Addicted To Craving

Excerpted from Dharma Dialogues with Catherine. Recorded in March 2017 in Byron Bay, Australia.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Catherine Ingram.

I haven't produced a podcast in a while as I was moving from the U.

S.

To Australia and getting settled in a new home,

But we have now started up Dharma Dialogues here and the following podcast is excerpted from a recent full session recorded in March 2017 in Byron Bay,

Australia.

Good evening and welcome.

In our first world countries,

Everyone seems to be,

Almost everyone seems to be very,

Very busy,

Very harried,

Rushing about,

Hither and yon.

For what?

It's like an addiction,

An addiction of more,

More stuff,

More experience.

It's so ironic that we who are,

Who are at a point of wealth,

Generally speaking,

Which has afforded us a lot of leisure time,

We have jammed that leisure time with increasing to-do lists,

Basically,

Running about,

Rushing about,

The next thing,

The next thing,

The next experience,

The next technological upgrade,

And on and on.

It's very ironic.

And as one becomes addicted to it,

We lose a sense of what it feels like to be content.

We forget what contentment even feels like.

There's,

That's the nature of addiction.

It's a,

If there's any space in the day,

If there's any nothing much happening,

The impulse is to fill it up with something,

To run to something,

To watch something,

To listen to something,

To race to something,

To get something.

And if you happen to be someone who challenges this in your own heart,

It might appear to others that you're sort of missing the plot.

Like if you're not going to the next thing and trying to get the next thing and rushing about,

It might look kind of like you're not really happening in life.

You're not really quite with the program.

This is the cultural madness that's very powerful with the most powerful media ever known to human history,

Inducing and selling us on the idea that we should just constantly crave something,

Just stay in a state of craving.

Yes,

Yes it is.

It's working.

It works.

It's very effective.

And especially when there's a mass hallucination that agrees that that's how we should live.

But as we can see,

If we look a little bit deeper,

It's pretty toxic.

There's a lot of stress,

A lot of,

Really a lot of violence and illness and disharmony in relationships and so on.

In that sense,

It's not really working.

And it's so interesting to discover,

Like when I think about the times of my life where there were big chunks of time where I was sort of on easy street in a way,

Living in a slower culture where the day just drifted into the night and then the night drifted into the next day and it wasn't jammed and it wasn't racing around.

Those experiences have lived in my memory in a disproportionately powerful way.

It felt like life at last,

Life elongated such that now even 40 years,

41 years since I first went to India,

Actually,

Yeah,

41 years.

And I was over there for a year that first trip and it's astonishing the detail,

The vividness of that time.

And we really weren't doing much.

I mean,

We were basically living in monastic situations and retreat places and like that.

And yet the days had a richness,

You know,

And since that time as well,

The times of my life that are slower and where,

You know,

You have a cup of tea with a friend that might last a couple hours,

You know.

Those times really pop and really,

You know,

Drench one in the sense of being.

Whereas the rushing about and the hustle,

I can look back on times where my life was just so busy and I'm just running from one thing to the next.

And it's like a blur.

It's like all I can sort of remember is the busyness of it,

But I can't quite remember.

It's almost like I was just barely witnessing it from some remove that I wasn't even in it.

I wasn't actually in my own experience.

I was somehow just barely catching up with it,

Like running with my hat,

Holding onto my hat behind myself.

And yeah,

The good news is contentment is not far away.

It can be just tuned into instantaneously.

And suddenly there is a slowing down.

There's like an internal slowing down.

It doesn't mean that you're no longer thinking or that you're no longer engaged or that you're no longer able to get your work done,

But something shifts.

Something shifts and the forward thrust of more and more and more and more experience and more objects and this,

That thrust gets way slowed down.

And more and more of the day you feel content.

And you notice that you look at the moon kind of longer than is usual or you're taking a walk even just in your neighborhood and you notice all kinds of things that you just hadn't even noticed before.

Little things.

In fact,

It's one of the keys to this kind of contentment is that you begin to notice little things.

You become very prone to having little joys,

Lots of them strung together through the day.

Instead of hungry for the big thing,

Hungry for the big experience,

The big glamorous,

You know,

Knock your socks off experience,

Which you might chase and chase and chase and never have.

Instead you become accustomed to simple things.

Right?

Little,

Whatever your little pleasures and sweetnesses are.

