TOPICS: Being stuck in the past or the future – Appreciating the moment – A frame of reference – No judgments in the child-like mind – Observing rather than judging – Having no opinions about other people – Most human interactions follow the same pattern – You are a timeless being – Your reactionary pattern determines your future – The immovable and the ever-changing Buddha – There is no state of no-self –

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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, July 4, 2016 during a conference in Seoul, Korea.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha and it is my privilege, as has been my privilege many times, to seal this ascended master conference in Korea. I want you to know that from the ascended realm we consider this conference an absolute success. You have shown incredible will to come together and to harmonize your beings with each other and with us. Thereby, we have been able to multiply the decrees and invocations, and you have been able to multiply with your chakras the release from our dictations so that they went into the collective consciousness with greater power. For this we are grateful and we congratulate you.

We have given you many, many teachings that I trust you will take and contemplate, discuss, perhaps even write and talk about with each other. That way you can, by using the outer teaching, come to a greater inner understanding of some of the things that were not said by words but were nevertheless said at the higher levels. It is necessary for you to understand that when we give a dictation, that which is spoken in the physical is only part of the total release. Not only is there, of course, light that is carried by the words but there is also an emotional, a mental and an identity level component of a dictation. If you are willing to use the physical words as your foundation, you can learn to tune in to the emotional, mental and identity components that cannot easily be translated into words. You can still get an intuitive feel, an intuitive experience of what is the total release of a dictation.

We do, of course, have many more things to say about and to both Korea and other nations in Asia. Therefore, we look forward to opportunities to bring this forth in the future. For now, I desire you to feel that this conference is complete in itself. As we have said before, there is always a high and a low potential for a conference and you have exceeded the high potential. What I desire to do here is to do something that perhaps has not quite happened at this conference because many of you are new to the teachings and because it is your first ascended master conference.

Being stuck in the past or the future

What I desire is to give you an appreciation for the moment, for the eternal now. As we have mentioned before, many people on earth have been brought up to not live in the now but to either be attached to the past or to be looking towards the future. Some people have become stuck at some point in the past. For some it was because they had such a traumatic event happen to them that they are so wounded emotionally that they cannot free themselves from the pain and the wound and they relive it again and again. For others it has been because they had such a high event in their life that they feel like nothing could surpass it later.

If you go to this Olympic Park and look at the names of the athletes that won medals at the 1988 Olympics, you will see that many of these athletes have felt that winning this medal, setting a record, standing on the podium and receiving their medal was the high point of their life. Many of them have felt like nothing could really compare and therefore the rest of their lives have been less than that peak moment. They are constantly longing back for that moment.

There are, of course, many other people who are not so attached to the past but are looking towards the future. Some look to the future with fear, fearing what might happen whether it be some calamity in their personal life (a disease or something else) or whether it might be a worldwide calamity, such as war or natural disaster. We even, of course, have those who are looking towards the end of the world as we have commented on before.

We also have many people who are dissatisfied with the current moment, with their current life, their current situation, and they are looking to the future with a hope that one day it will get better. Many hope that if they keep doing what they have been told to do, if they follow what their society and their parents have laid out for them, then one-day they will receive the reward they hope to receive.

As we have said, you are co-creators, so passively waiting for something to happen is not the constructive approach. If you are waiting for other people, society or some corporation to one day come in and change your life, then you are likely to be disappointed. If you are waiting for some Divine being to appear in your life and give you everything you want, then you are guaranteed to be disappointed.

Appreciating the moment

I, of course, would like you to understand that one of the key teachings of the Buddha, the true inner teachings of the Buddha, is precisely the ability to live in the moment. Now, you all have this ability to live in the moment, but again there are some people for whom it is very difficult to exercise it. If you have experienced very traumatic events in your life and you need psychological healing, then it can understandably be very difficult for you to live in the moment. We then encourage you to seek appropriate help in the form of various therapies. We, of course, encourage you to use our teachings and tools to heal your psychology. If you have experienced a high point at some point in the past and you are longing back to it, then the only real cure is to make a conscious decision where you decide that you will no longer look back to the past, but that you will open yourself up to receive the gift you can receive in the moment.

