Andrew Cohen - N°6 - LAST RETREAT - January 2025

So I wanted to speak with all of you about my emphasis on no relationship. So I want you to understand it very deeply because it's foundational for the teaching of evolutionary enlightenment. So remember that the in evolutionary enlightenment there's two truths. There's the being enlightenment. Enlightenment when you awaken to unmanifest reality is becoming enlightenment which is a relationship to manifest reality the creative process. So this is nothing and something those are the two dimensions of reality we want to relate to find liberation nothingness emptiness and somethingness manifest reality something and nothing. So what we're looking for, we're striving to, we're striving to find a perfect relationship to reality. That's the goal. If you want to be free, you want to be liberated, you want to have a perfect relationship to reality, if such a thing is possible. So we want to work towards, you want to strive to have through spiritual effort, a perfect relationship to manifest reality, unmanifest reality. That's the idea. That's the point and the purpose. What's the most perfect relationship to unmanifest reality? What's the most perfect relationship to manifest reality? Now, with unmanifest reality or emptiness, a lot of people don't understand emptiness because they still think it's a something. When they talk about it, they're talking about emptiness as if it's a something even though it's not anything at all. So, what's a perfect relationship to nothingness? No relationship. I want you to really understand this. The first goal is here. What's the most perfect relationship to nothingness or emptiness or unmanifest reality, no relationship? No relationship means not two, which means zero. This is a state of consciousness in which there's no relationship to any between two things. The relationship to nothingness which is which if you begin to understand it is a context in which you can experience infinite unimaginable absolute primordial freedom without beginning without end. Enlightenment is a state of inner freedom. So how do I experience this state of inner freedom? When contemplating the nature of emptiness, unmanifest reality but having no relationship to it. Sounds counterintuitive, right? No relationship to the unmanifest awakens you to the reality of the unmanifest. So you experience infinite freedom. You follow the no relationship is the way, the path and the way. That's what people in Zen are trying to do all the time. Cultivate no relationship. So that's one aspect of the argument. The other aspect of the argument is that we need to disembed oursel from ignorance and unconsciousness. When you wake up and you become conscious, when you wake up to enlightened awareness, you start to see, oh, I was I was thinking about this in a wrong way. I was stuck in ignorance, unconsciousness, wrong ideas, wrong thinking, which is obscuring my clarity of mind. So the way you go from being lost to being found is by letting go of wrong ideas. And with enlightenment, we want to be very radical. So the radical approach is going from I realize I have wrong ideas to having no idea whatsoever. That's the metaphysical leap. It's a metaphysical challenge. And it's what a lot of people struggle with. A lot of people who are living in ego consciousness all the time find it very difficult to assume the position of no relationship or no idea whatsoever. This is the spiritual work going from something wrong ideas to nothing. That's what no relationship means. So the pursuit of the understanding of emptiness as a direct cognition as a direct experience is a big deal. Most people don't ever really get there. So they can't let go of their mind. So a big part of the Buddhist awakening has to do with this particular equation we're speaking about right now. So no relationship is the goal of unmanifest liberation. But it's also the way to disembed yourself from ignorance every day. The way you purify your mind, purify your soul, purify yourself by liberating yourself from wrong ideas, not once but constantly and continuously every single day by assuming the position of no relationship. is how you practice constant self-renewal in the context of awakening to enlightened awareness. That way you never get old. A lot of spiritual practitioners get old because when they talk about their spiritual experiences, they're talking about ancient history. It's not fresh. It's not alive. It's not living inside them anymore. True for some teachers also. But we want the enlightenment to be living alive and fresh and never new. So pursuing this metaposition of no relationship as it relates to unmanifest reality is the way it's done. I don't know. So nothingness doesn't feel any particular way. Doesn't look any particular way. It's unimaginable. You can't imagine nothing. Something can't imagine nothing. Your mind is something. Your ego is something. Can't imagine nothing whatsoever. It's unimaginable. So you want to contemplate that which is unimaginable every day. It's a constant method of self- purification. If you stay with it, you'll be always be fresh and reborn, alive. Your enlightenment will be alive, vibrating with realness and authenticity. But you have to really contemplate the nature of what it means to have no relationship from the perspective of being, unmanifest being. So you want to get to the point where you understand that no relationship is freedom. It