Hey guys! We're here for another videocast! One more moment Master Gualberto was willing to be with us here on the channel for an interview, for a chat, where I bring some of Joel Goldsmith’s writings and also questions that you leave here on the channel for Master to answer.
Today, Master, I want to read an excerpt from the book “Arrows on the Infinite Way,” which is a compilation of Joel’s writings. And, in the excerpt, Joel states: “There were people who spent their whole lives thinking about God, who always lived with the Bible in their hand, however, they have always been astronomically far from God. What they had in mind was nothing more than words, and these are not and never will be God.” I would like you to comment a little, Master, on the study of the Word, on this permeating the mind with these words, with these studies.
MG: There is something here that we have to make clear to you: we are very inclined to be attached to words, symbols, and images. In fact, to every form of concept. The concepts, for us, are very meaningful. And here we fall into a serious mistake, which is to confuse these symbols, these images, these concepts, with the Reality itself, That to which these concepts, these images, are pointing.
So, the problem with us is that we are very verbal, very theoretical, and we have to be very clear about that. It seems to me, Gilson, that this is one of the most serious problems the seeker has, because within this search process, the intellect seeks to orient itself. And it seeks to guide itself, naturally, based on other people’s experiences, and these other people’s experiences are the experiences of books or scriptures. So, however beautiful, however profound, however significant this or that scripture may be, there we are still dealing with images, symbols, ideas, and concepts. The problem is that these concepts, when they are philosophical and mainly religious, become, within us, beliefs. And belief is an idea, it is something intellectual, it is an image concept, it is not an experience, it is not a direct experience.
So, the problem with this contact with the scriptures is that this contact is merely intellectual, merely verbal, and without a direct, real effect. That real, direct effect springs from an Understanding of that Reality. And this Understanding is only possible when there is an experience, and not when we are established on a level of beliefs, ideas, and verbal formulations. So, we tend to get stuck in these ideas, these concepts, these images, and these beliefs.
The result of this is that we go from one book to another, from one study to another, from one teacher to another, from one lecture to another, and nothing really happens, because we stay at the intellectual level. There is no direct experiencing, a direct living. The point is that this direct living, with regard to this Reality of Consciousness, – and here I mean the Real Consciousness of Being, which is the Truth of God – is not an experience.
Here, when I refer to a direct living, I am not even referring to an experience. An experience is something you go through. You go through the experience and you keep that too as more knowledge, so when it is uttered or described to the other who listens to it, it is just another belief, and for you it is something that has already gone, it is something that has no reality here and now.
So, this contact with the Divine Reality does not come through books and the study of the scriptures, the study of words, of ideas, it does not provide Freedom. Freedom is born from a direct experience with this Divine Reality, which is the Reality of God. The point is that This is not even an experience, let alone concepts within words, verbal formulations. So, these verbal formulations, these words actually become new beliefs and these beliefs are prisons. You profess a belief and that belief is a dogma, an intellectual concept. This is not a reality.
We use, for example, the expression Truth, Love, God, Divine Reality, Real Being, or Consciousness, or hypnotic state… We use these expressions without actually knowing what they represent. In other words, they are just beliefs. As beliefs, they are still part of the prison in which the ego is established, this false identity, which is the “I,” is established. That is, we are also dealing with an illusion. The “study of the scriptures,” said Ramana Maharshi, “before Realization is useless and after Realization it is completely unnecessary.” It is very strange for us to hear this, but coming from a wise man, we have to pay attention. And that’s exactly why: because we're dealing here only with beliefs, with new verbal formulations, with new theories, and it’s not possible to live on theories.
Theory, belief – I have been saying – is like a menu for the hungry. You do read the menu there, you find several dishes on the menu. Just a plate of those to solve your problem. Your problem is a lack of food, not a lack of theory about food. If it was a lack of theory about food, the matter of the menu would solve it. So, if reading the scriptures, studying books or listening to lectures, or learning something theoretically from someone, if that would solve it... but it doesn't!
So, when you look at yourself, you've already read dozens of books, you've studied the scriptures many, many times, and you live each day putting more information inside, theoretical, verbal, and intellectual. But this is not the direct experiencing beyond experience itself. Because, I repeat, this is not an experience, something that happened, it has to be something that is experiential here and now. That is the Reality of God, That is the direct experiencing of what is in theory. But when you are in this experience, you dispense with the theory, just as someone who already has the plate, eating, dispenses with the menu. That’s basically it, that’s just it.
