Mark: I’ve asked you a few times before about the bliss portion of Awareness because it was not evident. There was a sense of peace but… I’m still trying to know what is meant by “bliss” when you say it.
iRealization: Yes. You have to understand that experience for that word to make sense. Any experience is not bliss because experience is limited to that thing. One cannot experience something unless one is separate from it. For experience to happen there has to be a relationship between the experiencer and the object of experience. Where there’s no more of such separation, experience cannot happen because there’s no multiple things there. That absence of experience is known like you are knowing yourself now. As Being. The actual Being is Bliss.
Mark: Is joy also a synonym for that experience?
iRealization: When I refer to joy… joy is fleeting. Anything changing is fleeting.
Mark: Yeah, I’m trying to grasp an experience. In the end I’m trying to experience what is bliss because I know that anything I am aware of cannot be it.
iRealization: We’re looking at it in terms of understanding because we always use to understand things in terms of concepts, you know? So when there’s absolutely nothing there, that nothing which everybody talks about – the void and all that – all of that is another idea only. For there to be a void there has to be a knower of the void. But there is something that is there even when there is no knowledge of it. Whether something is known or not, knowability is never lost – the factor you can know something.
Mark: Yeah, I always arrive at that point.
iRealization: So who is that that knows something? The minute you say “I am the knower”, that is knowledge, again – also known.
So I cannot know myself as knowledge, you see?
Mark: That’s the thing. The actual experience is real but what comes after is like trying to transfer the actual experience to knowledge. Let’s call the “I am” the separation, the sense of a body, but the Being is there for sure and it’s not the body, it’s not anything but it seems that there is this habit of the mind trying to grasp it instead of abiding in it. It is self-evident, it doesn’t require confirmation by the mind.
iRealization: That is why you know yourself, right? How do you know yourself now?
Mark: It’s happening, a constant…
iRealization: How you know yourself now is because the experience is there.
Mark: “Yourself” as the “I am”?
iRealization: Yes, “I am” is an experience, isn’t it?
Mark: I am what? What do you mean?
iRealization: Just the fact that you are awake. I am awake. I am the waking state. “I am awake” is the experience, as opposed to the experience of sleeping.
Mark: What I’m trying to look for is the I Amness, in the sense of not being awake but existence itself.
iRealization: I know what you’re saying but first you have to understand what is “I am”.
Mark: Is the “I am” exclusive to the waking state?
iRealization: Yes, one-hundred percent, otherwise you wouldn’t know you are.
Mark: Hmm…
iRealization: Consciousness is the waking state, isn’t it? People say “I lost consciousness”, “I gained consciousness”.
Mark: Ok, so there has to be consciousness to know that I am.
iRealization: Not that there has to be consciousness. Consciousness is knowledge. When you have consciousness, you have knowledge of yourself.
Mark: So, “I am” is knowledge?
iRealization: To say "I am this and that" is knowledge. "I am" is an experience, it doesn’t know anything. I know I am. You don’t need to be told that I am.
Mark: But you are saying that only happens in consciousness?
iRealization: That’s why I said “I am” is an experience. You are experiencing yourself to be here, otherwise you wouldn’t know you are here. I am here – how do you know? Because I experience myself as being present here, the experience of just being is what I call “I am”.
Mark: So what is that experience in sleep?
iRealization: There’s no “I am”. No experience. I do not know myself at all – I lose everything. I lose myself entirely, as any object, as any idea or as knowledge. The Pure Self exists by itself.
Mark: So what is this certainty that the “I am” is not interrupted by sleep?
iRealization: Because you come back and say “I had a dream”. See… that “I”, who had a dream, also disappears with the dream, you know?
Mark: Yeah but I’m not talking about dreams, I’m talking about the continuity from deep sleep to waking.
iRealization: Same thing. “I was unconscious”, “I was asleep”, it’s you saying that. How do you know you were sleeping?
Mark: Are you saying there has to be a mind to claim these things?
iRealization: There has to be a recollection of memory. Claiming means memory. As in, something happened and I will tell you now what happened. All experiences that you claim require memory and ideas, also known as consciousness, duality – otherwise there is no experience. “I am” is an experience only in consciousness, otherwise I cannot experience myself. So the separation is creating the experience of the first thing, which is me, the I. “I am” is the first experience, which is the experience of the body. It is attributed to the body: “I am the body.” The “I know I am” is an experience also. You don’t have to come and tell me that I am awake. I know I’m awake! The knowledge of being awake is already there.
