GF Live 3-11-23 Do The Right Thing And Never Go Wrong

There can be no greater wealth than higher self-knowledge. And once we realize this truth – so that we prize transcendent wisdom above all other possibilities – every moment, wanted or not, serves as the secret path to the spiritual summit of ourselves.

Recorded Live: 3-11-23

Transcript

Imagine, If you would, Something that I can assure you is true, Being able to do the right thing at the right time so that you were assured that no matter what the outcome might be of your actions, That you would in the next moment do the right thing at the right time again. And therefore, In one respect, Never being wrong, That doesn't mean not making mistakes, But being in a relationship with life where you knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, Which is the point of our talk this morning, That there was a first move. I don't remember what that movie was with Billy Crystal, And I can't think of the title of that film. It was one thing, City Slickers. Thank you, Marcus. City Slickers. And Jack Palance was this old hardened cowboy, And Billy Crystal and the gang were trying to learn about this lost treasure, And Jack Palance kept one thing. What if there was one thing, Really one thing, One move, The first move for you to make in every moment, That when you did it, You were doing the right thing at the right time? That's literally what we're going to talk about today. So let's get started, Shall we? I want to read the key lesson to you. I'm going to ask Kate to post the key lesson, And once she starts posting it, If you would be attentive enough to not post in the middle of it, So that then everybody could see it, And when this gets reposted on our website and on InsideTimer, All of the information will be there, Because I'll do this again later in the talk with a special lesson that I'll ask her to post as well. So nice deep breath. Here we go. This is the key lesson for our talk today. There can be no greater wealth than higher self-knowledge, And once we realize this truth so that we prize transcendent wisdom above all other possibilities, Every moment, Wanted or not, In our life serves as the secret path to the summit of ourselves. We're talking about being able to do one thing, See one thing, Act in one way every moment, That we can be assured is the right thing at the right time, So that we never are in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. That's what our work is about today. Now I want to set the stage with a little story. You may be familiar with it. I'm not sure what book it was in some years ago, But it fit so well this morning that I thought I would start with it. Plus, I like stories because they kind of disarm this bit of ourselves that often gets in our own face when we have to face certain things that we don't really want to see. And so much of our interior work, The real process of moksha, Of liberation, Isn't achieving or acquiring, But being released from false ideas and images that we have of ourselves. So here's the story. I often use characters in stories over and over again. And one of my favorite characters that runs through many of my books is this wise old owl by the name of Solomon. Now Solomon represents Sophia, The wisdom, The highest part of ourselves. In one respect, Kind of the old man I use in other stories, Who's often shaking his head when he sees the would-be hero making mistakes. Solomon is always flying over the great terrain, The country that he is responsible for, Looking to see that everything's copacetic and if there's any problems, Because his task is to come down and offer any of the woodland creatures some insight, Understanding if they're caught in some struggle. And as always happens, Here he is flying over the woods. And he can hear a kind of an intermittent crying out mixed with a strange, Mm, Mm. So he'd never heard crying out, Mm, Mm, Mm, At the same time. So he drops down and he lands on a tree and there's this caterpillar. And the caterpillar, In between chewing away on its favorite leaf, Is letting out a kind of a moan, A kind of a cry. And Solomon's trying to understand why is it eating and then crying out at the same time. And he asks, What's going on? And the caterpillar looks at Solomon for a split second, But he doesn't want to be too distracted from his dining on his favorite leaf. The caterpillar's name, By the way, Is Paul. And Paul says, I don't understand. Agitated. I don't understand, Solomon. What don't you understand? I don't understand, Why haven't I grown wings? You know, Taken to the air like the rest of my friends. I don't get it. What's going on? Solomon says, Well, That's a good question, Paul. And I understand the source of your suffering now. And if you want me to speak to it, I will. But if you don't want to have me speak to it, Because you may not like what I have to say, Then just say so and I'll take off. And maybe I can join you later when you're more interested in learning some of the reasons for this almost insoluble dissatisfaction that you have. And Paul looks up, He says, What are you talking about? Everybody knows that your wisdom personified. Of course, I want to hear what you have to say. And so Solomon says, All right, Paul, Here's the truth. Everything