Vigilance

Question: Sometimes I hear of people awakening in the presence of the Master, and then later declaring: ‘I have lost it.’ I wonder if people can become Self-realized, awake, and then lose it.

Hanuman: There are different ways to answer that question, as I understand it. There seems to be these obscuring tendencies of mind that can be lifted for a time. And for some, these obscuring tendencies, these veils, seem to drop down again. There is this sense of having gotten it, and then there is sometimes the sense of having lost it. However, all that is born of misunderstanding.

What is misunderstood is this: There is often this experience of bliss that accompanies the Master’s presence and may accompany the event of Self-realization. It is this bliss which comes and goes, while the Consciousness, presence itself, you have realized yourself to be ever remains.

The arrival of bliss and the identification as the blissful one seems to be mistaken for realization itself, and the departure of bliss seems to be mistaken as ‘losing it.’ From the point of view of this lila, of this divine play, that one speaks of getting it and losing it.

However, from a truer point of view, there wasn’t somebody who got something, nor anybody to lose it: It was only the identification with the illusory one.

One can easily see why so often the Master would speak of the import of vigilance and add that even he himself must remain vigilant to his last breath. What a powerful statement on the essential import of vigilance. Vigilance is our natural state.

The Master said that we must continue to discern the eternal from the impermanent, the real from the unreal, and the import of vigilance and Self-inquiry. Self-inquiry and discernment are two powerful swords in behalf of liberation.