Transcription
When we were born, like Elizabeth Springdale, who was born here yesterday, we come into the world. We come from being fully at home and feeling that release that comes. We have a little shadow of it when we come home. At the end of the day, those of you that have a home and put your feet up, or relax, or have a cup of tea, or whatever that is—that feeling of coming home, or coming to a safe space, or feeling come back at peace, or at one.
And when we get separated from that, and that separation, I want to keep reiterating, is created by the mind. That's what the basic issue of the ignorance is, that is the root of suffering that the Buddha keeps pointing out. The basic root of suffering is thought, the clinging of the mind to things which separate one from all of it. Now, once that separation has occurred, there is incredible pain. We can call it being thrown out of the Garden of Eden. We can call it original sin, whatever you want to call it. I mean, there are different metaphors within different systems, but there is incredible pain, and in some profound way, all of our actions henceforth are an attempt to return to that being. For me, under Maharaj's blanket, or in the Heart of God, or in the hand, or being the one coming back into the one.
And we develop a whole set of techniques that we say make us feel good, give us a feeling for the moment of, yeah, and some of those give us that moment so intensely, and the rest of our life is so, so much pain of our separateness and so devoid of that feeling that once we find one of those things—for example, it might be a moment of sexual orgasm; it might be a moment of surfing, when you transcend the dualism between you and nature; it could be when you're doing something like cooking, the way you turn into just the joy of the process—it could be, it could be any number of things, could be any number of things that when that occurs and it works, it reinforces the behavior. And you start to do that behavior more and more because it feels good. It takes away the pain of the separateness, and the use of drugs, the use of material possessions, the use of relationships—all of it. When you get busy and get obsessed with relationships and wanting to get closer and closer to somebody, it is trying to get to the place where you come back into that oneness. It is. It's that yearning, and you can feel it permeate the universe of people's consciousness.
So when you look at addictions from that point of view, you see that it's not like evil. It is just an attempt to get back. The problem is that most behaviors that get you back is like what Maharaj said about drugs. He said, "It will allow you to be in the presence of Christ, but you can only stay two hours." He said it would be better to become Christ than visit him. And that's what you find out with most addictive things, that they give you a short rush, but they don't allow you to remain at home. They just allow you the taste of it. And then the minute you get thrown out because you weren't wearing the wedding garment, the minute you go back to heaven, but you can't stay because you didn't come in through the right way, you end up feeling like, "I did something wrong. I'm bad," and then that starts a reaction of mind so that you get the—you come down, then you feel guilt. "I must be bad. I should have done something else. Why didn't I do the practices that would have allowed me to stay there rather than the thing that's short term?" Because you see your predicament. What happens is that the opportunity for the immediate gratification—it's like what's called in psychology, the choice of the little candy bar now or the big candy bar later. And with little children, they'll always grab for the little candy bar now because they want what they can get now. They don't have any delay of gratification, and spiritual practices compared to having sex or compared to taking coke or something is more like delayed gratification versus immediate gratification.
So when you start to stand back and see your predicament and see what you're doing, there is a way from a spiritual perspective in which you begin with that slight bit of awareness to extricate yourself from the chain of reactivity that we're talking about—the chain of reactivity that goes from, "I'm feeling this hunger," and then, "I'll go for the gratification," and then, "Aha," and then the coming down, and then, "Oh shit," and then, "I should have done it the other way," and then, "I'm bad," and there's a whole chain of thoughts that go on. Every one of those is just keeping the whole process going. And as you develop a spaciousness, you start to look at where you can intervene in the process of the sequence that goes on. As the awareness gets deeper, you intervene at different places in the sequence. For example, the yearning, the hunger starts. And like for me, for example, I can—or I've had strong addictions to food—so that when I am feeling unloved, I'll eat and I'll get fat. It's a pattern, and then I'll hate myself, loathing because of my body, and so on, and I'll go through it. Now I understand the psychodynamics of that at one level, but let's take it from this point of view of the mind for a moment. The first place I began to intervene was when Maninder, my meditation teacher, said, "Ramdas, don't you see that it's just old karma running off?" And I began to break in at the point that after I had eaten too much to reduce my anxiety—because my mother fed me food when I was upset and I learned that pattern and all that stuff—I start to, instead of going into, "I'm no good," and revulsion and all this sequence, I break the chain at that point, and then I just go back into my spiritual practices. Instead of carrying out that whole sequence, I shortcut there. As the witness gets stronger, you start to go back in the chain further and further until, as the separateness is starting to come and the feeling of hunger, and as you're about to eat, you start to notice the fact that you're about to do that. And you, your mind anticipates the whole sequence, and you, in a sense, begin to see the emptiness of the form you're about to take. Now, if you try to stop it too soon, using your mind to stop it, there's a residual backlash from it. So I mean, I hope I'm not condensing this—I'm trying to give a lot of teaching very fast. I mean, as I understand it, as I've worked with it, that one develops a lot of patience and a lot of gentleness with oneself.
