I would just retell ever so briefly a story that over the years of my teaching I know has become a favorite for quite a few men and women because it holds within it the promise of something that I think all of us would very much like to understand,
If you will,
The magic inherent in that story,
In the idea.
Ever so briefly,
And I must be brief because there's so much to cover,
But I want to get you involved emotionally,
If not intellectually.
There was a woman who had gone to somewhere in the southwest of the United States to see some of these magnificent sandstone red caverns and the immense shapes that nature has hewed out of stone over time.
She's at one of these national parks and she comes to a place where this sign says the Valley of No Return,
And she's fascinated because of all the magnificent carving that the water has done as it rushes through these canyons.
She walks in with her camera getting ready to take pictures.
Now,
Unbeknownst to her,
A few miles away in a tower there's a park ranger and his job is to oversee the safety of everyone in that vicinity of that canyon because he knows,
As most people should know,
That when thunderstorms occur,
They can be 10,
15 miles away.
There are immense floods that rush through these canyons,
In fact,
Are responsible for carving out the magnificent forms they do.
She's not aware of the fact,
Because she's deep in this cavern,
That seven miles away,
The ranger can see a huge thunderstorm has appeared and is already pouring down water,
And he knows,
Because he sees her car there,
That she's walked into that canyon.
So he can't reach her,
It's impossible,
By yelling or megaphone,
Jumps in his Jeep and tries to get there before the floods come through that canyon and essentially ensure her death.
So he's racing as fast as he can,
She's walking deeper and deeper into the canyon,
Imagine if you will,
The two of them,
One going in the wrong direction,
The other trying to change the direction of that person,
And all of a sudden she hears this tremendous roaring sound.
Now,
If you follow the story,
You know the roaring sound is the floodwaters carrying cactus,
Rocks,
Wood,
Everything that's been collected in that canyon the prior season in this muddy mess racing towards her,
And he gets to the top of the canyon where he can look down and see this unfolding,
But no way he can yell over the sound of the flood,
And he sees her look up,
He sees her look at the flood coming at her,
And he sees her utter some words.
He can't see what she's saying,
But she says something,
And as she's speaking,
The flood reaches her,
He can barely look.
But whatever it is,
Somehow the flood parts at her feet,
Everything passing on the left and right side of her,
And her hiking shoes barely getting wet from the seven foot surge rushing by her.
He can't believe his eyes,
He rushes down with his Jeep to the entrance of the canyon,
There,
All muddied now from the flood that passes through,
She comes walking out.
And basically,
To bring the story to an end,
He says,
What,
Are you a magician?
How in the world did you make that flood with all of the debris,
Obviously going to carry you off and kill you,
How did you make it,
How did you not get hurt by that?
What did you say?
She said,
Well,
Nothing too critical,
Really.
All I said was,
You go on without me.
All I said to the flood was,
You go on without me.
Now,
Inwardly,
If you understand,
You realize that we're talking about this flood of negative reactions of these thoughts and feelings,
That every once in a while,
If not every day in some form,
We find ourselves trapped in a box canyon,
Meaning boxed in by the conditions that we believe are responsible for those reactions.
And that when they come,
There's no such thing as you go on without me,
We are carried off,
We are picked up,
Punished,
Ultimately deposited someplace.
Meaning once again,
Found ourselves the victim of what we believe are the conditions responsible for this flood of pain,
Of problems.
So with that in mind,
Kate,
Let's bring up the first key lesson,
Please.
Everyone follow closely,
We're going to build on this.
The painful experience we have to any unwanted moment is inseparable from being momentarily identified with our own negative reactions to it.
Which means all said and done,
That what we are actually suffering from and uselessly struggling against in these moments is ourselves.
What we're actually suffering from and uselessly struggling against in these moments is ourselves.
Pause.
What if that's true?
What if every time something happens that we wish hadn't happened,
That we meet with this instantaneous resistance?
