Transcript of a recording of Ilan Aviv’s group conversation at the core of the “People Forever” community.
The text has been edited linguistically only:

The only way people will ever want to wake up is if we’re going to be a source of inspiration. If our comments will be in a place of respect and transcend the ego and emotions that manage us, then other people will not know exactly what is happening but they will want something that is there. They will come, want to get closer and fall in love. If people fall in love with us then this is an ego trap. We’d better fall in love with each other, fall in love so much that we won’t be willing to give up on each other.

There will be moments when the ego will put chopped on everything. But then the infatuation will say its word! I ask: what is more important to me? What is more important, the work or the people around you? There are a lot of excuses. I just want to hear the truth. It is a question that we never ask ourselves. That’s where we need to go. May the people around us be more important than anything. Once people are more important than anything else, there is no longer an excuse to take us away from each other. From a place of total stay together, there will be no choice but to wake up. Because togetherness itself is a catalyst for awakening. When we are real with each other and do not pretend that everything is okay, but remain authentic and reflect each other, to tell the truth to each other. It can come with love.

We have voices in our heads like a police officer or a judge disturbing us. How can they be released to commit? How can I get there?
You just have to tell the truth. It doesn’t need to be softened. It is a process of revealing the truth. For me, it’s enough to tell the truth, the whole naked truth. It’s like literally stripping away from the shell. Once you strip off the shell, it will happen because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen. If there is noise in the brain then we will simply be aware of it and understand that it has nothing to do with truth and reality. One of the basic concepts of programming is to judge good and evil. It is still programming that says good and bad. If there is good and evil then it means that there is a list inside that is associated with good and a list that is associated with evil.

Is ponytail in hair good or bad? It’s not good and it’s not bad, it’s just reality. We learn to look at reality as it is. We have a voice that judges. Do not try to eliminate programming, because to want to eliminate something inside me is the programming itself, it is an ego. The desire to eliminate the ego comes from the ego. It’s a trick. The ego likes to come to its own funerals. There are many people who have already come to the funeral of the ego, eulogizing the ego, the ego eulogizing itself so that the person will think that everything is fine. “Go to sleep, it’s okay, we killed him.”

There will always be thoughts for people about something that happens to another, and this place of going on the defensive is well known. We are not protecting the other but something that happens inside. When we go on the defensive we have to look inside. If I’m on the defensive, it means I think there’s a war. No attack – no defense. I’m on the defensive – I think someone is attacking.

There are moments of absorption of things and then people think that they wake up. When a person wakes up, he knows that something has changed forever. It is not something that has doubts or something temporary. It is necessary to differentiate between awareness and awakening. Awakening is a cellular experience and not a mental or emotional experience. At the experiential level of being and it is also expressed through the intellect. For example, in creative thinking or in certain behavior. A awake person has no one to blame anymore and the excuses are over. He takes full responsibility for everything that happens around him. Includes everything that people do to him. He knows it’s all he is and has no one to blame anymore. Wakefulness is not necessarily associated with enthusiasm. It’s not exciting, it’s just that. There is pain, there is pleasure, these are real things at the level of sensation. The suffering is gone, there is nothing to suffer from.

What is the difference between pain and suffering?
Pain is a natural matter of the body, there is pain and pleasure, “I got hit so it hurts me, I am caressed so I enjoy”. The difference between suffering and pain is that pain is a natural thing that passes without doing anything, suffering is the resistance to pain. The resistance to pain gives rise to suffering. We got hit with a finger from the table, physical pain ensued.

When does it become suffering?
When we start swearing at the table. So the pain also increases. Who put the table there? Why did this happen to me? I don’t want to accept this pain, I resist it, I don’t accept reality, I deny what’s happening and then I suffer. For example, when someone hurts us, we say, “You hurt me.” Only that another person cannot hurt me, he can hit and it hurts us so we say “you hurt me”. Like infidelity. If someone has betrayed us and it hurts our faces, then we say: You hurt me and it perpetuates the suffering. Then every time when we meet this person we suffer, we think about him and there is suffering. Remember the pain and say you hurt me instead of feeling the pain, accepting it and letting it go and remembering that this is a person we love. He hurt us but we love him. There is no more suffering there.

Being next to a awake person will force the other person to wake up or go on his way. Being next to a awake person means that he cannot be manipulated. In a relationship a sleeping person will manipulate and want to control, that’s how he was raised and educated. Even a smile is manipulation. Any interaction at the sleep level is designed to achieve something, even if it is to achieve your love. “I want you to love me and be next to me.” To come from this awake place without all of these, and there is only one desire there – to unite. It is from such a magnet, it is not a deceit of will but from a great magnet from which all things come. If there are manipulations are conscious. It’s goal-oriented. The goal is to unite. Awake can stop doing manipulations. A sleeping person cannot stop the manipulations, the manipulations do him. A awake person has programming, drinking coffee and loving the sweet is programming. When you wake up, the programming doesn’t end, it just becomes transparent. You see the programming, you are aware of it and you dedicate yourself to something that is bigger than me. Something else becomes more important. Many people work for something greater than the intellect (out of a mental motive), it is learned. It can be done technically but it can’t get from there. It is something in the being that needs to be devoted to something greater. When we work for the world, that’s where the real pleasure lies. If a person once discovers that he no longer compromises on the small pleasures of the ego, it is no longer interesting. There is no effort there, it just happens.

To stay awake there is nothing to practice. It is to go outside and see the grass, to lift the fog that floats over the water. Waking up is one-way. This is not a process. It is impossible to go and come back. Once you wake up, it is impossible to go back to sleep after that. After waking up there is no choice but to do something with it, to pass it on. The awakening is not mine, it is not personal, it is not anyone’s. It may pass through certain people, but it’s not meant for me, for the ego, for a single person. No one has anything to do with it except to pass it on. And there it becomes even more valid, where it becomes worth something. Like knowledge – if there is no one to listen to it, it has no meaning.

Awakening is not that of the individual. It is not for the individual but for humanity. The fact that some people have been privileged to be near a awake person or to wake up is because they have been the good potentials to bring it to humanity. People who want to wake up, if there is such a thing at all, and are going to do awakening work for themselves, this is another trip of the ego. Even if they think they’ve woken up it’s not really. A awake person is a person who is willing to be asked all the questions and he will not run away but stay. Waking up for myself? Sit under a tree and wake up? It’s not really an awakening.

No problem with the programming. Either I use them or I don’t, like software on a computer. Either I use it or I don’t. If the programming has been turned on and it does not serve me then I stop it. There are programming that we want to preserve, there is no problem with them. As long as they don’t interfere with what we do for the world then what difference does it make? For example, I love coffee. It’s programming. Disturbing or not bothering? Doesn’t bother – so I’ll have a coffee. Bother? I will stop – because there is something more important.

A awake person sees himself as a tool for the world. He does not see the individual as a whole story but the individual as part of a story. The leg that serves the body. The tool varies depending on what the body wants to happen.

Knowledge is food for the ego. The study itself is for intellectual understanding. Understanding goes to the familiar, to programming, to sleep. To wake up is to be in the unknown, in what people call “empty”. The stories are made for ego. At the moment of awakening, an unconscious transformation occurs in the person. Mental awareness is often a hindrance to awakening because people learn and know more things about themselves and then knowledge fixates the ego. It is not the teaching that brings about awakening. As it is said in the movie The Matrix: “This is the question that brought you here.” It is not knowledge that brings a person to awakening.

Writer: Ilan Aviv