And generally, when people come to me with addictions, I'm inclined to say, "Start doing spiritual practices, start doing the studies that will allow you to see yourself in a new way, that will allow you to understand what that hunger is. You're feeding in a new way, to just get a little different perspective on it. Don't worry about the addiction. It will fall away when it will fall away. And when you do it again, just notice it," and the one line I always use—"How poignant I am, how poignant the human condition"—you know, I'm so gentle with myself. And what I have watched is the patterns of my obsessions and addictions have changed over time; there's no doubt about that. And yet I didn't deal with them directly head-on for the most part, because what you see is—and this is something that I'm sure I create a lot of waves in many people, including people that I love very dearly that I'm close to—I see that a lot of the programs to deal with addiction end up creating a new addiction to being not addicted. That is as bad as the addiction itself—that I mean, when you meet somebody that says, "I haven't smoked in three years, two months, ten days, and four hours," you realize that their mind is as stuck as their mind was stuck in smoking. Maybe they won't die of cancer; they'll probably die of uptightness. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but in general, I'm saying that dealing with it, dealing with things that are which you're caught in—the minute you start to stop them, you invest them in a way. And so my suggestion is that you just keep cultivating the practices. And every time you don't see—when I—if I get up in the morning and I got up and I decided to stay in the dream state and not get up to do my sitting, that could start a whole sequence of, "You no good. You'll never get to God." But in the time I'm saying, "You know, good, you never get to God," I could have been doing mantra. And when I realized and I began to sit in meditation and watch the sequence of my behavior, I saw that all my recriminations didn't help anything. Particularly, they weren't really functional except trying to make me feel comfortable with myself. And the better thing would be the minute I notice that I've lost it, or I've gotten caught, or I'm stuck, or I just start to do something—just pick up a holy book, do a mantra, think of my Raji, whatever—sing a song. I mean, I'll start driving to town and I'm going to give a lecture and I start to get uptight like, "Oh my God, I know what I'm going to talk about," you know? And it's all—it's a neurotic pattern. I know it from years back. It's my—I mean, I can give you a whole psychodynamic storyline about what that's about. I look at it; I think, "Oh, there it is." At that moment I start Shri Guru Chatter and I said, "Oh, Jerry, Johnny German animal guru Sudani," but I know Raghubir to be my Lungisa Joad. And six minutes later, I'm in a different space than I was before. Now, you could say from a psychological point of view that's denial, and you should work with that. But the fact is that thus far what's happening is it's getting less and less. And I'm able to hang in here now with very little of that old anxiety that used to be crippling. It used to be crippling my work with some of it. But psychologically, a lot of it is just—it's become uninteresting. It's just become uninteresting. And I just flip gears immediately. I flip gears because the minute you get lost in identification with your personality to the exclusion of identification with your soul—all right, that's what's happened. You've lost it. You've lost it. And there are a thousand times each day you lose it. And if you get caught in your soul to the exclusion of your personality, you lost it equally as much. And that's the balance of us as human beings.
X Question: This has been quite a process. I keep asking questions and then I get my own answer. Of course, that's all I am, is your own answer. So I keep rewriting my question. No doubt if I sit with this question, I would get the answer to. But my most current question is recognition that I feel like I'm in a codependent relationship with God. My—so what that means to me is that all the way that I know about relationship, about looking outside of myself and efforting and trying to—to get someone to want me and to love me and respond to me—that the way that I do that in relationship is basically how I see my relationship to God, and I don't feel like the way that my personality is organized right now that I can experience God coming back to me, wanting me, and loving me and accepting me. It's just the dynamic that seems to be really strongly operating in me right now. And when I think about how to do that with a relationship, I would—I would say that my work is to pull back and to not be so out of focus and to let relationship come to me. But the question I have in relationship to God, it gets a little more nebulous. It's not very concrete. And I'm wondering how to be in relationship with God and what's God's part, what's his role, what's his responsibility to me—to come into a relationship?
I think you're demonstrating, and what you're saying, the way in which psychodynamics are reflected in the way in which we perceive the spiritual journey, and that your writing the spiritual journey as a large version of what you're dealing with in the psychodynamic in your personality life. And I—there are a number of ways that appear to deal with what you're talking about in understanding the dynamics of dualism—the dualistic practice of experiencing, experiencing her as separate from you, experiencing God as separate—you can project into that which is beyond all forms, any form you want, so you can project into it the form of a father, the form of the judge, the form of a reject, or the form of non-love, or the form of a caring person, the form of somebody reaching out, the form of somebody who's waiting for you to reach out. These are all projections of the human mind because God is everything. So you're making of it what you wish. And it's in a way you're facing so much that you keep wanting to give it form, and the forms you choose to give it are based on the what you need in symbiosis to your own needs and your own separateness. And so you always end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy of proving that you are not worthy and not enough and not etc. And what I hear in it is the solidity of your identification of yourself with these particular psychodynamics. And so I can hear the way in which the mind is clinging to definitions of self. So in one way, if I were guiding you, I would give you meditation practices to help you extricate yourself from such a strong model of who I am. Because that strong model of who I am only allows you to meet God in a way that is symbiotic or complementary to that particular model. So that's the filter through which you're meeting God. So the question is, do you loosen the filter? That would be one way of doing it. The fact that you are presenting this question the way you are—this is another way I could do it, you see—is to say that the person who's presenting it isn't exactly the same person who's caught in codependency. It's somebody who is noticing the predicament. And what I would like to do is align myself with that part of you and see that part of you just notices the whole way in which you're doing what you're doing and sits with it and says, "Look at how I am reducing God to that kind of a partnership." And because I keep reminding us of the statement, "God, guru, and self are one and the same thing," so in a way it's as if the outer part of you, your personality, is filled with need, and the inner part of you is filled with the fulfillment of those needs. But the outer part of you feels that the inner part of you isn't available because that's part of the outer part of use model that I'm not good enough to have it. You see your predicament. I mean, you're cutting yourself off from your own inner source. And so I think probably the alternate—another way would be the practices, things like, "I am that which is"—techniques of not feeding the dualistic of God and me. Because every time you get near relationships, you slip into your routines about codependency and all that kind of jazz, and it becomes very dramatic. And the other one is to get quiet enough to listen to just the truth of your own inner heart and not turn it into a God, he, or a God, she, or a God out there. In other words, I'm saying that the dualistic practices may not be optimally productive to you at this stage because of the intensity with which you're holding on to your psychodynamic identity, and rather a way of emptying and tuning and listening, and perhaps relating to nature more rather than people—personifications. You know, I think I might suggest to you something like sitting by a stream, for example, for a while and just sitting with a stream and being tuning and tuning to the river and tuning to the wisdom of nature, rather than getting into a psychodynamic relationship with God.
