Is it essential to maintain vigilance? Can you give us some guidelines?
Yes, vigilance is essential. The problem with the word “vigilance” is that it is misunderstood to mean a strenuous imposition of discipline. Vigilance is discipline, but it is the discipline of surrender.
If you pull your attention even slightly from what is free, from what is boundless and endless, suffering is experienced. When suffering is experienced, the habitual tendency of mind arises to deny truth. By being vigilant, the capacity of thought to deny truth is acknowledged and seen through.
If effort is used to maintain vigilance, sooner or later you become exhausted. However, if you relax your mind, your individual mindstream is already naturally aligned with the ocean of pure awareness. Then alertness, vigilance, surrender, and discipline are all effortless.
Being still reveals non-identified awareness, pure intelligence aware of itself. If the impulse to effort appears, and it may because efforting is a strong tendency, recognize that this very effort assumes you are not that awareness. Check, has pure awareness moved? In truth, is there any separation between you and pure awareness?
Self-inquiry is vigilance. If in any moment you feel pulled toward identification with suffering, ask yourself who is suffering.
The belief I am not divine, radiant, eternal consciousness, and the resulting suffering, must be faced. Direct experience is self-inquiry. “ Who is not that? Who is suffering?” In self-inquiry, one uncovers self-denial through fabrication of thought. Belief in fabricated thought as reality leads to suffering. In the moment of directly experiencing the fabrication, the lie is exposed and annihilated.
What do I do when I am totally hooked into the drama that is going on?
Drop the story instantly! To be hooked, you must be feeding the story line with more commentary, or searching for release through a different story line. Drama might appear from past feedings, but it cannot continue without present feeding.
Be very aware of how you maintain past, present, and future. Vigilance breaks the imaginary bonds called “me and my drama.”
Do you always have a choice, in any moment, to not keep feeding energy to the drama that’s happening?
Yes, you always have the choice.
My suggestion is that you direct all power of choice toward recognizing the truth of who you are in every moment. Surrender the power of choice to deny truth. Give it up. Declare that you will no longer choose to believe that you are separate from truth itself, even in suffering, in drama, in grief, in adverse circumstances of all kinds.
The usual choice is to overlook pure, radiant awareness. Surrender that choice on the altar of truth. You may be tested, but if you have really given up the choice to deny truth, you will not be tempted.
Declare yourself married to truth, and be faithful, regardless of whichever old lovers come and ask you to play. Declare that you have chosen truth, and nothing can separate you from that. Old lovers may appear. Let them appear. If they are not entertained, they disappear.
Few people have the courage for this divine marriage, because it is imagined that pleasure comes from playing around with old habits. Playing around is normal in a certain stage of immaturity. With maturity, you realize that you have played around enough. There has been enough going from this thing to that thing.
In silence, the true Beloved reveals itself. Then you have the possibility of choosing the Beloved and giving up all other choices— all others.
This is the potential. Satsang is the wedding invitation. Recognize that the Beloved is here. Regardless of busyness, pain, or pleasure, it is here. It has been waiting patiently, lovingly, for you to finish your playing around.
Love of truth is mature love, but if you are fixated on adolescent fantasies, it can seem terrifying. It is feared that in mature love something will be lost. Yes, it will; and that loss is the gain of realization.
Choosing truth demands giving up flirting with egocentric arrogance and egocentric self-denial. Be willing to give up both egocentric pleasure and egocentric pain for the Beloved, and then tell me what you have given up.
I can discover freedom in silence, but to discover it in action is difficult.
The distinction you make between silence and action is artificial. Silence does not go anywhere when action appears. There is no action separate from silence.
Have you found the boundary of silence?
The boundary is that as soon as I find myself in mental activity, then I’m lost.
What does “I am lost” mean?
Days or weeks can go by before I notice the silence again.
In these days and weeks, does awareness go anywhere?
The awareness was not aware of itself.
But it was aware?