If you are looking to the future with fear of some calamity, then again I encourage you to use the appropriate tools to resolve this trauma, for it is a trauma that causes you to look to the future with fear. If you are looking to the future for some kind of reward, I encourage you to realize that you are a co-creator. If there is going to be a better future, you need to co-create it yourself instead of passively waiting for something outside yourself to manifest it.

You need to realize that in order to co-create that better future, you need to start by actually appreciating the moment, appreciating the situation you are in, as Saint Germain so wisely talked about. It is a key teaching of the Buddha to be present in the now. This is most obvious in the teachings of Zen Buddhism where they focus greatly on experiencing the now. I am not hereby telling you to become a Zen Buddhist, but I am telling you that it is valid to contemplate how to live in the now, how to at least experience the now at certain points in time.

A frame of reference

With this, I would like to take you through a little exercise. My purpose is to help you gain an experience of the now. My beloved, you have participated in this ascended master conference. You have been here, some of you, for the entire four days. You have participated in the rosaries, the invocations, the decrees. You have listened to the dictations. You have interacted with each other. For many of you, this has been seen as a process that leads towards a goal. There is always more invocations to give, there are more dictations to come. But now you have reached the final dictation, you have given the final invocation. There is nothing more to look towards in the future, and therefore I encourage you to recognize that the most valuable gift you could take with you from this conference was an experience of being completely present in the now, of appreciating the now.

Therefore, my beloved, I encourage you – in your own minds – to say to yourself: “STOP! I will stop my usual thought patterns.” I encourage you to step back and look at yourself and how there is usually always some pattern in your mind that is projecting thoughts or emotions on the screen of your conscious awareness. These thoughts and emotions are pulling your awareness into some reaction, into some sequence of thoughts and feelings, that is sometimes almost like a track that runs automatically. Your attention is pulled along with it without you really realizing what is happening.

Now, I call you to realize what is happening in your mind and to consciously realize that this is simply like a movie that is playing on the screen in a movie theatre or on your television set. I encourage you to realize that you do not actually need to stop the movie.

There are many Buddhists who think that during meditation you need to try to stop thoughts, but this is very difficult to achieve even for very seasoned practitioners. What I am telling you here is to say: “STOP! I will no longer be identified with the track of my thoughts and feelings. I will just let it run but I will step back and I will come to a new awareness that I am not the thoughts and feelings. I am not the mind. I am not the track playing in the mind. I am a formless being. I need nothing from the past in order to be complete in being who I am. I need not wait for anything in the future in order to be complete in who I am. I am complete right now! I am complete in this very moment! I am whole!”

You can therefore feel, that deep within you is a silence, the silence of the Buddha, your Buddha self. You may even be able to feel as the figures of the Buddhas sitting in meditative position in complete calmness and peace. You do not need to envision yourself as any form. You can actually, if this works better for you, see yourself as a formless being, feel yourself as a formless being, experience yourself as a formless being.

Now, I encourage you to realize that you are here in this room at this moment. You are not alone. You are many people here. Many of the other people in the room you do not know. Perhaps you have not talked to them during these four days. Perhaps you have not looked in their eyes. Perhaps you have not actually appreciated these other people, but I encourage you to open your eyes now and to look around. Dare to look at each other, to look each other in the eye and acknowledge each other. Dare to look at the messenger’s eyes, that are truly my eyes looking through his at you.

My beloved, let us acknowledge each other, for we have come together in a special unity that is very rarely seen on this earth: the horizontal unity of you below with us Above. This is a special moment. This is a rare moment. There are not many people who ever get to experience this in a lifetime, my beloved. Yet, you are here. You are experiencing that moment right now. When you recognize that you are here in unity with each other, you have performed a valuable, an invaluable, spiritual service. You are here in unity with an ascended master, a spiritual being. When you recognize this, what more can you ask of the present moment? When you recognize this, can you not be fully present in the now?

