Burning desire

The prison of experience

‘presence’ and ‘absence’

Can’t go ‘beyond’

No ‘disappearing’

No ‘fusion’

No connection

No abidance

No opening

The Nature of Being

Stuck in spiritual concepts

Dear Larry,

Larry: Thank you for the caring answer.

I will reply beginning with the first point 'burning desire' intensity. That is a very key point and I feel I can’t do anything for this if is not there.

Ram: Let’s put it this way, Larry. When you asked me if I can take you ‘beyond’ how badly do you want it? If you’re not highly motivated how can you succeed?

Larry: For sure I cannot have it continuously, it comes and goes on its own it comes more easily from listening to devotional music or reading some love poems like Rumi or Hafiz. But as quickly as it comes it goes and I am left with the old self ready to compromise and accept a life.

Ram: I appreciate your honesty. It seems as if you are a prisoner of experience. By that I mean that you define your happiness with reference to what is happening to you. Experience should neither validate or invalidate you. The spiritual experiences come and go and the worldly experiences come and go. You have no problem accepting the spiritual experiences. So why can’t you accept the worldly experiences? Both the spiritual experiences and the worldly experiences are just experiences. What do the experiences have to do with you, Awareness? What perhaps you don’t realize is that there is no permanent experience of happiness, unless it is the experience of your Self. The reason the experience of yourself is constant and eternal is because you are eternal. Experiences of objects never last because the experiencer, the experienced objects and the experiencing are in time.

You seem to want to be free from your little life. Freedom means freedom from the tyranny of experience. Freedom means that no matter what your life is, good or bad, it has nothing to do with you.

Larry: I cannot continue right now, inquiring in what to say next, Presence comes and it becomes meaningless to continue that issue...

Ram: Well, you will have to wait until Presence goes to give me an answer. There are never any questions when Presence is present. They only come when it goes. So the big question then is: why does it come and go? Any presence that comes and goes is not real. So what use is this kind of presence?

In fact, Presence is not coming or going. You are just having an experience which you call ‘Presence’ and then you have an experience which you might as well call ‘Absence.’ And I take it you don’t like ‘Absence’ so you want to ‘go beyond’ and experience Presence all the time? Is that it? But you say your desire to do that is inconstant too, like the experience of Presence.

Larry: By Presence I mean being here with intensity, aware, with no particular content in the mind or no particular intention...that means that to answer to your letter I have to be in my mind? And in this presence there isn’t even a desire for freedom.

Ram: Yes, you have to be in your mind. Why? Because this problem you have is in your mind. If you are out of your mind then why do you want to go beyond? If you are out of your mind you are beyond. Your desire for love, etc. is in the mind. Desire is the mind. You have a mind problem. This is an easy problem to fix if you want it fixed. But before we can fix it you have to see that it is the problem.

Here is another question. When are you not present? You can’t even realize you are absent if you aren’t present. You report to me that you experience Presence and the absence of Presence. So who is reporting this? It has to be somebody other than Presence or the absence of Presence. That somebody is already beyond. If that somebody is you, then you are already beyond.

 Larry: Actually I never desired freedom, I desire love, fusion, disappearing and yet being present to my disappearing.

Ram: Why do you desire love, fusion, disappearing? Because when you disappear you are free of your small self. What you want is to be free of the desire for love that the small self has. The desire for love is there because you don’t realize that love is your nature. You think it comes from someone or something else.

You are always present when your disappearing happens. If you weren’t present how would you know you disappeared? You are also present when you are present. So what is the problem? The problem is that you want your small self to disappear for good because you have heard that enlightenment is the absence of ego. Is that correct? Well, you have got hold of a very frustrating idea. Your small self is not going to miraculously disappear for good, nor is the experience of Presence going to be constant. The only way out of this problem is to see it from the Self’s point of view. The self does not have a problem with your small ego self. It is just fine to It. And the Self does not care when Presence appears or when it goes. Why? Because it is always free of the ego and Presence. And that is what ‘beyond’ means. This is why a spiritual seeker should be seeking freedom.

Larry: Freedom has not much meaning to me, I feel more connected to the word Truth, because I felt it in my gurus, I felt they were Truth!

Ram: Perhaps you have heard the statement, “And the Truth shall set you free.” Truth is the same as freedom. What is the Truth? That you are whole and complete, that nothing is missing. Because you don’t know this you want love, disappearance, etc. If this is not acceptable to you then perhaps you will tell me what you mean by ‘Truth.’

