Spiritual Enlightenment - Part 3

Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org, and in this video I am talking about spiritual enlightenment and specifically how to go about creating an actual experience of no self. The objective of this video is to create a real experience of no self.

This is a somewhat advanced thing here. I am not going to go into a lot of foundation of what spiritual enlightenment is. If you are hearing this for the first time, what is this thing called no self and what is this thing called spiritual enlightenment, you have got to go and watch some of my earlier and more introductory videos about that, which you can find on my channel.

In this video, I am not going to spend a lot of time covering theory. What I want to do is tell a little bit of theory, but then jump right into a guided meditation where we will try to get you a real little taste of no self. It is not real enlightenment, but just like a little taste of it so that this starts to feel real for you.

It is really important that enlightenment is not confused with some philosophy, some religious system or some way of theorizing about the world, but recognizing that this is an actual fact, an empirical fact that you can experience right now. It is happening for you every second of your life. The only question is – are you conscious of it?

Here, we are going to try and quiet your mind down so that you can become conscious of it, if only for a couple of minutes. What we are going to do here is we are going to show you the truth of no self. What is this truth?

To recap from all the other videos, the truth of no self basically means that the entity that you believe is you, which is the entity that is experiencing all of life, that is perceiving the sound of my voice right now, that is looking at me if you are watching me on video, that is feeling your body and that is thinking things, that entity is an illusion of the mind. It is not a real entity.

This is the mother of all truths. This is like the key that unlocks the highest and most advanced levels of personal development and self-actualization that you can get to in life. This is the key that unlocks it all. This is the mother of all truths.

This is what is behind all of your neurosis in life, all your fears, all of your frustrations, your inability to be happy, all the problems you have in relationships and all the problems you have motivating yourself and being productive in your life. It all basically boils down to this fundamental root problem. The problem is that you believe that you are this entity, but this entity does not actually exist.

What we want to do in spiritual enlightenment work is we want to undertake an empirical investigation using our senses and using firsthand experience to actually discover for ourselves that, in fact, it is the case that there is no self. It is one thing for me to tell you and you can even agree with everything I am telling you, but that is not going to be good enough. You need to actually experience it.

Believing does not count for anything here. That is our objective here. This is going to be a very practical video. In fact, you are not going to get much from it unless you actually sit down and do this guided meditation with me.

I am going to guide you through it. I am going to get to that in a couple of minutes, after I introduce this topic. Find a quiet place. Find a place where nobody will distract you. Find a place where you are not going to feel weird doing this.

If you are driving your car somewhere or whatever, then you are going to have to wait to do this when you are at home and in a quiet location. The key principle here that I want to really introduce before we get into the guided meditation is this principle. The only thing that is real is what exists right now, in the present moment.

The Only Thing Real Is What Exists In The Present Moment

The only thing that is real is what exists right now, for you, in your direct experience in the present moment. This is a very important principle. Right now, I am not going to go into length proving it to you.

You are just going to have to take it on my word, that this principle is the correct principle. One of the problems with doing spiritual enlightenment work is that people look for proofs. They want justifications, but all that stuff is really not important to us because we are going to cut through all that bullshit and get straight to the direct experience.

We are not going to need a lot of justifications and all of that stuff. Plus, I have got other videos that are going to cover the justifications and the theory in lots of detail. I am not going to do that in this video. I want this video to be very practical.

But, I want you to take this principle as an axiom because this principle pretty much does all the heavy lifting in this empirical investigation. If you just take this one principle and you run off with it and apply it rigorously again and again in your life, you are going to become enlightened. That is the power of this principle.

The trick is that right now, if you haven’t done this work, then you do not realize the power that lies in this principle. Again, reality is only what exists right now and right this second, in your awareness. It’s in your awareness.

This means that if you have some idea about how reality is, if you are thinking two minutes into the future, if you are thinking about yourself, if you are thinking about your family, if you are thinking about the person in the next room, if you are thinking about the back of your head, all those things are not what is actually in your direct present experience. This means that those things are not reality. We like to call a lot of things reality, which are actually not reality.

One of the things that we do with spiritual enlightenment work is that we get very rigorous about what we actually define reality as. Reality is not the past. It is not ten years ago. It is not one year ago. It is not even five minutes ago.

It is not even one second ago. It is right now, in this present moment. Also, reality is not the future. It is not ten years from now. It is not one year from now. It is not even five minutes from now. It is not even one second from now.

