One important lesson to learn is that things happen exactly as they are meant to. All the different possibilities you imagine are just ideas. What actually happens is the only thing that could happen. Life is that which happens, and there is nothing that happens without a purpose. We need to learn to use what is—as food for our growth.
We walk on the earth with our feet but we touch life with our mind. When there’s a relationship between body and mind, it gives stability to the heart. The heart is the seat of our Being.
The body, by itself, is temporary. The mind is a stranger. But when it connects to the body, the mind is no longer a stranger. It becomes a different mind— your own. It’s no longer the mind of mass conscious- ness. When the mind connects to the body, you get a taste of your heart, of your higher feelings, your real feelings. That’s the direction. From those tastes, you understand that you cannot take yourself to be a separate somebody.
The whole of Existence is connected. Your body is not given to you for yourself. It’s a part of the Earth. It was given to you so you could bring Conscious energy to it. By developing, you support the Earth to develop and become what it’s supposed to be. Instead of having a fragmented life, you could experience yourself as a part of the totality of the cosmos. And to do that, you need to bring Conscious energy to the Earth by bringing it to your earth—your body. That’s why you are here.
If you actually choose to do something, your doing is really “choiceless.”
Because when you see, it’s like seeing that you can drink water from two different sources. One is clean and fresh. The other is muddy, with all kinds of dirt in it. So the choice is clear. It’s not really a question. When understanding is present, of course you’re going to choose clean water. And when you are not connected to your understanding and choose the muddy water, the disharmony that results becomes an event that is harmonized by those who see it in understanding. So no matter how much disharmony is created by people’s “wrong” choices, it is always harmonized by the under- standing of those who are in a higher dimension of consciousness, with God as the ultimate see-er. That’s why the cosmic harmony cannot be disturbed.
Every moment is an eternal moment. Our eternal nature can be experienced only in the moment. The moment is Timeless—free from past and future, and lets us taste the eternal quality of our life.
It is possible to be connected to our eternal aspect, while allowing our relative aspect to participate fully in our daily life. Then there is no identification with the body, mind, or feelings. As they manifest, we simply see them as temporary aspects of ourselves.
When we don’t taste our own existence, we serve our temporary, relative aspect (which is in the cycle of birth and death), and fear remains a part of our life.
When we taste our existence, we are serving our eternal nature. We see life as one whole unified Existence, which we are not separate from. To put all this into practice, the first step is body-mind connection. Our mind should be where our body is. We can experience that the body is inhaling and exhaling. Our body is manifesting, and we can see that without identification. We have a chance to see this body is just a garment we wear while we’re on this Earth. Then there is no reason to have fear. Only when we lose the fear of death does the fear of life disappear.
There is no such thing as “matter” by itself. Everything is in the process of transformation. Nothing exists by itself. The second you measure something and quantify it, it is already transformed and is no longer the same as what you’ve measured. Everything is in relationship with everything else.
The nature of the universe is such that an exact explanation of anything is impossible, because nothing is static. There is nothing that is not in the process of being transformed. Still, the desire to formulate things as exactly as possible, and the benefit that comes from doing so, are totally necessary for a student of the Truth. Truth is experienced in the taste of your own existence, not in explanation. The answers to your questions exist in the Truth, which already exists in you.
To wake up and remain awake—that is a meaningful aim. When you are awake, understanding is present. And the purpose of the universe is to increase Consciousness, which means to increase understanding. Whatever you understand becomes the foundation for new understanding.
If you get stuck in the level of what you have already understood, that understanding eventually “deteriorates” into thoughts, then confusion enters and brings you to lower levels of consciousness.
When you hear Truth, and you chew it and swallow it and digest it, it becomes your own understanding. Only then can you really say, “I understand.”
We can explain the universe and say it’s made of charged particles, or that it’s made of energy and vibration. This may be so, but that’s only about the outer form. What about the meaning? What’s the meaning of your life? Why are you here? What purpose do you need to fulfill? Who is going to answer these questions? Our education doesn’t raise the questions of “Who are you?” or “Why are you here?”
Neither science by itself, nor spirituality by itself, can give us the necessary insight into ourselves. We each need to bring the scientific and the spiritual together in ourselves. From the first, we can find out about the observable aspects of life. From the second, we can start to look into the meaning, into the realizable universe. If we bring these two together, we find the four dimensions of Existence: matter, energy, Consciousness, and Awareness. By looking into these four dimensions, you can begin to look into yourself, and place yourself in relation to the rest of Existence.
Imagine a country where everyone really knows the taste of I have a body—not just for a few seconds, not just on and off. Do you need police in that country? Do you need a lot of laws?
The taste of I have a body brings people to less identification. When you are connected to the body, you do not harm lifeI have a body doesn’t refer to the body you imagine in your thoughts, nor to your interpretation of your sense impressions. The body is Awareness! You can’t limit it to something material or physiological. The body is that which is.
