Our journey today concerns illusion, the nature of illusion and the way out of illusion. Illusion is a state of mind. It’s a way of seeing things that is not exactly correct. Everything that we see with our eyes, feel with our bodies, taste, touch, hear, everything that we think, everything that we feel with our emotions, all things that we are drawn to because we consider them to be pleasurable, all things that we seek to avoid because we consider them to be painful, these are all a product of illusion.

Illusion comes in many different forms. Illusion means to not see things exactly as they really are. If you’re depressed you can walk through a field of flowers and see nothing to make you happy. If you’re joyful, if you’re elated, you can walk through a dark and desolate area and feel nothing but joy. While perception on the physical level certainly colors our experiences, perception on the mental level or on the emotional level has even a greater effect upon our awareness. But let’s begin at the beginning. Let’s begin with pleasure, pain and the senses.

In order to get a clear picture of reality, of what we are and what we are not, it’s necessary for us to look beyond the body. Most people use their physical body as the ultimate point of reference, as the polestar in determining their life’s awareness. We conceive of ourselves as being a body, occupying a certain amount of physical space, being so many centimeters tall, weighing a certain amount, being a particular color, having green or blue eyes — we think of ourselves as being physical, in other words.

Now, my point all along has been that you’re not really physical, that you are, if anything, a breeze. You are a wind, a wind of luminous awareness that is sweeping through a dream, a landscape that constantly changes that’s made up of a variety of different colors, and that as the breeze of your awareness blows through the valley of your dreams, through the different colors, it gives life to them. Death is the transmutation of this awareness, when the breeze blows in a new way or ceases to blow at all and becomes something that we really can’t feel. You might say it goes someplace else.

Life is the beginning of the wind. What was before the wind? What remains after the wind? Only eternity and eternality, that which has always been and that which will always be — nirvana, the void, completion, ecstasy beyond imagination, God.

Here we deal with the wind. And when the wind blows, even in the outer world, in the physical world, it’s always a good sign. Because there’s energy or prana in the wind; the force of life itself is the wind.

In the realm of the senses there is little or no wind. That which you call a body, that which appears to be dense and physical, packed full of atoms and molecules, DNA and RNA, protoplasm, that which you call a body I say is not physical. I say that it is only physical because you think it is physical. Simply because you can touch it and taste it and see it, simply because you can put your ear to someone’s chest and hear their heart beating, this to me proves absolutely nothing. This to me is a dream of limited awareness, as all of life is a dream.

The senses are dreams, five different dreams that run together. The senses are the dreams of limited awareness. You are, if anything, spirit, what I call the wind. The wind blows and frees us all from the trap of maya or illusion. You consider yourself to be physical. When you think of yourself you think of your body. I would suggest that your body is only another image in the dream, a dream that is given life by the wind.

Pleasure, pain and the senses. When we have a sensory experience we label it. For example, when you eat something that you like, when you have an orgasm, when you see something beautiful, when you hear a melody that you like or the voice of someone you love, when you smell the fragrance of flowers or a scent that you particularly enjoy, these are the dreams of the senses. The senses are a modality, a method of perception. The senses are a reflection of a body’s awareness. Just as you consider that the experience that you have of certain senses or through the senses is pleasurable, so you have also determined that there are a variety of sensations that you experience through the senses or as the senses that you consider to be painful. When someone hits you or you’re ill and your body aches — this is pain. When there’s an acrid smell, something very unpleasant; when you see something that you don’t like, that’s ugly; when you hear discordant sounds; when you taste something that’s not to your liking — this is pain.

The difference between pleasure and pain is choice. What one person considers to be pleasurable, another may consider to be painful and vice versa. The yogi or yogini, one who seeks to yolk or unite their consciousness with God, that is to say with infinite awareness, comes to see and realize that there is really no difference between pleasure and pain, that all are sensations and that one should neither seek pleasure nor shun pain. Because as soon as you seek pleasure or you try to avoid pain, you trap yourself in the pairs of opposites.

