So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for being here.
So settle wherever you are.
And let me say something at the start that I want you to actually hear.
I think you are tired.
Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.
But something underneath that.
I think you have noticed,
Perhaps recently,
That the whole business of being here,
Of being alive,
Being human,
Being conscious,
Is genuinely harder than the official story admits.
That there is a quiet low ache running through ordinary life that almost nobody mentions in polite company.
You go to work,
You pay the bills,
You answer the messages,
You eat the dinners,
You take the brief glimpses of joy when they come and you're properly grateful for them,
You really are.
And then between the joy you carry.
There is a kind of bewilderment.
Is this it?
Is this what we are doing?
Have I been missing anything that others have figured out?
And I think you have begun to see something that once you see it,
You cannot unsee it.
You've begun to notice that the deal everyone seems to have signed.
The deal you signed when you were too young to read the small print is not a particularly honest deal.
Work the job.
Get the identity from the job,
Build the security,
Hold the relationships and get the identity from those two.
Take the small joys,
Don't look too hard at the whole arrangement and definitely don't ask the big questions.
And if you do,
Ask them in approved formats.
A gym membership,
A retreat in Bali,
A podcast about purpose,
Or a journal with a softcover.
And under no circumstance notice that the whole thing on close inspection is made of cardboard You might have noticed that.
This is why you're here.
And the problem you're sitting with is the specific terrible problem of the person who has seen through the construction but who still has to pay the rent.
You cannot fully believe in the deal anymore.
And you also cannot,
With any responsibility,
Just walk out of it.
Because the bills are real,
The mortgage is real,
The people who depend on you are real as well.
So you're caught.
Between a system you can no longer fully participate in with your whole heart.
And a survival you cannot opt out of.
So I definitely am not going to tell you to manifest a better attitude and I definitely will not recommend a gratitude journaling because I think and I will say this directly The modern cult of gratitude has done real damage by turning a profound contemplative practice into a kind of cheerful denial.
I'm not going to suggest that the answer is to quit your job and move to Goa,
Because the people who give that advice are usually wealthy.
Or they tend to leave out the part where someone has to do the laundry.
So,
I am going to do something else.
Something much older and much more useful and much harder to fit on an inspiration tile.
I am going to talk to you about how the mystics,
The proper ones,
Not the Instagram ones,
Actually lived inside a world they could see through.
Because they did not leave?
The relocation.
And I'm going to try to show you as plainly as I can.
What that means in a life that includes a Tesco shop and a tax return.
Now let me start by naming the egg properly.
Because part of fight is so heavy.
Because it has no language.
The ache has been with humans almost certainly,
For as long as humans have been conscious enough to be sad about being conscious.
But it does not have a clean clinical word.
It also does not have a clean spiritual word.
So people who feel it tend to assume they have invented it personally,
Which adds on top of the ache a layer of mild shaming for inventing it.
The closest the field has come to this is the phrase Existential Pain.
The psychologist eventually caught up to.
Viktor Frankl,
Who frankly earned the right to talk about this,
Having survived the camps,
Wrote about the human need to find meaning and what happens when we cannot.
Then there was Yalam who built therapies around the four givens,
Death,
Freedom,
Isolation and meaninglessness and the suffering that comes from facing any of them honestly.
So the clinical literature now uses,
Only now,
Uses phrases like existential distress and existential dread.
And all of which is fine.
Yet none of which quite catches the specific texture of what I think you're actually feeling.
Because what you're feeling is not philosophical.
It is not abstract.
And it is not the fear of death,
Though that may be in there too for some of you.
It is the ache of an ordinary Tuesday.
It is the ache of putting on the right clothes for a meeting and noticing halfway through that you're watching yourself perform a person you're not.
It is the ache of being kind to people.
Who do not really know you.
It is the ache of being in a job that does not really need the part of you that is most alive.
For money.
That buys things that do not quite reach the part of you that is doing the aching.
And I want to say something direct here.
And I think you need to hear someone say it out loud,
That this ache is not a malfunction.
And this ache is not depression.
Though if it has become depression,
Please do not let me talk you out of getting support.
But the ache itself.
The ordinary version of it.
The low level background hum of,
Is this really it?
