GF Live 3-4-23 Leave The Pain Of The Past Behind You

If we know better than to look for the living in a grave yard, then why don’t we know better than to listen to old thoughts and feelings that keep promising us a new life, but that we’ve already seen – time and time again – have proven themselves to be dead on arrival.

Recorded Live 3-04-23

Transcript

I want to set the stage in a particular way for the material we're going to cover. And I would add right at the outset that I'm going to not only be expanding on what we've been talking about over the last maybe two, Three, Maybe four meetings. And I hope you're able to join me online for those free talks. You can find out about it in the profile or just search me out. And I'm going to go into it even more deeply tomorrow. So if you're interested, If this material helps you remember something that feels like it's important to be remembered, I would urge you to do so. Here we go. I think that most of us, In one way or another, Have heard the rather often quoted piece of Scripture from the New Testament, Where Christ was talking to his disciples, The men and women who were interested in understanding what he was bringing forth as a possibility in that time. He said, What man or woman taking thought can add one cubit to his stature? Now, I've talked about that idea before, But I'm going to expand upon it again. Firstly, The actual Aramaic translation of that is what person who is anxious can do anything to bring an end to that consciousness involved in that fear and anxiety, Basically. But I want to look at it more deeply with you. What man taking thought, What woman taking thought can add one cubit to their stature? What man, What woman can rise above, Become greater than the thinker of those anxious thoughts? What man or woman can rise above, Transcend, Become greater than, Add one cubit, Than the thinker of those thoughts? This is a fairly important distinction to make, Because the thinker of those thoughts and the thoughts that thinker has all belong to the past. There is no new thought. There are ways in which thoughts are reordered that point to possibilities in the physical world, But thought itself is the past. So Christ was saying, What man or woman taking thought, Meaning identifying with the thinker, Can stop living in the past. And if a person can't stop living in the past, Then how are they ever going to enter into the real present moment, Into the kingdom of heaven? Did you understand that? A few yeses or nos in the board would be good. I can't tell you how important it is to consider what I've just pointed out. As a rule, What happens in any, Oh my God moment, Any split second of a disturbance, What happens? Why did that happen? Why did she do this? Now what's going to happen? And in that instantaneous instantaneous resistance to the moment, Whatever its nature may have been, There is built into that resistance a question that we may actually ask ourselves or ask others, But by and large, We don't hear it when it first starts to formulate itself. And the question based, Appearing out of the onset of that sudden unwanted moment is essentially, How am I going to deal with this fear? How am I going to deal with this pain, With this worry, With this doubt, With this toxic person? What, How, When, What am I going to do, Taking thought to change the condition that I'm in, In this moment? We should all understand that it's pretty simple. Seems quite natural. Even if the words don't formulate themselves, It's built into the reaction. How am I going to deal with this? What do I have to do? Now, The question I have for you is how many times have you and I been right there? Not necessarily in the same physical circumstances, They're changing all the times, But how many times have we been there experiencing that exact same consciousness, Caught up in the exact same questions, And then carried along by what those questions, The reactions that are born out of them? What do I do? Where do I go? Yeah, Brad, That's right, About six billion. Too many times to count. Yeah, Thousands. All right, So look, We get it. We seem to be caught in some strange cycle, Where in the throes of those moments, Not unlike being caught, You know, Up here in Southern Oregon, There's a rogue river. Maybe you've ever stepped into a river or a riptide, Any of those things, Where you find yourself, You entered into it, And the next thing you know, You're being carried along, In this instance, By these thoughts and feelings, And all of them are looking for a solution to whatever that situation is that triggered that reaction. And by the way, Just to add this note, That that moment that we don't want was defined by the reaction, So that the reaction that defines the moment, By its very nature, Confines us to the consciousness from out of which that reaction came. So this is proving, If you can see it with me, This idea that what man or woman taking thought, What man or woman being the thinker, The reactor, Which is the past, Can do anything to provide a path that will do anything other than reincarnate the consciousness and the circumstances again. Yes? So without knowing it, In those moments, We're placed right into the exact same hands of a consciousness whose choices and actions have essentially recreated the experience that we don't want in that moment. What we're working to do here, God willing, You're working with me, Not just sitting there drinking a cup of coffee and looking out the window, Is that we are unknowingly unconscious inhabitants of a psychological system that is not just unconscious, But asleep to the actions it takes after it makes those unconscious acts, So that the reactions always have the stimulation in them that make it seem like suddenly, Oh, What, Here's a moment. But it's never a new moment when you are reacting to it, Because the reaction is painting the moment with all of the coloration, The characters of the past, That essentially confirms the consciousness in that experience. Now, The moment itself is always new. There is no such thing as a moment that repeats itself. That's just a fact. We've been proving this for the last 40 years that I've been talking. So that repetitious sense of a moment, Oh no, Is really the reappearance of a consciousness simply calling that moment what it does, And then deriving an experience that it hopes to escape by calling on the same content to help it do so. And it should be very evident it cannot. So to be clear, Because we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, All kinds of things happen all day, Especially if you're in business or have any practical matters to be concerned with. Where that event