Pretend for a moment that you’re outside. You’re walking around having a wonderful experience. Life is lovely. Now let’s say you come up to a building and you go inside the building and it’s a very curious building. There’s a central corridor, a hallway that runs down the building, which bisects it, and there are doors on both the left- and right-hand side. If you open a door on the left-hand side, perhaps the first doorway you come to once you’ve entered the building, you’ll go into a room that smells absolutely beautiful. If you close that door and instead go to the room directly opposite on the right-hand side of the corridor, there’s a room that smells with awful stinks.

The next door up on the left is a world of beautiful things you can feel. You can go in and feel silks and satins, just beautiful sensations. In the next room, on the right-hand side opposite that room, are painful experiences. If you walk in someone hits you, someone strikes you, there is cactus that you can stick yourself on.

The third room on the left: when you walk in you see nothing but beautiful lights, scenes are projected in front of your eyes, landscapes that are wonderful. In the room opposite on the right-hand side: terrible scenes, awful things, painful lights, darkness.

The next room on the left: wonderful things that you can taste. The room opposite on the right: unpleasant, awful things to taste.

The room on the left: all the wonderful music and sound that has ever been. The room across from it on the right: awful, terrible, shrieking sounds, unpleasant.

Ten rooms, and for each person the rooms are a little different and you cannot have the rooms on the left without the rooms on the right. One could enter into such a building and become so engaged in the ten rooms that you forgot there was an outside, that there was something beyond the ten rooms. Let us say that the experiences were so powerful and so intense in these rooms that you forgot all about the fact that there was something beyond them. As a matter of fact, all of life only appeared to you to consist of what was in those ten rooms.

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The rooms on the left-hand side you liked. Those are pleasurable experiences through the five senses. The rooms on the right-hand side of the corridor are what you call painful experiences of the five senses. These ten rooms comprise one aspect of your life.

One who practices yoga is able to walk through the corridor of the senses and remain unaffected. This doesn’t mean that feeling does not emanate through the senses, but simply that there’s no one there. Someone calls you on the phone. They talk for hours endlessly. You’re tired of them talking but you can’t stop them from talking. You go out into the world, there are the sounds of rapid transit buses, jet aircraft, people all around you. You go walking through a shopping mall, being bombarded by sensory messages telling you to buy this, experience this, feel this, advertising directing you to pleasure — this product will be more pleasurable, it will end an unpleasant experience. The realm of the senses.

One who practices yoga and meditation does not seek to run away from the senses because the senses, as long as they are there, will continue to dream. They will continue to bring forth a variety of different types of information in and through your being. Rather, the way is to not be there. The reason that you’re occupied with the senses, which ultimately lead to frustration, is that you have focused your attention upon them. The art of the perceiver is to focus your attention on the infinite, not on the finite — or on the finite as infinite, or on nothingness, or on all things, or to not focus at all, or to not be there to focus. These are the options in the operable world having to do with the basic levels of attention

If you must have happiness, you must also have unhappiness. If you must have love, you must also have hate. If you must have good, you must also have evil. If you must have day, you must also have night. These are the pairs of opposites. But there really are no opposites. There really are no senses. There really is no good or bad, day or night, love or hate. You can’t win and you can’t lose, except that you’re having a dream in which you believe you can. There are two alternatives. One is to alter the dream, to dream a different dream. The other is to put an end to the dreamer, to awaken from the dream of life.

The senses are wrapped up with desire. Consider who and what you are for a moment. You are consciousness, consciousness trapped in a body. The body is the body of illusion. The cells are the windows through which you look at existence. Or to put it another way, the senses are the windows through which you look at existence as you sit in the prison of the body. Your awareness was flying through the sky and it became trapped in the physical plane. And now you sit in a dark room and there are five screens, like TV monitors. Each of them gives you a level of perception, but there are only distant, faint images on the screens.

The pairs of opposites create desire. That is to say, that which causes you unhappiness in life is desire. Desire is neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so. Ultimately there is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so. What you call pleasant and pleasurable, someone else will feel is unpleasant. What you feel is unpleasant they will feel is pleasurable. Everything is definition. However, you can write the dictionary. You can define or redefine everything. You look at a flower that you love and you say it’s beautiful. You look at another flower that you think is not very nice. Now, you’ve already locked yourself into a terrible situation. If someone sends you the flowers that you like, you’ll be happy because you will experience a sensation that you enjoy. Or you will be happy because you desired, you wanted a particular sensory experience, which was the perception of the flowers that you liked.

