5.2 How do you set about recognizing that this is entirely a mental product of that?

It can happen that you dream deeply, with great involvement and attachment to the contents of your dream. On awakening, your mind can be confused – the dream can seem more real and more desirable than your ordinary everyday life. Sometimes it is with a struggle that you shake off the effects of such a dream; sometimes you have to work hard to clear your mind of the lingering effects of an attractive illusion.

That situation is exactly the one you find yourself in at this stage in your meditation. You have awaken from the dream which obscured the nature of reality from you. You no longer live, eat, breathe and think in ignorance – you know with intuitive certainty that this is that.

Now you must undertake the final meditative practices which cleanse your mind of lingering confusion about the nature of reality. Just as the ‘I’ which experiences reality in the dream is a product of your dreaming mind, so, too, is your individual sense of ‘I’, your specific and unique human individuality, a product of that in its unenlightened or dreaming state. Whatever your dreaming mind experiences is simply a product of your own thought process. Similarly, whatever ‘I’ experience in ordinary, everyday life, of self, others or things, is simply part of the thought process of that.

To experience that this is that, you need do nothing. The relaxed, transcendentally awakened mind naturally and effortlessly understands and experiences all external and internal phenomena as the product of the one, universal, all-embracing mind. Alternatively, and equally validly, the religiously inclined, transcendentally awakened mind naturally and effortlessly experiences all of this as subject to the will of, and immersed in the love of, God.

From a religious or a secular point of view, the relaxed transcendent witnessing of this makes manifest the underlying characteristic of conditioned existence. From the transcendent viewpoint of that, all of conditioned existence is suffused with infinite love. Out of that all-embracing, unstinting, all-giving love arises endless compassion for the suffering of the unenlightened.

Understand, experience and witness now the ecstatic love which is the union of this and that. The whole of reality, experienced as an inexpressible unity, is the eternally ecstatic interaction of stillness and movement. Like two lovers absorbed in sexual delight, the separate parts find fulfilment in unity.

Through realisation of the eternal unity of movement and stillness, love for all of this is born. Through action born of profound meditation, universal love is expressed. From deepest samadhi springs selfless intuitive action to heal, to help and to enlighten.

The way of action, the way of knowledge of reality and the way of love are inextricably interwoven. Express your love for this through intuitive action, devoid of individual volition. Love flows from understanding and experiencing the inseparableness, the inherent unity, of conditioned existence.

Throughout your life, Live and Act.