Next, could you talk—give some specific techniques about dealing with greed and strong attachments? What you can—I've been doing that and it don't work. Ha. I'm tired of chasing my own tail.
The issue with all kinds of events—the same really we were dealing with before—the question of addictions—is to quiet down enough so that you can begin to appreciate the mechanics of the process, so that you can see how it all works, not necessarily see the source of it. I'm not talking about going back into what caused it. I'm just saying look at it and see what it is and see how it's interesting. I—I will have an addiction, and then as my—my awareness gets stronger, which I'm cultivating through all my practices—as my awareness gets stronger, I notice that—that I still will respond to the desire and the pattern. But as I'm in it, instead of later on when I see that it didn't work or it didn't give me what I thought it would give me or something—in the despair and disillusion in that whole sequence—when I'm in it, I begin to feel its emptiness because the part of me is in it, still milking it for all I can. But there's another part of me that I've been cultivating that is just sitting with her and saying, "Lovely, isn't it? Ah, yeah, great." So, and I've watched that awareness, as I said before, starting to short-circuit the whole process, getting back earlier and earlier until as that thing which awakens the greed starts—in it—starts to thicken my consciousness. It's as if I'm falling out of grace into the desire system. The minute you identify with a desire system, which is really what starts the whole sequence of greed, the minute you identify with the desire, you will feel the finiteness of the game. You've just narrowed it down. You just imprisoned yourself again. Identification with a desire is imprisoning, and yet you have desires. And the question is how you can be involved in life with desires and still not be attached to them. How you can be fully human with all of the stuff, without the id that grabs. What we're talking about is awareness, and awareness at its freest sense is this spacious, vast thing that includes everything. The minute it gets caught in a desire, it closes down into, "I want that." And that's all you want is, "I want that." And then all the rest of it is irrelevant. "I want that"—you want your child. "I want that." And if I can't have it, it starts to scream and cry. And the minute later it doesn't want it anymore. And it's the same with us. I mean, we're doing the same thing. And I've got to the point where I see my desires—if I get them, fine. If I don't get them, fine. It's interesting. If I suffer, it's okay. That's as interesting as getting what I want. And I'm not a masochist about it either. I just begin to see that I have been at the mercy of those desires systems all my life, of you getting what you need. And people come up and they say, "I'm not getting what I need out of life." And I feel not badly that they're not getting what they need; I'm feeling badly that they are so caught in thinking that they need to get what they need because it's one level back. It's that identification where the problem is, so that I keep feeling that—just keep cultivating the spaciousness of awareness and then watch how the awareness keeps getting trapped. And you can only do that when there's a little bit of quietness in you that can sort of sit and watch. The thing is, it's going down again and again, and I'm off. And I mean, I'm not the traditional kind of teacher which advocates renunciation of keeping away from the things—I'd say, "Go out and be greedy, just bring mindfulness to it," and that will—you watch after a while. See, that's why Maharaj is useful to me, because Maharaj—as when I talk about my method being guru or grace of the guru—it means that his consciousness is present with me all the time. If I go into the bathroom and masturbate, he's there saying, "Interesting. Get in a rush. Is this fun? You're really having a good time?" You know, if I do something for the fortieth time that is gratifying but is for basically an empty work of energy, he's just sitting there just with you—also with love, total love. He's not judging me. He's not pushing me away. I can do that. But he's not having that consciousness around me all the time. I mean, I can feel that when there's an opportunity to have livelihood, that suddenly there's a chance to have more money in the scene. And I can watch that part of me that thinks I could get a little more money in order to do that—I make another human being an object to get that more money from them, rather than what is a reasonable thing that allows us to stay us, which is called right livelihood. Right livelihood is—us money. I mean, remember that Uncle Henry story? Okay, so tough. How many—don't know the Uncle Henry thing. Oh, okay. I'm assuming 10% of lying.
Some years ago, we put out a six-record album called *Love Serve Remember*, with a beautiful brochure of pictures and artwork and a box. And the whole thing was sold mail order for four and a half dollars. And it was really a beautiful production. And we put a lot of love and attention into it. It had chanting and questions and answers and meditations, and the third patriarch of Zen and Gospel of John and it—and stuff—was—it was wonderful. I loved it. And my father, who was a—was president of a railroad at that moment, took a look at it and he says, "Impressive, pretty good, good quality." I said, "Yeah." He said, "Four fifty. That's pretty cheap." I said, "Sure is." He says, "You know, can you charge more?" He says, "If you charged ten dollars, a lot fewer people buy it." I said, "No." I said, "Four and a half is what we—it cost us to produce plus a reasonable return." He says, "But if you charged ten, would a lot fewer people buy?" And I said, "No, probably the same number." He says, "Well, I don't understand. Are you against capitalism?" "No," and I said, "No." I try to think of how I could explain that to him. I said, "Dad, you're a lawyer and you've had a lot of cases, and I know that you take pretty good fees." "Damn right I do. I work hard." I said, "Yeah, you should do." I said, "You remember last year you try that case for Uncle Henry?" "Yeah." "You worked hard, didn't you?" "Damn right I worked hard." I said, "I bet you charged them a hell of a fee." He said, "Of course not. It's Uncle Henry." I said, "This is my problem. If you show me somebody that isn't Uncle Henry, I'll rip off." Know that's the issue of right livelihood. That is the issue of right livelihood—that you charge what is enough so that you can look another human being in the eye as a member of the family and say that's a fair thing for you to be paying for this thing. And that's finally where you arrive at. And when I see myself not doing that because the chance of—but I make them into an object in order to do that, I watch with—I watch the horrible beauty of nature unfolding. I see myself doing that. And I'm just quiet watching it. And I just—then I watch the karmic effects of it. And after a while it's as I'm starting to do it—it costs too much. It costs too much. There are many people that come up to me and say, "I love you so much. Can we go to bed together?" And the funny line—it always comes up in me, not always, but most of the time—is the funny line that always comes up too often—comes up to me—is, "We can't afford it," because the karmic effects of it will be too great because the amount of attachment inside of us, the way we're doing it. Can you hear the issue? Okay, next question. So keep on throughout the book. Yeah, exactly. Just be greedy. Yeah, I had a question, but I got so obsessed with it and I know that pattern. So I'd start doing wrong. And then I fell into a sleep. And in the dream, you…
Came in and told me I didn't need to ask that question. So right. Okay. So I took care of that one. That's great. I knew I couldn't get through three groups in a morning. All I have to do is use astral. I cheat a little bit. Great story, right? She's a true addict, so she's the proof the medicine method works. Thank you. Who's next?