is enlightenment. It's freedom itself. right now. You want to understand it with your mind, you understand it with your soul, want to understand with your true self. So it needs to become a metaphysition as a as a spiritual metaphysical reference point that's always available to you. Nothing whatsoever. That's emptiness as one half of the whole picture of the totality of reality. Emptiness is one half of the whole picture of the totality of reality. It's not the whole picture. It's one one part of it. It's one perspective. There's two perspectives here and this this is one. But for enlightenment, you need to become grounded in this perspective. You need to really become grounded and stable in it. And if you're doing it, your enlightenment will be flowing. It'll be alive. It will be fresh. How beautiful that sounds. Isn't it beautiful? I wrote a book called Living Enlightenment. This is what I was talking about, man. But we have to do the spiritual work which is the cultivating the metaposition of no relationship which is the zero position. So as I've been explaining over the last three days, the god consciousness is the knowledge of the sum totality of all of reality. Knowledge of emptiness is the knowledge of the sum totality of half of reality is half of god who godance. But this is eternal. When we're talking about dimension of reality that's eternal, unborn, uncreated, timeless, formless, beginningless, and endless. It's with eternity is what I'm speaking about. Being connected to knowledge of eternity as a conscious cognition, as a conscious knows, as a direct experience. And if you do, it'll change you in a beautiful way. So no relationship is the right relationship to half of the sum totality of all of reality half of God consciousness. And to repeat it will free you from ignorance. If you have no relationship it will clean up your mind's wrong relationship to everything over time because you're resisting the temptation to identify with anything. And as I was explaining, it creates infinite space. The space is a place of purification and truth. So if you're serious about this, you want to spend as much time in this context of infinite space as possible, much as you can afford. It'll liberate you. It'll clean you up, set you free. So ignorance is always available. Ignorance is always trying to catch your ego, trying to accumulate clumps of ignorance to cloud up your mind. So the position of no relationship, if you're very good at it, it prevents that process from happening. Most people's minds are covered with ignorance, complete delusion, unconsciousness, wrong ideas. Right? So no relationship will set you free and it's not just one experience. It's a constant metaposition that needs to be taken. This is half the picture. So we want to go from and you're teaching me want to go from wrong relationship which is ignorance. I realize I have a wrong relationship to reality to change that. I'm going to go from wrong relationship to no relationship which is what I'm talking about. Wrong relationship to no relationship. That's half the picture. So then in relationship to manifest reality, the world of the body, mind, personality, world, cosmos, manifest reality. Then if you're a sincere spiritual asthma, you want to know what is the right relationship to reality. Somebody please tell what's the right relation to reality. I want to know what that is. I can get up and I can walk straight. I can turn around and go left or right and follow my face. Tell me what the right relationship to reality is. Part of being enlightened is knowing the answer to the question, what's the right relationship to reality? Right? There's no two right answers to that question. We'll talk about absolutes. Now, please tell me the right relationship to reality. Oh God, please tell me what the right relation to reality is. Awakening to emptiness itself won't answer that question. He'll tell you about nothingness and infinite freedom, but he won't tell you what the right relationship to manifest reality is. That's the second question. So I want to know, we want to know what's the right relationship to manifest reality. And this is a more complex equation than the first one. So if you pay attention to manifest reality as you experience it on a momentto moment basis, you'll notice it's like a moving target. What seems to align in one moment a minute later was out of alignment. Right? In terms of your perception and observation of the nature of manifest reality that what you see in alignment one moment you look the next moment it's out of alignment. As the Buddhist said everything's changing all the time. Right? The Buddhist famous statement everything changes all the time. So we live in a manifest reality is a world of constant change and shifting sands. So when you think you're seeing clearly in one moment nature of the real you might be but things might be shifting so a moment later things will have changed which is the nature of manifest reality and its complexity right. So if you're going to be on your toes here if you're going to get this right you have to be constantly readjusting your position so you're all constantly aware of the nature of change that's constantly unfolding. So this is when you go from I don't know to I want to know. I want to know in this moment what's this? What's the what's the position of perfect alignment? Because a minute ago was like this. Now it's like here I want to be aware of