You Are The Whole Universe (The Wave & Ocean Metaphor)

This talk explains the 'non-dual' (Advaita) perspective that all is one single unified whole and there are no separate objects, the implication being that 'You' are not a separate object either, 'You' are the infinite, unified whole.

I use the metaphor of the wave & the ocean which is a long established analogy in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, this simplifies the teaching and makes it accessible to all even newcomers. This talk is informal and light hearted using very little technical language, suitable for beginners but also contains some of the deepest philosophical explanations for the nature of reality, consciousness and the individual human experience, so even advanced devotees of Advaita Vedanta may gain something from this talk. Those familiar with Mooji, Ramana Maharshi, Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira might find my delivery, philosophy and style familiar.

This talk incorporates and references Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism and Western Philosophy.

Transcript

You've probably heard the famous quote by the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, Who said, You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. You might have also heard the quote by Eckhart Tolle. Saying, You are not just in the universe. You are the universe. There's a similar but less well-known quote by Thick-Knocked Hunt. Who said, Before you were born. You were already here. As life itself. And when you die, You will return. You have nothing to be afraid of. Even Jesus said, I and the Father are one. It's different language, It's a different way of formulating it, It's a different way of explaining it, But ultimately it's speaking to exactly the same thing. He was saying, I and God are actually one. One, Single unified whole. And God is everywhere, Right? Everywhere and everything, The Alpha and the Omega. It's just a different way of talking about exactly the same thing. You are not a drop in the ocean, You are the entire ocean in a drop. Now you might have come across quotes like this, Particularly if you're interested in spiritual awakening and you have been practicing your Advaita Vedanta, Maybe through practices such as self-inquiry, Which is the path of jnana, Knowledge, Or through the path of bhakti, Which is devotion or surrender. And. . . Reading about and understanding this formulation. This way of explaining reality, This way of explaining your experience. This ultimately very scientific way of looking at reality itself and the universe. Because even hard science shows us that there are no actual separate objects. It is the human mind that divides everything up into separate objects and categories. It's ultimately a trick of perception. In reality, If you took the human mind out of the equation. There are no separate objects. And this will really bake your noodle. There's also no such thing as time and space. The human mind created that too. It turns out the human mind isn't perceiving these things, The human mind is creating these things. It's a concept that the human mind generates as a method for understanding its own experience. So a great deal of spiritual awakening is actually looking to the truth. Let's just get to the truth of the matter. And As William Blake said, When the doors of perception are cleansed, We will see reality as it truly is. So let's see if we can cleanse those doors of perception. Can we cleanse the lens of perception? Although we can understand this on a cognitive level, It seems to make some kind of sense. And it feels quite nice and reassuring, Doesn't it? Let's be honest. So, Oh, Wow. So I'm not that poor little me, That poor little fragile, Vulnerable, Desperate little thing, Striving about on this tiny rock in a vast, Unkind, Incomprehensible universe. Turns out all of that was a myth. It was an illusion. Like a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare. Turns out. It wasn't real. That's why this is referred to as spiritual awakening. It's waking up from the dream, Waking up from the illusion of separation. And it's a very useful formulation to see it in that way, Because that's exactly how it feels too. It feels like waking up from a nightmare when you spiritually awaken. And all that's really happening is that you're seeing reality clearly. Not just seeing it clearly, But experiencing it. Feeling it clearly. Because you're no longer identified with the limitations and the finitude. Of the neocortex. It's a tiny little thing. If you identify with that, With all of its It's limited, Time-bound, Biological constraints and bindings. It's not going to lead to a happy life. It's a very small part of our experience, Like a very thin veil over our experience, Our own mind, The neocortex specifically. It's a very thin veil that endarkens our experience when we remove the veil. That's when we discover enlightenment was the removal of what was endarkening. However, We can conceptually understand this formulation. Oh, So I'm not a drop in the ocean. I am the