So the senses, and this is kind of what all the great teachers have said, “The natural inclination for people often seems to be to distrust themselves and their perceptions.”, and that sort of thing, but here’s the reality of it: We are already living in the realm of great compassion and the realm of great awareness.

“Now”

I mean the vastness of space-time is already here. Eternity exists in every single moment. There’s the “be here now” idea, the “power of now,” and all of these ideas that keep being talked about are very much things that are already here. There is no place to go and nothing to do essentially, in awareness. The maneuvering and the manipulation of things in the world certainly do have a ripple effect in the consciousness itself. That’s absolutely correct, but the access to the spacious nature is already here. It already exists and it is very much something that everyone has access to. You don’t really need to learn anything to access it. It is awareness itself, the individual aspect of awareness, that part that is what the focus is on, is not the focus, is not the focuser essentially.

The two can be divided and it’s necessary to understand the separation, to experience the awareness in both. Compassion lies at the heart of the experience, because there is no awareness of the sad, painful nature of life, other than through seeing it clearly, as it is.

A Look at Yourself:

Just look  at what’s happening in your own life. Through that eye of awareness, that eye of clarity and light, then you understand that you have compassion for yourself. Clearly, the part of you that sees things as separate has been doing a lot of things in your life. It’s been in control of a lot of areas in your life. A lot of areas of your thoughts, and this is just the case with everyone. In many ways, it doesn’t matter how refined you become. There is still refinement that can be done.

The Dalai Lama:

I’ve heard the Dalai Lama discuss the particular points of a particular type of awareness in specifics that probably were six or seven layers deep, maybe eight. I don’t know really but he was walking down a path of perspectives that began with 1 and went to another and went to another and went to another. He was talking about the very finest perspective of the division, or at least a very, very fine division of opinion on whether or not one path is superior to the other path, or what exactly they were defining in the awareness, but the point being to continually cleanse the mind of the solidification of experience.   In many ways it’s about keeping fluid the ability to look deeper into the experience of consciousness. I don’t remember exactly what the topic was that he was talking about, but he was talking about a particular point in a particular teaching which I believe was probably the Lamrim. He was taking certain statements that were made in the teaching to another level, and applying his insights to it, and that was part of the teaching.

In Politics:

So the point is about this ability to perceive awareness or this ability to identify as the awareness. When you identify as the awareness itself, rather than an object of the awareness, when the identification shifts, it’s kind of funny. It’s hard to say “when you do this” because when this happens it’s not really necessarily your doing in a way, although you will follow the path that gets you there. It’s just as the Dalai Lama was talking about splitting, and so what the experience is of selflessness, meaning the awareness shifts from self-centered awareness to spacious centered awareness, to infinite centered awareness, to eternal centered awareness, moment, now. All of those descriptions of the type of awareness it is are useful. The mirror-like wisdom is another great way to describe it.

Description of Awareness:

So in this point, you’re aware that everything that you’re seeing around you, all of the objects and the phenomena, the drama, the patterns, and everything else that you’re seeing around you, are really just a reflection and not the real experience. There is a quality, a sort of a dream-like nature to the experience itself. This is easy to see in the realm of opinion, because the feelings that generate these opinions often change, the intensities of the opinions often change, and it is possible to get a group of people with a similar opinion in some ways and get them emotionally excited to the point where they band together and do something that they wouldn’t normally do. You can use that kind of a thought and just charge it emotionally, and then people tend to want to follow you, which is what is going on in the presidential realm right now, with one party, and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are engaged in a contest at this point. So it seems, nether convention has happened yet, so everyone assumes however that Donald Trump will be the republican nominee and Hillary Clinton the democratic nominee.

Charisma:

Donald Trump is able to get people excited. He engages them emotionally, and he talks to them about things that they feel strongly about. Many of those feelings are somewhat negative things. He plays on fears that people have and things of that nature. Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to be able to do that at all. In other words, she just kind of doesn’t engage on an emotional level, and so that is in some ways a little bit disturbing for some people. People are uncomfortable with people who are not engaging. The charisma is much more likeable than correctness. So Donald Trump has the ability to engage the emotions, and that is often a big part of someone’s charisma, whether it’s hope or even curiosity. I mean curiosity can have a certain level of charisma. Someone wrote a book on charisma and it’s very interesting.