Larry: I never knew before what Truth really was and then there it was not related to any rational content just their Being was it.

Ram: That’s right. Being is truth. What is the nature of being? Chaitanyam or Awareness. What is the nature of Awareness; it is whole and complete, limitless, eternal, always free, etc. The purpose of a guru is to help you understand that you are Truth. What good does it do if you can see them as Truth but you can’t see yourself as Truth? In what way are you different from them? The problem here is that you have projected the Truth that you are outside onto someone else.

Larry: So now there is a movement of love coming up and may be I am connected to you right now, difficult to say

Ram: You can’t be connected. You are me. The one in you to whom the love appears is me.

Larry: So I wait for this wave to subside to continue....see right now the problem I stated is not there, but using my memory I know it will come back because I cannot abide for long in This, just waves coming up and some ringing in the head.

Ram: That’s right. The problem is in the mind. When the mind is engaged in some other experience it forgets that it wants to ‘go beyond.’ And yes, the desire to ‘go beyond’ returns. This desire is there because you see yourself as incomplete. Look into yourself and see if this is true. See if there is anything missing. If you can see that you are complete then you need to retain this knowledge so that when you want to ‘go beyond’ you can kill the desire to go beyond with the knowledge that you are already free. If you are complete you are free.

You say, “I cannot abide for long in This.” This is absolutely true. Any experience is temporary. So the question then becomes how to be happy when you are having experiences you don’t want. And to do that is to stop wanting what you want and want what experience presents to you.

Larry: This is an example of how I meditate, just answering to somebody and inquiring into the Self

Ram: So what does the Self say?

Larry: Once I was singing for my guru and I felt like Sita calling Rama and I was calling him Ramu, Ramu...so now there is only consciousness, but my perceptions are normal, just something in me knows this in a way that is not mind knowledge, is not memory, just knowing without knowing probably bah!

Ram: That ‘something in me’ is you. Why objectify it? Why not take it as yourself. This will solve your problem. This will finish your sadhana. It sounds like you have been doing too much sadhana for a long time without Self knowledge and that you are confused about who you are.

Larry: What makes things difficult is that my heart knows but my mind not yet, I mean intuition has not reached the mind

Ram: This is absolutely correct. This is why I said above that you have to come into your mind. The whole problem is in your mind. I think you are victim of the experiential anti-intellectual view of enlightenment. Enlightenment is for the mind. You are already enlightened. I think the problem is that your thinking is confused. If you want help from me then you will have to learn to think about things differently. You picked up a whole vocabulary of words and ideas that are related the experiential view of enlightenment and now that you are ready to go beyond, these concepts are keeping you stuck. If you want me to teach you, you will have to change the way you think about the problem. You will have to get your thinking in harmony with reality. There is a way to do this but for someone who is as spiritual as you, who obviously has had a lot of spiritual experience, it would be a very challenging process because it would contradict some of your core ‘spiritual’ beliefs.

Larry: What is beyond to me? opening and opening and opening

Ram: Opening and opening and opening into what? Who is doing all this opening? What is being Opened?

Larry: I used the word beyond but actually I just meant beyond the small self, not beyond This that is here, where else?

Ram: OK. Now tell me what you mean by “This that is here.” I’m saying that what you call This that is here’ is you, the Self. There is no small self. Small self is an idea. There is ‘This that is here’ and that is the only ‘you’ there is. The problem you’re having is that you think you are something other than ‘This that is here.’ If I was your guru I would give you the name ‘This that is here’ so you wouldn’t forget who you are.

Larry: Maybe I will stop here because right now there isn't any problem. I hope this letter will be helpful to give you another side of where I am at.

Ram: It seems that the problem is not a very big issue if it comes and goes. It might be interesting if you could tell me why it isn’t a problem now.

Love,

Ram:

P.S. I will try to answer the other points in a different 'mood'.

Ram: If you have one set of views in one mood and another in another mood, then who are you? How can I teach you if you are one mood one time and another mood the next? This means that I have to have a teaching for each mood. And then I have to make sure that the teaching for each mood does not contradict the teaching for the other moods or the teaching will just confuse you further. Amyway, the jury is still out on whether I can help you or not. Learning non-duality for an experience-oriented dualist is hard work.