Ling all l l ring all Om I'm Jacob Watson.
Welcome to this mini satsang.
These are brief,
Spontaneous spiritual teachings and guided meditations with interwoven periods of silence.
I'm happy to be with you today.
What does the you mean?
What does the I mean?
I have been this,
You have been that,
This person,
This personality.
What is that?
Well,
It's an accumulation of time,
Space,
Mostly other people's wishes for us when we were young and the accumulations of our socializing,
What we needed to do to get along,
The roles we played to have our needs met.
And yet,
Certainly,
Certainly there was something else before all that,
Some pure self,
We might even say some pure soul arriving here in this body,
On this planet at this time,
Something pure,
Something pure.
Something pure still exists after all this time,
All this accumulation.
There is something underneath all that stuff.
Again,
Something pure,
The self.
Perhaps we feel it late at night,
Just before we drift off to sleep.
Perhaps we know it as the still small voice within or a gut feeling or an intuition,
Something indeed that doesn't change over time,
A quality that is always with us,
Always has been and always will be,
A quality of self,
Pure self.
We know this quality by other names,
Essence,
Soul,
Our spirit,
Or phrases like who we really are,
The person that is underneath everything.
Yet,
It doesn't have expression very much.
It needs encouragement,
Most often silence,
To come out,
To be known,
To be expressed,
And to be lived.
What is it exactly,
This essence,
This soul,
This spirit?
It's certainly pure,
Which means that it's untainted,
And it has a timeless quality about it,
Doesn't it?
Something that doesn't start and stop,
But just is.
We could call it by another name,
Is-ness,
That which just is.
We don't have to start it.
We don't have to start it or stop it.
Either way,
It's present,
It's with us.
In some ways,
It holds us.
It's not that we hold it.
It holds us.
It was always there.
It has always been there.
And we can't foretell the future,
But it looks and feels like it always will be there.
Certainly,
Our emotions,
Our feelings come and go.
We're sad one minute,
Relieved the next,
Happy the next,
Angry the next,
Grieving the next,
The rollercoaster of natural emotions.
But this quality of pureness,
Of spirit,
Of soul,
It just is.
And it has always been and always will be.
When I touch this quality,
When I live this quality,
There is the sense of relief.
I experience not only relief,
But a deep,
Spreading freedom.
That's the word,
Freedom.
It's the realization that I don't have to do anything.
Indeed,
I don't have to do anything to be.
And there's a period at the end of that sentence.
And then the next and the last sentence is,
I am.
I am.
And with the utterance of that sentence,
There comes both a deep peace and the realization that that's all I have to be.
Indeed,
It's all I am.
I am.
Suddenly and miraculously,
All needs melt.
They drop away.
They vanish.
And only I am left.
But a special I,
A capital I,
An I that is realization itself,
That is essence itself.
And when that happens,
It's not as if I feel lonely,
But the freedom endures.
In fact,
As I drop into the freedom,
There is a connection,
I feel.
A lack of duality,
Meaning a union.
The freedom of union.
For me,
As a human being,
It means suddenly never being alone again.
Never being alone.
But connected.
That deep,
All-pervasive union.
I am suddenly a beloved member of a beloved community.
Here,
In these spiritual realms,
Words don't suffice because this is a beloved community above all or perhaps under all.
Imagine it.
Your beloved community.
That word,
Freedom,
During this silent time,
This brief meditation,
This weaving of thoughts into reality in this moment,
This freedom expands into the silent time,
Into the meditation.
Again,
It is a freedom for me where everything drops away,
Everything but that pure self.
You might think that it's tiny,
That it's small.
Could it not be small if everything drops away?
But no.
It's large.
It's as large as the word connotes.
It's as large as can be.
I could say as large as we can imagine,
But it's more than imagination.
It is not something that I have to do like imagine it.
It just is.
Hence,
It's freedom.
Hence,
The freedom it offers me.
Freedom.
And it's not as if it has to be freedom from something.
Certainly that's often how we use the word,
To be free of something,
Free of,
For example,
Stress.
No.
Somehow it's freedom with a capital F.
Freedom.
Complete,
Total freedom.
It's not as if I'm not human.
I certainly have all the human qualities,
A body,
All my feelings.
They come and go.
But this freedom is something different.
It allows me,
Yes,
Certainly,
To continue to be a human being,
Thankfully.
I still have all my senses and things I like to do and my relationships and the coming of the day and the coming of the night,
All the human cycles that we live.
But this transcends all of that.
This freedom.
Freedom again.
So let that word,
And it's got to be much more than a concept.
Let that concept expand until it fills everything.
Freedom.
Our lived experience.
Let that be the theme of this satsang.
May you be blessed with freedom.
Thank you.
