The Only Work We Need To Do To Save Ourselves & The World

In this talk, given at an open class, we discuss the process of spiritual self-inquiry that leads to self-realisation, and how we can begin to work with, and overcome, what some call the ‘pain body,' throough a simple process based in love and awareness.

Transcript

The reason that I set this up was I could just see a need for something that was kind of not aligned with any particular religion or group and yet wasn't kind of floaty new agey-ness. Not there's anything wrong with floating new agey if that floats your boat but at the same time kind of didn't have the groupishness about it because sometimes something I can see a lot of is is that we mistake a great deal of cultural activity and group activity for for the sacred when actually it's got nothing to do with it whatsoever. Kind of learning to say things in a particular way or dressing in a certain way or there's loveliness about ritual and there is something to be said for tradition as long as it points back to something pure but trying to kind of you know wear the clothes of something is not the same as actually awakening to the truth of oneself. The message at the heart of what we're trying to do is the same message as all the teachers that we kind of have come to know across the kind of thousands of years but leaving the cultural aspects aside you know we have a bit of incense because it's nice and we light a candle. I've always been really interested in I'm only interested in what actually works and I've spent a lot of my life doing things that didn't work and if I can offer somebody even sort of a slightly better route than the route I took kind of thing then I'm kind of just keen to kind of show sort of findings from the path basically. My joke with myself is I've made more mistakes than anybody else so in kind of the meditational spiritual life so it might be nice to kind of help somebody not make those mistakes. The core of the practice is really kind of based in what is traditionally called self-realization which is about actually just starting to live from the life that you have sprung from, The life that's in you, The consciousness that comes before the mind and where we make a lot of our, Where all of our difficulties in the world come from is living from the mind because the mind is conditional it's like a basket that things have been put into. You're born because you have sprung from life and so you manifest in this world and then you're given a name which is fantastic because you've got to have a name, Nothing wrong with that whatsoever but then straight away as lovely as people might be or not lovely as people might be conditioning is begun to put on to us you know in our family to be one of us these are our values to be a member of this religion these are our values this is what we believe politically this is what we believe this is what a good person is this is what a bad person is and of course you know this is what you have to do in order to be fed in this family those things become very, We identify with those things and we believe that's who we are and all it takes is some kind of tragedy to happen which is usually how the world works that's why suffering kind of keeps happening. Suffering comes along gives that conditioning a good sort of you know slap on the side of the head and we realize that we're not what we thought we were a lot of the time you know and that's if we're lucky usually what happens is that we cling to our conditioning even tighter and yet the truth of ourselves is not something far away Jesus famously said the kingdom of heaven is within you know for what we're talking about to be true and one of the big things I always say in this class is please don't believe a word I'm saying I am NOT trying to teach it's not how I try to present I'm not the guru type or anything like that I just want to try and present something and then you look for yourself and that was really important and the Buddha said that and Buddha said look and see for yourself it's really important that you test this in every way and that's each individual's responsibility to do that but there's nothing difficult about it since you are already life the only thing that stops us experiencing the beauty of what we really are is our addiction to our identities the things that we live through and we might think that by letting those things go that the this terrible egoic behavior is going to come flowing out and that's not what we're talking about we're not talking giving in to the worst impulses that's something I've often heard people say what it is is actually not letting go of those things but just just starting to sense the truth of yourself inside so tonight's class because normally what we do is there are there are there are three traditional traditional gateways to experience life as I call it all the kind of the consciousness awareness that is and those are traditionally the gateway of silence which is when you then and we use this a lot in this class which is where you become aware of your senses and then you allow yourself to notice that your senses report to something silent in you which comes before the mind and then you begin to rest in that and amazingly that just allows you to be in that truthful place also something that works very very well is is what's called the gateway of the body and this is what Eckhart Tolle uses if you've ever read it if you've read a new worth or the power of now he talks about just feeling the life in your right hand feeling that in yoga Nidra works in a very similar way you just can feel the life in you and that too moves us into that kind of quieter place so we're not doing something we're not counting breaths and we're not kind of watching and we're not kind of labeling our awareness we're noticing that we're not the things arising in the mind and then the third gateway which is kind of it's not the big one or anything like that but it's it's it's one that comes in time it's not something that can be done it's just something that that comes in time which is is that you once you begin to recognize the consciousness the awareness because you know who you are you just are and you sit to kind of have a kind of deeper experience of that I was reading Dogen recently Dogen is the person who who