GF Live 11-5-22 Rise Above Any Form Of Feeling Helpless

Whoever fails to try what his heart would have him do -- because his mind tells him, “This you cannot do” -- fails to hear the ever-present Voice of Heaven forever shouting to all those who will dare enter the unknown: “No sincere effort ever goes without reward.”

Transcript

Hello, Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening. It's a rainy morning here in southern Oregon, But that's good in a way. We need the rain. It's amazing sometimes, At least where I live, I have some, I guess you'd call them small pastures that lay out in front of my little house up here. It isn't but two or three days worth of a little rain, And suddenly all of this life just pops up from beneath these sort of tannish brown rolling hills, And they take on a green hue, And the cycle of life begins again, Bringing up the much needed new grass for the creatures that have been hungry over the summer months, And they in turn giving birth to their young and we're surrounded at all times by these natural lessons, How life is not just providing for all of itself, But ceaselessly bringing about the renewal of those conditions, And I want to tie that into our topic a little bit today, So I think we'll get started. I don't know if when you decide to join me on Saturday mornings, And I hope that you join me on Wednesday and Sundays, Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings as well, Tomorrow morning, Which you can find out about in my profile or just look me online. I've been talking a lot about reactions over the last week or so, And I want to continue that study a little bit, So I hope that most of you have been working with me over the last few weeks anyway. The title of the topic I want to work on with you today is this idea of how to stop and drop any form of feeling helpless. Now, You know, How do I say this, In some ways the things that we learn about here, They're priceless in the world. I've done a whole series of talks, A whole album on something called The Secret of Being Unstoppable. You can take spiritual principles and if that's your ambition, You can employ them in the world, In fact, Wherever you see for the most part successful people. It's because one way or another they were working their way through the things that seem to impede us when we run into moments that feel like they're greater than our ability to deal with them, But my interest isn't in this world. My interest, And I hope you're interested, Is in what can this world, My relationship with my exterior circumstances, Teach me about my own consciousness. I was a very brilliant, Illumined, And enlightened man, And part of what he wrote, In fact, I can think of several examples of it. He said that you can't take any of your belongings from this world when you leave it. It's impossible. The only thing you can take with you is what you've developed within yourself, What you've learned about yourself, Discovered, And realized is true about your own consciousness. Mr. Howard, Vernon Howard said, It's wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions. I want to look at this idea of helplessness, Not with the intention somehow or other to help you get through your aspirations to succeed in the world, Although if it helps you there, That's great. But that's not the first and foremost point. So let me get into this with you to understand that what, In the truest sense of the word, That what is spiritual is ultimately practical, But more important—sorry for the earthquake—but what's more important is that if we can understand these true spiritual principles, Which are always revelations about our own consciousness, Then we'll be able to do things in the world we couldn't do before, But it begins with understanding ourselves. So I think everybody that's going to be here five minutes in is here. Let me get going. Nice deep breath. Remember, We're just looking. I have no intention to prove anything. My intention is to bring into your awareness things that have been maybe behind a curtain or so, And we can pull back those veils in Eastern traditions. We might be able to see something that frees us up a little bit. And once we discover that we can be free from these reactions, These conditioned responses that we have, And the helplessness they produce in us, Once we understand that, Get the smallest glimpse of it, We're on our way. At least we have an inkling of the right direction to go in terms to finding this liberation. So somewhere back in the 60s, There was a professor, A doctor I don't actually know. His name was Seligman, And he and his colleagues were doing research on, You've heard of Pavlov's dog, On classic conditioning, The conditioning of an animal, Of a human being. And the first test that they ran was that they took a dog, And they put that dog in a small area, And put on the floor in that small area these pads. And they could administer through those little pads a light shock. Now believe me, I don't want to get into that. They were experimenting. Now when they'd give that little light shock, They would ring a bell, So that after a few of these instances, They didn't need to provide the shock anymore. When they would just ring the bell, The dog would act if it had already been shocked, Even though it hadn't. So