GC: Master, funny thing is that the ego takes pleasure in reading, studying and ends up having an experience of pleasure, of comfort. And then there is a pleasant feeling, a good feeling, which ends up being an escape to postpone this intellectual issue, and having some experiences, which are fleeting. There’s an experience, there’s a good feeling, and then five minutes later there’s all the conflict, all the contradiction, all the anxiety again.
MG: We confuse, Gilson, this real contact with the Truth – which, in reality, is the contact with the Truth of God, but That is not outside, but within us... That is, we confuse the contact with this Reality, the direct work of this Realization of Reality that we carry within us – which necessarily involves self-investigation and, based on this self-investigation, [by] the annulment of this false “I,” which is the ego –, we confuse it with sensations.
So, the reading of religious books and so-called “spiritual” experiences, the emotion, the feeling, the sensation, the comfort, that touch that temporarily relieves us of all this ego oppression… We mistake it for the experience of God or with a contact that takes us away from this problem that we believe is outside of us. In reality, in this way we are showing, for ourselves, at this instant, a moment of only temporary relief from a pain that we bring. And, as a relief, we are faced with yet another escape in which our “I,” our “ego,” is hiding behind. In other words, in this matter of reading, studying, learning and this frantic search for relief, temporary fulfillment, relaxation, and comfort, we are really looking for a new way out.
The non-religious person escapes to other paths. He or she flees into drugs, flees into alcohol, into various forms of entertainment. Whatever the human being finds to amuse himself or herself when he or she is suffering, works for him or her as a means of escape. While the religious person... as they believe they are, in fact, looking for God – which, in fact, is just a projection of an idea about God, about what they believe to be God –, they ends up with this thing of a lot of reading, a lot of study, this pleasure, this feeling, this comfort, this fulfillment in hearing others talk about it. And when they get that, they feel really relieved, without all that heavy psychological pressure that the ego puts on them. But as soon as they move away from that experience – because it’s just an experience they're going through, which they'll remember later – they feel the same pressures again!
So, we end up spending many years in a mystical practice, in a religious practice, frequenting spaces where we sing, where we listen to the scriptures, where we read the scriptures a lot... but, in our life, in our day to day life, we continue as the same old people, with the same old egos, being the same old people who are violent, fearful, scared, aggressive, ambitious, and full of different problems within us, which we are not even aware of, because we never investigate, we never look directly into it. We don't look at it because we are only in theory, in this endless practice of studies and readings. It comforts, but it does not release.
GC: This point Master spoke about is very interesting, because it is unconscious! I see! I'm on this journey... Now with the Master I know that there is no longer any path, there is no trajectory anymore. It is really a work here and now. But looking at the past, in these last few years, I was on a journey and somehow the ego becomes more lustrous, becomes more spiritual and, to a certain extent, demonstrates peace, takes on a spiritual garment and, in that, it perpetuates itself. We are fooled! And the problems, as the Master was talking about, the inner contradictions are so deep that they are not seen.
So, I myself was unaware of this gigantic contradiction that existed, of this present “I,” of this “ego,” and it was not seen. And then I see that, with the Master, with this proximity to the Master, this falsehood that was already here, which is from this separation, from this separate identity, from this “Gilson,” started to be seen, this contradiction. And the escape... I escaped a lot, no longer to external things “of the world,” but I escaped to books or I escaped to meditation, to the meditation practice of sitting and meditating. And that gave a temporary relief, it was nice, there was a feeling, but what happens, Master, we even talked about it in a videocast some time ago: we get tired, we get tired of it. It’s reading, it’s studying and meditation, and it gets tiring... Until the moment Grace presents us with Grace in a body, a living Master, to really finish the journey, finish the search, and start this work.
MG: This is the point, which you touched on now, which is fundamental: as long as That does not come closer, as long as this Presence of Grace itself does not approach in an evident way, touching this condition – which is still a condition of self-hypnosis, of illusion, of mistaken identification with the “I,” but within a spiritual, religious, esoteric, mystical camouflage – while this Presence of Grace does not touch us, this search movement continues. This search movement is a movement of the ego-identity itself, of what it has projected as being its ideal to be found. When? At any moment! So, this search does not end, there is always this waiting, this hope, this quest, this search. And that search is a mere projection still of the “I,” still of the ego.
When we are religious or feel religious, which really is just an image we have of ourselves, religious people or God-oriented people – these are all self-images we have about who we are – when we feel that way, we apply ourselves devotedly to all this. And we do that, Gilson, really, unconsciously. It’s not that there’s evil in us, on the contrary! We are in search of the Good, in search of the Divine, in search of the Truth, but it is something that happens in that dream state, of unconsciousness, in that state of separate ego-identity. And the ego, listen carefully: the ego is not looking for the end of itself.
