often be very handy to have a teacher or somebody who’s been there to talk to you about it at that
point to get some clarity.
There’s also, there’s kind of like, there’s nuances in that first shift where, like Adyashanti talks about abiding versus non-abiding, and you can sometimes have an experience that feels a lot like a shift.
Like, for example, you may shift into a witnessing mode where you step back into this detached observer and you experience some of the symptoms of a shift, but the physiology isn’t yet stable enough to, or clear enough to sustain it, and so it fades off after a few weeks or something.
And there’s just little nuances like that where it can be very helpful to get some feedback.
And the second part’s right there.
– That’s one, the impetus of motivation.
Oh yeah, and that’s actually interesting because that’s…
Somebody was talking about that to one of the other…
I can’t remember if it was Adya last night or Bob Thurman today,
but somebody was talking about that because there can be this loss of motivation because the former ego drivers and that kind of stuff, Adya, right, they fall away and there can be sometimes a gap between when they fall away and when the deeper flow, as I talked about in that first slide, starts to become more conscious and then you can start to move with life itself.
So it’s kind of like a friend of mine is in that kind of place right now.
They’re supposed to be making a career change and there’s no motivation to figure out what they should be doing.
So it’s like, what am I supposed to be doing here?
And it takes a lot of practice, because you can spend years of our life where we’re trying to structure and plan everything
and do our New Year’s resolutions and set goals and all this stuff.
And when that falls away, there can still be some habit to do that, but it doesn’t really work the same way anymore.
I mean, it’s still useful to plan and all that kind of thing.
But it’s the kind of underlying drivers change.
But it is important in a number of ways.
Like, for example, in the, I guess, the seventh mandala of the Rig Ved, the sage Vasishtha, who is quite a renowned sage. He mentions the importance of desiring Unity after that first shift.
And the thing is, you have to know it’s there, because there are people who wake up, don’t know there’s more, and it feels complete.
It feels like you’re fully realized.
People often drop their practices, and they just enjoy it.
And it doesn’t mean they’re gonna stop,
But there can be subtle things going on that, like concepts of being, especially if somebody starts teaching and they have this platform they’re teaching and this is the way it is,
and it’s not so comfortable if it doesn’t stay that way.
But if you have that bigger picture, then it’s more useful ’cause you know there’s Unity.
And each of these stages is, it’s like almost exponential,
Because in Self-Realization, it’s like the point value
has woken up to itself, the Self has woken up through the apparent person.
But with Unity, you wake up to all of it.
And some of that is, again, it depends on the depth of that initial shift.
Sometimes it’s a really big shift, and sometimes it’ll quiet or it grows, but in any case, you tend to grow into it.
And so it’s a much bigger, much bigger thing.
And then Brahman is, you know, beyond everything.
It’s greater than everything.
And like I say, it’s really hard to describe.
And then when this other stuff comes online, it just is pretty unbelievable.
And I know you’ve touched on that a little bit too, like Bob Thurman’s talk this morning was talking about the Buddhaverse
and some of that kind of thing, where it’s actually lived and embodied, not just an abstraction that’s off here somewhere
that you’re, like as if you’re off in a cave somewhere,
but you’re actually living it directly.
Yes.
Brave people, come all in.
Question: Okay, three things.
Yeah, so the first one is where do you see yourself in this
if you want to share?
Fine if you don’t. And how to get there, number two.
(audience laughing)
Just real quick, just shoot that out there.
And then three, you alluded to it, but anyway, can you tell where people are if they’re on this continuum or not, and where, and so on?
David: Yeah, memory isn’t the strongest thing anymore.
Memory requires an emotional charge to actually, nothing’s making emotional charge, it’s like, oh, so I have to write things down more now.
But, okay, the first thing to understand is these are post-personal stages.
You go beyond the ego in your first step into Self-Realization, so none of this is a goal or something a person achieves.
You go beyond the person, and as you go further into this,
it’s less and less.
You don’t lose the person, though.
It’s not, people do sometimes experience an ego death with the first shift, a sense of it dying.
But what’s actually ending is the attachment to it.
The thing, the thing’s you, that’s what, you know, your concepts and the ego sense that that’s who you are.
So that lets go, and so the ego is still there, but it’s more now like a thumb.
It’s just an aspect of how you can function.
And like, I’m forgetting who said it, but somebody else actually mentioned this too.
If you look at examples of very awake people, they’re really unique personalities. They actually become more distinct
because the boundaries we put on ourselves as an individual fall away and we’re able to more fully express who we are.
So at the moment, I’m working on 3B there.
There’s lots to go, but there’s lots of other,
It’s not like you’re first in one and then you’re in the other.
It’s more a progression.
Like when you grew up when you were a kid.