the dog, That level of consciousness, Which we have, Was easily conditioned to finally relate the ringing of that bell with an unpleasant experience from the past. And in that dog's consciousness, In reliving the unpleasant experience of the past, It would respond accordingly. And in this instance, It would just lay down. Then Seligman and his crew put that dog in a new space, A larger space, And divided that space with a very short fence, Easily walked over, If not jumped over, By the dog, Right in the middle of that space, On one side these little pads that provide that little shock, And on the other side, No pads at all. And they were shocked to discover that when they pressed the little button and the dog was administered that little shock, They expected the dog to leap over the fence to an area that wouldn't be, That they had not been in before. But the dog didn't do it. The dogs, All of them that ran through that test, Just laid down right there on the spot, As though they had learned from the first round of experiments that there was no way, Nothing they could do to avoid that shock. I hope that's clear. Now, Seligman, Later writing on this, Called that condition learned helplessness. Write it down if you want to. Learned helplessness. Learned helplessness being the same as not even thinking there is a way out of a shocking situation. Because in the past, The repeated negative experience of that, With what seemed to be no way out, Left that creature, In this instance, Feeling absolutely helpless. And the dogs didn't, And he did this repeatedly. And over and over again, The same learned helplessness took place. The dogs, On the other hand, That he then brought in, Who had not been previously exposed to those shocks, Put them in the same space with the fence between the two areas. And when they administered the light shock, The dog that had not been learned this helplessness immediately jumped over the fence from the known area to the unknown area. What does this have to do with our wish to be free? With, If you will, These feelings of helplessness that come over. And I'm speaking particularly, Look, I get it. My finances are gone. The world is crumbling to pieces. People I don't understand. People, Why is the world this way? Why did she do that to me? And over and over again, We have innumerable instances where we look out at a world that seems to be overwhelming us in one way or another. And our response to the shock of these events pretty much turns out to be the same thing. Which is we basically fall into a certain feeling of helplessness. And if you're an aspirant, A spiritual aspirant, How many times does a man or a woman have to go through thinking to themselves, Well, I know who I am. I know what to do. I know everything about this. And we come into these moments and these moments deliver a certain shock. And by the way, I call a shock, What we call a crisis, A close encounter of the truthful kind, Where suddenly something that we don't expect comes along and challenges some idea we have of ourselves. And when that identity is challenged by that condition, You know, We may throw everything we have at it, But spiritually, We get to this point where we think to ourselves, There seems to be no way out. This learned helplessness, And yes, Anne, Learned helplessness is inseparable from learned hopelessness, Which we're going to touch on. So can we see the parallel before I go on with this talk, How we run into certain moments in life, Not just in the world, But a moment where suddenly, I think to myself, I've gotten past my anger or I've gotten past this depression. Maybe I've been on the wagon one way or another and suddenly I'm overtaken by an urge for a drink or a food. I run into some weakness, A New Year's resolution that died January 2nd. It could be a thousand different things. And then in that split second washes over us through a reaction, Something that begins, And this is important, I'm going to come back to it after this, Something that begins to talk to us. Now we don't see properly yet, But when that dog decided to lay down and not jump over the fences because it had had enough experience with that, That it thought there's no way out of this. And so in its own simplistic fashion, It fell into a hopelessness, A helplessness, And just decided to accept the condition that it didn't have to accept, That there was an unknown area that that dog could have gone to, But it wasn't even interested in exploring that. All of our spiritual work in one respect or another is coming to a gradual realization that everything we know about ourselves and about this world, That we are conditioned to accept as being the case, The situation. It has to be eventually recognized as something that has to be left behind. We must leave the known and go into the unknown, But nothing is going to do that until we finally begin to recognize that there is no such thing as a condition that can hold us captive. There is no circumstance on the surface of this earth that by its existence can make us helpless, Can bring us into hopelessness, Despair, And this is not motivational. There are names, I'm not going to go through all of them. Victor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, Saint Paul in prison. These are men and women who in the worst