Satsang in Palermo – Italy, June 2006

satsang palermo 2006

Avasa: Of course, you can never remove the fear of death at the level of a concept. The conceptual level is not allowing you to touch it, to taste it, to feel it. The moment that you try to face anything at the level of a concept, you are removing yourself from the perceptual level and you are taking the energy from the sensation at that level, to create the conceptual thinking about it in the mind. It’s a way of avoiding touching, and going through, allowing that totally. All that’s required to do that is to recognize the mechanism that’s in place there. The mechanism is the flicking from the perception level to the conception level. The only thing that you are afraid of – is fear itself. You are afraid of feeling the fear. And it is like you said – you can’t run away from it. At some point you are going to have to say ‘Come, let’s have this, totally.’ You are afraid of experiencing a feeling, just a feeling, it’s not fear, it’s just a feeling, and the mind has stuck a label on it and called it fear. Because the mind knows that, the moment you embrace that fully and go through it, you come out on the other side of death, and you rest in the Eternal, already dead. And the moment that happens, the one that believed itself to be alive, the one that the whole of the psychological mind surrounds, is realized to be just imagination, and it dies. You are actually afraid of getting rid of the one that you imagine yourself to be. When you are ready to do that, it will happen. Otherwise you are just supporting the illusion of the one you imagine yourself to be. You are not something that can die. Once you know that, the fear of death no longer rises in your Consciousness. You might get a good night’s sleep, then.

It’s a feeling that’s all. It’s intense, but if you are willing to embrace it, it’s no longer fearful, even if it reaches the point that the mind would call terror, you would still be willing to allow it to take place, and the moment that you do, you will laugh at the fact that you delayed that moment for so long, because once you have gone through it, you will see it clearly that you are not something that can die, and so there is no longer the fear of dying, because you see it’s just an idea, a concept. You are not something that dies. There’s no way out, you have to embrace it, either while the body is alive or at the moment of death, when you have finally recognized what every other human being recognizes, that you don’t die in the body, because you are Eternal. Why delay it? Encourage it, invite it every morning, invite it every night when you go to bed!

Partecipant: I am terrorized, I cannot sustain this!

Avasa: You can, because this body did! They are all bodies, they can both do ….what one can do another can do. We met a lady who had the same problem, had the same invitation, I would say, and it had eventually lead to her spending two years in a psychiatric ward, and she phoned us up from the psychiatric ward and begged us to go there to speak to her. Instead, she ended up coming to see us. And I kept smiling at her – it was obvious that she was in a very traumatic state. And she said ‘Why do you think this is funny?’ And I said ‘Well, I can see that you have no options left. You have tried running away from it, and the only option left, is one that you, that’s the one you imagine yourself to be, wouldn’t choose any way. And the end result is that you will come to enlightenment.’ She awoke the next morning, she said to me ‘I don’t want to face it, the moment I feel it, I just want to run away from it’. So I said ‘Well, so what’s the alternative?’ I said ‘So, you are going to run away from death by killing yourself? So, guess what’s going to happen in the last five minutes before the body dies?’ She just looked at me and said ‘Well, I can’t do that then, can I?’ I said ‘No, but you can welcome it now and have another forty years of life in the recognition of what you are.’ She was released from hospital the next morning, and we saw her two days later, and she gave satsang for twenty minutes, a lovely smiley lady. Her boyfriend looked a bit shocked though, he didn’t really know who she was. You can run away from it till the day the body dies, and then you are going to have to face it, and so is everyone else here, who hasn’t faced it. What you are doing in this moment is telling yourself through this form, the only option left. No imaginary person is going to choose its own death, which means that you have no options, they take place. Just remember to welcome it and give it a big hug and you will come out the other side, complete with a living form, absent of that you imagined what lived in it. What have you got to loose? (laughing). The only thing that dies is a concept. What you are can never die, because it was never born, it is Eternal. But the imaginary one dies, an idea, a belief, a concept dissolves. Be worth it just to get a good night’s sleep, wouldn’t it? Forget about enlightenment.

Partecipant: I could do it for just sleeping well. I really want to sleep. It is better than living.

Avasa: It depends which side of death …. (laughing)

Partecipant: I thank you for the answer. I feel that I am hopeless.

Avasa: Good, then you have stopped creating ideas about how to run away. And then it can just happen.

Partecipant: I am fixed that I will never die.

Avasa: Good.

Partecipant: I am very worried about it.

Avasa: Well, sorry to tell you, you are right.

What it is shared here is a completely radical and uncompromising message. It has no prescriptions and does not suggest anything to do at all. It does not ask you to be a particular way, but rather that you are not required to be at all.

It speaks about what has always been present and is right now but it was and is completely overlooked. It tries to describe a paradox.

When we are born the sense of separation between the body and whatever surrounds it is not present, then after a few years the identity arises and everyone around you will confirm to you that you are a real person, with free will and choice, that you have to work hard to become worthy, satisfied… you have to make your life work. A feeling of contraction is present and it becomes the centre by which all thoughts, emotions and actions seems to arise from.You are now someone and life is happening to you, you have to defend yourself with threats, you seek pleasure and avoid pain. You really believe that you can do all of these things. We become seekers, looking for something that can fullfill a subtle dissatisfaction, a subtle but deep sense of lack. What this message describes is that the belief of having an identity, a separate me amongst separate others in a separate world is an illusion. There is no one and there never was. Everything just happens and there is no one ever in control of anything.

There is no one right now reading this even if something there is strongly convinced that this is not the case. There is just THIS and it is NOTHING appearing as THIS. This cannot be understood or grasped by the me, but something can resonate there as this is the real nature of what is. In THIS ALL-NESS everything can arise, even the sense that separation is real, and that sense can fall away. There is no need or cause for that to happen. The illusion can remain until death or it can collapse right now.
When this is seen (by no-one) it becomes clear that what we were longing for all along has never gone away. There is just everything and nothing. THIS is pure joy, love and freedom.

Emotions, thoughts, feelings can still arise then in This, but they are not owned by a separate someone. There is no personal suffering any-more, there is just a flow of energy.
The seeing of THIS is not an experience that you can make happen by doing, because in this seeing you won’t be there. THIS does not belong to anyone.

The seeing of THIS, the so called awakening, liberation or enlightenment, can or cannot happen. There is no direction or purpose in LIFE. There is no-one there that can do anything about it. Even when an imagined you feels hopeless and helpless there is only hopelessness and helplessness happening.