Hi. Two years ago, I left a relationship that you might say you perform the divorce here at Lamar and that. And I left the relationship because the man who I was really loved very much was really a sexual addict and couldn't give up being with other women. And I went into my fear of being lonely and alone and have really gone through a tremendous transformation. And during that time, in the last two years, my life has become very full and I feel very connected to God, especially through nature. I have a lot of heart connections in my life, but the heart connection I'm yearning for has not manifested. And I have suddenly, in the last few weeks, come face to face with what I'm seeing is my own addiction, which is to connect in a loving way with a man and how I act that out sexually. And I don't know, there's a question in here, but it's really it's more of a very painful dilemma in which I don't know what to do with the fire and I.
Hear, sure, you're not alone in that predicament. I, I feel alone in this. No, you're not. Believe me, if you scratch the surface of many people, you find the same situation. There's two parts to the question: is how do we understand intimacy and what do we do with our yearning for intimacy and the other is what do you do with the energy? Intimacy between two human beings is has the potential of being one of the most one of the most evolved ways of being coming into and coming back home. The intimacy that occurs when two people share awareness, when they have transcended the boundaries of separateness for the moment, whether it's through sexuality or through the quality of trust and love that develops until there is this awareness that they both feel that they are holding together there. They're present in and delighting in separateness. And yet the experience of unity is a is a very highly treasured quality in the human condition. And it's it is a path to God. The what it is that's being yearned for is the feeling that is the product of the method. That is what you're yearning for, is that feeling of being peaceful, being at home, feeling warm, feeling safe, etc. The method of getting there is the relationship with another person. The relationship with another person isn't the endpoint. It's the process to get to that state of, Oh yeah, that you're not feeling right. So often the attachment to the method gets in the way of realizing the real thing about what the method was for, which is to feel that feeling of peace in one's being and at homeless and safety and softness and openness. The the kind of elaborate the when start to work with the sexual energy in relationship the delicate line between where the sex is in the service of the love or the sex is in the service of the increasing the oneness when it goes over the line into the greed for gratification or what's called lust, which is my need to use you to satisfy me in which the person becomes an object which takes you away from the place ultimately that you want to be. Although this isn't, can you hear the complexity of it? I mean, I'm playing with the edge of something because what happens is you're using when you use lust to get to God, I mean, sexual lust with another person to get to God. You're using a method which separates you in order for the moment of transcendence when you transcend the separateness, but because of how you got to there, the minute the orgasm occurs, you are back in your separateness again and you're back in a cruel way, in an interesting way. I mean, there is a cruelty to lust, as many of you recognize, I think, as opposed to sex that comes out of a quality of deep attunement and oneness with another human being. And just why your last relationship came unglued, which is because you you you couldn't transcend the object ness that sex gave rise to the feeling of in a way that your partner was more attached to that gratification to the monster like this for a moment. Let's not go that direction. See the the harsh answer. The harsh spiritual answer which we in the West don't really aren't able to handle because of our myths and our models. And the way we deal with personality is Maha. She's lying about about sexuality between people. He says, what is it when two bodies rub together? What is it? And from that point of view, people only come together to procreate. That's it. That's the only reason from an evolved sexuality. And what's interesting is you get to the point with another human being where you are so intimately with them in oneness, that to come down into a practice, to come to oneness takes you away from where you already are. It's interesting to be in love with somebody so much that the sexuality can be a play that comes out of that oneness, but no longer since it's previously been used as a method to get you to the oneness. It's like if you're in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to Detroit. Put crudely, that once the method that once you understand where you're going with another human being, where you're going into the space of oneness, you realize that sex, the foreplay and sexuality is a method. It is a method to bring you into unity, into union. And it's an exquisitely beautiful method. And obviously it's a profound method because it keeps the species going. But we overlaid it with a tremendous, psychodynamic, tremendously complex set of rules and needs and gratifications and theory and myth. And so on, so that most of the time people are having sex in their heads. I mean, they are really making love with their own fantasy life, which is part of the horror of lust. So, I mean, I haven't known how to quite say it. I've said make love only with your friends. It's one of the ways I started to sort of get to know somebody and open to them through truth and trust and hold back on the sexuality to the point where it's irrelevant. Then you can then you can have a ball, but when you need it, you've got to watch out that it doesn't come back and hit you in the head. That's what I mean when I say crudely, screw your friends. You know, I mean in gross terms.
