From this example, we see that experience, awareness, and dynamism are very much interconnected. There is a movement in your experience—a current, a flow—from one impression to another, from one perception to another. In fact, that’s your life: a current of experience, of impressions and perceptions that we can call a lifeline. Perhaps you usually don’t think of it this way. You probably see your life from a physical perspective: There’s physical space, and you have a physical body, and that body goes around in this physical space and does things or doesn’t do things, makes noises, and so on. Maybe you also include your inner experience and external perception, but these you probably situate within this physical perspective. However, you can also look at your life and reality in general as a series of changes in perception, and this perception includes the body and its movements. We ordinarily think that perception and experience are secondary to the physical space and the physical body that’s in it, but can you ever experience the physical body in physical space without perception? Can there be any life at all without perception, and specifically, without changing perception? No. Therefore, we can say that one’s life is a current of experience, a current of perception, a current of impressions. Experience includes all the modalities: vision, hearing, feeling, sensing, thinking, imaging, all together as one unified current.

Recognizing our love for the truth is a very joyous feeling. The heart now has found itself. It knows what it feels. It knows why it feels it. It knows what it truly wants. There’s a melting excitement, and a wonderfulness. It has been said that people can’t live by bread alone. True. Bread is important, but the food for the soul is truth. The body needs food, security, and safety; we’re not saying these things aren’t important. But at some point, we need to attend to the nourishment of the soul. We need to go to the next stage of evolution, we must travel to another star system. And it’s the heart that leads the way. No matter how you feel about it, at some point you must face the fact that the process of inquiry, of investigation, of understanding your experience, is a heart involvement. It is an affair of the heart that represents the spiritual dimension of your life. It is the lifeline of the soul. This means that regardless of what is happening in your life, there can be a thread of luminosity, sweetness, and intimacy running through it. You can love what is true and life can be a love affair that goes on regardless of what is happening.

Each person’s field of experience is individual; it has different components, different manifestations and influences, a different history. The optimizing intelligence will transform each person’s experiential situation in a different way. Another way of saying this is that each person’s current will be unique. All currents move toward the same reality—toward the wholeness—but this movement will meander through different terrain for different individuals. One person will be going through a valley while another is going over a mountain. Speaking in terms of the lifeline, we each begin from a different place, with different initial conditions, and this is another reason why each of us will have a unique lifeline. Within these differences, however, are similarities between lifelines, for the laws that govern our currents are the same. Nevertheless, the curve that is your particular lifeline will be different from the curve of someone else’s lifeline, even though we are all moving in the same direction—toward wholeness.

I will say a few things today about your relationship to the Work, to the teaching, and to the person of the teacher. The Work has existed in many forms and many times, according to the needs of each culture. In a basic, fundamental way, the teaching is your lifeline. It is the lifeline to your real existence. That is a fact whether you like it or don’t like it, whether you approve or disapprove, whether it makes you feel good or feel bad. It remains the truth. Your job is rarely, if ever, to accept or reject this fact, to prove it or disprove it. Your job, if you are sincere, is to try to see the truth about it, and how to utilize it to gain your real life. Without teaching, the ordinary person will remain undeveloped and will be only a potential human being. If you want to remain a normal human being, only a seed of your own potential, you do not need the Work. But if you want to actualize yourself, to live as a human being, then you must put effort into seeing how the Work is the lifeline for real life.

What this means is that our life creates a curve within the experiential universe. If you plot all the points of individual experience, you see that everybody has his or her own curve, or lifeline. This lifeline or personal thread is the continuity of our constantly changing experience, the continuity of where we are. To be where we are means following our lifeline. And when we’re practicing, when we are being where we are, when we are not interfering with our experience and just allowing it to happen, our “location” not only moves from one point to another in the experiential universe, but it unfolds and manifests new possibilities. Sometimes our lifeline manifests new dimensions—dimensions of presence, dimensions of awareness, dimensions of emptiness, dimensions of love—that were not present to us before. And even the feeling or thinking dimensions can unfold possibilities we haven’t seen yet.