I'm Caitlin, hi Caitlin. Hi, um, I think I've had a glimpse of the true nature that you describe
in one day earlier this year where I woke up without any prelude and everything seemed like
I was looking through a different lens. The colors were brighter, the connections with people were
more intense, the quality of time was different. I just wanted to stare at the sky and the trees. And
if you had told me that someone had put some drugs in my drink, it would have made sense because
that's how it felt, like I was tripping out. That was blissful to the point of nearly being painful
because all of the experiences were so intense. But it finished at the end of that day, and the
next morning I woke up with normal perception and sort of felt the loss of that intense experience.
I wonder if you could explain or perhaps talk about how it is that you can one moment be
in that state of perception, and then the next day, without, I don't think I changed anything,
I was not trying to hang on to it with my mind, or simply because the state of our mind changes
all the time. So, that was just a heightened state of mind. It was not the recognition of
your true nature, and the recognition of your true nature is much less exotic than that.
And your true nature is not a state that comes and goes. It's the transparent screen
on which your emails, your documents, and your images and your YouTube clips come and go.
It's just the ever-present background of your always changing emails, images, and so on. And
it's the emails and the documents and the movies and the images that are colorful and exotic and
sometimes strange, but the screen is colourless. It's transparent, it's empty, it's silent.
So, it's true that sometimes this recognition of our true nature will, as we've been speaking
today, can have a very profound impact on your mind and your body. It causes a great relaxation
or letting go, and that can sometimes be felt as unusual or exotic experiences in the mind or the
body. But that would be the byproduct in the mind and the body of this transparent recognition of
your true nature. But the recognition of your true nature is much simpler, much quieter.
Okay, thank you. And it's just a recognition of the presence of
awareness that lies continually present in the background of all experience.
So, you could go there now. You could just ask yourself the question, a question such as,
"What is it that knows or is aware of my experience?" Pause.
To find that out, you have to go, you have to take a step back from your experience.
Whatever it is that knows our thoughts is obviously not itself a thought.
Take a step back from your thoughts. Whatever it is that knows our feelings and sensations
is obviously not a feeling or sensation. Take a step back from your feelings and sensations. So,
you just come back to the fact of being or being aware. That's it. It's nothing exotic about it.
It usually can happen so quietly, and in fact very often does, that the mind,
well, the mind is not present in that recognition. When the mind reappears again, it is affected by
that recognition to a degree, sometimes in a very intense degree, like the laughing, the crying, the
kinds of experiences we've been talking about. But sometimes it can just be a very small affecting
the mind or sometimes not at all. Sometimes the mind takes a few weeks or months to catch up.
Maybe sometimes it's a few months before the mind realizes, "Oh, something's changed.
I don't get nearly as upset as I used to. There's much less conflict in my relationships. I don't
seem to mind what goes on so much anymore. I'm not continually upset about it. I just seem to
be at peace for no reason. I just seem to be happy most of the time these days." But then, six months
later, it notices, "What happened? I don't know." And the mind wonders what happened, what changed.
It doesn't know. It's like the example I sometimes use. It's like a headache. You wake up with a
headache, and then you go about your day, and then in the evening, you notice, "Oh, the headache's
gone. When did it go? You don't know when it did. Did it go at three o'clock in the afternoon, at
12 o'clock, 11 o'clock in the morning? And how did it go? You don't know. You didn't notice it going.
You just let sitting reached, "Oh, I'm free of that pain."
It can be as quiet as that. It's not always as quiet as that, but it can be as quiet as
that. And in a way, it's safest if it is as quiet as that because then you can never turn
around and claim some marvelous enlightenment experience. Well, I think I'd be horrified if
I was like Eckhart Tolle sitting on a park bench for years, and I don't know how my family would
survive that. But those are the rare occasions where this recognition happens unsolicited
and has a very immediate and powerful effect on the mind and the body. So, they make good books,
and I mean that with no disrespect. I have the greatest respect for Eckhart Tolle,
um, but there's something there to talk about, you know, it's a good story, yeah,
bench. It's very interesting, it's fascinating, and totally genuine. But many of you know this
story, you remember the, the um, who wants it? A Shinrio Suzuki, the Zen teacher who was asked
in one of his meetings, "Why don't you ever talk about your enlightenment experience?" And his
wife, who was sitting at the back, of course, stood up and said, "Because he never had one."
You see, enlightenment is not an experience. It can have an effect on the mind and the body,
and that's an experience. It can blow your mind apart, it can cause you to sit on a park bench for
two years, that's an experience, that's something to talk about. But the actual experience itself
is transparent. You can't say anything about it.
And the most important thing, Caitlin, is that the recognition of our true nature
is not an experience. Experiences are thoughts, feelings, sensations. They
come and go. It's a recognition of the ever-present background of experience.
The example I like to give is the example of
when we go to bed at night. We get undressed, we take off all our clothes,
and our naked body is revealed. We don't suddenly become our naked body. And nor is our naked
body a marvellous experience. It's...sorry, I had to hesitate there. You know what I mean.
At least from our own subjective point of view,
the experience, the subjective experience of our naked body is just the most ordinary,
familiar experience. There's nothing exotic about it at all. In fact, it's so ordinary and intimate
and familiar, most of the time we overlook it in favor of the more colorful aspects of experience:
our thoughts, our perceptions, our feelings. It's just the recognition. And it's not as if we were
not even in touch with our naked bodies now. All of us are, in fact, feeling our naked bodies now
against the inside of our shirt, trousers, but it's so subtle compared with the colourful sight of
this room or our conversation that we don't notice it. But what we did this morning in our meditation
was, so to speak, undressing, taking off all the layers of experience until only our naked being
was left. And there's nothing exotic about our naked being. We're actually experiencing it all
the time, but it's so quiet that it is outshone by the more colourful aspects of experience. So,
the awareness of being goes into the...is it obscured by the awareness of experience,
but the awareness of being is actually always present in the background of it, but so quiet.
And then when it is recognized, it's just...it's the quietest recognition that there is. And
nothing exotic about it, nothing extraordinary. It can be just, "Oh, yes, of course. Why didn't I
notice before? I was so busy giving my attention to the objective content of experience."
So, don't measure your progress by whether or not you've had a marvellous experience.
Thank you.