that you need to go through, Without exception, In order to be reborn, Remade with wings to free you from this terrestrial prison, All that you need is already within you. Paul says, Duh. Then what's the hang up? Still irritated. Looks around for another bite of something. And Solomon takes a nice deep breath and says, The problem is, Paul, That as you are now, You want things to chew on more than you want wings to fly. You must want wings more than you want to roll around and chew on things. Now, Let's be clear for a moment, What does it mean to chew on things? Well, I'll ask you, How many of you chew on troublesome relationships? How many of us chew on financial fears, Chew on worries about health, Chew on being attached or dependent upon and then enabling other people? We chew all the time. Chewing being chewing on thoughts, Chewing on our own reactions, As if somehow if we chew on them enough, They'll become digestible to us and become something helpful and something instead of painful the way they are now. I trust you understand the idea of chewing because we're going to come back to that. Can I see in the little corner of the chat box that everybody understands at least the first part of the simple story? All right. Now let's put ourselves in the place of Paul the caterpillar, Which actually we are in the place of Paul the caterpillar. What is Paul afraid of? Because as soon as he was talking to Solomon, He didn't like what he had to hear and he just kind of ran off. And that's a euphemism because caterpillars can't run, But he was moving so fast he was tripping over his own legs and fell to the ground. What is it that Paul was so afraid of? What is it that Paul is running from? Well, For one thing, Like Paul, Most of us just don't want to know that we aren't what we imagine ourselves to be. We want to have reasons and explanations for why it is that we're still, And we are, Impatient, Unkind, Ambitious, Fearful, Always measuring the moment to see if it makes us into what it is that we want to be seen as and to see ourselves as being, So that what we don't want, And by and large, Most of us, All of us, To whatever extent is true, Is that we don't want life itself to show us that we're in a dream, That we've imagined ourselves to be something that we're not. We imagine that we should be able to do things that we can't do and can't understand why and must find something outside of ourselves to blame for that. And so, Any time that life comes along and makes itself known to us, Which is always in the form of a shock, We never receive the shock properly. It's always battered away. It's always dismissed, Denied, Blamed upon something that if we can finally, In time, Get that condition to change, Then we will transcend this caterpillar tripping over ourselves' life. So, With that in mind, What do you think is our great task in life? And by the way, Every human being has the same great task in life. What do you think it is? It's surprising. The great task in life, The way we look at it now, Is to strive to achieve what we believe will make us whole. We strive to achieve, To acquire what will set us free. But underneath that striving to be whole, To be complete, Is what? Is this idea that somehow or other, If we could just get to that place where life seems complete, That in that same moment, We would achieve a kind of immortality? Things would be set. Our lives would be complete. And the mind that imagines that always imagines it because it doesn't feel complete with what it is or where it is. This is why it is always marching through time, Coming up with the next thing, A hope in things seen. And the divided mind that imagines what is missing, What it needs to become secure and free in an imagined time to come, Creates without knowing it at once the time that it's going to need to close the distance between what it imagines it is missing. Try and see this with me. I feel incomplete. She said this, They did that. I look at my life and I can't bear the sense of being incomplete because that sense of incompleteness is measured about what? About what I believe I need to be in order to be whole. And so I begin trying to become someone special, Someone rich, Someone affluent, Someone with prominence. And with every last moment that I imagine what I need to do to become what I've imagined, That very imagining creates the time it's going to take to achieve that. So that literally in that moment, I separate myself from what I am into what I hope to be and now must make this journey through time, Trying to prove and acquire all the things necessary to claim this sense of self that by the very act of what I've done, I've trapped myself in time. I feel compelled to make that journey. What do you think fear is? Other than meeting a moment where we feel compelled to get through a condition, To acquire what it is that we hope we will acquire when we finally are whole, Which is what? We seek immortality, But we seek it in the world of time. You could call it peace if you want to, Anne. We seek that which is changeless by imagining the changes that we have to make. We seek the divine. That's why, And I'll never forget it, Some of us were seated with V. H. , A brilliant Illumin Man who's now passed, And he said to