The Me Project

There are many types of co-existing awareness. There is an awareness of the functioning level of getting around in daily routines—and co-existing with that is an awareness of beingness that underlies the functioning level. The experience of just being is often what people feel most enlivened by in various exalted experiences—the quiet awe that comes when witnessing a birth or seeing the northern lights.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Katherine Ingram.

The following is excerpted from a session of Dharma Dialogues held in Melbourne,

Australia in November of 2019.

It's called the Me Project.

I often speak about something I call co-existing awareness.

And there's lots of types of co-existing awareness.

For instance,

You can be driving in your car and listening to the radio,

Singing along with the songs while driving your car,

Making all the right turns and putting your signal on or your wipers if you need to.

So that's an example of a co-existing awareness.

But another type of co-existing awareness is an awareness of the sort of functioning level of getting around and getting by and doing things in the day.

And an awareness of the beingness that underlies the functioning level.

So there's also the operation of the personality that's in a way the part of the functioning level of the day.

You relate to people,

You show up,

You speak your words,

You have a personality.

But then deeper on the beingness level,

There really is no personality.

Right?

It's just you know,

The moment when you wake up in the morning and you just wake up and for a moment that maybe it's just a blink.

You don't know your name.

You don't know.

You don't know anything.

You don't know anything about your to do list.

Right?

You wake up into just being.

Now that that fundamental experience is actually very precious.

Just being.

It's very restful,

Isn't it?

It's a lot of what happens for us when we when we're just there's no real program.

There's no agenda.

There's no big story running.

Right?

It's the kind of thing that many people remember as these glorious moments,

These sort of awakened moments of their lives.

They might be present at a birth or death.

Or they might have seen something so beautiful in nature.

Right?

The Northern Lights or whatever,

Such that it stops the the predominance of the of the functionality program and the personality program.

And it throws you into the purity of beingness.

Now I'm proposing,

And I have a feeling most of you already know this,

That you can actually start to use your own attention to basically be in this stream of beingness much more frequently,

Much more predominantly.

Because let's face it,

In our sped up world of doing and having and getting and accomplishing and figuring out and all the little bites of information that we're under a deluge of each day,

We can overlook beingness.

It's kind of lost in the jumble.

And you kind of get through another day and kind of crash out at night,

Where the system has to go to a shutdown,

Right?

Has to just shut itself down for eight hours,

If we're lucky,

And start up again,

Rev up again.

Some friends of mine were telling me,

Friends who are in California who you probably know in recent weeks there have been these massive fires.

And the big electric company actually turned off the electricity for about a million people because of the danger of the fire lines of the electric lines and the fire risk that they pose.

So a few of my friends have been commenting how nice it is that not only do they not have electricity,

But lots of their other people don't have electricity.

So when everybody doesn't have electricity,

Then no one expects to hear from you and you don't expect to hear from them.

And you don't have to be on the clock every second of the day,

Making sure your email is caught up and your text messages are caught up and your Facebook is caught up and your whatever,

All your various means of connectivity are all up to date.

They're living like people lived a long time ago.

Now they only got to do it for four days.

The electricity was off for four days.

But as several of my friends,

They were very lucky.

They weren't in the situation.

They were just in the area where they didn't have electricity.

They weren't in the fire zones.

Those people are not so lucky.

But the point being that it takes almost an act of will,

Whether on our own parts or on the part of nature or the electric company,

To unplug and to just step aside and to just be to really value that to really honor that to really let yourself have that.

And it informs everything you do.

It informs your work,

It informs how you show up with other people,

It informs your way of being kind.

It informs your clarity of mind.

I spoke the other day about how it actually makes you so much more efficient.

Everything you do,

You there's a kind of elegant simplicity,

You can just with a clarity of mind,

You can see the easiest path through whatever you're doing.

You let go more easily.

When you see that something is going,

You let go.

And sometimes you see that it needs to go.

Though it may still be a loss,

You realize it needs to change.

So you bow.

All of this comes very organically with being much more simple in your own innocence,

In your own presence.

Because a lot of the jumble and a lot of the activity is in a weird homage to a presentation of the self.

You want to,

You want to matter.

We find all kinds of ways for that to be experienced.

