Dismiss Troubled Thoughts And Feelings GF Live 4-25-26

Key Lesson #1: We gaze upon a brightly colored veil – see it flutter in the breeze of some passing event – and call it the world.

Key Lesson #2: To see how far we wander from home without taking a single step is the Way and the Path.

Transcript

The material we're going to look at today is going to require you to do a little extra work. But the work isn't born of an effort, It's a work born of opening yourself to understand, If you will, The conditions that we're going to look at together. So I think prior to leaping into this talk, And because probably a number of people still haven't logged in, I will bring you, Who have been on time and properly so, Into a couple of thoughts that will set the stage. I think most of us, Most aspirants, If they have any, They've logged any miles under their weary feet, They've heard expression like, One must part the veils of illusion. It's necessary to polish the mirror of the mind. Corresponding thoughts somewhere out there beyond right and wrong. There's a field, I'll meet you there. Nothing is good or bad, Save thinking make it so. As St. Paul, We see but through a glass darkly. What are all of these people throughout all of these ages talking about? That's what we're going to look at, Because there is an inclusive understanding that ideally will fall upon your willingness to see the truth of it, And in seeing the truth of it, You will be given a new way to look at your life and the world around you. It's just the way that it works. So, Kate, I'll ask you, Please, Let's go ahead and bring up the title of the material we're going to look at today, And then we'll get into the material. The title is, Dismiss Troubled Thoughts and Feelings Before They Drag You Into Their Dark World. Does that need a lot of explanation? Or is it pretty evident that whenever we find ourselves in some kind of trouble, Sure as shooting, We have been captured by or fallen blind, Followed blindly, A reaction and the thoughts that accompany it. And the next thing we know, We are kind of like that movie, The Ghost, Ghost with Patrick Swayde, Where those creatures, The shadow creatures come up and pull the bad guy down into their world. We can feel that gravity of a negative reaction when it comes over us. So, With that in mind, We're going to bring up the first key lesson. I will read it now. I will cover it again more in depth when we get there. Please, As best you can, Quietly surrender yourself to the intention of this lesson. We gaze upon a brightly colored veil, See it flutter in the breeze of some passing event, And call it the world. We gaze upon a brightly colored veil, See it flutter in the breeze of some passing event, And call it the world. Now, I realize that that's a little bit, If you want to use the word poetic, Mystical, But it brings with it a truth that we can begin to understand so that instead of looking out at what we're sure is that moment we don't want or that person that's bothering us or our own mechanical negative state when it comes up, Instead of looking out and seeing just that and believing that what we are looking at in that moment is the fact of that moment for us, We will begin to see that what we are actually looking at is a veil, A kind of a screen of an unconscious nature that as events touch it and move it, We see that movement and that world as being the entirety of our possibilities and it is not, As we'll see, If you're ready. You ready to go? Let's get into it. So I want to start this new lesson by going back and covering a kind of an old one. And I beg of you, Do not dismiss this. I don't know how many times I have to try and help a person understand that any thought in you that says I already know that is your death. You are dead the moment you think I already know that. Why? Because you're not looking at what is in front of you, You're looking at what you see as being what you know. And knowledge in and of itself, An entire talk coming in the future, Is a prison that we don't recognize as such because it's so familiar to us in the way that we constantly redecorate it. So here is the first thing we're going to cover that's kind of old, But we're going to see it through new eyes. You've heard the idea. A thought about a thing is not the thing itself. A thought about a thing is not the thing itself. I have the thought about sugar, A thought about chocolate. Now in that moment, That thought, If you want to use those words, Is sweet to me. But the thought isn't sweet, The thought isn't the chocolate, The thought in that moment brings with it the taste of some past experience. So that the thought, For instance, Dinner, The thought dinner comes up when a hunger comes. The hunger produces the thought, The thought is the image, The image doesn't bring an end of the appetite. But when we have the thought of dinner, There's a pleasure in it. And we believe that the thought dinner is the same as what we're going to have, It's the satisfaction. But all of this is to say, And I'm hoping you're following me, That the moment thought appears, That thought becomes a kind of a thing, A psychological object. Are you following me so far? It's simple in one respect, But we cannot dismiss it for its simplicity. Another example, A thought appears. How many of you have had a thought about someone? And the minute you have the thought about that someone, You begin to experience what you think is that person. They're not there, They may have died. But here comes the thought of that person. And suddenly