What if we actually understood that what we're struggling with in those moments is not the condition that our mind is blaming,
But rather with the ignorance of our own unconscious nature that is always set against anything that challenges what it has become identified with?
Try to see this with me,
This shift that would take place in not just our attention,
But our awareness itself.
Because we would see in that instant that our attention is automatically,
As we are now placed on the event blamed for our pain.
But the new awareness would allow us to recognize that this temporary appearance of this reaction with its corresponding sense of self isn't our true self at all.
We literally have taken on a life that has become so thoroughly conditioned in us that we don't know any better than to believe in that moment because of the identification with it,
That that sense of self,
Oh no,
What's happening?
That that sense of self belongs to an order of consciousness that we are not intended to be a captive of.
We would be able,
With this new understanding,
And I'll get into this deeply enough,
Just listening,
We'd be,
You go on without me.
We would watch the reaction come and go.
We would watch it rise and fall because we would see it as a temporary condition that instead of something that has to be overcome or controlled or that we have to run from,
We would be standing there as did the hero in our little story with an order of awareness that by our relationship to that understanding would place us in charge of these reactions instead of becoming a captive of them.
Let me show you how this is possible.
I wrote about this based on a true experience many years ago,
Many,
Many years ago.
I was in a supermarket shopping.
And you know when you're in a market,
There's lines and everybody wants to get checked out.
And so I get into this line and the next thing I know from behind me,
Somebody runs their cart right into the back of my heel.
Now what happens to you when somebody runs their cart into you?
You and I both know.
It is impossible to have anything other than a reaction.
The first one,
Of course,
Is instinctive.
Something hurts.
You want to turn around and see what's happened.
But part of that reaction involves a summary instantaneous kind of blame,
Resentment.
Something wants to lash out at what just caused that pain for you.
And so the judgment is in place.
It's inherent in the reaction.
And so you turn around and you get ready to give that at the very least that person a glaring look or hope that they will apologize for their inconsideration.
This is built into this consciousness.
That much is inescapable.
But now in this instance,
I turn around and there is in fact a woman behind me with her shopping cart and she has a white cane with a red tip on it.
Now if you don't know what that means,
It means that she is impaired.
Her vision is impaired.
She can't see.
She can see enough to shop,
But some of the visual awareness,
The spacing obviously isn't there.
And without knowing it,
She ran her cart into my ankle.
Now from that moment that I see the actual circumstance and what has created the reaction,
Now I am no longer identified solely with that reaction because I can see in that awareness that this woman couldn't do anything other than that.
In fact,
Not only am I not angry,
But a certain kind of compassion comes up.
And if you're understanding me,
The reaction of anger is replaced by a new and higher condition that we can call compassion.
Now let me ask you as I'm already 13 minutes into this talk,
Can you see that possibility that depending on the level of awareness,
A new kind of action is inherent in it so that we can equate this new awareness to a new understanding of the moment and the new understanding of the moment,
A new action in the moment itself.
And this is where our hope rests for those of us who want to have any kind of moksha,
Any kind of real life liberation.
To understand that this level of awareness corresponds to a new understanding and that new understanding,
A new set of actions.
And that if we want to be free of our present circumstance,
Which is that every condition that is against,
We see against us,
Captures us and carries us off in these waves of reaction and each reaction serving to confirm and validate the state behind it so that the angry reaction is validated by the thought,
What's wrong with people and why are they like this?
If we can have a new observer,
A new level of awareness,
Then in that possibility exists the new possibilities further of new actions.
And the new action in this instance that we're going to be talking about and are talking about now would equate to a new relationship with our own reactions,
A new relationship with our own reactions.
So that instead of being the end of the hose flying around when the pressure of that reaction pops out,
We're sitting there if you want at the place where the nozzle is and we can open or close it or altogether just set it down because a new kind of self-knowledge that we're going to look at together changes our relationship to our own reactions.
I don't know if you can see this clearly enough,
But every moment of our life we are visited in one way or another by some kind of thought or a reaction that because of our unconscious unaware relationship to us is confining us to how it defines us in that moment.
