Satsang Blog

Consciousness is affected but not harmed. It is the nature of aware consciousness to be affected by everything it experiences. Every color and sound, every event and experience, and every passing thought or feeling affects your consciousness. That is why we call it consciousness. A rock is not as affected by these things, and so we consider a rock less conscious than a person.

And yet consciousness is not harmed by anything. That is its nature, that it cannot be harmed. The form of anything can be permanently changed or harmed. Your body can be harmed, but the consciousness that inhabits your body cannot be harmed.

This is good news. It is like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly. No matter what happens, you as consciousness are completely unharmed. What a relief! There is nothing that can harm you. No one and nothing has ever harmed you.

This is not to say that consciousness is not affected deeply by both the good and bad things that happen to us. Every hurtful and unkind act leaves an impression in the consciousness of those involved. It is just that the impression does not permanently limit or damage the awareness of those involved. If something has an effect on us that is permanent, then it could be said that it has harmed us. But if the effect is temporary, then what is the ultimate harm? Everything that profoundly affects our awareness, from the painful to the tragic, eventually passes. It is the miracle of our consciousness that it can heal from any wound, even if our body cannot.

What you are is eternal aware space or consciousness. You have a body, but you are not that body. So, while your body can be permanently harmed just like your car or your camera can be harmed, you as consciousness eventually heal or recover from all of the experiences that affect you. Even if the affect lasts for lifetimes, eventually the karma or debt is released. From the perspective of something eternal, even many lifetimes is not that long.

When you realize that your true nature as consciousness cannot be harmed, that puts all of life’s difficulties in perspective. Similarly, when someone’s car is totaled in an accident but they are not hurt, we consider them lucky. This is because we have a perspective on the relative importance of damage to their car. It’s not such a big deal really, especially relative to a serious physical injury or death. If you realize that you are aware space, then everything else is like the totaled car: no big deal.

Some things are still more important than others. Physical harm is still a bigger difficulty than harm to a car or other physical object. But by knowing the truth of your nature as un-harmable space, then the bigger difficulties and even tragedies in life can be seen in perspective.

A simple question to ask is, What effect does this experience have on my eternal soul? And while everything leaves an impression on your awareness and ultimately your soul, nothing can ever permanently harm your soul, your true nature as empty awareness. In fact, every experience enriches your soul. Every moment adds to the depth and richness of your deepest knowing. We sense this in people who have faced a lot of difficulty in life and who are willing to accept their fate. There is a depth and wisdom that only comes from a wide range of experience, including painful and unwanted experiences.

This willingness to meet and have any experience can come from the simple recognition that what you are is open spacious awareness. Your body, mind, personality, emotions and desires all appear within that awareness, but they are not you, and the real you cannot be harmed.

In every moment, there are two possibilities. One possibility is to have all of our curiosity, attention, and passion focused on what is happening. The other, is to have that same curiosity, attention, and passion focused on what is not happening, what is not present, or what we think should or shouldn’t be happening. In every moment, the question is: What are you giving your attention to? Are you allowing what is, or going to battle with it—trying to change it in some way?

When our focus is on what is, our experience of what is opens up and becomes bigger, richer, and more complete. But when it is on what is not (the past, the future, or any thought about what is), our experience of the moment contracts and becomes narrower and full of suffering and struggle, because inherent in a focus on what is not is a struggle with what is.

When we look, we discover that most of the time we are in opposition to what is and oriented toward what is not. Life is mostly about how to make things better and get more pleasure, or how to get rid of the things that are painful. We are constantly evaluating our experience, looking to see what’s wrong with what we are experiencing and how it could be improved. We tend to be focused on what’s wrong with the moment or on what could be added to it to make it better. As a result, our attention becomes very narrow and our awareness very limited.

Once we see how much time we spend struggling with what is, the tendency is to go to battle with that—to try to fix that. We think the solution is to fix this tendency to try to change everything. But that only changes the content of our struggle: Now we are struggling with our tendency to try to change things. We suffer over the fact that we are suffering.

The other possibility is to just notice how much you suffer, without trying to do anything about it. Just allow the fact that you don’t allow much. Just recognize that that is the way it is. This struggling with what is, is just what we were conditioned to do; and this conditioning is also a part of what is.

Once we stop being in opposition to what is, it is possible to see how all of our struggling comes from the idea of a me. Without the assumption that something is my experience, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to change anything about the moment. Our effort and struggle to change what is only makes sense if there is a me. It is all in service to maintaining the idea of a me. In fact, the struggle is the me. When there is no struggle, there is no me. All of our suffering is how we have and maintain an identity.

Once we realize this, the tendency is to try to fix this—to try to change our belief about who we are. We focus on getting rid of identification, which is again, focusing on what is not. We are still suffering because now we are at war with our tendency to identify. Instead of being oriented toward and accepting of what is (our struggle with identification), we are oriented toward how we think it should be: I should know better than to be caught in identification; I should know who I really am.