that shift because I want my behavior, my actions, my choices to be in alignment with that absolute truth. The way things are in terms of manifest reality. So you have to be very careful, very sensitive, very observant, realizing that everything's changing all the time. And I'm sure over the last 5 years, four years, 3 years, as we're becoming aware of all this darkness emerging in Europe and in America, how many people are going crazy in terms of the way that they're thinking about reality? It's very scary. This is how the thought processes are so delicate. So we have to be very sensitive, very careful, and we never want to presume or assume that we're seeing things clearly now. But just because we saw things clearly 5 minutes ago, 5 minutes later, you have to readjust to check again. Have things moved on? Are they the same? This requires an enormous degree of sincerity in the way we practice being aware. So having a transparent ego in a good sense, having a pliable ego, having a soft ego means you're someone who's not egoically invested in their way they see reality because they realize reality is a moving target. Most people are too ignorant to practice like this. It's like talking to your grandfather, your grandmother. So the the practice of enlightenment here is the ability to let go of what what you thought was real or true or aligned 5 minutes ago and look again to see what's how things have shifted. So this is as I've been saying I don't know but I want to know. So wanting to know is the demonstration of profound evolutionarily animated curiosity about the nature of truth. I want to know. I'm not asleep at the wheel. Most people don't give a damn. They're too lazy to think clearly about anything. So, they don't really want to know. They just want to be left alone. Leave me alone so I can go back to sleep. Right? That's inertia. Leave me alone. I don't want to know. So, I want to go back to sleep. I don't want I don't want too much reality confuses me. There's no hope for you then. So, I don't know. What I want to know is the evolutionary impulse awakening to itself within you. I want to know the truth. I want to be in alignment with the shifting sands of the real. So when I act, I can be as close to being in alignment with it as possible. You're never going to get it perfect, but you can be much closer than if you weren't paying attention. So you want to do as well as you possibly can. So strive for perfection you're never going to reach, but at least you're trying. It'll bring you a lot closer to to reality as it is as it is, not as you want it to be. Not as you thought it was five minutes ago. You follow? So your ego has to be soft and flexible to be able to bear this kind of insecurity. A lot of people find us on an egoic level or level of personality very unbearable. Is reality I thought reality is one way. You say no baby, it's not one way. It's changing all the time. It's always morphing, constantly morphing, changing, shifting. How can that be reality? Because the reality is very complex, subtle, inscrable, mysterious. It's a work in progress. It's a shifting sounds. So the practice of no relationship will develop metaphysical muscles inside you which will enable you to bear the the total insecurity inherent to what I'm saying which is you'll never be able to be sure absolutely sure you'll never be able to be absolutely sure you'll be able to be very sure but not absolutely sure about anything because you realize you'll be able to get close to being sure but you'll never be able to be completely sure as things are changing too quickly. So, can you spiritually bear the insecurity of that and still have self-confidence? Still have confidence in your way of seeing things and your in the way your mind is seeing things and the way your ego is related to reality. Very big deal. We're very fragile beings. We're very fragile creatures. We often can't bear the truth that we're often not seeing things clearly. We can't handle it. Makes us feel threatened, frightened, and confused. But if you're a spiritual warrior, it won't bother you. Buddha say this is the way of things. This is the way things are. Life is very delicate and the mind is very unreliable. So many forces that work within us and outside us. So many forces that work inside us that are confusing us and so many forces outside of us. Look how confused and easily diluted so many people are. Intelligent people losing their minds just like all of us. So this simple dharmic position this metapos position of I don't know in relationship to unmanifest reality but I want to know in relation to manifest reality is it's a metaposition which is a constant practice a constant position we have to work with it'll keep you safe keep you fresh alive and current most people are living in the past not living in relation to the way things are now so are we paying attention Most of us are. We're lost in our minds most of the time. So the simple statement is I don't know but I want to know is very profound. It includes all the dharmas inherent in that. Tells you what you need to do, what you need to practice every moment. It's very profound, isn't it? very simple. It's quite absolute. It's absolute. And if you take for granted that there's quite possible you're seeing things not clearly a lot of the time, it'll help you to be humble because you know how hard it is to see anything as it is. You keep your ego very soft. So why do people