Some people want to matter by having lots of money,

Or fancy things,

Or position,

Or name and fame,

Or,

Well,

Fill in the blank.

This is very unique to each.

So it's this me project that most people are engaged with.

They're building the me.

It's a lot of work,

A lot of activity,

A lot of mental stress.

And again,

Turning to this simplicity of being,

You are content a lot with very little.

You find yourself feeling very grateful.

I was talking to one of my friends just a little while ago on the phone.

He called me.

He's a farmer near Armidale where there's terrible drought.

And his farm was down to a day's water before he hooked up this other thing on a nearby property that he has to get water.

But he was down to a day,

A day's worth of water for his food,

For his farm,

Which has lots of animals and lots of gardens of food.

And I could feel,

Though he's not very,

My friend is not very dramatic or he's quite understated,

But I could feel the relief in his voice.

I could hear it,

Right?

Something as basic as water.

It was ironic somehow because as he was telling me this,

It was literally pouring here.

I mean,

Just rocketing down.

I was very aware of this moment that we were sharing.

I felt a kind of enhanced presence in it.

I felt the beingness and the natural empathy that I was experiencing that was very,

Very connected.

So I speak about these same things a lot,

That in this presence comes gratitude,

Comes clear seeing,

Comes clear understanding of the preciousness of all of this.

Doesn't take things for granted because it knows,

The awareness knows the impermanence of things.

That's not hidden.

That's obvious.

But we forget,

Especially when we're just in this swirl of constant presentation.

We're like in a trance.

So we come to a situation like this where it's a signaling to your system to just stop and be,

But it's also a signaling for you to wake up out of a type of trance.

It's just constant thrusting forward and this just resting in beingness.

In the presence and just letting it be,

Thinking about that,

I've been thinking the last couple of days.

So I was having a conversation with a friend.

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and we were talking about trauma and about past trauma,

Specifically child things that have happened to you as a child that keep repeating,

Not just patterns,

But they inform a certain pain or a certain belief that's however it shows up.

Past trauma,

Whether it be growing up or experiences,

Whatever.

And in the letting it be as is,

Letting it go,

Open palm.

We were talking about the need for not remembering in order to reignite the old pain,

But to reexamine something and maybe move it along or something,

Whether it's with therapy or with tapping or whatever people do.

To actually go back and revisit this,

The pain without reigniting it and having to relive through the trauma or anything like that,

Which is kind of,

But then doing it with awareness.

I'm not sure what my question is,

But the question has something to do with there are two sides of this.

There's two hands of this and there's doing it with a great deal of balance so that you don't lose the awareness of the now,

But then you do actually have to trigger in the past.

And I know Eckhart Tolle calls it like the pain body,

How to deal with a pain body.

And I haven't looked into that.

I just know that that's the term.

So just,

It's a really interesting subject.

And we were talking about something specifically.

So what do you have to say about that?

Yeah,

Well,

Of course there's a place for a sort of therapeutic investigation if needed.

And only to the point that it's needed and complete.

I think sometimes people fall into a kind of habituation of kind of going over and over their story and they just get,

They're basically living their present life in a story of what happened in the past.

So I would say that's not so helpful or useful or wise.

But if there are patterns that are,

As you say,

Forming the life now and are perhaps re-triggering other kinds of pain,

The pain body,

Or causing messes in your relationships that are similar every time,

You know,

And this is a clue,

Of course,

If a certain thing keeps happening with different people,

The same thing happening that's problematic and you're the only consistent variable in the situation,

Then of course one has to look at the patterns that are being played out.

So that's very useful to do.

And usually it's suffering that will inspire you to look at it.

I mean,

You have to start with a certain ground of general awareness before you'll even be interested in being introspective.

A lot of people just never are.

There are patterns and their conditioning is such,

So strong,

Or their opportunities of introspection are just not there,

That they just go through the whole of the life in highly conditioned ways.

But for some people,

They're naturally introspective and other people who might not necessarily be introspective,

But they have tremendous opportunity and it knocks on their door and they answer it.

And yeah,

It's quite helpful to a point,

But beyond that point,

It actually is not only not helpful,

It becomes counterproductive to constantly be thinking about your story and what does it mean and kind of going over a little minutia of,

He said that and I said that and then we did that and what did I think of that?

