REALIZING PURE CONSCIOUSNESS

 

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.