Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: I want to quote something you said in your book, because I
loved it. You say, "Although it still appears that the sun revolves
around the earth, once you've recognized this is simply ignorance,
you do not persist in referring to the earth as the center of God's
universe. And once enlightened to the significance of the deep
meaning of the observer is the observed, you do not then revert to
the myopic question, and then why do I appear to be separate
from the tree. When there has been penetrating clarity, such a
question will not be seriously entertained". It really is all about
clarity, right, Robert?
ROBERT WOLFE: Oh, yes, absolutely. That's the word that's
used for enlightenment basically is clarity. And that's what it
amounts to; it's ending the confusion that's in our mind, ending
the confusion that we have about who this is, and what it's doing.
When you see this unbroken wholeness, then the separate ideas
that we have come to an end.
One of the things that's of interest to me is that sometimes I will be
talking with someone about these matters, and they will come to
acknowledge that there is no separate self, that the I-idea is just
that, an idea, it's an identification that we make regarding
something that we sense as being different. So a person will come
sometimes in these discussions to say, yes, I am not an I, I'm
something that transcends that. And yet in the next sentence or so
they will begin, but I this and I that, and I this, and I that. The
point of these teachings is to come to a place where you recognize
so fully and deeply that there is no separate Self, that the I-thought
really doesn't present any longer as something to be taken
seriously. In other words, the I-thought may appear on the screen
of consciousness, but it's seen to be basically illusive.
So that is the point of these teachings, is to come to the place
where the sense of being separate completely ends, totally ends,
that's not to say that we don't use the word “I” any longer, or
answer to our name, and so on and so forth. But while we do
those things on a relative level, when there's never a moment in
our mind when we're not clear that this is all basically an illusion.
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