us, It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions. It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions. Never occurs to us when we're looking at our health or our relationships that the reason we're so anxious, So stressed to try to get everything done, Wrapped up, Clean, It never occurs to us that the reason we want that to happen is so that all of this disturbance that is in us can finally go away because we have achieved what we believe will complete us through whatever that condition is we've imagined. But we have this evidence, It's inescapable, That pursuing the sense of being immortal, Whole, Complete, Through conditions that are passing, Is a recipe for disaster. Because as long as our identity is determined by the conditions that we measure our sense of self through, The moment those conditions change, So is that sense of what we believed made us whole and immortal, Gave us that sense of being at peace with ourselves, And then the peace pops. Eventually, At least I have found this to be true, Certainly it was for myself and now for the students that are interested in the work that I do. I was always looking for one thing and one thing only, Why love is so important to us. Because love lends us a relatively stable sense of self. But even that, As we know, Often falls apart when one that we love or something we love suddenly turns out to be unloving or challenges the image we have of ourselves as being a loving person, And we go to hell in a handbasket. Dean, What happened to the caterpillar depends on the caterpillar. Time can't make the caterpillar see. The caterpillar either sees what we're talking about, Or it doesn't. And in this instance, We're talking about this incessant sense of insecurity that drives us by the way, Dean, To all of the addictions we have, Looking for something to console us, Instead of working to understand the consciousness that in its constant state of feeling incomplete, Is never ending, We're trying to bring an end to the pain of being incomplete, Which it cannot do of itself. So we go back to this question, Why is to seek immortality, Time defeats all other ambitions. How? How do we find that? And this is the mind, You see the mind caught up in trying to measure how do I get my hands on something, The minute it tries to measure how it gets its hands on something, Separates itself from the very thing it needs. And look at how simple this is. You can see it if you're willing to see it. All of Christ's teachings, Most of the true teachings, Point this out, As above, So below, As within, So without. What is it that never dies? What is it that never dies? We look around and we see everything dying. What is it that never dies? And look, Yes, Marcus, Louise, Soul, Awareness, Look, One day we're going to have to get past the comfort that we derive from these words. If I really knew that awareness never dies, That the soul never dies, I wouldn't be afraid. I wouldn't run around seeking a way to make myself whole. I wouldn't, The world never dies. You know, Dean, In one respect, That's true, But let's nail it down. I've got to move on. What never dies is life itself. And you could say love never dies, Because life, The expression of life, Is a creation of love. But let's not get distracted. I can look out, I see life never dies. I live here on the mountains. I've been up on this mountain for 30 years. I've watched, I've watched, God, Countless generations of squirrels. I don't know. They look like the same, They do the same thing, But it's another squirrel, The turkeys. All of life, Reborn, Reborn, Reborn, Same forms, Different actions, To some extent, Depending on the conditions, Life never dies. Which means if we want to understand how to find this part of ourselves that is indeed part of the creator, Part of creation constantly being reborn, We must seek it there. We must seek it in our own life, Not in some God we imagine, Not in some soul we hope we have. We must seek life where life is. And by the way, That's right out of the New Testament, Because it can't be found anywhere else, Let alone in a dream about life, Which is what the caterpillar was in, Dreaming that it should have wings, Dreaming of its one day when it flies above its problems. The only way we transcend the constant state of a troubled mind is by entering into the world that troubled mind makes for itself as it tries to create for itself from the content of itself what it says is peace, What it says is unending life. And there's only one way to do that, The heart of what I try to show men and women, And that is to do what? In essence, The last thing that we want to do. Where are we to find life? Within what we already are, But don't know it. That's where we find life, Within what we already are, But don't know it. And what is it that we already are, But don't know it? And by the way, Why don't we want to know it? Because at least half of our life, We don't want to know. See it for yourself. I don't want to know that I have to do things today that I don't want to do. I don't want to know that I'm carrying from the past these resentments. I don't want to know my weaknesses. I don't want to know how easily I'm set off. I'm a spiritual person. I don't get set off. I don't want to know why my mind