GF Live 10-01-22 The Perfect Plan For Fearless Living

Any plan born of desire soon expires both itself, as well as the fulfillment it promised to those who seek it, as imagined. On the other hand, those who follow what they love are continually enriched, especially as they realize that the flawless author and guide of their journey...is Love itself.

Transcript

We're going to look at something together today that I know is going to, In some ways, Be upsetting to a lot of you. And I would just add, Before I begin to unwrap what we're going to examine, As I always do, Don't believe anything that I say. In so many ways, And we'll look at this later in the time together, It is this unconscious tendency that we all have, To whatever extent it's true, To believe in things that we don't understand. I just quoted Stevie Wonder. When we do, We suffer. So I don't want you to agree or disagree. I want you to see whether or not what I'm saying is true. And whatever I state, I always substantiate with what is evidential if we're willing to see it with our own eyes and experience it directly, As we're intended to everything about our life and what we discover in it. If it isn't substantiated by conscious experience of that truth, That fact, That principle, Then instead of that idea or insight substantiating what is intended to help set us free, It becomes a stumbling block. So let's, Assuming everybody that's going to be here with us is here, Let's get into it and see what happens. First, I want to set something out. It shouldn't be too difficult, But it's necessary to set the stage. What matters the most in our life, Meaning what determines our course, The path we take through life, The things that we meet along that path, And more importantly, The way we respond to all of that unfolding relationships. What matters most every step of the way is what we love most. It's something that we're not very familiar with because for the most part, I think that most of us believe that we have something that comes first and foremost in our life and it's what we love. But I think if we look closely, Just to close this first point out, You can't separate where your attention goes in any given moment from what you love most in that moment. Think about it. When we love something, That love is a form of effortless attention. But when we run into certain moments, If we're honest about ourselves, Our attention goes not to what we love, But to what we fear and that our values in that moment aren't predicated on an order of love that by its very nature takes the sting out of that kind of unconscious suffering when we are caught up in a fear, So that we can see if we're honest about ourselves that we do follow, Think, Act from all day long what we love. And if we examine our lives, How much of our time is spent aware of the fact that so much of what we love actually turns out to be the thing that causes us to fear. You'll see. I think a good measure of, If it could be measured, Of an individual's, The extent of an individual's love for what is true and good is whether or not when these unwanted moment comes along and the suffering with it is whether or not when that moment comes, And this is important. We are, Our present perception is that we enter into these moments. I entered into the room where the intervention was going to take place. I entered into the restaurant where I met friends and family. But the truth of the matter is that we must see more deeply than this. We do not so much enter into these moments, Although we do walk into physical spaces, But when it comes to love, Suffering, Unconsciousness, Fear, When it comes to those things, We do not enter into those moments. Rather those moments, Those conditions enter into our consciousness so that something is coming into and through us, Ever bit, In fact more importantly than what we think we move into ourselves. Everything is entering into us. And to understand that idea means that whatever it is that's entering into us is intended to enter into this consciousness and upon entering into this consciousness be acted on by something in that consciousness that not only transforms the way we perceive that moment, But transforms the very nature of the perceiver of that consciousness. So that you may use the words that you like, But the bottom line is that in that moment where that condition has come into us, We exit that moment a different order of human being because our consciousness has been transformed through the relationship with that moment, With what it is showing us about ourselves. And I'm taking the time to stress this point because I want to make something evident to you. I want you to see something. Without freedom from fear, Without freedom from worry, What value is there in anything that we seek outside of ourselves by the way and everything that we seek outside of ourselves is in one way or another to acquire some power, Some position, Some possession that imagined once gained will free us from the fears that we have, From our sense of inadequacy, Our sense of not having enough, Of being incomplete. It is difficult to speak of these things because for the most part most of us are so used to being tense, Anxious. We wake up in the morning. We don't even know what the day brings. Our mind starts to tell us there's that and the other and without even noticing it, A certain set of reactions, Very familiar, Very mechanical, Start to roll through this mind, This sleeping mind and as it does, Tension, Anxiety, Stress of one kind or another. I've got to go be with this person