The reaction tells us our possibilities and no reaction is intended to define our possibilities,
Let alone confine us to those choices.
Rather every last reaction is intended for a completely different purpose that we're going to look at now.
Let's take some more examples instead of in the market.
You watch the news,
He said this,
You go to work and they did that.
You get in your car,
Somebody cuts you off.
In that moment,
We see these events as giving rise to the reaction that seems to follow the condition blamed for it.
We see the event as giving rise to the reaction that we blame the condition on.
But this is not true.
This initial reaction is what I'm going to call the first event.
The initial reaction is the first event.
It is entirely impersonal and it serves in its entirety to present to us a completely different order of being.
How do I say this to you?
The reaction that we have,
We see as being separate from the event,
But we need to understand in that initial reaction,
The event and the reaction are a singularity.
The event and the reaction are a singularity.
There is not one without the other.
We don't see this because we see,
Here's what happens,
Disturbance,
Attention to an event seen as responsible for it.
The disturbance rolls into a reaction.
The reaction then defines the event and without knowing it,
We are defined by the conditioned response to it.
We need to see how we are presently caught in a level of awareness that once we can awaken from can change our relationship to our own reactions.
So the first event is the reaction.
The reaction and the event are a singularity.
I've spoken of this at length.
If a tree falls in the woods and makes a sound,
If there's no one there to hear it,
Does it make a sound?
This mutual dependency,
You can't have an event without a reaction.
You can't have a reaction without a corresponding event.
They appear together,
But our mind is not together.
It is not whole and sees the condition as being culpable,
The responsible party for the painful reaction.
It is not true.
Follow me.
If you see that much reaction,
Event,
Singularity,
All at once,
We can begin to understand these reactions.
As I said,
They're impersonal.
There is no one by my name to whom that event or reaction has taken place.
All reactions at every level are a kind of ceaseless karmic reconciliation of all the events involved in that moment because life,
The divinity,
The intelligence of it is never is unendingly rebalancing creation,
Always restoring harmony.
And these reactions are part of the revelation of that action.
And the revelation of that action is impersonal.
It isn't happening to you,
It is happening to all that you are and specific aspects of yourself that are still,
If you will,
Out of alignment with the greater whole.
So that this is a karmic experience,
Impersonal at its outset,
But then it becomes highly personal to us.
How?
Because the first event rolls into what we're going to call the second event.
The second event,
Meaning what comes out of that impersonal moment of reconciliation between active and passive forces,
The second event is the appearance of some corresponding sense of ourselves.
Something happens.
First,
There's just the awareness,
Just the disturbance.
And now my mind,
Your mind goes looking for what has caused that.
And the only way it can find what it says has caused that is to go back into its conditioned past and find some corresponding relationship to something that is familiar.
And so this corresponding self then names the event according to the conditioning of its consciousness.
So now the reaction that is impersonal and ultimately celestial in origin is crushed into this strange dark ball of a personal reaction to something that my consciousness says that just happened to me.
And once I'm in that world,
I am out of the world of awareness and in the world of an unconscious nature that is dedicated to deciding what it needs to do to get rid of the condition that it created when it named the conflict.
So that here I am,
And I'm struggling,
As the key lesson said,
I'm struggling to try to change the conditions.
And instead of having the possibility of becoming aware of the consciousness responsible for the experience of it,
I'm out there doing nothing that feels like something to get rid of the problem.
No reaction has the awareness,
Let alone the wisdom to realize the purpose of its own appearance.
No reaction has the awareness,
Let alone the wisdom to realize the purpose of its temporary appearance.
So that not only is that reaction powerless to solve the mystery of itself,
But as long as we identify with that reaction,
We remain under the power,
In quotes,
Of a certain part of ourself that can't stand not knowing why it's experiencing what it does,
Because it believes it can change the condition that it blames for that experience.