Existence exists. This is the truth and you are in it. Now, what do you want to do with that? You want to bring it to your life, but you picture some “you” in your mind and you want that “you” to have it. But that’s not reality. Existence exists is reality. Reality always is. When you don’t see it, it’s because you are imagining another “reality,” an imaginary one.
The light of Existence is so strong, the imaginary dis- appears in its presence. When Existence exists, there is no “you.” You are Existence—this is always the truth. But you need to develop, you need a unified I, so you can bring that knowledge into your life. Then, instead of believing you are “you,” and living the life of “you” in the darkness of identification and separation, you can be yourself, be Existence, and manifest your life.
Each thought, unless you see through it, becomes a crystallization, a hole that your mind will push you into. That’s why you have to examine everything until you bring it to seeing.
The higher our level of consciousness, the more open we are to see the Source of whatever we look at. The lower our level of consciousness, the less we see the Source, and the more we mistakenly believe ourself to be the source of our own existence.
What makes us human? You become truly human when you enter into the realizable aspect of yourself. That’s the real difference between humans and animals. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What’s the purpose and meaning of my life?” Until we have these questions, we’re still living in a level below our potential. Our essential questions make us human.
We are identified with our name and physical form, with our lifestyle and our possessions. We think they give us an identity. But they’re just limitations. You limit yourself by your identification with the friends you have, with the car you drive, with your partner, your parents and children. You “have” them, at most, for as long as you have this body. When this body dies, “have” goes with it. What you possess is temporary at best, limited to your lifetime on this Earth.
But what is the truth of yourself? The truth of yourself is eternal. Your home is not Spain or France or the U.S.—it’s the entire cosmos. You are an unseparated part of all that exists, but the “education” you’ve received so far won’t let you comprehend this. We are conditioned. We don’t really have a mind—we have a conditioned mind, a “crystallized” mind, and we can’t think beyond our conditioning.
The purpose of relationships is to break down all these partitions. For that, we need the support of the “triangle principle.” If you and I relate as two ends of a line, how could we possibly have a peaceful relationship for long? If you say one word I don’t like, I become your enemy. But with the triangle principle, when we interact, we each experience our connection to that which is higher than ourselves. Then we can relate in harmony. The purpose of relationships is to give us the possibility to have a taste of unity within diversity.
When we focus on pleasing our personality, we’re actually suffering. We try to fulfill the desires or concerns of our personality, all of which are tied to the past and future. But real satisfaction comes from being present and in harmony with what is happening.
When you’re sitting in a movie theatre, you become so identified with what happens, you forget you’re just watching shapes and colors on a screen. In the same way, we take everything that appears on the screen of our consciousness to be real. We forget about the light that caused those images to appear. We become totally identified with everything we do and our interpretation of it. “I’m good.” “I’m miserable.” “I was wrong.” “I was right.” We get caught in the wheel of identification with ourself.
What we think of as freedom is not freedom. Freedom really means becoming free from yourself—from your identification.
You can’t get rid of your unconsciousness. It’s already formed, and mass consciousness is always feeding it. So “you” (your personality, the “you” you believe you are) will always be unconscious. You cannot make life into a formula—“Do this. Don’t do that.” Even if you sometimes succeed in manipulating your personality so it behaves the way you want it to, the next time, it may do just the opposite. Whatever improvement you seem to have achieved, it is still in the unconscious dimension. So you really haven’t accomplished any- thing. You’ve just moved temporarily from one place to another on the unconscious plane.
But if you see how your personality manifests, whether “good” or “bad,” whether you like or dislike it, the part of you that sees is already in a higher dimension of consciousness, and has a harmonizing influence.
Everything that exists has a connection to the source of its existence. To know that connection, you have to let go of all that you think you are and all that you think you are not. If you let go of everything, what takes place? You come to silence, and there is no “you.” There is nothing identifiable, yet that silence vibrates with the energy of Existence. Not Existence as we imagine it, but Being-existence. You had Being before you appeared on this Earth. But to understand this, you have to let go of your “riches”—your identification.
The more you move towards Self-understanding, the more you begin to see that there is only one self in the whole of Existence. Self-understanding means understanding the Totality, connecting to the unlimited energy of Existence.
To be who you are, you need to be present, and to be present, you need to bring your body and mind together. The next moment, you again have to bring body and mind together. It’s like a ladder that reaches from the Earth to heaven. You climb up, but you always come back down. As long as you have a body, as long as you’re on the Earth, you always need to begin again with the first rung. But the beauty of it is that each time you climb, your consciousness and wisdom grow. So you are fulfilling the purpose of your existence.