entire ocean in a drop. Kinda get it. I'm not in the universe, I am the universe. Kind of get it. You know, It's there. I get the formulation. Before, Before I was born, I was already here, As life itself. And when I die, I will return. So I have nothing to worry about. Well, It feels lovely. Feels lovely. I don't know, Can I, How do I feel that? How do I really experience that? Well, My favourite way of explaining this is by way of a metaphor. That is the metaphor of the waves and the ocean. Specifically. . . How the wave relates to the ocean. . . Is exactly how the body and mind relates to the infinite universe. So, We're going to use this analogy so that we can deeply understand, And it is my hope. . . That you actually start to feel this. So, I will be referring to body and mind, And might even say body and brain at times, But keep referring to your experience. After all, You experience life. You never experience a body and brain, You experience life. And that might seem like, What? Wait, What? Run that back. Try that again. Well, You never experience the body and brain. What you experience is experience. You experience life. And so become very interested in experience itself. Not a conceptual experience, Not an idea, Not a thought. And forget about physical matter quite so much, Because you never experience physical matter. You experience your experience of physical matter, And that's different, As we'll see. So although I will refer to body and mind. What I'm speaking about really is your experience of life, Your experience of body and mind, And begin to think of your experience of life as material. Everything is made out of consciousness. Everything's made out of awareness. Everything is an experience. Our experiences can be very varied. Our experiences can be very different. We can have pleasant experiences, Unpleasant experiences. I mean, The number of experiences we have throughout our life are. . . Near infinite. Not quite infinite, Because the body and mind is finite, So it can't be infinite, But near infinite. The multiplicity, The diversity of experiences that we have. But all experiences are an experience. So I'll invite you here first to actually become very interested in that fact. Everything you experience is an experience, And all experiences are made out of this material, The material being awareness or consciousness. So, If we picture. . . The Ocean. You picture the sea. And we can imagine that this area of the ocean or the sea is fairly near the beach, And so a wave starts to rise out of the ocean. There's the energetic forces that are producing the wave. And here already. Beginning to end. Refer to yourself, Your body and mind, As though your experience of the individual body and mind is similar to the wave that rises out of the ocean when a wave begins. In the ocean. It starts to rise up, And it's quite subtle at first. It's just a mound of water that's rising out of the ocean and moving along. And this has its analogy with our infancy, When you're a baby. Yeah, A little baby one. Your experience of life isn't very vividly defined. It's not very sharply defined. It doesn't have a rigid form. It's very ephemeral. You haven't been taught that. Names and labels. You haven't been taught concepts or categories or divisions. You don't even have you don't you have no concept of your own name. You when you're an infant, When you're a baby, It's everything is just wide eyed wonder. It's just a raw experience. It's formless. It doesn't have conceptual frameworks on it yet. And so that's similar to when the wave rises out of the ocean. It's subtle. It isn't sharply defined. It's not rising very high out of the ocean. It's almost indistinguishable from the ocean itself, And that's what life is like when we're babies. And if you cast your cast your awareness back to that period of time, You might start to get a sense, Get a feeling for what that was like. Remember when everything was still formless, It was just colour, And shape, And light, And sensation, That's all it was. Now, As this wave rises. . . And here, Let's say. . . Let's imagine that we've given this wave. . . Some kind of sentience. So it has, If we give the wave a mind, If we gave the wave perceiving faculties, So it had eyes, Ears, And a mind, As it rises out of the ocean, It comes up and out of the ground of being that it was just in. It's risen up out of the body of water that it was just previously in. So this is like as the body and mind as we come into our childhood, It's like we've become slightly more sharply defined, We've risen up out of the ocean. Meaning we've come out of the root and ground of the universe, The raw material of the energy of the universe that was formless and starting to take form, Now it's starting to take a much more defined, Vivid, Rigid form. It's an experience that is being categorized and divided. You begin to perceive yourself as separate. That's the biggest mistake that humans make. And it's one of the first ones that we do. Perhaps it's analogous to eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Eating that