It is right now. This might seem like it is kind of a pedantic point, but this is a very critical point because once you start to do this self-inquiry, what you are going to discover is this. Oh my god, most of my life, I lived either in the past or in the future. A lot of times, we think we don’t always live in the future.

Actually, what you are going to discover what you mean by future is that you mean a year in the future. Sure, you don’t live a year in the future, but it’s the way you run through your day. You are usually living five minutes into the future or two hours in the future.

Your mind is just thinking forward all of the time or it is thinking about the past. Well, what we need to do is that we need to recognize that this stuff is not reality. That is a figment of our imagination. It’s like a projection inside of the mind of something.

We call that reality, but that is not really reality. This is really where a lot of the illusion comes into play. That is a very important point. Even in the present moment, you might say – “Okay Leo, it makes sense.”

But, even when you are in the present moment, there is still a lot of thinking that you do in the present moment about whatever. You could be thinking about the back of your head right now and believing that it is a real thing. Actually, that is a thought, an image in your mind of the back of your head, which you are not actually seeing or experiencing.

You might be experiencing it if you are feeling the back of your head. You are certainly not seeing it. What we mean by what is actually real is that it has to be felt, seen, smelled, heard, touched and immediately perceived and sensed by you, right this very second.

Right now, if you are not experiencing the Moon, the Moon is not real for you. If you are not experiencing the Sun, the Sun is not real for you. If you are not experiencing your children or your family, it is as though your family does not exist.

It is not real. That is what we are saying. This is a radical claim to make. You might wonder, are we even justified to make such a claim? What I am going to say right now is just go along for the ride with me because it is not about justification.

It is about where we are ultimately going to go, using this little tool. This tool is not to be taken as gospel. It is simply just a tool that is going to help us get to some cool place experientially. The important thing here is that enlightenment is experiential.

Enlightenment is about actually being the truth that we are looking for. It is not about a logical and rational understanding. We are not trying to model reality here. We are not trying to outsmart some other person or trying to come up with a better theory of life that we had in the past.

That is not what we are trying to do. This is a very big trap that a lot of people get caught up in. It’s a very big trap. Just because I warn you about it, it does not mean you are not going to fall into it. I am going to keep warning, again and again and again.

Some of this stuff might seem like I am being repetitive, but this is just the nature of the work. There is not much substance in spiritual enlightenment. It is very simple. You just be the truth. The problem is that we kind of need to move in circles, around and around and around, until your mind starts to actually get what we are referring to here.

We are referring to very simple and basic things. Understand that existence itself is not a rational thing. You can use your rationality to think about life and to come up with the laws of physics and all of this stuff, but the very fact that something exists in reality, the very fact that reality itself is real and it exists is not a rational thing.

This is not something that you can use your logic on. This is not something that you can think about. It doesn’t make any logical sense that something exists versus that it does not. It makes no sense.

It just exists. We just happen to find ourselves in this amazing reality. We tell ourselves that we know so much about reality. In a sense, we do, but in another sense, we do not really know what the existence of it is.

We know how to manipulate reality, but that is a very different thing than understanding the existence of reality itself, which is what we are trying to get at with spiritual enlightenment. We are not only concerned with the existence of reality, but we are also even primarily concerned about what is our personal existence. Who am I?

What am I really? Am I the body? Am I the thoughts in my mind? Am I the voice in my mind? Am I the thing that perceives all of these sensations?

What am I, actually? This might seem like it is an obvious thing. I am this creature, standing before you or I am this creature, sitting over there. Well, it turns out that it is not quite so simple. In fact, you are not that creature.

Even presently, you don’t really believe that you are that creature, but you are just confused about it. What I want to demonstrate to you in this video with this practical exercise that we are going to do is that enlightenment is not a philosophy.

It is not a theory. It is not a religious system. It is not a belief and it is not a scientific model. It is none of those things, which should really peak your curiosity. You would then wonder – “Well Leo, then what exactly is it?”

“How could it not be one of those things? Everything that I have known in my life is one of those things. What you are proposing here, either you are masquerading it as something else, but it is actually one of these things or it is actually and really something totally different.”

“What could that be? I cannot even imagine, because anything that I can imagine is either going to be a theory, a philosophy, a belief system, a religion or a scientific model. What else is there?” Well, that is a very good question.