today. I've got to go do this. Look at what's happening around the world. Oh my God, It's a nightmare. Not that it isn't a nightmare but the fact of the matter is what does what is going on in the world around us have to do with the fear and the negativity within us when if we will see it. It is our attempt to escape that fear by changing or controlling the conditions that have produced the world and its conditions that we see. Without knowing it, We're complicit in a certain kind of cycle of conflict that isn't produced by the world outside of us but rather is a – what's the word I want? – is a manifestation of the way our own mind works. So I want to get that point out right at the beginning. Freedom from fear, From unwanted moments and why do we have an unwanted moment unless we fear it. Freedom of fear is not in a time to come. You examine it. How many times have you set out, Changed this relationship, Go live somewhere else, Get a new job, Get off the grid, Do whatever it is you're going to do, Find some new political affiliate, Do so. How many times have you set out thinking upon that first step of that journey that what you've imagined is going to finally free you from this anxiety or this tension, From this conflict, This bitterness, This impatience, Only to find out that sooner or later – and it always is later – that I didn't – I still have this – I'm still worried. I'm still tense. Why? Because the way our mind works, Which we're going to look at deeply, Is that it imagines what it must have, What we must do or become, In order to liberate us from whatever it is that we are feeling fear for in that moment. Now freedom from fear cannot be produced by any effort we make to escape a fear. Freedom from fear will never be found by avoiding what we fear, By running from unwanted moments. We're going to examine the real nature of these fears, Of these unwanted moments, Because we think that what we fear, The unwanted moment that we're worried over, We think it's out there somewhere and it is not out there. As we're going to see, The reason that we have the fear that we do is because when certain moments come along and each particular to the kind of person, The persona we have, The conditions we've been raised in our environment, Our culture, Our religious ideology, All of those things formulate over time in this consciousness a certain set of content, A body of knowledge, All of which is very definitively connected with what defines us and confines us to those moments when the moment or that person, That situation challenges whatever it is that we become identified with. And in the moment when that identification is triggered, Our reaction to the condition does what? It points outside of us to what it says is threatening us. But what we're looking at here is to understand that the task of freedom, Of being released from the fear, Has to come from another order of consciousness other than the one that is responsible for creating it. I'm going to say it again. We are looking for a relationship with another order of love. Not the love that we now know that is inextricably tied to all of the people, Places, Possessions, Powers, Assumed images that is inextricably laced with those things so that in any moment when something comes along and threatens that identity, That identity which is a construction of a certain mind becoming attached to and captured by its own images that give it its sense of self, It only knows how to react to that moment and blame the moment for the condition of fear. But the condition of fear is not a creation of the moment. The condition we call fear is where this consciousness not understanding itself because it has…how shall I get to this? Because it has been misdirected, It has fallen in love with something that has betrayed it. So we're looking for another order of love and I'm going to get to this point. I will not go past it. Where do I find this love? Isn't that the thought? I've been talking to men and women for over 40 years. Where do I find this? What must I do? What can I give myself? What can you give me that will do that for me? I can give you nothing. I can show you some things. The very mindset of where do I look for this order of love, This perfect love that sets one free, The very mindset of where do I look for that is the betrayal. There's a very old, I don't know, Sufi story. There's this fish and it's very anxious, Looking for a school of…a school. It finds a school of fish, It runs up to the master of fish and it says, I'm so anxious, I'm so worried. What's on your mind? The little fish looks to the master and says, I have to find water. If I'm ever going to be free, I have to find water. I'm told that I need to live in it. What's the master fish going to say? You live in water. Water is what gives you life. Water is what you swim through. The idea that we have to go looking for this love, This perfect love that frees us, The idea that we have to look for it is the first betrayal. It is always with us. We are always within it, Without it we do not exist. But this is difficult for us to consider because it's frustrating, Isn't it? You've heard ideas like this, It makes me crazy. Where am I to find it? So the first thing that we have to understand, And you can write this down, Is that we have to stop looking and start seeing. We have to stop looking and start seeing. And here's the thing that I said is going to be very challenging for us. What is it that we must see if we want to come upon and have the direct conscious experience of the perfect love that sets us free