Be complete and feel that there is nothing you need from the past, nothing you need from the present, there is nothing you need from the world, for we are complete in our oneness now. Those of you who can experience this completeness, you now have a new frame of reference that you can take with you and use. When you have time in your busy lives (or when you decide to make time in your busy lives), you can use whatever means appeal to you, including playing this dictation or reading it, giving invocations, playing music, doing whatever works for you. But make that effort to tune in to my Presence as the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. Then, based on your experience of this moment, you can experience the same completeness again. When you do this, perhaps many times, there can come a point where you begin to feel you can maintain your appreciation for the present moment on a continuous basis.

No judgments in the child-like mind

I understand that in the beginning there will be a contrast between your normal state of awareness and those times where you are fully present in the moment. There will be those moments where you are fully present and then there will the many moments of your normal life that demands your attention and pulls it into these patterns. As you experience more and more of these moments where you are fully alive, fully present, fully in appreciation, then you can begin to feel there is less and less contrast.

This does not mean that you are always sitting there being fully awake in a meditative posture, for surely there are many times that your normal lives demand your full attention. But you can come to a point where, at any moment where you think about this, you can tune in and you can be fully present in the moment even when you are doing certain activities that do not demand your full attention.

I am not telling you, as some Zen Buddhists want you to believe, that you can always be completely in appreciation of the present moment in the midst of busy activities. Life is very demanding and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with having these periods where you are focused on a particular activity and therefore you do not have attention left over for visualizing or feeling yourself as the complete Buddha who is detached from the situation and appreciating the situation from without.

What I am saying is that you can have a state of mind where your life is a constant process of appreciation. You are appreciating life in general, and at any moment you desire, you can tune in and appreciate the present moment fully when you have left-over awareness for it. This, of course, is part of that child-like mind.

What we can add to what Saint Germain said earlier is that the child-like mind has no judgments. It has no value judgments. It does not analyze. It does not compare. Essentially, when you are trapped in the past or trapped in the future you are constantly analyzing and comparing the present to the past or to the future. The past was better than the present. The past was worse than the present. The future will be better than the present. The future will be worse than the present. There is this constant analytical, comparative track running in the mind. When this is there, you are not present in the moment, your attention is pulled into focusing on the analysis. You can cultivate, and you need to do this consciously, the state of mind of not judging, not analyzing. This is a delicate process that will take time but by using our invocations and our teachings it is an attainable goal.

You can come to a point where you have no need to judge what is happening in life. You have no need to always express an opinion about this or that, about what other people are doing, what other people are saying, what the politicians are doing, what the politicians are not doing, what the local sports team did or what they did not do. All of these things, that are occupying most people, can fall away in importance to where you do not need them to feed this element in the mind that always wants to be judging, putting something down, putting something else up. There is always the comparison based on the dualistic scale of right and wrong, good and bad, up and down, this and that. You can deliberately and consciously decide to engage in a process of setting this aside.

You can make specific calls for the consuming of the energies in the emotional, mental and identity realms that are pulling your mind into repeating these patterns where so many people have such turmoil in their emotional body that they are constantly feeling a need to be angry at somebody. They need to have a scapegoat that they can direct their anger at because they will not acknowledge that it is truly anger against themselves. By working on yourself, you can come to this point where you no longer need to judge everything. You no longer need to evaluate everything and you do not need to have opinions about everything.

Observing rather than judging

What will you then do, you might say? What kind of a life is this? Does that mean that you become a person who has no thoughts? Nay, my beloved, it does not mean that you are not engaged in life. There is a state of mind that is beyond judging based on a dualistic scale and it is a state of mind where you are simply observing. This is not a dualistic, relative evaluation and judgment. It is an observation and you can begin with observing yourself based on a very simple standard, if you want to use the word standard.

This messenger many years ago tuned in to my Presence and received the thought that the goal of life was Buddhahood. He recognized that in order to attain Buddhahood, you need to overcome your attachments. He had a vision, that he received from me, where I went through the final initiation before I entered nirvana. I had to be confronted, while sitting under the Bo Tree, with the demons of Mara. He realized that what the demons of Mara were doing was attempting to reach into my mind and find some kind of pattern, some kind of attachment, that they could use to pull my attention into a reactionary pattern to what they were doing before my eyes.