That is not a sickness.
That is an entirely sane response of a conscious being to a situation that is getting more and more uncomfortable.
You are a self-aware creature on a small planet.
And you did not ask to be here.
And you will eventually have to leave.
And in the meantime,
You've been handed a deal that requires you to spend the bulk of your one short life performing roles to earn the right to keep performing them.
If that did not produce at a minimum a low-level background ache I would be slightly worried about your sensitivity to reality.
I would argue.
That the ache is evidence of sanity.
It is what a soul does when it notices it is alive in a body.
So now,
Let us look properly at the deal.
Because we cannot relocate inside something we have not seen clearly first.
And I want you to know that I am not about to launch into a triad against modern capitalism.
Partly because that has been done.
And partly because most of those tirades have a way of being delivered by people who have rather conveniently arranged their lives to be exempt from the system that they are critiquing.
So,
I am not exempt.
You are not exempt,
I am assuming.
So the deal is the air that we breathe.
So,
We can look at it without thinking we are about to escape it.
Now as far as I can tell,
Here is the deal.
Spend the years between roughly 22 and 65,
When you're most physically alive,
Cognitively sharp,
Creatively present,
Doing work that for most people.
Is not what they would do if survival was not on the line.
And then get most of your identity from that work,
And then get the rest of your identity from relationships,
Which is fine in principle,
Except that the people in those relationships are also exhausted from their own deal.
So you end up holding each other in shifts.
Save a fraction of what you earn for a future version of yourself.
And by the time that version arrives,
If ever,
You'll be too tired or too elderly to do anything interesting with it.
Then distract yourself in the gaps with the screens that have been engineered by very clever people to be marginally more compelling than your own thoughts.
Then take the small joys,
Weekends,
The holidays,
The dinners,
The children if you have them,
The dog who does not give a damn about any of this and then treat those small joys as the actual point of life.
And please try not to notice the structure as a whole is somewhat absurd and definitely do not ask whether the part of you that is most alive is being fed by any of this or not.
So that is the deal.
And it is not entirely a bad deal.
I want to be even-handed.
The deal also has hot showers,
Dental care,
Antibiotics,
The entire history of human music available on a small device in your pocket,
The possibility of love,
The possibility of children,
The possibility of doing meaningful work for some people some of the time.
And the strange,
Persistent miracle of strangers being kind to each other for no reason.
They are also real things.
So the deal is mixed.
Anyone who tells you it is purely evil is not paying attention.
And anyone who tells you it is fundamentally fine is also not paying attention.
So here is the thing,
And this is the moment of the talk that I want you to actually feel.
Because everything turns on this.
The deal becomes unbearable not when it is hard.
But when you mistake it for who you are.
The deal becomes unbearable not when it is hard,
But when you mistake it for who you are.
When the job becomes the self when the role becomes the soul when the construction becomes confused with the constructor when you start to believe and you have been told relentlessly your whole life by every advertisement and every promotion and every linkedin profile that you are what you produce you are what you earn you are who you are partnered with and you are what title you carry so the deal as a deal is something a person can manage.
But the deal taken as identity is something that will suffocate a soul over 40 years and then offer you a retirement party with a voucher.
There is an old phrase from a Christian contemplative tradition that I want to lay down here because it solves the puzzle in fewer words than I have managed it in 20 minutes.
Be in the world.
But not of it.
Be in the world but not of it.
So that is the move.
Not leave the world.
Don't pretend the world is fine.
Don't become an activist.
Just be in it.
Show up.
Do the work.
Pay the rent.
Take the meetings.
Love the people.
And not of it.
Do not let it be the thing you're made of.
Do not derive the substance of yourself from the constructions that you participate in.
Keep the costume on.
Stop confusing the costume with the wearer.
And the same wisdom shows up in different clothes in every major tradition.
Which is one of the reasons I have come to take it more seriously as I've gotten older.
The Bhakti tradition has a teaching called Karma Yoga.
That means do the action fully.
With everything you have.
But release attachment to the fruit of action.
The Sufi spoke of being a hollow reed.
The music plays through,
But the reed is not the music.
Then they were the Buddhists and with their characteristic precision they would say suffering arises from identification with what is impermanent and constructed.