from fear? What is it that we must see if we want to be free of unwanted moments? Write it down, If you will. Nice deep breath. All fear, All psychological fear, Is born of unconscious self-love. There is no psychological fear outside of unconscious self-love. We have been brought into a world, Been immersed in a consciousness that has conditioned us to believe that love is something that we have to go find, And more importantly, That we have to create, That we have to do something in order to be in relationship with it. So that for the most part, If you examine your life, What you'll see is that there's always this essentially inescapable sense of disturbance in us, Itself inseparable from the reaction that produces it, But I'm going to touch on that in a moment. And that every reaction that we have as we are presently constituted, Points to something outside of us as responsible for that reaction. Now what we don't see but can, Is that the only reason that we feel threatened by anything that unfolds in the world, And I'm not saying, God forbid, That we should ever believe such, That we shouldn't hold in our hearts and minds, The hope that men and women all over the world don't have to suffer the indignity, The suffering, The cruelty of other sleeping human beings. But we must wind into that understanding how we cause other people to suffer through our ambitions, And our ambitions are to save ourselves from what we see threatening us as we have established, Seemingly established, Ourselves in this world. And when we have that reaction, And the reaction points to the condition, And again you must see this, What is my solution to any moment where a condition that what, I wouldn't be threatened by it if I weren't identified with it, If I weren't attached and dependent on a certain lifestyle, A certain political party, A certain affiliation, A religious ideology, If I wasn't dependent upon it and attached to it, I couldn't feel threatened when someone or something comes along and seemingly disrespects it, What we call disrespecting it. Do you know that intelligence can't be disrespected? It's too smart for that. It's too wise. In that moment, What happens? The mind, First asleep to itself, Doesn't see that what has been threatened, How shall I say, It isn't I who have been threatened. Go yell at the sun. Go be disrespectful to a mountain. The old idea that an elephant isn't bothered by a dog barking at its heel. Love cannot be made to fear anything. Love like light changes whatever comes into it. And so it is intended to be with us that whatever the moment brings up where suddenly there is this fear of some condition, That condition inseparable from the consciousness attached to and identified with what it is, That whole thing is meant to be a revelation of that consciousness. So that instead of what we do now, Which is what, And this is why I said that all psychological fear is born of self-love. The minute that I have a fear, A worry, Or a threat, My mind, Your mind, This unconscious nature comes up with an image. Instantaneous production of an image to protect me, What I must do, Where I must go, The imagination of an action to take that will either control or change the condition or by which I will find some way to escape it and regroup and then start again. So the point here is what? That I turn to an image that is made from the content of myself, My past, This consciousness replete with all of these failed exercises to free oneself. I identify with another image. And please I ask you, What is self-love if not the moment when this unconscious nature creates an image made from the content of itself and then looks to that image as a way to protect itself from what it fears it may lose or as another thing to love that may finally help it get past what is so cruel in this world? Isn't it astounding? I'm sorry that I'm so inadequate at being able to convey ideas from, Insights from above. You can't feel fear without self-love. And now that I'm thinking about it again, One of my favorite passages from the New Testament, What did Christ say? You can't serve two masters. You will love one and despise the other. The two masters is this unconscious nature with its desire that forever forms an image of what it has to have to be free, Unsuspecting that it wouldn't need an image of what it needs to be free if it weren't already in fear. So that every image it identifies with is the seed of a fear to come. Love doesn't grow fear. Love liberates us from fear by showing us the consciousness responsible for its almost ceaseless creation caught up in a body of reactions that almost never stop, Nor are they intended to. Life itself is a cosmic reaction. Without that cosmic reaction of active, Passive, And reconciling forces, There would be no life. It is a ceaseless reaction. But out of that ceaseless reaction is intended to come new conception, New life, Rebirth. For us, What comes out of our reaction to life is not a new life. It is an old life replete with the old fears that continue to create in its own image more fear. So let me get to what I always call the actionable part of this. Because you know, Let's say that you're listening to me, You haven't thrown the computer away because you've been told you must love yourself. Sweet God, You know who came up with that idea? People who ran out of other ideas about what to love to free them from fear. The world is a stream of disappointment as long as we look to it to free us from fear. The world streams fear because that's the only way it can sell love, Sell protection, Sell