This essential essence, this illuminating energy, this vitality of intelligence which is seeing through the eye, thinking through the mind and is the inner essence of you, which I call ‘intimacy’, that is what is called the Self, this inner power.
I use a small pa system to amplify this talk today. Even with all its components in place, all in working order, nothing at all happens until you plug it in and fuel it with electricity. Similarly, nothing happens in this object called the body and the mind without the fuelling energy of this illuminating, intelligent vitality, the deathless Self.
All the things that we take to be sentient are matter. The skin is matter, the hearing is matter, the brain itself is matter, matter ready to work but only working when fuelled by that inner light. At the point of death, when that inner light does something and disappears, the body is no longer animate. When I unplug the amplifier, it’s still fully formed but it will do nothing because the animating power will no longer be there.
This vitality is thriving most dramatically in every single person. It’s been thriving your whole life – thriving, intimate – the first, surging in its wonder, creating all these effects and giving life to all your attitudes, ideas, wishes, wants, love, passions and work. The energy within, consciousness, the deathless Self, is what you feel right now to be ‘I am’, without knowing it. That sense you have of ‘I am here’, that’s what it is. It’s this energy, this consciousness, this spirit, this vitality, this intimacy that’s exactly what’s giving you this feeling ‘I am here’. Most closely to you, something has felt ‘me’ and has been here throughout all your experiences. That feeling is this energy. It is not anything else, this energy, and it’s familiar because intimacy is familiar. It’s existence itself