'Abide in I AM' means when awareness recognizes that this is obsessive thinking,
and thought could arise and the thought is 'I AM,'
which becomes the bookend to that obsessive thinking.
Our contentment and our piece is not to be found in outcomes, but rather in our Being, in what we are at our core.
And this is not an intellectual belief.
We can test this out for ourselves. We can start moving back to the heart more regularly.
So Nisargadatta's teaching would suggest that we abide in I AM.
His guru suggested this to Nisargadatta Maharaj: 'Abide in I AM'
Nisargadatta trusted him and three years later - as the story goes - there was self-realization.
So what exactly does 'Abide in I AM' mean?
What it means is that there is this field of Being that exists prior to thinking.
A field of Being that we are not particularly familiar with,
because for our whole life we have lived as the thinker, as the doer, trying to control life through thought,
imagining the future and having expectations about it, remembering the past and having regrets, and complaining in the present moment.
Looking at things and judging them as 'good' or 'bad.'
Judging them as in line with how we think life should be or out of line with how we think life should be,
all based on the ingrained beliefs of who we are and what we need in order to be complete.
So for a large proportion of the population there is no idea that there is any other way of Being in life,
no experiential reference point of resting in the heart,
no experiential reference point of functioning from outside the continuous, incessant, obsessive stream of thinking.
And so 'Abide in I AM' is suggesting that there is this field,
and that thinking about the past and the future with expectations and feeling guilt and blame is what keeps us outside of that field.
And so all of the concepts that we are speaking about tonight are concepts
that say our suffering is basically a feeling in the body that at the base of it comes from a belief about ourselves being the doer and the other being the doer and we needing life to be pleasure, pleasure, pleasure in order for me to be happy and complete.
So it's pointing to this obsessive thinking and saying 'none of it is true.'
In fact all of it is our suffering.
And so 'Abide in I AM' means dropping out of that thinking into Being.
And this is not something that we do, but rather it's a happening once there is this realization that all of this thinking is actually taking us away from where we want to be.
We start off with this obsessive thinking, because deep down we think it's good for us, deep down we think it's going to take us to what we need, deep down we think we might control life and we might actually get happiness through pleasure.
Now we can start to see that we have been doing this for long enough and that thinking is actually the suffering.
So this now is part of the body's up-to-date conditioning, this concept and 'Abide in I AM' means when awareness recognizes that this is obsessive thinking, a thought could arise and the thought is I AM, which becomes the bookend to that obsessive thinking.
So it's 'Why didn't I do this,' 'I should have done that in order to achieve that result,' 'that person should have helped me,' etc.
And then there is a recognition that that is what is happening,
and the thought I AM arises and the I AM can cut off that thinking
And it cuts off the thinking, because now we realize that there is no point in this thinking.
So we're happy for it to just stop midstream.
And so I AM can drop us into Being.
And what we'll find is that it might drop us into Being for a second.
And before we know it we're back into thinking again
about 'why didn't I do this?' or 'why didn't that person do this,' and 'I need this to be the outcome and it's not looking like it's going to happen.'
And then minutes can go past where this obsessive thinking has happened before awareness lands on it again 'There it goes again.'
And the thought I AM arises, I AM.
And at the end at the full stop there is a dropping into Being.
Maybe only for a second again before the thinking starts again
But that doesn't matter that we are dropping only for a second.
What can happen is that we can find ourselves doing this ten or fifteen times in a day.
Not as a practice so much, but rather when awareness lands on the obsessive thinking, the thought I AM - which is the bookend to that obsessive thinking, the end, the cut - that thought arises automatically.
And we can carry on our day as we are doing this, we do carry on our day.
And the thinking will come back and that's O.K.
Then the thought I AM cuts it off.
And each time we drop down into the heart,
what I mean by dropping down into the heart is that the center of consciousness resides up in the head, because of all the thinking.
But its home is actually the chest in the heart.
So when the thought I AM arises it cuts off thinking and if we can imagine that all off a sudden the center of consciousness is dropping into the chest area and that life is being seen not from the head, but from the chest.
The reason it's in the chest, in the heart, is that that's the place where impersonal consciousness links into the human being and functions through the human being as personal consciousness.
So the heart is the junction box for impersonal consciousness connecting to the body and flowing through the body as personal consciousness.
And so in the heart resides the sense of Being, the sense of I AM.