Meditation – Misconceptions about reality
04/20/2025
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Transcript of the Meditation
Welcome, everyone. Lovely to be with you.
To explore, to share, to wonder, to question, to take a look together freshly.
Our experience is not in time.
In this moment, does not appear in the mind, does not appear in time.
The mind appears in presence.
Time, events, thoughts appear in that which does not appear. You are that, that awareness. Take a look.
Awareness, knowingness is the source.
What is the world-body-mind without your knowingness, without awareness, without I.
I meaning being. I, meaning that which is and cannot not be.
The silent, aware presence.
So invite your mind to rest, to be transformed, to be appeased by the silence which permeates these words.
Let things be as they are. You may notice the thinking muscle operating.
It’s okay. Notice that you are that which perceives it. You are that within which the thinking muscle operates.
You are the awareness of that.
And possibly, you may not need to follow the stream of thought just to let it be.
Like the singing of the birds or the breeze, gentle breeze flowing through.
There may be a tendency to want to understand or grasp or do something.
So maybe we can invite ourselves to relax out of that, to be without knowing, to do nothing, to let it be without knowing what it is.
Let be.
You can turn your attention, if it’s helpful, to the breathing, the breath, the heartbeat.
Notice the spaciousness surrounding it, permeating the breath, permeating the heartbeat.
There is nothing you need to do to be aware because awareness is.
There’s no on and off switch. There’s no dimmer. When it comes to awareness.
From the mind’s perspective, we assume that reality refers to perceptions, the senses: perceiving a mountain. The mountain is real out there somewhere. There is a real mountain.
We perceive a thought, and there is the impression that out there, somewhere, there is a mind, and within the mind, there is a thought flying by like a bird.
From the perspective of the mind, we perceive sensation, and we imagine that this sensation is enveloped by your skin. There is a skin, body-mind-skin, and inside that skin, there is a sensation.
This real body somewhere out there, and I’m inside of the body, and these sensations are inside of me.
That’s from the mind’s perspective. Such a wide imagination, wide and wild imagination.
Because when we take a look at our experience, yes, there is a sensation of hunger, but the sensation of hunger does not arise in the body. It arises in awareness.
Sensations arise in awareness. They don’t arise within aa body bag.
Check it out.
We are all familiar with the add on. We add on a body. We add on a structure. We add on the skin surface, a boundary.
But if you pinch yourself right now, you pinch your arm, all you experience is a sensation arising within awareness.
There may be a story while the sensation is inside my arm or inside my body.
We are all familiar with this added on story, which is based on the belief that consciousness resides within a body or is limited, personal.
But our experience does not lie. You pinch your arm, there is a sensation that arises within awareness.
The images, the narratives that you carry about yourself, these images, arise in awareness.
You are that which perceives the image. You are not the image.
You are the reality which is, which knows it is, and which perceives and knows it perceives.
Check it out.
The body may have a name, of course, it does. The body has a certain shape and size, gender.
And you perceive that. You perceive the body. Yes. For example, an image in the mirror. Or a picture, photograph. Or you can look at your hairy arm. That’s a man’s arm.
Or the beard growing on your face. You are the perceiving aspect.
You perceive a mountain covered with this large cacti set. They grow in Arizona, I forgot their name.
You are not the mountain. You’re not defined by the mountain.
You are the reality aspect. But the mountain is not separate from that reality. And yet, you cannot say reality is a mountain, period. No!
You cannot say the ocean is a wave. No!
You cannot say the rainbow is the yellow color. No!
It is said that reality is no thing, and yet everything is it.
How do we reconcile that? No thing. There are no things, and yet everything is it.
The ocean, we say there are many waves. But from the perspective of the ocean, the one and only reality, what is a wave?
We separate reality in the world as real, the body as real, the mind as real, the concept as real, all different realities.
Are there are there four realities? And then there is I. I meaning the body, I guess.
From the perspective of ignorance I refers to the body.
