Someone once asked, “What is the difference between surrender to uncontrollable, unspeakable, unnameable ‘thatness’ and being crazy?”
The primary difference is in the words “me” and “my.” Even speaking about “your” realization is the beginning of the fall into at least mild delusion and craziness. There is a tinge of craziness in claiming anything as “mine.”
When you recognize that there is no “me,” that there is only truth recognizing itself through perception of form, this is real sanity. Not what passes for sanity in the world, but true sanity, the bliss of being.
Yes, there can be a fear of being crazy with happiness in the world. Dare to be that happy! Then you will see that you are happy because you are nothing. You are no thing at all. You will laugh and laugh. When you laugh, the mind is stopped. In the instant of laughing, there is no thought. In any instant of no thought, your true face is revealed. Live in the world of false faces, knowing your true face.
In that moment of both emptiness and fullness, I feel like nothing matters. If you are in that space, how can you get anything done in the world?
Why would you want to work?
The idea that nothing matters is very different from the experience that nothing matters. The experience that nothing matters is one of expansion. It is not a nihilistic dismissal of responsibility. If you relegate the experience to the idea of nothing mattering, you miss the mark. When the mind rests in the stillness of its source, the concepts everything matters and nothing matters both collapse.
There is no formula for the manifestation of realization. Ramana stayed at the foot of the holy mountain Arunachala all of his life. He lived a life in retreat from the world, and yet the whole world has been touched. How that was done, who can say? Looking for a particular formula or activity for the “enlightened life” is the attempt to imitate or model space itself. Living by imitation is living indirectly. You are space. Be as you are, and then see.
So the radiance comes out of just being anything?
For seekers in India, the life of a sadhu, a life of abstinence from the world, is considered a holy life. In other cultures, a life of total service is considered the correct life. Some truly holy lives will be celebrated by the world. Some will remain obscure and unknown by the world. A true life, a holy life, is a life lived in surrender to truth, however it looks.
Stop the practice of separating yourself from totality, and life is fully, unknowingly, mysteriously revealed. You will be quite surprised. Your life may not change at all, or it may change quite radically.
Satsang is being revealed in your lifestream, now. The ocean of truth is revealed in silence, speaking, eating, walking, sitting, action, and nonaction.
There is no particular face to enlightenment, no particular personality to enlightenment, and no particular action to enlightenment. Defining enlightenment does not make enlightenment. Any definition is somebody’s version of enlightenment, and all versions are limited.
I have questions about living in the world and money. I don’t have anything secured toward my future, and I guess there is some fear about that.
This fear has nothing to do with the future; it has only to do with the past. It has been passed on to you. Release the past from your mind, and it is truly and completely over. Every time a fear of survival arises, a thought or feeling of need, meet it as it is. As long as you are following fear-generated thought with instructions from the past, it may seem to have a kind of respectability. Respectable fear is called worry. It is a legacy passed on to you from your parents or culture, who received it from their parents or culture. It is a worthless gift from your ancestors.
Discard this worthless gift. Meet fear directly, clearly. In this direct meeting, you will discover there actually is no fear, and clarity naturally reveals itself.
Who can say whether you will have money next week, next year, or ever again? If you are willing to meet this fear, whether you have money or you don’t have money, you realize you are free of the bondage of the past.
If you go back far enough in your ancestry, most likely there was the experience of imminent starvation. This is a huge fear, and it gets passed on from generation to generation. But look at the affluence of this lifetime. Look at the grace of this birth. If you waste this lifetime carrying around the old baggage from five generations ago, you will miss this exquisite window of opportunity to discover what is at the core of this and every fear.
Right now, you most likely have no real worry about your next meal or about shelter. Of course, you can fabricate many worries if you want a special meal or a better shelter, but I am speaking of the most elementary concerns. In your life at this very moment, there is no real need to worry.
What a rare lifetime! What a good birth. Use this opportunity. Don’t throw it away. Meet life fully and completely. Discover who you are, really who you are.
