Self Realization and Liberation by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
www.ramaqutoes.com
There is no beginning and there is no end. Nothing is final. There is no absolute. There is no highest point, nor is there a lowest point. These configurations are ideas. Ideas are primitive constructs, symbolic representations, reflections in a mirror.
Self-realization is liberation. Liberation is self-realization.
We see the world through thought. Thought not only in the sense of individual thoughts that we think, but thoughts that have amassed, that have collected, that have formed composites.
In this world, and in other worlds too, there are views. And what we see in a view is not necessarily what is in the view, all that is in the view. We have to separate to some extent the perceiver from that which is perceived or we have to lose all distinction whatsoever.
We are cognizant of time, the sense that there is mutability. Time is change. It's the separation of eternity from itself. When eternity is separated from itself, we see it appear in different forms. Time is not a movement in space. Space is a movement in time.
There is no deterioration and there is no creation. There are projections, moments of existence. Each moment is perfect.
All the creations of God stretch out infinitely. All times, past, present and future for all beings, worlds unimagined.
So reality does appear to exist, there does appear to be birth, youth, people appear to have children. But all of it's a dream. These are isolated moments that are only connected by perception. There is no separation.
Self-realization is not the awareness that this world is a dream, that's a part of self-realization.
time is our turning of the pages of this vignette, of this collection of photographs. Each one of these events is happening independently. There is no cycle of growth and development. Rather, there are moments of perfectly manifested reality. They appear to be in sequence, because we place them in sequence.
A flower never unfolds. The sun never rises. All of the moments are independent and only seem to be connected by a causal change, which we call time, because we are time and it is we who are connecting them with our consciousness. They all exist independently.
Everything that has ever been or will ever be exists. What we do is we, as a body of perception, take a tour. And we visit different things, we say that they are. When we leave them, we say that they no longer are.
Self-realization is like the thin air; only you have become the thin air. There is no sense of form. There is no sense of being a person. When you close your eyes and meditate, there is no sense that you are meditating.
Nothing is distinct and separate.
The waves of the ocean arise and have a separate birth, crashing on the shore, but then back into the ocean they go. They never left it. There is no movement in Nirvana.
There is no movement in Nirvana. There is no sameness. And one does not consider it to be timeless because one is not one. It is you, my friend, who go away.
What we discover is it was not the waves or the birds or the wind that were standing out and being separate from existence; it was we who were standing out and being separate from existence.
We erase ourselves; we go away. But we don't really go away, and we don't really erase ourselves, since we were never there to begin with. We weren't there to begin with in that what we are, or conceive of ourselves as, is a perception.
We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades, it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?
The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the self.
It's like a wave. Frozen in time. None of the waves are really moving, you just think they are
As a surfer is poised on a wave on his board, cutting quickly to the left. He'll always be there, in that moment. He's never left it. He had no birth, he didn't go to school, he didn't purchase the board; none of those things ever were.
The Samsara is the movement of life. And you, an individual self, a form, a moment on a wave, are bound. You're bound by the frame. You've become so engrossed in the movie of your life that you have forgotten that you're sitting there watching.
Pass the popcorn, please. Life is a film, theatre, a theatre of the soul. We play different roles on different stages. At death, we walk offstage. At birth, we walk onstage. Self-realization is that timeless, perfect awareness.
Well, what is God, then? God is that which watches. God is neither masculine nor feminine, although God can assume any form. God is that eternal reality that is in everything.
The world of time, of space and condition, pleasure and pain, birth, growth, maturation, decay and death. Spinning, spinning, spinning this world. Always spinning.
one day the plays end and the screen goes blank. There is nothing. Everything returns to its original formlessness. And then another dream begins.
But who is that is dreaming all of this? Ecstasy. Pure ecstasy. Joy beyond understanding. Bliss beyond the dry dullness of the mind's philosophical ranging. light beyond any light in this world. The substance and the essence of all existence is this light, the transcendental light.
To become conscious of God, to become God's consciousness, to become God, to be God and to be beyond God, God being beyond God, God having an existence separate from the creation. Going beyond God to that which God came forth from, which sustains God, to which
God will return. To be that, to merge with that, to lose one's self and find one's self endlessly again and again in that. Self-realization.
Self-realization. No ego, no desires, no weight problems, no tax forms, no death to die, no life to live.
How could being the entire cosmos and all of its wonder and all of its stages and cycles, and yet being that which is beyond them all, the invisible - be extinction. Extinction? The extinction of what, of whom? How can that which has never been be extinguished?
None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.
Illusions are shadows moving endlessly across the ground. The shadows are quite real but they're shadows. They have very little substance.
You create time by joining events together. But they don't join together; there's no separativity.
things don't make you unhappy. People don't make you unhappy. You make yourself unhappy. Because you are in the cycle. You're stuck. You're stuck in time.
Liberation means no rebirth. Now, does that mean you don't reincarnate? Well, you never did reincarnate.
you may have had countless lives, and many more stretching before you, and what else have you got to do with your time?
The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going. Liberation.
The awareness of liberation is not liberation. The awareness of time is not liberation.
The awareness of place, space, or condition is not liberation. You can't say what it is, but you can sure say what it isn't.
If you choose to be free, if you choose to be liberated, if you choose to be what I am, then you've chosen freedom. You can do this. That's my sole purpose in life is to sit here today and tell you that you can do this. In any life. You can do this in one of your past lives, in a future life, or right now. I prefer now.
You have to refine your being. You have to go through all of the stages and steps of erasing yourself through service to others with purity, humility, integrity.
Go through the things that life gives you to go through, happily. You have to loosen the grip of time, gradually.
Remember when you were a person? When you still had a life? Yeah, those were the good, old days, weren't they? Oh, we had a hell of a time, didn't we? Fought battles together, grew up together, listened to music, went to parties. We worked. God, do remember all the work we did all those years in school, sitting in a classroom listening to the teacher? Then we became teachers. Do you remember the time in the world where we taught them?
God, Atlantis was only yesterday. Let alone Los Angeles. Remember that incarnation in Los Angeles?
existence is perpetual motion. Galileo wondered about it, Da Vinci.
Timelessness and time. Life and death. Your existence is passing before you. Grains of sand in the hourglass. The Wicked Witch of the West has you in her castle and she's turned the hourglass over and the sand is running through. Will you be liberated? Or will you die? The only way you can beat death is liberation.
you don't know why, but you know you have to go home. It's an eternal longing.
It's Marvell's Drop of Dew. Wanting to go back to the sky. We're drawn by a force we don't understand. Through worlds, through experience.
Self-realization doesn't imply loss, gain, even transition; it's only a settling. The separate sounds on the beach, the birds, the waves, the wind. They all come together again. They blend. They harmonize.
There is no time when we really love each other. That's the magic of love. When we really love each other, there is no time. Don't you understand? So love, love is self-realization. Love is liberation. It's the only way beyond time. It unravels the knot of existence, is to love.
- Zen Master Rama
