Rama, a Living Buddha

The pathway to enlightenment is, for most of us, very experiential. While you may accept the philosophical concepts that are handed down with meditation—a belief in the reincarnation of the soul; the stateless state of nirvana; a sense of dharma, that there is a code of right and that when we follow the highest good we become the highest good; cycles and theories of cosmic evolution; the different lokas and planes of reality—while we may acknowledge that all of these things exist to some extent, what really brings us forward on the pathway to enlightenment is the need for spiritual experiences and visions.

Spiritual experiences fall into many different classifications. The most common type of spiritual experience is the one that you’re having at the moment. We call it life. We’re not apt to think of life as a spiritual experience. We feel that life, as we’ve come to know it, is flat or bland. But life for one who has not lived is a spiritual experience. It is not so much that life is flat or bland, it’s just that we see it that way. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we don’t see it.

Life is energy, constantly moving, changing, recycling, becoming new. The energy of eternity takes on countless new forms and we experience them. We experience them through our senses, through our mind, through our reflections, through our emotions and through our spiritual bodies.

The spiritual experience of life is never ending. As you sit listening to me, you’re having a spiritual experience. Later, in the day or the evening, your spiritual experience will continue. Life will precisely direct you through a variety of different experiences. These experiences are not the experience. The experiencer has left and gone someplace else. There are no plans to dream, no visions to keep. These experiences are the beginning and end of existence because that’s all there really is.

We sit on an island in the middle of eternity, thinking to ourselves how important we are because we sit on an island in the middle of eternity, not knowing all the while that eternity is an island. We feel we’ve come to know something, that as perceivers with intelligence we’ve developed clarity and order and form, but we’re only an island. The island of eternity.

We wait. We wait for our loves, we wait for our completion, we wait for the fulfillment of our desires. We wait with hope, apathy, resignation, belief. We become despondent, elated; we wait. We wait for the final experience, the vision, the dream quest that will lead us above the ebb and flow of this life and will place us into that which we have not experienced, that which is new, that which will command all of our attention to the point of complete absorption.

Life is the only spiritual experience there is, life and death. Death is but another part of life. There is no beginning and there is no ending. We’re marvelously eternal. And our perception of existence changes as we change, which changes existence. Perception not only defines existence, but it creates existence. It gives it form. Without perception, there is no existence.

When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings, we dream our friends, our relations, we dream our bodies, we dream our dreams. There is no beginning and there is no end. Some days there’s not even a middle.

A person tries to understand truth. They seek to come to some kind of resolution about the meaning of life. They seek to explore their own humanity. What is it to be alive? What is it to be? Or not to be? There are no answers. The waves crash on the beaches as they always have, the children play, the aged and the infirm wait for death, and those in midlife are caught up in a cross-current, somewhere between youth and old age, somewhere between birth and death, trying amid all the cruelties and joys in life to find silence and some kind of perfection—perfection in their art, perfection in their work, perfection in their loves, their children, their spouses, their lovers, their disciplines, their vacations—an endless panorama of spiritual experiences.

Now, if you’re really a perceiver, you have this broad-based acceptance of life, you’re able to look and feel and believe, and yet at the same time you’re somewhat withdrawn. You stand back behind the gateways of your eyes and quietly observe the coming and going of eternity, a witness. You allow life to do to you what it will, trusting it always, and observe. But there’s not so much a sense of action, of being an actor. Rather, of quietly watching the spring buds emerge; the summer with all its fruition; the beauty of death in the fall, transmigration; and the winter, the preparation for the new life.

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It’s enough sometimes. It’s enough to watch, to sit in front of a fireplace and listen to the crackling of the wood and stare into the flame and to contemplate immortality, without thinking about it too much. To feel that in this moment there is all that will ever be or has ever been. Alexander the Great is walking the Earth conquering. Caesar is being murdered. Bach is writing his fugues and preludes. Shakespeare is putting on his latest play. Kennedy is being shot. The world is dissolving in the final cosmic flash. The world is being born out of the molten masses of dreams.