However, if someone sends you the flowers that you don’t like, then you won’t be happy. You desire to receive a certain type of flower, but the ones that you considered not to be beautiful arrived. Therefore you will be unhappy because your desire was not fulfilled. Or perhaps no one will send you flowers at all and you’ll become despondent because you will receive nothing. There’s no way out of the world of desire. It’s like being in a giant maze, and you go round and round in the maze trying to find a way out, but all you find are more convoluted corridors and passageways.

The senses give you a limited amount of freedom and that freedom is initially attractive. The senses open you up to a particular vision of yourself. And who’s to say if what you see and feel with the senses is correct or not? However, there is another level of perception, another way of seeing things, which you’re also familiar with, called emotion.

Emotion is feeling and it operates through the pairs of opposites as do the senses. But emotion is not so much a physical feeling, although it can be triggered by a sensory experience. You could have a pleasant experience — someone could touch you — and you enjoyed that and that would trigger an emotional response. Your heart would love. Someone could strike you, could hit you, a sensation that you don’t like, and that could trigger a response of fear. The emotions, in most cases, cannot really be triggered by the senses. Emotions are the prisms, the crystals, the glasses through which we view the senses.

On our chain of evolution we have the objects of sense experience, that is to say, a flower. We have the senses, which perceive or transmit the five screens, the TV screens, which show us five different ways to perceive the flower: the way it looks; if we touch it with our bodies, the way it feels; the way it smells; if we were to taste it, the way it tastes; the way it looks, the coloration, the form. We apply the five screens to the object of perception, the sense object, and we see it in five ways. All of that information then is passed through the emotion or the emotional level of being. That then is passed into the intellect, to the mind, which cognizes the experience, which considers it, which evaluates it, which measures it against past experience and memory, which looks at it from the point of view of desire. Does the shoe fit or is it a bad fit? Is it what you desired or is it not what you desired?

The intellect or mind analyzes, separates. Behind the mind is a luminous field of consciousness in which the mind floats, that viscous sea of eternal awareness in which operates the intuitive mind, which some call the over-mind. This part perceives the essence of an object without the use of the senses. It intuits it. The senses provide you five screens to examine an object. Those screens are filtered by emotion and by the intellect. Remembrance and desire, attraction and aversion, operate through the intellect. But at the same time you could sit next to your friend the flower, close your eyes and experience its essence, having shut off the five screens: seeing, tasting, feeling, smelling, touching. Shut off the five screens and you will find, when you still your mind, when you enter into a meditative state, that you can experience the flower, not necessarily as flower, but as essence, as being.

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Suppose the five screens that you have — your five little television monitors, which then go through the filtration process of the emotions in the mind, which you thought showed you very clearly what was there — suddenly are inadequate. Oh, while they did show you accurately certain information, they didn’t show you everything. For example, here in Malibu where I’m making this tape today, for the last four and a half months when we looked out from our home over the ocean, all we could see was the horizon, no land. Then about three days ago, suddenly the air changed and it became very clear, and we looked out at the horizon and we saw a huge land mass, one of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands — a huge island that was there. It was like Brigadoon; it had never been there for the five months we lived here. There was no island and suddenly there was a huge island.

The senses paint a certain picture for us of the world. They reveal to us the way something looks. It is not that the senses are necessarily inaccurate, nor is it necessarily that they’re accurate, but let us say that they don’t necessarily show us everything. Intuition, then, the intuitive approach to understanding, is another way, a more direct and immediate way, that is not subject to as much error and as many problems as sense perceptions are, to view existence.

Now, classically, in the history of spirituality, there have been many attempts to reach the intuitive level, in other words, the ability to cognize or experience something without experiencing it as most human beings do. People have attempted to still their senses through mortification, through austerity, fasting, disciplining themselves. People have attempted to go beyond the senses through the use of drugs or intoxicants, or to expand their sensory perception and see it in a new way. Some people have sought to shun the world. The idea is to not look at that which is beautiful because it’s a trap, a beautiful trap. Because as soon as you become enraptured by the beauty of the world as you see it through the senses, then you’re snared into the pairs of opposites.