All your circumstances support your awakening now. You find yourself in satsang. You find yourself where truth is being spoken directly to you, as you. What an opportunity. As you say, you recognize there is no real problem, and yet you still have this old fear. Drop all your mental baggage about fear, and meet it pure and simple. By baggage, I mean any concept concerning past, present, or future.
The fear of survival is a deep, animal fear, but the human animal is a rare incarnation. The human animal actually has the possibility of discovering its true identity as beingness itself. What a mystery. What a gift. I have heard it said that it is possible in other species. I don’t know about that, but I know that it is possible in this species to awaken now.
There have definitely been times in the past when there was no food or shelter. There may come a time in the future when food and shelter are not so certain. At those moments of preoccupation with survival of the organism, the question of who you are is usually overlooked.
Now here you are without those concerns. Will you overlook this essential question from habitual concerns of survival, or will you now discover the truth?
All my life, I’ve noticed how I constantly go out and come back, go out and come back. I have those moments of real peace and bliss inside myself, but then I go out again.
Where is out, and where is in?
I’m not sure, but it feels out, and it feels in.
Well, let’s find out. Let’s be sure where out and in really are, because these are important concepts. Find the boundary between the experience of being out and the experience of being in.
I can’t put my finger on it.
That’s a good beginning. When you first started talking, you were very certain you go out and then you go in. First you discovered peace, centeredness, and ease within, and then you discovered the inclination of out-in-out-in. This is very important. You discovered retreat. Then you made a separation between retreat and the rest of the time. This separation is only a mental conclusion based on what you believe exists in and what you believe exists out. In truth, that which is discovered within is not confined to any location. Boundlessness is not limited by any boundary! Discover peace within, and then see it everywhere. See that, in reality, there is no in and out. All is in oneself.
How, then, do I be in the world?
This is the same as the previous question. Stop making the distinction between “me” and “the world.” At a certain stage, the distinction of out and in is an important distinction to make. Now the important distinction is between what is permanent and what is impermanent, what is real and what is unreal. This is called “discriminating wisdom.”
From what you were just saying, however, it appears that discrimination has now become institutionalized in your mind. Now you have religious warfare between the ins and the outs. This familiar, old game is going on only in the mind. The way to end the game is to expose it. Where, in reality, is the boundary between in and out? I understand feeling in and out, and experiencing in and out, but in reality, can any boundaries be found?
At this moment, it is obvious there is no real boundary.
Good. Now discover what is the real boundary between this moment and any other moment.
Conceptually, I get it about letting go and just being. I also know that “trying” to be is not being.
You are still being, whether you are trying to be or not. Trying simply demonstrates that you haven’t realized the effortless peace of being without trying, but you still are. You cannot say that you’re not, can you? Even if you say you are not, you can only say this because you are!
But what’s missing is the realization and the peace. There is still the mind chatter, this ongoing internal conversation.
Are you tired of this conversation?
Yes.
If you are tired to the degree where you have lost all faith in these gods called “the commentator,” “the evaluator,” “the tryer,” then perhaps you will stop paying allegiance to these gods. When you stop the habitual allegiance, you will naturally and easily recognize these mind games as the tricks of false gods.
One of my biggest fears about enlightenment is that others in the world will judge me.
They will. It is a given. They do right now anyway. Judging is the nature of mind activity, and you are surrounded by it.
Let yourself feel totally judged insane, deluded, absurd, and stupid. Whatever it is you imagine that will be so hard to bear, let it come now. You will see that it is nothing, simply judgment. Then what force can it have? Anyway, if they are judging you, they are thinking of you. When you awaken, if they are thinking of you, even if they are judging you, they will receive the transmission of awakening. Let them judge you. It is their way of loving you. Distorted maybe, but at least their attention is on the announcement of awakening.
Invite the judgment. If you directly experience this judgment, if there is any residue of clinging to some particular entity and its status or position in the herd, it will be revealed. Let it be revealed. As long as you have a fear of judgment, there is a sensed lack of freedom to be who you are.
First receive the judgment that you are goodness, purity, beauty, and freedom. Fall into that. Then invite the negative judgment. You are stupidity, delusion, and bondage. Now, finally, what is true?