All of the events of all of our lives are going on simultaneously. There is no beginning and there is no ending. There is only this moment, and all the eternities that have ever been or will ever be are contained in this very moment, if you will but look, if you will but look and see that at the moment you are having a spiritual experience.

You are a vision. You are a dream. And we call this waking, waking to life. Slowly like a young fern we unfold, the fronds unrolling, stretching ourselves upward towards the light, feeling the atmosphere of an alien world, reaching for nourishment, for strength, feeling the winds of change, growing without knowing how or why. And it’s enough sometimes. Sometimes it’s enough just to be, to not think, to not calculate, to not triumph, to not lose. It’s enough sometimes to sit in the sunshine, to watch the raindrops, to sit alone and feel this marvelous thing that is existence, that is our self, our body, our spirit. This is a spiritual experience.

A spiritual experience is not something that you have, it’s something that you are. We’re always trying to get to something, to get to the experience, to have the flash, but it’s here, now. It’s quiet. The most profound experience is quiet and fulfilling, drenching you with its life, with the knowledge and awareness of countless eons, timelessness, all present in this moment, all futures forwarded to this address—an endless parade, a panorama, of all that will ever be and never be contained within your perception—standing behind your eyes, watching through them.

Who is watching through them? Who is watching through your eyes? Who is that? The perceiver? Not she who feels or thinks, not she who believes or wants or loves or hates. Who is she? Who is the one? The one who has always been this moment. She is a spiritual experience. She is a dream, a vision.

Spiritual experiences are all there are. There is nothing else, there is no beginning and there is no ending. There are no crimes, there are no punishments, there are no absolutions. These are all ways of talking, games that people play, invented to pass the time. But here, with me, alone, the two of us, on top of the mountain today, or perhaps by the ocean or just back from the ocean, surrounded by the spring, far from the wars and war’s alarms, far from the noise of the city, far from the newspapers, the political strife—the world of mankind has faded away. When you sit here with me today on the shores of existence, you’re in no hurry to go anywhere; the world is forgotten. We seem to have lost our purpose, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve forgotten that there was a past, that there is a future, sitting here today on the banks of existence. No thought, no mind, no belief systems. Perfect stillness. The sound of the waves crashing, the birds in the distance.

Life is a spiritual experience, it is! Today we’re here. Oh, you may think that you’re listening to this tape in your car, or in your home, or wherever you may be, but you’re not. You’re really not. You’re here today with me, sitting here, listening, watching. Or perhaps I’m with you. Listening and watching. It’s just the two of us. There aren’t any more, you know, and there really aren’t even two; there’s only one. There’s only the one who’s listening, the one who’s watching behind the eyes and waiting.

We wait for spiritual experiences. We cause them. We dream them. We dream the self. From a structural point of view, there are naturally different levels of spiritual experiences. While everything is a spiritual experience, we can place order in what appears to be but is not really chaos. The body is a spiritual experience—its perceptions. The body is holy, as are the senses, as are its actions, its gestations, its movements. Desires are holy. Emotions. Everything has its own integrity, in its own time and its own place. But in the world it’s hard to know that, in the cities, with others, sometimes alone, with our mind raging and stampeding and thinking and analyzing and calculating and remembering and giving birth to marvelous thoughts that trap us. It’s hard to know what matters, what we really care about, what is important.

We’ve been so influenced. We’ve been raped repeatedly by the minds of others. Conditioned, programmed, taught how to see, think, believe, taught to cross at the crosswalk, not in between, because it’s functional. And it is! It’s true. But we hate it, we rebel, and that’s a dream, that’s a vision. That’s a spiritual experience. You see? All methods of perception, all ways of seeing, the terrorist and the savior, they’re all one. Each is a spiritual experience. An act of God.