You have puberty but you still have these childish things and you kind of go back and forth and around.
So there’s a lot of filling in to go.
But it’s not something I’ve achieved.
It’s just what’s coming through once I opened the door and get out of the way.
Question: So actually, you’re saying that [3B]…
Yeah, that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening here.
And that’s partly why my book took a little longer to write than I thought.
I had to be there before I could write about some of this.
I knew about it, but I couldn’t… I was quoting other people
at first, and in early drafts.
And how to get there. Oh, how to get there, yes.
Well, the key, this is a slightly different slideshow, one of the things I talk about in a different version of this is what gets you to the first stage.
Once you’ve made that first shift, as long as you understand what’s going on and support the process, and do your house cleaning and resolve your old emotional baggage and that kind of stuff, it moves progressively along.
But to get to there, the key for the first part is transcendence, basically, or pure consciousness or samadhi, or turiya, which is from the Upanishads, which means the fourth.
We all experience waking, dreaming, and sleep states, but there’s actually a fourth state we experience every day as well, and it’s consciousness itself.
Essentially, every time we go from waking into sleep or sleep into dreams or waking up in the morning, we briefly drop into a neutral gear of consciousness and then the other state comes out of that.
And so we experience it every day, but it’s unconscious for the most part.
So the purpose of practices like meditation and some other kinds of things is to make that more conscious and bring it more into our life.
And as that gets more and more familiar, there’s a kind of an awakening process that’s taking place, which isn’t really apparent because we don’t really know what it is we’re going
towards.
I’ve had the ideas of it, but until it’s lived, you don’t know what it is.
But we’re kind of moving towards it.
And then there’s a certain point, and there’s kind of like a timing thing.
We all have these cycles going on in our lives of various types.
And at a certain point in our cycle, it becomes time and it just happens.
You might be on a retreat, you might be listening to a spiritual teacher, you might be getting onto a bus, a car might honk at you, who knows, something triggers it and pop.
I’ve heard that some people say that sound is the most subtle sense and the closest to the fine vibrations where consciousness is just starting to become.
So an effortless meditation is what I recommend.
It actually has the advantage of, an effortless meditation also is that it helps you get a really deep rest, because at the fourth state you’re basically in a state of deep rest,
deeper than sleep potentially, and yet you’re alert, and that really helps to clear baggage you’re carrying and that kind of stuff. So it helps with both consciousness and clarity, preparation.
Okay, there’s a thing they call, where people are in the process, darshan, or what I refer to as resonance. Different kinds of people resonate with other people. Like if you’re devotional, you’ll be more attracted to a devotional teacher. And maybe not so much into a heady guy like me. They’ll be some people you can sense. And if you’re resonant with that person, then you usually have a really good idea of how they’re doing. If you’re less resonant, then it’s harder to tell. But you can usually use somebody who’s experienced with this kind of thing, can use questions to kind of explore their experience and find out what’s going on.
As you grow further down the track, the resonance gets more and more universal from what I’ve seen, which gives me a good sense that I’ve got lots to go yet.
But, yeah. Perfect. Great. Okay. Thank you. Anybody else?
Question: I flew all the way from Malaysia, 10,000 kilometers.
For the conference?
Yeah, for the conference and some retreat after the conference.
And this stages somehow disturbs me, you know, when I see the stages.
Why?
It’s like, this is not what I understood about
No, I know
No, no
Like
No, I understand
The thing, the point, what’s the point, you know, what’s the point?
Even to reach this stage is a huge leap
I mean, 7 billion people
David: No, actually it’s not
We’ve been in an age where, where, um
Yeah, where enlightenment became much less common
But that’s changing now. I mean, even in the last 10 years, even the last 3 years.
I know dozens of people just in my hometown who have had that first shift.
And the thing is, it’s actually natural and normal in a higher age, and we’re moving back towards that now.
So it’s not a weird thing. One of the things that often surprises people when they wake up is how ordinary and normal it is.
So they have this, oh, it’s something really special and out there.
I mean, sometimes there can be like wild, flashy stuff or like really intense bliss or something like that.
But generally speaking, it’s something you live in your daily life.
So it’s actually normal and we’re coming back to that now.
And so some of this stuff is being revived.
Some of this old understanding about the nature of our potential, our natural potential.
my book’s title.
Question: Yeah, sure. So, no, I like to hear the news, but I experientially, I realize the world is quite dark. In terms of…
David: Okay, well, let me talk to that for a sec. One of the things about what’s going on in the world right now is consciousness is rising, people are waking up all over the place, and what that’s doing is raising consciousness up. Because consciousness isn’t individual,
It’s universal, it’s shared.
And so what it’s doing is it’s bringing stuff to the surface to be seen and cleared.
