Volume 12 No. 3
Your life and yourself: a soap-bubble and space
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I am Silence
without form,
without time,
without conditions,
previous to all this.
As silence I am
every form,
the progress of time,
the essence of the conditions,
the source and true nature of it all.
I am Silence,
free and
everything, everyone.
And that: without words.
And that: applies to everyone.
*
Text Satsang
From a talk with Douwe Tiemersma, September 26, 2010, Retreat day Advaita Center Gouda.
About being and understanding
Beginning from daily life the self-being has a great depth. All the levels that we have talked about play a role in everyday life. However, many people are not aware of many of these levels and therefore define their lives, their existence and their world in a flat and limited way. But of course all these levels are always present. In that respect you are always already yourself. And that self is also always already the source of everything.
Just take a look at it from the act of understanding. When in everyday life you say “I have understood something” what do you mean by that? It doesn’t just mean that you have processed the information, but moreover that you have acquired a being-understanding of something. Understanding is making something your “own”. You experience that something comes from outside that then becomes “your own” and then you say “now I understand”.
Thus, understanding has to do with your own self-being and that is not on the level of words. Understanding is a clear seeing and insight, but it is not an insight of a witness who sees something from a distance. No, it is a higher form of direct insight in which you are involved; it’s always about self-knowledge. In your own sphere things become clarified. When it concerns the Essence, that being-insight is at once realization.
Usually understanding occurs at a lower level and has to do with a limited sphere into which you can adapt a particular piece of knowledge. The thing that you have understood then belongs to that level and the self-being to another level. When you really return to the sphere of your own experience, you learn to look more clearly, and recognize and understand things from an increasingly greater depth.
When it’s about the level of the ultimate understanding, yes, then that consciousness will so evaporate, in terms of forms and qualities, that in fact every word is too much. You can no longer even say that it is an understanding on the level of being. Consciousness and being come together and then it’s no longer possible to say “I (me) have realized something.” No, everything has dissolved. Even a word like “realization” is already too much, because with a word the whole world of thought immediately arrives: who or what now realizes something?
What you can say is that with enlightenment or liberation all the worlds and all the levels suddenly become transparent in their relativity. They are absorbed in the groundless openness so that the heaviness and borders all fall away.
That also applies to your self-being.
thegroundlessopenness 