But here we sit, the two of us today, just for a little while, a short time, beyond within, waiting. There are changes, there is transition, or so it would appear outside of this lovely garden that the two of us are in today. But here time is forever. Yet we do note the seasons change. I suppose we could go out into the world and make forays to change the world, but by the time we went out and changed it, the garden might have changed too and we might have missed that. Perhaps it’s better to sit in the garden today, the two of us, and sip some tea.

There’s a level of experience beyond experience. There’s a world of dreams beyond dreams as you know them. We call it the superconscious. It is the home of spiritual experiences of another kind, another order. The waking dreams of life as most people know them are spiritual experiences. Their children, their families, their lives are spiritual experiences. But there is another order of spiritual experience that some of us choose, that some of us are chosen by or that we choose not to choose, therefore choosing. And that’s to be in the garden of the heart, in the perfect stillness where the white light of eternity meets the white light of eternity and there’s flux and stillness at the same time. This is enlightenment. It can be yours, if that’s what you want. It’s not so hard.

People complain that enlightenment is a difficult thing to reach. I don’t think so. I just don’t think that they want to. If you want to, it’s very easy. You simply set your sails for the course. There may be storms along the way. There may be people that you meet, but they’re all part of it too, the journey is.

We find ourselves looking for that Northwest Passage, the way through to enlightenment. And I tell you that the way to enlightenment is enlightenment. There is nothing else. It has always been the same. The times may change, the technologies may change, the leaders may change, the spiritual philosophies may change, the egocentric liberators who bind us may change. But the path has always been the same, and it hasn’t been walked on. It’s rather new, still. I think you’d enjoy it. The Sierra Club has not yet walked all of its members down its ways. No, it’s only been trodden by a few.

Isn’t it funny that in all the history of existence only a few have walked its full length in this world? And you can be one. Oh, you don’t know how far you’ll walk. You can stop whenever you like. If you come to a nice inn, you can spend the night, marry the innkeeper or his daughter, and stay there forever, or for a time, until you decide to move on again. That’s a spiritual experience. We call it a lifetime. One after another like beads on a string, they stretch out before you and behind you. Must you choose the next bead on the string? Yes. No. Is there another string?

I think of telephone networks, of vast interchanges—thousands of calls coming in and out on microprocessors, all on little chips. Little messages, little emotions, passing through wires, through laser beams, crisscrossing eternity. Existence. I think of airports, of places of transition. Places where the planes connect. Realities touch. Watching the passengers leaving the plane and the relatives waiting. Meeting them, hugging them, crying. The businessman who gets off the plane, no one to meet him, thinking about the length of the rental car line. Holding his briefcase and his carry-on luggage for security. Living a life he doesn’t believe in, yet not having a choice. So it would seem.

I think of the farewells—the plane leaving, the soldier hugging his girlfriend of one night. The old woman going to her son’s funeral, dressed in black. The couple traveling together to New York. The young child with its mother, who will cry all the way. The flight attendants moving to another city, another destination, uniforms in place, their suitcases on the little rack with wheels. And the plane leaves. And those who came to see it off go back to their lives and those in the plane, where do they go, into the sky. Units on a microprocessor. Voices in the night. Spiritual experiences.

Each one, each life is a spiritual experience. And you’re having all of them, you are all of them. You are the old woman going to the death of her son, his funeral, and the long processions of agony that follow. You are the soldier and his young lover. You are the flight attendant thinking about getting back to her husband. And you are that endless space through which the planes fly. It’s you who’s listening to all of this. That’s a spiritual experience. It’s you who still believe in truth, when there is nothing else and it’s not necessary to even believe in it, although it’s nice.