Be finished with the prison of others’ opinions. You can never acquire a big enough supply of others’ opinions to prove that you are goodness, you are truth, you are beauty, if you have not realized it yourself.
There is a story about a man who tended to Ramana Maharshi while he was living on the mountain in a cave. At first, there were just the two of them, but eventually other people began to be attracted to Ramana.
After eleven or so years of silence, Ramana started speaking. More and more people began to gather around Ramana, and then his attendant began getting possessive, even ordering Ramana around. Finally, he even told Ramana, “This is my cave; this is my ashram.” At that time Ramana left the cave. He went down the mountain to where his mother was buried, and a bigger ashram was born.
Eventually the attendant followed him and took over the management of the new ashram. Because he was possessive and generally obnoxious, he generated a lot of strife. Ramana invited his brother to come in and manage the ashram, and the obnoxious man was ousted.
The man was furious and vengeful. One of the things he did was to publish a book about all of Ramana’s faults. Ramana asked for the book to be brought to him. In the preface to the book, the man had written, “This book would have been much longer, but I ran out of funds.”
Ramana saw this and said, “Oh please, we must raise funds for this man.” Then he read more of the book and said, “He doesn’t know the half of it! We have to get more money, and then we will put this man out in front of the ashram, and he can give these books away to whomever comes.”
This is the way to deal with judgment.
I am afraid that others will judge me if my path changes too radically in their eyes.
To be bound by concerns of what others will think if you are original, free, true, intoxicated with God, if you look strange to them or you don’t keep within the bounds of what they say you should be doing and thinking, is a sad state of imprisonment.
Everyone can relate to this. It is brainwashing and conditioning, and it obstructs satisfaction. No matter how much approval you receive, there is never enough, because true happiness does not depend on the approval of others.
You may even be hated for awakening to the truth. Certainly, some people will hate you for it. It is a threat to their neat little lives. When I was first with Papaji, a friend got upset with me. She hated me. I was shocked! How could this be? She was my spiritual friend. I asked Papaji about it and he said, “It is just to be expected.”
You will also be adored and loved. Believing either the hate or the adoration is a trap. Don’t take either one personally. If you are adored, it has to do with the adoration arising in the heart of the being in front of you. If you are hated, it has to do with the deep threat perceived and feared within the mind of the being in front of you. This is none of your business. Be radically true to who you are, blissfully, unknowingly true to who you are, and all is taken care of.
Why not just go to a cave and sit?
The cave is within your heart. Go there and sit. Rest there for one second. You cannot rest if you are immediately thinking, But if I go there, what might happen with my friends, my job, my work, my life? These are the thoughts that keep you from what you want most.
I live in the country, and being in nature day in and day out has become a path of mirroring, a way of experiencing life. When I’m quiet and just sitting, all of a sudden, I start opening to the nothingness. That is a very peaceful place, and I just watch without judgment, but as soon as it is time to stand up to do a physical action, it’s gone.
What is the problem with that?
I have lost that feeling of peace.
What hasn’t been lost? What is present before the feeling, during the feeling, and after the feeling?
Well, peace is.
Is the peace separate from the activity?
When I totally lose the peace is when a human being walks toward me. All the habits come up, conscious and unconscious, even though I’m just standing there, because a human being has walked into my field.
Yes, it is so hard for humans to recognize other humans as part of nature. You have identified yourself and others like you as separate from nature, as separate from the totality of being.
Particularly when my mind is going click-click, and contraction is happening. It’s like a bomb’s gone off.
Yes, it is not so subtle.
And this other person and I haven’t even started talking yet!
But you have. You started talking long before any actual physical conversation. This human aspect of nature has triggered all your old superstitious thinking of what human is, what this human reminds you of, and what this human might be. This internal talk arises from concepts of yourself and other as somehow separate from the totality of experience.
Nature is teaching you, parenting you, and being intimate with you in the most impersonal way. Learn the lessons of nature. When these so-called others like you reappear, you will see only yourself in all your infinite form, just as you see infinite form within nature.