brought Soto Zen into the world and he was asked you know why did the Buddha meditate why did the Buddha sit and he answered well the reason that the Buddha continued to meditate was not because he needed to but just to actually to get to dive deep into life into the bliss of truth and reality you know so it's about just the experience of reality but the way we're gonna work this evening is slightly different because we've got a break coming up I wanted to kind of look at it's not different it's exactly the same thing but just another way of looking at things each religion has a kind of higher counterpart you know I'm sure you know that you know so like with Christianity you have Gnosticism with Islam you have Sufism with Buddhism you have Zen and with Hinduism you have Vedanta Vedanta and Zen are very very close to each other as is well actually I'm actually personally very fond of Quakers as well something I sometimes do is just go and sit in a Quaker group because it's just being you know it's wonderful but what Vedanta does is it uses a process called the process of inquiry and this is not an intellectual inquiry it maybe it begins as an intellectual inquiry and it just is predicated on a simple question who am I and it's really interesting if you look at Vedantic teachers I always tend to look at students rather than the teachers because it's very easy to kind of say these things and basically the basic Vedantic teaching is is that anything you can witness is not you anything that's witnessable outside of yourself is not you and so as you begin to kind of rest into your consciousness you deliberately allow yourself as things arise you allow yourself to see whether if you were seeing it then what who is seeing it that's basically it if it's seeable who is seeing it and you arrive at a point where there's nowhere further back to go and you're just left at the core of being and so it's the same thing it's exactly the same thing as kind of arriving in the sense of life that's in you teachers like Nisarg Dat who else can I think of Romana Marishi this would be kind of a primary way that they would work with people not necessarily the only way because it actually depends on the I don't like the word student but the it would depend on the person who's kind of come to have instruction depend on their relationship with their consciousness with their awareness and where they're up to and it may be that you know the best thing we can do like for me at the moment with the loss of my mum I'm not I'm not meditating on my own at home so either Abba my partner is either sitting with me or I'm doing a lot more yoga because there's just there's a choking aspect it doesn't matter that you kind of practice for many many years and things like that a death is a death and and it you know you maybe you kind of see it in a slightly different way but it still has this this tightness that it's that it brings we have human lives a Maya and and it has its grip it's just that you view it in a slightly in a different way you're not reactive about it so what Romana would do and Nisarg Dat would do is they would kind of they would try first the inquiry way of doing things with people and if you know if there was a lot of reactivity there or holding on to a particular part of their identity then they would say well actually you know let's do some yoga let's let's just be in kind of a wide lovely open awareness and let's go and look at the trees you know go for a walk or do some yoga or whatever so it's a you know or you might kind of do the following of the breath meditation or you might do trattak so all meditations are good it's all good but sometimes I think we we let ourselves kind of start not too easy but just a little bit kind of we just don't go for it because there's nothing to go for we already are and but we kind of think there's some sort of paradigm we've been taught and I don't know where it's come from that we have to be a seeker that we have to take our time that we have to melt the ego away and kind of work for many many years until we achieve an enlightenment experience and then that takes kind of the life away or something like that which is absolutely not true what does take time is us ungripping and allowing ourselves to be the beautiful life that we are to be the flowers of life that we are that's going but yeah my own kind of change because I lived a very different life until just a few years ago very egoic and then I just started looking for what was truly alive in myself and then looking for what wasn't and I thought to myself well I don't I can't do what everybody else is doing and and and I don't know if this is mad or not but Jesus seemed to be saying this and the Buddha was saying this and this poet that I love over here Rumi and Kabir and DH Lawrence were saying this kind of thing there has to be some truth in this doesn't it is this or are we all just kind of going on like this so with as much love as I could I started attending to this and and this Agdat the same sort of thing happened with him and with Tole the same sort of thing happened with him that there's just this kind of feeling that we're all living crazy false lives and I can't do this anymore what's real and then you have this sense of life in you which we all have and then it's just like well can I just live from this can I live from this kind of light that's inside me and noticing that that all of that things making me react well that's not me reacting that's just like there it is again and this feels like dead and secondhand so what if I don't do that what if I just stay in the life and for me slowly the shell kind of came off that's why I thought it'd be interesting to talk about what we what some people call the pain body now what in yoga or Buddhism just very quickly two minutes a two minute version of samskaras or the pain body what what seems to happen such a big subject we actually need to do a retreat really to kind of and have a week-long retreat where we deal with the pain body that was something in time I want to put retreats on as we live our lives as we deal with our condition responses our reactivity and then as suffering results because of that which it ultimately does because that's all that we can have even if we live a perfectly nice life a nice hemdenbridge life for