I think there might be an end to it one day, an end of this nature and this cosmos. I know there’s an end to it. The cycle closes. The “for sale” signs go up. Last day clearance sale. Then the flash comes. The unexpected light. The radiance beyond radiance, not a physical light, this light. And all the worlds are withdrawn. Everything ends. The void, the dream ends. All that we thought was solid and substantial goes away. Not the ending everyone supposed. No supernovas, just white light. Everything just dissolves, goes away. Just as at the time of death, you will watch this world disappear before your eyes. Everything will become hazy. You’ll hear a high-pitched ringing sound, or a buzzing sound. You’ll feel light, and then suddenly the world will fade from your eyes. When it ends, it will end that way. With white light and beautiful colors. I’ve seen the end. It’s really not a bad ending. No credits though. Spiritual experience. The end. The beginning.

Now I realize too, that there’s a function in a tape. We want information, techniques, methods. We need to have a sense of having gotten something out of it. And this is a good feeling. It creates progress. And this is said without irony or malice. There must be a sense of purpose and order in a world of purpose and order, or in a world of disorder, which lacks purpose. This is the section of purpose and order—in order to give it purpose, sort of a purposeful order.

In order to have spiritual experiences, you must be willing to surrender and give up everything. It’s only with the sense of complete abandon that you can have the highest experiences. Which is why, of course, most people don’t have the highest experiences. You can judge your experience, its level of intensity, you can predict it by how much you’re willing to let go. If you need to cling to your family, your friends, your beliefs, then your experiences will appear to be rather ordinary. The more you can let go, the more you will be.

It’s not intended that everyone in this lifetime who practices self-discovery should reach liberation. That’s not proper. It’s intended that only a few should. And you may be one of those few. And you should always believe, not that you are one of those few, but that you might be. Because you might be. Suddenly your name turns up on the paper having won the lottery. No one is there to collect the check, though.

To have spiritual experiences, it’s necessary to alter your understanding, the way you see life. There are lots and lots of ways. If you need a quick spiritual experience, fast for three or four days on fruit juice or protein powder, or something. You don’t have to starve yourself. But you will immediately change planes of reality. Then after you fast, you’ll find yourself in the world again. But if you need a quick one, that’s good.

Prolonged changes in consciousness come about, and of course occur, through intensive meditation experiences. The bottom line in meditation is to have no bottom line. To sit and meditate with your whole being and to reach that stillness. Then of course, when all thought stops, consciousness becomes eternity. You see that it is.

Another way is contact. Contact with light in any form. To meditate with one who is liberated, with one who is no longer fettered by family, friends, conditions, relatives, appointment books. One may keep these things, but there’s no one in them. For the enlightened, there’s only this garden. And the music, the music of life. The beautiful music. The one who listens.

Contact with such a person produces total chaos in your life. You’re moving along at a certain cycle, a vibratory pitch. Your life is progressing. It’s predictable, within a basic span of human experience. Suddenly you come upon one who is liberated, one who laughs loudly and frequently. Their vibratory rate is infinite. You reach out to touch them emotionally, spiritually, physically, and as you do, as you open yourself to one who is free, that freedom enters you. The vibratory light that permeates their being, that is their soul, enters your being and it changes your vibratory rate. Perhaps just for a short time; it’s maybe initial contact. And you’re no longer the same, for a while, like fasting. Then you come down. Then you find yourself in the world again. Then you make a choice—to go back, to consolidate, to change, or to regress and relapse into your former state. Which is not entirely possible, but you can convince yourself that it is. That’s a spiritual experience too. Maya, we call it—illusion. One of an endless chain of spiritual experiences, dreams, and visions.

It’s unnerving to be naked and to be touched. It’s unnerving, I suppose, to have someone who can look through every fiber of your being and not really look but still look through them. To be with someone who’s completely unemotional and yet, at the same time, a flood of love. If we have something to hide, it makes us nervous. If we’re willing to allow someone to look in, then what’s there to be afraid of? Remember, you’re eternity. No one can hurt you. No one can take away from you that which you are. They can take away your house, your car, your friends, your family, even your own life, but they can’t take away what you are. No one can do that. That is what you are, that is your integrity. This perception is a spiritual experience, a vision of reality, a dream.