torments me. All I want to know is how do I get rid of the torment? I don't want to know anything about the mind itself. And I listen to the very mind that torments me, The thoughts that torture me, The will that drives me to act against myself as if it's actually my friend, Because I don't know anything about myself. If we want to be free, If we want to know what is timeless, We're going to have to know what we already are. And what are we already? We're alive. Please don't let it go over your head. And please don't dismiss it. Do you know that most of us never know we're actually alive? I'll show you. Come back into your body while I'm speaking. Come right back into your body and be aware of yourself and aware of me at the same time. We call it double attention. Wow, There's a completely different sense of myself. I'm participating in this moment. I'm not the progenitor of it. The moment before, My thoughts and feelings, What was identified with, What I was pushing away, That was my sense of self. But if I actually come back into the moment and know I'm alive, If I actually know what it means to be alive, Then in that moment, Let's do it again, I come back into myself. I'm aware of myself. I'm aware of my surroundings. And if I'm actually in that place, I'm not just one with the creation of that moment. But to the extent I'm capable of that kind of being alive, That kind of awareness, I'm actually present to the fact that my life is being created on the spot. I'm not producing this awareness. This awareness isn't mine. It belongs to the, It's an established aspect of creation, This consciousness of myself. These are moments where, And again, I'll show you, We've had glimpses of this immortality of what is timeless, Simplest way to put this. You go outside on a beautiful day and it doesn't have to be beautiful one day, You'll understand this. The whole of life is like this. And you've all had these moments, I've spoken about them endlessly, Where you see something that is breathtaking. That light at the twilight hour, That sun that breaks through the clouds after it's been cloudy and rainy and snowy for days on end. And it is what we call awe-inspiring. It is breathtaking. Why? Because in that moment, We as the observer are not separate from what we're observing. And we realize ourselves as something that is greater than the person who didn't want the moment before or who had to dream of a moment to come because we're in the moment that is alive. And being in that moment as part of that life, We have a completely different relationship, Not just to the conditions we're in, But to ourselves as well. We've had glimpses of that. And if you've had them enough, Even an epiphany, You start to wonder, How do I return to that place of being alive? How do I remain there becomes the real question. I can only go so far so fast with 40, 42 minutes, But I'm trusting that you understand. I'm describing the evidence, As slim as it may be, Of another completely different order of life that another part of ourselves that we're mostly not in relationship with never stops seeking. The prodigal son returning home because he realizes, She realizes that there's no place like home, That that is the central urge, As Whitman said, Of every atom to return to its divine source so that it can merge with what has given it its life and participate in the life that it keeps being given. And there's only one way, And I started the talk with this, That there's the right thing to do at the right time so that you're never wrong. Take a deep breath, We're going to make a transition now. Please, If you will, If we're honest and examine our priorities, What are our priorities determined by? What is it that you think about most every day, Most of the time? Our priorities, Meaning the actions we take in this world to procure or protect what we will, Those priorities are an extension of our values. I do pursue, Try to acquire and protect what I believe is the most valuable thing in every given moment of my life. The problem is, Is that as we are now, Our reactions determine our values for us. By that reaction pointing to what it blames for the pain in that reaction, So the value in that moment is to somehow or other escape or control the condition blamed for the shock, For the reaction. And so, Without knowing it, We do all the time, Moment to moment, What we believe benefits us most in that moment. You hurt me, What I believe benefits me most is to figure out how to get you to see you're wrong. My value is to make you see you're wrong. My value is to make you suffer for making me suffer. That's what I value. You may say it's not, But what do you think resentment is? Resentment is the value of an unconscious nature that believes something made a victim of it, Unable to see the only thing it can be made a victim of is something challenges the image it has of itself. So here I am, And I start to recognize my values are what are determining my choices, And that always justifies in that moment, Whatever it is that I have to go through. So my values include justifying why I'm angry, Because the values belong to something explaining that I'm not really like that. And if you weren't the way you were, I wouldn't be the way I am. That's part of a value