Is presence the same as Being?
When you become conscious of Being, what is really happening is that
Being becomes conscious of itself. When Being becomes conscious of
itself — that’s presence. Since Being, consciousness, and life are
synonymous, we could say that presence means consciousness
becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness. But
don’t get attached to the words, and don’t make an effort to
understand this. There is nothing that you need to understand before
you can become present.
I do understand what you just said, but it seems to imply that Being,
the ultimate transcendental reality, is not yet complete, that it is
undergoing a process of development. Does God need time for
personal growth?
Yes, but only as seen from the limited perspective of the manifested
universe. In the Bible, God declares: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,
and I am the living One.” In the timeless realm where God dwells,
which is also your home, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and
the Omega, are one, and the essence of everything that ever has
been and ever will be is eternally present in an unmanifested state of
oneness and perfection — totally beyond anything the human mind
can ever imagine or comprehend. In our world of seemingly separate
forms, however, timeless perfection is an inconceivable concept. Here
even consciousness, which is the light emanating from the eternal
Source, seems to be subject to a process of development, but this is
due to our limited perception. It is not so in absolute terms.
Nevertheless, let me continue to speak for a moment about the
evolution of consciousness in this world.
Everything that exists has Being, has God-essence, has some degree
of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness;
otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would
disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals,
humans — all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees,
consciousness manifesting as form.
The world arises when consciousness takes on shapes and forms,
thought forms and material forms. Look at the millions of life forms on
this planet alone. In the sea, on land, in the air — and then each life
form is replicated millions of times. To what end? Is someone or
something playing a game, a game with form? This is what the
ancient seers of India asked themselves. They saw the world as lila, a
kind of divine game that God is playing. The individual life forms are
obviously not very important in this game. In the sea, most life forms
don’t survive for more than a few minutes after being born. The
human form turns to dust pretty quickly too, and when it is gone it is
as if it had never been. Is that tragic or cruel? Only if you create a
separate identity for each form, if you forget that its consciousness is
God-essence expressing itself in form. But you don’t truly know that
until you realize your own God-essence as pure consciousness.
If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a
birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes
later he gets eaten by another fish — that’s tragic. But it’s only tragic
because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got
hold of a fraction of a dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made
a separate entity out of it.
Consciousness takes on the disguise of forms until they reach such
complexity that it completely loses itself in them. In present-day
humans, consciousness is completely identified with its disguise. It
only knows itself as form and therefore lives in fear of the annihilation
of its physical or psychological form. This is the egoic mind, and this is
where considerable dysfunction sets in. It now looks as if something
had gone very wrong somewhere along the line of evolution. But even
this is part of lila, the divine game. Finally, the pressure of suffering
created by this apparent dysfunction forces consciousness to
disidentify from form and awakens it from its dream of form: It
regains self-consciousness, but it is at a far deeper level than when it
lost it.
This process is explained by Jesus in his parable of the lost son, who
leaves his father’s home, squanders his wealth, becomes destitute,
and is then forced by his suffering to return home. When he does, his
father loves him more than before. The son’s state is the same as it
was before, yet not the same. It has an added dimension of depth.
The parable describes a journey from unconscious perfection, through
apparent imperfection and “evil” to conscious perfection.
Can you now see the deeper and wider significance of becoming
present as the watcher of your mind? Whenever you watch the mind,
you withdraw consciousness from mind forms, and it then becomes
what we call the watcher or the witness. Consequently, the watcher
— pure consciousness beyond form — becomes stronger, and the
mental formations become weaker. When we talk about watching the
mind we are personalizing an event that is truly of cosmic
significance: Through you, consciousness is awakening out of its
dream of identification with form and withdrawing from form. This
foreshadows, but is already part of, an event that is probably still in
the distant future as far as chronological time is concerned. The event
is called — the end of the world.
When consciousness frees itself from its identification with physical
and mental forms, it becomes what we may call pure or enlightened
consciousness, or presence. This has already happened in a few
individuals, and it seems destined to happen soon on a much larger
scale, although there is no absolute guarantee that it will happen.
Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness:
identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free
themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They
will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair,
madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don’t get
off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most
dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.
What do you think will happen on this planet if human consciousness
remains unchanged?
Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own
minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below
thought. Everyone does that every night during sleep. But this also
happens to some extent through sex, alcohol, and other drugs that
suppress excessive mind activity. If it weren’t for alcohol,
tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are
all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would
become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that,
if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become
a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply
keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the
breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher
consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the
daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from
generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so
find true liberation.
Falling back to a level of consciousness below mind, which is the pre-
thinking level of our distant ancestors and of animals and plants, is
not an option for us. There is no way back. If the human race is to
survive, it will have to go on to the next stage. Consciousness is
evolving throughout the universe in billions of forms. So even if we
didn’t make it, this wouldn’t matter on a cosmic scale. No gain in
consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself through
some other form. But the very fact that I am speaking here and you
are listening or reading this is a clear sign that the new consciousness
is gaining a foothold on the planet.
There is nothing personal in this: I am not teaching you. You are
consciousness, and you are listening to yourself. There is an Eastern
saying: “The teacher and the taught together create the teaching.” In
any case, the words in themselves are not important. They are not
the Truth; they only point to it. I speak from presence, and as I speak,
you may be able to join me in that state. Although every word that I
use has a history, of course, and comes from the past, as all language
does, the words that I speak to you now are carriers of the high-
energy frequency of presence, quite apart from the meaning they
convey as words.
Silence is an even more potent carrier of presence, so when you read
this or listen to me speak, be aware of the silence between and
underneath the words. Be aware of the gaps. To listen to the silence,
wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present.
Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in
between the sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates
stillness inside you. Only the stillness in you can perceive the silence
outside. And what is stillness other than presence, consciousness
freed from thought forms? Here is the living realization of what we
have been talking about.