I want to demonstrate to you what else there is. What there is, besides all of that stuff, is that there is reality itself. There is being, being as in “to be”. This is the thing that all those other things are trying to describe.

What we want to do is that we want to eliminate all of the middle men. We want to go directly to the being, without any intermediary. We are not going to use a philosophy, a theory, a model or even thought to get there. This is because if we are using thought, this is basically what all those different things are, theories, philosophies, religions and scientific models, they are all thoughts.

The problem with thoughts is that if you are thinking thoughts, you are not actually being the reality. You are just thinking about reality. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could be reality itself, without thinking about it? That might seem irrational.

That might seem crazy. That might seem like it is impossible, but I want to suggest to you that it actually might be possible. It is just that you haven’t really practiced doing this before. No one has really taught you how to do this before.

You have never really had one of these kinds of experiences. You have never really had a true experience of being. What you have had 99.99% of your time in life is an experience of thinking, of conceptualizing, of modeling, of theorizing, of philosophizing, of religion—sizing and every other kind of “sizing” that you can come up with.

All of it is basically thoughts. What we want to do is cut through all of that. Now, I want to start this meditation process. I am going to guide you through it. What you are going to do is just sit very comfortably.

This is going to be a very enjoyable process. You are going to sit very comfortably. I am going to take you through this thing and it will take maybe 10, 15 or 20 minutes. I am not sure how long it will take, but we are going to guide you through.

What I want to help you do here is that I want to help you actually get a little taste of the experience of no self. This is an experience of what it is like to actually not be a self, but to be the actual reality that we are trying to really understand. The word ‘understand’ is not a very accurate word here.

We are trying to understand this without thinking about it, which is tricky because you don’t know how to understand something without thinking about it. In your life, you have never done this. Before I begin, I want to give credit to Peter Ralston who I got a lot of great ideas and information from about enlightenment.

He is one of my favorite thinkers about this topic. Some of his guided meditation sessions were really helpful to me, so I was really inspired by that. Let’s go ahead and begin.

The Meditation

Go ahead and take a comfortable seat. I want you to sit with your back straight and upright. Get comfortable. Put your feet flat on the ground. Close your eyes and we will begin. Make sure that you are in a quiet spot and that no one is going to interrupt you for at least 10 to 20 minutes.

Okay, good! Go ahead and close your eyes now. As you do that, I want you to relax your body, just a little bit. Start relaxing all of the muscles. Relax your face. Relax your legs. Relax your stomach. Good!

Start to bring your attention in the present moment, in the moment of right now. It is not a second ago, not a second later, but right now. Notice all the sensations in your body, all the feelings, all the emotions, all the thoughts, any itch you might have, any pressure in your body you might have and any feelings of warmth and coldness. I want you to feel all of that.

Feel the pressure of your butt on the seat that you are sitting on. Don’t think about it. Just experience it, experience it as a raw sensation. Good, now experience the sensation of the soles of your feet on the ground or whatever surface they are touching.

Experience that. Right now, that experience is happening for you in the present moment. Every experience that you experience is only happening in the present moment. Good, notice that you did not notice these sensations previously, five minutes ago when you were watching my video.

You were totally unaware of all of this stuff, but you are in the present moment right now and you are starting to get a sense that these things are happening to you every millisecond. These sensations are morphing, changing, evolving and changing how they feel. Just go with that flow, whatever it is for you.

Just allow it to be and just accept it. Can you allow yourself to accept the present moment exactly as it is, even if it is not perfect and even if you have some lingering worry in the back of your mind of some problem that you have in life? Go ahead and just let that go, just for now and just for a few minutes.

You can always come back to it. Any worries you have about the future – go ahead and let that go too. Just get very present in the moment and start feeling your body. Without moving, can you sense your feet? How do your feet feel?

Can you sense your legs, your lower legs and your upper thighs? Go ahead and sense them right now. Good! Now, sense your butt, sitting on the seat. Just feel it, whatever it feels like. Good, now sense your back, sense your stomach and your ab muscles, without moving them.

Just sense it. Good, now bring your awareness up to your back, your shoulder area and also your front chest muscles. Just sense all of that. Notice how this sensation is happening without your control.

You are not controlling it. You are not manipulating it. It is just happening. You don’t need to think about it. You don’t need to make it happen. It is just happening.

