Joy - Living Love

What does living love actually mean? What is the spiritual bypass? Does it eliminate the need for sadhana or spiritual practices? What does sadhana actually mean and how can it help you? Listen here.

Transcript

The power of this teaching is its immediacy.

It's your direct experience,

Your direct realization.

But there's a difference between experience and realization.

Realization is permanent.

Experiences come and go.

So the experience of bliss is beautiful.

It's a taste of the living truth in your heart.

And suffering invariably returns even after the most profound experiences.

But in true realization there is no return to suffering because there is no experiencer.

There is no one to experience anything.

So it's no longer,

I am experiencing bliss.

Right?

Or I have realized something.

The I is ego and that must be seen through completely,

Totally,

Fully for realization.

This is the nature of realization.

It's a shift in consciousness.

It's a radical shift in consciousness that comes about spontaneously,

Without thought,

Unexpectedly,

Without doing anything.

So I want to talk a little bit about sadhana,

Doing sadhana,

Doing practice.

The doer is the problem.

So sadhana is letting go.

That's what it means.

It's not creating a newer,

Better you or a special you.

There is a lot of misconceptions about what enlightenment is,

What awakening is,

What bliss is even,

And what self-realization is,

And what leads to enlightenment,

Etc.

So awakening,

Self-realization,

And liberation are three different things.

Somehow they've been mashed together to mean one thing.

Awakening means liberation and nothing could be further from the truth.

It is common to hear about the spiritual bypass,

Which is related to Papaji's perspective of Ramana Maharshi's teaching.

And the spiritual bypass is to go directly to your heart and stay there.

Going into your heart and recognizing that you are pure consciousness,

That you are pure happiness,

Is very fast,

Very immediate,

Quicker than a finger snap.

You can go immediately into your heart and have a taste of the living truth,

The living happiness of your being,

Instantly.

But the staying there is the difficult part,

And sadhana supports staying there.

Staying there requires the ability to be still,

The ability to inquire,

The ability to remain focused on the Source,

No matter what is happening in your life.

It is the end of giving your attention to the stories that your mind will naturally weave about you,

Your life,

And people in your life,

And what they did and what they said.

We spend the majority of our waking time in time travel,

Traveling to the past and to the future,

Replaying conversations and strategizing about how we are going to prove that you are right.

This is what mind does.

It goes from past to future,

It creates strategies for survival,

Strategies for success,

Strategies to get,

Strategies to keep,

And it's extremely complicated.

And the ultimate strategy is to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong.

This is part of the genetic mind,

Which is the genetics of thought.

Liberation is not something that happens in a finger snap,

Or less than a finger snap.

It is earned,

It is not given.

The teacher does not give you anything.

The guru does not give you anything.

The guru is the consciousness of your heart,

And the outer guru is pushing you into the consciousness of your heart again and again and again,

And annihilating the story of you so that you can live in the truth of you,

Which is vast,

Still,

Indescribable,

Love,

Happiness,

Peace,

And joy.

That is the only purpose of the outer guru,

Is to push you in to the heart until you stay there.

Until that becomes your predominant point of view,

Which is the point of view of love,

Compassion,

Omniscience.

The spiritual bypass is often misunderstood as liberation,

Going into your heart,

Awakening to the truth that you are pure consciousness,

You are not your body.

That is awakening.

That is instant,

And that is what the spiritual bypass represents.

It's an introduction to the truth of who you are.

But to remain as that requires sadhana,

Letting go of everything tied to the feeling,

I am me.

Letting go of attachment,

Letting go of desire,

All attachment,

All desires,

All doing.

It's seeing through this sense that you are in charge and surrendering to the omniscience of the heart as omniscience,

Right?

And this is where the love,

The bhakti,

Arises from.

So if you take a moment right now and give your attention to your heart,

And allow your heart to expand with love,

Expand and expand and expand and expand,

And where does that love come from?

Where does the me come from that you feel inside of you?

Who feels love?

Who experiences love?

What doesn't come and go?

So when we use words like love,

It can be confusing,

Because love means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Love can mean sex.

Love can mean relationship to other.

But this love,

The love revealed through sadhana,

Through the practice of letting go,

The practice of inquiry,

To see through the illusion of you,

The purpose is to be free of the mind and ego entirely.

Entirely.

So that you are no longer a slave to your mind,

And you are free as the vast presence of the heart.

But everything I'm saying is conceptual until you have the direct experience.

And the power of this teaching is direct experience,

And beyond experience,

Which is revelation,

Realization,

Deepening into the living truth,

Which occurs naturally when you train your mind to stay focused on the source,

To be one-pointed,

Focused entirely on the source,

Until you realize for yourself that you are nothing you think you are.

Nothing that you think you are.

You are not the body,

You are not your relationships,

You are not your family,

You are not your things,

You are not your desires,

You are not your purpose,

You are not your name.

That is nette nette,

The nette nette of now.

Nothing that comes into your mind really encapsulates the living truth of who you are.

And when you realize this for yourself fully,

Deeply,

The experience is one of deepening,

Deepening into the presence of being.

And the deeper you go,

The less you react to circumstances in your life.