fruit is the same as identifying as the neocortex, The tree of knowledge. The neocortex, You know, Identifying with the human mind, Thinking the mind is really important, Thinking it's really accurate, Thinking I'm really important, Right? Maybe that was the, That's the, The fall of man that's spoken about. Know that's just one idea I'm not so I'm not putting that forward as a as a final position I'm just It's one idea. Now, We can imagine this wave coming out of the ocean. And now it's got eyes, It's got ears, It's got perceiving faculties, And it's got a mind. Think about what life would be like from the perspective of the wave. How long would it be until the wave forgot that it was the ocean? How long would it be? It wouldn't be long at all. Because the wave's now standing up and out, Looking around. Would not see the ocean because it's standing up. Standing out. Right, From the substance, The material that it was previously in. It's no longer formless, Gigantic, Huge, Infinite material. It's condensed into a tiny little thing. So it's standing up and out from the ocean. And now looking around, It will perceive itself to be separate, Thanks in part to the fact that it can see other waves. So this is one of the core reasons for our own sense of separation, Is that we can perceive other beings. We can see other people. And so we think, Oh, I must be separate because I can perceive separate beings. So if the wave coming out of the ocean perceives other waves, It, It classifies and categorizes itself as one of those things, Which is what we do as we're going through life. We witness other beings and categorize ourself according to the same things that we witness. And then we start to compare ourselves. How am I, That wave would think, How am I doing as a wave? Am I the right shape? Am I the right size? Am I traveling the right speed? Do I have. . . Am I the right colour? Am I waving correctly? A sentient wave, That's what it would ask. It would ask, Am I waving correctly? Am I doing this right? And it would compare itself to the other waves around it. It would think, Oh, That wave's much further ahead than I am. That one out in front, It's ahead of me, And there are other waves behind me and to the left and to the right, And we all look a little bit different, But we're all basically the same thing. A bunch of separate objects. This is purely due to the fact that the wave has forgotten. It's the ocean. There are no separate waves. It's all the same body of water. There are no waves. Even in this analogy, We're the ones creating the waves because of the way that we perceive things. Interestingly enough. Does that. Fascinating essay by Neil Postman talking about neuro-linguistic programming. Saying that we perceive waves in part because of the way our language works. So, Wave is a noun. It's like we see a separate object. But there are other cultures that don't have a word for wave as a. . . As an object, They refer to it as a movement. So the, I think it was the Hopi Indian tribe don't have words for separate objects. Everything is a verb. There are no nouns. So when they perceive a wave, They see a far more accurate representation of reality because they see an energetic movement pattern in the body of water. They don't see a separate object. That's kind of what we're learning how to do here. If it wasn't for the human mind, There would be no wave, It would just be movement in water. And here we can draw that into our own experience of life and this will help us. This is our spiritual practice now. This is our spiritual awakening here. It's only because of the human mind that you're perceiving yourself as a story. Essentially as a narrative. As an image, As an object. It's a separate thing. A flesh and blood thing, Wandering around, Terrified, Afraid, Full of fear and desire. Trying to grasp hold of things and push other things away. The root cause of all of that is because of this initial misperception. When the human mind is not there. Which we achieve through anatta, No mind, In meditation. There's various practices to do that. To be rid of our identification with the ego. That's when we discover, Ah, Exactly what's being pointed to here. You are not the wave. Why? Because there are no waves. Haram Abi. You are an energetic movement of life itself, As Thich Nhat Hanh was saying. Before you were born, You were already here, As life itself. So, Before the wave, It was already water. The wave now and we're going to be following a single wave now. I'm getting kind of. . . I feel quite sentimental about this wave, This particular wave. What should we call him? Wall-E. Wall-E the wave. Wall-E the wave. See? And now, Rob, We've really. . . I've really stitched up this wave now by giving it a name and some attributes. I called it It-He. So now it's Wall-E-He. And I've already started putting all these concepts and stuff on, Right? And as you're following along, It's like we've created. . . This is how quickly the human mind puts a narrative, Puts a story. On things and feel how much that makes sense. We anthropomorphise things and it's