An Absolute Relationship to Life: A Talk on Enlightenment and the Human Condition - Softcover

This talk was given without premeditation in Amsterdam, Holland in July 1996 and was edited for clarity the following December.

I began teaching in 1986 and in the ten years that have passed since that time, I have learned something very important. Spiritual experiences, as profound as they may appear to be, usually do not in and of themselves lastingly enlighten. Nor do they, it seems in most cases, deeply transform the individual's relationship to the three most confusing aspects of the human experience: the movement of time, the presence of thought and the arising of feeling. Indeed, the movement of time, the presence of thought and the arising of feeling, for all but a very few, seem to instantly obscure the awareness of an absolute depth without which the direct perception of the true and right relationship of all things is impossible. It has become very clear to me that it is the one-pointed contemplation of our actual relationship to these most fundamental aspects of our experience, rather than brief interludes of nondual perception, that in the long run creates the powerful foundation upon which discriminating wisdom -- the wisdom that liberates -- can become manifest.