Mark: But it is not an object, right?
iRealization: Yeah, so that Knowledge is capital “K” Knowledge. The actual Knowledge. The only real Knowledge of anything, which is the Pure Knowing principle.
Mark: To go back to sleep again, you’re saying that capital “K” Knowledge is not there in sleep?
iRealization: The capital “K” Knowledge is never lost, no? That’s how you know there’s nothing in sleep. It is the knowing of nothing – that’s when you wake up and say “I was asleep because there was a gap in my knowing of objects. But I know that there was nothing.” You see? But again, if I say it’s a void, if I describe it, it’s again knowledge. If I experience it, it can only be based on an idea, otherwise I cannot experience anything. Who would experience? I would need to be there as a point of experience, then I create other things – objects – then I experience the object. Like in dreaming, I create the world and I create everything. In pure sleep, which is dark deep sleep, I don’t see anything. What I call experience comes later on, I come back and say I had very good sleep. And it’s not actually an experience. The absence of all experience is what you call sleep.
…
Mark: It seems to me that with that realization you end up not knowing anything, right?
iRealization: You don’t know any partial knowledge. It’s the total thing at all times – complete.
Mark: So… the experience of separation, and for me that experience comes from the senses, as in feeling localized somewhere in the body, it seems silly because I cannot be a thing that I’m aware of. In that, the recognition falls back to the witnessing.
iRealization: Yes, one becomes aware of the operation of knowledge.
Mark: I think I’ve heard you say before that it requires effort to reach supreme effortlessness. And that requires a very keen attention to not fall into the habit again.
iRealization: Yes, it becomes easier and easier and it accelerates after a certain point because you are not doing it, you know?
Mark: That’s a paradox, right? The initial desire comes as an impulse to find something, peace or whatever, and after some time it’s realized that it can never be found as we usually find other things, so it sort of relaxes.
iRealization: Exactly, it’s just the understanding of knowledge. Once you understand knowledge, knowledge is not required – that’s all.
What is it? It’s knowledge! Knowable things. It’s not Knowing. It’s the consciousness principle operating. So the minute one is awake, one is already aware of the problem. The minute you are conscious, you know there’s a problem. Conscious of what? What can you possibly be conscious of?
Mark: Very silly now that you say it.
iRealization: Very simple. One is conscious because one imagines it. *laugh* That’s all. So imagination, consciousness, knowledge are all synonyms.
Mark: Let me go back to see if I got it. There’s no way for there to be knowledge because that would imply that knowledge stands as its own thing.
iRealization: Knowledge is the shadow, it is the clouding factor of reality. Clarity means no bias. Otherwise one is biased and doesn’t see clearly. What is it that biases you? Knowledge! Without knowledge you cannot be biased.
Mark: Indeed. When there’s the sense of separation, there’s the impulse to find out what it is. And that impulse leads to the realization that the separation is also witnessed, so that for sure is not me. But that impulse I think has to do with wanting to find the last thing to relax.
iRealization: I hope it is, otherwise it’s usually trying to find some solution to make yourself feel better in the moment.
Mark: Yeah, I’m not interested in that. The whole issue is seeking again, again. It’s very tiring, the sense of effort is very exhausting.
iRealization: Yeah. One has to become aware of it. Effort means the operating I. There has to be a doer. So, the doing is effort! Having free will when there is no free will is effort. Futile effort! Nothing can ever change.
Mark: That’s scary. That’s the reaction my body got when you said that.
iRealization: Because you want something in this conscious state. You want an experience of objects but it becomes clearer that you don’t want an object of experience.
Mark: Yeah, absolutely not.
iRealization: So you have to see what exactly is an experience. We are constantly addicted to experience. People talk about “direct experience”, that concept itself may be a problem.
Mark: Yeah, I think it always comes back to this – that one has to be very, very attentive to what’s going on and having that as the priority and then it becomes obvious every time. We come back again and again and again. I would describe it as attention, as this impulse to wanting to find out and being on the lookout for what’s really happening.
Photography - Courtesy of Rob Mulally