And then there was Krishnamurti.
Who I should mention because he was rather a good clinician for someone who refused to be called one.
He said something like this.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
And he was not telling people to leave the society.
He was telling them not to confuse adjustment with sanity.
They are not the same thing.
So sometimes the ache that you feel,
I feel,
Is this soul refusing to fully adjust.
And that refusal is not sickness.
It is just a quiet stubborn saying,
No.
Before we explore what actually works.
Let's spend a bit of time naming the things that do not work.
Because the modern wellness market has been selling you with great confidence and at a considerable expense.
Several different anesthetics for this ache.
And I think it is important to be honest about why they do not reach the place that hurts the most.
Now no offence to anybody,
The first one is gratitude.
And I want to be careful here because gratitude as a contemplative practice,
Real gratitude,
The kind that the wisdom traditions taught,
Which is closer to wonder than to bookkeeping,
Is one of the most powerful things a human being can practice.
I am not against that.
What I am against is what gratitude has become,
Which is a cheerful piece of denial in soft colors.
The version that says,
Some random person talking on a reel,
Write three things you're grateful for every morning.
And the version that says,
Someone always has it worse.
The version that effectively asks you to feel better by comparing your suffering to that of strangers.
Which is a strange thing to do yourself and which mostly works by adding guilt to your existing pain so you stop noticing the original pain because now you're too busy feeling bad about feeling bad So that is not a healing,
That is a sedative.
And you might have tried it.
And it did not reach the egg at all.
So you are not failing at gratitude.
You're noticing correctly.
That someone has sold you a thimble and called it a wealth.
And.
.
.
Now let's come to gratitude's sophisticated cousin,
Positivity.
The promise is that if you simply change the lens,
The picture will change.
Every difficult situation contains a gift.
The universe will not give you more than you can handle.
You are on the path.
And positivity as practiced on the internet.
Is a kind of magical thinking dressed up as wisdom.
And it is particularly cruel to people who are suffering.
Because it implies that their suffering is a thinking problem that they could solve if they were more positive.
They are not.
So most suffering is not a thinking problem.
Most suffering is an entirely appropriate response of a living being to a difficult reality.
And the third is busyness.
It's the most common one and also the most respectable and the hardest to see through.
The trick of busyness is that it never quite lets you sit long enough to notice the exit.
You schedule yourself into a state of perpetual just-about-coping.
Where every evening is full,
Every weekend has something.
And every quiet moment is filled by a screen.
And the egg which can only really be felt when the body still never gets a chance to speak.
So you're not feeling better.
You're just on the run all the time.
And running is exhausting,
Which is fine.
Because being exhausted is its own kind of relief from the feeling.
Until you can't run anymore.
Which is usually why people show up in a therapist's office finally still and finally exhausted enough to sit and they think they have had a breakdown.
They've not had a breakdown.
They've had a breakthrough.
A breakthrough of the ache that had been waiting patiently for 40 years for them to slow down.
The last one,
I am picking on this.
Because it is the one most relevant.
Even to people who listen to talks like mine.
Food is the one I have a duty to be honest about.
And this is what we might call premature spirituality.
The use of spiritual concepts before they have been embodied as a way to bypass the human work.
And let me say some phrases you might know them.
Trust the process.
Everything happens for a reason.
Let it go.
So,
They are not wrong at all.
The mystics did mean something by all of them.
But in the mouth of someone who has not done any work.
They become tools of avoidance.
They become a way to skip past the legitimate human pain into a spiritual story that promises the pain was somehow a secret gift all along.
So,
That is not spirituality.
That is a denial in robes.
Genuine spiritual traditions all insisted,
All of them.
That there was no by-bus.
The Desert Fathers,
The Cave Yogis,
The Sufi Orders and the Zen Masters,
None of them said you could leap to resolution while skipping the wound.
They said you had to go through the boundary.
And freedom is on the other side of the human,
Not instead of it.
So if you have tried these four,
Gratitude,
Positivity,
Busyness and premature spirituality and they have not reached the place that hurts,
I want you to know that it is not your failure.
They were never designed to reach that place.
They were designed to manage it or monetize it.