How did I feel?

And I grew up in a time of lots of those kinds of encounter groups and therapeutic things.

It never was that attractive for me.

I was always in some silent meditation retreat,

But because I lived in this world of that was happening in my culture,

In my counterculture also,

I was privy to all the goings on of those things and lots of my friends were in formal therapy for years and years and years and it was a big part of our culture and of our conversation.

But I did notice that I felt some of my friends were sort of addicted to constantly thinking about the me story.

And I think sometimes therapy can instigate more of the thinking of the me story than is really healthy.

And unfortunately for the therapist,

I mean,

I've known so many therapists,

So many therapists have come to Dharma dialogues over the years,

You know,

And one of the things they come,

They come,

They can,

They're confronted with is they'll start to realize they need to set their clients free.

They will see that they've come to the end of the therapy,

But then that puts them out of the work and the income from that person and who and also who they would have developed a great affection for.

So they've enjoyed it themselves.

So it takes a kind of high integrity person to keep making themselves redundant in their own job.

And that's why transpersonal psychotherapy became so popular.

That then moved people into having a therapeutic context that then became more focused on transpersonal work,

Meaning more beingness kind of interaction and engagement and setting free the story much more quickly.

But finally,

Even that after a point,

You can't just be talking about that over and over again either.

So I've definitely met a lot of therapists who actually quit being therapists or who had to really change the way that they were doing what they were doing that after a point they couldn't really do talk therapy and story therapy.

They could do it until it was not needed.

So in our own case,

We look at that,

We know.

And I even know when I've played out a story,

Either in my mind or in processing with friends,

I can hear when it's like I'm just going over the same ground.

I've already mined it for every last mineral in it.

And all of that,

That I just spoke about,

Falls under the category of coexisting awareness,

Whereby on the functional,

Therapeutic,

Psychological level,

There's a story happening,

There's activity.

And on the underneath,

What streams beyond and below and through is just this beingness that is more and more where I recommend hanging out,

Where you really do see all of this as a tempest in a teacup,

As one of your people there said from your homeland.

And that you don't have to strain so much about figuring it all out.

You know,

You let things slide.

You don't strive for perfection or makes your personality or only if it's causing a problem.

One of the things that's very touching to me is how earnest we all are.

Like we want to be good and we want to be better.

You know,

There's something very dear about that,

You know,

It's very touching and very,

You know,

Like the human spirit tries to just rise in all its ways,

You know.

And in the spiritual world that's very common,

You know,

People want to be,

They want to make it,

They want to make it to some level.

Back in our Buddhist days long ago,

Early practice days,

This meme went through among our teachers who I look back now and realize they were just these young Westerners,

Barely,

Barely older than their students.

And anyway,

We thought they were the bee's knees.

But somehow or other they put out this meme that if you could be mindful for 24 hours,

You would become enlightened.

So there were,

I never attempted it,

Of course,

But there were more earnest people than I around the scene.

And so there were people that are,

We'd have these long meditation courses,

Silent meditation courses in,

You know,

Freezing Massachusetts,

They would go on for months.

And you'd see people in the hall sitting on their cushion,

Hour after hour after hour,

But they'd be asleep while sitting,

They'd be like this the whole time,

Trying so hard to be,

To hit the 24 hour mark.

No one did,

Of course.

So we didn't get to test the theory.

Of course,

I don't believe in any of that anyway.

But it just goes to all the ways we,

The endeavors of climbing our mountains,

You know.

Do you believe that some people don't want to be better?

If people say that,

I think it's a,

Maybe it's a truism and I hear what you say.

I'm just wondering.

I don't want to be better.

Because you've achieved it?

Not at all.

No,

No,

Not at all.

No,

Because I accept exactly how I am.

I'm not,

I'm not on a project about myself anymore and haven't been for a very,

Very long time.

I stopped seeking,

You could say,

In the early 90s.

After 17 years of meditation practice,

I met a teacher who basically said,

Call off the search.

And it wasn't that I stopped seeking because I found,

It was because I saw the futility of seeking.