defense, Sell the things that it needs to by creating the conditions that it promises will free you from it if you just bite into it, Bite into it a little more. What does it mean to love myself if in fact all fear is born of unconscious self-love? To love myself, You look at it yourself. What have you been told? Find something about yourself that's loving, Lovable. And where do you find that? Where do you find that? In an image. Not to mention that the image crumbles. It's like I have to take this supplement. I'm a bit of a naturalist, You know. I've been given a supplement that when you bite into it, It explodes into dust. It's like eating dust. That's what the images of ourselves are. They're momentary idols, Images that the moment any condition comes along, Dust. And then the consciousness that is attached to and identified with it, What does it do? It has to come up with, Has to put humpty-dumpty back together. It has to find another image to love. And when it can't find an image to love, It finds an image to judge. Love one, Despise the other. Love one, Judge the other. See how perfect it is from this higher view. No, Our task is to begin in these moments to realize, As we should have by now, You know the old saying about the old myths about the hydra, Cut off one head, Another appears? Well that's what we have to see with ourselves, Is that can I have a moment, A negative reaction without resisting the condition? No, I can't. And my mind, My reaction tells me the condition is what you said, What they didn't do, The way this went, That's why I'm having this negative reaction. But the fact of the matter is, Is that as I've pointed out already, What is that reaction doing? The reaction is pointing to a condition outside of us as responsible for the turmoil going on inside of us. So what I want to get to this point with you is to help you understand that the reaction, The way we presently have it, Is a misdirection. When we identify with our current reaction, It is a misdirection, Whereas the reaction is intended to bring us into a relationship with it that is a redirection of our attention. So here's the event, Reaction misdirects, Says look at him, Look at her, Look at this, Look at that, Takes our attention and places it on what this consciousness calls out as the condition responsible for the fear running through it. But we know the condition isn't responsible for the fear running through this consciousness because we've seen to some extent this consciousness can't be afraid of anything without first being identified with whatever it is that's threatened. So the real source of the fear is in this attachment, It's in this identification, That's where the fear is, In a consciousness that doesn't know itself apart from what it has become attached and identified with. So instead of allowing that instantaneous resistance, We know that, I call it the contraction, This sudden constriction, Stress, Anxiousness, Anger, Impatience, Instead of allowing our attention as it does mechanically, Habitually, To redirect our, To misdirect our attention, We're going to reclaim our attention. If nothing else, We're going to reclaim the ability to remember that the moment of that reaction is intended to be a redirection of our own attention. Let me briefly tell you a story. It was a, I don't know how many years ago now, Long time, I was working with a wonderful enlightened man, Vernon Howard, And he told a story, A small group of people back in the day, About what he called the message catcher, And I can't take up too much time to tell you the story, But by and large, It was about a man who lived in this small town and almost every day, He would go for these long walks following a stream up the mountain, And he would always come back down the mountain with healing herbs, Precious gems, Something of value, A metaphor for being enriched by the journey that he had taken, As we are intended to be enriched by this journey through life, Not made poor because of our fascination and attachment to the things that actually turn out to be what we fear. So one day, This young woman fascinated with what he was doing, But couldn't follow him. She would always lose sight of him, Which is an important distinction, Because she wasn't able yet to understand what it was that allowed him to go to these places and recapture, Reclaim these treasures that belong to the soul. One day, She asked him finally, Where do you go? What happens to you? What are you doing up there on the mountain? And he said to her, Basically, I'm a message catcher. What do you mean a message catcher? Again, I've got to go quickly through this. He said, As I go up the mountain, Every once in a while, A message will come down the stream. And if I'm attentive to the stream, Meaning if I'm attentive to the moment as it's unfolding, If I'm attentive to it, I'll catch the message. And the message is always giving me further direction. It's always clarifying what I need to do, What I need to understand to take the next step in the journey up the mountain to get to where these treasures await. But you see, What wasn't spoken in that, And I speak it now, Is that the real treasure isn't in the healing herbs. It's not in the things that we're able to bring down. The real treasure is the gradual revelation that there's another order of consciousness, Literally another order of humanity, Waiting out of sight, Meaning beyond our capacity to be present to now because of our fascination with the world and these things in it and how it makes us feel about ourselves. Another order