𝗔𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝘁𝘀 ~ 𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝗚𝗼 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴...

You can't control your thoughts. You can't control your feelings because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings. And they're running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. Here they go. You're still breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair. Still seeing and hearing. Are you doing that? I mean, is is breathing something that you do? Do you see? I mean, do you organize the operations of your eyes and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It's a happening. It happens. So, you can feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. You're hearing. You're seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is happening shining. There it is. All this happening. And may I introduce you? This is yourself. This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that's the way you function. You function by happening. That is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. [Music]

And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach it to you because the minute you start thinking I should understand that, this is this stupid notion again of I should bring it about when there is no you to bring it about. See, that's why I'm not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is to talk about what is. It amuses me to talk about what is because it's wonderful. I love it and therefore I like to talk. If I get paid for it, then I make my living and sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing. So this is not an, you see, this is the whole approach here is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you are, things would be, would be sane. [Music]

but you see you can't do that you can't make that discovery because you're in your own way so long as you think I'm I, so long as that hallucination blocks it and the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility. When at last you see, you can't do it. You cannot make yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind. See, when we try to control the mind, a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control your own mind mainly to prove to you that you can't do it. There's nothing, you know, a fool who, who persists in his folly, will become wise. So they, what they do, is they speed up the folly. And so you get concentrating and, uh, you can have a certain amount of superficial and initial success by a process commonly called self hypnosis. And you can think you're making progress. And a good teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he really throws you with one. Why are you concentrating? See, Buddhism works this way. Buddha said, "If you suffer, you suffer because you desire and your desires are either unattainable or always being disappointed or something. So, cut out desire." So, those disciples went away and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire and threw out desire. But then they came back and Buddha said, "But you are still desiring not to desire." They wanted how to get rid of that. So when you see that that's nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. In seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, was just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just part of the experience. [Music]

So there isn't any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings. We, we get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that verbs are processes and subjects are nouns which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously, it can't. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower, there can't be knowing. Well, that's just a grammatical rule. It isn't a rule of nature. In nature, there's just knowing like you're feeling it. And I have to say you are feeling it. As if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say I am feeling, what I mean is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I mean there is feeling there. I have to say even there is feeling. What a cumbersome language we have. Chinese is easier. You don't have to put all that in. You can say things twice as fast in Chinese as you can in any other language. Well anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought, of feeling, etc., just goes on by itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will call meditation, and slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull, don't try and get rid of it, because that will again produce the illusion that there's a controller. Just it, it goes on, it goes on, it goes on, and finally it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there's a silence, and this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. And you don't see any past. And you don't see any future. [Music]