You and I have been trying to change our experience for 10,
000 years predicated on blaming someone or something for the pain involved in it.
And yet we see even if we can get rid of that person or change the circumstance,
It doesn't change the fact that we're going to find ourselves in another place in another time where the exact same thing happens to us again and again and again.
Why?
Because we don't understand our own reactions,
We don't have the awareness of their actual purpose in life,
In creation,
And mistake,
Listen to this,
The awareness of ourselves born in the moment of that reaction as being a captive of that circumstance instead of a part of that creation.
Is only the nervous system,
If only the nervous system was possible to train not to react.
Chantel,
Listen to me,
We're not trying to train the nervous system.
We're trying to understand that we are something more than the nervous reaction to anything that challenges what we're identified with.
This isn't about a discipline.
This isn't about control.
This isn't about trying in one way or another to make life finally this living meditation where everything's going to be groovy.
It's about understanding that who you are,
If you want to use these words,
Is the meditation of life itself.
It is life meditating and having an awareness within which that meditation reveals the fact,
In this instance,
Relative to what we're talking about,
We can be present to the whole of any moment.
We can be present to the whole of any moment because in truth,
Our true nature is already there in the moment and present to everything that unfolds within it,
Within the light of that awareness.
That is our true nature.
So are you saying that we are on the same places because we don't understand ourselves?
Yes,
Exactly,
Pinar.
We remain unchanged.
Listen to this paradox.
Because we keep trying to change the conditions we blame for our reactions.
Instead of allowing and becoming aware of all of these reactions,
This ceaseless reaction,
Instead of becoming aware of how that initial reaction is not intended under any circumstances to create the second event,
Where the second event is the me that now knows what happened.
There is,
I know this is hard to understand.
There is no you that knows what's happening.
God,
If you need,
If ever you,
What could be more evident than that?
Because this is me.
I know what's happening.
I know what's happening.
I've got it.
I got it.
I don't have it.
I'm pretty clear.
It's just not clear.
But because of the passage of time and the way that these false sense of self constantly appear,
It creates the illusion that we've got a handle on something.
Can you have a handle on creation?
No,
You're a part of it and a significant part.
Because what I'm describing to you is that in the light of this new kind of awareness that I'm trying to describe to you.
See,
You have to do the work to see what I'm saying.
You have to do the work to see what I'm saying.
And I'm going to give you an exercise at the end of this talk to help you enter into at first what will be a practiced meditation,
But ultimately a living meditation that requires no effort at all on your part.
But let me not get ahead of myself.
Those who should be able to at least suspect,
If not catch a glimpse of the fact that I'm sitting at home,
You're sitting at home,
You hear something,
You see something.
And in that moment,
For whatever reason,
Unlike all of the other moments leading up to that,
Suddenly there is this resistance.
There is a disturbance.
Now that disturbance is in fact the experience in our awareness of something,
An impression,
An energy,
Something has come into this consciousness and that consciousness,
Passive to what has acted on it,
Reacts.
It cannot not react.
That reaction between these two celestial forces,
Active and passive,
Something that is timeless,
Something that is in time,
That reaction is the first event.
In the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth,
The light and the darkness,
The yin and the yang,
The active and passive forces.
In the beginning,
That reaction gave forth to light,
Gave forth to an awareness.
But the reaction itself,
Key to this,
Has no personal aspect to it at all.
It's just a revelation of a relationship between two levels of being that in their marriage is produced a new conception,
A new possibility.
But we never know the new possibility,
The new conception intended to be created in the beginning,
In this first event.
Because what happens is that instead of watching,
Being aware of our divine relationship and responsibility in each and every moment to that union,
Instead of that,
The first event becomes the second person,
Becomes the second event.
And the second event is suddenly this unconscious nature can't stand anything that's challenged,
Some content of itself,
Pre-established,
Dependent upon.
And it responds instantaneously to this reaction with wanting to know what that reaction is.