Perspective:

So the perspective is no perspective at all, essentially. This is the pure perspective, when the state is the state of awareness which. I don’t know how you’d want to describe it. There’s any number of ways to describe the state. In its purest form, it is only suggestively connected to a body, or any phenomenon, all the more energetic or harmonic experience than a concrete one. That experience exists within everyone, all the time. It is what enables us to have ideas and think things through and perceive at all. It is like perception itself, and so without judgment, without thought, in the present moment and just that pure awareness. This always exists. This is not something that doesn’t exist.

Finding Enlightenment:

People are not seeking to find enlightenment outside themselves. Many people are seeking to find enlightenment outside themselves, but the experience, the enlightenment, isn’t separate from yourself at all. In fact, it is one’s self. The most self that one can be, other than the different all selves that are self by separation, so this is the oneness-self, the one self, the one I, the great I, not the separate I’s. There’s the ultimate, which is not even an experience of any boundary, I mean it’s hard to say. The space in which everything occurs and then everything that occurs is not necessarily the same thing, because the one is unchanging. Although it contains everything, it doesn’t change in itself.

Mastering The Steps:

Knowing that that is part of reality, then all of the things that happen within reality are things to understand: areas to be observed and pondered, patterns to be mastered, patterns to be mastered by other patterns to be mastered. They’re a mystery. It’s challenging enough to master the first step, and often, the true mastery of the first step doesn’t happen until other steps are mastered. The true mastery of those steps sometimes doesn’t really happen until a completely new level of mastery takes place, or work on it begins. As things begin to fall into place and the new layers of skill are revealed. Then things begin to happen.

John Bonham:

One of the most interesting pieces of music in the 1970s rock genre is the drum solo by the drummer for Led Zeppelin. John Bonham, he plays into his own ability. You can tell that he’s trailing where he wants to be. The piece is about working to catch up with how fast he’s actually playing, which is kind of a funny way to describe it, but that’s the way that it sounds to me. So he’s playing the drums so fast that he can’t quite play that fast, so he seems to lag a little bit. It’s an interesting piece of music. I believe “Black Dog” is the one that I’m referring to, but there was another one also, “Black Mountainside” or something like this. A great drum solo from a great drummer. What made him great was that he was willing to push his own limits in there. He would perform like beyond his level, and still pull it off. It was just amazing, amazing that he could be that good. Even when he was pushing himself beyond his own ability he’s still that good. He didn’t drop anything, he didn’t make any mistakes, he kept the whole thing going, but you can just tell that he’s playing into his ability to play that fast. Something that I really enjoyed about that, and then that’s the kind of thing that’s always stuck with me, as far as what it means to master something, and what’s the importance of skill.

The Great Consciousness:

So right now the idea here is that every human is still a part of consciousness. Just because someone thinks that they’re separate from the great consciousness, that somehow all of their thoughts and awareness and desires, moves, emptiness, feelings, emotions, and all of these things are somehow separate from the great present moment, the great now, then this would be a wakeup call for them. There’s no hiding from this. There’s nothing to attain and no reason to attain it. If you want to know what reality is, what the real existence is, pay attention to whatever in your perception is not a thing. That is described in all the different ways of describing it, is the now. It is the infinite, is the divine, is the present, is the holy spirit. It doesn’t matter, the great spirit, Om, the great vibration, the one, the Christ, Allah. All these awarenesses are the same, the Bodhicitta, which is really the compassion that arises from it. So this is the spacious nature, the diamond, the wisdom in the lotus, the lotus itself.

The Experience:

Be aware of all of these things if they mean anything to you at all. It’s that complete open mind, that complete presents of spirit. Complete or incomplete it’s always here. It’s always there. The idea that you’re experiencing and having thoughts means that you’re part of it. Even if you weren’t, the experience is still going on. What you’re seeing is the organization of the experience. You’re not seeing the experience itself, which is vast and infinite and completely interconnected. There is no division whatsoever in the experience. The experience is all one. This is the thing. There’s only one life, so really all these questions about reincarnation and the afterlife and everything else aren’t particularly helpful. There is only one life. Humans create an opening for other humans within their minds, hearts, and lives, then a human is created to fulfill that opening. It’s almost like the king is created by the subjects in a way, but everybody is creating everybody. This is how the idea of reincarnation works. Then are there harmonics that reach out in awareness? Are there certain patterns that have always existed?