I'm having the experience. Am I having the experience of that person? Or am I experiencing the content of a conditioned set of thoughts, As if those thoughts were the person themselves? Can you see that thought is not the person itself? I have a thought about an upcoming event. Suddenly I feel fear. Is the upcoming event the source of the fear? Or is something in me that's telling me the meaning of that event? Another thought that I'm identified with, Projecting something, And then I take that thought, That image, As being the future, The event that's coming. So in that moment, In these moments, What is it that we are actually present to? Are we present to the actual event? Are we in the presence of the actual person? And we know that we're not, If we followed this simple introduction. We're not in the presence of the event or that person. We are in the presence of an image that we have a thought, And more accurately, A thought construction, A construction of thoughts that have been assembled over time in order to deal with whatever the original disturbance was that we gave a name to. And then it went from that point on and on and on. Are you tracking with me? I pray that you are. But here's the key. In that moment that I'm describing, That person, That event, The unconscious mind is passively, Meaning we don't see it, Nor does it know it is doing it, Is passively doing something so subtle and virtually instantaneous that that mind doesn't know it is looking at a representation of the thing it believes it is seeing. It would be like looking at a shadow of a tree and then going and try to pick the fruit off of the shadow. Crazy to think that way. And yet in the shadow of this ignorance that mind lives in, That image is no longer seen as an image. I don't know I'm looking at an image, At a thought, Because the nature that has created it is taking that image, Which is a projection of itself, To be reality. But if we can, And I hope we can, See from our vantage point, What we are actually looking in that moment is a substitute reality. Actually, A kind of dream that seems very real to the nature that is dreaming it. Still with me? This knowledge that I'm giving you is not going to solve problems, But it may help you start to see the nature of the real problem that is always with us. So if I can even suspect that when the thought of that person, My brother, My co-worker, The picture of that moment that is right on the horizon that may or may not be coming good or bad, That in the moment when my mind brings that thought up onto the screen of itself, That thought doesn't appear by itself. It appears with all of the content that it has drawn to itself and that it has been drawn to over millennia, Quite literally, So that that thing that we're looking at, We think it's true. But if we can begin to suspect, You know what, It's just a thought. If I can realize that much about it, Even in a small way, Then I'm on the, How shall I say, The precipice of realizing probably the one great truth that all true spiritual masters, East and West, Have always been trying to convey, But not succeeding, Let alone in the way that they would wish. It is not me and my thoughts. It is not you and your dreams. It is me and the dreams that these thoughts and reactions weave. And it seems like we are other than these psychological states and the experience they produce, Because when I'm having a negative experience, I can't conceive that that reaction, That negative reaction and the sense of self that's involved in it. They can't be the same. I'm the one being punished by that reaction. And the reaction is because of you. So therefore you are responsible for the reaction. So it seems to us that we are other than these states, When in truth, These states, These thoughts, These reactions are the movement of a divided mind that is unaware of its own divided level of being. It seems like there are two there. There is you that I'm thinking about and me who's troubled by you. I am not troubled by you as unpleasant as your manifestation may be. I am troubled by the thoughts that I have about you that are in turn the product of a reaction going on in an unconscious passive nature, Busy rejecting and resisting anything that doesn't match the way it feels, Insists that person or that condition be. I'll pause here for a moment. Let some of this sink in. Are you able to follow me still? Have I gotten too deep, Too quick? There's no way I can impart to you the significance of these insights and not because they're mine, They're certainly not mine. But more importantly, The kind of freedom that comes that cannot be created by thought. So, Slow it down. I have a little quiz for you. And I'll take a moment with you. Name one thing that we are always in one way or another involved with, That we are always listening to, If not talking with, That in spite of the depth and breadth of that relationship, That we know nothing about the nature of what we're involved with whatsoever. What would that one thing be? And I've been alluding to it. Anybody want to type a word up there? What would be that one thing that we're always in relationship with, And yet we know nothing about it or our relationship with it? Anybody want to take a shot? Someone writes our self-thought identities. Terry, Thought. That's it. Thought. Thought. Everything else that everyone is writing on here is the outcome of a nature that tries to deal with what is troubling it or what it wants from life. And the only way it can relate to life is through thought. It has