Transcription
Remember, mentioned at the beginning, the famous dictum: "Know thyself."
Now, here we have two different kinds of knowing. You can know yourself conceptually, which you do, for example, when you visit a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst will analyze your past, and you will talk about it, and you'll be encouraged to explore more and more of the things that happened. And it can go on for years. It's interesting, very interesting. That's knowing yourself, but it's not the way the Greek philosopher meant it. That can be helpful because often it shows you where you are trapped. It shows you what the obstacles are. It can be helpful.
But knowing yourself in the deeper sense is the other kind, which is knowing yourself as the aware presence in which there's no conceptualization, because that is the essence of who you are. And then there are basically, you exist in two dimensions. You exist as a person, physical body, psychological form, physical form, psychological form. You have a history as a person and you have a future. And as a person, you live in time, on that speeding train. And undoubtedly, as a person, you are already being consumed by the fire of time, and the speeding train is speeding up more and more.
And then you also, you are there as the deeper, the essence of who you are is awareness or consciousness, which is not yours. Your manifestation of it, it manifests through you. It is the ray that emanates from the source. And that's why you are incredibly deep when you realize your own consciousness, which is not your own. I just say it, then you realize how deep you are. I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson had some, I'm not good at quoting, but he had something. The essence of who you are is like a wick, like a candle. The wick of a candle that is deeply, deeply goes into being. You are rooted in this beingness that far transcends the person, that connects you to the totality of all life. And that is known in the non-conceptual knowing of yourself.
And the non-conceptual knowing of yourself is presence, awareness, the ability to rise above thinking. Not continuously, but then you can use thinking, and actually the presence or the awareness can operate through you and actually use your mind in wonderful ways so that you can co-create with the universe. You can create things. But that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is realizing it first. You realize that, and then you can, you're no longer trapped in your conditioned mind. But the mind can still operate, still does. You exist as a person, and you realize who you are beyond the person. That's the end of the ego. The ego, end of ego, doesn't mean it's the end of you as a form identity. You can still operate as a normal, so-called normal human being. But not really normal anymore, because normal is insane. But you don't have to become weird. When you realize who you are, you just become very natural. And you still give conventional answers. People say, when people say, "When were you born?" You give your birthday and your year. You don't necessarily say, "I was never born. I am nobody." Who are you? The ego can still, you have to still, even when you realize that the awareness that you are, the ego can come in still and claim something. "I'm more present than you. Nobody has less ego than me." I hope they don't put this statement of mine on a very short YouTube clip.
Now, invite into your life that aware presence in daily life, and especially when you're getting unhappy in whatever form. That's always a signal. Something unhappiness. I'm using this generic term again, in whatever form. And remember, even if light irritation is unhappiness, anger is unhappiness, although the ego loves it, the body suffers when you're actually angry. Any of those things, you notice, okay, it means, can okay, there it's arising. I have lost the easiest way of looking at it is to say, I must have lost the present moment. And when you realize that you've lost the present moment, because the present moment is presence, when you become aware of the present moment, your problems dissolve. Not that you deny your ability to cope with problems, so-called problems, which are challenges. Increases when you no longer make these challenges into a problematic sense of self. Always coming back to the present moment. Return to the present moment, because that's all there ever is.
We talked about time. Time seems to be the fire that consumes us all. But on the other hand, this is very paradoxical. And I just want to leave it on a practical level, not on a philosophical level, and not on a scientific level. Don't want to talk about Albert Einstein's theory of relativity of time. But even more practical, the weird thing is, time seems to be consuming your life, and yet you never actually experience time except as thought in your head. But you have to. Is the statement true? You have to see in your own life, is it true when I say you never actually experience time except as the thought in your head? Because all your past lives as thought, all your future, which are projections from the past, live as thought. If you remove thought and you're just aware, there's no time anymore. There's only the present moment, ever and now. Although you are being consumed by time, the physical vehicle, the strange thing is, it's always the present moment. And people have this burden of past, but it's thought. And if you step into the present moment, you immediately step out of thought into awareness. And that can become a, you can make that into a habit, especially when thought causes you suffering or unhappiness. And most of suffering or unhappiness is caused by thought.
Thought causes you, when thought causes you suffering or unhappiness, say, "Okay, just hang on. Do I want to suffer? Do I want to be unhappy?" You can do it in a simple thing. Let's say you have an argument with your partner, and you need to be right. And suddenly you realize what you're engaged in, being right. And then you realize it has no, it's meaningless whether you or he or she is right. And then you just let go. But not in, be aware of ego, not in the sense that, "Okay, I'm so conscious, I'm letting go now of this. You can carry on without me." You let go defending your mental position. You let go of identifying with your mental position. Just, "Okay, yeah, maybe. Okay, it's fine. Yeah." And of course, immediately the whole thing collapses without an opposition. So you can observe how unhappiness arises, and then ask, "Do I want to be? How can I not be?" And then you step out into, you step into the present now.