The ego is conservative, it lives in continuity. What is ego? It is the sense of a present “I” posing as the seeker of God, but it is still the ego itself. And it is not looking for its own end, it has no consciousness for that. It is the movement of unconsciousness itself, of the dream! So, our common state is the state of unconsciousness. When the Presence of Grace reveals itself, when It arrives, It arrives ending all of this, because all of this needs to be undone; because that is what keeps us trapped in the illusion of the sense of separation, that dream sense of being “someone” in time, space, separate from God, or, at most, having contact with God. And we call this contact communion: “Me in communion with God.” The Reality is that there is only God, and when God is present, there is no one left to be in communion with Him! There is only Him, and the sense of “I” is gone; once the sense of “I” is gone, all illusion and all need for theoretical, intellectual, verbal knowledge, symbols, images, beliefs...That’s it what happens, that’s how it happens.
GC: Master, I have a question from Jesus Amaral. He asks: “Is it thought that creates the thinker?”
MG: See, we have here in this question a very “key” point for this disintegration of the “I,” of the ego. The sense of “I” in you feels present within this experience. What experience? Any of them! When a thought arises, that sense of “I” says, “I am thinking.” When something is seen, it is only seen. It says, “I see.” When there is speech going on, it says, “I am speaking.” When a thought is going on inside your head, it says, “I'm thinking about it.” This “I” is actually a fallacy; it is an illusion. It is thought itself passing as the thinker.
This sense of the thinker in us is thought itself in expression, and vice versa: thought is the sense of “I.” When we have thoughts, we have the thinker. When we have no thoughts in our heads, is there any thinker left? The moment you have no thought... is the thinker possible without the thought? Look, we always have the two together, but, in reality, one is the reality of the other. It is the same with any experience. In a given experience, the illusion is someone having the experience. In fact, the experience is happening. After the experience has taken place, the thinker says, “I went through that.” That’s when another idea comes up, which is the experiencer’s idea.
So, you see, here we have a great key to the end of that sense of “I,” which is separate from Life – and, here, Life is what happens here and now, here we have the key: this observation of the movement of experience, be it thought, feeling, or emotion. When there is this verification of this movement, in this attention of pure observation, if we do not place the “experiencer” element, the “thinker” element, the “observer” element of this experience that is taking place here and now, we are freed from the sense of a present identity. And when we are freed from that present sense of identity, that experience undergoes an extraordinary change, because there is no longer the illusion of separation. That’s something we get closer to when there’s this observation about ourselves right now, here, which is Self-Awareness.
We have to investigate what the mind is and how it works within ourselves, what this movement called “I,” the “egoic mind” is, how we work internally. Gilson, this is the study we need to do, because books give us the letters… They are black letters on a white background, which is the paper, but this self-observation gives us the verification of the experiencer of experience. And this finding of the experiencer is the end of itself.
So, the real study, which I have laid out for people who approach this work, is not of the scriptures. You've already read a lot! You intellectually, in terms of words, already know enough. Now you just need to learn the art of looking at yourselves, what I've been calling “unlearning that ‘I’.” What we need, Gilson, is to “unlearn this ‘being'” that we believe we are, we confuse ourselves with and which we pass as being. We need to unlearn this “I,” the idea of this “being” that we are. This needs to go away! Envy, fear, jealousy, anger, ambition, lack of love, psychological confusion, inner restlessness, the inner chattering inside the head, and that movement of thought that goes from one thought to another in an uncontrolled way inside us – all of that needs to go! We have to unlearn this for a new life, for a new brain, a mind in deep and meaningful Silence, within an experience of Intelligence, where the sense of reality, without the dream of separation, is present.
This is what the sages call Enlightenment or Awakening of Consciousness. And it has several names, in each religious culture it is named differently. It is your Natural State, free from the sense of a separate “I”; it is Life free from the “I,” free from the ego. It is the reality of this Christ-Consciousness, in the language of Paul, in the language of Joel Goldsmith; it is your Natural State, free from the illusion of the sense of the thinker, the experiencer, the observer. So, what do we have? God, the Reality of Intelligence, of Presence, and That is Love. None of what we know as love is Real Love. It is something completely outside of what we know.