In between you suspend the mind of time, the historical mind.
Come to complete not-knowing, being, but not in time. In this moment, not in time.
There is a Zen koan which says: what does your face look like before you were born?
Good question. The mind can’t go there. No? How can I go to before being born?
The mind is material. It can’t do that.
What if you’re never born? What is it that is born? What is your experience of being born? Tell me something about it.
But don’t tell me a story. Don’t tell me your grandfather’s story or your uncle’s story. Tell me what is it you know!
In the Upanishads there is a reference to this battle. The sage says that you cannot kill that, which truly is. Those bodies you imagine to be alive, they’re not alive. You cannot kill the life.
That which has the seed of death in it is already dead.
That which is real, that which is absolute, that which is cannot not not be.
You cannot kill reality, truth, essence, life.
The medical industry, they refer to life as a heartbeat and brain activity, MRI activity.
I am not talking about life in that way. That is not life, that is sentience.
There is a difference between life and sentience. The heartbeat can stop and brain can stop functioning. That would be the end of the sentient aspect of this body.
But life is a different matter. But because there is such a confusion about the term life, maybe I should not use the term life.
Let me stay with the term being or reality.
The instrument is not that which you are.
The body mind is a wonderful bio-computer with amazing functioning senses and mental activities and capacity to perform complex functions, but it’s just an instrument.
The best bio-computer around that we know that we know of.
But why define yourself via the bio-computer?
You use the bio-computer in many different ways for many different functions.
You take care of the bio-computer. You feed it. You give it some rest. You perform various functions that serve the bio-computer.
This does not mean that you are the bio-computer. And if you believe you are the bio-computer, then you have the form of mortality that is haunting you.
You experience a sense of limitation. You experience that whatever is happening to the bio-computer is happening to you because you believe yourself and you feel yourself to be this bio-computer, to be this body-mind.
Is it possible to be free from that belief?
We all know it’s an ancient belief that’s been deeply rooted in our body-mind.
We feel that we are this person. We feel that we are this body. We feel that we are aging now.
The bio computer is aging. You are not aging.
I know the mind when the mind hears that, it goes berserk. It goes, what the heck? What the heck are … what the heck are you talking about? Of course, I am aging.
But, no, there’s a challenge here. You are not aging. You are not getting every day closer to death! The bio-computer is!
This is not a belief. I’m not asking you to believe this. I’m inviting you to take a look. You perceive the bio-computer. You perceive the body. You perceive sensations. You perceive images.
You do not need to identify. You do. We do, but we do not need to identify.
Some people think that if we don’t identify with the body-mind, then we won’t be taking care of it. Nonsense!
You don’t identify with your car, and you take care of it. You don’t identify with your shoes, and you take care of them. You know? Yeah. When there is mud on them, you clean the mud off of them.
Not identifying with the bio-computer does not imply ignoring it, does not imply trashing it. No. That’s nonsense.
You use your car for a trip. Yeah. You take care of it. You change the oil. You check the air pressure. When you’re done with the trip, you park it in the garage. You forget about it.
Not obsessing about it. But we obsess about the body-mind. We obsess about the bio-computer. A deep identification, like, that is what my reality is, it’s my body-mind. No!
Your body mind is awareness consciousness. That which perceives in this moment, that which hears these words, is not a female or a male organism.
That which perceives these words, that which hears, that which perceives is invisible to the senses. It is nonphenomenal. Check it out.
No phenomenal aspect. It is not a female awareness or a male awareness or a tall awareness or an old awareness or a young awareness or an awareness that’s in California or that’s in Texas.
No. California and Texas appear within awareness, but awareness is not in Texas. You are not in Texas.
The body-mind is in Texas. The car is in the garage.
Take a look.
This understanding is a very significant part of your human journey. Much more important than living fifteen more years and having a nice house, with two cars in the garage.
So if you have any questions, please make sure to unmute yourself. You can also raise your hand. Any questions?