possible circumstances, If ever you were going to fall into despair, Hopelessness, And helplessness, It would be in the hands of human beings who are torturing and punishing you, And that there's no way out of that. And yet we can see repeatedly that men and women have found in those moments something that was not present in the condition itself, But in their own consciousness that they could enter into and not only change the way they relate to the condition, But turn the helpless, Hopeless condition into an entrance into another world altogether within themselves that then would turn that helpless, Hopeless circumstance into something that nourished and fed the soul so that not only did they not perish and die in those circumstances, But they flourished and became true illumined souls who by their work using those things that most of us collapse in front of created conditions for others by which they might see they don't have to fall into that feeling of helplessness. So what am I 16 minutes in? I want to set the stage. If you could just let me know in the panel here, Is everybody following what we're looking at and trying to uncover here? If you would just go ahead and send me a high sign, Whatever that might be. Thank you. It's so important not that we agree with each other because we want to believe what we're talking about, But because we see and agree and know that possibility exists. We just have yet to understand how to actually capitalize on it, Use it in the proper way. So here's a quick story. Excuse me, Imagine for a moment that you're what an athlete, Track and field in college or high school. And you want to participate. You have a longing just to explore your own physical prowess to discover what you can and can't do physically. So you go out and you join the team. You want to join the team for high hurdles. Now as you know, They have red shirts, Blue shirts and yellow shirts, They have levels. So you make your tryout and after about five or six attempts of banging the heck out of your shins on the low hurdles on the track, The coach asks you, Do you want to try out for the next level? And then you can learn and then perhaps move up the scale. No, I don't want to. Now after a few points that we're going to make, We'll see why. So put yourself in that place. Now maybe you persist, But why would that person decide that they didn't want to try anymore, That they weren't interested in exploring what they needed to learn because they had been convinced by their own reactions to their own inherent limitations physically that what, What happens when things like that happen to us? That athlete, We can say, Maybe she says, I'm too weak. I don't have the strength. I don't know the technique. The bar is too high. And we can see if we will, That each of those excuses seems to the person saying them valid reasons for the negative outcome. So that something in our mind looks at what we couldn't do and then begins to justify why it is that we need to separate or fall away from or give up on what we hope to succeed with learning. And this is, This condition is physical and more importantly, It begins spiritually, Psychologically, But we don't see it. So that to make the point, If you're following me, Anytime we run into anything remotely similar. Let's just take this young lady who wanted to join the track and field. And now let's put her at a business meeting. And the business leader, The supervisor saying, I'm looking for a few people to join the team so we can explore these possibilities. And she's sitting there and with no idea at all. This is part of our problem. Our consciousness is so fragmented, So broken up that we have no what we might call time body. We have no awareness of our own consciousness that spans time. So that the past sits there in the dark of us like a set of files, A set of old energetic, Corrupted files, Bodies. And when a certain moment comes along, Those old reactions, Those old feelings, They'll just pop up, Unbekoned. And we don't even know they pop up and they give us our opportunities. They tell us who we are. So that little girl sitting there, No, I can't because something in her is telling her you won't clear the bar here. I remember the first time I fell in love hard. Maybe you do too. First time I fell in love hard, I got my heart broken. She left me for another boy. And it was a killer. And I remember when that happened. I remember sitting in this little bar in my mom and dad's house out of sight, Out of mind so nobody could see me and I was banging my head on the wall. I will never fall in love. I'll never do this again. I'm never going to fall in love again. Now you know what that feels like. I'm never going to this, I'm never going to that. You know that. And then of course, You know, You fall in love again. You do that again. But can you see that every time that you meet someone after that first powerful impression, That first negative reaction, That there is something there inside of you looking to see is that person like this other person? Is this going to happen the way that happened? So that we begin to actually enter into these moments. I'm just talking physically right now. Forget the spiritual realm. We enter into these moments where there are always new opportunities with an old set of reactions, Mains