Good, now sense your shoulders and upper arms down through your elbows and into your forearms. Sense all of that. Good, now sense your hands, the tendons in your hands, the muscles in your hands, the palms of your hands and all the way through to your fingertips, without moving.

Just sense that. Good, now sense your neck muscles and move that awareness up into your jaw and into the front of your face. Feel the sensations, the raw sensations in your facial muscles. Go ahead and completely relax all of them. Make your jaw very loose.

Relax your face so that it is totally comfortable. Good, now go ahead and take one really nice and deep breath in, at your own pace. Inhale slowly and then exhale slowly. Good! Relax your body as you do that.

Go ahead and relax your body right now, even more than it already is. Feel all the tension melting away from your body. You are becoming very still, very calm, much centered in the present moment and very in touch with existence. Notice that all these raw sensations that you are feeling are raw existence.

Don’t think about it. Just feel it, notice it and experience it. Existence is experience. Good, now go ahead and take one more really nice and deep breath in calmly and then exhale. As you exhale, relax your body completely.

Good, now let’s have you take one more nice, steady, calm and deep breath in and then as you exhale, relax every single muscle in your body until you are completely and totally relaxed. Very good, now let your breaths breathe automatically for you, without having to control it. Notice how the breath just breathes for you, without you having to will anything.
There is a certain raw sensation to the breath. Good, now also notice your heart beating inside your body and what that feels like. Can you feel it? Good! Notice that this happens automatically, again, without any conscious control from you.

Good, now what I am going to have you do is imagine some things. I want to have your mind be very calm, very still, very tranquil and very placid, like a still pond without a single ripple on it, as you go and imagine these things. I want you to just accept what I tell you and just go with the flow.

Just see where it takes you. If you are comfortable, just go with the flow. Don’t think about it too much. I want you to imagine now the point from where you are sitting now, in the present moment, all the way into the past, all the ways back into the moment you were born. Imagine that all that time never even existed.

Just erase it from your memory, as though it never even existed. It is just not real. Good, now what I want you to do is picture all the time from the present moment to tomorrow, to next year, all the way to the end of your life that you can envision, all the plans that you have, your entire calendar, your work week, your schedule and all the huge and big goals you have for your future. Erase all of that from your mind.

Just make it a blank. Pretend like it never even existed and like it will never exist. It is total fiction. Good, now notice that it leaves you very centered and very present in the moment. The word ‘past’ doesn’t even exist in your mind. The word ‘future’ doesn’t exist in your mind.

All there is are things that are happening exactly now, moment by moment by moment, as I am speaking and as you are feeling all the sensations in your body. Good, now imagine that all the possessions that you have, your house, your furniture, your car, anything else that you own, your bank account, all the money in it, take every single possession that you own and imagine in your mind that they just do not exist. They are just completely erased from reality.

They do not exist. They never even existed. Can you allow yourself to imagine that? Good, it is a total blank spot, as far as possessions go. Now, I want you to imagine your job. If you are a student, imagine your school or any other social obligations that you have.

Imagine the schedule that you have for the next week or for the next month. In your imagination, I want you to completely erase these things. Imagine as though they do not exist and they never existed at all. Poof, gone! Good, now I want you to imagine all of your social roles that you play in life.

I want you to imagine your friends and your family, the people around you, your relationship, maybe your husband or your wife, your girlfriend or your boyfriend. I want you to imagine that none of this exists. Take it from your mind and just totally erase it. It doesn’t exist and it never existed.

Total blank! This feels fine. You are not threatened by this. It is just a total blank. Now I want you to imagine the society that you live in, the culture that you live in and any societal obligations that you have.

Imagine that this society and this culture are just a complete blank. It does not exist and it never existed at all. It is totally gone from your mind and it does not influence you any more at all. The culture does not influence you.

Society does not influence you. Imagine you have no social responsibilities. You have no social role whatsoever. Good, now imagine all the personal worries that you have in your life, all the concerns that you have, whether about money, relationships, your health, your career, your business or your personal development.

Take all of those and imagine that they do not exist and they never even existed. There are no worries, no concerns and no fears. All of it has just been erased from your mind. Imagine that you have no personal concerns whatsoever. Good!

Notice how good it feels, how calm and peaceful it feels, so just keep going with it. Allow yourself to just play along and to just go with the flow, even though it might seem a little bit unorthodox or weird to be imagining these things. Now imagine all the beliefs you have about life, all the scientific beliefs that you have, all the religious beliefs, all the spiritual beliefs and all the everyday common and most basic beliefs you have about life.