And so it pulls from the content of itself,
Whatever is familiar and conditioned for it,
And then it says,
Ah,
That's what happened.
And now we are in the hands of an unconscious nature that has called out the event.
And then because it's called out,
The event begins to unravel its choices,
Also conditioned in order to deal with and mitigate whatever it is blamed for its pain.
This is the initial reaction followed by the second reaction.
The initial event followed by the second event.
And the second event is the formation of a false identity,
The formation and continuation of a false sense of self.
There are no exceptions in what I'm describing to you.
Oh,
Maybe I've misunderstood the question.
Yes.
So Pinar is asking,
Okay,
So now what?
What do I do with this understanding?
And Pinar and everybody else,
Listen to me,
The intellectual understanding of what I've described is useless unless you take the intellectual understanding,
You take that new knowledge as best you understand it,
And bring it into your experience through acting on it.
Not just thinking it,
Not just hoping it does something,
But actually acting on what you are being shown,
And hopefully what you see as being true.
Because if you can understand the possibility of this other level of awareness,
You realize that in this other level of awareness that is showing you that this second event,
The second coming of what we call ourselves,
That it's a lie.
It has no basis at all,
And no purpose save for the perpetuation of this unconscious nature and the sense of self that it creates.
That's it.
Pinar,
You don't have to protect yourself from sick people.
You have to protect yourself from the sickness that tells you your pain is produced by them.
Because it is a form of psychological sickness to believe that the pain I'm experiencing is because of the event.
The event is revealing to me some latent consciousness,
Undeveloped,
Incomplete,
That only knows how to resist and react to what challenges it.
So that in the awareness is the new action,
And the new action is evident if you're following me and what I'm saying.
What's the new action?
The new action is that I must begin to realize my responsibility in the moment of this sudden negative reaction is to watch it,
And watch the sense of self that comes with it,
Watch it come and go.
Just like the story,
You go on without me.
You go on without me.
Not because I'm spiritual,
Not because I'm powerful,
Not because I'm somehow super productive in my understanding,
But because my understanding allows me to see that what I have always called myself when an unwanted moment comes,
When a painful thought appears,
What I've always called myself isn't myself at all.
It's a level of consciousness,
Unconsciousness,
That perpetuates itself by giving every last one of these creative reactions a name that it creates out of the content of itself so that it can assume control again,
Or that it can change it,
And it can't.
It isn't the power to walk away even,
Pinar.
It's the power to realize I don't have to do anything other than remain quietly aware of this nature that is being revealed to me,
Listen,
That is being revealed to me as being within me.
So that the experience I blame for being out there isn't the experience that's out there.
It's inseparable from the reaction to it,
Because the reaction names the experience.
And once the reaction is named,
It's named by someone,
In quotes,
That gives it its name.
And once we've been trapped into giving the reaction a name,
Then we're trapped to follow out all the choices and the absolute limited possibilities inherent in that particular perception.
If you can understand this,
I need to start wrapping this up.
You,
Who you are,
Your true nature,
Again,
You have to see this.
It's no good if you just want to believe it.
But believe me,
Challenge what I'm saying,
Experience your true nature.
My true nature is there in the beginning,
Not just prior to the creation of some momentary expression of consciousness awakened by that reaction.
But we are there to observe each moment of creation itself and allow the intelligence in that awareness to let all that is being revealed in that moment about ourselves,
About all that you are and ever will be,
All of that being revealed moment to moment.
And your true nature,
My true nature is inseparable from that revelation and everything that appears and disappears within it.
Let me restate that.
Everything that appears and disappears within it.
Have you noticed when you have a negative reaction,
That even when you,
In quotes,
Get control of the condition blamed for it,
That it doesn't go away?
Some residue wants to continue considering thinking about it.
When you understand what I'm saying,
All of this,
Like a wave in the ocean,
Exactly like a wave in the ocean.
Imagine a parent with a child awake enough,
The kid's having problems with a classmate or being bullied or whatever it is.
