Transcription
It was in my 29th year. I woke up in the middle of the night, and this was not uncommon for me: waking up in the middle of the night and feeling intensely depressed and in a state of great fear at the same time. That happened again that night, and the thought occurred to me, "I can't live with myself any longer." That thought repeated itself in my mind: "I just, I can't live with myself."
And then suddenly, I looked at the thought. I kind of stood back from that thought and looked at it and said, "That's a strange thought. I cannot live with myself. Am I one or am I two?" This thought seems to show that there are two people here: I and the self that I cannot live with.
I didn't have an answer to that question. It's just that question, that puzzle, arose in my mind. Much later, it reminded me to it reminded me of a koans that they have in Zen that are puzzles that are designed to stop the mind. For example, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is a famous koan, and it doesn't have an answer on an intellectual level. And so, the question that arose in my mind also didn't have an answer on an intellectual level: "Who am I, and who is myself that I cannot live with?"
But that question triggered an inner shift. Something inside me, and I didn't understand it at that point, must have disidentified from the self, "the unhappy me" as I later called it. So, a kind of an inner disidentification happened. The "I am," which I later recognized as the consciousness that I am, separated itself from the conditioned entity, the conditioned consciousness [Music] that was that provided me with my sense of identity, the self, and that consisted largely of an unhappy story.
So then, I felt I was like being drawn into some kind of vortex of energy, as if I were disappearing in that. And there was still a moment of resistance, and I heard something almost like a voice inside me that said, "Resist nothing." So I gave up resisting the feeling, almost the feeling, of disappearing into nothingness.
And so, I don't remember very much else that night. All I know that the next morning I woke up, and I opened my eyes and I looked around the room [Music], and everything seemed as if I was seeing it for the first time: fresh, new, alive. The light coming through the windows, familiar objects on the table, they looked fresh, new, into life.
So I got up and went out for a walk, and I looked around, and everything seemed so peaceful. Even the traffic in the city seemed so peaceful, and I knew something strange that happened. Suddenly, everything was filled with aliveness and peace, and I didn't know why. This inner peace, as a background to all experiences and the background to all sense perceptions, even as a background to my thinking, that they never really left me again. But it took me a long time to understand it, to be able to put it into words.
And so, a little later, I started investigating other spiritual teachings for the first time: Buddhism, Christianity, and more contemporary spiritual teachings. And very quickly, I recognized the truth that is in many cases hiding underneath sometimes centuries of cultural additions, interpretations, and misinterpretations. And I could see the truth that's in Buddhism, that's in Christianity, the original teachings, and in turn, they shed light on what had happened to me.
I, for example, I picked up the New Testament and I read Jesus' words: "The peace that passes all understanding." I said, "That's exactly what I feel as this peace, and I don't understand what it is." So he must have had the same experience. He peace suddenly arose which was not causally related to anything in the external world. It wasn't caused by something wonderful happening in the external environment, so it didn't seem to have a cause, an external course.
And then later, I visited Zen teachers and so on, and again, I recognized the truth of Zen immediately. But they also helped me to understand and and put it what had happened to me into a wider context. For example, I remember talking to one Buddhist monk who said, we talked about coming to the end of always having to think, thinking. He said, "Zen is about not thinking ultimately." And I immediately realized something that I actually, strangely, I hadn't realized before: that my thought processes, ever since that happened that night, had become reduced by maybe 80 percent. So I wasn't actually thinking that much anymore, and that's why there was so much peace.
So I realized the continuous mental noise, as I now call it, which is the compulsive and largely useless thinking that most people are continuously engaged in, that had come to an end. There would still be some thought, and I could use thinking when I needed it, and occasionally thoughts would come in and out. But there were huge stretches of no thought, and in those long gaps and intervals of no thought, there was that wonderful experience of inner peace. And I realized that inner peace had been there before, even when I was still anxious, but had simply been covered up by the anxiety, by the hyperactive mind.
And so, this then gradually developed into a spiritual teaching. So, the spiritual teaching now, uh, attempts to show people that they have within themselves already what they may perhaps are looking for on the outside. The aliveness, the peace, the sense of deep inner fulfillment is already present in every human being as their innermost essence. So it's not a question of needing to obtain or acquire something new, which is often what spiritual seekers are looking for. Everybody is looking for to acquire something to fulfill him or herself. They may be looking for it on a material level, on the level of experiences, or on the level of accumulating knowledge or accumulating wealth. Or spiritual seekers want to add more spiritual experiences to who they are, or find themselves at some point in the future. And you can't, because if you're looking to the future to find yourself, you're missing yourself already: the essence of your being, which you can only find in the now [Music].