There was awareness in every moment.
Is awareness separate from silence?
I’ve never looked at that.
Well, look. There is always more to see.
Events happen in awareness. Your individual mindstream may be consciously aware of an event or subconsciously aware of an event. In this moment, turn your individual mindstream toward the ocean of awareness that is aware of your individual mindstream as an event.
Conscious and subconscious awareness dissolve in the ocean of pure awareness. Events remembered and events forgotten dissolve here. Here you are—purely I.
I am lost. I am found. I am in meditation. I am at work. I am having a good time. I am having a bad time. I am ignorant. I am enlightened. There is still I, just I. The true I does not go anywhere.
So focus on the I in every moment?
Focus on the I right now and tell me, what do you find?
There is only awareness.
Thank you. Do you see?
Yes!
It is wonderful that you recognize this in an instant in satsang. This is the halfway point. To complete your journey, begin to explore if awareness ever goes anywhere. Is true I ever lost?
When you think I am lost, check. Who has gone? Has awareness gone anywhere? Experience of lostness has appeared in awareness, but has awareness been affected?
Recognize directly what is always present and cannot be other than present. Then stop looking for particular states to confirm that.
Once you have experienced this confirmation directly, every state is a reconfirmation. Experiences of loss, bliss, sadness, good events, bad events, are all recognized to appear in awareness. Finally, totality of experience is the reconfirmation I am That! Before and after any thought of what I am or how I am or where I am, I AM.
Following an instant of realizing pure silent awareness, a great rush of many physiological and emotional effects occurs. The tendency is to become attached to these byproducts. When the byproducts are finished or change or transform, the thought may arise, Oh, I lost myself. Do you hear the absurdity of this thought? Where can you go? Only thoughts of you go.
Events come and go. Thoughts come and go. Moods come and go. Good times come and go. Bad times come and go. Awareness is always present. You are awareness.
Awareness, your own true self, is vast beyond measure. Awareness has no problem with anything appearing or disappearing in it. Everything is included.
Whatever seems to pull you away from silence, when experienced directly, is also discovered to be a confirmation of eternal, silent presence of awareness. Without awareness, how can imagination of past appear?
See for yourself.
In every moment?
Yes, in every moment. Now we are speaking of vigilance!
I had an image of climbing a ladder, and it seemed that every rung of the ladder was a realization or an accomplishment. Then all of a sudden, the ladder turned into a greased pole. At first, it felt like I was falling down and backward. Now there’s just no direction to it at all, and it’s a delightful ride.
The first step is in giving up your defeats. Give up your hell, your insanity, your personal suffering. Next, give up your victories, accomplishments, and self-importance. Really fall. Free-fall.
Give up the old ladder of accomplishments. Whatever is acquired must be defended. This defense fraudulently uses the name of vigilance. Defending is not vigilance. Vigilance is the willingness to free-fall through all illusion.
The moment the identification I am somebody arises, directly inquire into its reality. Then falling is not falling. In direct self-inquiry, rising and falling are not separate. Truth and you are not separate. Life and you are not separate.
I notice that when my mind is quiet, it is very easy to be aware of myself, to see what arises and to not touch it. But throughout the day I forget, and I have to keep myself coming back to vigilance. I feel that vigilance takes effort.
The effort arises from the misunderstanding that vigilance means to capture some particular state. Stop all attempts to capture. Do not make vigilance an exercise. Be vigilant by surrendering every effort to define yourself according to mental or emotional states.
Effort is not needed to be. If you trust being and begin to explore being, as being, then can you find any activity separate from yourself?
Vigilance is attention. Attention gets its attentiveness from pure awareness, which is who you are. Self-definition only keeps you fixated on waves while yearning to find the deep. The ocean has no problem with waves. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine the waves as separate from itself. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine its depths as separate from itself. Never for a moment does the ocean imagine any separation between wave and depth.
Be the ocean. This is vigilance.