of consciousness, Sending these messages. Another order of consciousness that can see and that wants us to see what we are presently blind to. And what a perfect sting. Of course, What could I be any more blind to than the things I think I love and must have to fulfill me? I believe in order to be fulfilled, I have to have a certain modicum of income, A certain place to live. I believe in order to be free, People must love me without question. I believe that liberation is somehow connected with people never questioning my opinion and assumption. And most importantly, I believe until the whole world sees the world the way I do, The world stinks. I'll tell you what stinks is a consciousness that's so identified with the content of itself that it keeps manufacturing in the image of itself that it can't see that it's burying itself in the very thing that it says will free it. Now last five minutes, Every reaction is a message. The reaction tells us the message is that we have to go mess with something. The real message in any reaction is the momentary revelation of the consciousness that feels threatened by passing time. That's the real message in the reaction. That's why I said we must understand we're being misdirected into trying to control or change the condition when the redirection is to realize that right in the reaction itself, Right in the most painful negative reaction is the message of liberation, Is the message that is coming down from conscious humanity, From a part of yourself. You are not separate from that order of humanity, You are just cut off from it right now. And cut off by what? Self-love. Cut off by what we don't understand how we are always looking to ourselves to free us from the very thing that ourselves created. We just don't see it. Our mind is not free enough because it is so easily made to feel fear. You know the smallest thing? I have to call my brother. I have to go into this meeting at work. I just heard something is changing. I've been doing something a certain way my whole life. We all have that, Don't we? These are attachments. These attachments, We can't shatter an attachment by ourselves. It's impossible. But when we catch the message in the reaction, And the message is the illumination of everything that is a part of that reaction, The message is in the illumination itself of the reaction, Revealing all at once that I can't have a reaction to something that I have to do, That I'm afraid I won't succeed at, Unless I have come into that moment, Unless that moment has entered into me stirring up what I don't know and don't understand about my own images, My attachment to myself. I don't see it. And so comes this reaction. Something has acted on something that is passive, And there's this reaction. And the reaction is actually the illumination of the consciousness involved in it. That's what the reaction is. The reaction is not, Oh, There's a problem. If there's practical things to be done, Great. But again, You must examine this. You tell me, Why would I ever give myself over to a fear unless I believed the fear somehow or other could lead me to what will make me fearless? I used to say years ago, If you fell off of a boat out at sea, And you saw a great white shark, Would you swim toward it saying, Please, Great white shark, Help me get out of the water or do you understand the nature of a shark is to consume anything that looks tasty? Fear consumes the fearful. Fear does not free you from fear, But fear misdirects by pointing to what it says will free you if you just become that or get that or go there. And so the misdirection of fear is to get us once more attached to and identified with some image of a time to come when we won't be in the grip of this, In the jaws of this fear. But there's no such time to come. Liberation from fear is in the realization that this fearful nature knows nothing at all about love, Let alone how to liberate us from what it forever promises it will do. Use the reaction as the message. Let the message be that you want in that moment to no longer be misdirected into identifying with something else, Identifying with the condition, Identifying with the promise to be free of the condition, Identifying with who you need to be later or what you must do to get this person to stop. All of that in time is the perpetuation of fear. Love is not in time and neither is fearlessness. Catch the message in the reaction. Allow the illumination of the consciousness revealed through that reaction to show you that love is never not all around you. Little fish said, Where's the water? We say, Where's the love that perfects us and frees us? We are forever and always in it. We just have to learn to open our eyes. We need to learn to see the moment as it is, Not look at the moment we don't want and then imagine a time to come when it'll be other than that. But work requires our attention. That's it. Remember fear is inherent in unconscious self-love. If I feel fear, Let me examine where it is that I love something. I love the image of myself. I don't want it threatened. I love this thing that I've got, This possession that gives me a special social status, Whatever it may be. Let me become the student, The observer of this condition instead of its captive as I've been. That's it. Got to go. Do your work. Do your work. I talk several times a week for free online, Nothing to join, No cost. Search me out. Go to my profile. Learn about the talks. I'm not allowed to say any more than that. Be safe. Do your work. Bye.

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