like, Oh, That makes sense. But in a weird kind of way, We anthropomorphised ourselves. We came up with the idea, The image, The story of a human being. What if there's no such thing? What if there's just being? This story called human, Something we overlaid over the top of our experience in order to try and make sense of it. Which is exactly what we're doing with Wally the Wave right here. Who's looking around thinking, Hey, Maybe I'm better than some waves. Maybe I'm not as good as other waves. What even is this? And Wally's gonna be thinking like, What actually am I? What am I made of? What is this substance? What's going on here? And if you were to say to Wally, Don't worry, You're not a wave, You're actually the ocean, Wally would say, You've gone, Done, Lost your mind, What are you talking about? Because from the perspective of the wave, From the perspective of WALL-E, He is a separate object. He would say, I am a separate being. Now, Refer to your own experience of life. If I was to say, Don't worry, You're not that individual human. You're the, You're actually, You know, If you just look around you and just really experience this, Ah, You're actually consciousness itself. You're the, The raw material of life. You are made of the raw material of life in the same way a wave is made of water. You are made of the raw material of life. And you'll feel a lot of resistance to this. Yeah, Man, What are you talking about? But go to your experience. Whatever your experience is, Good, Bad, Negative, You're having a good time, Bad time, Whatever, Whatever your experience is, It doesn't matter. No experience is a barrier to spiritual awakening because all experience is made out of consciousness. So it doesn't matter what you're experiencing. Be interested in what experience is made of. You will find ultimately that experience is made out of awareness. It's made of consciousness. Consciousness, Because that is the only way. That's the only thing that is present in every experience. You might have lots of experiences where things are present, Things are there, Your experience of other people, Your experience of objects, Your experience of events, There's other stuff going on. But the only thing that is there for every single experience that you ever have is consciousness. It's the only one thing that's always there. So, When I'm referring to what the ocean is in this analogy, That's what it is. Formless consciousness. Now, Your current experience of a human life, Your current experience of you, Of who you are, Consider it to be a condensation. A localization, A formulation a movement in this consciousness. I mean, Even the Hindus say Shakti is consciousness in motion. Shiva is consciousness at rest. And Shiva and Shakti are actually the same deity, The same being. But Shakti, When Shakti decides to go off on an adventure, She has a lovely great time. She's consciousness in motion. When she comes back to Shiva, Shiva is consciousness at rest, Meditating. So in this analogy, The wave would be Shakti, The ocean would be Shiva. So, Refer to your own experience now, And you can continually test. Yeah, I'm having some wild experiences. I'm experiencing a body. I'm experiencing a mind. Right now, I'm experiencing filming a. . . Recording a talk. All right, That's what I'm, That's what I'm experiencing right now. It's quite a surreal experience, Let me tell you, Because I can, This is like very meta, Very meta ontology, Because I can see myself recording myself. So, Just refer to your current experience now. Refer to your current experience. We don't have to get rid of it. This is something that it's common to miss in spiritual awakening. People are trying to erase their experience. But the ocean doesn't need to erase the wave. The wave is a natural movement in the ocean. And the. . . The biggest joke of the whole thing is that the wave never actually stopped being the ocean. The wave never left. Even though it might feel very much like you are separate, You kind of stepped out of the universe, You ceased being the formless life energy itself, And you separated yourself. Like, Humans really have this delusion. We think we separated ourselves from the natural order. Ultimately, There's not actually any such thing as something being artificial. I know that's gonna be, That's a lot to say, I know, But ultimately, A skyscraper is just as natural as a tree. It's just as natural. It that might take a bit of a bit more kind of meditating on but Once you get that, Oh, There's no stopping you. You're well on your way to spiritual awakening. A skyscraper is as natural as a tree. No such thing as something being unnatural. Because all of it is reality. And reality never leaves itself. Reality never stops being itself. It just is. So Wall-E, Our wave here, Is absolutely hurtling along now, And as Wall-E continues, Growing in size, Growing in power, Growing in ferocity. If you think the closer the wave gets to the shore, The taller it gets, The more chaotic it gets. It takes on a more severe form. It does that arcing, Arcing, Curled over sort of thing. There's