All right. Now, see, after living with somebody where I was absolutely delighted and thrilled and I love the intimacy of it and fed on it. And it was a deep feeling for me. I also saw that that wasn't the path that was suitable for me at this moment, and I saw why and I understood it. And I can't go in all the details, but I understood that and you can raise questions about it. But from my point of view, it was clear and I am now living alone. And when I live alone there is the there is loneliness that arises and that when you go to bed, it would be nice to have somebody warm feet to snuggle with and so on and all that sort of thing. And I miss it, but that's okay. That's okay because there is there is a way in which the complexity of that dance masks the deeper truth of it, I would suggest I mean, I guess I'm tough in this. I would suggest that you allow yourself the grieving and allow yourself the sadness and allow yourself the loss and allow yourself that I don't have what I want and grieve and cry and do what you need to do until you can say, okay, and here I am, until you can find the place in yourself that can be at peace without having what you want, then you are in the optimum position to get what you want because until then your need for it is creating something and everybody you meet that is reducing the potential of that relationship to be meeting a true being of spirit in the right place. Can you hear what I'm playing with? Yes. It's the statement in spirituality again and again. Give up what you want and you will get it. But you can't say, okay, I gave it up. Now I want it because it's not clean enough. It really is a giving up and it's giving up into depth and friendship. And you go through a grief, you go through a lot the grief. I'm not going to get what I want and I'm going to be lonely and it's going to hurt. And here I am. I mean, it's people that die before you when they die young or people that are sick or people that are anything or people whose child dies. There is a grieving process. Or when you lose a job or you lose a dream, there is a grieving process. Will deal with that. An illness group. Sorry, cheat. Okay. Sorry. I took so much time with that one because that's the one that's relevant to a lot of us. Next, anymore?
Yeah. Question is, how can we diagnose the root cause of a negative behavioral pattern? The root cause of a negative behavioral pattern? And what bearing does this understanding have on rooting out the problem completely? Oh, that question is concerning the use of history of historical versus a historical techniques of behavior change. There are therapeutic techniques which say, let's look for the cause of why you are unhappy, and let's go back to find out what the root cause was, the way in which your father or mother was, the way in which your early experiences were. But the other existential technique is to say, this is what we've got, and it's being reflected right now. Let's deal with what is going on right now. Let's not worry about the history because that's then this is now this and let us change the way in which you look at the world right here. The power of historical techniques is mainly when there is a reliving of the early experience itself in such a way that there is an emotional catharsis that occurs. That is there's an emotional release that occurs at that moment of reliving to intellectually relive. It doesn't do much. It just makes you very sophisticated about your neurosis. That's it doesn't necessarily get rid of much. You can give a wonderful story about your childhood or it's extremely difficult. I mean, a lot of the rebirthing techniques, a lot of the regression techniques are all designed to emotionally reawaken those early experiences in a way that you emotionally go back into it and come out of it it from a different place. They are difficult to do. And I'd say the the success rate is I don't know, it's not astounding. And I wouldn't even hazard a guess about it. Certainly not more than 50% that because that that whole therapeutic technique focuses on that when it doesn't work, the technique doesn't know what else to do. So it just keeps focusing on it and focusing on it and focusing on it. And it doesn't really go very far. Yeah, right. On the other hand, when a person is ripe to one of those moments can release a huge amount. So there is a a timing and a ripeness for that process of using historical data as a release mechanism for a behavior pattern. Now if you just notice, I made it clear once before I said it before, but maybe it didn't come through very clearly because it's such a subtle point that the techniques when we talk, when we follow the breath in meditation, we are focusing on the mechanics of mind, not the content of mind. When you follow the breath and a thought comes up of I'm unworthy, or I wish my father hadn't done that, or I mean, I was amazed when I went to my meditation master in Burma. The value of him for me was that unlike the meditation teachers I had in the West, who I could suck in by the fascinating way in which I related the content of my thought. See, in the West, I'm so charming in the way I present my thought that I could get anybody. And then I all. Furthermore, I was Ram Dass and that was another added little thing, you know, I was a somebody, so but when I went to the Burmese master, he couldn't have cared if my what my, my name could have been six three for all he cared and the content didn't interest him in the least. He was only interested. It was like he had one of those desks with little pigeon holes in it, you know, little compartments in it. And you would say bloop. And he would think memory plan, planning this negative sensation. Emotional state, positive emotional state. He had a set of categories for the way the mind was working, not the content of the mind. And I at first I thought, well, he's missing the essence. And then I realized how seductive the stuff was of the content. And what I was getting from him was he was freeing me from the content and merely focusing on the mechanics of the way the thought form was working. And so when you go into those kind of meditation techniques formally, what you do is you undercut the whole way in which content works, and you just get into mechanics. And as you keep opening an opening and opening and keep dusting away the content without focusing on it, without getting seductive, seduced in by its bottomless well of fascination, because we are all so fascinated with our own stories, you just start to get lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter until your mind just let it go. And you say, But how can I let it go? I didn't understand it. How can I let it go? I didn't work it out. How can I let it go? I didn't catharsis. How can I let it go? I mean, I can't let it go. That's my personal history. Now, I've told about how once, several years ago I had all these boxes of memorabilia. Every time I moved. I'd always have the shipping company move these boxes of old pictures and old love letters and important documents and finally, I was moving again and I just moved about four times. And each time it's just shipping and storing, shipping and storing it. I thought, Why am I doing this? It's as if I'm holding on to my past in case I run out of the future. Because, because. Because, in fact, I never opened the boxes. I just mark them and move them and store them and then collect more and mark them and more them. Store them. And I thought, I don't need them, so I'll burn them. I'll throw them away, is what I decided. So I went through them and I threw it all in the trash can and I found myself in the middle of the night out going through the trash can because I woke up and I thought, Oh my God, I threw away that. And I go out and I was going through I saw it. So I thought, now I have to burn them. I mean, that's the only way to do it. So I, I started a fire in the fireplace and I started throwing in these things, saying goodbye and throwing in. And I milk the drama. I'll never see your picture again. And I threw it away and and then one of my rascally friends brought me a big stack of pictures of Maharaja and he says, You want to throw these in? And I said, Well, no, I still need those, still using those. And now if I look in my basement, I got rid of all about eight boxes then, but I notice I've collected more and I have another five or six boxes down there now, at