And connections,

Connections with your dear ones.

Such that you can just show up in a very quiet,

Simple way.

Have a real heart to heart conversation.

And that can be actually how you always show up.

And your phone will start ringing a lot.

Because people are very attracted to that.

People,

We're very responsive to being in the company of someone who's present.

And who we have a sense is actually hearing us when we speak.

Not just hearing the words,

But hearing us in their own heart.

And these are the riches of life.

The connectedness that you might feel in those circumstances.

Many years ago I was having Dharma dialogues in Portland,

Oregon in the 90s,

In the 1990s.

And there was a guy coming.

He was a fireman.

And he rarely spoke.

But one night,

He was kind of shy actually.

And one night he raised his hand and he talked about how at work he was noticing that he was not really wanting to participate in a lot of the sort of locker room banter that was going around,

Which had been his culture as a fireman for many years.

And he was starting to feel a bit ostracized because he wasn't into the jokes and he wasn't into the sort of sexual innuendo and so on.

He just wasn't into it anymore.

He was finding himself feeling a bit isolated and feeling that people were sort of shunning him.

I forgot what I said or what the rest of our conversation was,

But anyway,

I'm sure I probably said something like,

But what can you do?

If your own depth is such that that is no longer entertaining or bearable for you,

Then what can you do?

Just go there and do your job and not expect to have camaraderie in that way.

Well,

Sometime later,

I don't remember how long,

Let's say six months or maybe a year even,

He raises his hand again and he reports that over the course of the time since he had last spoken,

Different of his colleagues,

Of his fireman friends would take him aside one by one and share with them some difficulty they were going through.

Somebody's kid was on drugs or wife is leaving him or different things whereby they knew that this was a safe place where someone would hear them in his heart.

And he spoke about how he had never felt so connected to those guys back in the day when they were all sort of rousing buddies as he did now when they're speaking on a different level on a different frequency.

So when you sit in that place of contentment,

Of simplicity,

Of quiet,

Just hanging around,

Just being not hungry for more,

You exude a clear presence that is kind of a safe space for others.

And there's one other piece I would like to say.

It's a gift of course to yourself to be in that way.

It's very,

It makes life easier.

It's very much a gift to yourself to tune in this way,

To be in that kind of simplicity.

It's also a gift to everyone who loves you because on their list of worries,

Your name does not appear.

And that is a lovely thing.

It's a lovely thing to have,

As we know,

When there's someone in our life who we know is just they're always pretty okay.

You don't have to worry about them.

One of my very best friends just died in January.

And from the time she was diagnosed,

Which was only September,

To the time she died,

I was never worried about her.

She was just so light through the process.

It's like she's my guru and dying.

She just breezed through it.

Right?

She was not on my list of worries.

I was on my list of worries in loss,

But she was not on my list of worries.

Thank you,

Catherine.

So for those of us that are caught in the busyness of life and have created a world of busyness,

Can you give us some simple steps to withdraw from that into greater peacefulness?

Because I'm very aware that it's calling me and I find it very easy to get sucked into the morass.

Yes.

Well,

I love that you notice that it's calling you.

So that's the number one first step.

And what I suggest in this case is that in the moments when you actually are just in total simplicity,

Those moments of,

You know,

Just really let yourself notice it.

There can be a tendency to kind of just barely land on it and think,

Oh,

That's nice.

And then immediately the attention goes somewhere else.

But if you can bring in the intentionality to notice,

You know,

It is really nice to just be content for a few minutes.

All right.

To just really start to have a little love affair.

Let the attention brighten up and sparkle a little when you notice,

You know,

Recently a few weeks ago,

I went with my friend Juliet.

We went to dinner in Lennox Head and it was a beautiful night.

And there was a crescent moon and Venus,

There was a crescent moon and Venus was sort of right next to it.

And the two of us stood out at the curb and we just looked at the moon and Venus for quite a long time.

I mean,

We just sort of knew that we were having this experience.

And then we got this wild thought that we would go over to the ocean.

She had a little Bluetooth speaker.

We went over to the ocean and just danced in the moonlight.

And it was so much fun.

And the night really sparkled for me.

It really was like,

It was like some time out of time,

You know,

Like that to really let yourself,

Let yourself go actually,

You know,

Let your real self play,

You know,

Let your real self,

Right.

