For or Against

When speaking about an absolute relationship to life, I am speaking about a perspective that embraces all of our experience. Absolute relationship means a per- spective that embraces everything. Everything includes everything. And when we enter into the world of distinctions, the world of light and darkness, heat and cold, pleasant and unpleasant, and all the rest of it, what is our absolute relationship to all of that? Therefore, what is our bottom line? What our bottom line means is this: from a per- spective that is absolute, is our relationship to life fundamentally positive, or is our relationship to life fun- damentally negative 7 . What is the bottom line from which we relate to life and to all of our experience? Now that we have re-entered the world of time and space, mind and body, the world of distinctions, on a deep and fundamental level we have to know what our relationship to life as a whole is. That means is our fundamental relationship to life positive or negative? You see on one hand, we can deeply be convinced that the whole business of being alive is basically rotten, and yet still enjoy certain aspects of it—still try to get the most out of it that we can. On the other hand, we can also be deeply convinced that the whole business of being alive is a profoundly positive event, in spite of the fact that much of what occurs as part of that event is horrifying. So therefore, absolutely speak- ing, are we for it or are we against it? When we are only aware of one half of who and what we are, the half which is activity, which is voli- tion, and we are out of touch with the other half, which is stillness, which is nothingness, we experience our- selves as not being whole, not being complete. For a human being, being out of touch in this way causes suf- fering. At times this suffering can be unbearable. Like a brain disconnected from the heart, it's a kind of tyranny that can seem to have almost no beginning and no end. Sometimes intense, sometimes mild, at other times it can disappear. But it always seems to come back again. For most people this tyranny seems to be the fundamental substratum of all of their experience. And as long as this is the case, it will be the very foun- dation of everything that we know. Therefore it is not difficult to see how it would be impossible to be able to embrace life in a way that is truly whole as long as the core or fundamental substratum of our experience is one of almost unending suffering. What I am speaking about is not always obvious, it can often be very subtle indeed. What I am speaking about is something very deep. I'm not talking about appearances here. I'm talking about the core of the matter—our fundamental relationship to life. So because there was something deeply wrong we began to search for ourselves. We did that through let- ting everything be as it is. Through letting everything be as it is, we discovered that nothing at all was wrong because we discovered a place where nothing at all had ever happened. And if nothing at all had ever happened, how could anything be wrong? That's what Liberation is. In perfect death there is nothing wrong. That's the glory of it! So we go from there's something wrong to there's noth- ing wrong. That's what the inner journey is all about. Only the person who really goes very deeply into this and truly is able to let go of the way everything was before will become a liberated individual, a radically transformed human being. Only the courageous indi- vidual will go that far. Most people don't have the mettle for it. It's simply too far, too fast, too much. In the discovery of that which makes us whole, if we die in that discovery, if we surrender unconditionally, then that means that all of the ideas we had about the way things are have to go. Why? Because all of the ideas and conclusions we had about the way things are, were based only on a partial experience of life. So when our experience becomes whole, based on the rediscovery of the other half of who we are, all of the ideas that we had about the way things are obviously have to be relinquished. They have to be relinquished because they represent what has now been recognized to be only a partial view, a partial perspective, which is by definition what ignorance is. So if we surrender, if we truly allow ourselves to die unconditionally, then every- thing changes. Then our relationship to life changes in a way that is absolute.