least besides the books and I'll probably have another burning because both that I feel the sadness of losing my personal history and also the lightness and almost a surprising lightness of I don't have that anymore. It's gone, it's gone. I'm free. I think all of us, when you look at people, you often see as like Saint Nicholas, you know, they're carrying this big bag of personal history and they come in and they set it down and they're just exhausted. I mean, go ahead. This is who I am and this is who I join. And this is who my father was and my mother was. And this oh, god, this may mean you sit down on an airplane and you just say hello. And 4 hours later, the person has told you they brought out all these. Let me show you this one. And then I had this brother who and then I had this and they just oh, you have this let me show you this one. And it's it's interesting. Everybody just keeps reciting their they keep reinforcing their models of their own existence over and over again. Let me recite this one. Oh, no, it's my turn. You. So I think when you ask the question why it's less interesting for me now, then just how do you get rid of it? Not why it is exist, but how do I get rid of it? I'm less interested in why I am the way I am than how to get on with it and much more. I see where I'm going and I let it pull me towards it and I just keep discarding stuff even though I don't understand why I had it in the first place. So you can hear the credit predisposition at the same moment. As I say, there are moments when you are so ripe to let go of something. I mean, I realize at one point that I was in like I was in a jealous rage over a relationship. Just imagine that. I'm sure none of you have ever been snapped. I've done interviews with all of you, so I do know. But I was in a jealous rage over a relationship. And I was crying and screaming and hating and loathing and. And I, boy, I thought, this is really thick. See, that's a little cloud in a little blue sky saying this clouds really heavy duty. And I thought this is such an old pattern. It's so familiar to me. And I can't I don't have enough discipline in my technique yet to get around it. I need some help. And what happened was a guy called me on the phone who the year before I had seen, and he was such a mess. And he called me up and he sounded very light over the phone. And I said, Why are you so light? You were such a mess. And he said, I've got this great union therapist. I said, What's his name? I, I said, I'm going to go to him too. So I went to him and what I and we examined the situation and then his mirroring allowed me to see some links and I was so ripe for that at that moment that the minute I saw the link, something changed and it changed for about two months. And after about two or three months, if we had done what we could do at that moment, and what became apparent to both of us was that the work I had done on myself over the years, that I was a happier human being, that he was. And then it became poignant. I mean, I was paying him, you know, so we I finally said, Don't you think this is ridiculous? And and then we just became friends. And that was that one. But there was a moment that was ripe just to see those things and get a mirroring for it and let it go.
Questions, you know, just questions from the mind traps section. Yes. Fear a lovely group. It's about substitution. How do we recognize patterns of self-deception, compulsion or addiction? When we do recognize and try to change these? How can we avoid substituting an old one for a new one? Thank you. Is the search for enlightenment? Not yet. Another cover for our fear.
Much now. Just now, when I was silent in response to that, my awareness went through a series of stages. I heard the question, first of all, in my mind I repeated the question so I could make sure I heard all the dimensions of it. That was the first part about the attachments and addictions of mind. How do we get to see them? How do we know that? When we do something about it? We're not just substituting new ones. Isn't the search for enlightenment another one? Those were the three major components of your question. Then I saw myself starting to think about the answer, and then I said, Not deep enough. And then I started to empty. All I did was go back to my breath, the rising and the falling of the breath in the abdomen. This was all happening just now. And then. Pretty soon the whole thing was empty. In other words, no more mind structures, not thinking emptiness, but just not just right. The rising, the attention to the rising and falling was still another one that I was using to get rid of the first ones. But as I kept going in, then I just went into the rising and falling and then there was just then out of that came this, okay, now this is another structure of mind. What I'm saying to you now is another structure of mind. You are saying that is taking what you said and reorganizing it. The issue isn't that I'm that I have a structure of mind because we are the only way of interacting in the universe is through these structures. The issue is where one is in relation to them and how tightly one's holding on to them. You not that one has structures. Take for example, the structure of trying to get enlightened. Now, trying to get enlightened is a structure is a great little story. I must read you a young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous martial artist. When he arrived at the dojo, he was given an by the sensei. What do you wish from me? The Master asked. I wish to be your student and become the finest karateka that karate in the land, the boy replied. How long must I study? Ten years, at least, the master answered. Ten years is a long time, said the boy. What if I studied twice as hard as all your other students? 20 years, replied the master. 20 years, replied the student. What if I practice day and night with all my effort? 30 years was the master's reply. How is it that each time I say I will work harder? You tell me that it will take longer? The boy asked, and the answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the way. Now the stance one takes to become enlightened is a trap. It's a place you are a that is not enlightened. It's a it's a stance in which somebody is going somewhere. I'll meditate. Now, this. But as I told you the other day, the beautiful Ramakrishna image when you have a thorn in your foot, one of the things if you're out in the woods you do is. You take another thorn and you use the thorn to dig the first one out and then you throw both thorns away. You don't save them. So in a way, understanding that all practices are traps of the mind and you use a trap to get rid of another trap. But the way in which you take on the second trap is with intentionality and consciousness, and you see it as a trap I am using. While the first one you had learned so deeply, it was it seemed almost real. For example, most of the way you're thinking every day is so deep in it feels like it's all reality. But as you keep doing the following of the breath, it keeps forcing you to see the way in which you are manufacturing the structure, the habitual structures of your own life. And as you go deeper and deeper, you begin to see the little ways in which the mind keeps recreating your own existence. That happens in the deeper meditation practice. Now, once that is all loosened up, then you've loosened up the old ones that were so deep and you didn't even notice they were there then. The whole practice of following the breath is just another one you're going to let go of. You don't want to end up just being a breath follower. You want to end up being free. Okay? And what is important is that you have a kind of a a light appreciation of the traps of expectations as Khan said to me the other day, he said, Expect, expect the unexpected. Yeah, it's a nice one. Always expect the unexpected, but that's still an expectation. And there's a great story of, you know, the Sufi sort of wise being a wise man named Nasreddin who's really he's like somebody that's kind of slovenly and always kind of seems like kind of stupid, but it's that incredible kind of wisdom that he has that the Sufis know how to do so well. And Nasreddin was very unreliable and very undependable. And
He went to his neighbor and he said to his neighbor, "I would like to borrow a pot. I'm having my relatives in for dinner and I need a big pot."