Nature is experienced as completely relational, totally present, but not personal. When a tree relates to you, it relates totally but impersonally. You could drop dead and the tree would not cry. This is the great teaching of nature.
I also lose my peace when I have to meet some time agenda. All of a sudden, I think, Oh my gosh, I have a three o’clock appointment and...
That’s right. That is an example of taking it personally. The crux of suffering is taking everything personally. Finally, you have to discover who you are. This I who is late for an appointment, where is this I?
How do I live with uncertainty?
Really live! Any certainty is only within the mind. When you live in peace with uncertainty, you are naturally confident. Recognize the unknown as the reality of living, and you won’t be distracted by thoughts of grasping and trying to make permanent what is by its own nature impermanent. Every event, every experience, every thing is impermanent. This recognition is divine uncertainty, and it reveals divine security.
If I become more of that which I am, can I help to heal the world?
This idea of you becoming more of what you are, or of the world becoming something different, is nonsense. You are what you are. Stop all these ideas and beliefs and thoughts, and discover what you are. This is primary.
Discover who you are. Don’t become more of who you are. Becoming more of who you are is imaginary. Discover who you are now, and tell me if you can find any location, boundary, limit, or anything that can “become” that.
You have assumed there is something else needed, but this assumption is based on your past idea of what the world is, who you are, what you are becoming, what healing is, who can heal what, and even what enough is. Who is measuring that, and by whose standards?
There is something vast, unknown, and unseen, where measurements of enough are left behind. Here, there is no possibility of measuring and no measurer. There is no world separate from who you are. There is only wholeness itself. Nothing becomes whole. It is recognized to be already whole.
But the world doesn’t seem whole.
I understand that the world doesn’t seem whole. I am not speaking about seeming. Many things seem one way or the other, and this seeming changes back and forth. Something seems one way one day, and within hours it can seem the other way. A cloud goes in front of the sun, and it seems the sun has disappeared. In the night sky, you see stars. In the day sky, it seems the stars have disappeared. In the desert a great lake may seem to be just over there. Drink from that lake and you discover it is sand. Drinking sand is believing “seems.”
Seeming is ultimately unreliable because it is based on sensory information. Seeming is the interpretation of the world through the senses and through the conclusions based on past interpretations. Has it been reliable?
The senses are fickle, having to do with moods, biochemistry, genetics, and environmental events. Sensory information is changeable, and if you rely on what is changeable in searching for wholeness, I am afraid you will be searching endlessly. If you can recognize what is already whole, then you have recognized a very deep secret that is always untouched by changes and seemingness.
Recognize what is permanently whole, permanently here, and then your lifetime is no longer spent spinning and searching in seemingness.
You know this from your life experience. One set of beliefs is pushed aside for a new set of beliefs, and now the world is seen through the eyes of the new beliefs. Then that set is pushed aside for another set. You read the paper and the world seems one way. You hear another opinion and it seems another way.
I agree with you. But are you saying that the world is fine the way it is?
I am not saying that the world is fine. I am pointing to what is eternally whole. Before that discovery, any conclusion about either the world’s fineness or its rottenness is speculative.
You follow the senses as if they give you real, true, accurate information. Obviously they don’t, do they? Isn’t it all tempered? You feel good, you take a walk, and everything looks good. You feel bad, you take a walk, and everything looks bad. There is a way to see that sees through what looks good and what looks bad, a way to see wholly. But this discovery must come from direct experience, or it is an imposition. Without direct experience, it is just another belief of the latest dogma.
Don’t wait for someone to tell you how the world is or what the world is. Only settle for firsthand discovery. Don’t wait for some leader to herd you into a particular direction. Even if you believe it is the best direction, you must not settle for anything less than the direct experience of what exists deeper than the senses, deeper than thoughts, feelings, conclusions, and the way you have put it all together.
Of this, I cannot speak a word. I have yet to find a word that comes close. I can only point you in that direction.
In daily life, I feel like I lose sight of the truth because I’m preoccupied from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to sleep at night.
