Medicine Talks

This talk is not for the faint-hearted. It carries raw, unfiltered truths that can transform your life. As children, we are often disconnected from our "inner management system" and it's imperative to rekindle that connection if we are to lead inwardly guided authentic lives.

In a world that chases success and happiness externally, Bassam, soberly reminds us that true happiness lies within. To return to a state of unbridled child-like joy, we must first become aware of our human condition.

As the talk draws to a close, Bassam offers a crystal-clear description of meditation's transformative power, and concludes with a spontaneous guided meditation session.

Prepare to embark on a journey of self-discovery, healing, and the profound wisdom of "Medicine Talks" by Bassam.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Bassem.

Thank you for joining me.

How are you feeling?

What's your current state of mind?

What's your current state of being?

Just notice it.

Freedom lies in the power of noticing.

Simply by noticing,

We allow,

We see,

We permit reality to take its due course.

And it's for this reason that mindfulness and meditation have withstood the test of time,

These ancient practices that have survived to this day.

How can I do life in a way that minimizes my suffering and that maximizes my joy?

We are caught up in this experiment trying to figure out how do we do life in a way that is joyful.

Philosophy aside,

Spirituality aside,

All schools of psychology aside,

All learnings,

All ideas aside,

It boils down to this.

I am here.

I'm required to live my life.

I notice that if I do life in a certain way,

I suffer.

If I adjust and correct my way,

I don't.

How do I do less of the first and more of the latter?

And we don't have to go anywhere outside of ourselves to know how we are doing.

So I'd like you to take a moment to tune in,

To allow your breath to be natural,

And to let your outward gaze turn inward,

And to let your senses feel the entirety of you.

Don't think,

Just sense.

Is there sadness?

Is there tranquility?

Don't think about it,

Just look.

There's great power of liberation simply in looking.

The human keeps himself,

Herself on a treadmill of busyness,

And so we never stop to look.

There's nothing more powerful than the stoppage of time in order to look without thinking.

You look,

You sit,

You turn your gaze inward,

You let your breath be natural,

And you allow the sense that is in you in this moment rise.

It might be grief,

Sadness,

Happiness,

Joy,

And you don't do anything with that.

You just look.

What is the presenting emotion?

What is the presenting sentiment?

To receive that sentiment in the here and now,

Being with the arising sentiment,

Being with the arising mood,

Being with the arising emotion,

Without judging it,

Being critical of it,

Just looking.

And in that looking,

Reality is permitted to resolve.

And what is resolved in the moment,

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

So by allowing yourself to be with what is presenting in the moment,

You're allowing a whole chain of historical realities to rise to the surface and to release.

The human condition is a condition of incessant thinking that keeps us on the go.

It's not done to us by anyone.

We do it to ourselves.

Bob Marley famously said,

None but ourselves can free our minds.

None but ourselves is responsible for our incessant thinking.

And we notice that thinking starts to quiet at once when we begin to just be.

We have been sold on the idea that our fulfillment lies outside of ourselves,

On the belief that our fulfillment comes outside of ourselves,

In space and time,

And is due to things working out outside,

Is due to outer security.

And because we are busy,

We don't stop to investigate into the truth of this idea,

If it is indeed true that our fulfillment is an outer phenomenon.

In childhood we are told that our reward comes from outside and is according to good behavior.

Childhood conditioning disaligns us from our core,

What I also call our self-navigating or self-managing system.

Childhood conditioning talks us out of our connection with our intuition in favor of outer ideas belonging to history,

Which are fine,

But they are not uniquely our own.

All of us possess an inner guiding system.

It's also called the deeper self or the higher self.

It's simply that which guides you authentically to be you,

Instant to instant.

We are talked out of our connection with that,

And we are connected with outer ideas of good behavior.

Consequently we lead disconnected lives,

Caught in cycles of unfulfillment.

And when someone tells us to look inside,

We don't even know what that means.

We are prejudiced to thinking,

And so we try to think about what it means to look inside.

But thinking cannot tell you.

It cannot give you answers because the answer is beyond the mind.

It's behind your thinking.

The answer is there when you separate yourself from your thoughts to discover that your thinking and your reality are not the same.

Being prejudiced to the mind,

However,

We think that our thoughts is who we are.

So we never find out who we are.

We never discover who we are.

It's probably the most grievous misfortune that the vast majority of people never see themselves in a lifetime,

Never meet themselves.

This meeting of the self is called enlightenment,

It's called nirvana,

Self-realization.

It's been referred to by many different names.

And through conditioning we embody all these ideas about life,

About what it means to be human,

About what it means to be an individual,

And about what constitutes a good life.

We are told that success is a product of achievement and doing,

And we are told that happiness is a product also of achievement.

It's something that we have to get,

Not as something that we are.

So we begin to chase success and happiness rather than knowing success and happiness within.

And we begin to be guided by these ideas as opposed to our inner self-management system that knows us because it is our higher self.

There's a wonderful Sufi story which talks about the plight of this person who is trying to pick fruit from the shadow of a tree.

No matter how much he picks,

She picks.

No matter how many baskets he fills and saves for a rainy day,

It's never enough.

No matter how much fruit he picks from this shadow of the tree,

Nothing consoles the soul.

And yet all that's needed is a slight adjustment,

A little turn to the left,

And there's the real tree.

And that's the condition of the human.

And that's what we're all doing.

We live in the shadows of ourselves and never finding contentment,

Never getting rid of the inner anxiety,

The terror within,

Never getting rid of the jealousy and the envy that others are doing it better.

On occasion,

Crisis has to happen.

Maybe an accident,

Maybe a car crash,

Maybe a fall,

Maybe a loss,

Which forces us to stop.

You didn't manage to create moments in your life of stoppage every day,

And so life was forced to create a situation to force you to stop.