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You were walking by the house and having a good time outside and everything was fine — good old undifferentiated reality; you were a wind blowing through an empty, cloudless sky, no point of reference, everything was perfect. Suddenly, something in you was attracted to one of those five rooms on the left-hand side of the corridor, which you called beauty, and you were pulled down in there. But once you get inside the house, the door closes behind you, you can’t get out, and you wander aimlessly from room to room. As much pleasure as you will experience, so you will experience just as much pain; as much joy, so just as much sorrow. This is what we call human life. As long as you are human, that is to say, as long as you fit the definition of human, as one who exists within a body as a body, who is in the realm of the senses, then all of the toils, frustrations, good times and bad times that we’ve come to call life must be for you. But there is another way and that way is not necessarily in the rejection of the senses, nor in the rejection of beauty, nor in the aversion of that which you call ugliness or pain. Rather, it’s simply a question of focus.

Think of the senses and desires like fly paper. You’ve all seen the cartoons in which there’s a character who gets stuck on a piece of fly paper and they push it off with one hand and finally free it from the other hand, and now it’s stuck on their other hand and then they get it stuck on both hands. Very sticky stuff, difficult to get rid of. Desire and sense perceptions are like that. Sometimes the more you try and get away from them, the more caught up in them you become. The very desire to escape sense experience, to escape pain or pleasure, can trap you as much as pleasure and pain in their simpler forms. Everything is an illusion, even the idea of going beyond pleasure and pain is an illusion. It’s a description, modified through the intellect and the senses.

The way out is to become still. The more you struggle, the more you’ll get stuck. To just continue to act is to get stuck also. Rather, what I’m suggesting is to become so still that you dissolve and disappear and that the entire situation is gone. Because the only reason the situation exists, the only reason the senses exist, the mind exists, personal history, memory, emotion, pleasure, pain and the senses exist, is because you give them meaning. If we allow you to dissolve, if we dissolve ourselves in the white light of eternity, then we will find that what seemed to be so real — being in the house of the senses — was only a dream. We were in a terrible, terrible nightmare and it was all so real. Within the context of the nightmare we could have tried to get away, but we may never have gotten away because the nightmare may have been endless. If we can but wake up from the nightmare, it all goes away. We’re waking up from the illusion of selfhood, which is engendered by the belief that you are an individual perceiver.

What I’m suggesting is that nothing is solid, that nothing looks the way it is, that everything is light. Not even light as a perception, but light as a word to describe that which is beyond cognitive perception. When you meditate, when you stop thought, you’ll go beyond the realm of the senses. You will not experience a modification of what you did before. What you are erasing are not your senses or the objects of sense experience or the emotions which color them. You don’t have to, in other words, get rid of your loves and your emotions. Nor do you have to eliminate your memories of times gone by or even your expectations of the future.

Yes, true, you can modify the software of existence. You can remove expectation, you can limit desire, you can restrain the senses — these are all various forms of yoga, various pathways. But what I’m suggesting is that all of them only take you into more modifications, in my estimation. They’re all partialities. The only way to truly transcend, to wake up, is to no longer be as you now are.

We don’t want to change the fabric of life — who are we to do that? Rather, what we want to do is to meld with eternity, to become part of that eternal light, beyond light. Substance beyond feeling. Essence beyond believing. There and there alone is existence. And when you live in that nonexistence each day, which we call God realization, satori, nirvana — words, words, words — when you live in that essence, then as you exist in this world, as you meet pleasurable or painful experiences, as your emotions filter around you, as your desires soar through you, you’re unaffected. You’re unaffected by the transitory movements of existence and you can look at a beautiful rose and see its beauty. As a matter of fact, you can redefine definition, look at anything, and see beauty because everything is beauty if you decide that it is. If everything is beauty, there is no ugliness.

