# 20th February, 1991 — Wednesday
Paul: I am experiencing a lot of frustration, and, at times, a lot of anger. The phrase, “Nothing that I see means anything,” isn’t just an idea or a statement, but it is, indeed, the way I am experiencing everything at the moment. I don’t seem to be finding meaning in anything that I see, or anything that is happening, or anything that I am doing. Certainly the only thing that seems to be getting done is keeping appointments. And although the individuals calling seem to experience meaning from them, I am not.
I don’t even know how many days it has been since the last conversation I had with you, but certainly the intervening time has not been spent in no thought, or no thinking. And I have not been particularly conscious of being with you. I am aware that there are a lot of similarities now to our first conversatons,[1] in that, for example, I must say that the things you are saying don’t seem to be relevant. My experience doesn’t seem to be changing. It seems to be getting worse — I mean by that, less fulfilling and less of what it used to be.
I feel less in touch with people, less in touch with meaning, and although what I am about to say doesn’t reflect exactly what I’m feeling at the moment, there is a certain amount of — I can’t even think of the word — a certain amount of pleasure, a certain amount of good feeling, because, in spite of being frustrated and all, in spite of nothing seeming to improve, it does feel finally like I am growing, somehow. It does feel like there is movement, it does feel like an old familiar feeling of, I will say, stress, associated with what turned out to be breakthrough when you first came along. And so. In that sense I guess it does feel like something is happening for me, as opposed to just happening for everyone else. But, I don’t know that I’m doing any of this any more gracefully than I did the first time.
Anyway, … that’s where I am at the moment, and I will be interested in anything you have to say.
Raj: It is, indeed, very simple, Paul. You are in an identity crisis. You are struggling to maintain a sense of identity, or get hold, again, of a sense of identity that is crumbling. I will tell you something: A sense of identity is not a fair substitute for Identity, Itself. I will say, it is an unfair misrepresentation of Identity, Itself, and yet it is, up to this point, all that you have known ‘in this lifetime’. And since that is all of your infinity that you have any conscious embrace of, it does, indeed, seem as though your identity is crumbling.
That is why everything is becoming meaningless. After all, if you don’t know who is observing it, how can you know how to interpret it? And, of course, interpreting Reality does constitute a translating of It into other terms, doesn’t it — terms other than Its original form or expression? If you have been living in an interpretation of Reality from a sense of identity, where have you been? Up Shit Creek, that’s where! In other words, nowhere.
Now, with the breakup of a sense of Identity must come the breakup of the interpretation of Reality. What you have construed your Identity to be, and what this sense of Identity has interpreted Reality to be is giving up the ghost, fading, becoming the no-thing and the nothing that they are. This means that your self, as a point of awareness in infinity, being aware from that point of awareness — which is an utterly false sense of All That Is — is yielding to Awareness, Itself.
All-embracing Awareness is not a sense of Identity. It is Identity. But, being infinite, It cannot gather a sense of Itself from anything else. Thus, Identity and Awareness, Consciousness, are synonymous. If you want to know who you are, then be aware, and pay attention to the experience! And understand that waking up constitutes, indeed, a loss of identity. I mean by that, a loss of everything that has been experienced and defined as identity by you up to this point. I cannot put it more simply than that.
The sense of identity that you embrace is finite and body-oriented, and it gathers its sense of itself from its interpretation of its surroundings and the way its surroundings respond or do not respond to it. This constitutes unconsciousness!
You have literally only one experience of identity which is consciously available to you, and that experience of identity, I am declaring to you, is not Identity, but a sense of Identity. It is the sense of Identity that will be lost, but not the experience of existing, not the experience of being Conscious. And to refine that slightly, it will not constitute the loss of being Consciousness. Therefore, this identity crisis is a part of healing, a part of Awakening. It is to be embraced rather than resisted. It is to be rejoiced about, even though all you can see is that it is obviously an experience of loss. But, again, it is a loss of a conceptual image projected upon Reality, which has altered the perception of Reality, obscuring It, but which has never altered Reality in actuality, and never for an instant altered or annihilated You.