So seeking is another way of saying to be on an improvement project,

To be on an betterment project.

So what I propose is that it's in the deep acceptance of yourself as you are,

The profound acceptance that basically says,

You know,

I didn't grow this actually.

I'm not really doing it.

You're not growing your hair.

You're not making your heart beat.

You're not making your autonomic nervous system work.

And you're not even thinking your thoughts.

The thoughts are rolling through.

So it's all a very,

It's a program that's here in space,

Operating fully.

And the only little wiggle room you really have,

And that's also debated as we know that even that's debated,

Whether there's free will or not,

Whether there's any control of this or not.

But I always say if choice arises,

Choose freedom,

Choose love,

Choose to direct your attention in an intelligent way.

So you have this little tiny rudder on your big ship of conditioning and of genetics and all of that to move your attention around a bit.

You can move your attention.

And my recommendation is to move the attention into just the simplicity of being and a deep acceptance that knows that the conditioning arises,

That sometimes anger arises,

Jealousy arises,

Hatred arises,

Fear arises,

As does mercy,

As does compassion,

As does joy.

And one can incline the attention in the ways that are much more beautiful and heartful and connected.

That certainly can be an intention.

But in terms of self-improvement,

In terms of beingness,

In terms of the really core beingness,

I'd say give that one up.

And it's in the giving up.

The transformation occurs in the surrender,

In the relaxation,

In the saying yes to yourself.

That's where the transformation is.

So it's a self-fulfilling solution.

Yes.

Do you mind using the.

.

.

It's a self-fulfilling solution.

Stop trying to be better or different or in so doing you accept yourself and you're much more peaceful.

Yes.

That's true.

Yes.

That's where the transformation is.

But the thing is you'll be pretty much as you were in terms of the patterning.

It's just that it gets lighter and easier to deal with and you don't operate so much from it.

Like if there's negative patterning that you have been operating from in your life,

In the relaxation and in the non-fighting with your own dear self,

You have a lot more space around the arising of an impulse and the acting out or the speaking of words.

There's a space.

It still may arise just as it ever did.

And I think that that's one of the things that people get confused about is that they notice that the craziness of mind can continue and they get horrified by it because they think they've been doing all this work and that it should stop.

That the mind should be more pure or that the thoughts should be more altruistic or whatever one's idea of improvement might be.

But what if that isn't the case?

What if the thoughts are similar to the conditioned mind that you're used to but that now they're just like their little poofs that go by in an instant and that you really don't pay much attention to.

And there you are just enjoying being.

And then there's this background of you know,

Stuff that's going on that is no longer the ruler of your activities.

I've been thinking a little bit lately and I feel really,

Really privileged and particularly in the last couple of months to be,

I know it sounds a bit of a cliché,

But I seem to have found all these really wonderful women around me and intelligent,

Really fun,

Don't take themselves very seriously,

Very self-deprecating,

Really energising and inspiring.

And they're not doing anything outwardly,

I suppose,

To try and convey that.

It's just in the association,

In the conversation,

In the giggles.

And I'm really,

I'm delighted to be amongst them,

But I'm also really proud of our gender,

I suppose.

And it's just been,

It's been really uplifting and you know,

I think I went through a tricky time with the relationship and I kind of decided to get myself out of the pattern that was difficult there.

And then,

I don't know if it was coincidental,

Pure luck,

Or whether I allowed it,

I'm not sure.

But it's been,

If that's the case,

It's been a wonderful coincidence.

Oh,

That's beautiful.

I like that.

That is a privilege,

What you've just described.

That's a great privilege.

And the last one that I guess,

Is I have a daughter who's now become a young woman and watching her learn and reach out and become stronger and also falter.

But being able to assist her has given great joy as well.

Oh,

Beautiful.

That too is a great luck in life,

Isn't it?

I think I was a bit of a sod yesterday.

But we all have those moments and sometimes I think those moments are necessary to appreciate the other way of being.

Yeah.

And also when they arise,

They arise and you rectify whatever mess they might create,

But then move on and keep relaxing into being where it's just okay.

Yeah.

I love that though.

Yes.

My brother has three grown children who also have children of their own,

But he calls his children his homegrown best friends.

I love that.