much more noise. There's much more clamor because we're approaching the coast or the beach. And there's much more energy. It's more ferocious. It's more chaotic. And that's what we perceive as we get older. We start to feel more and more responsible as we get older and older. And I think that's simply because we have spent a longer period of perceived time, Because time doesn't actually exist in the formlessness. Time only exists from the perspective of WALL-E, Right? Because WALL-E is a temporary wave. But time doesn't exist from the perspective of the ocean. It's timeless. But if WALL-E's been out of the ocean for its own perceived length of time, It feels more and more separate. Because experience seems to keep reaffirming that it is a separate thing. Sorry, It, He, Wally, He thinks he's a separate thing, And the longer he spends in the wave form, The more separate he's going to feel, And the more intensely experience will appear to reaffirm his separate nature. It just seems so obvious as as more and more experiences accrue. Say this wave's going along, Sees a boat. Hey, That's nice. Even hits a boat. I never thought of that before. Wally hits a boat, Whacks his head, Smash underneath, You know, Boats tossed everywhere. And then Wally continues, Carries on towards the shore. So what was that all about? That was like, I don't know, The first catastrophe or crisis you had in life. Seagulls swooping in, Fish stop by, Dolphins jump out of the ocean in front of you. It's just beautiful, All this colour, All this shape, All this noise. Because all of this is going on, Which is ultimately consciousness, The universe, Brahman, God, Shiva Enjoying this experience. Just enjoying it. Let's enjoy being temporary and finite for a while. On the deepest level, Shiva knows all is well. This is a temporary dream. But from the perspective of Wall-E, All kinds of chaos is happening. In fact, Even disasters are happening. I mean, Maybe Wally hit the boat. Whack! Smashed his head against the boat, But he managed to carry on over the other side. Maybe Wally's friend? Another. . . Another wave? Let's say, Wendy. Wendy the Wave, She hit the boat and she didn't come out the other side. So, First experience of loss for poor Wally. And naturally, From the perspective of Wally, This is heartbreaking, And Wally then needs to grieve. God what just what a terrible tragedy but from our perspective witnessing this Wally and Wendy are actually the same being, And although Wendy perhaps prematurely returned to the ocean, She never leaves Wally, And Wally never leaves Wendy. And ultimately, When all of this is said and done, And old Wally's played out his story, He returns to the ocean and will be reunited with Wendy. But the biggest joke of it all is that they never parted. As one, One, Uh, What's it a Zen master said? We cannot part because we never met. Another one by Thich Nhat Hanh, Who said. . . I was never born and I will never die. So Wally now approaching the shore rapidly. Having experienced ups and downs quite literally. So I imagine of all the beings in this universe, A wave is going to experience ups and downs a lot more than any other. Okay. Because ups and downs is what they do, Right? They love it. Rapidly approaching the shore and can now see that all the waves, Every single wave, It wasn't just Wendy that's disappeared, That Wally can look ahead and see every single wave that has gone before me at some point charges forwards and crashes to the shore and then vanishes. What happens? What happens? What happens to these waves? They're not there anymore. I know I've been kind of laughing and joking around but. . . Let's get serious now. Let's really deepen. Our understanding here in this metaphor. That's what WALL-E witnesses, The individual forms disappearing. Wondering where do they go? Because if you look to the shore. . . There's not even any water there! There's not even anything that even closely resembles a wave. So Wally can't refer to his own experience in thinking, What happens next? Because as far as Wally can see, This is a totally alien land in front of me. It's just barren, Blank. And it appears the wave that was just in front of me just crashed to the shore, Disappeared, And now there's nothing. Terrifying. Because due to our self-awareness, That's going to happen to me. And it's this that prompts a lot of spiritual awakening. In spiritual awakening we make the mistake of looking up really we should look down Was it Friedrich Nietzsche who said. . . Most people never find God because they don't look low enough. If Wally looked down, Rather than ahead and up, We'd see the wave crashes and then recedes back to where it came from. And this is what is meant, This is why when spiritual teachers talk about saying you are ultimately illusory, There is no individual separate being there. And it can seem so unkind and it can seem so. . . What do you mean? That doesn't make any sense. It seems a bit dismissive or invalidating. There's that sort of feeling to it. I'm on this journey. I've got all this stuff I want to do. Don't tell me