no direct relationship whatsoever with life, None. The life of that nature is death. And I've been talking about that for the last week or so, And I will go more deeply in it tomorrow, By the way. So don't miss tomorrow's talk. Let's look at this together, If you are willing to look at it with me. And again, This is, It's rhetorical, But I'm asking you, So I'm all day long. Imagine how would that go? Imagine you know somebody and all day long they're bathing in something. And one day you say to them, You know, What you're soaking in isn't very good for you. And they say to you, What are you talking about? And you say, Every time I see you, You're soaking in a tub of troubled thoughts. I am not. I don't soak in troubled thoughts. I don't soak in worry about tomorrow or regret over the past. You're crazy. But I'm asking you, Where do our thoughts live? In what world do they arise? Do they dwell? Do they move? Because if we can understand where our thoughts live and how they move and what they dwell in, Then we would begin to realize that, And listen, Whatever the world may be in which our thoughts dwell is the exact same world in which lives the nature thinking them. If we can understand the world in which these thoughts dwell, And we've just spent 17 minutes looking at it, Then in that moment, If we can kind of sort out where these thoughts dwell, What world they're in, Then we realize the same world has to be the nature thinking of them because the thinking and the thought, The thinker and its thoughts, They're one thing. They're not separate things. Can you have a thought without a thinker? Can you have a thinker without the thoughts that it's massaging? And the answer, Of course you can't. So our thoughts dwell in the same world in which lives the nature that never stops thinking them. We know to some extent, I trust, The dreamer is the dreamer separate from the dream it's having? I'm asking you, Here I'm having a dream. Is the dreamer separate from that dream that it's having, That it's momentarily living out? And of course the answer is no. There is no dreamer without a dream, And there is no dream without a dreamer. And so it is equally true. The thinker is not separate from its thoughts. It is made of them. It comes from the same world that they do. It feels to us like I'm having these thoughts. No, You are not having these thoughts unless at some level, And I have to throw this in, You are capable of having enough attention to apply practical thought to a practical condition. And that's almost never. Even practical conditions bring up impractical reactions and solutions born out of them. So I'm asking you to see if it's true, Dreamer is not separate from dream, Vice versa, Then can we see to however we can see it, Even if it's just for a moment, The thinker of these thoughts is not separate from the thoughts it's thinking. Can you see that with me? And if it's not separate and it's coming from the same world, Then we can essentially say, Though they seem to be different qualities, They are made of each other. They are made for each other and by each other. How do we not see it? Listen, When this nature, When this thinker sits in judgments of its own thoughts, Come on, Do you ever think about what's wrong with yourself? Of course, There's so many things wrong with me. The thinker is looking at the thought and when it looks at the thought of what's wrong with you, Obviously I'm not that which I'm looking at, I'm better than what I am judging. So out of us comes this judgment and the thing that we don't see is that as the thinker judges its own thoughts, It then begins to resist and reject its own thoughts because it believes one way or another that it's other than what it's judging. So thought judges thought. It's not you judging yourself. Thought judges thought. The thinker judges the thought that it has of itself that always fails by comparison in thought. And when it reaches its judgment, What does the thinker do? When the thinker sees the thought, Oh, I shouldn't, Oh, That's wrong, It sentences itself. We feel like we're sentenced by a world that, No, We're sentenced by ourself. And when we sentence ourself, Because it's right for us not to be that way, Or it's wrong for people to be the way we imagine they are in that moment through our identification with the thoughts we have about them, In that moment, We actually believe something's changed. This is what people call change. Looking at something that they believe is real, That is a thought, That as they look at it, And this is very important now, As they look at that thought, Whatever it is, About something, Someone, A moment, A memory, That thought, As we've described, Does what? That thought literally becomes an object, A thing in the mind. Then the same mind that has manifested that thought does what? You should know. It begins to react to its own conditioned content. So it brings up a thought already colored, Already shaped by its past experience with the same, And as it looks at what it's created, Up comes a fear, A desire, A resistance, Something, Some kind of reaction to itself that it doesn't know it's looking at itself, And it gives that thought substance. The substance of a thought is provided by the thinker having a reaction to its own creation, And once that thought gains substance, You and I both know what happens. Now it has weight. Now I'm burdened by it. I've got to do something with it. Are you following me? Am I making this clear enough to follow? So now not only is what has been imagined, Does it feel