Second.
The fact you can see through them is not cynicism,
It is discernment.
And discernment is beginning of the work,
Not the end of it.
You had to see through the false answers before the real ones could land.
I will say something briefly true about myself.
I have been the person doing the deal and I have done it for years.
At some stage I built a career,
I had the title that looked great on paper and I had a very competent adult life.
And I have also for some time now been quietly aware that the part of me that was most alive,
The part interested in souls,
In suffering,
In the actual reasons people are the way they are,
Was not really being used by the deal at all.
It was kept mostly for evenings and weekends,
Like an instrument you used to play but you no longer have time for.
And lately I've been making a slow,
Unsteady move out of that arrangement.
Towards a life that has more of me in it.
And I will not pretend it's going smoothly.
I will not pretend I figured out the finances or the identity or the question of how a person who has spent a long time taking their substance from a roll learns to take it from somewhere else.
But what I will tell you is this.
The hard part of leaving any version of the deal is not the work of leaving it.
It is the discovery that when the role comes off that you do not yet know who you are without it.
When the roll comes off,
You do not yet know who you are without it.
There is a real moment.
And you may know this moment yourself where you take the costume off and you realize that you have over the years been deriving rather more from yourself,
More of yourself from the costume than you would have liked to admit.
So that moment is not pleasant at all.
It is also,
I think,
Where the actual work begins.
Because what you find underneath is not nothing.
But it is also not for us that much.
It is very quiet.
It does not have a title,
It does not have a salary,
And it does not look impressive at parties.
And you have to learn slowly that this quiet thing,
The one that does not perform,
Is the closest thing you have to the self.
But that is all I will say about me.
I am still inside this.
I have not figured it out yet.
So here finally is the move.
And I am going to lay it down as plainly as I can.
Because the contemplative traditions have made it sound mysterious for 2000 years?
And I think mystery has been part of the problem too.
It is not mysterious,
It is simple.
It is just very hard to do,
Which is a different thing.
So the move is to not leave the deal.
The move is to stop locating yourself inside the deal.
That's the whole thing.
So the deal continues,
The job continues,
The bills continue,
The roles continue.
You don't have to quit your job and move to Bali.
What changes is the location of the eye that is doing all of it.
You move from it.
From inside the construction to underneath the construction,
From the costume to the bearer of the costume.
From the part of you that has a title,
To the part of you that simply is,
With no title,
With no role,
No story,
No productive function.
And notice gently.
That part has been there the whole time.
You just had not gone looking for it.
And I want to be slightly careful here.
Because the move sounds on the surface like the kind of thing a slightly stoned 23 year old would say at a music festival and I want to keep it firmly clinical So let me put it in the language of nervous systems and parts and ordinary practice and not in the language of mushrooms.
You have inside of you what we might call layers.
The top layer is socially constructed and that is the part that has a name,
A job title,
A CV,
A set of relationships,
A citizenship,
A set of opinions about things.
And that layer is real.
It is useful and it gets you through customs.
But it is constructed.
It was built over the years by your participation in particular families and schools and cultures and systems.
If you had been born in a different time or place,
That layer would look entirely different.
It is yours.
But it is not.
In any deep sense you at all.
Then underneath the socially constructed layer,
There is a layer which is more personal.
Your particular temperament,
Your sensitivities,
Your history,
The specific shape of your nervous system,
This is more durably yours.
So it might not depend on your job title,
It would survive a different career.
It is closer in.
But it is still made of something.
Of conditioning of inheritance and of formation.
And underneath that,
This is where every contemplative tradition agrees.
Despite using completely different languages to describe it,
There is something else.
Something that is not constructed.
Something that was not assembled out of pieces.
Something that was simply there before all the layers arrived.
And that will be there even if all the layers stripped away.
The Christian mystics called it the soul.
The Hindus call it Atman or the witness.
The Buddhists call it Annata,
Not Self.
And point it to a kind of awareness that contains experience without being any particular content of experience.
And the Sufis spoke of Qalb,
The heart.
Not the emotional heart,
The deeper heart,
The receptive heart that sees.
They are all saying the same thing and they are all roughly pointing in the same direction.
They're all saying underneath the layers there is a WHO that is not made of layers.
