Avasa: In the same way as if a fish is surrounded by water, a human being is surrounded by truth. The same way as the water around the fish pervades the whole body of the fish, the truth pervades the whole body of the human form. The form itself is a manifestation of truth.

What appears within it as the play of the mind is a manifestation of truth. That which knows of the presence of the body and the mind is the unmanifest aspect of truth. Now it seems strange if we are utterly completely saturated in truth, why truth is sought at all. It is all that exists. Every object in this room is truth manifesting. Every thought that appears in the mind that you imagine maybe to be personal, is the truth manifested. Every feeling that arises as physical or emotional is impersonal. It is the truth manifested. Now clearly if what is being stated here is true, and it is, it would seem futile to seek truth. The body is truth, your mind is truth, the world is truth, and what is manifesting in is the unmanifest aspect of truth. So why the seeking? For some reason we are not able to see directly. What it is we think lies in another moment.

This is because we are not looking in the right place in a sense. We are not focused on what is already present. There is a lot of misinformation about what this thing called enlightenment is, that every human being is seeking, that some of us are aware that we are seeking. Any description would be wrong, because in itself it has no description. Like trying to describe water to a fish that was not aware that it was in the water it was seeking. It was all around it, beside it. Already it’s … . but it has no description. This is why the seeking takes place. Because when the seeking action arises it arises with the intention of finding something. The seeking action ceases to arise when it is realized that there is nothing to find. When it is realized that that nothingness is all around. Both within and without. The body itself is made out of that nothing. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The form is the temporary appearance of emptiness, the emptiness is permanent. Which means literally that it is a complete waste of time seeking because you already are what you are looking for. It is not a feeling, it is not a bad feeling it is not a good feeling. The mind doesn’t like that word, ‘nothing’. But the truth is, the truth is nothing. It is not a feeling, it doesn’t have a shape, it has no color, taste or smell, it has no sound. It has no description. It requires something other than the senses of the mind to recognize the truth of oneself. When the truth is recognized, it is not recognized by the mind.

When the truth is recognized it is recognized by the truth itself. It is self confirming. It is strange that it should be self confirming in every single moment. When we claim to be a spiritual seeker what we are actually stating is that we notice that there is a seeking action present in the body. It has always been there. We just suddenly become aware of it. And as a spiritual seeker not knowing what it is we are looking for, we think that the accumulation of knowledge or experiences will at some moment reach its peak and enlightenment will take place. Well this is not true. Any more than reaching of the seventh chakra immediately results in enlightenment. The energy can be at base level, first second or third chakra and enlightenment can take place, because the whole chakra system, all those systems that are based upon gaining knowledge and experience happen in time.

Enlightenment is not the result of time. It is not a product of time. It is the eternal. It is the recognition that what one is, is the eternal. That happen in any moment. We don’t need to add one more experience, or one more word of knowledge to what we already are. In order for this realization to take place. In fact believing we need to go through any system is an avoidance of what can be presently recognized. Whenever realization has taken place, it has always taken place in the eternal moment. Which is this moment that we are in right now. It has never taken place, it has never taken place in the past. It can only take place now. Now is a presence which never changes, which views the world through the senses of the human form. Presence which is eternal. Still unchanging, rested. Not in time, not affected by time. But the witness of time. And this is what is recognized in that moment of realization. The self which is recognized at the moment of realization is the nothing that is looking through the eyes of the form. The eternal nothingness. It was never anywhere than right where the body was in each and every moment. So simple but so obvious when this is seen. I know a few people here in these meetings who have had a glimpse of this and those glimpses will continue to repeat without your help. Also anything you do will not hinder that glimpse returning.

And eventually it will become stabilized, the seeing of this will become permanent. This is the way it takes place. It isn’t the result of anything, it is a sudden insight, the seeing of what lies behind the play in time observing time, it can’t be claimed, it can’t be held onto we don’t need to do that. It is always present, we don’t need methods, we don’t need to do anything. To arrive at it, it is already arrived at. It is what we are. It is the one who is living through these forms right now. … to have improved but it isn’t. It is silent, still, colorless, tasteless, without any smell, without any feeling, we already have it. The mind might tell you another story. It does that, it arises out of this tries to convince itself that it isn’t so. The truth is you cannot get away from truth, you cannot get to it. Because it is already, always has been what you are.