You cannot lose truth. It is only possible to imagine yourself separate from it. This imagining creates suffering. Truth is always present.
I guess I really know that.
Don’t even know it. That is the catch. Truth can be attended to, but not as an it, not as an object. Truth cannot be known, and when you stop trying to capture it with the mind, there it is. The world itself, filled with all its suffering, cannot exist without truth.
Truth is everywhere, in everything, and if you are paying attention to that, you see it everywhere, in everything. Truth doesn’t live in a place. All places appear in truth. If all places appear in truth, then they are of truth.
When I say attend to truth, I am not instructing you to focus your mind on something. To focus is to bring attention to a point. Total attention is three hundred and sixty degrees.
It seems like there’s really nothing to do.
Living truth has nothing to do with activity or inactivity. There is no thought of making anything happen or not making anything happen. Those thoughts come from fear. They arise from the fear of emptiness, the fear of nothing, or the fear of nothing happening.
There may arise the desire for a certain outcome. To live in truth is to surrender this desire and put that surrendered attention on the truth that always is.
Then how do things happen?
Quite naturally, just as they always do. What is removed is the struggle. Your natural state is ease of being.
Some people have an idea that enlightenment is some kind of zombie state. You often see a manifestation of this idea in spiritual groups where there’s a kind of numbing out, a modeling of nothing happening, pretending as if there is nothing happening. Ease of being cannot be pretended or modeled.
Could you tell me what you understand prayer to be and how it works?
How can I use my focused intention to benefit others in the world and ease their suffering?
You are asking about true prayer, not the usual prayer of acquisition.
I’m talking about when I pray for my brothers and sisters or for the world.
Pray for truth. Pray that truth be known. Pray that all being awakens to its true nature. Then pray to be used by truth fully, completely, without any expectation or need of personal or material gain.
You asked how you could use your intention, but if you imagine that you use truth, then truth is imagined as some object, your object. If you pray to let truth use your body, mind, and emotions, to let truth actually have your life, to let it direct your life, then all those previous ideas and agendas drop away. All ideas of what you need to do to be happy are finished.
My intention is that the greatest good is done, but how do I use my intention so that this happens?
What is it you want? What is it you really want?
That we remember who we are.
Your whole prayer is right there. If you really want this, the prayer must be one hundred percent. If you take ten percent off to also want something else, and then another five percent for something else, then you have less than a full prayer.
Yes, make your whole life prayer. The details are not up to you, because who can say how life should look? Visualizing how it should look can only come from some past conclusion based on cultural or political conditioning.
With maturity, this particularizing of wants and desires based on past experience is recognized to be futile. Recognize that you don’t know what truth should look like, or how truth should reveal itself. Only know that above everything, you want the truth, as you say, for your brothers and sisters, and for yourself.
Let truth write the scenario. Let truth live your life. Truth cannot be visualized, because any visualization is still limiting its manifestation.
Truth is not limited. It is not limited to affluence and comfort. It is not limited to poverty and discomfort. If you are attached to any state or circumstance, you are missing the boundless fulfillment of truth. If you are fixated on a particular image of what your life should be or what your brothers’ and sisters’ lives should be, there is that much energy taken away from the prayer for truth.
Isn’t true love about the absence of separation?
True love is the absence of the belief in the illusion of separation. It is the recognition of the truth of who you are, regardless of appearance, feeling, circumstance, comfort, or discomfort. If this is your prayer, this is a very serious prayer. This prayer takes enormous resolve. It takes the willingness to surrender your personal suffering. To surrender your personal suffering, you must discover what is the root of personal suffering.
The root of all suffering is the belief, and the continual practice of the belief, that you are separate from pure, limitless consciousness. That you are a separate entity, and that you are located in a particular body. I am not asking that you substitute another belief such as “I am God,” or “I am limitless,” or “I am boundless.” These, too, are beliefs. You are bigger than any belief. You are beyond measure.
The strong belief in “me” and “my needs” is the root of all evil. It is a great mistake.