fight? Because they think they're right. If you think you're right, you get self-righteous. Then you may start creating conflict. If you're sure you're right, create self-righteousness, tendencies for conflict. Sometimes you got to do it, but I'm just saying it's dangerous. So, as we spend this more time together, I want you to just contemplate the nature of not already knowing. I don't know, but I want to know. And see how free it can help you to feel. doesn't let you off the hook but helps you to find your own way to liberation in the present moment. So if you want to be fully liberated whatever that means I don't know what it means to be fully liberated but if you want want to go in that if you want to go in the direction of being fully liberated whatever that means you have to include the sum totality of all reality which includes emptiness unmanifest reality and all of manifest reality have to be in your picture. You have to take everything into consideration and put it right on the table. Then there's a chance you'll get it right. You heard it before, haven't you? It's ever new. You know why it's ever new? Cuz it's absolute. It's never failed me. that I never had a reason to doubt it. It's not doubting everything. It's being I'm speaking about a vast openness. It's not We shouldn't be doubting everything all the time. Drive ourselves crazy. But you're missing the important part of this equation about my awakening because I keep on quoting my guru. He said, "I'm so glad you found a friend you'll never be able to see. The friend I'll never be able to see means I can't have a relationship with him, which is unbearable. It's unbearable not for your ego not to be able to have a relationship with its best friend. It's very mysterious, isn't it? Work on it. Non-duality is a mystery, not tuness. The ultimate oneness of all things, seen and unseen, known and unknown, is a big mystery. Can never get a handle on it. I know it. I can control it. It's beyond the mind. Beyond the mind, beyond the mind. Always beyond the mind. So, you have to let go. keep skiing downhill faster and faster. I don't know, but yet I seem to know. The reason I can teach the way that I do it is because I'm practicing what I'm talking about. That's what makes it possible for me to do this. Nothing else. So, I'm putting it into practice what I'm sharing with you. I'm putting into practice every day in front of you. I seem to know what I'm talking about. I'm as surprised as you do that I that I seem to know what I'm talking about. I'm not objectively aware that I know what I'm talking about, but I see that it is the case. I see again and again I prove that it's true. But it's not an objective fact that I can hold on to. I have no dualistic relationship to my freedom. So as I continue to share with all you guys, the secret of enlightenment is letting go of the mind. And it's not easy. We have to respect what we're doing here together. So if you just realize what you seem to realize, take responsibility for what just happened. If there's a measure of knowledge about the truth, an absolute truth, don't pretend to be ignorant and want. You had an understanding, so take responsibility for it. You can't be virgin forever. You only be virgin once. It's true for all of us. You have to take a little bit of ownership of what you just realized. Okay? Don't let your ego pretend it doesn't know anymore. You might have trouble remembering what we talked about or what it meant, but you know that we had a very good important discussion about something very important and then you can remember. It'll help you. Don't let the ego make a game out of this. If you're serious, you realize it's not a game. This is life and death spiritually. A lot of people think it's a game. It's like something you do when you're on vacation. You go to India and go listen to Dharma and have a good time and then go back home and not change. Some people come here every winter. They go see a lot of different teachers and they don't change a bit. It's what they do in the winter. Like they go some people go to the Baham Bahamas or the Virgin Islands or Goa. Some people come to Tu and go visit gurus. I'm talking about people they get they do it for 20 years and they don't change. They sit in sats saying sang and they hear the dharma but they don't change. They don't take it seriously. It's kind of spiritual entertainment for aging boomers or millennials. I'm encouraging you to take what just happened seriously. So you realize you just realize something important to own it. It'll change you. So when I always talk about people taking themselves seriously for the right reasons, that's what I'm talking about. Take yourself seriously for the right reasons. Take the reason you came on the retreat with me very seriously. When I met my guru, I never met anybody that would talk about enlightenment like it was a real thing. I sat in front of many meditation teachers that mentioned enlightenment, but they were far from it. They made it very clear that it was something that existed, but they didn't know what the hell it was. When I met him, he was talking about enlightenment like it was something that was growing on trees all around. And I couldn't believe it. He was taking it so seriously. And uh he started taking me seriously. He took my enlightenment seriously. I thought he was crazy. I didn't know how to relate to it. I couldn't relate to someone who was taking enlightenments