of reactions, That's what I call them. The mander of a reaction. And this remains of a reaction goes with us everywhere we go. And without knowing it, It comes up and colors what we perceive as possible in these conditions. So that we're all the time without knowing it, Listening as was that young lady at the track and field and then in the business meeting, Something that is telling us, Giving us a valid excuse for why in that moment we cannot possibly go past this condition. We will fail. We won't succeed. We won't get what we want. And here's the point. This is where we unconsciously identify with our own unconscious reaction. Now let that sink in. We unconsciously identify with our own unconscious reaction. Now if you had a friend and went with you into that business meeting or with you on the track and before you even started was telling you why it is you're not going to clear the bar, You're not going to transcend this pain, You're not going to get past this addiction, You're not going to succeed. If you had a friend like that, How long would you hang out with a friend whose every comment to you in the face of any possibility was to basically condemn you and then convince you why it is that you can't do something? You wouldn't hang out with somebody like that. And yet that's exactly who we hang out with. We literally hang out with a consciousness that is asleep to itself that we've been in quotes friends with for so long and look for it to protect us. That we not, It doesn't dawn us that we're a prisoner of our own perception because we're not present to the perception when it pops up in the form of this limiting negative reaction. Here's another story to illustrate this. Imagine an old timer. In my talks old timers always represent wisdom. And he's down in a cave, A miner, With a young apprentice who's been assigned to him and there's a cave in and there's dust and darkness and all the rock has fallen where the entrance is and it just looks absolutely hopeless. And the young miner with the old timer starts whining and moaning, We're dead, We're doomed. And the old timer says, Just hold your horses. That's what an old timer would say, Like me. Kids are horses, Follow me. Where are we going? And the old timer says we're going to go, We're going to follow, See we're going to go deeper into this cave. What are you crazy? Go deeper into this cave? If we go deeper we'll surely get lost. And the old timer says, You know, If we stay here what's going to happen to us? He says, Well maybe they're going to dig down. He says, Well maybe they will and if we go find out that we can't get out we can always come back. He says, How do you know, To the apprentice, How do you know that we can't find a way out going into the unknown area of these mines? Have you been here before? Should we just throw in the towel? And the young apprentice says, No I've never been in this place before. The old timer says, Well think about it for a moment. If you've never been in this place before then how do you know what the possibilities are? And the apprentice says, Well I know I've seen movies, I've heard others talking. Old timer says, Look, Follow me or don't. You can sit here and you can die or you can begin the process of discovery and find out whether or not there's something other that's possible for you in this moment than just to accept this hopelessness and this feeling of helplessness. Now that little story, If I was able to express it with any accuracy at all, Tells us that we don't know much about our own negative reactions and the innate sense of helplessness that underlies them. Basically all we know, And this is so important, All we know about our own negative reactions that produce this despair, This depression, This hopelessness, All we know about them that make us feel inadequate to even the possibility of exploration is what they're telling us is true about ourselves. It runs so deep. I don't expect you to suddenly just throw off the bondage of this relationship that you have with this unconscious nature, But I want, If nothing else, To show you at least it should be suspicious. Why in the name of God would any human being succumb to feeling hopeless unless in the time leading up to that moment that triggers that torment, That individual is so used to listening to their own mind telling them that the reason that they feel the way they do is because of the conditions that that same consciousness points to outside of them or that points to them inside of themselves, Judging themselves. We know, Or at least we should, That so much of our helplessness, The sense of hopelessness, Can't be separated from judging ourselves. How do I come up with feeling helpless or hopeless without something in me judging the condition and judging my own possibility? And then you have to ask yourself, And if you've never done it, Let it start. How is it possible that something inside of me knows that where I am and what I'm going through is inescapable, That there's nothing that can happen in this moment? I lost my job. I learned that I'm going to die. My mother is about to leave the planet. Someone I like. You fill in the blank. I'm asking you for just a moment to look and see how in those same moments, Those shocking moments like the dogs, Something in us intimidates us. We're