No Stopping Place


Ishvara:

Humans place value on well-worn paths, old books, and ancient history. All of these are important to human belief. But actually they are not valuable; they are "has beens." They are what-was, or what was believed to be what-was, because the actuality might not have been that way at all. People fabricate and interpret things; they make up stuff. If you are writing a book, and you try to remember how it was, your memory can become confused with a dream you had, and so the dream winds up in the book and becomes "how it was."

You can't rely on "what-was", which is a good thing, because if you rely on what-was you can never be with what-is. Life is about being with what-is. That is the mastership: you are able to be with what-is. "OK, this is what's happening, now let's see what this is; let's connect to it, let's experience it, understand it a little bit." Too much understanding becomes confusing. There is a saying, "Know thyself, but not too much." People leave out the last part. Most people try to understand too much. When you "understand" too much, you become distracted, and lose sight of what-is. When you try to explain the beauty of a flower in detail, you have already lost sight of it. It is just a beautiful flower. It is simple.

People have criticized me for simplifying things. People want more explanation, which is really saying, "I want you to tell me how, why, when, where, how much, and whether I can do it." I settle for: You can do it, so do it. You don't need the how, when or why. It just happens, it unfolds, it comes about as it does.

The intellect wants authority: "Who says? What is the authority for that?" Mastership presents its own authority. When you are mastering energy, you are the authority of what that is. Suppose you fall in love, and you go to some supposed expert and say, "I think I'm in love; I feel warm and fuzzy, and I think of this person all the time. Do you think that could be love?" You don't need to be told you are in love. You already know it. Humans don't have confidence in direct experience; they go to someone else and ask, "Did I have a direct experience?" The mastership of Life is very simple; it needs no outside authority.

As you master Life, you find various ways of being that resonate with you. It is important to you that you resonate with what you are understanding. You find moments where you resonate with that kind of awareness, that kind of connection, that kind of experience, and that is part of the mastership. It would not be fair if there were not a way for you to know when you are "on", when you are in-line with what-is. The body has a response to that; there is a resonance, a feeling, a sense of connection, and that lets you know you are on course. You can't ask other people, because if you are not on the course which they want you to be on, they will say, "No, you are off course. You are not on the right path." What you resonate with is your "path." It is not a second-hand path.

Getting to the point where you trust your knowing involves transcending beliefs and concepts about things, and getting down to what you feel directly. It involves realizing that if you have had an experience, it is yours. You have had it, and it can't be taken away. However, in the mastership of Life each experience leads to something else. There is no stopping place, no ceiling, no limit.

After you have had an experience, the intellect thinks, "I lost something; it's not there any more." Sure it is there. You cannot un-have an experience. In the years following the awakening event which I had eighteen years ago, I sometimes thought, "Well, it would be nice to have that experience again." I felt I had lost something, that the experience was not there any more, but I came to realize that I had already gone so far beyond that experience that I would have to go backwards to have it again. Yet the intellect does that: it glamorizes an experience, makes that experience "it", and then you keep referring back to it, thinking, "That was it. This isn't it, but that was, and so I've lost it." You diminish yourself when you believe that. Every experience you have had is real, but you are already moving beyond it and getting ready for the next experience. That is the mastership of Life.

The mastership of Life involves one experience after another after another, without clinging to any of them, but embracing the Now. It is so simple when you think about it. If you have always lived in a darkened room, and one day you accidentally turn the light on, suddenly you have an experience and you think, "Wow, look at that!" After that, you cannot have that same experience again. You can turn the switch off again, and then on again, but it doesn't seem as exciting. That is the nature of experience.

After you have seen the light, you are never in darkness again, but the light will never be the same. The initial moment, the beginning of awakening, is a "first." There will be many other moments after that, but you become used to the glamour, the excitement, and you think that nothing is happening if you don't continue to have that excitement. It requires that you trust your experience, relying upon the connected awareness that you are progressing moment by moment, experience by experience, that you are just experiencing greater degrees of light, and that it will never be the same as coming out of the darkness. It will be another degree, a greater awareness, and not a big deal.

It is human to want excitement, the thrill, but after awhile the experience becomes ordinary, and not such a big deal. That is where the trap is, because you begin to think, "I'm not getting it any more; I've lost it." Not true. You can't lose it. Once you've had the experience, it remains yours, and you are ready for the next experience, but don't expect it to be as glamorous or as exciting as the very first experience.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This is the continuation of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on March 13, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
Alaya® is a registered trademark and service mark.

If you forward this message, please include the copyright notice.

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
Thank you for your support.


To learn more about Ishvara and the Alaya Community, visit our website at www.alayanet.org

To subscribe to this message list, send an email to tgrant@alayanet.org with the word "Subscribe" in the subject of your message.