that seriously. Seemed to know what it was and was taking my enlightenment that seriously. I didn't know how to relate to that. So we don't know how to relate to these truths because we don't take them seriously at a cultural level. So we're not used to taking higher consciousness seriously. We have to teach ourselves how to do it. But if you take it seriously, you're tilling the soil inside your soul, make it ready to become strong and awake. So take me seriously, take yourself seriously, take the context you're in here seriously, and things can happen. Otherwise it just becomes just another experience that comes and goes. Doesn't it doesn't lead to anything changing. Understand? So be smart, be intelligent, be sensitive, be serious. How you feel doesn't matter. Remember I said what we think doesn't matter. What we feel doesn't matter. Only matters what we do. So be dignified. Remember what I said and take it on. show that you're listening, that you care about what we're doing here. So, we're going from wrong relationship to no relationship to right relationship. And as I'm fond of repeating, it's not something we do once, something we want to do every day. So the beautiful thing about the meditation dharma is we get to go back before the beginning. Any within yourself, you want to be able to go back to before the beginning every day. So you can be reborn every day metaphysically. Metaphysical rebirth on a daily basis sounds pretty good to me. I'll buy it. If it's if it's real, I would want that. And for example, if I just talk about no relationship, it makes me feel good because there's the infinite space. It becomes reveals itself in the relationship. Becomes apparent by the minute I think about it. It makes me feel free. Makes me feel good. Makes me feel safe. Your own potential for higher consciousness can be like your lover, someone you're in love with. Higher consciousness is not a separate being from you. It's not separate from you. You can still have a dualistic relationship with your own absolute. Make it the most important thing in your life. Care about it more than anything else and it'll be good to you. But it takes a lot of courage cuz most people won't know what the hell you're talking about. So you'll you'll feel these things in yourself if you are sincere. You won't make it about you. Don't make it about the thing itself. And you will or you won't. No guarantees for any of us. follow. If you're sincere, you will let it go. Sincere means having integrity. It's kind of like Donald Trump, you know, he's in it for himself, right? He's a pig. It's all about him. It's not about It's not about what it means to be the president of the United States. It's all about his own ego trip. It's disgusting. Do you understand when I say there's no guarantees? Do you understand what I mean? For all of it, we're all imperfect. So there's no guarantees except our own best behavior. It's up to you. It's up to me. It's up to all of us personally. The outcome is it dependent upon me depend upon you not what anybody else does. Make sense? Isn't that very empowering? Very empowering. You don't have to wait for anybody to save you, to promise you, sweetheart, everything's going to be okay. Everything might be okay. Everything might not be okay. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what we're going to do when we're under pressure. Nobody knows. There's no guarantees. So, you have to become very self-reliant knowing there's no guarantee on the outcome. It's very empowering though how alone we really are in this. God abandoning us versus us abandoning God. That's really in our hands, not in God's hands. If we believe all these things we're talking about here, it's up it's up to us to prove that they're real, demonstrate that they're real, convince other people that they're real through our own act of faith, expression of faith. You see, so this is a new way to practice religion because before it was written in a book. That's what made it true. It's all in here. Was written a thousand years ago. Must be the truth. So now we can't rely on what was written about 5,000 years ago. Because thousand years ago people were ignorant in many ways but now it's up to us to be the exemplars of the real to have the courage to in the new spirituality which is much more demanding and not to believe in anything that someone said a thousand years ago. That becomes up to you and up to me. Isn't that exciting? So I to me it's a new religious potential that's emerging. So the truth of the religious impulse is dependent on us to actualize it. And you don't have to be a true believer or a follower. You have to be the one. In the end we all do. Be strong, get strong, act strong, do what you got to do for all of us intelligent people. I I say everybody I give everybody 30 years to be a fool. 30 years of human experience to be a fool. Act like a fool. And then you say, "Well, by the time we've had 30 years of experience, we've learned, we should have learned a little bit about the basics of life and death." Because a lot of people want more time to be a fool. I say, "Well, why do you want more time? You had 30 years." So some people in their 60s and 70s feel, "I need more time." I said, "You've had a lot of time. What have you been doing? Because 30 years is a reasonable amount of time to be a fool, isn't it? You say you have to figure this out by the time you're 10 years old. Nobody's ever going to do it. By the time you're 15, you should be a man. No, you're too young to be a man. By the time you're 20, you're just a young person. You don't know anything about anything. When you become 20, 21, 22, 23, you start having all kinds of adult experiences and you start to suffer. You start to find out more about how tough life is. and you have chance to make a lot of stupid choices and act like a fool and suffer the consequences of your own karmic ignorance. But by 30, if you have integrity as a person, you've figured a few things out. You have an opportunity to become an adult, a mature adult, a conscious person. