Here, it is not about knowledge, it is about flowering!

Your nature is Consciousness. You always have the power, the freedom of mistaking yourself for the present experience or of maintaining yourself as a witness. You are a witness of the experience when you are completely present. But, you are not present when you are interpreting, translating, judging or evaluating what happens through the thought; you are not conscious.

You are Consciousness, but in general, you mistake yourself for the thoughts about what happens and you give illusory identity to the experience the body is living through sensations and perceptions. Here is the ego, the unconsciousness. You are totally free to live without the ego, but you need to make use of it, otherwise you will never discover what it means.

Right now, “listening to” is the Consciousness. Interpreting what you “listen to” is unconsciousness. For interpreting, you need the thought evaluating, agreeing, disagreeing, accepting, or rejecting. For listening, don’t. When you listen to a bird, you are not worried if it is singing right or wrong, if it is in tune or not. But, when you listen to a human being, you pay attention if he/she is out of the tune, if he/she is going to sing a wrong note. That is the point! Here is the unconsciousness. So, you are pure Consciousness listening to a bird, but you are not Consciousness listening to a human being singing. You cannot live in this Freedom of only listening, because you are too addicted to be someone. And when are you someone? When you judge, interpret, translate, evaluate, measure, choose, like, or dislike.

Participant: It is impossible to understand This. It is only possible to live This.

Master Gualberto: You have to live this Freedom to discover It. You need to work on that. This is the purpose of Satsang: to work the disidentified attention of this false “me.” Trying to understand, for example, is an effort, and intellectually we are addicted to this. Why do we do this? Because, in the ego, we want to capture what is being said in order to own this, in order to have something else added to the collection of our old trunk of trash called “trunk of knowledge.” It is enough to listen without effort, without ambition, without desire, without wanting to understand it, or without rejecting for not understanding it.

The problem is not “to misunderstand” it, but to want to understand it. When a bird sings, you do not understand what it is doing, what it is singing, but you do not care, because you are free to listen to it. But when it is a Guru, you say, “Gosh! I want This he has!” There you are, ambition has arisen and you have missed it.

Participant: I am here because I want this State the Guru lives in.

Master Gualberto: But you cannot reach this State by wanting It. You can realize This in you by relaxing. What do we do in Satsang? We learn how to get rid of what we have always done. We start by stopping doing anything, and Grace comes and runs us over. Then, there are no “us” anymore, just the Grace, the Wisdom, the Intelligence, the Presence, the Consciousness, the Truth.

We hear the sound of two hands clapping hands. Now, what is the sound of just one hand clapping? This is a Zen koan. You cannot get there by the intellect, you can be here and now, in This, in this relaxation, in this “listening,” in this attention without effort, then this “Thing” that is already there emerges, comes up, it has the liberty to get out of the cage of the ego, of the intellect, of the envy, of the ambition, of the desire of possessing and achieving. The Guru gives you This, God gives you This. It is not you who catches Him, it is not you who reaches Him.

Participant: In this work, we must have patience and calmness. It is no use getting desperate because of any annoyance, because of any pain, because of any doubt.

Master Gualberto: This comes through internal ripeness, through the blooming of the Natural State. Because of the vasanas, the tendencies of the mind, it takes some time indeed until you know what I am talking about, because until then, you do not know it.

You still do not know just to hear. You hear and it seems you are trying to catch what I say. It is not possible to catch my speech, but it is possible for This to establish there on you. In the beginning, we intellectualize, analyze it, “Wow, that's it! I know it!” But it is not like that, because here it is not about knowledge, but flowering. When you somehow think you are not growing, you are not evolving, you are not making progress, using Robert Adam’s words, “this is a sign you are making progress!”

Participant: There is no food for the ego here, and then it says, “I am not evolving!”

Master Gualberto: There is no food for it. What we have here does not strengthen it. Studying Ramana’s words, Bhagavad Gita, Vedanta, this is what strengthens, feeds it. But, there is no food here, it is just about emptying.

* Online meeting transcription, originally held on July 4^th, 2018 - First published in Portuguese on October 16^th, 2018 - Online meetings every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10 pm (Local Time: Brazil BRT), except during Retreat periods. For more information about Paltalk app and how to participate, please access: visit http://mestregualberto.com