Your prayer must begin exactly where you are. You imagine yourself to be a particular body because you sense the body. It feels like you are this body, and it looks like you are this body. Find what is closer than the senses, closer than appearances, closer than feelings. Quite remarkably, that realizes itself even through this manifestation of appearance of body and separateness.
This is what I mean when I speak of prayer. Realized prayer is not asking for something. In realization, your entire life becomes a prayer of thanksgiving. Satsang is thanksgiving. Give thanks for this moment of revelation. Have your life be a life of thanksgiving that naturally springs from revelation. Then all of life is revealed to be a confirmation of that.
I have desires and hopes of accomplishing something in the world. I want to publish my book. When I sit quietly, a lot comes in. I write. I paint. Finally, it’s like there has to be an end to quiet. I have to get up and do something with what I am painting and writing.
Who says so?
The part of me that wants to always be on the quest.
If you follow that part, you will always be on the quest. You will always be doing something or imagining you are doing something. You will always stay busy.
This is where I don’t get it. There’s a missing piece.
It is the piece you have yet to surrender.
The truth is, if you stop for one pure instant of self-recognition, those things may either get done more than you could imagine, or they may not get done. There is no guarantee one way or the other. Your particular life form may be more active than it has ever been, or it may be inactive. What you give up by being absolutely still is the choice of appearing to direct the outcome. A true book comes from stopping absolutely. If a true book is to come through your form, it comes through because it cannot be held back.
It comes through the not-doing?
In music, art, literature, science, and in a full life, there is that which cannot be withheld, cannot be constrained, that which has to be expressed. It uses your intellect, voice, limbs, or the techniques you have learned. It uses your life; so give your life totally to that. How it is to be used cannot be known. Perhaps you will have many books. If they are true books, they will come.
Are you saying that that place of stillness, of letting go, of surrendering, is so divine that all these things get done anyway?
That place is already here. It is so divine it is eternal. It is divine beyond any concept of divine. Surrender all your ideas to that, and let it do as it wishes, as it wills. Truth is far beyond individual will. Individual will is just a spark of that.
You will see your life used, but it may be used by your never moving from your room. Truth is unpredictable and uncontrollable. It is divinely uncontrollable, exquisitely uncontrollable, and undeniably uncontrollable.
Do we become like a vehicle, a conduit, or a vessel?
Recognize your true self. Stop fighting that you are that. Surrender your intellect to that, and then your intellect is used. I don’t know if it will be in books. I don’t know if you will ever speak or write again. That is irrelevant. How you will be used is bigger than you or I can know. Let the future be as it is—blessedly unknowable. Speak and write if the speaking and writing must come, and be silent if no speaking and writing come.
Ramana sat in one place, and his just sitting continues to shake the whole world. Many people said that he shouldn’t just sit there, that he should be out in the world doing social action like Gandhi. But something bigger than what people thought and what he had been taught directed his life. Ramana, in his mastery, only answered them in silence. From the outside, it appeared that he was doing nothing, that he was inactive. But look, this formal satsang, here, in this time, in this part of the world, is the result of his “inactivity.”
If it is the nature of a particular form to be active, let it be active. If it is the nature of a particular form to be inactive, let it be inactive. Compassion is not about the activity or inactivity of the form.
You are that which is the source of both activity and inactivity. In your willingness to be that totally and fully, you cannot help but help. Not by any intention of helping, not by any agenda of helping, but through your true nature as love.
Do you follow this? It is very important. People have such ideas about activity and inactivity. Truth is deeper than any idea. Realize truth. Your hidden question is a question of trust. Trust that silence. Trust that pure love, just for an instant. Then at the very least, you stop contributing to suffering.
There is a command that is deeper and closer than can be known, and it is more vast than I am able to speak of. It is exquisite. It is alive, present, spontaneous, and out of your mind’s control.
You ask if that is all there is to it. There is no end to it! No one has ever reported an end or an all to true self. In the instant of being absolutely still, an opening of the mind occurs—an opening into eternity.