You don’t have to feel that pain is particularly unpleasant. Everybody is so afraid of pain these days. They’ll do anything not to experience a little pain. To seek pain is not good, it’s just an attachment. To run away from pain is not good. That is to say, when pain comes to you in life and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, you shouldn’t be afraid of it. Oh, you will be, it will hurt as long as you’re still there, but if you’re not there, who’s there to hurt? No one and nothing.

What I’m suggesting is that there’s an ultimate good that we call love. Not the love that is the opposite of hate, but the love that is compassion, that transcending perfection which is existence, which is the crystal beauty of life and death and beyond, which is the light of existence that weaves the fabric of the dream that you’re now in and all the dreams that have ever been or will ever be. And that that is love and if you turn your attention to that love, then the relative information that comes through the senses and the mind and the body and the memory and the experience and the intellect which discriminates, that all of these things, which would make you happy or unhappy, which would bind you to the conception of being a limited spirit in a body or just a body, don’t even exist. All of the joys and pleasures that have ever been, all of the pains and frustrations that will ever be, all of the experiences that have ever been had, when put end to end will not even be seen in the bliss of eternity of nirvana.

Rather than get all caught up in trying to battle yourself, which seems to me to be self-defeating — why try and destroy what you are? — rather than hate yourself because you don’t make the kind of spiritual progress you think you should, as I see so many people do and be miserable, or love yourself and get caught up in your ego when you think that you’ve made some kind of marvelous spiritual progress and trap yourself in that, rather than get caught up in any of this sticky fly paper that everybody calls life, what the heck, why not instead focus your awareness on eternal things? Because in this life you will have to go through the dream of this life. You will have to experience birth, growth, maturation, decay, and death. There’s no way around it, but that’s not necessarily an unpleasant dream, my friend. As a matter of fact, you’ll hardly notice it.

When you go to the dentist’s office, if you focus on the experience, on the pain, and oh, how awful it is, and you’re filled with fear — a terrible, unpleasant experience — it can ruin your whole day. Or you could go to the dentist’s office and meditate so deeply that you wouldn’t even notice there was an office. Well, what is pain then?

Don’t run towards pleasure. Don’t run away from pain. Both will trap you. Be indifferent to both. That is to say, enjoy both. Don’t make a big deal, in other words, out of your life, your experiences, your memories, your desires, your pleasure and pain, your life or your death. If I take a candle, to bend the well-worn phrase, if I take a candle with the flame and look at it in a dark room, my God, that candle flame is so bright! In the darkness that candle flame will illumine everything, it will be all that exists, I can look at it, and it will be the brightest of flames. If I bring that flame into a cave where there are people who have never seen light, it will blind them. They will think that they have seen the ultimate radiance, those people who have lived in that cave in darkness for so long that they have forgotten what life and light is.

But then if I take that flame and I go outside in the bright day and I hold it up to the sun, you know, I won’t even see that flame — that flame that a few moments ago was the brightest light that has ever been to those that had never seen light — now, as I hold it to the sun, it will not even exist. And if I take that sun, which is so bright that you can only look at it for a few seconds without losing your sight, and I hold it up to a supernova, an exploding sun, I can’t even see it. And if I take that supernova and I hold it up to the white light of eternity itself, which is that which creates, sustains and transforms existence, which we call God, nirvana, eternity, I can’t even see that supernova. And if I dissolve my own perceptions in the body of the self that perceives, then there’s no one to see, the dream has ended, we have left the realm of the senses and we’re awake in the world. We’re traveling the bardo of consciousness and experience in the plane of time, in the realm of the senses, the substance is matter, and the time is eternity.

Refocus your field of attention. Look instead at eternity. Don’t be caught up in your happiness or your unhappiness, your career, your life, your job. Enjoy all things. Don’t run away from them. Don’t be afraid of your desire. What I’m suggesting is that by living a certain type of life you won’t necessarily attain self-realization. There is no certain type of life that you have to lead. It really doesn’t, as a matter of fact, much matter. What does matter, however, is that you refocus your field of attention to God. When your awareness is focused on God, then you can be with anyone in any situation — single, married, celibate, active, in pain, in pleasure — it doesn’t matter, because who’s there to notice? And even if there is someone still there to notice, notice what? When your consciousness is wrapped up in the immortal light of perfection, when all you care about, see, and feel is God, what difference does it make? You can be in your office, you can be out jogging, you can be driving in your car, you can be lying in the hospital dying, what’s the difference?