Avasa: Of course, you can never remove the fear of death at the level of a concept. The conceptual level is not allowing you to touch it, to taste it, to feel it. The moment that you try to face anything at the level of a concept, you are removing yourself from the perceptual level and you are taking the energy from the sensation at that level, to create the conceptual thinking about it in the mind. It’s a way of avoiding touching, and going through, allowing that totally. All that’s required to do that is to recognize the mechanism that’s in place there. The mechanism is the flicking from the perception level to the conception level. The only thing that you are afraid of – is fear itself. You are afraid of feeling the fear. And it is like you said – you can’t run away from it. At some point you are going to have to say ‘Come, let’s have this, totally.’ You are afraid of experiencing a feeling, just a feeling, it’s not fear, it’s just a feeling, and the mind has stuck a label on it and called it fear. Because the mind knows that, the moment you embrace that fully and go through it, you come out on the other side of death, and you rest in the Eternal, already dead. And the moment that happens, the one that believed itself to be alive, the one that the whole of the psychological mind surrounds, is realized to be just imagination, and it dies. You are actually afraid of getting rid of the one that you imagine yourself to be. When you are ready to do that, it will happen. Otherwise you are just supporting the illusion of the one you imagine yourself to be. You are not something that can die. Once you know that, the fear of death no longer rises in your Consciousness. You might get a good night’s sleep, then.

It’s a feeling that’s all. It’s intense, but if you are willing to embrace it, it’s no longer fearful, even if it reaches the point that the mind would call terror, you would still be willing to allow it to take place, and the moment that you do, you will laugh at the fact that you delayed that moment for so long, because once you have gone through it, you will see it clearly that you are not something that can die, and so there is no longer the fear of dying, because you see it’s just an idea, a concept. You are not something that dies. There’s no way out, you have to embrace it, either while the body is alive or at the moment of death, when you have finally recognized what every other human being recognizes, that you don’t die in the body, because you are Eternal. Why delay it? Encourage it, invite it every morning, invite it every night when you go to bed!

Partecipant: I am terrorized, I cannot sustain this!

Avasa: You can, because this body did! They are all bodies, they can both do ….what one can do another can do. We met a lady who had the same problem, had the same invitation, I would say, and it had eventually lead to her spending two years in a psychiatric ward, and she phoned us up from the psychiatric ward and begged us to go there to speak to her. Instead, she ended up coming to see us. And I kept smiling at her – it was obvious that she was in a very traumatic state. And she said ‘Why do you think this is funny?’ And I said ‘Well, I can see that you have no options left. You have tried running away from it, and the only option left, is one that you, that’s the one you imagine yourself to be, wouldn’t choose any way. And the end result is that you will come to enlightenment.’ She awoke the next morning, she said to me ‘I don’t want to face it, the moment I feel it, I just want to run away from it’. So I said ‘Well, so what’s the alternative?’ I said ‘So, you are going to run away from death by killing yourself? So, guess what’s going to happen in the last five minutes before the body dies?’ She just looked at me and said ‘Well, I can’t do that then, can I?’ I said ‘No, but you can welcome it now and have another forty years of life in the recognition of what you are.’ She was released from hospital the next morning, and we saw her two days later, and she gave satsang for twenty minutes, a lovely smiley lady. Her boyfriend looked a bit shocked though, he didn’t really know who she was. You can run away from it till the day the body dies, and then you are going to have to face it, and so is everyone else here, who hasn’t faced it. What you are doing in this moment is telling yourself through this form, the only option left. No imaginary person is going to choose its own death, which means that you have no options, they take place. Just remember to welcome it and give it a big hug and you will come out the other side, complete with a living form, absent of that you imagined what lived in it. What have you got to loose? (laughing). The only thing that dies is a concept. What you are can never die, because it was never born, it is Eternal. But the imaginary one dies, an idea, a belief, a concept dissolves. Be worth it just to get a good night’s sleep, wouldn’t it? Forget about enlightenment.

Partecipant: I could do it for just sleeping well. I really want to sleep. It is better than living.

Avasa: It depends which side of death …. (laughing)

Partecipant: I thank you for the answer. I feel that I am hopeless.

Avasa: Good, then you have stopped creating ideas about how to run away. And then it can just happen.

Partecipant: I am fixed that I will never die.

Avasa: Good.

Partecipant: I am very worried about it.

Avasa: Well, sorry to tell you, you are right.