This is not a dress rehearsal and we forget that,

You know,

We just kind of grind along,

You know,

Day after day grinding along and we get into a rut with it.

You know,

We forget how to just let our spirit soar.

So sometimes it takes kind of a strong intention initially until there's a habit.

And then you can let the strong intention go because the habit has taken root.

But it's amazing how,

And it's wonderful how fast that habit can shift.

You would think having practiced the other habit so long and so diligently that a new habit wouldn't stand a chance,

But because it's so pleasurable,

Right.

And so it seems so true and so real.

And it becomes more and more obvious that time is flying by,

That there's more of our personal history behind than ahead.

In most of our cases here tonight,

Not everybody,

That you begin to realize,

You know,

How very precious,

Right.

How very precious this is,

Despite how hard a time it is too.

I mean,

Let's face it,

We're living in crazy times.

But even so,

There have been lots of other crazy times in history.

Ours is a particular difficulty.

But longevity was never guaranteed to anyone through time.

And yet,

So many lives are squandered on the,

You know,

The pile of unfulfilled dreams and the someday story.

And,

You know,

So my main recommendation is,

A,

Honor the fact that you do have the pull,

You know,

This,

It's like you're a plant turning to the light in the window,

Just organically.

And also notice what it feels like when the sun is actually on you,

Right.

Notice when you're in those moments looking at Venus or looking into the eyes of a baby that's sitting next to you on the bus or in the traffic,

Right.

All those moments,

All those little moments start to feel like real life,

Right.

And this dream life of chasing starts to feel unreal.

Hi.

Yeah,

Thank you for all your words of wisdom.

They're wonderful.

But I need to get down to the basic because I don't really understand about Dharma and the Dharma community that you referred to last week.

I was going to ask last week,

But I didn't have the courage.

So,

Yeah,

Just could you elaborate a little bit more on that,

Please?

Well,

It's very,

It's very informal in a way,

The Dharma community.

What I mean by that is not some organization or you know,

Cult,

But rather people who love the Dharma.

And what do I mean by Dharma?

What I mean by Dharma is the adherence to kind of an underlying harmony through life,

Like the celebration,

The interest in and the adherence to finding that stream,

Like a Taoist stream that rolls through,

That is the easiest way,

That is the most,

The wise route.

That's what I'm referred to as the Dharma.

It's sometimes classically translated as the truth.

It's sometimes translated as an equivalent to the Tao,

The law,

The sort of the law of things.

But as I've lived with that word for so many years,

What it means to me is an underlying harmony in any circumstance,

Right?

So sometimes it's a time to speak,

And sometimes it's a time to be silent,

Sometimes to act,

Sometimes like to everything there's a season.

It's knowing,

It's knowing the,

Well,

I used the phrase last week,

Which is one of my favorites,

That it's the service to the greater good that's part of it.

And it's easily accessed.

It's written already in your heart.

Nothing,

There's no belief in it.

It's not a system.

It's not a religion.

It's what is clear when one is awake.

And that's why there have been these similar words spoken over so many centuries.

And the way that we can test the metal of whether they're true or not is that they ring true,

And they've been ringing true over the centuries.

Whereas so many other ideas and philosophies and belief systems and religions have become antiquated.

They did not stand the test of time.

Thank you.

Yes.

After coming last week,

I was struck by the fact that I'm widowed and my kids have all grown up and run away,

So I live alone.

When I tend to go in to make dinner,

I'll automatically switch on Radio National because there's all sorts of interesting programs.

But I realize it's not just that,

It's also about avoiding silence.

Sometimes I just switch it on because it's there.

So to choose silence is quite a challenge.

Let me say another thing about this though.

You don't have to sort of impose silence on yourself if in fact turning on the radio is interesting to you,

Gives you a feeling of having a bit of company,

Especially if you're alone.

That's all fine.

You can actually be experiencing that from a very quiet place,

Right?

But if there's a constant running away from any type of quiet,

Right,

That you've just got to fill up things and you've got to have a sense of like,

Almost like a sense of panic if you don't have the next thing ready to go.

That's something to look at.

But otherwise,

I think it's actually totally fine to be,

If it's interesting to you and listen to the news or listen to a program or whatever and enjoyable,

Enjoy it in a simple place inside yourself,

Feeling content,

Right?

Feeling content.

So again,

Not to impose some sort of monasticism that isn't really your fit.