real? That's a saying of mine. The feel is real, But the why is a lie. It's a good explanation for it. Not only does it feel real, But the body follows the mind and it responds. So now I have this reaction. I have this threat. The body registers what the mind looks at and reacting to. Now the body is filled with the chemicals required to protect itself, And then that reaction brings the mind back in as a validation of what it says it knows is true, And all that's really taking place, All that's growing in that moment is the illusion that there is a me and there is that person, That there is a me and that thing, That problem, That past, That future. That's all that's growing is the illusion of this division that we don't see is a singularity. They're born in the same moment, But it doesn't stop there. Try to see this with me. I've got to keep going because I have a story to tell you. Once this division starts and I'm trusting you can see that, Well, Yeah, It's kind of like a rock rolling down a hill. It picks up stuff, Right? So once this division starts and the conflict inherent in it begins to become enhanced, Thought that started it begins to build on the very thing it was responsible for beginning, Like Lego blocks, You know, Those inner, Those interchanging blocks that kids like to make things out of, Intersecting pieces. So this mind already replete with innumerable experiences, Conditioned thoughts and feelings that one way or another can connect with that movement. It literally kind of draws to itself everything it needs to substantiate the meaning of that moment. And the more the meaning of that moment is established as being real, The more that reaction heightens because now I've got a real problem to deal with. That's the narrative. Do you see how it works? So what began as a single thought literally gives rise, Gives birth to an entire psychological world, A single thought born of an unseen passive reaction to something that rubbed against some other thought, The content inside of this unconscious nature, And then a thought, And then the whole world, It creates an entire world around itself. This is what it means to live in a bubble. An emotionally convincing world populated by all kinds of imagined outcomes, Others imagined as populating it as problems or pleasures. And of course, All of the imagined consequences and we live inside of it as if it were reality itself. Now, Katie, Let's bring up the first key lesson, And I hope everybody can now see what was hidden in it. Read along with me, Everybody. One more time. We gaze upon a brightly colored veil, See it flutter in the breeze of some passing event and call it the world. Boy, I don't miss tomorrow's talk. Have you ever been locked down in a little world of some petty anger, Some deep, Seemingly impossible to escape regret, And never suspecting in that moment that what you were looking at has nothing to do with what is real and factual in that moment, But rather that you are captured in a kind of dream that is perpetuating itself, The more it draws you into resisting the experience of what it has produced. So what we are seeing, If you're following me, Or I'll put it to you this way, Am I seeing the world the way that it is? Or am I looking at a veil woven of thought, Animated by reaction and sustained by identification? This is an important idea because God willing, Some of this will sink in and then you'll have that reaction, That thought will come to you. You'll feel that fear creeping in and you'll start to understand, You know what, What am I actually looking at? And then instead of this mind that looks only at what it projects as being the possibility, You'll see that all its entire set of possibilities are, Are contained in this little prison-like nature that constantly is creating a world for itself that it doesn't want, Or that as it doesn't want it, Then it can have a thought about what it needs to do to escape it, And then everything's good again. And because we don't see this veil as a veil, We live behind it. You understand that now? We don't see the veil of thought as a veil. We see it as all the possibilities in that moment. So we live behind that veil. We live within something that is impossible in terms of producing the freedom it promises when what? When that same nature projects a thought about what we have to do to escape the torment we're in and how everything, How it pictures a time to come. And then I look at that and I'm identified with that thought and all the other beautiful images, You know, The scarf flying in the wind and the bright white teeth as I'm driving a convertible, Whatever it might be, Whatever insanity the world wants to sell us. And that's all it does. What do you think advertising is? It's trying to trigger one thought, One thought that brings up some form of consolation or pleasure. Failing to, Failing on our part to understand that as it brings that up of that, What we might be, What we might have, Attending that thought in the same moment is its opposite, The fear we won't. And now I've got to go get it and I've got to get more of it. So even as we identify with the dreams that are keeping us a captive of the world, What's really going on? See it with me. We keep trying to solve this confusion, This conflict we're in by using the very instrument that creates it. Because as we've seen, The nature of the thinker can't be changed by the nature of its thoughts. They're one thing. And the more trapped we feel, The more we try to think our way out of a prison that is literally created