18  Liberation TC  "18  Liberation" \l 1

In essence the spiritual self of everyone is liberated. The spirit is beyond all bondage, and you are spirit itself.

Man only starts to live when he finds the key to life everlasting; and life everlasting is the spirit within man.

Consciousness, being universal, permeates every cell of our bodies. The significant difference here is that although it permeates every cell in every one of us, in the ordinary person it is lying dormant, while in the realized person it is awakened.

The unfolded person would have humility. With humility comes a total sense of surrender and he becomes very ordinary. He becomes more ordinary than ordinary, and that can be regarded as extra-ordinary! It is all so simple. We need to cultivate only these few virtues to find that unfoldment. They are not cultivated in the sense of a façade or as an outward show, but as a real living example of what surrender is, what humility is, what love is.

Cosmic consciousness comes about when the mind, at its first level, recognizes itself to be a mind, yet is separate from the Absolute, having recognition of the source of energy. With recognition of the source of all light and energy, appreciation begins. Appreciation always bring with it love and devotion for the light and the source. Recognition is cosmic consciousness. Appreciation of the light and the source is God consciousness. You are conscious with the entirety of your mind, whose range is as vast as the universe. With the entire universal mind that is within you, you appreciate the Manifestor, of which the universe is the manifestation.

We will only reach our goal when awareness becomes aware of itself.

When you reach the state of enlightenment then you exist alone, but that aloneness, that oneness, encompasses the entire universe. In the scheme of things, in the oneness you experience, in that aloneness, there is no aloofness because you have become part of the entire universe.

Highly realized people are people that are in communion with Divinity. We only have a handful of such people in this world at the present moment. What they have to do is be able to relate their spiritual selves to the world. They have to take on a certain grossness so they can teach.

The unfolded man can stand apart from the world and all the strife and turmoil that he might have to go through.

Consciously or unconsciously, man is seeking freedom. He wants to be free of all suffering and is attempting to do this within time. What a contradiction! It is a contradiction because real freedom can only be found when we realize the meaning of timelessness. We have to go beyond time.

Getting back to one’s essence means unconditioning. When one ceases to be complex and becomes simple, then he enters the kingdom of heaven. The Bible says that, too. “Be like a child and enter the kingdom of heaven.” This is what it means.

During the time of Buddha, in spite of all his great teachings, the world was not enlightened. Krishna could not enlighten the world, neither could Christ or any other spiritual teacher. Yet those who are attracted to a particular spiritual teacher, who have the required love and sincerity for their own personal progress, can move forward for their own self-betterment. In this lifetime few will achieve enlightenment. Yet even those that do not receive enlightenment will feel the benefit of progress made on the path.

If your window is clean and the full light is shining through, you will not notice that there is a glass. The glass exists, but it is so infused and empowered with light that the glass becomes as if non-existent and purposeless. That is the mergence we want.

Self-realization is limited to the finest relative in that you are still the individual self, but limited by the boundaries of the finest relative. Knowing the entirety of the small self and its various ramifications, from the grossest to the subtlest, you become free of them. You can stand apart from them because of the state of equilibrium.

Bondage is a superimposition on liberation. The superimposition comes from what we call mind.

Whatever bondage you assume yourself to be in is your creation.

The highest aspiration a person can have is to reach that area of absolute knowledge (which means knowingness of everything), absolute bliss (which means being joyful), and existence (recognizing that I exist, and I am all existence as far as the universe is concerned).

There are two kinds of people that can feel totally self-satisfied: the Self-realized person and the lazy bum. The Self-realized person has nowhere to go because he has reached it all. He has become so one with all existence that he can’t go beyond existence itself. He has encompassed and covered the entire existence within himself and there is nowhere else to go. The lazy bum feels self-satisfied because he is lazy.

A Self-realized man is a person who is beyond the attachment of all the qualities of daily living. But the Self-realized man, still being embodied, has to perform his physical and biological functions. He has to eat, he has to have rest, but his performance has a subtle quality to it, and his very breath is meaningful to the atmosphere of the world.

Bliss is self-existent. As a person meditates with regularity, he goes deeper and deeper and reaches areas of greater and greater bliss until he actually becomes bliss himself. The ego-self has now become totally transparent and all the dirt has been washed away through this simple process.

A medium is not necessarily a Self-realized person. A Self-realized person would not go into mediumship.

A Self-realized man can choose to sit in the Himalayas in samadhi and bide time, so that the momentum created by his past karmas just wears off gradually—like a top. (When we spin a top, after it is spun, it still has a momentum that it has to run off.) When that momentum runs off, he discards the body. Then there is another kind of Self-realized person who identifies himself with every action in the world and in society. He identifies himself with every human being, with every animal, with every creature, with every plant. The heart beat of the plant is his heart beat, and the heart beat of the human being is also his heart beat. He does this for the purpose of teaching.

Before taking birth, he has the choice to merge away into Divinity, but he things, “No, let me not merge away, so that the air in this balloon becomes merged away in the universal air. Let me remain an individual and be born. There is a lot of work to be done.”

If you are at the point of realization where you have become one with the Divinity within yourself, then by all means discard all the teachers, all the books, discard all the external circumstances—they are not necessary for you.

Let us use bondage as a lever to find freedom. For the man who discovers freedom in bondage, and bondage in freedom—he is the realized soul.

If we keep on throwing more stones into the pond, then the ripples will be continuous. But if we cease throwing stones in the pond, then the momentum of the first stone thrown will dissipate itself, and the pond becomes clearer. That is the path, that is the way to freedom.

You are enlightened. All the meditational and spiritual practices are just to remove the clouds that obscure the sun of enlightenment.

Who wants enlightenment? Have that attitude. Just let me do what I have to do and enlightenment will come on its own.

When we have this feeling of liberation within ourselves, although we are involved in everything, we find the peace that passes all understanding. Understanding comes from the mind; peace comes from the heart, and the heart is so powerful that it overrides all the ripples of the mind and stills the pond. When the pond of the mind is stilled, the light within shines through in its fullest glory. And that is what life is all about.