Never be sorry you had only a short moment of consciousness, because you can always start again. The joy of life is in that first step. If someday, you think of yourself as already close to the top of the ladder, or even halfway up, you should question whether you have climbed at all! Our starting point is always on this Earth, in this body. You are here to understand that, and to learn to bring consciousness to every cell of your body. Every time you connect to the body, you become more conscious—you live your life on this Earth, but with clarity, because your consciousness comes from a higher dimension.
You can only see things as they really are when you see yourself as you are in relation to them. It means to see things as a part of your existence, not as separate phenomena. Existence is one unified whole—nothing separate exists. There is one life force, and it enters into everything that has been created. That means it also flows through you. When you are present, you experience it. In experiencing it, you are no longer something separate.
Sincerity comes from taking a good look at your life, from seeing that all the outer pleasures you seek don’t bring you inner fulfillment.
Honesty comes from seeing that what you are has to be weighed by your own conscience. It doesn’t matter what you may get other people to think and feel about you. When you are alone with your own conscience, you know how close or far you are from putting the Truth above yourself. Honesty means giving more importance to Truth than to yourself.
Simplicity comes from seeing that even with all your efforts to accumulate knowledge, you do not have understanding. Then something may open up in you that desires direct connection to Truth.
We need sincerity, honesty, and simplicity—we need all three. The main obstacle to development is identification. Our identification prevents us from seeing things as they really are. The more we raise our level of consciousness, the less identified we become.
The purpose of the Universe and our individual purpose are the same. The Universe manifests to increase consciousness. We evolve by increasing our own consciousness. When you raise your level of consciousness, you can become unified within yourself—you are in the heart. And your consciousness is there, unseparated from the heart. The union of mind and heart, of Consciousness and Conscience, gives birth to new understanding.
Ordinarily, we are identified with our personality, so we experience our interpretation of ourself and the events of life, not what actually is. Knowing by taste that body breathes is the beginning of self-development. The more this direct knowing grows, the more it includes knowing Existence exists.
We need to grow, to develop. The more we do, the closer we come to the Source. The more we grow, the finer our consciousness becomes, until it becomes Consciousness that can see things as they are.
In openness, we receive the energy that comes from a higher dimension. To receive it and make it our own, we have to “ascend,” to grow towards it. Higher and lower dimensions are connected through ascending and descending—“heaven” descends towards the Earth, and Earth has to ascend towards heaven.
We are the bridge between these two. We have to receive from heaven and give to the Earth. Under- standing is the vehicle for this movement. The light of Consciousness shines, and when you receive it, it becomes the substance of your understanding. Understanding is permanent. It never dissolves.
Something real exists. We cannot qualify or quantify it. It simply is. We can experience it only for an instant, because we are not unified in ourselves. That’s why we’re not fully able to receive the support of the unity of all that exists.
The question is, how do we prepare ourselves to be in the field of Unity? The answer is to bring our three parts together. We don’t have command over our feelings, but we can start by asking our mind to do something. We can ask it to come to the process of inhaling and exhaling. Staying with that, the feelings eventually come in, and we experience being more unified in ourselves.
The thoughts in your mind are the voices of others. They are formed mechanically, unconsciously. To come to your own thoughts, you have to be conscious of your own existence. Your real thoughts are elevated. They come to you from your essential nature. They relate to the meaning and purpose of Existence. Your Being participates in them. When they come from your Timeless nature, they are realizations, because they come from reality and present reality to you.
Life touches life. Existence manifests itself. When you have body-mind connection, you are on the right road. You don’t need to be worried about where this road is going or where it ends up. You can simply be grateful you are going in the right direction. The difference between being lost and simply being is one breath. Because in knowing you are breathing, you invite Conscious energy to participate. That which is conscious of the breath is conscious of your existence, and reminds you that you are here on this Earth for a purpose.
To relate to the aim and purpose of your life, you need to bring body, mind, and feelings together, and then enter into the present moment, which gives you a taste of your existence.
Everything that exists exists in harmony with the Totality and fulfills some cosmic purpose. We have the unique possibility to choose the level of consciousness we live in. We can be a conscious part of that harmony, and fulfill our purpose harmoniously, or we can be an unconscious part.
Each thing that appears—and the process it goes through to find its harmonious place in Existence—is part of the purpose of Existence. We have the possibility of consciously participating in the process of Existence. That’s also the way to discover and fulfill our individual purpose.
When you want to learn a foreign language, your mind learns it for you. When you want to read a map, you use your mind. But even more useful is the mind that connects to the body.
If your mind connects to your body, it can help you a lot. You can’t ask your body to be where your mind is, because your mind might be on the other side of the world right now. But you can ask your mind to be where your body is. Wherever your body is, that’s where your mind should be. And when it’s with the body, the mind is freer, more available. It can think better. You can experience the effect on your life in other ways, too. If your mind is with your body while you’re cooking, the food you cook is better. If your mind is with your body while you’re shopping for clothes, you probably buy more suitable clothes. But the real benefit of body-mind connection is the possibility it gives you of entering higher dimensions of consciousness.