I find myself on this roller coaster of emotions, getting very angry, getting very sad. Does that mean that I will never reach the state of the bodhisattva, where I can help others in the world?
First of all, the bodhisattva state cannot be reached. It can only be recognized as your preconditioned nature. Sattva is a Sanskrit term meaning tranquil, peaceful. Bodhi means awakened consciousness, awakened heart and mind. This is your original nature. As long as you are identified with the roller coaster of emotions, you are overlooking what is already and always calm and peaceful, what is already awake. You are overlooking the truth of yourself by fixating your thoughts on your emotions.
The awareness in which the roller coaster is moving is already tranquil and awake, with no rejection of the roller coaster and no clinging to the roller coaster. Recognize this tranquility, and the roller coaster naturally comes to a halt. There is no juice for it to continue. The passions that were fueling the roller coaster are consumed in the one passion for truth, for freedom, for God.
Without being fed, no body can exist—not the physical body, the mental body, or the emotional body. In Indian society it is customary at a certain age for a seeker to become a sadhu, leading a life of physical renunciation as a way to discover the bliss that is beyond bodily needs.
To truly nourish the emotional body, stop feeding the mental body! Discover the natural harmony of emotions that is beyond mental tyranny. By not feeding thoughts, the emotions come to rest in the tranquility of awareness. When some past pattern of emotionality arises, if thoughts are not fed around it, the pattern can cease.
Papaji was asked by Ramana to leave the ashram and go rescue his relatives from Pakistan, and then to support them.
He said, “No, I don’t want to go. That is all a dream. I just want to stay here with you, my Master, at your feet.”
Ramana said, “Well, if it’s all a dream, then what is the problem?”
So Papaji returned to the world, working hard as a mining engineer, supporting a hundred people, and holding satsangs in the evenings.
What a great gift this teaching is for all of us! There is no necessity to do anything with the body. Truth is much more subtle than that. Let the body be as it is. The body is not the problem. The identification with the body as yourself is the problem. You must discover what is present, clear, pure, and untouched, regardless of emotional state. This is already bodhisattva. If you are attracted to that, if you love that, if you have a respect for that, then give even more love and respect to that, and see how your body is used.
Sitting here with you, it is so easy. Outside, it is very often difficult, and a lot is troubling me.
Where is this “outside”?
Not sitting with you.
Then you must have mistaken me for some phenomenon. Don’t limit me to any person. Then you will see that the word “outside” makes no sense. The phrase “not sitting with you” makes no sense. This makes as much sense as saying “I am not present.”
I’m playing my old play.
Stop playing your old play. Part of the old play is following the thought that it is easy sitting here and difficult outside. This very thought gives credibility to the possibility of “outside” and “difficult.”
Don’t give these thoughts credibility. That is the old play of the past. It may arise out of past momentum, but the moment it arises, don’t continue to feed it power. In that moment, let the thought sink back into nothingness. Let it be liberated.
But it seems to be my experience in the world.
Your experience is what the old play is. When this old play arises, don’t follow it, and there will be no experience of it. The experience is only perpetuated if you continue to feed it by following these thoughts. In the moment these thoughts arise, or when you discover that you have followed them, let them go. At that moment, ask yourself Who am I, really?
Sometimes I do this, and it is helpful, and sometimes it feels like an effort.
When you feel the effort, let the effort go, and don’t ask yourself anything.
Sometimes it just falls away by itself.
In either case the old play is finished. Either it falls on its own as you let go of any efforting, or you can direct your mind inward. This old play cannot continue without some effort. Maybe you are so used to this effort that it actually seems easy. Don’t believe it. Not believing it is the same as not touching it.
So it only belongs to the old belief system?
That’s right. Past experience belongs to the old belief system. Now you are reclaiming your soul from this past relationship with a tyrant god (the old play) who has been drinking your soul’s blood.
That’s why I wanted to speak, because I really wish to have this in my daily life.
Yes, truth must be realized to be in your daily life. Don’t settle for anything less. In every second that you are willing to inquire, you will discover I is always here. I is always present. I is vast, limitless, pure awareness. You are I.