I don't exist. So maybe spiritual awakening only really we can only really understand it when we're ready and we want to understand it. Maybe we can't earlier in the earlier in the journey. When you're just coming out of the ocean and enjoying smacking your head against a boat. Because in a weird kind of way we do enjoy it even when it's a catastrophe. Sorry, These metaphors always start getting absolutely wild. I cannot help but go on tangents. My apologies to you. So we become quite attached. This is why the Buddhists talk about attachment being one of the root causes of our suffering is because we become attached to the individual narrative. I've become quite attached to WALL-E. As you can probably tell, At some point Wally's gonna have to crash to the shore to end this analogy and end this talk, Right? But I don't want to do it, Because I've already become attached to this being, To this story. I feel quite sentimental. I'm rooting. I'm rooting for old Wally. And yet, It's a completely fictitious character that I just made up. There's no such thing. And waves aren't sentient. And yet I cannot help but have an emotional connection because of the story that I've overlaid over the top of what is essentially just an energetic pattern in water. Now exactly the same thing happens when we are refusing to let go of our ego identity. We don't want to let it go. We don't want to let it go. Because we've become attached to the object. Emotional narrative that we have overlaid over the top of what is essentially an energetic pattern in consciousness. But it's important to let this attachment go, Because if we could, As some kind of angelic wave-being, Come down to Wall-E and explain all of this. . . Wally would no longer be afraid. And Wally would look forward to meeting Wendy again. And Wally wouldn't be afraid of crashing to the shore. Because Wally would understand there's no such thing as crashing to the shore. There are no individual waves. And I'm sure crashing to the shore is not going to be pleasant. There's no softening the blow, Unfortunately. That element of experience has to happen. Otherwise, There's no story. We have to have a finite ending in order to reconnect with the infinite. And this is where no metaphor is perfect. Any metaphor or analogy only takes you 90% of the way. You have to go the next 10% yourself. Soz. Because. . . In order for the infinite to be there. The. The temporary has to be experienced. But that I'll explain that in a different metaphor in a future talk, Because that's that's a different. That's a different ocean of waves. Let's say. So if Wall-E had a spiritual awakening, All the waves around Wall-E would still be terrified all the way up to crashing to the shore. Or Wall-E. And then smash into the shore. Crash! Frightening, Loud, Chaotic, And Wall-E is destroyed. But is Wall-E destroyed? Just, When a wave crashes to the shore, Does anything happen to the water? Is the ocean damaged by the wave hitting the shore? Is the ocean harmed? Is the sea harmed? And let's really up the ante here. What if it's a storm? What if you got 20 foot, 30 foot waves smashing into the cliffs? Waves rising high, Almost hitting the birds, The waves are going that high. Lightning, Thunder, Rain, Hurricane winds, Tornadoes, Whirlpools. Does any of that harm the ocean? Might harm the clits. Might harm the boats. Might hit a bird and harm the bird. Doesn't harm the ocean. No matter how high the waves are, No matter how chaotic. The ocean is not overwhelmed by its own movement. So, If you can get a sense for this energetic material that really is the true substance underlying all of your experience, You can relax. Truly. Reality does not threaten itself! It's just movie. And nothing truly ends. When we see a single form end, It's just returned to its original nature, Just as the wave crashes to the shore, Returns to the ocean. And what then? I don't know. Well, I do know. You go right back to being the formless life experience. Formless, Empty. It doesn't mean, Meaning it doesn't have shape yet. So when, Again, When spiritual teachers might speak about the formless void or like empty consciousness, That sounds a bit like that sounds a bit dull or sounds a bit scary. Sounds a bit like that's empty. That just sounds boring. That's not what it means. It means that the formlessness essentially means just if you imagine the the water underneath all these waves, It's vast, Open, Very powerful, Very energetic, It's deep, These are deep currents, There's still movement there, It's just not taking an individual form, It's just energy in a huge body of water. And if you really touch into that, Particularly if you become very aware of your very deep emotions, Deep emotions, That's what you're experiencing. It's essentially what emotions are. They're the current underneath the waves. That's why emotions direct our behavior, Because they're the currents underneath it all. So when we return to the fundamental nature, The fundamental substratum of reality itself, We rejoin the raw material. Now, If we break the analogy down a bit, Because