Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
experience is just all these little waves appearing, thoughts coming
and going, feelings coming and going, sensations coming and
going. That's the beauty of personal experience, really when you
look you never can find anything that's solid or fixed or static, it's
always just this dance of waves.
So what you are is the ocean in which all these little waves are
coming and going, and the point is that the waves are the ocean.
Because really that's what we're doing in a million different ways,
we're seeking the ocean, the ocean is already complete, but we're
seeking that ocean in time when actually the ocean is appearing
right Now as all of these waves. That's how the ocean appears, the
ocean appears as all these little waves, as these thoughts,
sensations, feelings, sights, and sounds, and smells, everything
appearing right Now is the ocean. But the thing is we don't see it,
that's the peculiar thing we could say of human beings, that
although on one hand everything that's appearing right Now is
completeness, it's wholeness, completeness, the ocean. And again,
I think it's important not to get too hooked on the words because
we could sit and debate words for hours. If you've been a spiritual
seeker for long enough, you've read enough books, been to enough
teachers, you probably collect thousands of these words,
consciousness, presence, being, awareness, the witness, the
observer, the observed; on and on, and on. And it's funny because
it used to confuse the hell out of me years ago, because you would
read one book by a spiritual teacher and they would say, there is
only awareness, there is no such thing as consciousness. And then
you read another book by a different teacher and they say, no, no,
no, there's no such thing as awareness, there's only consciousness.
Or one teacher says, no, there's only presence, there's no
awareness, or someone else says, no, no there's only awareness
there's no presence. And then you start to think, oh my God, well
who's right? [Laughing]
TRIP: Oh my God. Oh, gosh. I want to ask you something, I want
to play devil's advocate for a minute, because you say you're not a
teacher and there are no students, and there's nothing to be
learned, and there's nothing to be given, there's none of that. I
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