And the neighbor said, "Now, Nasreddin, you're very undependable and unreliable and I really don't want to entrust my big pot to you."
That's rude and says, "Please, please, I promise I will bring it back tomorrow. I absolutely promise on Allah."
And finally the neighbor relented and said, "All right, if you will bring it back tomorrow, I will give you the pot."
Nasreddin took the pot, went home, had the feast. The next morning he knocks at the door. The neighbor, the neighbor opens the door and there is Nasreddin with a big pot.
The neighbor says, "Nasreddin, you brought back the pot?"
Nasreddin says, "Yes, of course."
And the neighbor looks inside the big pot and there's a little pot, and the neighbor says, "What's the little pot doing there?"
Nasreddin says, "The big pot had a baby."
So Nasreddin was delighted. The neighbor was delighted, of course. And he said, "Oh, thank you, nice road." And then he took the pot and he was so happy though.
Two weeks later, Nasreddin came to the door and he said, "I'm having another party. Could I borrow the pot, the big pot again?"
Now, now in the neighbors mind you see, the neighbor says, "of course you can."
Nasreddin, "Right." So Nasreddin takes the big pot, goes away the next day. No knock on the door, no Nasreddin. The neighbor waits another day, no nice road. And finally the neighbor goes to Nasreddin and says, "Nasreddin, where is my pot?"
Nasreddin said, "It died."
Do you see the way Nasreddin played with the mind of the guy? I mean, he sucked him in and then did an end. I mean, it was just exquisite about of mind. Hmm.
In relation to the first parts of your question, I think most people are so entrapped in their mind that they don't even know they're entrapped. And that's the line of Gurdjieff that I quoted the other day. He said, "You don't realize your predicament. You are in prison, but if you would escape from prison, the first thing you must realize is that you're in prison. If you think you're free, no escape is possible." So far out image. No, most people do not have. They don't identify with the little blue space. They don't identify with the part of them that sees the predicament of the rest of them. They are just so busy being the reactive part of themselves with their righteousness and their fear, and their determination and all the and their pity and all those kind of human emotions. They're so reactive and it fills all the space and they never stop to reflect. They wouldn't think of meditating or reflecting, and they get up. And from the minute they get up, as they wake up, their mind starts to run its numbers and they keep getting into the reactive thing, "Oh, I've got to go to the toilet. I smell coffee. Oh, I've got to get up. I must remember to do my laundry. Oh, forgot to call so-and-so. Oh, I want to sleep ten more minutes. Oh, it's warm in that car. What was I dreaming?" And the mind starts and it just feeds this continuous her like one of those hammers in the street and it just goes all day until finally you just fall into exhausted sleep at night and then start the next day and it's just mechanically running off and there's no space in at all.
So that I think what is required, first of all, is the beginning of what's called awakening, which means the recognition that you are in prison. That's what awakening is about. And that recognition has to come in some way. You got a little whiff of the fact that there is freedom, that there's something other than what you're stuck in. Now, you say, "Well, that's grace." It's grace to recognize that. Because in actuality, as I said earlier, is having those experiences. But most people's minds are so strong, they interpret the experiences that would show them that there is freedom. They reduce them and interpret them in terms of their prison model. So they say when they have an experience that would be transcendent, they say, "I was out of my mind." That's a way of rejecting the thing. Do you hear that? Or in science you can't explain something. You say it's error. That means I can't explain it. It's just once you begin to awaken, then you have a little bit of leverage from which see your predicament.
Now, one of the ways that you can help yourself is to buy is by connecting yourself with other consciousnesses that will mirror for you the ways in which you're stuck. That can be books, it can be photographs, it can be the Sangha or Satsang or the community of other beings who are attempting to awaken. Because once you start to begin to awaken, you start to see people in a different way. When you are stuck totally in your mind, you looked at other people totally in terms of their relevance to your needs systems. Once you begin to awaken, you're able to meet other people on two levels. One is within your need system, and one is that little bit of space around it. And the satsang or sangha or community is that is meeting those people in that little bit of space in the new perspective around the predicament of life. And then what happens is once you meet such people in books or pictures or whatever you then ask them in one way or another to help you. Like when you take the words of Christ or the words of the Buddha or the words of Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, or or any of the wonderful, great beings that have lived through history, who have made the mystical journey. Their words, just reading their words is like reminding you and showing you how stuck you are. It's mirroring for you, your stuckness, and just sitting with that mirroring and sitting with that space and sitting with those friends who tell you you are stuck. That process is constantly working to dislodge your staying within the stuckness, and it's helping you start to let the stuckness start to lose its solidity and thus crumble a little bit.