oceans and waves and water doesn't actually work like this, But from the human being perspective, When we get rid of the human bit and we return to being, Get rid of the human story, The energetic residue of what we picked up during this temporary movement, This temporary localization of consciousness does return to the deeper body underneath. It returns, And it is still, It still carries some of that energetic shape. And that informs the deeper currents. So your life does matter. Matters more than you could possibly begin to imagine right now, But sometimes it's best not to think about it too much. But we could say. . . And this is, I'm not, I'm not saying this as a, As a definitive, It's just now as we've developed this metaphor, And because this starts to answer a lot of the deeper questions as we've developed this here, If you've stuck with me thus far, Just a little further, Because we're going to answer so, So many of the very deep questions that are the real head scratchers when it comes to spiritual awakening that are almost impossible to answer from the human perspective. But now, Well, We'll keep using Wally the Wave as our example. Maybe this? Would go some way to explaining how karma works, And vasanas, If you've been interested in the Hindu and Buddhist formulation on this, The Advaita Vedanta stuff. Because what if Wally the wave then returned to the broader ocean of being, And Wally's experiences as a wave then influences the water at large? Thank you very much. Even just a single drop. Of water, What's that quote? A single drop of water balances the whole universe. That's a famous Swami said that. My apologies, I can't remember the one. But they won't mind. Swamis as a whole don't mind whether they get name-checked or not. So what if Wally's experiences, Smacking his head against the boat, Losing Wendy, All of the. . . All the chaos and noise. . . It now, When Wally returns to the ocean, That just completely dissipates. So there's no more pain, There's no more suffering. But what if that water still carries some of that shape, Some of that charge? Now, So to bring that analogy into the human experience, Maybe you return to the root and ground of being and you could you could remain there as formless life energy not formed into another temporary form for centuries perhaps even millennia or perhaps longer yugas perhaps hundreds of thousands of years as this formless energetic substratum before it's your time to rise to the surface and localize again. And maybe whatever happened in the previous localization informs what happens in the next one. For example, Let's say. . . Another wave forms, And a large part of the material that forms in this new wave is from Wally's old wave. But now it's just raw material again. It doesn't have a name. It doesn't have an individual narrative. It just has some of the color, Some of the residue of the previous experience of being a wave. And now it's forming into a totally new it's important to note that. It's not, It's not. WALL-E is not reincarnated. It's not WALL-E that reincarnates, It doesn't work like that. The raw material that made Wall-E, Because Wall-E was never there. This is the key. This is the key. It's all still one single unified whole. There never was a single individual wave. I'm just trying to explain a little more on some of the deeper concepts like karma and vasanas as we're here. It might carry some of the energetic residue from a previous form, But it is a new form, Completely new. However, That particular wave might be afraid of boats! Might have a phobia of boats, For obvious reasons, And would never understand why I'm afraid of boats. Where did that phobia come from? Never had a negative experience with boats, But it's just there. Weird. So what if a lot of the subconscious and unconscious material that we have in life that does kind of direct a lot of our behaviors, Decisions, Thoughts, Feelings, Etc. Maybe it's a hangover from a previous form. As Carl Jung said, Until you make the unconscious conscious, It will direct your life, And you will call it fate. Maybe there's a little. . . I don't like the formulations of karma that are a little bit kind of shaming and. . . You know, If you have bad things happening in your life, It can almost be a little bit of spiritual invalidation and spiritual dismissiveness of your suffering. Say, Oh, Well, That's because of your past karma. It's a bit too easy that it's a bit convenient that isn't it i don't think that's the way it works with karma not quite I tend to formulate karma as. . . It's more like work. It's a pile of work that you arrived. You arrived at the desk in life and there's a pile of karma there to get through. Some people don't bother their entire lives, But the karma doesn't go anywhere. You're going to have to get to it at some point. Wally. Right. So and other people crack on. So or you could see that as that's your Dharma. That's your Dharma. That's what you've got to get through. And some people choose to be responsible and accountable and do the work that they're here to do in life. And other