I'm enjoying just sitting and allowing it all to flow over,

Which is part of what I came for.

I'm mindful that it's not a seeking thing.

It is a curiosity.

One of the things that I found myself thinking about in listening to you is the irony of being and how there's something about the deep knowing versus the need to know.

I don't want to overthink it.

I think that's how I experience when I do have those moments of being,

That there's just this deep,

Deep,

Deep knowing.

I watch a lot of people trying to figure it out.

Yes,

Yes.

I do too.

That's the irony of it,

I guess.

It is the irony,

Yes.

That slightly humorous.

It's totally humorous.

In fact,

It's interesting you used that word because my teacher Poonjaji used to say,

When you recognize this,

You'll laugh because it's so obvious.

You can't believe you've made such a production about it.

The ridiculousness.

And also the schlep of seeking all of the books and going to faraway lands.

All of the earnest struggling and striving.

And yet that is an important part of the process,

I think.

For some.

Others can actually call off the search,

And actually skip most of the search.

I think it's a wonderful thing for those who find that at a young age.

Exactly.

And to tell you the truth,

It's luckier now for younger people because there are so many people who have seen this and have seen through the seeking and who one has access to.

It used to be,

If there was such a person around who could be an elder,

A mentor of some sort,

They'd have to be in your village maybe.

But now people can be sitting in a room in Estonia and have these inclinations and be able to find a resonance with someone who actually speaks their language.

So their heart language.

So yeah,

It's very interesting about the complication of the conceptual mind for something that is actually so direct an experience and is actually a familiar experience.

It's just that we keep overlooking,

We keep brushing it aside.

I often do this little practice of my own.

I mentioned it the other night in a different context because I use this little practice for lots of different things.

But I view things from my imaginary deathbed.

And that informs all kinds of things.

Like gratitude,

I spoke about it the other night in the context of being grateful for every little difficult,

Boring day.

Looks pretty good from the day of the deathbed.

But also at the deathbed,

The profound experience of being,

Especially if you know that that is going to not be the case soon.

That recognition of how profound to just be,

You know,

And from that understanding how silly it is to just constantly be thinking about some other life or some other thing or some other time or some other way of your life working out.

From that vantage point you see the absolute futility of spending all,

You know,

And you just want to say,

Sweetheart,

Make it easy.

It's fine.

Just hang out.

Just cruise.

There is also something about,

We still have to do.

I don't think,

There's not too many people who can,

You know,

Exist in this society and not do,

Not be part of the doing.

That is certainly the case.

The doing can be applied to things that one can have some sort of result in,

You know.

And we do have to feed ourselves in the way that things are arranged in our civilizations that we tend to move about in.

You know,

They don't just hand out free food unless one is extremely lucky and born into some rich family or whatever,

Marry somebody rich or is rich themselves somehow.

But yeah,

People,

We have to work.

We have to figure out.

I sometimes reflect on the fact that,

You know,

We basically eat three times a day and some people nosh more than that.

I mean,

That's a lot of activity that has to go into that,

Acquiring the food or cooking it,

Let alone getting whatever amount of resources that you need to get to acquire the food.

And then on top of that,

All the other things of modern life,

A car,

A place to live or at least money for transport somehow.

And all of those things,

Yes,

We have to do a lot in our societies,

More than we used to.

Yeah,

It's the what so.

And that's why I highly recommend don't add on to the to-do list.

This whole other project,

The me project,

You know,

Getting me enlightened.

Yeah,

Take that one off the list.

And back in the 70s,

When I first went to India,

It was like this transition time,

Really.

Because in those days when I went,

Sadhus could still ride the trains for free.

And everywhere they went,

People would feed them.

So I had a couple of friends who were very dedicated practitioners and who wore robes who were sadhus.

And that's how they lived in India for years.

They didn't touch money.

And they spent a lot of time in quiet ways in monasteries and doing practice.

And if they did move from one place to another,

They rode the trains for free.

And people would give them food on the trains.

And it was a way of life where you could drop out in a sense and just be.

You know,

The winds of your own impulses move you around.

But that's not the case even there anymore.

And yeah,

So a lot of doing goes on for us.

But I find as I started out with in the deep immersion in being,

It informs the doing.