For some people it actually really is their fit.

For some people,

They just prefer silence to anything.

And if that's just not so for you,

Then so be it.

Enjoy.

Hi,

Nice to see you.

Yes,

Just wondering if you could speak to us about freedom.

Freedom.

And in what context do you mean?

In any context.

Are you feeling unfree?

Well,

I'm a mother,

Well I was a mother of two children for 20 years,

So I haven't felt really free.

I'm just starting to get my freedom back now and yeah,

I'm not really sure what to do with it actually.

I see.

So you've been raising children for 20 years and they're out of the nest?

Oh,

I've still got one at home,

Yeah.

But you're feeling a lot more time on your hands,

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah,

I guess freedom is in the moment sort of thing,

Is it?

It's in the now.

Well,

It's also a perspective,

It's also a state of being,

Right?

Some people are very free in very unfree looking circumstances,

Right?

And other people who have enormous personal freedom,

Nothing's binding them,

They have plenty of money,

Nobody's hanging on them,

Nobody expects it,

You know,

Are trapped in their minds,

You know?

So it's really a condition of awareness.

And that's not to make light of certain horrible circumstances,

Prison situations,

Which would be very hard to feel free in,

Even though it can be done.

There have been people who did manage to be very free in those circumstances.

I mean,

I would be very challenged,

I think psychologically,

If I were in prison.

That's my worst nightmare,

Being in prison.

Yeah.

Everybody's worst nightmare.

Yeah,

Exactly.

Or trapped in my own body if it were,

You know,

If you were locked in with nothing else moving maybe except being able to blink your eyes or something,

All of those kinds of things,

Those very extreme situations we haven't been tested in.

Ram Dass once said something so interesting after his stroke,

Sometime after his stroke.

And it was at a point after the stroke when he was quite debilitated.

He's gained some speech and motion since that original time of post stroke.

But at the time that he said this thing,

He said that his greatest fear had always been something like what happened to him,

Right?

That something like that,

Being paralyzed,

Having mobility taken from you,

Having speech taken from you,

Etc.

Had been,

You know,

Naturally a huge fear,

Especially for someone like himself who was so articulate and relied on that as his power.

But he said that the actual experience of it was not at all what he had feared.

Not that it was a day at the beach,

But it wasn't as horrendous,

You know,

It was really a moment to moment thing whereby moment to moment you're dealing with the circumstance,

Right?

You adapt to whatever is going on.

Yes,

Right.

That's right.

We are amazingly adaptable,

Really.

Yeah,

We are.

We're very,

Very strong creatures,

You know.

We come from strong stock.

We do.

We come from,

Our ancestors were the winners evolutionarily.

Most of everybody died before they reached puberty and had kids.

And for the longest time,

You know,

Lots and lots of people died,

Babies died,

You know,

But to make it to puberty and then to have children over the course of these centuries,

Many centuries,

It meant it was a pretty hardy stock and moreover than to keep doing that generation after generation.

So we do,

We're very adaptable creatures.

So you have a huge advantage in addition to the biological evolutionary advantage.

You have another advantage in that you have a love of the Dharma.

And that will,

Just that simple,

As Atticus just said,

Just that simple attraction holds you in good stead.

Because even though you might be far away from it,

In a time of crisis,

Your mind will come racing back.

It'll basically be the only sanctuary you can find.

I've had that thought so many times in my life,

Even recently.

I've had the thought of like,

I only have the Dharma as sanctuary.

In other words,

I can't find a stable external sanctuary.

Yeah,

Nothing is permanent.

Everything's changing every minute of every day.

And can go up in smoke any second.

Yeah.

But that one understanding,

You can just rely on it as your lifeboat.

Is it like love?

Dharma like love?

Well,

Certainly love,

And of course it's a word we have to be careful with,

But love is much more accessible when you're in your clear heart and mind,

Right?

Love,

Whatever it means to you,

Bubbles up.

And mostly,

As opposed to what sometimes one has thought about love as something you might get,

Mostly it bubbles up in the context of wanting to give itself away.

That's mostly what's happening with it.

When you feel that kind of,

When you're really sitting in your quiet,

In your clear,

Clear,

Clear space,

Your experience of love is something that wants to flow out.

Not necessarily have to come in because,

Not that you would deny it,

But that you're experiencing so much wellbeing,

So much love,

So much tenderness.