They are things you believed because other people have told you about them. They are theories you have about how life works and how things should be. I want you to imagine that all of this is just completely gone. Poof, erased!

It is as though it never even existed. Good! Imagine also any traditions that you have, that these are also all erased, as though they never existed. Good, now I want you to imagine any emotions that you have had in your life or any emotions that you presently feel or think you might feel.

Imagine that all of these emotions are completely gone now and they have been completely erased. There is no happiness, no sadness, no excitement, no loneliness, no fear, no anger, and no frustration. All of it is just gone. There are no more emotions.

Imagine that emotions never even existed in reality. Good, now I would like you to imagine that any opinions that you have about life, about yourself or about other people and any conceptualizations that you have, any theories you create, any stories in your mind about what reality and how it works, all of these are now gone. They are erased, as though they never even existed.

You have just completely released opinions. You don’t need opinions anymore. Good, now I want you to imagine that thoughts no longer exist. Literally any thought about anything does not exist anymore. It is just gone from your mind as though it never existed and as though you lived in a reality where thoughts do not exist.

Good, now notice, without thinking because thoughts no longer exist. As you listen to me, you are not thinking about anything. You are just existing now. You are just being right now. You are just experiencing whatever experience comes to you, right now and in this very moment.

Good, now imagine that there is no self-image anymore. There is no more picture in your mind of you. There is no more picture in your mind of your body, your name, your personal history, your social connections, your relationship to reality or your position in life.

Imagine that your self-image is just completely erased. It doesn’t exist, as though it never existed. Good! Can you feel the sensations and experiences right now and in the present moment, the sights through your closed eyelids, the colors, the feelings in your body, the sound of my voice, other sensations you might have, smells, pressure of your body and pressure in your mouth of your teeth and your tongue?

Imagine that these things are just existing. They are pure existence and not even part of your self-image because the self-image has been erased. So, what are these things really? Take a look at your sensations right now, without thinking about them.

Get very curious and ask yourself – what are these things? What are these sensations, these colors, and these sounds? Allow yourself to experience them as though you are experiencing them for the very first time, as though they are completely new, fresh and alien to you.

Take all the beliefs, assumptions, opinions that you have and thoughts about these sensations and just erase them all from your mind, as though they never existed. Feel the sensations and wonder – what are these sensations? What are they really?

What are they? Why do they exist? How can they exist? Good, now imagine that these sensations exist without an observer observing them, without a you feeling them, but that they are just free floating experiences.

They are just like a torrent of raw experience, without anyone experiencing them. What this makes them is that it makes them the raw fabric of existence. Imagine that existence just exists, without reason, without logic, without explanation, without even an observer and without you.

What if you weren’t something that was experiencing life and all of these raw sensations, but that what you call YOU was actually and simply the sum total of every raw sensation that is being felt right now? What if you are not simply some aspect of these sensations, like the bodily aspect or the mental aspect, but you were the entirety, the whole Universe of sensations?

Right now, that is being felt. That is existing right now. Imagine that you could exist, without being a YOU. Can you allow yourself to not be anything in particular? You are not a body, not a mind, not a thought, not a word and not an image, but a nothing.

Can you allow yourself to be nothing? Who are you really? If we strip away everything that we have stripped away, if we strip away your possessions, all your friends and family, your cultural influences in society, your traditions, your personal worries and beliefs, your emotions and your thoughts, remember, all of these things are gone now, they do not exist, even the self-image, the image you have of yourself in the body and occupying the body, also does not exist anymore.

Even the notion that you are experiencing my voice right now and that you are experiencing sitting on this seat and feeling that pressure on your butt, your feet and your legs, is not you feeling that. If we strip all of that away, what is left? If all our opinions of reality are gone, all of our preconceived assumptions and all our thoughts and theories are gone, what is left?

Don’t think about it. Just experience what is left. Can you allow yourself to experience reality exactly as it is, without any filters, without any assumptions, without any thoughts and without needing reality to be in any particular way?

Take a moment now to accept exactly what you are experiencing, whatever it is and even if it feels uncomfortable or unpleasant. Just allow yourself to accept it completely because this is reality. This is existence itself.

Good, now just take a moment to feel this in silence. If you are having any thoughts, stray thoughts coming up, allow yourself to accept those too and just to feel those for the raw feeling that a thought is. Thoughts feel a certain way. Allow yourself to accept that.