So the doing flows out of beingness.

And so you find ways to do things as elegantly simple as possible with a kind of eye to kind of heart's eye view to creating as much space around things as possible.

Another thing that I think is that this kind of shift allows your movements to be less.

I sometimes use the example,

For instance,

Do you know the game of Go by chance?

It's a board game.

It's very ancient.

It came out of Mongolia,

But it's extremely popular in places like Japan and Asia,

But a lot in Japan.

Anyway,

It's an incredible,

Insightful game.

But it's very simple in its execution.

It's just a grid with white and black stones.

You play them one at a time and you just put a stone on an intersection on the grid.

And then the opponent puts a stone on.

Well,

The idea is to control territory.

And there are simple ways that that's understood in the game of Go.

You control territory by these stones.

So a Go master can put one stone on an intersection and control what the other player who's less experienced takes 15 stones to try to control.

One stone.

Everything is very understated in this game.

So it's called a well-placed stone.

A well-placed stone.

So one of the things that happens,

I believe,

I experience,

I think I experience in this process of falling more and more in love with just simply being and being averse to complicating my life with any kind of extraneous promotion of myself,

Is that I have a lot more well-placed stones.

And I know,

I notice when I start putting too many stones on the board,

Right,

I notice this is getting crazy.

There must be a simpler way.

Does that equate to losing territory?

When you have too many stones?

Well,

It equates to losing territory in that when you have created a mess by being overly complicated,

By being confused,

By having your own ego needs be blinding you,

Then as soon as the awareness soaks in about that,

You let go.

Right?

You either find a way to make amends or fix it or let go.

And you can do that.

And that becomes kind of a well-placed stone of its own.

You can have that be the end result of some things that were your projects and that are no longer your project.

And as I said a while ago,

That doesn't necessarily come free.

There's loss because we're human creatures and because we experience loss and we have sometimes sorrow or regret.

So I always encourage us to use regret as an ally to kind of clear the brambles for the path forward.

What I've been ruminating on in the last couple of days is when I was here on Tuesday and one particular person said,

Don't practice.

And practice.

And then you kind of agreed with her about the word practice.

There are some kind of words that we cringe about because practice,

Spirituality,

They kind of develop these kind of beautiful curtains of cliché and stereotype about them.

And we try to use them in the raw sense,

But as soon as we use them,

The stereotype takes over even though we have had no intention to use the stereotype.

Because it's just,

That's language.

Words start,

They're overused and then suddenly they become stereotypes.

And a beautiful work and suddenly over 10 years become an ugly word.

Or you'll cringe about it.

So going back to the word practice,

I mean,

For me,

Practice is incredibly important.

Whatever that word may mean for you or may mean for me or for any of you.

Well,

That is what,

Just to be clear,

That is what I said to the woman the other night when she said,

Don't practice.

And she kind of was against that notion.

I did agree that that word is loaded and loaded in certain ways that indicate that you're doing something for a later date.

That's how we usually think of the word practice.

Okay,

Good.

Yeah.

So if you're thinking of the word practice in a completely different way,

And many people do,

And actually I have had to really be careful about using,

Criticizing that notion or word,

Because I have had this kind of conversation hundreds of times with people who are very benefited by,

They're not necessarily future tripping in any way with their notion of practice.

They're just giving themselves time to really immerse in simplicity of beingness.

So no problem.

Yes.

So this whole idea,

Going off grid,

Okay,

Practice for me is going off grid.

Okay.

So it's putting yourself in a space where you are practicing nothing.

Okay,

That's a kind of oxymoron or paradox.

How can you do nothing?

You know,

Shakespeare and King Lear says,

You know,

Nothing comes of nothing.

Okay,

Well,

Yes,

So something cannot come of nothing.

So if I'm going to stay in a space of nothingness where self disappears.

Let's stop here for a second.

Self disappears.

That's not necessary either.

No,

It's not.

Okay.

And that notion also can be freed.

Better to say conditioning.

Okay.

Even conditioning arises.

It doesn't matter.

Arises and falls.

Arises and falls.

It never stops.

Yeah.

And so getting this idea of practice,

Off grid,

Space,

Pausing,

Self arises.