We try on different hats in the clothing store of existence—lover, husband, teacher, educator, nurse, engineer, mechanic. We live with others, we live alone, the cycle continues. But where is that spiritual experience that will cause the breakthrough? Where is that moment that we’ve always suspected existed? Where is that moment with Christ when his 12 disciples were seated around him at the Last Supper, laughing and talking—when you’re with the chosen one, the enlightened one? Where has the meditation garden with Buddha gone, with he and his disciples meditating in stillness? Where are all the holy and pure moments that we’ve always suspected existed? Where are they? They’re here with me. I being you, sitting here for you today, on your behalf, since you were ill and couldn’t come. In this perfect light, in this still flux that radiates, as I listen to the voice that speaks, with no sense of what it does or why, curious like a child, enjoying light. I am your spiritual experience, as are you mine. This is all there is until there’s something else, which there is, all the time.

The urge to take you beyond words, to make you conscious of eternity—I can only accomplish this by awakening your eternal longings for spiritual experiences, for a level of awareness seen only by a few in all of the cycles of creation. You can be one of the few. It’s not hard, believe me. If it was, I couldn’t have done it. It’s easy. All you need is the pure love of God, of life, of those around you. And of selfless feeling, a feeling that it’s more fun to give than to receive.

It’s more fun to be anonymous. It’s more fun to meditate and to still our minds and to lead the special life that we lead, we seekers of truth, without thinking too well of ourselves, on a very even, down-to-Earth basis. To be willing to accept pain and pleasure with an even mind, meaning you don’t get too taken out by either one. To love those who love us. To forgive those who condemn us. Knowing that we’re all the time sitting here in the light, and then there’s nirvana, the ultimate spiritual experience, when the world fades away and life fades away and death fades away. No fear of death in nirvana. Only eternal life, eternal being. Not as we’ve come to know it, but as we came to know it once before.

You forget, my friend, you forget that you spent quite a bit of time at that particular resort we call nirvana. And now, out in the world, you’ve forgotten. But it’s not strange or unnatural. It’s nothing that you haven’t done before. It’s easy. Nirvana is easy. Spiritual growth and development is easy if that’s what you want. If you want spiritual experiences, you can have them. All you have to do is want them. You have to be like Dorothy. You have to click your heels three times and want ever so much to be home, more than anything. And then the way will be shown.

Spiritual experiences, dreams, and visions. There are different types of dreams. Naturally, there are dreams in which we wake and find ourselves in another world. This is the dream we call life. Then there are the dreams that we have at night, when we put our heads on the pillow and move into the astral. Most dreams are not too important, in the sense that most of them are numbers that don’t answer, parties we didn’t attend. But occasionally a dream is not a dream. Occasionally it’s not a mindless shuffling from one scene into another, one body into another, one picture into another. And that’s a vision, a dream vision. Suddenly, in the midst of the dream, everything stops. Someone comes to us, a spiritual teacher, a being of light, and the consciousness, the quality of the dream changes dramatically. There’s a feeling of eternality about it, or perhaps a joy so great that we could have only experienced it in a dream—a joy that was too great for this world that we live in, too great for this mind, too great for this body.

In dreaming, we’re in the astral, and in the astral we have a greater capacity to feel, to see and to believe and to understand. After such a dream, you will be different. For two or three weeks, you’ll see a pronounced difference in your consciousness. This is how you know it was not an ordinary dream. Upon waking from the dream, you’ll be surcharged with energy. You’ll find that if you tell the dream to someone, they will experience a part of it too. Don’t tell it too frequently to unreceptive persons; it will dissipate its energy and power for you, but don’t be afraid to share it. To share is to give. To give is not to lose, it’s to grow.