He realized that what they were trying to do is to look at my lifestream, all of my embodiments, and look at the attachments I had had, and then try to use those attachments to engage me. It was only when I had no attachments, that I was able to remain completely unengaged by anything presented to me by the demons of Mara. This, of course, has its parallel in the teachings of Jesus where he said: “The Prince of this world comes and has nothing in me.”

While there certainly is a final initiation that you must go through before you enter nirvana or the ascended state, you can look at life as a continuous version of this initiation. You are always dealing with the Prince of this world, with the demons of Mara, who have only one goal: to reach into your being, discover an attachment and use it to pull you into a reactionary pattern that then consumes your conscious attention for a time. For some people it is not “for a time” but for a lifetime or many lifetimes that their attention has been completely consumed by a particular pattern, such as defeating those other people that they see as the enemy or having a particular experience or attaining a certain goal. Whatever it may be, there are many, many people whose attention has been consumed by something for lifetimes. You are not among those people or you would not be here. Your attention is not completely pulled into material life or you would not be open to the spiritual path.

Therefore, you can recognize this and you can recognize that the goal of the spiritual path is to gradually come to see and overcome your attachments so that there is less and less whereby the demons of Mara, the Prince of the world, can pull you into a reactionary pattern to the world. The measure for your own advancement on the path is how often your mind is pulled into these patterns, how intense they are, how emotional they are. The more you feel that these fall away, the more peace you begin to experience. As Saint Germain said, the more peace you have, the more you can play with life. When you attain some measure of this peace, you can begin this detachment, you can begin to look at life in a different way without the evaluation, without the judgment, without the analysis. Then, you also begin to look at other people and when you meet a person who is telling you about his or her life, you do not need to have an opinion about how that person should live.

Having no opinions about other people

Most of the time when people have opinions about what other people should do, it is because you yourself feel threatened by something that other people are doing. You have the opinion that they should stop doing what makes you feel threatened or what forces you into a reactionary pattern. Many, many people have the attitude that when they are reacting to other people, it is the other people’s fault. They are the cause of it. Such people have not been willing to look at the fact that no one can make you react unless you have an attachment in your being. When you are on the spiritual path, the path of Buddhahood, you of course acknowledge that it is up to you to overcome your attachments. When you do so, other people can no longer pull you into these reactionary patterns.

That is when you can begin to look at these other people and instead of having an opinion that is determined by your own wounds and attachments, you can now simply make an observation. You can observe: “Is my friend at peace?” If your friend is not at peace, then you can attempt to tune in intuitively to what it is that takes away your friend’s peace. Then, you might feel inspired to make a simple statement where you are not trying to tell the other person what to do. You are simply stating in your own words what you are observing and how this is taking away your friend’s peace. Perhaps your friend could find another way to look at life without being pulled into these patterns all the time. If your friend is receptive to this, you might then recount your own experience of how you overcame your attachments. In some cases, your friend will not be receptive and may even respond negatively and refute your observation, but you can then remain non-attached to this. You do not need to feel rejected. How can you feel rejected when you had no intention of changing your friend?

Most human interactions follow the same pattern

My beloved, most of the interactions that you see at the personal level between human beings can all be categorized under the same pattern. You see a person who has an inner attachment that is causing him to be in a constant reactionary pattern. This reactionary pattern is reinforced, triggered or stirred up by other people. When the person will not recognize the need to change himself by overcoming the reactionary pattern, he will seek to change other people in order to avoid them stirring up his inner pattern. You see that 98% of human interactions in this world are in this category where people are trying to change others in order to avoid having to change themselves. When you begin to see this and when you begin to free yourself from it, you will feel such a liberation, such a sense of peace, such a sense of bubbling joy!