system that we believe are our values. And I'm telling you, They are not. This is what I meant by chewing, Instead of being in the right place where these wings develop naturally, By the way, In the cocoon, In the darkness of unknowing, Our mind that creates the conditions we fight with or blame or deny, Then choose on all of the reasons why life shouldn't be that way, And then choose on ways to control those conditions. So it doesn't have to go through that same thing again, Which by the way, As you know, It keeps going through again and again and again. So the fact is that we are without knowing it, Just as the Paul the Caterpillar, He's not acting in his best interest as he chews on his favorite leaf. His best interest was in the moment where the will of something other than himself came along and said, Listen, It's time for you to enter into a new order of your own existence. And I don't know what it is, Says Paul, I don't, It's dark, What's happening to me? No, I want the familiar. We cannot live from a life that continues to be familiar and be free from the attachment to the familiar at the same time. It's impossible. Look, These are hard lessons. No one wants to believe that we choose against our own best interests. None of us want to believe that. Because in the moment where an unwanted condition comes, Yes, Angela, Some darkness suddenly appears, Seems to dwarf what little light we've got. In that moment, We believe our best interest is to change or control that condition instead of recognizing that as a human being alive in an endless flow of creation, Creation itself has brought about that condition to bring me into a new relationship with the consciousness that denies or feels threatened by life. This is so difficult to convey. We live from a consciousness that believes it is wise to deny or delay a condition that seems to work against our own best interests, Because we believe we know what our own best interests are, And that's what we value. The hard lesson to understand is that these are not our values, And they never were. These values belong to my mother, My father, Their grandparents, The world at large through millennia, And a world that keeps reevaluating its values and creating new laws, New rules, So that the values that never worked can somehow be stuffed down our faces, So that we then will embrace the values that were given to us yet by another group of human beings, Another level of consciousness that is unconsciously attached to what has no value at all. How do we know that's true? It's, Again, It's evidence. How can anybody value what makes them a victim of their own values? Am I not a victim of my own value if I live in fear of the security I imagine will make me whole and timeless? Am I not a victim of my values that make you the problem, And so I have a problem with every relationship that doesn't agree that I am what I imagine myself to be? We just can't see it, Because what we value in the moment where that truth is revealed is explaining to ourselves why someone else is responsible and has made us a victim. We are never a victim of anything other than what we don't understand about ourselves. End of story. And by the way, So is every other human being the victim of the same. And when you get victims acting on victims, You get victims blaming victims for being victimized. And nothing changes, Which we can also see is true. Just the depth of the degradation, The extent of the victimization of humanity, Victimized by its own consciousness, I might add. If we understand that to any extent, And God willing that we do, And must, If we ever want to know anything about what it means to be actually alive, To participate, To be an instrument of the Creator, To play our role in creation itself, If we ever want to actually understand that there has to be a full shift in our priorities, A full shift, Instead of moments where how do I prove myself, How do I pursue, How do I protect, What I believe will imagine me, Make me secure? Instead of doing that, The new priority must be to see what each moment is revealing to us about our present priorities. Say it again, The new priority must be to see what life is revealing to us about our present priorities. And how do we know what life is revealing to us about our present priorities? How can my own priority punish me? My priority is to be secure. My priority is to ensure that you like me, That I gain prominence and that I keep looking like I want to look like, In sanity. That priority is my pain, Isn't it? So I must have a new priority, And that must be to be a conscious participant, Not just in creation itself, But a participant in the will of the Creator and a witness at the same time to all of that. I'm going to ask Kate to bring something up now that I wrote, So if you would not post for just a moment while I go through this. This is an explanation that you will have to contemplate, If you will. Let me get into it now. Just stop posting for a moment, Please. To be completely what I am, The awareness of what is acting upon me as inseparable from what is acted on within me. To be completely what I am, The awareness of what is acting upon me as inseparable from what is being acted on within me, And silently witnessing how there is seamless