Ecstasy of Freedom
- Title
- En Ecstasy of Freedom
- Date
- En 1976-Mar-30
- Decade
- En 1970s & Earlier
- City, State
- En New Lebanon, NY
- Location
- En Abode
- Description
- En A slow meditation, full of meaningful pauses allowing the group to follow Pir Vilayat on the path to a deep stillness that ultimately leads to grasping the nature of one’s real being: to awaken. Seeing oneself as a visitor to planet Earth helps us see the illusory nature of our self-concept--our personality, mind, thoughts, emotions. One is still involved on the earth plane, but doesn’t get caught in appearances. There is ecstasy in this freedom and in perceiving the programming and meaning of things. To be free from oneself means there is no other person: we experience all joy and sorrow as ours.
- Topic(s)
- En Awakening
- Meditation Practice
- Freedom
- Ecstasy
- Subtopic(s)
- En Stillness; Self-image; Programming
- Type of event
- En Family Talk/Class
- Type of publication
- En Recording
- Media
- En Audio
- Transcript
- Extent
- En 0:27:16
- Identifier
- En L7613
- File Format
- En mp3
- Language
- En English
- Digitizing Team
- En Abad
- TajAli Keith
- Author(s)
- En Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
- Full Text
-
En
This evening we're going to engage in a meditation. [pause] There are a lot of different kinds of meditation.
First of all, experience the stillness, [pause] immobility of your being, as compared with the motion in the world around you, [pause] and then experience the same thing, more deeply inside, the contrast between the moving thoughts and the stillness of your consciousness. And the more you can experience stillness, the more the thoughts appear to be illusory. The moment you let yourself be carried into the thoughts by the consciousness, the less you're able to observe them clearly. [pause]
And you soon realize that the whole pivot around which the thoughts gravitate is the sense of me: the sense of myself. [pause]
And so, you see how you can let yourself be drawn into the trail of the thoughts by relaxing into the personal ego consciousness and enjoy or even [pause] suffer from the thoughts, and get yourself into a real trip, letting thoughts get away with you. In those thoughts there's always aspirations, and fears, and insecurity about one's personality, a desire to affirm oneself or a fear of not being considered what one would like to be considered. All of those emotional trips come to the surface when one lets these thoughts run away with one. [pause]
Now what we want to do instead of imposing upon ourselves a theme, what we want to do is to [pause] realize our real self--which one can do by refusing to let oneself be drawn into the personal emotions, by the stillness that we impose now upon our being, in the depth of our being, in our emotions.
And so you see right away that the thoughts can't run away with one anymore because one doesn't let them play their tricks on one [pause] and so, one is able to look upon the thoughts quite objectively, like forces that are trying to exercise some action upon one. [long pause]
Remember the thought that we've come across so much lately: awakening. You awaken from the physical condition, and the mind condition, the mind world. And one of the best ways of doing it is to remember that you are the visitor on the planet Earth [pause] because then you begin to identify with your real being.
It's a matter of seeing that one's personality is a formation, a passing formation. It's not one's real self. And then one realizes that most of one's thinking is done from the reference point of one's personality. And that's of course not meditation. That's one's general way of thinking.
If you think of yourself as the visitor on planet Earth, and you don't identify yourself with your personality anymore, [pause] and now you're the observer. You're observing what's happening on the planet, you're observing what's happening to your mind, you're observing what happens to your emotions [pause].
You can't be right down there in your personality any longer. [pause]
It's as though you are rising above your personality consciousness. [pause]
And there's an ecstasy in being free from the prison of one's personality consciousness. [pause]
The personality becomes the object now, and it gives one freedom from it. [pause]
And one begins to gain a feeling of eternity, [unclear] indestructibility. [pause]
And at the same time, one experiences that one is involved in--not just in the body, one is involved in the suffering, and the joy, the whole proliferation, the bubbling of the sprouting of life and the [pause] festering of the flesh.
And that's what I would like us to do now to see very clearly our involvement—our involvement which really means that we are also the body, not just considered as a vehicle. And we're the body of all people, and at the same time, [pause] in this stillness, our freedom. [pause] The ecstasy of freedom. [pause]
It's not freedom from involvement on the earth plane. It is freedom from one's concept of oneself [pause]. It's freedom from illusion. The illusion of thinking that one is one thinks one is, or the illusion of thinking that things are the way they look. And getting caught in emotion because one believes things to be the way they appear to be. [pause]
So the emotion of the heart is replaced by the emotion of the soul, because the emotion is not attached to our person, not tied up with our person, but it's ecstasy.
Because one doesn't let oneself be caught by the way things look, one discovers such meaningfulness. It's so extraordinary how things are programmed. The meaning of it all is so ... overwhelming, shattering [pause]
So, in one's deep ... a deep stir of one's being faced with reality, that one feels like ... glorifying.
And it’s not something that you ... a theme of meditation that you set upon yourself. It just arises out of the freedom that you gain by overcoming the ordinary viewpoint, through meditation.
It's being awake. [pause] You see what it does to your thinking? You're not caught up in your thinking any more, when you're awake. You can watch your thinking go on, it's following its course, but you're not caught up in it. [long pause]
It's just like waking up from a dream [pause]
And being free. One is free from one's ... one is free from one's thoughts, one is free from one's beliefs, one is free from one's emotions. One is free from oneself. Which means that nothing can affect one, even though one feels very deeply solidary to all the suffering of people. But a sorrow affecting one doesn't affect one more than it would if it was happening to another person. [pause] And one can enjoy the joy of another person as much as one's own.
And anyway, there is no such thing as another person. That's what the awakening is about. It's just an illusion.
Part of Ecstasy of Freedom