by our identification with the thought. Now I'm getting ready to make a transition. Can we see some of this? I'm not saying can we live it yet? I'm just saying, Can we see some of this is true with, With, With at least some suspicion that we may have been deceived up till now about the activity of our own mind? Because if we can see even in the smallest way, God, I'm always trying to think my way out of this pain, But the pain I'm trying to think my way out of is a reaction to my own thought. So the thinker can't free itself. The thinker can't free itself, Let alone bring an end to itself. And if the thinker can't free itself, Which it can't, I don't care how clever you are. And if it can't bring an end to itself, Regardless of all your, The icons that you worship, That one day you'll be free living in some world with chocolates on the streets and Hershey kisses from the trees, Whatever your heaven is. If I can understand that nature will never bring an end to itself. Rather, All it does is continue itself with every thought it has about how to transcend itself. Where does that leave us? Because if we understand our situation and I'm trusting, We're coming to a big transition before this story. If we can understand this, Then there's something in front of us. Maybe it's not clear to you yet, But it will be now. Oh my God. If the thinker cannot think its way out, If it can't bring an end to itself, What other action is there? My actions follow my thoughts. My thoughts bring up reactions. My reactions bring up more choices. My actions are the instrumentation of choices produced by a mind resisting its own content. So that all of the effort of trying to bring an end to something is in fact, It's continuation as thought brings up the problem, Promises a solution to it and leads me deeper into that psychological world, That unconscious world where thinker and thought are one thing. So if that's clear to you, Some kind of action that thought can't imagine, Let alone initiate must take place. I'll let that sit for a moment. Somehow, If I've understood any of this, It leads me to an understanding that isn't intellectual, That if I'm ever going to actually bring an end to this relationship, It's not going to be about thinking how to bring an end to it. It's going to have to be an action that thought the thinker can't come up with. Do you see the problem? Why all of the grant, The grand teachings talk about this, That we see through a glass, We see, But through a glass darkly because we don't see. All right. I have a story and then we'll summarize our talk today. Nice deep breath. I'll pause. There was a man who used to like to get up just before the sun came up and go for long walks. He loved the quiet. He loved seeing the shift take place that had no particular moment to it where shadows began to fade into the light that released them. But one morning as he was taking this long walk, He stumbled on a pond that he had never seen before, That he didn't know was there. And as he came upon it, It was right at sunrise. So picture this, As the light of the sunrise touched the water, The man saw reflected in that pond, As we all have a world of extraordinary beauty. You fill in the blanks. Maybe he saw the mountains glowing in that early light, Maybe some trees capturing the shadow and light at the same time, The sky unfolding and all the colors that it does in a new dawn. We've all seen moments like that in waters I trust. And so he's sitting there and he's fully captivated, Never seen anything like it. Had never seen a reflection like that. So a longing comes up in him and he steps closer to the pond to get a better look. But as this man steps closer, His foot falls on a small, Unstable edge of the pond. And when it steps down with that weight, Part of that, The earth crumbles beneath his feet and falls into the edge of the water. And in about a moment, As I'm sure you can understand, The image in the water he was looking at, The reflection, It begins to waver, To tremble, If you will. Now in that moment, And all quite involuntarily, Because he didn't want to lose the beauty that he was captured by a moment before, He reaches out with his fingertips to steady the water. And even as his fingertip just touches the surface of the water, What happens? We know what happens. It actually further disturbs the reflection. And it actually shatters the beauty that before had just been a little bit of a waver. Now he's alarmed because he doesn't understand what's happening to the beauty that he was identified with and thinking to himself, Well, I need to be more delicate, Chastising himself for being awkward. Again, He tries to recapture the reality of all that beauty that's disappeared. But with each attempt to smooth out that pond, You know what happens, Each effort contributes to its distortion. Now, Soon this man begins to become very frustrated. Let me break into the story. When do you become frustrated? We become frustrated when the world that we are looking at unfold in real time is somehow something falling into and shattering whatever the image is that we had made of the world in which we were successful, Happy, And content. And as the world that is of thought in imagination, As it wavers, The mind not knowing that it is looking at the effect of its own action, Then tries to think about how to get it better, Make it quiet. So this man like that, He keeps trying to bring an end. He said, What's wrong with this world? Why won't it stay as it was? Why is it changing? And hours literally spent trying