You're already experiencing it.

So it's like,

You're sitting in love.

Often people use the phrase,

I'm in love,

But it has a particular object,

A person or something.

But when you're actually sitting in love,

When that's your,

Your part of the state of your being,

It's really an outflow,

Mostly,

That's happening.

It's pretty sad that we don't all feel it all the time,

Isn't it?

Yeah.

It's kind of like though,

You know,

It's kind of like,

I mean,

Mothers feel it,

Don't they?

Loving mothers,

Lots of mothers are very loving,

I've noticed.

And it's kind of like the way that one feels about one's children becomes much more universal of how you feel about all the other beings,

Right?

You feel a certain familial feeling,

Right?

A wanting,

A well wishing,

Wanting the best for them.

That's part of the Dharma as well.

Because it's,

It's what naturally occurs.

You don't have to go looking for it.

You don't have to sit around and say,

You know,

Do meta practice and all those things.

You don't,

That's not necessary.

It's extraneous.

You love your children,

But you're always worried about them.

Yeah.

But you know,

When you're sitting in this,

I like to say simplicity of being,

Right?

Just being,

Right?

There is a kind of surrender to what is,

Right?

So,

I don't mean a passive abdication of any responsibility or anything like that.

But what I mean is that when something happens and it's happened,

You just,

You find a kind of strength whereby you just take care of the details with as much love as is possible for you.

Right?

And you also don't lay on your own,

It's like the more you can just be there as that,

Then you're exuding an okayness in the circumstance,

Right?

Your friend has had a car accident and now there they are broken legs and whatever.

One of my friends was just in a car accident in Maui a few weeks ago,

A number of weeks ago.

He was in the hospital for weeks.

He just got home.

He's pretty banged up,

Really banged up.

But I called him recently and he was just himself.

I was so happy to hear he just sounded like he always sounds.

And so we talked about the whole thing in a kind of just a straightforward way with kind of without any morbid drama with it.

We just talked about it.

It's easy to slip into the victim mode when you have when bad things happen.

Sure,

Into like seeing it as a tragedy and all of those things.

So again,

In this quiet,

In this simplicity of being,

I don't mean to say that you wouldn't feel compassionate if someone… We should have known you back then.

Yeah,

But you know now.

And others will benefit from your knowing.

And you will also benefit.

So you talk a lot about being in silence and doing things out of silence.

So like you can watch… because I know that people have talked a lot about Papaji and he used to have a TV on a lot.

There'd be this huge presence whenever people went to see him.

And there'd be this huge silence around him.

Yet they'd be watching TV and whatever.

And I always found that,

Initially I found that a real contradiction because I thought,

Well how can that be?

Because I always thought,

I always imagined silence as a monk up on a hill and meditation and no noise around him except for the natural sounds.

And sometimes I see that I could drop into silence.

I can be driving the car and I'll be in silence and it will last for whatever it lasts for.

But for me it's not a constant state at all.

It's more,

It's rare.

So what I'd like to know from you is more about how you go about making that state become more present in your life or more permanent.

Well it's again,

It's the falling in love with that simplicity and it starts to gain a kind of,

It becomes larger in your taste of existence.

It becomes more and more strong such that even when whatever is going on,

It's happening in this field of your own simple awareness that's just floating,

Right?

It's just floating along.

So noise or you're watching a drama.

He used to watch Bollywood movies amazingly.

Sally used to live in the house,

Must know very well how much kind of noise there was.

But you certainly had a sense that that was not happening inside of him.

That his being was just this strong presence.

Because when you'd speak it would be transmitted very strongly.

So yeah,

It would be,

It would not be a very stable understanding if some noise threw it off its course,

Right?

Some people live in circumstances where there's almost always noise,

Right?

They can't go away from it but they can still experience.

I said last week,

You don't have to quiet the mind.

You just notice the quiet that contains the mind.

And it's the same with,

You don't have to quiet the world.

You notice the quiet in your own being that is aware of the world.

So that it becomes stronger and stronger.

And you're not in resistance.

If there's some troublesome thing happening that you can change,

Then go ahead and change it.

But if you can't change it,

You know,

Krishnamurti once said something like,

My secret to happiness is that I don't mind what happens.

Right?

So it's like that.

You're just okay,

This too.

Yeah,

And I've experienced that sometimes.

It's definitely not a common state.