Very good! The question is – what is your most essential and fundamental nature? Who are you existentially? What are you? Do you even exist or is all that exists raw experience, without even an observer experiencing the experience?

Take a look, without thinking and without any prejudice about how you believe reality ought to be or how you believe it really is. Remember, leave those aside. Those are all erased. Just bask in that raw experience and accept whatever comes up.

Can you feel how calm and peaceful you are right now, being totally in the present moment? Can you feel how pleasant it is simply to exist? Can you allow yourself to be happy just now, with reality exactly as it is? Don’t you feel complete right now, in the present moment, without needing anything at all?

Don’t you feel perfectly confident, perfectly secure, perfectly content and perfectly at ease, without needing anything? You don’t need a relationship. You don’t need money. You don’t need a new goal. You don’t need more personal development.

You don’t even need enlightenment. Just now, right in the present moment, allow yourself to be calm, content and happy. Acknowledge to yourself that mere existence is enough to be happy, the mere fact of existing.

You might not even know exactly what is existing. Who is this entity that exists because we stripped away everything that you thought was you? All those things we stripped away, those were not you, including your self-image, including the picture in your mind you have of your body, the back of your head and of this entity who is listening to my voice right now.

What if the voice that you were hearing right now was not something that you were hearing, but it was something that simply existed and that you were it? You were not hearing this voice. You are the voice because you are everything that is being experienced.

You are the entirety of experience. There is no center to you. Wherever the experience is, that is where you are. Good! I am going to give you a few more seconds to bask in that emptiness. Notice how pleasant the emptiness is, how fulfilling and how peaceful it is.

Good, now on the count of three, you are going to take three nice and deep breaths in at your own pace and then you are going to open your eyes. One, two, three! Take three nice and deep breaths and then open your eyes.

Good, welcome back! That was a little guided meditation and that is a meditation that can produce the experience of no self. There are no guarantees. Everyone is different. Some people might have had a very powerful experience of no self.

Others might have had monkey chatter the whole time and not really been able to experience anything. Others might have been resisting the whole time, coming up with objections or been feeling emotions of various kinds. They may have been distracted and not been able to focus.

If you were not really able to focus, you felt distracted and your mind was all over the place, then I would encourage you to go through this exercise again and as many times as necessary until you can get some sort of calm, very peaceful and very content state. It is a state that you might call no self. It is a state where you, as an entity, dematerialize.

You Are The Invisible Man

When that happens, you merge with raw experience and with existence itself. This state can only be experienced without any thoughts, prejudices, opinions, assumptions, social roles that you play or any other images that you have of yourself. You cannot be attached to any of that.

You cannot be attached to your emotions, to your thoughts, to your beliefs, to your possessions and to your position in life. The reality is that what you really are, whether you have experienced it or not, is you are nothing and emptiness. This allows you to be reality itself.

But, what happens is that you identify yourself with a particular small section of this whole giant experience, which you call your body, your thoughts and your mind. You identify yourself with just this, which precludes you from being what is out there. This distinction is created between I am here and everything else is there.

If you go through these kinds of exercises, you will notice that this distinction can blur and merge, and actually can be completely erased. This is not because it is some fancy mental technique, but because it is actually the truth. What your present way of existence and living is, socially, your current life, is putting on garments on top of the invisible man.

You are really, fundamentally, essentially and existentially really the invisible man. But, because the invisible man cannot be seen, what you do is that you have to put on garments, socks, jackets, pants, shirts, hats, glasses and jewelry. You do this because when you put all of those things on, you can look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself – “That is me!”

But, what is interesting is that it is also possible to start stripping those things away. Take off every one of those pieces to see that they are not essentially you. In fact, they are just little garments and artifacts, very silly little things and very arbitrary little things.

You totally could have been wearing a different hat and it would have made no difference to your essential nature, which opens this very profound question. What is your essential nature if it is none of those garments? That is the question that I want to leave you on in this video.

That is the question of spiritual enlightenment. That is not a question that can be answered through logic, through rationality, through theorizing, through philosophy, through religion, through prayer or any other external action. It can only be realized by very honestly; extremely honestly, radically honestly looking inside to see what is really there. It is not what you think is there, not what you want to be there, not what other people told you is there and not what makes sense to be there, but what is actually there.