in vain, About lifetimes spent trying in vain to smooth the surface, To get life to look like what we came into that moment looking for. Hypnotized by the attachment and identification we have with these soothing thoughts, These images of ourselves and of what the world is, Only to find out that that image is not the source of something soothing us. It is the secret source of our suffering because when the world moves as it must, And everything starts to change. And then we try to keep things from being what they are. In fact, We do what we disturb and constantly keep disturbing. That's just what he did for hours on end. He would try to imagine he'd go to the other side of the pond, Adjust his angle, Put his finger up. Maybe it's the wind, Maybe the beginning even to blame himself, But no matter what he does, Nothing happens, Except it gets worse. And here we come to the main part of the story. This has to happen to us until at last, This man fully exhausted as the sun's going down, In his exhaustion, He becomes completely still. He is expired. Everything that thought, Reaction, Desire is telling him he has to do to reclaim the contentment that was there before he began to mingle with it and try to capture it. And in that stillness, The man is in and undergoing something incredibly simple reveals itself. And that's the point of this story. The world that the man had been trying to fix was never in the water itself. The world the man had been trying to fix was never in the water itself. It was only a reflection. And the disturbance that he struggled against was produced by the movement of his own hand. And in that moment, He stops trying to change what he was looking at. And so he steps back because he understands the correlation and he remains quietly there looking at that light in the surface of the pond as it reflects itself. And for the first time, This man, You God willing, See both the reflection and the water in which it appears. Not just the reflection, The reflection and the water, The thought and the mind. And seeing all of that as a singularity, The struggle comes to an end because there's nothing that needs to be done other than to simply see what is in front of you at all times. I have a troubling thought and I follow it with thoughts that are meant to solve the trouble. I have a troubling reaction because you didn't respond the way you're supposed to and my thoughts then go into the reasons why you are the way you are and then what I need to do in the days ahead to get you to be the way I see you in the image I have of you and of myself. This little short parable contains an unthinkable truth. And the unthinkable truth this little parable, Like all parables, Contains calls for an action that thought simply can't imagine. Because why? Because now we understand that freedom cannot be found through any movement of mind. Freedom cannot be found through any movement of mind, No matter how spiritual, Deeply sophisticated, Scripturally oriented, All the rest of that, No matter how delicious that freedom is that we seek, It will never be known by the mind that seeks it because the movement of the mind is the disturbance itself and then we become identified with the object, Then something disturbs it, Now we're off trying to do what? To deliver ourselves from something that we were complicit in creating. So there is an entirely different kind of action that's required. The story reveals it. An act of understanding that no thought, No thinker will ever create or produce and it's an action, Listen to me, That's not taken. It's an action that's not taken. It's inseparable. It's inseparable from seeing the truth of oneself because in seeing the truth of oneself, In that revelation of the whole, What's false comes to an end by itself. Second key lesson and then wrapping up the talk, Please, And don't get ahead of this. To see how far we wander from home without taking a single step is the way and the path. To see how far we wander from home without taking a single step is the way and the path. Because if the kingdom of heaven is within, What's the distance between ourselves and it? Must we wander out as the prodigal son or is the thought that captured the imagination of that prodigal son and then produced that endless journey that ended up living with pigs, Is that thought and that nature, That which wanders and that which seeks to bring an end to its own dissatisfaction in the wanderings it imagines? Because if we can see all of that is true and see it at all levels, Then we realize, You know, This mind, This thinking mind is a wandering mind. You watch your mind when it is thinking and it is wandering, Looking for a solution to something that some other thought reacted to. So this wandering mind isn't just the physical mind, It's a psychological one. And it's, And it is always a movement away from what it has imagined it needs to claim or otherwise escape. So in summary, Full summary, The return home is not a journey. It's the ending of the movement of thought. Because when thought finally stops moving, Then heaven and earth is perfectly reflected within each other. And we, As the witness of that reflection are realized as a part of what we see where nothing needs to be looked after, Attained, Gathered, Not that we don't have physical lives with practical responsibilities. Please don't misconstrue me. But that if my mind is moving and trying to bring an end to something that's troubled it, That movement is itself the trouble and there is no escaping it by entering into that world.