So to notice the silence in myself.

But then again,

It's not,

If I go actively searching for the silence in myself,

I don't,

I won't necessarily find it like that either.

Because it's not something that I can actively search for either.

It's something that is in me and present.

Very good.

But it's not,

I mean,

It's like,

If I start searching for it,

This is not correct.

I would say it disappears.

Well,

No,

It doesn't.

But it's like,

I don't even have the words to describe it because I actually don't really get it.

Because I mean,

Words fail me because on the one hand,

I see there is a way I can sometimes get there,

But I don't really get it how I get there.

I mean,

I don't really,

This one I'm asking is how,

Because you're saying,

But you notice a silence in yourself.

So I mean,

I don't know if you can say more about it.

Yes,

Make no effort.

Make no effort at all.

Well,

That's the thing.

Sometimes it just turns out randomly.

I haven't even like,

And then I'll be like,

Hope might be,

You know,

A few minutes to a whole day.

It depends.

But you know,

But what I want to know is,

Well,

So keep on asking is how,

Whereas even though I know that's probably not the right question,

But you know.

Yeah,

Make no effort.

Make no effort.

Rest.

Let it be.

And if the mind is jumping around,

Don't worry about it.

Don't make that another level of problem.

The mind jumping around doesn't matter.

Right?

There's a line from the Aastravakra Gita.

The awakened one is not distracted even in distraction.

Now I've added a bunch of other words.

Is not irritated even in irritation.

Right?

Is not confused even in confusion and so on.

That there's a certain coexisting awareness that on one level there's a bunch of phenomena.

And on another level in your being,

Maybe it's a witnessing presence,

Whatever you want to think about it,

The words aren't going to matter really,

Or be accurate.

That becomes more and more where you're hanging out with your attention.

So see,

I say all the time,

And I'm not kidding,

I don't care what my mind is doing.

It's like a madhouse.

Right?

But then you're not following your thoughts either.

Correct.

The thoughts are there,

But they run through.

But underneath it all is this,

What do you want to call it?

The field or silence or,

But it's,

But everything else is running,

Can be running over it,

But that doesn't really matter.

Correct.

That's how it is for me.

I,

Most of the time it's just running like a crazy stream.

Right?

Like a,

Like a,

I've sometimes used the example of,

You might be old enough to know this.

When I was a kid,

When I was a kid,

The commercials at the movies had this little bouncing ball that went along the words,

In fact,

Along the syllables,

You know,

Like,

You know,

You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodan or something like that.

Do you know those?

Maybe it's a very American thing,

But anyway,

A little bouncing ball would go along as if you couldn't read onto the syllables,

Right?

On the screen.

And in a way it's like our minds are just bouncing along,

Bouncing,

Bouncing,

Bouncing from one thing to the next,

Next thing,

Next thing,

Next,

Right?

And some of them get caught,

Like it gets in a swirl,

Like a particular thought form becomes very,

You know,

Either very interesting or fanciful,

Attracts you in fantasy or is horrifying,

Scares you to death.

You start giving it more energy,

More attention,

Right?

Start really playing with it,

Dancing around.

Okay,

So that habit can shift.

That habit,

I can tell you,

Will shift.

You can just be disinterested.

It's mostly nonsense,

Right?

And you start to parse out what is actually relevant and what is complete nonsense and most of it is nonsense.

So you then just keep resting.

You don't care what it's doing.

I used to describe it years ago.

It's like having what I called a crazy old aunt who lived in the attic,

Right?

And she's up there babbling and ranting and screaming and complaining,

Right?

And every now and again you say,

There,

There,

Dear.

You holler up there,

There,

Dear,

Right?

You can't kill her,

Right?

Your crazy old aunt in the attic,

Your crazy old uncle,

Right?

There he is.

So meanwhile,

You're busy living your life,

Right?

Enjoying your life,

Taking care,

Operating on a different,

On this pristine level.

And the mind does its own thing and you really aren't bothered with it.

People make the mistake in spiritual circles,

A huge mistake,

That they're going to transform the mind.

They're going to purify it.

Someday it's going to be altruistic and think nice,

Brilliant,

Genius,

Spiritual insight thoughts.

And you know,

I would not wait for that.

Right?

Could be waiting a while.

Huh?

Could be waiting a while.

Could be waiting,

You know,

Until your last breath and it didn't happen.