reconciliation is the realization of a perfect peace forever being revealed and reborn at the same time. To be completely what I am, Which is what? The awareness of what is acting on me as inseparable from what is being acted on me, And silently witnessing how that seamless reconciliation of those active and passive forces is the realization of a perfect peace that is forever being revealed and reborn at the same time. That awareness, That level of being, Is immortality. But there is no one outside of it. The leaves on the tree aren't outside of the roots and the ground that gives birth to it. The sunlight that streams down and gives life to the trees and the leaves. The leaves are not apart from the sunlight that feeds them. Everything is part of a constant creation, Divine in origin, An act of love at its root, And anything that is outside of that suffers for the lack of the love that it, Without knowing, Is cutting itself off from. When our first and foremost priority is to recognize that our values have very little to do with participating directly in the moment, But rather trying to protect what we took into that moment with us from the content of our demands and security, When we start to realize that, Then it begins to create a new first. Surely if you know anything of the New Testament, And this is not just the Bhagavad Gita, The Dhammapada, Every last true teaching speaks to this idea that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. That there has to be a reordering, A turning around. And for that to happen, We as human beings have to learn to do the right thing at the right time, Which means that in any unwanted moment, Every moment, Actually, There has to be a new choice. And that choice is to make, If you will, A new move in a new direction. And we can do this. This isn't complicated. We just have to see how it's upside down now. Right now, The first move I make when you make an unwanted move in my life is I move against you or I try to move away from you. When life seems to move against me, My first move is to figure out why life moved that way and then try to figure out how to get something out of it or escape it. But that's not the right move at all. The right move has nothing to do with separating ourselves from the condition we don't want. The right move and the right value is to enter into that moment so that we can start recognizing what it is that's moving us. It is impossible for a man or a woman who has obtained any true awareness of themselves to act against themselves. It is impossible. Because there is something God willing growing in its presence in us that recognizes that's capable of seeing. You know what? Why do I, What sense does it make to want to blame someone or something for the pain I'm in when the more I attend to that problem, The more pain I experience? Let my first choice be to go within. Let that be my first move. And don't make it complicated. What does it mean, My first move? The right thing to do at the right time is to go within. It means to enter into the awareness of that moment. What's the awareness of the moment? That paragraph, To be what I am completely. The awareness of what's acting on me. You said this, I look at you, I feel like you did something, But I'm not going to separate now what I feel you did from the part of me that sits there and hates what you did, That resists it. They don't exist without each other. And if they don't exist without each other, Meaning that what is acting and what is being acted on, If they're actually a singularity, Then can I understand that in that seamless, In that convergence of what seems to be two separate things, There is obviously an awareness of that that brings about a completely different way of participating in that moment, Seeing it. To understand as best I'm capable of doing, What it means that the first move, What matters most in every given moment is no longer to serve the reaction born out of being identified, But to observe it. First move, No matter what, It'll take a long time probably just to get to the point where you realize my first move is to resist, Resent, Or otherwise try to control what I'm reacting to. That's a dead man's game. That's right, Richard, The truth will set you free. It's a dead man's game because what I'm giving, Because my attention is taken by the very thing that created the condition I don't want, Which is an unconscious mind. So the first move must be to not serve the reaction, Let alone that sense of self, But to become the silent witness of it. And then as we work that way, As we learn to work that way, Where instead of being thwarted all the time by the conditions that work against us, Those very conditions, Like Christ said, He prepares a feast in the presence of my enemies, They will begin to give me a nourishment that I can't obtain in any other way. By bringing me into what it means to be alive and in that aliveness to realize the whole point of this work is that we're already a part of that life. We're not apart from creation, But we have agreed presently to live from something that takes us apart from it so that it can go look for what it calls life. And it's not out there.

Reviews

May I forget this lesson less and less in this beautiful life Thank you

Thank you 🙏