Until now, I have left the explanation of Plato’s cave untouched as it was enough for this period of study. To most of you it was clear enough to understand that these puppets on the walkway behind the people and in front of the flame were the conditioning, your attachment to them, them being your emotional  buckets. You understood that the world we see out there isn’t really where we see it, its reflected light falls into our eyes and is translated within, that the sound we hear isn’t outside of us that we hear, but we hear it within. That the waves picked up by the ear are translated and made sense of in relation to our collection in the buckets. Recognition happens within.
The picture, taste, sound, smell and or feeling might differ per individual due to what it collected and its judgment to it related to the experience at the time(s). So your awareness of it happens within, not out there.

So far you’ve understood that the projections on the wall are really your inner wall and that in your waking state, what some call the matrix, the illusion, lies mainly a poor ability of seeing how things really are, instead of realising that they have been discoloured  by a limited point of view. And that they are lived in accordance due to your attachment to those judgments as your truth.
That these thoughts and judgments rise up in you because of resonance, the way it was stored and distorted, recognizes of itself, or gets charged and rises as thought and or feeling to which you say, I think, I feel etc. And the moment you act upon it, you induce karmic residue.

But what about when you dream, when you sleep and dream? When you wake up you say, I dreamed that I was doing this or that, went there, seen this or that, experienced such and such etc.  Your eyes are closed, but you still experience seeing and hearing etc. What remained in both the waking and dreaming state was the I.

Then there is the state where you do not dream, where ego is laid to rest, where these energies are not being triggered anymore, where the resting is most effective. But the I never left.

So who AM I?

Let’s look at alchemy for a moment  and call this I the gold, now we can make a coin out of it and a trader is able to recognize the coin. He knows he can buy things with it. But let’s say a person made a necklace out of it, the woman recognizes it as something to wear around her neck, and let’s say someone makes a seal ring of it, and he knows he can give it its mark. For the woman the necklace is gone and the seal ring has lost its meaning to her and therefore its value. For the trader too, he cannot buy anything with the necklace, so it’s worthless to him too. But when they all ran in debt and needed cash the trader was surprised to see he gave as much for the necklace as he could have gotten from the coin and the ring too turned out to be the same value. How could that have been? The essence never changed, it was gold. What changed is much like the different states, awake, dreaming etc. You are not those states, not the awake, the dreamer or sleeper. But without it nothing could be, so what is this I we cannot see, yet penetrates all?
The I itself is non dual, just like the gold. If one takes away the gold in the necklace there is no necklace anymore. Similarly if we take away the gold of the coin or the ring, they cease to exist. But the gold is the necklace and the ring as well as the coin at the same time, as it is the I.
The necklace is not a ring nor a coin but gold is all of them, if there were no gold, none of them would be. So it is the dreamer as well as the dream world. Gold being the only reality. Without it there would be nothing. When you wake up from your dream and say it was not real, it was entirely constructed by you, everything was generated from you, you were there and all in it was created by you. In fact you and al in it was you, you were one with it.
It might appear as a necklace, it might appear as the awake and from it the world, it might appear as the sleeper and from it the dream, but take away the gold, take away the I and there is nothing.

Now what is this gold? It is consciousness.

Here we talk about knowledge, but it’s indirect knowledge. It has to become direct knowledge, only then can you become aware of it. This means ignorance must be removed.

In your search to find this I, the true nature of self, you will find god, and when you have found god you will have found yourself. Now this I doesn’t have knowledge, IT IS knowledge, it doesn’t have happiness, IT IS happiness, it doesn’t have love, IT IS love.

This picture shows your waking state, but your dream state would be another screen in front of the screen you’re watching and the dreamless sleep a black screen. Ignorance. While the first two are infused with misinterpretations like the snake and garden hose, the dreamless state, even though its ignorance doesn’t have any misinterpretation, simply doesn’t see the garden hose at all. Now the projections on the wall are not just your minds collection, the buckets, the same is with the bodily memory, the memory in the cells, your DNA and so on.

As you might not know what your great great grandfather looked like, your body does. You have his eyes or nose. But did you pay attention here? Did you not let yourself be led to identify with I am this body again?
The reason for this is the same why you still identify with the thoughts and feelings that arise. The scale of direct and indirect knowledge. Practise your focus, and build up the challenge, you have to build up the time you remain aware and focused, like any skill.

Yes, it takes effort before it becomes effortless.

 

29-07-2018

Moshiya van den Broek