I.
Imagine a dewdrop on a leaf. Within that dewdrop, zooming in, there is a world inhabited by people, animals, trees, ants… everything in the same proportion as we see on earth. But if you zoom out, they all occupy the space within the dewdrop. Except they don’t know it.
Now if you zoom out more, then it is possible that the world in which we’ve imagined this dewdrop on a leaf is also in a dewdrop. And if you zoom out even more, then is it not possible that you are also in a dewdrop?
Whether you zoom out or in, either way, there is no end.
If you are peeking out of a window, watching life pass by, is it possible that someone else is peeking out of a window and watching me look out a window? And so on and on and on…
How do you determine you are the only objective reality?
II.
Imagine a cow comes and eats the leaf on which the dewdrop sits. The same dewdrop in which resides this world full of people with hopes and dreams of a better job, better car, with their sadness, ideas of right & wrong, good & bad, all the concepts of this world… suddenly eaten up by a cow.
Now imagine this cow’s milk is collected by the shepherd for his master and sent to the marketplace, and is bought by a mother who tells her son to drink it because it’s good for his health… and on and on… all of it happening within the space of another dewdrop on a leaf which a goat comes along and munches. Imagine, 10000 years of civilization, of ideas and concepts, all wiped out in a single moment.
You cannot see reality. You are living in an illusion, in your head, without knowing the physical world around you.
III.
In a dream, a tiger attacks you. Do you wake up and jump up to close your bedroom door in fear that the tiger will walk in? Do you need someone to tell you that it was just a dream or is it obvious? And yet, you believed the dream to be reality and felt fear.
Then what makes you think that what you are doing now is real? What if this too is a dream? Just like when the dewdrop in which the cow has eaten the first dewdrop gets eaten by the goat, similarly, when you wake up from the dream, how do you establish that you are now in a waking state? Whether your eyes were open or closed, thoughts came and were being processed.
A tiger attacks you in a dream but once you wake up, you do not take action to protect yourself from the tiger. Then why do we take action when something happens to us once we are supposedly ‘awake’? Why do we take action on ideas of ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad’ or even the idea of doing 3SRB?
IV.
Just like a 3SRB gadget in which 6-8 MP3 files are embedded in the chip, there is an internal programming within each of us and we can see only what we are programmed to see, not more.
However, there is a bug in this programming i.e. the same programming which makes us believe that the dream is unreal but our so-called waking state is real, is also the programming that makes us fall asleep and dream in the first place. In the perfect programming, we would not sleep. The fact that we sleep means that we are not in reality. There would be no such loophole.
Remember the words of St. Peter –
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed (1 Corinthians 15:51)
This world in which we live our lives, have jobs, marry, feel fear, have beliefs etc. is but one dewdrop, one dream.
So what do we do? We don’t keep zooming out like with the dewdrop analogy; we simply don’t sleep and as a consequence, we don’t die.
Remember, the programming does not make us feel that this awake dream that we call life is reality; it makes every dream feel like reality.
As long as there is sleep, there will be dream and as long as there is dream, there is sleep. Patanjali said, ‘As long as there are images of fancy, there is sleep.’
V.
Let’s say Rs. 10,000 is stolen from my home.
In this statement, I will assume you understand that the concepts of ‘Rs. 10,000’, ‘stolen’ and ‘home’ are false. Now we come to the concept of ‘my’ or ‘I’. When I feel this fear of my money being stolen, why don’t I ‘wake up’ and console myself, saying it is just a dream? And even if I do ‘wake up’ to this in that moment, I will still go back to sleep.
So what to do? This ‘I’ who feels the fear goes backwards and asks, ‘Who am I?’ This ‘I’ is completely dependent on images of fancy. But we are far from such questioning. We admire things like a chair, compliment its design, we say it is pretty. We don’t pay attention to the thought processes behind these actions. We are so into the falseness, into these images of fancy.
Now imagine my hand is badly cut and requires surgery. A local anesthesia is injected into my hand and I no longer feel the pain because the information is no longer being relayed to the brain. So obviously, the cut was not the source of pain because the cut is still there. It was the information being relayed that triggered a response of pain in the brain. So the brain is the source of pain, not the wound.
It is the same with all other events in life. It is the information about the event that is relayed and registered in the brain which triggers a response, not the event. The event by itself is meaningless.
For example, the event of the sudden death of my son does not create sadness, it is the triggering of the concept of a son in my brain. In this case, is the event itself causing emotion? Say, in the previous example of the theft, the money that was stolen is fake. The money would still be stolen but would it elicit the same response?
Therefore, whatever happens, it is in the relay, in the transmission where concepts are triggered. This is called the Ego – the central processing unit internally which holds the entire thing together.
Now this Ego does not exist. It is a programming. Science fiction shows a time in the future when computers will become masters. But that has already happened. This computer within us, this programming has started to believe its rites and rituals, in other words, its coding.
Yet, a programming suggests the existence of a programmer. And every good programmer also keeps an entry point from where he can enter the programme whenever he wants. This entry point is the soul, and the soul’s reflected light is the Ego.
But first, to break the programming’s belief that it is real, we have to break the programming itself i.e. break our patterns. Then we will reach the actual Ego – not the ego we talk of in everyday language – the central processing unit.
So keep breaking your patterns. Try to break one pattern every day. If you can break a hundred in a few years, then you get the gift of non-sleep.