GC: Master, you talk about, exactly, stopping studying anything outside and studying ourselves. And then I would like Master to talk a little more about this, because when it comes to “studying oneself,” in my case, I saw a lot of the idea of this introspection, of questioning oneself, trying to discover the origin of some feeling… and I know that Master’s approach is completely different. Could you talk a little more about this “studying yourself”?
MG: That introspection or that look inside is what you do when you look for someone. When we are looking for someone who can help us to analyze ourselves, we are looking for a therapist, someone who can help us in this understanding of ourselves. Here it is not about understanding oneself through introspection and self-analysis or through analysis. Introspection, self-analysis or analysis requires the presence of an entity present to do this work. Introspection requires someone who looks inward, analysis requires someone who analyzes someone, and self-analysis is the “someone” analyzing himself, and that implies the presence of an analyst with the analyzed thing.
In fact, this analyst and the analyzed thing are always one and the same. It is like the thinker and the thought: it is always one and the same. And thought does not analyze thought; and thinker does not analyze thought. The thinker is the thought! So, the thing that analyzes is the analyzed thing. So, we are within the same game, this dream of a present identity, doing analysis, introspection or self-analysis, observing thought from the point of view of the one who observes, who is the thinker. In this condition, we stay within the same game. Some out there call it self-knowledge. It is in this sense that people seek personal development. They want self-improvement, so they are doing a self-examination, a study of themselves in that intention, in that goal.
Here, to study oneself is to understand that this “yourself” is not real, it is to become aware of the illusion of this “yourself.” If you go, here in this work, in this search for the “I,” for this thinker, this analyst, this self-analyst, you discover that this self-analyst does not exist, that this thinker does not exist, that this “I” does not exist. So, I use the word “Self-Awareness” in the sense of recognizing that the sense of an identity here, in this experience of thinking, feeling, speaking, emotion, and sensation, is not real.
So, when I use here, Gilson, the expression “study yourself,” I am talking about looking, and only looking. This “look” without the sense of someone looking is not introspection, it is not self-analysis. This has nothing to do with self-improvement. Self-improvement is the sense of an improved “I” – it has abandoned vices and found virtues. This we have already done throughout the history of mankind. Human beings have improved. You can improve as a person, you can spiritualize yourself, you can become a better and better person, a certain amount of work on your own “I,” on your own ego is enough. You used to smoke, stop smoking; you drank, stop drinking; you had certain harmful practices and habits, you leave them. This is improvement, this is self-improvement. That is not what we are dealing with here.
Here, to study oneself is to realize that this envy requires an envious person, this jealousy requires a jealous person, this fear requires a fearful person, and this suffering requires a sufferer. Looking at oneself without the sense of someone being present is an approach of the Real... That’s why I have called it Real Self-Awareness. This is what brings you closer to the True Meditation. And why does this bring you closer to True Meditation? Because it breaks someone’s sense of being present in this instant, in this moment, it gives you this vision outside of this sense of an “I” in this experience, then something, which is Real Meditation, shows itself right away as your Natural State, where What you are, which is outside of the mind, the body, the world, which is your Natural State of Divine Reality, shows itself as Realization.
The profound Truth about your Being is that there is no one right here and now. There is only this Reality, which is not someone’s reality. So, it is in this sense that this “studying yourself” becomes something essential, because studying yourself here, in that sense, as I have been placing it, is to discard yourself from this present moment, into a Real Life, where That which is Nameless, Unspeakable, which is Truth, your Being, blossoms in Intelligence, in Love, in Happiness. That, Gilson, is the end of suffering. It has nothing to do with self-development, self-improvement or human transformation. It’s the end, really, of all that.
GC: Too perfect! Too much, Master! Too much, too much... It’s a Grace to be able to have this opportunity to see all of this in Master’s life: this Freedom, this Love... this Freedom from suffering, this “being Free”... This Love that flows is indescribable, Master. To be close to you, to see your simple life, your common life, but in that total freedom at every moment.
It’s been our time here, Master. So, thanks for this videocast. Here’s an invitation for those who haven't had the opportunity to spend an intensive weekend with Master Gualberto, a weekend intensive. There are online meetings and also face-to-face meetings, including retreats. So, here’s the invitation for those who “felt” it... because it’s not a feeling, but for those who perceived something beyond words, when looking into the Master’s eyes. And also, for those who haven't subscribed to the channel yet: subscribe and leave the “like,” make a comment, send questions that we will bring to the next videocasts. Thank you very much, Master. Gratitude.
MG: Okay, everyone! Thanks for the meeting. See you soon.
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