Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
question what am I. Is that something that you picked up from
somewhere else?
ALBERT NAHMANI: I'm always careful of how the words keep
sneaking into our awareness. We are so conditioned to use words
without realizing what they imply in some ways, because we just
were made that way. So that the question, what am I, exactly
brings about the forefront, not to make the assumption that there
is a who, because who am I implies immediately without us even
being aware of it, that there is a who. And so putting that into
question, through the changing of the words who to what, opens
up if you would, brings about the question as to whether there is
such a thing as a who.
WIZARD: I think it's a brilliant edification.
ALBERT NAHMANI: Yes, John. And like you said, it's best to
bring the talk to the present, to what we are here, Now, and the
small talk usually likes to piggyback on that. And I'm just
constantly redressing for myself, it's amazing how much, even
after all this time, I find myself saying words that, I do not mean
that by those words, but there they are, I'm being embraced with
them, like the me, and I, and all that nomenclature.
TRIP: Here are some words I wanted you to maybe clarify, and I
don't know, what the heck we've got an hour or so [Laughs]. We
have a small window to get into the fine points here. But whether
or not it's possible to experience absolute reality has been talked
about on our program several times, and some people say there's
no such thing as an enlightenment experience. Others will say
that what the mind can report on is not it. Now in your own write
up of yourself, in your own bio, you talked about you experienced
the absolute reality known in Buddhism as the clear light of dawn,
and you went into great detail explaining what that experience was
like. And also I noticed in one of the few videos I was also able to
watch, somebody asked you about this state that you abide in and
you said, well it's not a state, it's more like an experience. So
where do you come down on this experience of enlightenment?
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