And so you can see in US politics, there’s stuff going on and people are like, “What the heck is this?”
But what it’s doing is it’s bringing stuff to the surface people were unconscious of.
And sometimes that’s messy, especially if people don’t understand that’s what’s going on, and they get into a battle with it and they see it as a disaster. And in some ways it is.
But there’s another level where it’s actually giving us an opportunity to move things forward.
And some people are stepping up and helping their neighbours and they’re pushing for changes in laws and so on like that. And it’s part of the process. And apparently we’ve got a
couple more years of this.
Question: I have three more related questions. One is, I listen to most teachers on YouTube, so this is my first time meeting a living teacher, so it’s so great to be here.
David: Well just to be clear, I’m not a teacher, I’m a writer.
Question: Well you said you’re there.
David: Yes, but a teacher is a skill. A person doesn’t automatically get a skill at teaching just because they’ve woken up. And some people think that, they have that idea, but some people are terrible teachers.
Question: So some of the teachings, at least some of the teachings, they have a few characteristics or parameters that describes this non-duality. One is, I mean I’ve seen a lot of
interviews you’ve done, you know, the pump station thing, [batgap.com], so I’m seeing you live.
– You’re Tim, right?
– Jim, right.
– Rick.
– Rick, Rick, Rick, okay.
So, anyway.
One is this concept of you can’t do it.
– You can’t?
– You can’t do it.
– Yeah.
– It’s a happening rather than a–
– Something else.
– Yeah.
– But, yeah.
– The question just now how you do it is–
David: But there’s kind of two simultaneous truths there.
One is that it’s nothing that you do.
It’s nothing you accomplish, it’s not a goal in itself, and yet, if you engage in spiritual practices, you’re going to make it more likely that you’re going to shift, and you’re going
to make the process a lot smoother.
Rick: Accident prone.
David: Yeah, more accident prone.
Yeah, because otherwise, you can have, people who have shifts, like Eckhart would be an example where he spent two years on a park bench trying to figure out what had happened and integrate it.
Whereas if you’ve got a little background and you’ve got decent spiritual practice, there’s a much smoother process.
I mean, that’s not universal. Certainly it depends on what you’re bringing into the process in the first place, but
Question: So the second thing about the thing is about you’re saying the person do not go. It’s the attachment to the person which is, yeah, it falls away but many teachers also speak of
There’s no person, there’s nobody inside, but the personality remains.
David: Part of it is there’s this… because we’ve gone through, spiritually, we’ve gone through a darker age and we’re rising out of that now,
the teachings became really emphasized on the monk’s approach,
a withdrawal from the world, dismissive of ego and that kind of approach.
And that’s true in the West and the East. That’s no longer necessary.
Most of the people I know who are shifting are not monks.
As a matter of fact, the people I know who are monks are stuck.
So it’s something to be lived in the world and it’s becoming more normal.
But yes, there is a lot of teachers who teach quite differently from this.
They’ll talk about Self-Realization as The shift.
They’ll talk about, you know, you have to cast off your ego and give away your possessions or whatever, you know, just as…
You have to do these various kinds of harsh things.
But it really is not necessary anymore for most of that.
Question: I suppose the falling away of the person is a natural process, it’s not a rejection
David: Yeah, but you don’t do it with the mind
It happens naturally when you realize “Oh, I’m this instead”
So you replace this little guy or whatever, person, with an infinite person.
It’s not a bad thing
Not only that, even with Self-Realization
When it becomes established, it’s called Sat Chit Ananda or Nirvana, which basically both refer to bliss.
Because one of those koshas, one of those layers I mentioned, that’s just above consciousness and the beginnings of creation is bliss.
You live with a body of bliss all the time, but you’re not conscious of it because there isn’t the clarity there.
But when you bring that clarity and you have the stable platform of that first shift, then the bliss can come online.
And actually the Upanishads talk about it coming on in stages.
And they talk about a hundred times the bliss, and a hundred times the bliss, and a hundred times…
It’s kind of like this exponential scale.
And it’s quite interesting because it can sometimes come on like a bang, where you’re just blasted.
as Tom Traynor in his interview talked about an example of that.
You kind of hope it doesn’t happen in public because you’re kind of left bawling and laughing and just really quite intense.
And then that becomes normal in about two, three hours.
That’s becomes your new set point.
And it progresses upwards.
And that’s not in line exactly with the stages.
It just happens through clarity.
Yeah, so that’s one of the reasons why it’s something you might like.
Question: So finally, is there such a thing as being with a teacher or being with an awakened person, there’s an energetic shift that happens to someone. It’s not just wisdom, it’s not just understanding.
David: Oh no, not at all. Understanding is useful but it doesn’t wake you up. But someone who who is awake that you resonate with can help. Because it’s like that awakeness is right there, and so the awakeness that’s here can recognize the awakeness is there and can trigger awakening.