My beloved, if you truly experienced completeness in the moment a little while ago when I took you through that exercise, then you have already experienced the peace that you will begin to feel on a continuous basis when you overcome these attachments. Then, you come to that conscious recognition: “But I don’t need to constantly be judging other people or judging life, and actually I don’t need to constantly be judging myself. Ah, I can stop judging myself. I don’t need to be judging myself.” Then, you can free yourself from the most subtle ploy of the devil or the demons of Mara, namely to get you to always judge yourself based on the idea that you are somehow flawed or deficient or you made some mistake in the past that you need to spend eternity seeking to compensate for. Instead, you can simply go into a state of mind, as the messenger described the other day, where you are at peace with being who you are right now.

You know you have not completed the spiritual path or you would be ascended. You are in embodiment, but you do not need to judge yourself for the fact that you have a ways to go before you can ascend and you have unresolved psychology. You can simply observe yourself. You observe your reaction. When you see yourself reacting, you do not need to judge yourself harshly, or feel bad, or feel that you have now made a mistake, or that you are a bad person, or that you are not a good spiritual student. You simply observe the pattern and then you say: “Why am I reacting this way, what is the pattern, what is the belief?” When you come to clarity, perhaps by using the invocations and by praying to your favourite ascended master to help you see this, then you can see the pattern. Then you can say: “Do I want to live the rest of this lifetime repeating this pattern?” If you feel: “No, I don’t,” then you look at the decision and then you consciously change that decision. Then, you have taken a step towards freedom but you remain in that state of not judging yourself.

You do not need to judge: “Am I a good spiritual student, have I reached an advanced level of the path?” You just need to wait for the next time you see a pattern and then without judging it you observe: “What is the effect of this pattern, what is it doing to my actions and my feelings about myself and life? Do I want to feel this way? Do I want to act this way?” Then, you follow the process and again you liberate yourself. You come up higher and you feel more free. As you begin to accelerate this process, you can come to that point where you are constantly at peace with flowing from one situation to the next. As we have said about the Tibetan Buddhists, you are locked in to the fact that life is a continuous flow.

You are a timeless being

You do not need to evaluate situations based on whether they were good or bad, whether they were a success or whether you made a mistake. You recognize that anything that happens in the material realm is a temporary manifestation. You realize that even though there can be physical consequences that you cannot undo (you cannot change, you cannot free yourself from because you cannot change what happened in the past), the physical consequences are not actually affecting your life experience, for your life experience takes place inside yourself. It happens in the mind. Therefore, you can recognize that whatever physical situation you are experiencing, it is an opportunity for you to see a reactionary pattern in yourself, to free yourself from that pattern and then move a step closer to Buddhahood.

What happens in this lifetime truly has no eternal, ongoing, timeless impact on your life. As you begin to escape judgment, as you begin to escape identification with your body and with your physical situation, you realize you are a timeless being, an ongoing being. You have had many lifetimes before this one and you will have a long existence after this lifetime. What does it then matter what happens to you in the physical when what happens in the physical has no impact on your life after this lifetime?

My beloved, if you could look back to what happened to you a thousand lifetimes ago, you might see that you might have experienced a terrible physical consequence, such as being killed in war. But it was a thousand lifetimes ago. Does it really matter today what happened so long ago? It is no more significant than when you were a child and you lost a cherished toy and could not find it again. What does it really matter today that you lost that toy in childhood?

You realize that the physical events have no significance in themselves. They can only affect you through the reaction you have in your mind. My beloved, whereas you cannot change the physical consequences, you can at any time change the reactionary pattern in the mind. This is the essential key to walking the path towards Buddhahood, namely that you recognize that you can always change what takes place inside your mind. It is what takes place inside your mind that determines your experience of the now, your life experience. It also determines your future, the course you take in the future.

Your reactionary pattern determines your future

You may look at people and you may see that many people who experience an undesirable event react the same way: disappointment, anger, negativity. They go into a reactionary pattern. My beloved, now consider this: Any event that happens to you in the physical is a single point. You are sitting here right now and your situation right now, in this moment is a single point. In front of you is a huge plane, a huge surface like the big square down here in the Olympic Park. You are sitting at one point, and in front of you is the entire open square and theoretically, you can walk in any direction you want on that square.