Because you don’t see the things that others see with their eyes. While they all see ten images from the five screens filtered by the intellect, passed through the emotions and the reflections and the aversions and the attractions, which we call desire, with the limited conception of the body as life and death, as the non-body, the extinction of the body — these things don’t really exist for you. Rather, you’re looking at light and beauty. You are light and beauty, fathomless light and beauty, all of the time. That is the real nature of existence, and those who say that you’re not a realist and you don’t really see life “as it is” are shadows, reflections of the one light, which is eternity.

My simple, patented method for dealing with existence, its trials and tribulations, its good days and bad days and wonderful nights, is to not try so hard. I always see everyone, all my students and everybody in spiritual practice, oh God! They’re trying so hard to be so good and so perfect, and that’s wonderful and that’s admirable and nothing will be lost, they’ll amass a lot of good karma and then they’ll have to spend many lives working out all that good karma. [Rama chuckles.] Rather, what I would suggest is that you just love God and stop worrying about trying to get ahead in the spiritual league, and that if that love is complete, as it grows and that rapture increases, as you turn your awareness more and more to God — which doesn’t mean that you don’t look at the world because God exists here too, you know — but as you do that more and more, then this world will matter less and less and soon you won’t even see this world. It’ll be our candle in the sun and the supernova and the white light of eternity. There’ll be nothing but light, nothing but perfection, nothing but beauty, immortal essence.

And then you’ll look at your friend the flower and your friend the flower will be more beautiful than ever, and your friends the people and your friends the experiences and your friends the emotions and your friend the body, they will not be any less important. Rather, all of them will be expressions of that divine essence, which is perfect light, because eternity is everywhere and nowhere. It’s not simply in the sky, it’s here on Earth too. In all the moments you’ve ever had and experienced in this life, there’s been eternity.

What I suggest, then, is to become aware, to open up your heart and feel eternity, not to pay too much attention to the newspaper, just to pay enough attention so you know what’s going on, but no more. To just bask in the light of eternity and let everything follow its proper course and don’t be too impressed by your successes or your failures, by what life brings to you or what life takes away. Don’t get trapped in that house with the ten rooms. Rather, be an essence, a wind, a breeze that’s flowing through the sky — that’s eternity!

And if you ever need a sense of identity, if it gets a little undifferentiated out there for you, then only assume one identity: love, the love that binds all things together, the love that is liberation. Liberation doesn’t mean going off to some university and getting a degree and being issued a certificate of liberation. It means no ego. Dissolved. Dissolution. Gone. No forwarding address. Nirvana. Or it means being here in the world playing.

That’s what’s expressed in the “Searching for the Ox” pictures in Zen. If you’ve ever looked at that sequence of pictures, which we’ll talk about perhaps some time, you see then there’s self alone. The last picture is really not a picture of leaving this world. While the experience of satori is had, while you become absorbed in that light, then there is playing in the world, the final picture. As you find yourself moving back and forth from the superconscious where you’re compounded and absorbed in light, you’ll find yourself again playing in the world with just enough essence and substance to play. Realization doesn’t lead us to death or to the dissolution of the self. Oh, the self dissolves again and again in that white light of eternity, but it brings us back to this world, to play in it. But we’re different when we come back.

Before self-realization we’re trying so hard, the struggling being. Then we melt in that white light of eternity; we can’t see ourselves — the candle in the sun. The sun, even, is gone. Then we find ourselves here again, but we’ve been transformed by that experience. Then all we can do is play in the world, just play.

Pleasure, pain and the senses. Just another passing experience as you sit on your raft with Huck Finn cruising down the Mississippi. Once in a while we stop the raft, we get off, and we go out and have an adventure. Then we get back on that river of dharma, that old Mississippi. We go a little further down, with Huck and Jim and the King and the Duke and all the other cast of characters that are there in our lives. We’re all on a river, on a raft called consciousness.

Don’t be afraid to stop and get off and have a few adventures. But remember, when it gets thick out there, head back to the raft like Huck and get on the raft and head further down river.