If I am already fundamentally free, then why do I not feel as though I am free?
The only obstacle is your belief that you are an independent entity. That is the only obstacle. You are stuck in this belief. It belongs to a personality invented by society, education, experience, beliefs, second-hand information and all kinds of reading. You have identified yourself with this fictitious “I” and you live from this point of view. You look at and contact the surroundings from this viewpoint. Because the personality is an object like any other, you live in object-object relationship.
What happens when you become aware of it? The moment you become aware of it is the most important opportunity, an opportunity to see how this insight acts on you. Until now your brain has functioned in the pattern of taking yourself for someone, and when this pattern suddenly collapses there is a reorchestration of all your energy, a transformation of your being. The old reflex, which is so deep-rooted, may come up from time to time, but you are now aware of it. You ignore it and then forget it. Why put yourself in the cage of a fraction? You are the whole, the global.
Is this insight -that you have taken yourself for someone – enlightenment, or is it a forefeeling?
This insight frees the mind from wrong thinking. It comes from your real nature. Often the mind appropriates the insight again, and it appears as a point, an experience in space and time. The insight itself is constant.
Is the insight that you are not the personality the ray of light in the dark room?
Yes, but you are still in the dark room, even though there is light in it. You must give yourself entirely to this light, and it will take you towards its source. Then there will be a sudden moment when you are no longer in the dark at all but are completely taken by the light. This was my experience.
The mind is identified with objects, but it governs. Is there something, other than simply being open, to help the mind let go of its hold?
The natural state is a non-state of not-knowing, non-concluding. When there is knowing, there is a state. But your real nature is not-knowing. It is a total absence of all that you think you are, which is all that you are not. In this total absence of what you are not, there is presence. But this presence is not yours. It is the presence of all living beings. You must not try to be open. You are open. When you say, “I must be open”, you create a state. When you say, “I am going to meditate”, you make a state of it. You are meditation. When you go into the state of so-called meditation or openness, you are like a donkey in a stall.
What is intelligence?
Intelligence is spontaneous behavior. It is creativity. When you are free from the person, from the “I-concept”, when you are free from psychological memory, then you are open to intelligence. This intelligence is in you, it is not outside.
Excerpted from a talk in Delphi, Greece 1990
The 100th birth anniversary of Jean Klein will be observed on October 19
Jean Klein
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