Remember, the soul’s light is blinding. You have to constantly work to one day come to a point where you do not get blinded by this light. If you don’t run from your patterns but instead, look at your truth directly, then one day you will not be blinded by this light.
Your patterns are simply asking for release. Look at your truth every moment. This way, one day you will see pure Ego, pure light without any traits you associate with.
As you keep breaking patterns, you will come to a point where you will be able to pause before you react e.g. if your money is stolen. Instead, start to focus on the area of your heart in the chest, inside your nostril and the space two inches below the top of the skull. Right now, the fear you feel is in concept form and is felt when it relates to your imagined self. But there will come a time that you will feel fear, anger, happiness, all in pure form.
So keep destroying all images of yourself e.g. I like, I dislike, I hate this movie, I love this person etc. Don’t reject, accept everything. When you reject something, you are rejecting God’s creation.
Don’t hide a single thing from another human being. ‘You can stand in the light only when you have nothing to hide.’
Then you start seeing how you once were, very long ago, when you were without personality. When everything was good. Then you start meeting your essence on the way back home, taking the same steps back that you did forward.
Then we go back to how we were before birth. You can either go back or fast forward to death, it is the same thing. After death is the same as before birth.
At the end of this journey of the essence, you meet the Ego – the one who wanted to take birth, wanted to experience. You will then go beyond and see the Soul – It is not into anything but everything is in It.
This Mr. T calls God, rather a derivative of God. Even after this, we will take birth but now we will live according to Divine Guidance.
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Existence can be divided into three groups – the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom. Human beings don’t belong to these groups. They’re not part of existence. They make up the fourth group.
Plants wake up the moment the sun rises. Some birds fly in a flock. They have an inner timing. But we are never governed by this universal time.
Humans feel two types of time – 1) Physical time: This is the biological clock which is governed by a section in the brain that controls all instinctive functions in the body. This section performs billions of calculations every second to keep the body running smoothly.
2) Psychological time – We may all share physical space. So 6:30pm is 6:30pm for all of us. But we are all in different psychological times. This explains why, in a classroom, although there is one lesson being taught, different children absorb the lesson differently. People think it’s because some children don’t pay attention. That is not true. It’s not that we’re not paying attention. It’s just that our attention is on something else which is not in the present moment. This creates a separation within our systems and consequently, a separation between us and others. And this way, man, even though he belongs to the 4th kingdom, lives as if he belongs to the third – the animal kingdom.
(Both physical and psychological time are, in the end, not real. But we have to use words humans are familiar with for the sake of explanation. There is no duality within us – there is only one governing system which can’t be described as either psychological or physical because it’s both)
When you were a child, people around you asked you – What do you like to eat? What do you want to do now? etc. And so we become accustomed to getting our desires fulfilled. This creates a self-image that ‘I’m the centre of the universe’. This attitude continues throughout life. We internally always expect life to go our way. And when certain things go our way, we feel pleasure and when they don’t, we sulk. No matter what our age, this is the way it happens.
In times of strife – that is when things haven’t gone our way (and they’ve gone someone else’s way) – we’re given the opportunity to see that what we’re doing is false. We’ve been deluding ourselves into thinking we’re different and consequently reinforcing a sense of separation by thinking ‘I’m different from you’. Every person accumulates his personality traits and identifies with them, increasing the gap between himself and the Other. And also internally, between himself and himself, since all traits are in every human being. All traits are in all human beings. If attention doesn’t go into being all-inclusive, a gap occurs.
Why do we have times of grief? Because we don’t get what we want. There is always an expectation. We want to be special, not like the masses. If we don’t get what we want, we feel singled out. But the sun rises and shines on everyone. A plant doesn’t think it’s not getting enough sunlight, that other plants are getting more. And because there is no sense of separation, there is no depression. When there is no separation, there is no pleasure as well.
When there is separation, there is depression and pleasure both. And as long as there is separation, there will be desire. As long as there is desire, there will be time. And as long as there is desire, there will be space as well. We always desire the Other, what we think to be separate from ourselves.
The only way to defeat time (and space) is to be okay with whatever is in the moment – neither attraction nor repulsion. And this way we’ll be thrown back to ourselves, the real self – the only reality. (This will be explained further in future sessions)
However, we’re never okay. We’re always complaining. We keep trying to recapture the comfort we felt as children. And we think this comfort comes from outside of us. This creates a pleasure-seeking pattern that is directed outwards, in the external world. Essentially, we remain childish all our lives.
No matter what the mind says, the pleasure-seeking pattern within us will always override. No matter how hard we try, no matter how sincere we are in our efforts, we stay the same. An emotion comes up and it takes over. The pleasure principle overrides everything. And the pleasure we derive is from feeling good about what we think we are. This pleasure principle operates every moment. Our every action is governed by it.
We operate keeping only our welfare in mind. We go against the laws of nature – this makes us criminals. We become lethargic, we procrastinate. We get a headache, indigestion or a disease like cancer. We think we can hide our intentions from the world, but the body reveals who you are. As long as you are a criminal, you will always be on the run. And as long as you’re on the run, you will never be free.
Freedom doesn’t mean to chase your pleasures or to run away from your pain. To do what you want or to not do what you don’t want. That is just the operation of desire which perpetuates time and space. When you’re free, there is nothing to desire and no space which contains the objects of your desire. Time disappears. And when you no longer desire, the object of your desire disappears. In other words, space disappears. The absence of time and space is freedom.