So when people are well along the path, it can be useful to spend time, like go to satsangs or hang around, whatever style of teaching the teacher has who’s awake that they resonate with.
That can help the shift happen.
Although it’s not mandatory, certainly, but it’s one of those little things that can help.
Question: Thank you so much.
David: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for the questions.
Anybody?
Question: I’m just going to say this in here.
I’m thinking about children.
And it seems to me that if I’m a child maybe that’s because I’m not a child anymore.
I love it that each generation we’re getting more and more
grown up.
How does that relate to all of this?
David: Yes. Well what partly is, people who, well the way they say it, I don’t know this from experience, but I’ve heard it said that because consciousness is rising now, there’s people, souls you could say, that are choosing to come now, where they didn’t want to be in the mud before, but now they’re showing up.
But it’s also because this is, consciousness is rising, kids now are being born into a place.
Now you can’t really stabilize Self-Realization until the physiology has matured.
So according to the old text, it’s around age 24 or 26, somewhere in there, when the physiology is matured, then that’s possible. But I’ve certainly seen people who are getting
a lot of taste of that who are younger than that, and I know a few people who’ve woken up really clearly in like their 21, 22.
Excuse me, it’s kind of moving. So they’ve got a whole life to live with this stuff. And so it’s going to unfold very beautifully and naturally because they’re not caught up in… you get to be in your 50’s and 60’s, you’ve collected all these concepts and dislikes… more stuff to work on. Some people are doing a little better job.
Question: So what’s the connection between physiology and these things?
David: Well, it’s kind of an interesting thing because some of my concepts about what is required for enlightenment was kind of this idea of some perfection or whatever, but that got blown out of the water.
Some of the people I’ve seen, I remember once about 8 or 9 years ago, on a retreat, this woman woke up and I had just met her and discovered that she was a compulsive liar.
Constantly telling stories about herself and trying to defend, you know, this kind of, create this artificial appearance and which of course was badly done and so everybody saw through it pretty quickly but she woke up, just completely innocently and then the need for that fell away
so it’s an interesting thing, it doesn’t require perfection
Now on the other hand, it is good to do some clean up and stuff because if you do hit Self-Realization without doing any heart work and resolving some of your old traumas and things, unresolved experiences, you can get into a place where essentially it’s right there all the time.
You can’t escape it.
Because part of the old thing with your ego, you can kind of create these unconscious spaces and kind of stuff things over to the sides and down in here.
We’re not going to look at that.
But after you wake up, now you’re conscious.
So everything’s conscious.
Well, not right away, but it does take time.
But it’s just, if you’ve got stuff that’s right there on the surface, there’s not any escaping anymore.
So I’ve seen a couple of people go through a bit of a rough patch after they shifted because they hadn’t dealt with that stuff.
But that’s not typical.
But it…
Question: So you’re arguing with theology and that’s a different stuff.
Yeah.
David: Well it’s kind of, yeah, but it’s an interesting thing because from one perspective the physical body is a body of consciousness. There’s no separate physiology or separate layers, it’s all just one thing. And so, and yet on the other hand there is that need for certain kinds of things to be there, like a stable physiology.
You don’t have, I mean a person can be handicapped or have that kind of stuff, can still wake up just fine. But there does
need to be a certain stability there for it to be consistent because there’s a kind of an energetic embodiment that happens.
But that’s one thing to mention though, the Kundalini tradition, sometimes there’s become too much of an emphasis on the Kundalini itself. But Kundalini is an effect. It’s part of the process of embodying it. It’s not what causes enlightenment. It’s the body adapting to the shift and creating the body that supports it.
So there is certainly adaptation required. You’ve been living in a certain way and experiencing life in a certain way and all of a sudden you’re infinite and there’s a whole bunch
of little things that come with it.
And so it’s kind of like, and of course somebody like myself who studied this for years and years and there’s all these concepts, it’s like, “Oh, that wasn’t right.” And, “Oh yeah, I guess that was right, but that’s not how I understood it before.” And you have to kind of go back and realize.
And it’s actually kind of interesting because as you go through the stages, each time it’s like going back to kindergarten because your whole sense of self, your sense of the world, your sense of what’s real and true changes.
And that may sound like a bad thing, but actually it’s great because every one of them is an upgrade, but it does require a little time to adapt to and adjust in the body.
Okay, we are drifting into lunch time, so anybody who needs to go for lunch is welcome to, but I’m happy to chat with anybody else who wants to talk. And this is a reminder, in an hour I’ll be in the bookstore if you want to have your book signed.
But if you don’t, then you get one later or something like that.
I’m happy, to chase me down on that.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[Applause]