filled with, This is important, An immediate resistance to the condition that has been described as inescapable by our own reaction to it. So it isn't the condition that is inescapable. What we're a prisoner of in that moment is an unconscious identification with a reaction that is part memory from the past pushed forward into the promise that you can never will be able to do this because you never learned, Never got past it in days gone by. I cannot tell you how important it is to understand this in your spiritual life. Yea, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. How is that even possible if we've even gotten to any point in our life where suddenly we're walking through this valley and everything around us seems to be at a dead end? The heart is as dry as an old desert, The mind is about as flexible as a piece of steel. And all we have are these negative thoughts, These thoughts born of a consistent reaction of judging ourselves for having come this far and now being lost with no hope. Helpless, This is much greater than I am. There is no darkness that is greater than light. Darkness doesn't exist without light. And to feel helpless and hopeless in the face of some dark moment, Again, Whether it's physical or spiritual. We begin by understanding that what our reactions are telling us that we can and can't do, They don't know? Would you go to an echo and ask it for directions out of a dark canyon? When I put it that way it sounds ludicrous, Doesn't it? An echo can't. . . An echo has no intelligence? Now I'm telling you that when you listen to a reaction condemn you, You are agreeing to be confined by the definition it gives you. And that's the only time we feel hopeless or helpless is when we have listened to our own mind define for us the circumstances as if the mind defining the circumstances actually sees the circumstances. The mind that is defining the circumstances is coloring the present moment with all of the bitterness of the past, All of the ways in which we fell when we tried to clear the hurdle, Which we have to do. You can't just get up and jump over yourself. You have to discover there's no self to jump over. The thing that seems helpless and hopeless is just the way in which your mind and your habitual reaction to anything you don't know what to do with. Do you not know what to do when you're negative? You know exactly what to do. Lay down on the side of that pad where you accept and agree to take the shocks and then hate the world or hate yourself for the condition you blame as being greater than yourself. And no such condition exists. No such condition exists except in our consciousness that by its fragmented, Divided condition continues to paint the present moment with all the colors of the past and then calls that canvas our possibilities. We can do much better than that and I better get into this a little bit because I'm going to run out of time. One thing that we never notice when we're in the throes of these negative reactions and I hope I've made that clear enough, A reaction that we cannot have without comparing the present moment to some captivity in the past. You cannot have a negative reaction that isn't born out of resistance to a circumstance. Before any negativity there is resistance and there cannot be resistance without some form of recognition of them being resisted. So what in the name of God recognizes the moment as something to be resisted other than a latent consciousness sleeping in itself that looks at that and goes, Oh that's like this or that's like that. It doesn't come up and say it although it might but the instantaneous verbalization of no, Negative, Not this, Not me, Not now, That can't take place without something seeing what it is that it feels is greater than itself. And I don't know how many times I can say this, I've been saying it for 40 years, More than 40 years, There is nothing greater than your capacity as a human being to transcend your own consciousness through a new awareness of it. And this old consciousness is not going to invite you to explore it, It wants to hold you a captive and keep you in that continuity of time so that it can use you throughout time to provide a familiar sense of self of being helpless and hopeless. So if there can't be this negative limiting hopeless, Helpless reaction that tells us we're set, We're done, We're in a cave in too dark, No point in exploring, If that can't happen without resistance and the resistance is always a reflection of something from the past projecting itself onto the present moment psychologically and it does so so convincingly, It is an amazing thing over all these years. I've met so many hundreds if not thousands of men and women who ask, Can you help me shake off the pain from my past? And then you prove to them that the only time they experience the pain of the past is when they give their attention to the very thing they don't want to experience, Then they will absolutely simply reject that idea, Failing to see that that consciousness has such a grip on them that that consciousness has fallen in love with hating the feeling of helplessness. That consciousness has become enamored with hopelessness because the more hopeless and helpless it feels, The more it can resist the very condition that it has created in