Some people say you shouldn’t share your spiritual experiences, dreams, and visions with others. I think that’s nonsense. It’s a very selfish attitude for a person who cares only about their own realization, and one who cares about their own realization will not have such a realization, or they’ll only have the realization of selfishness. Never be afraid to share a meditation experience, a dream, or a vision. When you do so, you must do so without egotism, without a sense of being special. You had it because you were special, because you were better than others? More advanced? No. You have to feel you had it simply because it was there, it was a gift, which you didn’t deserve, nor were you not worthy. It came, it opened your life, and then when you tell it to another, you must tell it not to make them jealous but only to inspire them. Keep it very simple, very humble and very pure, as it was. Don’t tell too many people.

And then write it down. It’s most important to keep a journal, a journal of your spiritual experiences, dreams and visions. These are moments out of time, and you need to record them because they’re few and precious. By keeping such a journal and keeping it by your meditation table, you will find it’s nice, occasionally, to sit down, before meditating or after meditating, and read over some of them. You’ll find that you can go back to them. On a dark day when you can’t meditate too well, when your thoughts are turbulent, when you open up the journal, you’ll read back about a dream you had, a vision, a spiritual experience. Something with your teacher, something by yourself, when the world fell away and time stopped, and there was time out of time, and everything was quite right.

Beyond words, yet you put it in words. It will bring the vibration back to you. You’ll be able to touch that place and go back there. It’s very important to keep a journal. You don’t have to write down everything that you do or every meditation that you have. It’s better not to; leave them alone. But whenever a special meditation occurs, a special experience, a special dream, type it up or write it down and keep it in your journal. It will grow and it will aid you.

We’re imprinted by the world, by our civilization. We have to re-imprint ourselves with a higher imprinture. We need to publish our experiences to the skies. We do this in our journal. No one reads the journal but us, so we don’t have to impress anyone with our style. We don’t have to hope that someday someone will discover it, publish it, and think how wonderful we were. We’ll let it leave the world when we do. Therefore, we’re free to write as we really are. Because no one would read it but ourselves—we’re writing for ourselves—then the journal will be free of egotism. We won’t be writing for a future audience. We can be truthful, honest, and clear. We’re writing it to God. Try to keep a journal. It’s a very important thing to do in the early stages. Very important.

Try not to hold onto any type of spiritual experience that you have. Very often we have a very powerful experience and then we fixate on it, and in doing so, we lose the purpose of the experience. The purpose of the experience was not the experience itself. The purpose of the experience was to loosen a defined state of being that we were in. Then we cling to another state of being which was the experience and we fixate on that. The purpose of the experience is not to relive the experience. To see the movie once was fine. If the movie comes to town again, it might be fun to see it again. But we don’t have to follow the movie from town to town. Let’s see other movies. Or take a break from the film.

Try not to cling. Enjoy the experience. When you have the spiritual experience, if you’re sitting meditating, you may feel different sensations flooding your body, you may see different lights, hear sounds — ignore them. Be neither attracted nor repulsed, because as soon as you become caught up in them you’ll stop the experience, unless it’s an extremely powerful experience. Let go. Let the experience take you where it will. Don’t try to understand what they mean; they don’t mean anything, they are their meaning. Don’t worry about the color of the light you saw, the sound, the ray of energy. These are all mental fixations, ideations. You’re trying to move into the superconscious, beyond the known, into the vast ocean of light. Let it be. Later, if you want to, you can think about the experience. But during it, just let it happen. If your mind starts to fixate, make the mind quiet. Let go.