And while there may be practical things to do,
The parent takes the kid to the ocean and says,
Watch,
Sweetheart,
Watch.
See that wave?
Yes.
Where did it go?
Well,
I don't know.
It disappeared.
Wait,
There's another wave.
Watch it.
Watch it.
Here it comes.
And then it crashes.
Where did it go?
I don't know.
Well,
Sweetheart,
It's the same thing with these painful thoughts and feelings you're having.
If you would watch them come,
Watch them rise and remain watching,
You would see them disappear.
But when you give that wave a name,
You're giving it a name born of some resistance that you have to it.
And now you're experiencing your resistance to the condition instead of allowing the revelation of the condition to prove to you that who you are is this ocean.
Who you are is this other order of being that everything rises out of and falls back into.
All of these reactions have their definitive place in terms of this reconciliation of a much broader order of being.
And you and I,
By the grace of God,
Made in the image of the divine,
Are meant to be the constant witness to,
The observer of this whole thing as it unfolds in me,
In you,
Moment to moment to moment.
Instead of moment to moment to moment running after something that we believe will change the pain we're in or hold some new promise to complete us in a time to come and all of its nonsense and life proves it such.
So let me get to the last part,
An exercise,
A living real-time meditation if you want.
Start with two minutes,
Five minutes if you can.
Don't sit and chant to yourself or,
You know,
Do whatever it is your habitual meditation.
Instead,
Take five minutes dedicated to doing one thing and one thing only.
And that is your intention to be as still and quiet inwardly as you can to watch for those five minutes reactions and thoughts rise and fall.
That's it.
Nothing else.
Silently observing,
Silently aware of the fact that virtually every moment something is calling you to identify with it.
We're so used to that unconscious system of a self being derived from every reaction and corresponding thought that it doesn't even dawn on us that there actually is an ocean from out of which these waves rise and fall and that if we were present to them properly we would see them rise and fall and we would know ourselves as that other order of being that is no longer a captive of these kind of reactions.
So the point being,
This exercise,
Let this reaction,
The thought,
Anything that comes up inside of you,
And it does,
It wants to grab you,
See?
And that's the trick because it feels like something's trying to grab my attention.
Nothing is trying to grab my attention.
Some level of my attention wants to grab onto that so that it can know itself through that.
And then let all of this,
These reactions and associated thoughts that are doing what?
They're creating a sense of myself.
So I'm going to watch how something in me creates endlessly one sense of self after another.
I'm going to become the observer of this consciousness of legion instead of one of its soldiers so that I can,
Little by little,
Realize that every one of these identities that appears in that moment,
It comes with its own association.
You might practice this,
You might start,
And 30 seconds later the time is up and you realize,
Oh God,
I was just carried away.
I just became another self,
Another identity,
Another me that isn't me at all.
So that for these five minutes,
That's all you're doing,
In real time,
You're making an effort to remain aware of how each thought and feeling literally cannot stand alone and calls for another sense of self correspondingly.
And if you get captured by that thought,
By that feeling,
So be it.
Observe that.
Watch your reaction.
Watch you judge yourself.
Just learn.
Learn by action.
Not learn by reading,
Not learn by hoping,
Not learn by believing,
But learn by participating directly in the appearance of this initial reaction over which nothing can be done other than to see it there.
And then watch how something wants to appear out of that,
This me that wants to be.
There is no real me that comes out of that reaction.
The reaction is revealing,
If you want to use those words,
The real nature,
Your true nature in which everything appears and disappears,
Appears and disappears.
Then you begin to get a handle on this idea of,
I go before you to make a crooked place is straight.
The essence of real life is emptiness.
Awareness is perfect action.
All of these ideas begin to finally formulate and find their right place inside of you because now you're feeding the consciousness.
You're feeding the energy that allows this field to continue to expand and reveal to you everything that you need to know to be free.
Work,
Work,
Work.
You have no idea what awaits you if you will do your work,
A completely different kind of life.