itself. Yeah, Abram, Stop thinking, Wouldn't that be nice? Just okay, I'm going to stop thinking. You can't stop thinking any more than you can stop breathing. But you can discover the nature of that consciousness, Of the thinker and its thoughts. You can make headway into realizing its machine. And in the discovery of that, The beginning of a natural separation of the wheat from the chaff, Of the reaction from the reality of the past from what's possible, That is in fact possible, And the clearer we become about what we're given to see or do in that moment to enable that understanding, The more the mind will quiet by itself. The mind must quiet itself. You try to quiet the mind is a waste of time. That is you doing what ultimately is hopeless because resistance to the disturbance creates the disturbance. Another topic. So let me get to the end of this talk. If we see that what we're actually resisting and the pain of it and the helplessness is not the condition itself, But the way in which we're reacting to it, Then we understand that what we have to work with isn't the condition, At least not first. First we must be able to see through and transcend the grip that that reaction and the familiarity of that identity has on us. This is why I say there's no such thing as a condition greater than our ability to transcend it because of what? My three favorite spiritual words. I can learn. I can learn. Stevie asks, What's the best meditation for healing? Stop hurting yourself. What's hurting me? Please God that you can see it. What's hurting me is that there is something in me that cannot wait to go into the past, Pop up as many painful thoughts and feelings about what he did, She did, What's not going to happen, How I lost this opportunity, How I'm going to die. The fear of death isn't the fear of death. The fear of death is the byproduct of a negative imagination calling up every possible dark thought it can about what death means. You don't know what death means. We heal when we stop hurting ourselves. We stop hurting ourselves when we realize we can transcend a consciousness that is dead set literally and dragging us into and through the repeated reiteration of the experience of ourselves. But I can learn what does that mean? So let's take the last two minutes here. Here I am and I'm looking out at the day and it's just, It's, Oh God, Well, I can't do this. I don't want to do this. Why are they doing that? I've got to go through a no, No, No, No. In that moment, What are my opportunities? I'm already helpless. The moment I unconsciously identify with any negative reaction, I am helpless in that moment because that reaction, No matter how it paints my possibilities, Is teaching me and directing me through the content of itself through the past. And I will reincarnate that consciousness and I will have that experience again. On the other hand, If in the moment I feel that reaction and I can sense this helplessness, This hopelessness coming over me, I may have been bathing in it and billion human beings do. In that moment, I can begin to extricate myself from those dark cold waters by simply remembering, You know what, I've been here a thousand times and I've been here a thousand times because I keep seeing the time that I'm in through the same eyes. Can I open new eyes? What can I see about my own consciousness that is contributing to this condition instead of what do I need to do about this condition based on what my old eyes are telling me it has been seen? I grow by entering into the condition I don't want, Not by trying to change it. And I enter into the condition, The feeling of helplessness or hopelessness, By asking inwardly a prayer, If you will, Please, What can I see about this moment, About myself, That I've never seen before? When you ask what can I see about myself, About this moment that I've never seen before, You are asking to observe the moment you're in through a new set of eyes. You have extricated your usual sense of self from the usual condition and ask to see into the condition. And when we change in the smallest way the observer of that moment, The minute the observer changes, The observed changes as well. They are a singularity. And when I see even the smallest thing, I never realized how many times I've had this exact same feeling. That's something I've discovered. Usually something's condemning me for being weak and continuing to do that. If I can just discover the smallest nuance, I don't care how tiny it is, Then in that moment I have cleared the hurdle of a mind that is set against itself and set against me seeing into it. And now I know something I didn't know before. The observer has new ground and the new ground is that what it observes is changed with every moment that it brings new eyes, A new wish to learn into that moment with it. I can learn. Let me see what I've not seen. Let me ask. God never, The divine never fails to answer that prayer. And the only way you'll know that is if you utter it through action. Gotta go. I hope I see you tomorrow and of course I'll see you next Saturday. Find out. Find me online. Be safe. Remember I can learn. Not I can think. I can see. And if I can see, I can change what I see because what I see is inseparable from the seer. Bye bye.

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