Of course, the problem is that the way in which you are stuck so fulfills your your need for security. Because even though you're stuck, it's home. You, I mean, even your neuroses are familiar. You know, "I'd rather have a familiar neurosis than be out there, you know, like flying." Yeah. So what we call. So, seeing your addictions of mind to this is who I am and this is how the world is, is not just it doesn't just drop away because you see it because there's still a lot of juice to holding it. There is a readiness for letting go of things. And the word that is used often is virago or the falling away of worldly stuff. There is a place where you just it isn't worth holding on to any longer and you're then open. It often is required. There's despair involved in that. There's despair of finding yourself so trapped. And sometimes the despair is great enough that it opens the door for you. It is true that what most people do is that they substitute immediately a new structure to feel safe in. So the old structure they got rid of. And the only thing you can hope is that the new structure will be will be taken on from a place. So most of the structures that you have about yourself and the world were developed in your pre conceptual time between the time you were, say, six months and 15 months old. That's when the basis was laid down for the whole game of your ego. And so they are emotionally learned structures, they are not conceptual. Initially they didn't the rational mind didn't mediate it. When you learn something rationally, you can unlearn it more easily than when something is learned emotionally. Because when it's learned emotionally, you can't get at it. So that therapy has a very hard time getting to those extremely early learnings that happen, that which will lay down so powerfully. So what you're doing when you take on a new structure is you're taking it on conceptually, intentionally and so it is easier to let go of later. And then you use that new structure and keep moving yourself into the new structure and then like when you have felt "I am no good," you then can feel "I am good" and you can use "I am good" to dislodge "I am not good," but then "I am good" has to fall away because that's just another place to stand. If you want to be free because free is neither good nor not good. Free is just free.
So you get help from your friends. A little help from your friends, whether it's books or people or pictures or images, you cultivate the witness you that you you intentionally take on new models in order to dislodge old models. A lot of traditions teach a model for looking at the universe and looking at yourself, and they let you intellectually the new model. And then you keep learning it and practicing it and talking and practice talking from out that model. And you are slowly substituting that model from the other model. Ultimately, the art is that you need models to function in the universe, models of mind, you need structures, but you hold them so lightly. You hold them so lightly. Like when the great way says the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. It doesn't mean that you don't have preferences. It means that you are not attached to your preferences. It's like, "Would you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?" Well, "I'd like chocolate ice cream." That's a preference. "I'm sorry, we don't have any chocolate ice cream." Well, "then I'll take vanilla ice cream." That's different from chocolate ice cream. Oh, my gosh. You know, I am done as you cultivate that that emptiness, that quietness, that place in you that doesn't have any models, that doesn't function in the world, it just is. And then you take on the functioning facade of models and preferences and all that you need to function in the world. But you there's a place in you that sees it all as game or play or structure that you've taken on in order to function in the world. "When I'm with you, I have to be somebody to be with you. I've to be in a role. There's no way you and I can be together that isn't mediated through role. Even though we can meet behind the role, we have to meet through the role as long as we are embodied." Can you hear that one? Is that too thick or.
And the quotes in the Castaneda books that are quite fascinating, which don one who was a another wise being, he says it in a very fierce way. He says, "A person of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it and looks and rejoices and laughs and sees and knows, knows that his life will be over altogether too soon. Knows that he as well as everybody else is not going anywhere. He knows because he sees that nothing is more important than anything else." This is when you're sitting back in there. In other words, a person of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived. And under these circumstances, her or his only tie to fellow humans is controlled folly. Thus a person of knowledge endeavors and sweats and puffs. And if one looks at that person, that person is just like any ordinary person, except that the folly of life is under control. The folly of life is under control. In other words, the mind models are intentionally taken on. They're not unconsciously, Lee. You're not stuck unconsciously with them. Can you hear that?
Mary gave me this fascinating set of letters that that occurred between Bill Wilson, who was one of the founders of AA, and Carl Jung, and what had happened was Jung had had a patient named Roland H, who was the founder of AA, and Jung had told Roland H that his case was hopeless and that only a religious conversion could affect his addiction to alcohol. And to which Bill Wilson wrote, "Dear Doctor, you on this letter of great appreciation has been long overdue. Tell us about AA." And then he says, "I doubt if you are aware that a certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a mr. Roland H, back in the early thirties, played a critical role in the founding of our fellowship. The Roland H has long since passed away. The recollection, a remarkable experience. He remembers it as follows: Having exhausted other means of recovery from his alcoholism was about 31. He became your patient. He remained under your care for perhaps a year. His admiration for you was boundless. He left you with a feeling of much confidence. To his great consternation, he soon relapsed into intoxication. Certainly that you were his quote of last resort. He again returned to your care, then followed the conversation between you. That was to become the first link in the chain of events that led to the founding of AA. My recollection this account is this. First of all, you frankly told him of his hopelessness so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our society has since been built. Coming from you, one he so trusted, admired the impact upon him was immense. When he then asked you if there was any other hope, you told him that might be provided. He could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience. In short, a genuine conversion. You pointed out how such an experience, if brought about, might re motivate him when nothing else could. But you did caution him that these were comparatively rare. You recommended he place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best." Then it tells about how he, in fact, did join a group. And it did do it. Okay. And then this fellow's story about his thing and his letter from young dear Mr. Wilson. "I had no news from Roland H anymore and often wondered what had been his fate. Our conversation, which he is adequately reported to you, had an aspect of which he did not know. The reason that I could not tell him everything was that those days I had to be exceedingly careful of what I said. I had found out that I was misunderstood in every possible way. Thus I was very careful when I talked to him. But what I really thought about was the result of many experiences with men of his kind. His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for homeless. That's that same thing of coming back, the one expressed in medieval language, the union with God. How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood? Our days, the only light and right in a legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace, or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism." Okay, these are the three paths that he's pointing out. "I see from your letter that Roland H has chosen the second, which was, under the circumstances, obviously the best one." Okay. Just thought you'd be interested in that. You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraved poison. The helpful formula thus is spiritus contra spiritual. "Thank you again for your kind letter. It's from." Oh, it's. It's inoperable. It's reprinted. I'm sure it's reprinted in all the AA literature.