The past and future are curtains that separate you from who you are. When you’re in the past, you don’t really exist. When you’re in the future, you don’t really exist. But when you remain present in the moment, you have freedom from time, and your entire past and entire future exist—in this very moment.
We think the present is something between the past and the future. That’s a mechanical way of relating to the word. That would mean the present is in the same level as the past and future. But the present is free from past and future. It’s in a higher dimension than time/space events. It has one foot in time and one in the Timeless.
So to be present, you have to rise above yourself. What self is that? The self you think you are. If you rise above it, you see that’s exactly what you are not! You are not what you think you are. You are not what you feel you are. You are not what your sensory perceptions say you are. What you think, feel, and sense are only events. But you are not an event. You are that which is conscious of events. And to be conscious of events, you need to be in a higher dimension than those events, so you can see them.
Fear is just another emotion. There’s nothing extraordinary about it. The remedy for it is to lose the fear of being afraid. As long as you don’t accept things as they are, you will always be afraid. If you accept things as they are, you lose your fear, because you see what you are. You see you are two things at the same time—your observable aspect, and your realizable aspect. Your observable aspect is in darkness. Your realizable aspect is Light. Light has to penetrate the darkness in order to create more consciousness.
As your understanding grows, your wish is not to change outer conditions just so you can live your life more comfortably. You wish to grow, so you can function harmoniously in any situation or condition.
The Earth is one ring in the cosmic chain. For Conscious energy to reach the Earth, we have to receive it. When we receive Conscious energy, the Earth receives it.
What happens at the moment you receive Conscious energy? You don’t live life reactively. You see, and you manifest in harmony. And the more harmony, the less chaos. You use time instead of being used by it.
When you have body-mind connection, you are supporting life. When you are “disconnected,” you create chaos. The more you receive Conscious energy, the more you see yourself in unity. When you separate yourself, the distance you create between you and everyone and everything else is filled up with fear. Fear is the ultimate entropy, because it doesn’t let Love, the Divine emanation of the Absolute, pass through. Fear prevents Love. But Love diminishes fear. Love connects the links in the cosmic chain, so energy can flow as it should.
If you look at the state of humanity and of the world, you can clearly see that the cause of all disharmony is that we live without participation of Consciousness or Conscience. Instead, we have thoughts and morality. Because we don’t taste that we exist, we see everything not as it is, and so we don’t really understand anything. To see reality, one must be real.
The Absolute manifests as everything that exists, as every subatomic particle, in order to know itself. That’s why the universe was created. The Absolute knows itself through you knowing yourself.
In the school of life, there are three stages. The first is growth of our essence. Then the essence is covered by the personality as it forms. The third stage is self-development—seeing through the personality and dis-identifying from it in order to feed the essence. Because of the way life is on Earth, people rarely enter the third stage. That’s why things are the way they are.
Although we live a hundred years or less, we still have the possibility of comprehending the universe. Your understanding, no matter how small, is independent of your body, mind, and feelings, because they are not who you really are. When they die, nothing actually happens to you, because you are your understanding.
If you can accept things as they are, you remain natural. Being connected to your naturalness, you find the naturalness that underlies the seemingly unnatural manifestations of life around you. You connect to the Timeless Awareness that exists in everything and cannot be destroyed or eliminated by the way things manifest in time.
At every moment, we come to a fork in the road. One direction is right and one is wrong for us. Of course, ultimately, there is no wrong direction, and even if we take the wrong road, from the perspective of Existence, it will eventually lead to the right road. But if you come to the perspective of “I am the one walking down this road,” then immediately right and wrong come in, and what you do at each moment of your life matters.
Things are as they are. This is true. But you can’t omit anything from this clarity. Within it, your choices matter, and your understanding of right and wrong, according to the degree of harmony between your consciousness and your Ultimate nature, matters. There is a certain dignity you need to have at any given moment in the face of Existence.
The weight of seven billion unconscious people, the entire weight of people’s unconsciousness, is needed to keep you believing you are your personality, separated from the totality of Existence. In reality, mass consciousness has no weight, but it appears to, unless you come to the level in which you see you are free of it. If something false becomes widespread, it appears more believable. So when seven billion people believe in separation, it appears as if it’s true. If only ten people on the Earth were unconscious, look how strange the concept of “you are separate” would seem.
When you have a moment of Consciousness, you drop all the weight of mass consciousness. That’s why Consciousness has such a definite taste.
You can’t do much to change or control the situations, people, and events in your life, but you can raise your level of consciousness and relate to them consciously. Then they become food for your growth. Every condition is really a gift given to you by Existence.