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to offer a a way of making sense out of life that's very reasonable because the thing is we all have reasons to not be ready now. We all have excuses not to be ready. We want to disempower that part of ourel. And so what I like to encourage people to do is to think of the reality of their own evolution in the context of time, evolutionary time. We all only have so much time to do this. We don't have an infinite amount of time to be a victim. We don't have an infinite amount of time to work this out. We don't have an infinite amount of time to save the world. We just don't. This reality. So the ego creates this delusionary state where some imagines I have infinite time to do when we don't. Then we just don't. life is too precious and too demanding. So when I say 30 years is plenty of time to to be a fool. It's a reasonable it's a reasonable amount of time. We all want to try to do this in a compassionate way. We want to raise the stakes for all of us. We want to be able to do our best. That's the idea. I'm asking everybody to be responsible to be willing to be responsible. The main thing is we get our ego in good shape. A happy healthy integrated. Yes. To be free you have to have a healthy ego. as a vehicle to work through. As I was explaining several times today, and I know it's difficult to understand, the what I call the authentic self is not a self. It's a state of consciousness. This emerges through this through these self structures. The authentic self doesn't have a self structure. It's a state. It's a feeling. It's experienced as a feeling, as a knowing. The self-hating ego can't can't handle this kind of these states. can't hold it in the long run. To indulge in negativity is to indulge in self-destruction. And self-destruction is real. We can do can destroy ourselves ourself at a level of the soul and and personality. We can mess ourselves up quite badly. We're not careful with our self. The soul I understand to be the deepest part of the self that's still personal. So in my understanding there is the ego which is the false self personality and there's the soul which is the metaphysical container of all of your karmic history beyond this life. It's where you have experienced enlightenment, liberation and love and devastating pain and suffering in your past life experiences. All the karmic baggage from the past what the inant they call the karmas and we carry in our soul. It's karma from your past lives which have momentum. You were all born with the momentum of the past karmas. So they all exist in our soul. So for example, some people are born with miraculous talents, capacities that they didn't learn in this life. Playing musical instrument, gifts of all kinds don't seem to come from this lifetime. Spontaneous emerging miraculous quality comes from a past life. So the soul contains our past suffering and our past gifts also. So it's the deepest part of the self that's still personal. So the ego is totally personal. The soul is relatively personal. And the true self is not personal at all. It's only one true self in the universe. It's your truest self. It's who you really are more than you are a separate soul. More than you are separate ego. It's more real than anything else. But in the true self, there's not a trace of anything personal or anything unique at all. So the authentic self is similar because it's the evolutionary impulse becoming manifest in you at a level of the self. is the creative impulse awakening to itself in your body, mind and personality and your soul. So it's a very it's an impersonal exuberance about the possibilities inherent in life. Joy, enthusiasm, awakened enthusiasm and joy. It's a thrill of the possible. When you get excited about something that's wonderful, something that would change everything, you get very excited about it because it's so positive. You can get spiritually uplifted. Nothing personal in it. So what I would like people to do is to observe the differences between the ego self which can be positive what the ego feels like what it looks like what it thinks like what it acts like what it walks like what it talks like and the difference between the ego and the soul we're calling the soul which is much deeper the soul feels much more real much more intimately who I am at the level of the personal when people discover their soul they start getting very quiet and very feel very intimate with themselves and with reality, but it's still personal. It's still about you, the separate self at the level of the soul, which is more real than the ego is real, but it's still not real from an absolute point of view. And then when you awaken to the true self, you discover this completely different dimension of who you are. And you realize this has been the ground of your experience all