And the entire practical move,
The whole thing the contemplative traditions were trying to teach is to begin to live from that layer,
Not the construct itself,
Not from the role,
Not from the title,
But from underneath.
The costume can stay.
The roles continue to be played.
But the I doing the playing is no longer the role,
It is the wearer.
What changes when you make that move?
And I want to be honest with you about what changes.
The job is still tiring,
The bills are still bills,
They are real,
And the deal continues to be what it is,
Mixed.
What changes is that the deal can no longer touch the part of you that matters the most.
The construct itself continues to do its job.
You go to work,
You pay rent,
You be civil,
Be functional.
But it is no longer all of you.
There is somebody underneath you who is watching all of it with a strange calm.
Almost amused tenderness.
Who knows that all of this is temporary?
Who is not impressed by promotions or destroyed by setbacks?
And who is in some unaccountable ways,
Fine.
Not fine because everything is fine.
Fine because you are not finally made of the things that are not fine.
So this is what mystics were actually pointing at when they said the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
Or the Buddha nature in every being.
They were not making spiritual real estate claims.
They were trying to point the finger at an underneath layer and to suggest but you are not the constructed thing on the top.
One last important thing,
But this is where more spiritual talks lie to you.
This underneath self is not something you built.
It is not an achievement.
There is no protocol that gets you there.
You don't need to go for a Kundalini transmission class.
You do not earn it through 20 years of meditation.
Although 20 years of meditation may help you notice it.
It's already there.
It has been there since you were a child.
It is there right now.
And it was there when you were three and watching a leaf.
It is in fact the part of you that has been there the whole time,
Slightly underneath the noise,
Doing the actual seeing.
The work is not to construct it,
The work is to remember it and then slowly with much practice to live from it instead from the layer on top.
Here is the part I most want you to take from this talk.
Because I think the entire practical wisdom of every tradition is compressed into this one sentence.
You can live the deal fully without being made of it.
You can live the deal fully without being made of it.
That is the move.
Please don't refuse the deal and don't pretend the deal is fine.
Don't find your identity in the deal.
Live it fully.
Show up properly.
Do good work.
Love the people.
Pay the bills.
Eat the dinners.
Take the joys.
Take the sorrows.
And at the same time,
Keep the substance of yourself in the layer underneath.
The deal becomes the costume you wear to do the necessary participating.
But the you doing the participating is no longer a costume.
Now expect to forget this regularly.
The construct itself is very old,
Very practiced and very used to running the show.
So it'll every day climb back up to the driver's seat and you will every day have to gently notice and slide it back to where it belongs.
That is the practice.
That is not failure.
Then stop expecting the underneath self to be more impressive than it is.
It is not flashy.
It does not have a tear-tog.
It is in fact embarrassingly ordinary.
The quiet noticing.
That has been there the whole time,
Doing nothing in particular.
The longing for spiritual fireworks is the constructed self's last attempt to convert even your liberation into a brand.
But the underneath is quiet.
Quiet is the whole of it.
And be tender about the egg.
The ache that you came with,
The quiet and low ache of being here,
Is not going to disappear.
The deal is genuinely uncomfortable.
And a sensitive soul will register that discomfort.
Now here is where I will leave you.
Most of us,
For very good and honest reasons,
Will live and die inside some version of the deal.
And that is not a defeat.
The wisdom traditions were not telling people to leave their lives.
They were telling people not to become their lives.
They were telling people to keep something of themselves underneath the participation.
Some quiet inner ground and to live from there.
You can do that tonight,
Tomorrow,
In the next ordinary meeting,
The next ordinary commute.
So the work is not to escape your life,
The work is to find the part of yourself the deal cannot touch,
And to slowly with practice take up residence there,
While continuing with grace and good humour,
To play the part that the deal requires of you.
So once again,
Be in the world,
Do not be off it.
Wear the costume,
Stop being the costume.
Take the deal and refuse to become the deal.
And underneath all of it,
Quietly,
Patiently,
With no fuss,
Be the one who's simply there.
That is who you always were.
So welcome home.
Be gentle with whatever in you has been quietly aching tonight.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
And until next time,
Namaste.
