The personality is a point of view. Enlightenment, or reality, is also a point of view -- nothing else. It is not a certain state. The personality is the point of view that there is something we need to get, somewhere we need to go. Enlightenment or freedom or reality is a point of view that "what is" is what is. That is what is there and there is no hope for anything else. When I say, "accepting what is," I do not mean accepting unconsciousness in yourself. Accepting what is means complete consciousness, means complete awareness of what is. When one is unconscious of what is, there is a rejection of what is. The enlightened point of view, or the natural point of view, which is what I prefer to call it, is that there is what is, all the time. It can be personality, Essence, heat or cold. "What is" is what is. Very simple. If there is any attempt to get something else, to change what is there in your inner experience, then there is conflict.

If you love truth for its own sake, the truth will free you. But if you hope the truth will free you, you cannot be free. You must love the truth for its own sake, without hope. Then there’s no question of freedom/no freedom, no question of essence/no essence, no question of enlightenment/no
enlightenment. It’s just love of truth, and that’s it. Nothing else is there. Anything else will bring discord. Accepting what is, understanding what is there, loving the truth that is happening at every second is the natural state, the state without personality, the state of no-mind, is the state of no-division. It is the state of hanging loose. When I tell you to love the truth, to love what is there, to accept completely what is there without any conditions, what does that mean? What is there at this very moment may be a rejection of what is there. Are you going to reject that rejection? It’s a subtle process to pay attention, and to be aware of that movement. The complete awareness of this movement will bring about understanding, which, as we have said, is the freedom. The truth of the situation is the freedom. Awareness does not need to be motivated. It is what is there. We’re always aware of something. As long as there is motivation for anything, awareness is restricted away from one thing and toward another. When there is no motivation, awareness will just be there, free. With awareness, there is a possibility of understanding, of seeing the truth. Because awareness and understanding are possible, freedom and happiness are possible.

By pitting yourself against what is, you are acting according to the delusion that you have a separate will and that you can have your own way, different from what is happening. This is one of the principles of ego: that you have a separate will and that you have choice. Even when you believe that you are helpless and can’t do things, there is the implicit belief that if it weren’t for your helplessness, you could have your own way. From this egoic perspective, it seems obvious that you need to tinker with things, both inwardly and outwardly. This manifests externally as manipulating other people to make them conform to how you think they need to be for you, and internally as constantly evaluating your experience to see whether it is “right” or not, and trying to change it if it doesn’t match your ideas of how you think it should be. “What state am I in? Oh, no! I’m being reactive—that’s no good—I should be just being. Now I’m being. Good, good. I should stabilize that,” and so on, as if it were up to you to make your state become this or that. If you contemplate your experience, you will see this constant activity. The moment you are identified with your ego, you are involved in this activity of trying to make yourself feel better, and not scared or unhappy or empty. All ego defenses are based on this principle of changing your experience to make it conform to how you think it should be.

Reified concepts are the main barrier to penetrating to what is, and the basic concepts that form our experience are physical. You are more convinced, for instance, in the existence of your body than in the existence of inner freedom, because while your body is a physical thing, freedom is not a physical thing. It is particularly these physical concepts that we have to penetrate in order to perceive what is. The ground of the personal mind is constituted by physical concepts.

Seeing non-conceptual reality, what is, does not eliminate the usual world that we perceive. It is as it is, except that it appears more porous. Things are not as discrete from each other as they usually appear to be. We see that they are made out of the same thing—the space, the earth, the table, the rug, me, you. We’re all made out of the same thing. It’s a homogeneous existence. This homogeneous existence is non-conceptual in the sense that there’s nothing you can say about it. When you say something about it, you tend to close it off. The less you say about non-conceptual reality, the more it will open up and appear as it actually is. When I talk about seeing the reality of what is, I don’t mean that you are suddenly going to see all kinds of strange things in front of you. The physical reality is part of what’s there: it’s just not the only thing that’s there. When you see the totality, physical reality will appear differently, as if you are seeing it in a different light. It will have more color, more harmony, and more refinement. You will see more the sense of beauty, the sense of grace in physical reality. But that sense of beauty arises through seeing the porousness and the consciousness that constitute the physical world. This basic, fundamental, pure consciousness and existence is independent of the various forms. It is specifically what I call non-conceptual. So a table is a table, but at the non-conceptual level it is not a table. The concept exists, but it does not exist on its own. The concept is simply a surface phenomenon of something more fundamental.

So when we are willing to be completely in the moment, we have a better chance of seeing what is actually there, what is actually happening. If we are saying, “No, I don’t want this, I want it to be different,” that blocks the experience and gives us less chance of seeing the truth clearly. So when true will is operating, it enhances our awareness of what is there. It allows us to have a more complete and full perception. Only when we have this complete perception can we truly understand what is there. This understanding of what is happening is in itself a discharge, a regulation. When such insight happens it is like an orgasm—it is a release of tension. Just as your mother released your tension when you were hungry or in pain as an infant, allowing a relaxation, the process of simply seeing what is there and understanding it releases what is false in us. Discontent, pain and conflict are not part of our natural state. When you see and release what is false, it goes away. This is the discharge, the regulation. And what remains is what is real.

In the last few meetings, we have explored the subject of non-conceptual reality. We have approached the non-conceptual by discussing what concepts are and how they influence perception. Basically, we have tried to get a feeling for what we mean when we speak of experience with concepts and without concepts. Some of us have some inkling of what I mean by concepts, and what I mean by experiencing things without concepts. To experience things without concepts means to experience things without the past, with absolutely no mind, because mind is the filter we put on reality. When we speak here of experience without mind, we mean without discursive or discriminating mind, not without awareness. The non-conceptual is what is, without the overlay of our past experience, our past prejudices, and our minds. This is what is referred to when some traditions, such as Zen, talk about “no mind.”

It is simplistic, even mistaken, to think of non-manifestation as the forms existing somewhere and coming into manifestation through the manifesting power of the dimension of dynamic presence. This would simply be a process of vertical translation, modeling the process of universal manifestation on the physical view of reality. Being is much more mysterious and magical; it simply manifests what is potential to it, in effect, creating it out of nothing. Forms exist in potential, the way a tree exists in the seed. But there is not even a seed, just the mysterious emptiness of true nature. Before manifestation, there is only the unmanifest, the absolute mystery and depth of Being. Furthermore, manifestation is always new. It is not like the universe is manifested and then continues in time. No, it is always manifesting, in different forms and shapes, giving us the impression of change and motion. Manifestation is a similar process to creation, but bypasses the dualistic reification possible in the view of creation. Such reification is possible, and quite common, in the view of creation because creation is easily viewed anthropomorphically. In addition, manifestation is a universal process. The totality of what is manifests at once and continues to manifest with local variations of forms.

Regardless of the stories you tell yourself, at this moment, this very moment, there is only this moment, here, now. Nothing else exists. For your direct experience, only the here and now is relevant. Only now is real. And it is always like that. At each moment, only that moment exists. So we need to ask why we put ourselves on hold, waiting for the right time, waiting for the right circumstances to arise in the future. Maybe the right time will never come. Maybe the conditions you have in mind will never come together for you. When will you begin to exist then? When will you begin to be here, to live? Regardless of the ideas about past and future that dominate your experience, right at this moment only this moment exists, and only this moment has any significance for you. The most direct and obvious fact of experience is that the moment, the here and now, is all that exists. This is all there is for this moment. Whatever is happening at this moment, that is your life. The future is not your life; it never arrives. What is actually here is always only this moment.