Life loves us to such a degree that will customize an experience in order for us to find our way back home.

We are lost souls here on this planet Earth,

Finding our way back to the light.

That's why we come here,

In order to find our way back to love,

To the kingdom of heaven within.

It's not outside,

And it's certainly not in time.

The way out of heaven is thinking.

Thinking is always a separation from self.

There's this idea that you have to have thoughts in order to live.

There's a difference between conscious thinking,

Which is dedicated,

Which is purposeful,

And unconscious thinking,

Which is habitual,

Automatic.

The vast majority of people have never had a conscious thought.

It's just unconscious thinking,

The mind recycling the past,

Motivated by terror,

Fear.

I'm not a good boy.

I'm not a good girl.

Daddy doesn't love me.

Makes the mind race into creating strategies in order to win my daddy's approval and love.

My teacher's recognition,

I'm better than my fellow student.

Look,

Mommy,

I got a better mark.

That's what's behind the mind.

And so meditation is an ancient solution to this ancient problem that is expressing itself in contemporary ways,

In modern ways.

Not enough money,

Not enough security,

Wrong people in power,

Other people are ridiculous,

Always looking outside for the cause of my suffering.

When my suffering is simply an addiction to thought,

Conditioning separates us from our self-managing system,

School separates us from the now,

Trains us to look at the present as a problem to fix.

It was a place of play.

And now school is telling us that the now is a problem and we have to look to the future to fix it.

And we begin to live in a future that never comes.

And that's why when you look on the street,

The friends you are talking to,

Your boss,

People who are serving you in the chemist,

The drugstore,

The supermarket,

No one is here.

They live in time,

In the mind.

The masters of wisdom tell us it's very rare for a human being to encounter the concept of enlightenment.

They also say then,

Within those who encounter the concept of enlightenment,

One in a million practice,

As Socrates put it,

Know thyself.

These words were written on the proverbial doors of Delphi in ancient Greece.

We are living misguided lives,

Caught in cycles of unfulfillment.

Now surely,

Life didn't create us in order to be miserable.

So what do we do?

Meditation.

Meditation is the art of realigning us with our core,

With our God Self.

Through meditation you learn to disconnect from your thinking.

Imagine that your attention is a double pointed arrow.

One point is pointing at me in the screen and the other point in your arrow is pointing back to yourself.

Between you and me,

There's an invisible shaft bringing your attention from the point on the screen back to you.

So going from point one pointing outside to point two pointing back at you.

So imagine this invisible shaft and I want you now to travel backwards from the outside back to yourself.

That's the first contact.

You've come from the world,

The outside point,

To you.

That's the first contact.

First contact is with your body,

Not with aliens.

Now imagine that this point is at the area of your nostrils.

The area where your upper lip meets your nostrils.

Imagine that that's where that point of the arrow is.

And now let your body just breathe.

You might close your eyes if you want and keep your attention on that point of the arrow at your nostrils.

Let your body just open and breathe.

Don't control your breathing.

And then just keep your attention at this point of the arrow at your nostrils.

And now I'd like you to just feel the breath traveling into your nostrils.

Your body expands with it a little bit.

Don't force it.

And then the breath falls out.

And you just keep your attention,

Your focus,

On the point at your nostrils.

The seam where your upper lip joins your nostrils.

And keep coming back there.

That's your anchor point.

And you're breathing softly and your body is just opening and relaxing,

Releasing.

When you notice that your mind,

Your thoughts,

Your stories,

Your desires,

Your fears have taken you away,

You just bring your attention and focus back to the second point of the arrow at your nostrils.

And you might begin to feel tinglings there.

You might be able to feel the air touching your upper lip.

But always your body is open and always your breathing is natural.

So you're not doing breathing techniques.

You're not controlling it.

All you're doing is noticing.

Meditation is the art of noticing.

And this way we come out of the mind and into the body.

Out of the mind and into the body.

Out of the mind and into the body.

And then you notice that your attention has been stolen again by your thinking.

You don't make a problem.

You just bring it back.

Don't try to stop your thinking.

Don't try to stop your sensations.

Don't try to stop your breathing.

Just notice.

And as you do that,

When you do that,

Your body takes this opportunity to release and to unwind and to de-stress.

All the build-up of tensions and hypertension is going back all the way to your childhood.

And if you build a practice of this simple thing and you do it regularly,

It means you are answering the call.

The call of your inner soul.

And the whole universe will bow down in honor.

And suddenly the inner blessings will start to come.

The deeper you go,

The greater your blessings,

The softer your heart becomes,

The gentler your thinking becomes,

More focused.

And you begin to become a magnet of good,

A magnet of service,

Loving service.

People start to seek you out for guidance.

Help me to come back home within myself.

I'm caught in the world.

I'm caught in cycles of unfulfillment.

Sit.

Close your eyes.

Put your attention at your nostrils and watch the breath.

And when you notice your attention has been taken away by your thoughts,

Your job is simply to bring it back.

Meditation is simply the art of disconnecting from your thoughts and plugging into your breath.

And slowly,

The breath will take you to yourself,

The managing system.

Thank you for listening to my audio.

And I really hope to see you on another one.

Reviews

Thank you for guiding me back to myself in a moment I was lost outside.

Excellent guided talk. Your voice is very soothing. Great concepts in this

Thank you for guiding me back home to myself this morning 🙏🏼

I love this talk, such precious pointers, and ending with breath. This is how to achieve bliss. Thank you Bassam 🙏🏽💝💚🌱🫱🏽

“Thinking is always a separation from Self” 🤍🤍So true. Thanks for the talk Bassam 🤗🙏

Thank you Bassam for taking the time to record edit and post some of your live talks which allow us to listen to it again and again very interesting talk as usual