Another possibility is to be really present to this tendency to identify, without making any effort to change it. If that’s what is happening, then that’s what is happening. You just let it be that way. You can even be amazed by it all, including the fact that there is a sense of a me. You see how unreal this me is, but you don’t struggle to be rid of it. There’s no longer an assumption that something is wrong that needs to be fixed.

When it is finally okay for the moment to be just the way it is—including the fact that we identify as me and therefore battle with the moment—then more of our experience can be recognized and included in our awareness. If we are willing to be present to and allow our identification, then it is also possible to notice something beyond identification, something beyond our struggle and effort to maintain a me. What that something is, for lack of a better word, is Being.

Along with awareness of identification and the struggle and suffering inherent in that, is an awareness of this larger ground of Being in which everything is happening. When we see that all the me is and ever has been is a lie, but we don’t turn away from that awareness or judge ourselves for it or try to get rid of the me; then we start to notice that, along with the struggling inherent in the me, is a beautiful, rich presence of Being, which is allowing everything, including the experience of me. We come to see that the me’s struggle is only a tiny percentage of our entire experience and that this struggle is happening in an ocean of allowing. This allowing is Being.

When we are allowing, we include in our awareness what it is that is allowing, and that is Being—which is who we really are. This realization can be a very jolting experience or a very quiet one because Being is actually very familiar. Every moment of allowing has actually been a moment of experiencing Being.

Identification is the source of suffering. It is only the me who ever has a problem. All of our suffering can be traced back to identification, to this misunderstanding that the me exists. It’s not that the me has a problem; rather, the me is the problem. Everything that the me does is a form of battling with our experience. The me is this split in our being that goes to battle with itself. That’s all that the me is.

Paradoxically, what brings us beyond the struggle and unlocks the bigger view is realizing how much we enjoy identifying. Once we allow things to be the way they are, it is possible to admit that identification has been a lot of fun. The illusion of a separate self is an incredible act of creation. It has created the whole drama of human existence. It has inspired many of the great works of art and literature. We love to identify, but that doesn’t mean we also don’t suffer from it.

This creation and projecting of a false identity—a me—is not a mistake. It’s natural, spontaneous, and inherent in human nature. It’s one of the richest parts of our experience—and there is also the even richer possibility of no longer mistaking the me as the totality of who we are. Identification isn’t a mistake, and yet there is much more to life—and to us—than that experience.

In this satsang with Nirmala, he invites you to a deeper experience of your true nature.

Most of us think of a ghost as something that only exists after we die. We imagine it to be a piece of us that continues to hang around and haunt the places we lived while alive. What if there are ghosts of yourself that are around while you are alive? What if what you think you are is actually a ghost?

 As we usually think of them, ghosts are insubstantial forms that come and go. They are not quite solid or real, and most people can’t see them. And yet how substantial or real are our images of ourselves—our ideas about who we are? If you have an image of yourself as an attractive person one day and as an unattractive person the next day, how real was either image? And can other people see your self image? What does it mean if you have a self image of being unattractive and someone acts attracted to you anyway? Maybe they can’t see your self image. Maybe your self image is a kind of ghost.

 We are not always willing to see that our idea of ourselves is a kind of ghost because we really believe that is what we are. We may wonder, Who am I if what I think I am is something insubstantial and not real? What is here besides the ghosts of my self images? There is a strong sense that we do exist, that we are real. But does this sense of existence and reality come from our image of ourselves? Or does the sense of being real and of existing come from somewhere deeper within our being? It’s difficult to know for sure since the image and the sense of realness can both be present at the same time, and our egoic idea of ourselves can co-opt that deeper sense of realness we naturally have.

 One way to distinguish what is real from what is not is to ask yourself how real your ideas of yourself are. One measure of how real something is how long it lasts. The more real something is, the longer it lasts. How long do ideas about yourself last? They come and go (like a ghost in a ghost story) and don’t last very long at all. A thought is often over so quickly that we can’t remember a moment later what we were just thinking. Our images of ourselves are constantly changing and fading away to be replaced by another thought about ourselves or a thought about something else altogether. So those images or identifications must not be very real. They may just be ghosts in our minds.

 What about the pure sense that you exist right now? Does that come and go? How often do you have the opposite sense—that you don’t exist at all? The sense that you exist is more real than your ideas about yourself because it doesn’t come and go. You exist, but your ideas about yourself are just ghosts. What you are is not contained in your ideas or identifications. What you really are is still here even when your ideas about yourself fade away, like ghostly images in a movie.

 It is the real you that matters. You can become more curious about this real you than you are about the false ghosts of identity. What is the real you made of? What is it like? What does it want? What can it do? These are rich and meaningful questions to explore, but remember that the real answers are not to be found in your ideas about yourself. The truest answers can be found in the simple sense that you exist.