example I've got nothing against a dream which I love living here but I see the bubble you know that we live through a lot of the time or we're very lovely and intellectual as I was you know or you know whatever it is that we live through we know that it's not real we know that it's not real and all you have to do it's better to kind of look outside of oneself all you have to do is look in a cafe and you'll see people who are supposed to be friends they've never met each other you see people who've been married for years sitting at a dinner table in a restaurant and they say they love each other and yet there's nothing nothing there they've never met needs are meeting needs or perceived needs are meeting needs and then our needs are either met we believe I'm met by that person or are not I love you if you do that for me you'll love me if I do this for you the contract of marriage etc etc etc I hear all the time I were I used to work in schools teaching creative writing a lot and I see teachers talking to children in false voices I see parents talking to children in false voices I see people come in this room and speak from their intellectualism from their knowledge from their learning I've done it I'm no better than anybody else and it's not a life it's not good enough for us because we're just life itself with these beautiful we're so beautiful and we're just like your life is coursing through us and yet we've learned to kind of live like this and then a suffering builds we tend to kind of view ourselves through the experiences that we've had through the suffering that we've had this person has betrayed me I hurt myself like this in an accident this person has died on me this terrible thing happened this person has done things to me and eventually it forms a kind of shell which become very deeply worn grooves in Vedanta they call it Vasana in Buddhism they call them samskaras in you know tolay calls it the pain body and this thing becomes kind of like a self-protecting wound it's a wounded part of ourselves that if anything comes anywhere near it you just lash out we react you see you see this happen a lot on a Saturday night when people are drunk around towns people who are kind of mates one minute and they just the next you know it's just gone like that kind of thing things just break down out you know we use alcohol we use sex we use drugs to try and get beyond the pain body to try and find a place of peace a place of freedom but we were looking always the temporary means looking always to something not real insubstantial something that's going to end but because we don't know any other way because we don't just sit and in presence with our children because we've not been sat with by somebody in presence with us and just experience the natural love of another human being that is not a created thing we we just we just maybe if I keep drinking maybe if I keep taking the drugs I'll have this enlightenment experience maybe if I do enough yoga I'll become lovable and somebody will love me I don't know if you recognize any of these things I'm talking quite hard but this is what it's like but it's that thing in us that just lashes out that reacts or that clamps down so tight and abuses ourselves and punishes ourselves that's the pain body and it's very very subtle and it's got like little hairs and feelers that are always out there looking for somebody who looks like that person who hurt us that person who mugged me that man who did that to me that woman who did this to me and it seems like that's it and there are personal pain bodies and then there are cultural pain bodies and then there are national pain bodies and then the world it seems to form into kind of countries which is really quite interesting if you look at different nations they have different reactive tendencies this is the main thing that is in our way and you can't do anything about the national pain body and you can't do anything about somebody else's but you can do something about your own and you can't do it with your mind but the mind is a tool that we have a beautiful astonishing tool that can help that when it is illuminated by the consciousness within which all that means is that we trust our consciousness a bit more and that we maybe perhaps become a bit more honest with ourselves radical honesty with ourselves which doesn't mean going around going I am so bad I have a pain body it's just radical honesty of there it is and the pain body is a bit like rumpled stilt skin the second we see it arising if we just say if we have the courage to say to ourselves that's the pain body if we name it and perhaps I have this thing of putting our hand on my hand on my heart we do it in the class sometimes I just say put your hand on your heart at the end of meditation if you find yourself the pain body arising if you just put your hand on your heart attend to the senses so that you can kind of come back inside 80% of the pain body stuff is taken care of because aware the second you name it it can't continue you notice the tendency to want to keep going at first but first it happens and you notice afterwards it happened then it's then you notice while it's happening and then you notice just before and then you're basically pretty much in consciousness and it's it's basically formed from hard ego and it will melt slowly as we just keep returning returning returning to consciousness over and over again and our own hearts not creating love but just genuinely going like that it's the pain body that's the only work we need to do as human beings to save this world to change this world it could be done in in no time at all but we just don't have the courage for it a lot of the time politicians particularly trade on the pain body if you look at what's happening with our kind of people who want political power look at how they poke trying to find the pain body that will cause the most kind of reaction see that and that's how we play each other as well that's how people have power over you if you feel that somebody's controlling you having power over you watch for how they know what your pain body is and go like that Christmas with your family that fight that always starts there's that thing people closest to us can see it very clearly and they can go for it like that and the person who loves us is the person