Even if you have experienced a certain event in life, there are still many paths that are open to you into the future. When you have a reactionary pattern in your mind, that pattern will prevent you from even seeing the many paths that are open. It will focus your attention on one path, and often the most negative one. You will think this is the only way you can react and this is the only path you can take into the future.

I tell you, that when you walk the path of Buddhahood and overcome your attachments, you will come to a point where you can experience an event and it may not be an ideal event from a certain viewpoint. It may not be what you actually desired, but nevertheless you will see that regardless of that event, you have many paths open to you that you can take into the future. Because you have overcome your reactionary pattern, you are free to choose among those many paths, and that is when you can flow with the River of Life. You realize that your life is an ongoing flow, and it is not a process where you can stop and be stuck in a certain point no matter how dramatic or traumatic of an event you experience. The flow does not stop. You might decide to take yourself in a certain direction that makes you feel like the flow has stopped or that you are going against the current of the River of Life and experiencing tremendous opposition but the flow has not stopped.

When you overcome your reactionary pattern, you can see that by a slight change of your view of life, your approach to life, your attitude to life, you can change the direction of your life. Then, in the future you will end up in an entirely different destination than the track you were on based on the negative pattern. My beloved, what does it really matter what has happened in your life here in the physical? What does it really matter which road you have taken, as long as you end up at your ascension point at the end of this lifetime? Or at least end up at the highest possible point you can reach so that you open up for a better incarnation in your next lifetime.

What does it really matter what happens to you, when anything that happens can be used to set a better course into the future? When you recognize this, you can avoid being pulled into these reactionary patterns. You can begin to observe the patterns. You can begin to dissolve your attachments, and for each attachment you dissolve, you move one step closer to Buddhahood. This is, of course, what I desire to see for you. That was what I attempted to teach, to demonstrate to my disciples 2,500 years ago. So few of them were able to get it. Nevertheless, some people have been able to use the teachings of the Buddha to get this, and many more, hopefully, will be able to use the teachings of the ascended masters in this age to lock in to the essence of the path to Buddhahood.

The immovable and the ever-changing Buddha

My beloved, I wish to give you some thoughts based on what I said the other day, namely that, I the Buddha, am an ever-changing being and that I have transcended myself many times since my last embodiment 2,500 years ago. I am aware, of course, that my statements were provocative to those who have the traditional view of the Buddha. They were deliberately made to be provocative because I do not want you to fix your minds on a static image of the Buddha.

Of course, it is true that there is an element of the Buddha that seems unchanging from the human perspective. What you need to understand – in order to resolve what might seem like a paradox – is that the human state of consciousness is what I called the “Sea of Samsara” where there is constant turmoil, constant movement. It is, of course, your attachments that pull you into reactionary patterns to what happens in your physical life, and this is what creates the turmoil that makes your life an entirely chaotic process.

In order to begin to chart a new course in your life, a systematic course towards Buddhahood, you need to overcome some of this chaos so that you find some peace, some silence, some moments to step back and look at life. This is where it can be valuable for you to focus on the Buddha as the immovable Buddha, the peaceful Buddha, the silent Buddha who offers you a refuge from the chaos of the Sea of Samsara. This is a valid image when it is used for this purpose.

When you come to a higher level of the path, and you have begun to establish some inner peace, then you need to recognize that even though the Buddha is immovable by any force in this world, it does not mean that the Buddha is static. It does not mean that the Buddha is never-changing. Silence, peace, immovability does not mean that there is no ongoingness. That is why we have given the teachings about the River of Life, which are beyond the teachings I gave 2,500 years ago in a certain way, or at least expressed with more modern words.

