What is present when you are absent--JK dialogue snip

[Guest guest]

After one has seen through the I-thought and it no longer has a hold, are the residues that come up in certain situations a conditioning in the body that will take time to work out? For example, you might see your mother and the old pattern might come in immediately.

 

Of course if you take your mother for your mother and you for her son—the relationship between mother and son or daughter is very strong because the mother sees the son as a prolongation of herself. So she superimposes “my son” on you and you go in the trap. See it in the moment itself.

It is not only the seeing but the impact of this seeing in you, how has it acted in you, that is important. Seeing this is the transmutation.

 

 

 

Let me be more specific. There’s an ideal that many seekers on the path to, that after the moment of awakening one goes through life and never has a reaction again. My question is: Are there not momentary reactions but also the instant seeing of that reaction?

 

Yes, reaction is an object like any other. It depends on how you see your environment. You can see if from the point of view of your five senses, the body. You can see it from the point of view of the mind, the person. And you can see it from the point of view of consciousness. But you know exactly when you are completely at home in your absence.

 

What is present when you are absent?

 

Your totality.

 

How do you feel it?

 

How can you feel absence?

 

How can you call it absence if you don’t feel it?

 

You cannot feel it. It is not an object. In other words you feel it without feeling it.

 

Like awareness?

 

 

Awareness could be called a feeling that is not bound to the senses.

When you are in love, when you love your love, you love yourself. You are nowhere. You know these moments when you love your love and are nowhere.

You want to take it in your hand, fix it and see it objectively. That is not possible. It creates a subject-object relationship.

 

What is there in the absence you are talking about? I mean, there has to be something because I am alive, I am not dead.

 

 

 

There is Life but not the expressions of Life. Life is there.

When you see an object and you are completely concentrated on the object you feel this energy of concentration. Give it up and you will feel yourself behind you.

 

Give up the concentration?

 

 

Yes, give it up completely and you will find yourself behind you. But the object is still there. See what your relation is at this moment. You see the object and at the same time you are aware of the seeing.

 

But when you give it up you essentially have no relationship with it.

 

 

Then, I would say the object is in you. It is perceived by your perceiving, by the perceiver. Give up perceiving and conceiving, and what remains is your presence.

 

In that process does the object itself change?

 

Surely, because when you look at an object through conceiving, the object is memory. Try to see an object without memory the way a poet or certain scientists see it. See how it appears and disappears in our presence. Something which appears and disappears in our presence is no longer an object.

 

 

Jean Klein and questioner.UniversalMeditations