Not because the circumstances have gotten better or have changed or anything like that,

Or that you are a newer,

Better,

More special person.

Not that.

That is ego.

Ego always wants to be special,

Unique,

Powerful,

Because the ego feels weak,

Powerless,

Hopeless.

This is the source of self-hatred and despair.

So it is natural to want to be the special one,

The enlightened one,

The master,

Right?

But this is ego-based.

It starts with ego.

Ego is still present in a moment of awakening.

The spiritual bypass goes directly through the reflective consciousness of your ego into the heart.

That is going directly in by giving your attention to the source of the feeling,

Me.

This is the spiritual bypass,

This is awakening.

It is not the end,

It is the beginning.

Awakening is the beginning.

Next is self-realization,

Where you have a deeper experience of the consciousness that you are,

Which lives in your heart.

And then finally,

Liberation is the annihilation of the doer,

The experiencer.

No ego exists in liberation.

So the practices are support for developing the skill to remain still as heart,

To stay in the heart as the omniscience of pure consciousness.

This is the nature of self-realization and liberation.

But these are three distinct phases of your spiritual evolution.

And the true teacher is no different from you as a human being.

The only difference is that they have the full realization of the source.

And they have remained as that and have practiced sadhana for a period of years,

Usually over 10 to 12 years.

So it takes time,

Perseverance and concentration to develop the skill to remain quiet,

To calm the mind,

To be the truth,

The living happiness in the core.

This is who you are,

Not what the mind is telling you,

Even about spiritual concepts.

So spiritual thought and ideas and discussions about spiritual belief systems and practice and what Ramana said or Ramana did or Papaji said or Papaji did or Koshi said and Koshi did have nothing to do with this realization of truth inside of you.

And only you can go into the cave of your heart and stay there.

The desire for liberation has to be extremely strong because the Maya of life,

The circumstances that change,

The feelings that change,

The conversations that change,

The movies that you go to,

The change,

The family gatherings that change and change and change is not real.

It is Maya and it is very,

Very seductive.

And one of the reasons it's so seductive is that so many people are seduced and lost in the endless house of mirrors that Maya represents.

And that is change,

Changing change,

The endless changing nature of this world.

So freedom is in the world and transcendent of the world.

So the body is in the world,

But is the body who you are.

So when you fall in love and close your eyes and stay there in the heart and don't move to react to any life situation,

See through the story that your mind is weaving to prove that you're right.

The movement to prove that you're right steals your joy,

Your happiness,

Your natural state of love beyond all ideas of love,

Peace beyond all ideas of peace and happiness beyond all ideas of happiness and the state of happiness that also changes.

Happiness changes,

Right?

You experience happiness or bliss one minute,

The next minute you're angry about something,

Right?

Or you're afraid of something or you're worried about something because you haven't developed the skill to stay in the heart.

You're giving your attention to the mind and whatever the mind is telling you and believing the mind,

Right?

If you think of Eve in the Garden of Eden,

The snake is the mind saying,

Yes,

Eat of the tree of knowledge and you will know everything.

You will become God,

Right?

This is the false promise of the egoic mind,

The genetic mind,

Right?

And you are cast out of paradise and the paradise is the heart.

It is the love in your heart as love beyond all ideas of love,

The vastness that can never be described.

And when you fall in love totally,

Completely and surrender all of your attachments and you love this presence with all your heart,

All your mind,

All your soul as love,

The bliss is overwhelming,

The love is overwhelming.

Everything shines with the light of pure consciousness when you surrender to love.

So surrender to love right now.

The bypass is don't wait,

Do it right now.

Stop thinking.

Stop giving your attention to your thoughts about sadness or how bad you are,

How worthless you are,

Or how wonderful you are,

How special you are.

Forget all that.

Forget the short stories about what happened yesterday or the epic story about how horrible you are that's been woven into your whole life story.

Forget all that.

That is the illusion generated by your mind that steals your natural joy.

So stop giving your attention to the internal voice in your head.

Stop it.

Give your attention to the heart as love and experience the bliss of being.

The bliss beyond all ideas of bliss.

It's not the bliss that comes and goes.

Bliss that comes and goes is an experience.

The bliss that this teaching reveals is beyond the experience,

Beyond the experiencer,

Beyond all ideas,

Spiritual ideas,

Mundane ideas,

Beyond all thought.

It is the end of thought and this living love is in your heart.

Go there.

Stay there.

And be free.

Shanti,

Shanti,

Shanti.

Reviews

Paints a vivid picture of awakening directly to the “consciousness of your heart” and truth of your being

Wow a meditation to be listened many times very profound. Thank you .

Very interesting and calming ...

That was amazing... I can’t wait to make my friends listen to this!

A lot of wisdom to unpack ✨ Thank you for sharing 🙏🏼💝

Thank you for a beautiful soft flowing meditation 🙏🏼

Beautiful. Thank you 🙏

Much gratitude for this wonderful lesson. Namaste

Beautiful meditation
Thank u

Beautiful Realization! Thank you!

Lovely and comforting. Thankyou for imparting this gentle wisdom up on my day🌀💙🙏

Thank you🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

On the mark. Thank you. Succinct perspective and very clarifying.

Beautiful. Thank you. 🙏💐