who can see it and doesn't do it and actually you know and if we had the courage Pima Chodron who I just adore until you know there's no more adoring left in me kind of thing just like Pima Chodron she's just astonishing if we have people who are very close to us who are also just wanting to work with truth if you could point out the pain body arising to each other and then not kill each other for it that would be a really wonderful thing so in one of her talks she she comes up the idea of kind of perhaps these people on retreat start working with each other but instead of saying look your pain body is showing you just kind of pull your earlobe you have a little sign you know which just means you're off you're in there you're trapped in it and sometimes it's just too tight to do anything about but you can be honest about it afterwards and just go and apologize you don't need to beat yourself up about it it's going to apologize if it's happened and if that person actually cares about you then they'll forgive you you know and if they don't they don't without you can do about that but you've learned from it that's the only thing that matters as we learn to bring consciousness more and more to that our mind becomes illuminated and that stuff starts being washed out cleaned out but there'll always be a couple of bits left I say this every week you know because these things run so deep in the human life they leave two or three tracks in each person that are quite particular to each person but they're usually around relationships with other people or money or sexuality or something like that and they're not forgetting rid of but because we were based much more in awareness then just knowing that they're there and their tendency to rise we understand what what caused them to rise up because we keep bringing consciousness to it we actually just begin to lose interest and so it never goes away there's always something kind of going to try and poke at you and you'll be tender in that spot it's like if you kind of broke your leg once and it's still aches ten years later it's still there but you're not going to go down that reactive route because you have this space of consciousness as as your healing and protection but that's the that's the problem that we face it's up to each one of us to do something about that if we choose to because that's what we're that's what we're I don't know but I assume that's what you're doing here that's why we're here is to be free of those things and to kind of live our life more fully and to kind of enjoy our lives and and love each other and love yourself and and that's the thing that's standing in the way it's nobody else there's nobody else standing in the way and once we've dealt with samskaras life is an awful lot lighter and illuminated and beautiful it doesn't mean you escape suffering because people are going to die we're going to die we're going to get ill but we can attend to ourselves with consciousness and love and each other and meet each other because to be met is the greatest of things thank you so much I really do feel like we need a retreat soon I think to kind of a could have done a lot more this evening especially on this subject you know the fasteners of the pain body it's the place where true growth is that's what we need to attend to to genuinely have what we want in our lives and yet it's very easy to start sort of looking out for this stuff and we need maximum love and forgiveness for ourselves for this because you can't just get rid of it by thinking right I'm not going to do that anymore it doesn't go like that this is this is the deepest entrenchments that will kind of bring us back again and again and again and keep rising up again and again and again but when we meet it with presence and when we meet it with love for ourselves and forgiveness and not getting into a victim or a blame cycle about it but just yeah that thing happened I'm aware of that just letting awareness come each time it will quickly quickly go away I reckon anybody can be through their stuff in three to six months honestly you know it does seem time-based because this stuff has taken a lot of time to accrue I think it can be free of 80 to 90 percent of our stuff in just just a very short time period honestly just with an honest loving heart that's all that it takes and just the daily turning up again and again and again in everything that we do in every meeting that we have with other people in every interaction with our partners and so on in the people that we meet at work and in the time alone by ourselves that's the great one who are you when you're alone not like we're kind of sitting watching it like this but just just as we kind of deepen our consciousness our awareness of our consciousness bringing that back again and again that's it if we could just do that for a while really really make a difference bless you thank you so much

Reviews

Such deep and profound wisdom stated in a way that is easy to understand. Thank you!! 🙏🏼💖

Such wisdom.... “Working on ourselves will remedy most of the obstacles to our own freedom”.

And “real” connection is so rare... Indeed.

Thank you for this... and for your clarity.
Blessings
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Well I see I wrote the comment above over three years ago. This is an "outstanding" talk... how wonderful whatever providence led me to revisit. I so hope it doesn't get lost in so much content here on IT.

Bless up dear John. You are an honest light in a world that yearns for truth.
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Beautiful John. I have been practicing a long time but this kind of practice is the one that brings up a lot of stuff and I’ve realised that in my seeking to ‘get there’ there is a very strong pain body as well as physical pain and a health condition on top. So in one way I need to drop the labels as I often identify as that but in order to heal I also need drop below the fears and anxiety, although there is courage and a willingness to do so it’s not an easy thing as fears compound. I’m grateful for your teachings and will be a little more willing.

Gosh...this is a terrific talk! I look at my IT stats of consecutive days and 1000s of hours of meditation and realize: The Journey starts here.
Thanks for opening the gate.
Namaste.