the time. This is who you've always been. This part of yourself is infinite, timeless, formless, beginningless, endless, infinite and eternal, unborn and uncreated. It's always been there. It's absolute. It's indestructible. It's uncreated. That's when you start getting very quiet and very still. Oh my god, this is a whole other dimension of reality. And the authentic self is the exuberance about life, about existence. It's what I called it before the urge towards life. The urge towards existence is the experience of exuberance and inherent happiness and joy. And when you begin to experience that, you realize that life becomes happy about its own potential for liberation for about creativity. You experience that kind of happiness. It's a different kind of happiness. It's not personal. Ecstatic joy at the impersonal nature of the creative process awakening to itself within us. And so remember the true self and the authentic self are absolutes. The soul and the ego are personal and relative. Doesn't mean they're insignificant. That's a different level of reality. So what I like people to do is to become very familiar with what the ego feels like as if we aren't already versus what what the soul feels like. What does your ego feel like? What does your soul feel like versus what does your true self feel like? What does your authentic self feel like? They're all for completely different selves. Completely different self-natures with completely different experience of self that we all can know because we're all the same in this. The ego feels like the ego feels like the ego feels like the ego feels like the ego. On a good day or a bad day, it feels like the ego. In the end, the soul feels much deeper and much more meaningful, much more sensitive. much more meaningful to me because it's a place of much deeper vulnerability and more deeper connection to life, life, karma, time, family, past relationships, pain and suffering, joy and happiness. It's all happening in a personal sphere, personal stream. Very felt at the deepest level of the personal. So it's very real, much more real than the world of the ego. Then when you graduate from the soul to the true self, you enter into a different dimension of experience and feeling and knowing that's transcendental. It's cosmic. It's absolutely it's untouched by anything that ever happened in time. It's the ground of your experience. It's a source of liberation and it's a place where you experience a kind of happiness you can't imagine because nothing ever happened there. It's a place where nothing ever happened. There's no karma in your true self. So imagine what would it be like to be free from karma, free from the past, place where nothing ever happened, where the universe hasn't even been created yet. It's unimaginable freedom, inconceivable freedom, where all things are still possible. Nothing because nothing's happened yet. Make sense? And then there's the authentic self, which is this evolutionary exuberance. It's overwhelming joy about what's possible. It's always being excited about what's possible, to be turned on by life, turned on by the positive implications of the possible. And you're directly experiencing it at level of vibration. And I try to explain to people that it's possible to experience awaken to the infinite potential. It's an experience. So when you experience the presence of infinite potential, awakening to itself within you. I mean, I literally mean infinite potential, which as I said yesterday, the day before, it doesn't matter what's happened before. Doesn't the past is irrelevant because the infinite nature of the possible is ecstatic. isn't ecstatically overwhelming. It's a it's a higher state of consciousness where you feel happiness beyond belief about what's possible. And that happiness gives you the energy to start doing things you never have the strength to do otherwise. Gives you gives you metaphysical energy to act to co-create the future from a place of absolute certainty about what's possible. From that you'll be willing to take big risks. You take big risks that your ego would never take because you're in touch with this possibility that's extraordinary but it's not personal. It's a universal potential and like I've been repeating to realize that this is all built into the system is very exciting. The system is already pregnant with these potentials that we don't invent them with our minds. We discover that they self-existing independently self-existing within us. When you discover, you say, "Oh my goodness, this is amazing. Then the question is can we actualize them? That's our spiritual work. So in any case, I want all you to pay attention to your own feelings and your own thoughts about all of this. And I want you to learn how to distinguish between your happy ego, your unhappy ego, your soul, your true self, and your authentic self. become an expert. You become an expert if you if you practice self-observation because a lot of people when they awaken to your authentic self, they just feel I feel excited. They they don't understand what it is. They just feel excited. Light, joy, lightness of being about what's possible, they don't realize, no, this is the authentic self. This is the evolutionary impulse vibrating. It feels so good. They just think it's an ego. The ego is having a good feeling. No, it's not that. So the telltale sign of awakening to the authentic self is all things are possible. No matter what