It falls away.

It arises.

It falls away.

And yet,

You know,

Kind of between the moments of arising and falling away,

We kind of want to deepen that space where we can reflect deeper and deeper.

And when the seeking,

And I think that's where the seeking stops.

When we can actually enter into that space between the arising and the falling,

The seeking stops.

And we just accept.

And,

But at a grand scale,

On a grand scale,

I don't know if the seeking actually stops.

It may be happening at a deeper level,

But maybe not at this conscious level of I'm seeking B from A as a cause and effect,

Or to achieve something.

I think that the seeking,

As it's typically understood,

Can completely stop.

Now,

Because we're humans,

There's a certain way in which desire or just something that moves through us on a daily basis continues.

And that's,

Again,

Part of a co-existing awareness.

Right?

I mean,

My teacher,

Poonjaji,

He loved cricket.

He would cancel satsang on the major cricket days,

Because he really loved cricket.

And yet,

You did not feel in his company that there was really anything,

Certainly nothing going on in the way of seeking.

He was in such a strong presence of being.

But because he's a human animal,

Was,

He had desires,

He had ways that things moved him about in the day.

He liked to go for a walk at a certain time.

So I think we have to kind of be very careful,

And I know you are given all the languages you speak,

With the precision of this understanding,

With the precision of using the language about seeking.

Yes,

There is something like what I get up in the morning,

There is some way in which I have,

Like,

I want to be helpful.

I just,

That's how I'm built.

You know,

A lot of it is conditioning,

Really,

Because I was the oldest child in my family,

And I had to kind of function a lot as the mother.

And so it just got very highly conditioned from a young age,

More as the big sister.

And so I play that role a lot in my world.

You know,

I do a big sister thing.

And I can feel that as a certain motivation that I live with.

It's,

Again,

There's a deeper stream that's happening that's just hanging around,

Not doing anything,

Just being.

And that is a more relaxed place.

But I can feel the conditioning and the way that I bow to that conditioning and service that conditioning a lot.

So are you getting a sense of making a distinction between a seeking that is about some conceptual,

Or some kind of attainment,

Or,

You know,

An enhancement of me,

That can be off the table entirely gone.

And I know so many people for whom that's the case,

Who used to be really strong seekers.

But we still manifest in the world in our various ways.

And we still,

I've been reading this book called The Violet Hour,

So nonfiction.

The subtitle is Great Writers at the End,

Meaning at the end of their lives.

And it's pretty interesting how different of these legendary characters,

How they died,

And what was going on in their minds when they died,

Especially in the cases where they've been celebrated the world over for their thoughts,

And their words.

And then when things start leaving them in terms of their ability to speak or to do another book or to finish the book that they were on,

And they can't.

So the identity is leaving well before they actually exit this world.

Very,

Very interesting.

Just to add to that,

I was listening to one of your podcasts,

And the one on Bertrand Russell.

Is the one Die Before You Die?

Or is it Growing Old?

No,

Bertrand Russell was on Growing Old.

And you read a beautiful excerpt,

Which I read many,

Many years ago.

I love that.

I know.

It's so beautiful.

It's about the idea of when we are young,

We are like a small river,

And the water is rushing over the stones.

And so we're really having this sensory experience of our confined world.

And in that sense,

The self is manifesting.

And personally so.

Very personal.

It's very personal and manifesting.

As it needs to.

It's a developmental thing.

Yes,

Yes.

And then getting older and older and older,

It widens and merges into the sea with the self no longer.

The self is more expansive.

That's it.

What I was trying to say is about seeking.

At that early stage,

When you're saying the doing is necessary,

The seeking is necessary,

I think,

At that particular stage in life.

And then when you get to a particular stage,

Whether it be if you're older,

For some people,

They might not really need that stage development.

But I think most of us,

We get to this,

We start to grow older.

And then suddenly we,

If we've been practicing,

If we've been seeking,

Then suddenly perhaps we can,

Over a period of time,

We can start to feel ourselves merge into that open sea and become more expansive.

And the seeking kind of mellows down.

And another way that I understand.

.

.

Do you want to say what I'm saying?

I do.

I like what you're saying.

It's very clear in terms of the actual words that he did say.

