The talk tonight is about one of the most kind of central facets of evolving consciousness,

which really is emerging from a trance where we're living in a contracted identity.

But on this path of awakening, what's really happening is we're waking up out of a small

or confined or limited sense of who we are.

So I'll talk about that in a way, and I just start with the word trance itself.

Somewhere in a trance, if we're suffering, first of all, we're in a trance.

If you're suffering, you're in a trance.

And what that means is your reality has in some way been contorted.

You're in some way in a narrowed version of reality that's somewhat distorted.

And there's a fixation going on.

The mind is fixated in some pure-based way, and then it plays out in how you're thinking

and feeling and behaving.

That's trance.

The mind has contracted.

When we're in trance, we're fixated basically on something's going to go wrong.

The sense that something is about to go wrong or already going wrong, it's the flip side

of that, which is something's missing.

Like right now, it's not full or complete or okay.

Those are the two versions that the Buddha described eloquently in terms of grasping

in a version.

So what happens is that because we're feeling something's wrong or missing, we're in control

mode.

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