You need to recognize at the higher levels of the path, that even Buddhahood is not stillstand. You will see that there are some people in the East, both in the Buddhic and the Hindu tradition, who portray life as a wheel. Somehow, your soul emerges out of Nirvana and you go into embodiment, and you make karma that it necessitates that you come back into embodiment. Then, you can discover a path whereby you can free yourself from your karma so that you are not forced to come back into embodiment. Some people and some teachers teach that after you free yourself from the wheel of rebirth, you disappear back into Nirvana and you disappear as an individual being. Then, my beloved, what is really the point of emerging from a state of nothingness, going through all this turmoil on earth and then going back into the state of nothingness? What is the point? There is no point, and that is why many people have come to feel hopeless, to feel that life has no purpose if I just disappear after all this struggle.

There is no state of no-self

What we teach, as the ascended masters, is of course the reality that you are an ongoing being. After you escape the wheel of rebirth, you can ascend and continue your conscious evolution towards higher stages of consciousness. When you quiet the turmoil in the mind, it is important, it is essential, for you to begin to lock in to this ongoing nature of your own being and therefore also of the Being of the Buddha. How can you feel that you are striving towards Buddhahood, if you think this is a static state. Or a state of no self, as certain teachings teach, but here is no state of no-self, my beloved. There is, however, a state of no human self, no separate self. There is no state of no-self in the sense that there is always the Self created by God, your divine individuality that is ongoing.

It is not a matter of overcoming the human self and disappearing into nothingness, it is a matter of overcoming the human self and reconnecting to your true Self. The trick here is, my beloved, that overcoming the human self will, to the human self, feel as a state of no-self, a state of nothingness. The human self cannot envision a state that is conscious but does not have the dualistic polarities of the human self. To the human self, to the fallen beings, this seems as nothingness but it is not nothingness. It is not no-self. It is One Self. It is the Buddha Self.

The image I want to leave you with is again that of a river. When you look at a river that starts in the mountains, you see that at the first stages of the river, it drops in a very steep drop and the water moves very fast and the water is very turbulent. This is a symbol for the phase most people are in where they are so trapped in their own reactionary patterns, so trapped by their attachments, that they are caught in the Sea of Samsara, the whirlpools, the turmoil, the waves, the chaos. Everything in their life is chaotic and they are being flung to and fro by slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune. They have no control of their life and they cannot stop the rollercoaster of their life.

Then, when you walk the path and you discover the true inner peace of the Buddha, you are like the later stages of the river where it flows gently through the landscape. You begin to experience that even though there is movement in the river, there is an ongoingness of the river. You can still feel at peace for there is not the turmoil.

When you come to that point, you can get a different perspective on the Buddha. When you feel peace in yourself, even though you realize that you are still in embodiment and you are still moving with the River of Life, you can see that peace can actually be attained in movement. Then, you can realize that what seems like the immovability and the static state of peace of the Buddha is not actually static.

My beloved, think about the river. You are at a certain point in that river, and therefore you tend to look at the river from that viewpoint. Now step outside the river and then look at a river that starts in the mountains here in Eastern Korea and flows through this city of Seoul. Then, realize that this river can be looked at as a wholeness. It is made up of individual water molecules, but you can switch your perspective and you can realize that the entire river is one continuous mass of water. That, my beloved, is the Buddha, the entire river, the oneness of the river that flows. Some parts are turbulent and some parts are calm, but the entire river is one whole. That, my beloved, is the Buddha. That is silence in movement. That is the River of Life, and I AM that river and you are that river.

You will say: “But I am in the river,” and, yes, you are, but it does not prevent you from connecting to the totality and realizing that the entire river is the Buddha Nature. Therefore, you can tune in to the totality so that even though you are at a certain point in the river, you can still in glimpses experience the totality. This gives you a fundamentally different perspective on life. It is the ultimate key to overcoming those last attachments that you carry with you even on the higher stages of the path. They must be overcome before the river of your life can flow into the ultimate sea, the peaceful sea that is beyond the Sea of Samsara, or that is what I called the Other Shore.

Thus, my beloved, I wish you peace in movement and I seal you in the peace that I AM, and I seal this conference, this true breakthrough to a higher state of consciousness for you individually and for the collective state of consciousness of South Korea, North Korea and the larger Asian area. Be sealed in the ongoing, ever-flowing peace of the Buddha.