No,

I wouldn't wait for that.

I would just accept the goods as they are.

The mind is very useful as well.

Of course it is.

Some more than others,

Yes.

For working things out.

I mean,

You know,

For working things out,

For designing things.

Sure,

Of course.

It's an amazing machine.

But then of course it can get,

You know,

Really caught up in some sort of anger or having a go at some person.

And it's like,

You know,

I'm gone.

That's why I'm saying,

You know,

Take the good bits,

The few that there are,

Right?

Take the good bits,

Use the good bits,

The functional,

The,

You know,

The few brilliant insights and so on and creative impulses and loving impulses of,

They will stand out,

Right?

They will stand out as they're lit up like these crystal things.

They will stand out in this,

You know,

Opaque morass of nonsense.

Right?

And you can stay,

It becomes amazingly easy.

I used the example last week.

You were here and heard.

When I look at my email in the mornings,

I instantaneously don't even see the spam.

I just pull out my eyes,

Just land on the only relevant few emails that need to be addressed.

An astonishing amount is otherwise spam,

Right?

So it becomes the same with your own thought process.

There's some that are functional and necessary and,

You know,

Those will pop for you.

The rest you can just really ignore.

And especially when it's telling you a spooky story,

Whatever that story is,

A little spooky story.

And it can become,

Because the,

Because the biology is wired for fear response.

Sometimes it's like they say in Zen,

You paint a tiger on the wall and become afraid of it.

Right?

You're painting tigers on the wall in your mind.

So you have to be careful about all that.

And the same with fantasy.

Some people paint fantasy instead of fearful things.

And again,

Then even though that's not as unpleasant,

It's very soupy and woozy and it's not real life.

Right?

There's whole,

There's whole generation now,

A couple of generations who are involved in,

It used to be called second life online.

Right?

People just living in cyberspace with little cyber avatars,

You know,

Living a second life.

Well,

That's a kind of explicit representation of what people do with just fantasy.

Right?

So these are the things to watch and to just gently,

Gently,

Gently.

You don't have to impose anything extra.

All you have to do is come back to reality.

Right?

You just find yourself in a little,

Either nightmare or fantasy.

And then it's just move the attention right back here.

Simple,

Simple,

Simple.

Ease.

Nothing special.

Just ordinary this.

And then that ordinary this becomes quite extraordinary.

Like I said at the beginning,

You become very prone to noticing small joys,

Small delights,

Connections,

Little sweetnesses here and there.

Not to worry,

Not to even,

Not to even keep accounts of how you're doing.

Right?

Don't worry about how yesterday I was so clear and to damn crazy.

Not a worry.

Don't even keep the account.

Just come back,

Hang out,

Do nothing,

Make no effort.

This has been in the deep.

You can subscribe to these podcasts on iTunes and also access the entire list from my website,

KatherineAgrim.

Com.

We also welcome your tax deductible donations in support of the podcast production.

Just click on the donate button found in the upper right of the homepage of the website.

Till next time.

Reviews

Amazing thank you 😊

Thank you... 🙏 I found your analogy of a crazy aunt living upstairs with our crazy thinking minds very helpful. In the interests of equality, I have a mad uncle up there! 😅 Thank you... 🙏

Loved these teachings today. Thank you.

Thank you for this talk, it appeared just at the time I needed it 🙏🏼

Your presence and mentor is deeply appreciated thank you so much for sharing The practice🙏🌹✨💕

Thank you Katherine

Lovely, and so what:-)) Appreciation! !!

Absolutely wonderful! So calming, reassuring and wise. Highly recommend.

This is so inspirational and yet down to earth. Thank you for setting me straight on a few misconceptions.

Great words of wisdom explained in the simplest ways. She has become a favorite now ! Every podcast is so enriching ! Thanks so much !

This is wonderful ❤️

Thank you for the beautiful message. Exactly what I needed

Just what I needed in this time in my life..........it will be a joy to minimize the wanting and be content. Thank you 🦋

Excellent talk. Modern wisdom. "Make no effort." Thank you. Namaste. 🙏🏾✨

Enjoyed the discussion

Fantastic !!! Thank you🦋🌷💕❤️🙏🏻

What a wonderful expierience and guidance - so clear and simple - thank you so much!

Excellent. I want to listen to more of her Dharma talks. So much wisdom