And a way that I understand what he's saying,

Though,

And it's something that I've talked about in my own language in the past,

Is that your sense of self widens.

That the way,

Like,

When the identification is very strong,

When you're young,

It is quite personal,

Right?

It's very personal.

But with more time or wisdom or whatever,

You begin to feel that the continuation goes on,

Whether or not you're in it.

And you start to feel yourself as part of the whole that is blazing here in this mysterious existence in which we find ourselves.

So it's almost like in terms of his view of the widening of the river into the ocean.

I'm saying the same thing in a different way that you're becoming.

.

.

At first you're becoming the you.

It's all about the presentation of me.

And that's an important psychological developmental stage.

You have to,

As many psychologists have said,

You have to have a strong ego to transcend it.

The transcending of the personal happens in a beautiful way in this view into an identification with the all.

The word is just delight,

Which I think you used.

And I really don't want to say anything because I've been so delighted in listening to the conversations.

It's such a privilege.

So thank you.

But I don't refuse to speak because I would like to add voice to this coexistence of our awareness here,

Which these conversations are bringing up.

And you mentioned language and how beautiful is language?

How beautiful is articulation?

I've just been like watching,

Almost watching a scene unfold here.

And these conversations that are happening and the thinking and the reasoning and the all are just part of this moment.

It's wonderful.

That's that's I'm in a stage of transition.

Yeah.

Quite a big life transition at the moment.

I'm transitioning to transition countries.

I'm transitioning different relationships and it's all happening at the moment.

And so if I tell them where you're going to send them,

OK?

OK.

All right.

Later.

Later.

No,

Go ahead.

That's OK.

It's just so wonderful.

So Pari is going back to her homeland of Nagaland after living here in Melbourne for 30,

20 plus years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a stage transition,

You know,

But it's it's starting to happen now.

So it's a big shift for me.

So I was also thinking about this thing that you were saying about practice and the importance of practice.

But practice can be balanced with.

I think I'm understanding you're saying that it's it's there's a need for a certain practice and I call it wrestling because in the ebb and flow,

Even while we're coexisting in our realities,

You know,

You still have to grapple with certain situations that come up for you.

But also there's a wonderfully what you call it,

Just gift wrapped with insight.

And we might not even have to practice because suddenly insight comes in a flash.

And suddenly you know something that you never knew before.

Just like that.

What a gift.

Anyway,

I'm rambling on.

So I just want to say it's been such a delight,

Really.

And I'm so glad that everyone braved the weather and we're all here.

Thank you.

I'm just sitting here and just enjoying.

I mean,

I always enjoy being in this space and I have done for over 30 years now,

Been in groups and sort of in this deepening of being.

And it's just always a place I feel at home.

But I was just thinking that.

More and more,

I feel at home anyway,

Wherever I am.

Yes.

Yeah.

So that's a really beautiful awareness.

I just had.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

I know that's true.

Yeah.

Actually.

Yeah.

I know.

I observed that a lot.

And I was just feeling the gratitude for the journey that that's been and that still is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been amazing.

And it's such a good point to make that it really the whole that the understanding,

Of course,

Ends up that anywhere you are on a crowded train,

On a turbulent flight.

Right.

By the bedside of someone you love who's not well.

Doing your taxes every.

It's just it's just the this coexisting awareness.

Yeah.

It shifts.

It shifts from we go along as we're talking about.

We're marching along in life,

Becoming somebody,

Being somebody with all that goes with that.

And the the mind,

The tram of the mind is taken up a lot with that.

Right.

But it starts to shift.

It shape shifts.

And pretty soon you're much more in being.

And the other part is getting taken care of.

The coexisting part is getting taken care of.

Just like if you're listening to the radio,

You're mostly driving.

You better be.

You better be mostly driving.

But you're able to sing the song.

So in this case,

You're mostly in this war of being.

And you're taking care of business.

You're manifesting enough to get yourself fed and do all those things and show up for your friends and be helpful and all those things.

But it's I mentioned the other day and it'll be on a podcast.

But.

Take Not Han has a new book out called At Home in the World.

And yeah,

Being at home in your own being,

In your own skin.

Yeah.

That's where to be.