Your habit, your conditioning, is to scramble to reestablish, somehow, a sense of Identity. But the real call is for letting go of a sense of Identity and letting yourself into the apparent Void of Awareness, of Consciousness — the simple experience of being — and then simply abiding in It and paying attention. Without the overlay of a sense of Identity upon the experience of Consciousness, Consciousness has the opportunity to register as the Meaning of Identity, and Reality has the opportunity of being Known.
And so, to use current terms, this is not an identity crisis, but a healing crisis which, if you successfully resisted it, would constitute no healing.
I know that you think you are just hearing the words, and that they do not have relevance — no practical meaning; that they express an intangible, idealistic, unusable set of paradigms. But, I will tell you that they are registering with you deeply, and that from where we stand, you are rousing more significantly throughout more of the full spectrum of You.
I encourage you not only to endure this apparent meaninglessness and loss of identity, but to consciously embrace it as representative of the shift into the being of pure Awareness, as a most desirable, healthy, and Sane experience. It is not happening for no reason. It is happening because for nine years you have practiced Listening, which has constituted an essential part of your waking up! And it has constituted a sufficient enough arousal of You in your right Mind to trigger further spontaneous Awakening that you could say is not a result of conscious three-dimensional choice.
The only so-called three-dimensional choice you can make in this process is the choice to Listen, the choice to be in the not-knowing Place.
This identity crisis, this health crisis, this distressing experience you have been having, has arisen since our last conversation, has it not? Has it not become more pointed? More unavoidable? More obvious? How, then, can you say that things are getting worse, that there is no progress, when the movement that you have found distressing is a significant movement of Awakening? I facetiously say, “Maybe you will arrive at a point where you will not know who you are”. What is facetious is the use of the word ‘maybe’. But, you will not arrive at a point where you don’t know that you are. You will not arrive at a point where you will not be aware, conscious.
There isn’t any definition of Identity. There is only the experience of It. And the true meaning of Identity is found in the experience of being Consciousness — not a point of consciousness or awareness.
The simple fact is that you have always been conscious, but you have felt it necessary to come up with a definition of what that means. A definition is a concept, and a concept is an interpretation — a translation, if you will. And so now you are involved in a translation back to the spiritual original of You, an undoing of an act of defining yourself to yourself, which caused you to lose the experience of your Self.
The three-dimensional frame of reference is the realm of definitions, and that is why it is apparently constituted of time and space.
In the beginning, God, created all that is — at least so it is expressed in the first chapter of your Bible. And then, in the second chapter, man provided definitions — named all that God had made. Man has been living in the world of his definitions ever since, unconscious of Reality as It is, unconscious of his Identity as Consciousness, Mind — God’s recognition of Himself in His movement of Consciousness.
What you have been experiencing as a problem over these last few days has actually been your healing occurring, your Awakening occurring — the loss of a sense of yourself as not only a thinker but the definer, the interpreter! The words do not say, “And God saw everything that He had made, and interpreted it to be good”. I will tell you that your healing is progressing nicely, and the prognosis is excellent, and the loss of a sense of yourself and the loss of definitions that seemed to give everything meaning is not a problem, but the solution.
I encourage you to abide in, and be totally allowing of, the meaninglessness, and the inability to know who you are. I encourage you to be comforted by the experience, rather than defining it as bad and resisting it.
In the beginning, when our conversations first began, you allowed yourself to be in the not-knowing place. At that time, the not-knowing place was a place of not knowing intellectually. Now, the not-knowing is striking at, or cutting through, the very core of the sense of Identity, and the meaning of every thing that has been defined.
In the absence of the definitions, in the absence of any means to identify yourself, Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven, and your Self as the Christ, the direct expression of God, experiencing everything from God’s point of view, will begin to be available to you. If you will just pay attention, and not try to hold it all in the grasp of concepts, or the grasp of a thinker, and know that whether or not you, as a sense of identity, are doing well or not, whether you are being able to hold onto your definitions or not, this movement of Awakening is proceeding, and the undoing will be complete. I encourage you to be curious without preconceptions as this image overlaying Reality fades, and Reality is revealed, clear and perfect.
In 1982. ↩︎