If you have an experience and you’re afraid—suddenly you find yourself letting go and dissolving, experiencing something new, don’t feel bad. But realize the next time that you don’t want to do that. You stopped the experience. But a spiritual experience will never hurt you. God is trying to open a new page in a book to show you something new to read, a new picture to see. The next time the fear comes back, remember, ‘Well, last time, I remember I was afraid, I held on and I stopped myself. I’ve meditated, I’ve worked for a long time to have this beautiful awakening, and I stopped it. And I don’t want to have that happen again. I love the experience. This time when the fear comes, I’m just going to shush it away, push it away. This time I want to feel eternity. I want to know it, as it really is. And nothing is going to stop that, nothing. Not myself, not my thoughts, not my fears. What’s the worst that could happen to me? I might become enlightened. I might become happy. What’s the worst that could happen to me? Do I think I’ll lose my mind? Am I afraid that after the experience I’ll be deranged, I’ll be crazy?’

That’s not how it happens. It’s only light. It’s like pure water, it can’t hurt you. You have to trust. In order to have a great experience, a great vision, you have to trust God completely. You have to trust that light of eternity and know that it only, only, has your welfare in mind. Unless you can let go, there will be no experiences.

A great deal of what we do in self-discovery, along with our meditation, is to learn to let go, to break our bonds with the past, to give up that which binds us. Only you know what binds you. You don’t necessarily have to leave a person or a family or a marriage, but you have to leave the part of yourself that clings to it. Sometimes it is necessary to leave these things, only because we’ve outgrown them. They were fine at the time, then we move on. Sometimes they’re working—well, why should we leave them if they’re happy? But sometimes we change and we move in a new direction. We feel eternity beckoning. We know that we could stay in the life we’re in now, with the people we’re with, and that would be a lovely life. But the vision calls us on.

You see, the vision is the vision of self-giving. It’s the vision that we can lead a personal life for ourselves and enjoy ourselves and make people happy. Or we can dedicate our life to a higher principle or ideal and move beyond the personal life to a more cosmopolitan awareness, where it’s not the two of us walking down the street together, just loving each other and sharing our little world, but where we’re able to laugh more freely, love many, and work for many and enjoy many. This is attached love versus unattached love. One is not better than the other, it’s just different, and sometimes we move from one to the other, kind of like a seesaw, until one day we see that unattached love is just much more fun.

The couples walking down the street, arm in arm, they love each other, then they quarrel. They make their plans, their dreams. They go on a vacation together. They dream their lives. They dream their children, their world. Or we can walk down the street by ourselves observing. Perhaps with many friends, talking and laughing. Not having to create the special world between the two of us, which is ultimately our trap, our rebirth. That’s a spiritual experience, a dream, a vision. There are so many of them. At every stage of life, in and out of life, the word of thumb, I suppose, the rule of mind, the matter of the subject is endless. Mixing metaphors dancing.

Consider wisely, oh nobly born, oh you who must cross the threshold of life and death again and again, oh you who is in the bardo—remember, life is the bardo. This is the bardo now, not after death, now. Remember, oh nobly born, choose well, because what you choose you will become. If you choose spiritual experiences, dreams and visions, then you’ll have a life that’s quite dissimilar, quite beyond that which most have. It will make special demands, but they’re lovely demands. Or you can choose the mortal coil, which we’ve all chosen many times and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s old and comfortable, but it lacks luminosity. It lacks the pure intensity, the completion, the moment in time out of time, when everything is one and there’s nothing but light, that transcendental light that is the beginning and that is the end, that is everything. That all-powerful light.

So, oh nobly born, listen well. Neither be attracted nor repulsed as you cross the bardo. No matter what you see, hear or feel here or in any world, know that it is your self-form, that it is an extension of your being. Whether it be the most powerful experience or the most subtle, finite or infinite, be neither attracted nor repulsed. Instead, meditate on the clear light of reality, the clear light of the void, the pure gentle white light of existence that is existence. Feel that, become that.

All these other things are spiritual experiences, dreams, and visions that rise forth and return to that light. Focus on that light and enjoy the experiences as they go by. Whenever you cling to one—a person, a world, a reality, a plane of being, a lifetime, a cosmos, a cosmology—then you will rest there for some time until you let go again, until the tide loosens your ship which has been stuck on the sand beds and you wash free again and you sail onward, in search of the light.