people avoid it and resist it. And if you avoid and resist it, It's just going to get worse and worse. So you're just going to come back and do it again and again and again until you just do it. You might as well just do it. Do your Dharma. Work through your Karma. And vasanas could be seen as the deep energetic currents in the ocean underneath the waves. That speak to the broader patterns. If you've noticed there are patterns in life of you just seem to be on like a kind of 10 year loop or a four year loop or something, Or you just have the same relationship over and over again, The same job over and over again, Same interpersonal struggles over and over again. Could be a vasana. But anyway. . . We won't get too much more bogged down in some of the. . . The nitty gritty, The grimy stuff of the spiritual awakening, Cognizing of this sort of stuff, Because ultimately it doesn't matter. So there's some things I just want to end on here. Relax. Relax. I think I was telling myself that as much as all of you. Relax. Relax, Relax, Relax. See on those days that I'm in my Samadhi, I'm experiencing the spiritual awakening. Can't really call it a state because it's actually your fundamental nature. Samadhi and spiritual awakening, It's not a state, It's a recognition. So on those days that I'm in that recognition, I'm aware of the Corin Bryant body and mind. I'm aware of those emotions. I'm aware of those thoughts. I'm aware of all the people. But what I'm experiencing mostly. Is being. And there is only One Being. It's like if Wally became spiritually awakened, Became aware that he was the ocean, And then decided to live life from the perspective of the ocean, Rather than from the perspective of the wave. But doesn't try to get rid of the wave, Doesn't try to push the wave away, Doesn't try to get rid of the wave. Just is, It'll play itself out. It's an energetic pattern that is doing, Doing what it does. But from the perspective of the ocean, It's a much calmer, Much more relaxed way of being. And you'll find it's much more energized, Much more positive, Much freer, Much more limited, Not limited, Much more unlimited, Because it's the wave that's limited, It's the wave that's finite. You see, This is why it's such a creative state to be in. Spiritual awakening is very good for creativity because you're tapping into the formless consciousness. The ocean that hasn't yet formed into a wave. That's very creative because it's raw material. If you look at a lump of clay, It can be anything. Could be a vase, Could be a mug, Could be a cup, We don't know yet. It's the raw material that could become anything. That's what the ocean is before it becomes a wave could be anything. So if you're spiritually awakened, It's very creative because you're you have a direct line to the formless. This whole talk of just that's all I've done, Just open up to the formless, See what comes through. And then I guess the skill of Wally the Wave is deciding which bits to say and which bits are best to leave out. Because for every single thing that I say, There's ten other things that I decide probably aren't appropriate to talk about right now. But relax, Relax is the key, Just relax. Think of all of the things that if you truly realized this, That you would no longer need to worry about. All that stuff of Wally worrying, Am I the right height? Am I the right size? Am I the right color? Am I the right shape? Am I doing it correctly? Am I waving correctly? Is this right? Is this how it's supposed to go? Why does everything seem so weird and chaotic and exhausting and strange and destabilizing? What's going on with all of this? All of that, Once Wally realizes, Sees clearly what's going on, Oh, I'm not the wave, I'm the ocean. All of that dissolves completely, It just goes away. Because it's seen, And those problems aren't solved, It's seen that those problems were an illusion. They simply were unnecessary. They stemmed from a false perception, A false assumption. The deep key here is that. Your body and mind never said, I am you. Ever considered that. The body and mind that you take yourself to be never once said I am you. You assumed that. Based on how things appear, So it's rational and reasonable and logical, I'm not saying you're not stupid for assuming that, That's how it appears. But it never said, I am you. It's an assumption. It's a belief. When we start challenging that assumption and that belief, That's when things change. And the final point. You never left the ocean. And I think maybe that's one that will help for people who have been stuck on the spiritual path for a long time and perhaps wondering why did I get involved with the ego in the first place and how do I wake up to this realization when I've done all this stuff and I've got this life and it's all chaos and everything. You're already awake. You are already awake. You never weren't. Because the wave never stopped being water. Even when localised as a wave, It never stopped being the ocean. It's everything I have for you today team. Thank you so much for watching. Take care. Be well. Stay present.