A Must-Read Letter from the Field

This letter is from a friend and former student.

Dear Fred and Betsy,

How are you guys doing? It has been a while, so a thought came to me that I must write to you.

Pardon me if this is time-consuming, I know for sure that you guys are very busy people. 

I am really loving the weekly Satsangs and also your youtube videos, for which I will be eternally thankful to you and Betsy.  

I wanted to share an analogy that came to me and wanted to know what you think.

We use the terms Awareness (Nothingness), Consciousness (Sense of being) & Objects of consciousness. 

I felt that consciousness is like a torchlight, which when put on reveals itself and also the objects on which the light falls. In other words, consciousness self-illumines itself and the experiences within its field. 

However, Awareness or Nothingness or Darkness cannot be illumined in the light of consciousness. Like the light can never find the darkness, so the consciousness or sense of being can never find the Ultimate awareness or nothingness. But the fact that we cannot find darkness with light, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. 

Darkness is the ultimate truth because it is the field where light emerges and vanishes. It is not that darkness is eliminated, when the light comes, the darkness still prevails, but can never be found out by the light. The light may come and go and illumine the field of experience while it is on, but the ultimate truth is darkness, which is the true nature of everything that exists. 

I thought this analogy—which spontaneously arose actually helped me in differentiating clearly Awareness (Nothingness), Sense of being, and Field of experience. And we are that darkness, that emerges sometimes as light, the light which then illumines the experience. When light falls on something it takes the form of the object exactly like how consciousness or sense of being does. We in our ignorance give so much attention to the object, and forget that what we are actually seeing is the light that illumines the object. But the truth is that light is also born out of darkness, and will die down into the darkness. Darkness alone prevails—which light can never reveal. We are that Darkness; we are that and that alone is. 

I hope I have not gone off tangent, but i felt this way of thinking made clarity in me more profoundly visible. 

I hope you and Betsy are doing well.

With thanks and lots of love.

Your own Self—Raj

Thanks, Raj!