may have happened in the past, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. All things are possible no matter what may have happened in the past. It's very liberating and it's unbelievably empowering. Did you ever hear Barbara Mark? So she had a powerful awakening to the authentic self. She was always awake to the evolutionary impulse. I once called her and she was sleeping. She was an older woman. She picked up the phone. She was, "Hi, Andrew. How are you doing? Did I wake you up?" She, "Yeah, I just woke up." And she's always, she was always turned on about the possible. Always turned on, always excited, always exuberant. But she wasn't awake to the ground of being. She wasn't awake awake to this to the true self, but she was awake to the authentic self in a way that was very unusual, profound, miraculous. She was a maverick. She was an evolutionary. And of course it's very easy to awaken to the true self and have no idea about the evolutionary impulse is very common around here. So yes, so the more common is that people awaken to the true self to some degree to some degree but they don't have any idea of the evolutionary impulse. That's the other face of God. They don't know about that. So, as I said before today, what's very revolutionary, what's so important about awakening to the evolutionary impulse as this God vibration is that it's totally life positive. It affirms life. It affirms your existence, affirms my existence. It's life affirming. A lot of people are not so sure that to exist is good. They want to die and never return again. They never want to come back to earth which is life denying. Right? So in a lot of the eastern dharma rebirth is bad karma. But in evolutionary perspective rebirth is good karma. That's a very different way of seeing reality. So these are very important distinctions. So we've got to feel good about being here. And the evolutionary dharma answers that question in the most profound way and it gives us coming gives us an obligation to do the work to make the world a better place. It's helpful to think about the authentic self in the way that describes as the psychic being which is the psychic being as a moving train towards the train to move towards the future. Everybody's awake to the psychic being. It's in that training car moving towards the future. It's a work in progress. It's this evolutionary momentum. And the momentum is so independently self-existing always. So when you wake up to the psychic being, you wake up, it's like being asleep and then waking up in a moving train and realizing you're not alone. There's other people that are awake to this evolutionary potential and moving towards it. But to repeat, it's independently self-existing always, which is very exciting. So when you wake up to the psychic being or to what we call the authentic self, you wake up to this evolutionary momentum that's independently self-existing that it changes the way you feel about everything. Life is good to this is good. So much is possible. Let's get that. Let's do it. Nothing else to be. There's nothing else to do. Let's do it now. And it destroys you temporarily to destroy the ego. all the ego's objections. But what about me? What about this? But that who cares? Sounds irrelevant. So I'm just repeating, so bear with me. Please pay attention to your changing states of consciousness. Be aware of where you are in any given moment. If you're in your unhappy ego's complaining, be aware that that's your unhappy ego complaining. Be objectively aware of it. If it's your happy ego talking to you, be aware it's your happy ego talking to you. If you're awake to your true self, you're feeling free from karma, free from ever being born, resting in being. This is my true self. And pay attention to the difference between that and your ego. Pay attention to it. Note, make a note in yourself of what the difference is. When you start getting very excited about what's possible in the future, realize that's this moving train, independently self-existing moving train towards the possible. It's already there. Take note of what it is and pay attention to it. That's how you wake yourself up. And most importantly, don't let your ego boss you around. Don't let your ego be a bully. Don't let your ego push you around. ego can be very cynical. Ah, that's all BS. You know, it's not true. I'm very happy because I feel now we're sharing the fullness of the teaching. This makes me very happy that now we can share the whole thing with all of you. This teaching is very complex. It's full of paradoxes, but it's of a piece. It's one package. So to appreciate how liberating this teaching can be, you have to be able to cognize the whole thing, even glimpse it. I feel this is now beginning to happen. If you feel you suddenly become aware of a whole truth, it's true. It's teaching us the whole complete. I didn't make it up. It came through fully formed. So if you feel that it can liberate you because it's a whole package, it's true. Allow yourself to feel the wholeness of it and allow that to give you a sense of confidence about it. I want all of you to just to realize that uh there is this dimension of reality which the dharma comes from. The dharma is self-existing. Such a beautiful gift to all humanity. Where does all this come from? It's a gift. It's a whole realm of reality where this awakened intelligence is self independently self-existing comes to us as a gift. It's a miracle.