Cosmic Awareness

Cosmic awareness or cosmic consciousness as it's sometimes called is the realization that we're light. That each one of us is light. In the early stages of our cosmic awareness, we see ourselves as beings of light. There's still a sense of separativity. When we meditate and we're able to stop all thought, suddenly we're suffused with light. We get a sense of being outside of the body, or beyond the body. Our consciousness expands and we see ourselves as beings of light. And that's certainly true. As we progress in our inundation with light, as we make friends with light, and we come to know it better, we come to know our substance and our essence, then we find that we're not really separate beings of light. That that's a dream that we're having. The dream of multiplicity. Each one of us dreams that we're a separate individual with a history, a future, with a moment, with something to do or nothing to do. Meditation takes us beyond the moment to eternal awareness. Cosmic consciousness. Nirvana. These states of awareness are open to everyone. It's just a question of where we focus our time and energy.

To become conscious is like swimming up from the bottom of a lake. We're down at the bottom of the lake, and we're swimming around, and everything is murky and dark. And all we have to do is swim towards the light, towards the surface. And as we go higher it will get brighter and brighter and suddenly we'll break through the surface and there'll be nothing but light. The murkiness will fade away. In our day to day life, we're swimming below the surface -- planning, making decisions, revisions, schedules to keep, people to meet, people to forget. (Laughter). We see ourselves changing, aging. Maybe we're conscious of it, maybe it's better that we're not. We experience pleasure, pain, freeways, which are a mixture of both, depending upon the time of day. And people promise us Enlightenment, instant satisfaction, in one form or another. But it's a very rare individual who realizes that they're not an individual. It's a very rare person who goes beyond their personality.

Now, of these there are two types: the lucky and the unlucky. The lucky are those souls, those beings, those persons who meditate, who seek, who experience the divinity of all things, and then they go away. One day they climb on top of a mountain and they're gone. Life just takes them away. Oh, they may have died, but they couldn't have really died since they had left long before death came. They merged with the all. They reached the end of the cycle of birth and death. The lucky. The few. The proud. (Laughter)

Then there are those who follow a different path. They perhaps went to a good private school also. They attained liberation, or liberation attained them, but they chose to, were forced to, were brow beaten by God into, working in the world with people. The unlucky. We call these people heros. After they've been dead for a long, long time. During their lives we call them fools usually, put them in exile, make political prisoners out of them, assassinate them, crucify them, emulate them occasionally, but rarely deal with who and what they are. And even more than who and what they are, since that's actually not that important, simply what they have to say. Their expression.

The expression of an enlightened person is not what they say with words. There is nothing you can say about the Superconscious. You can paint a gradual picture. I don't know if you remember, when you were a kid, they had this thing, the Etch-a-Sketch. A great device they brought out and it was this little square screen, and it had two little knobs on it, and you could draw lines with it. And these perfect lines would appear on the screen. And if you did the right one you'd get a vertical line, a horizontal line. And you could make intricate little mazes and designs, and if you were clever, you could do both at once, and kind of get curves. And that's what life is like for most people. (Laughter).

But for someone who's enlightened, it's not like that at all. For someone who's enlightened, there is nothing but light. That's why we use that phrase. Nothing appears to be solid anymore, because it isn't. They have the ability to pass through countless dreams of existence. To see the past, the present, the future, and beyond. They can be in thousands of places at once. Experience all tonalities of emotion. And then go beyond the human to the superhuman. To become God, to be the awareness of truth itself. To transmit that, to try and bring that across, it's hard to do in words. You can do parables, analogies, exhortations, beg, plead, but the way the truth is manifested, really by a person who's attained truth, is probably in their expression. Maybe in the way they answer a question, not so much in what they say. Perhaps a gesture. A way of being that's so fluid that there's no perception of being as we know it.