But now can you do that, remember what I said Shankaracharya said, “You pass through the woods and you think you see a snake and it’s a rope,” and so on. Well, let’s put it this way. You are walking in nature and you think, oh isn’t this beautiful, isn’t it lovely, I enjoy this. And you think well, that’s not meditation is it? It’s just like living, anybody does that. I’m supposed to be meditating. So, you’re on retreat. Well you think, well isn’t it wonderful that God is looking at His/Her body through my eyes. That is -the physical world as the body of that one being, and through my eyes, so that my eyes are the instruments through which God sees Himself, discovers Him/Herself.

So you have a totally different way of looking at things. You walk in nature and you’ll be, it will make you high, it will make you very high. Somehow you’ve reached beyond the limitation of your identity as an individual spectator.

But then, there’s a third step. Because in Sufism, and this is also true of Vedanta, all is one. So you cannot say that the divine consciousness is looking through your eyes. Your glance is the divine glance that has become focalized. That’s the way of thinking in terms of unity. And you see that it’s a more advanced way of thinking.

My glance is the divine glance that has been funnelled down, limited, but still is not other than the divine spectator. And that accounts for the incredible glance of the dervishes. Because the glance of the dervish is totally impersonal. It’s like the whole power of the intelligence of the universe is right there. It’s not coming through his eyes. It is his or her glance.

So Buddha says, when consciousness has been carried beyond the point where it is a personal consciousness, that is the state of awakening. And the Sufis would call it God consciousness. So at this point, what Sufism is saying and what Buddhism is saying is exactly the same, except using different words. Now that is the breakthrough.

Okay, now let’s see if you can do that. If you think - I am the spectator. Or then -the spectator is the whole universe, looking at itself, which is the cosmos, through my eyes. And the third one, I am the consciousness of the universe that has been focalized into a focal center.

(pause)

That’s the breakthrough of awakening.