transpires, You get the phone call, You see the text, You hear the email, You see the email, And you look outside and there's already six inches of snow on the ground, And you live on a hill that you're probably not going to get down. So in one respect, It's necessary. There is a certain function to ask, Well, How? How will I deal with this day? How will I deal with this particular matter? But the question of how will I deal with the matter is a practical question. I'll restate it. It's a practical question. How am I going to get out if I have to go out today? That's a practical question. But you and I both know, By God, We should be clear on this, That when the question, How am I going to get down the driveway? How am I going to handle that particular piece of business that needs to be done? What am I going to do with that person that's so troublesome, But they need to be part of this operation if it's going to be a successful system? Those questions, How, Do not have pow in them. Our questions, How, Always have some kind of worry, Doubt, Fear, Something, Some eminent threat that if I don't deal with this successfully, It's the end of my life. And I want to be clear that when the question, How, Has the pow in it, You're in the wrong place. You're looking at the moment from a wrong part of yourself, Which is what this whole talk is going to be about. And more importantly, If you and I are ever going to learn how to live above, I mean, Rise above this consciousness that simply reincarnates itself, The past over and over again, If we're going to do that, We're going to have to find a way outside of or above that consciousness, Which we are created to be able to do. So that we start to understand reliving the same mental life cannot possibly deliver us to a life above that reactive, Constantly fearful, Anxious, Regretful state. The mind is fantastic. It's boggling. We can build a ship and go to Mars, But the same mind that can build that ship cannot take itself past its own pain, Because that level of consciousness is not aware of itself and believes that its reactions to conditions is what it needs to be aware of, Unaware of the fact that the reaction is the reiteration of that consciousness and the content of the past. Everybody still on board with me? So the question is, How do we liberate ourselves from this conditioned mind, Knowing that even the question, How do I do that? What do I have to do? I've got to get past myself. Even that question belongs to an order of consciousness that does not yet understand itself. It does not yet see itself, Because if it did, The discovery of the sheer futility of hoping that thought is going to rescue me from the thinker, From the reaction, It would bring everything to a beautiful quietude. This is how the mind becomes still in and of itself, Not by imagining how to transcend itself, But by seeing with great clarity that as it is, It cannot transcend itself and must develop a new kind of awareness, A new order of attention that allows it to do what it is intended to do. Let me rephrase this for you. This is not a tongue twister, It might sound like it. It is impossible to think ourselves outside of any moment that our own thoughts have created. It is impossible to think ourselves outside of any moment that our own thoughts have created. We just don't see it. I'm having a reaction, All these thoughts, And then right from the moment, The onset of those reactions, Those thoughts, I begin to call on the exact same level of consciousness to rescue me from the condition that that consciousness is pointing out as being inescapable, Or I must struggle to do so. It is impossible to think yourself outside of any moment that your own thoughts have created. If you can understand that, Your mind in and of itself will begin to grow quiet. Not that you won't start to struggle, Because you'll start to see how incredibly addicted you are to the sensation of self as it's trying to extricate itself from the very thing it created. It's just this dark, Eternal form of a consciousness that imagines it knows what freedom is, And then is a captive of its own imagination. So even the finest mental life can't deliver us beyond our own, Beyond the inherent limitations of our present consciousness. And we're always trying to make, We're always trying to learn something with our mind. What we have to learn ultimately only comes in the form of a revelation that's in two parts. One part of the revelation contains humiliation, Because I see that I've been blind, And I didn't know it. But the revelation of that blindness by an awareness that shows me the fact of myself, That revelation is in fact, What takes me past the limitation that I didn't know I had. This is the principle of the work. Note by note, If you will, Step by step, Each step revealing just behind it what we were and have been, And at the same time drawn by the step above us to make that exploration and go through that process of discovery. So I've got to keep going here. From that unique vantage point that I just described, We stand on a precipice of a certain kind, A kind of an unthinkable leap. And that unthinkable leap is that we start to recognize the disparity between this mental nature, This intellectual nature, This emotional nature, Operating individually, Separately, In conflict with each other. The leap is standing there and recognizing that here I am, I'm afraid again. And yet, I also know in my heart of hearts, I'm not meant to live in fear. Here I am, I'm hateful of that person in the past. They may not, Maybe they're even dead. I have these regrets, These resentments in my past. Here I am, I'm here again. And maybe for the first time realize that I'm not really here again. I've never left here. I've never understood the consciousness that reiterates the content of itself, So that in the repeated experience of itself, It goes on as me, But it's not I, Is it? So there I am on one side, And the other side is the recognition of that. To be able to see that and understand I'm called, All of us are called to a higher order of life, To become truer human beings, More loving human beings. And by the way, There is no love in thought at all. The most loving thought in the world is absent of kindness. That's why it said Christ came to fulfill the law. The law itself has no love in it. So here I am, And I'm at this point where I see where I am, And I can feel where I need to be, But I can't take myself there. Even the awareness of my condition can't span that gap. But if we understand what I'm describing, That that mental world is itself not the world that I must find this freedom in, But I must find freedom from that mentality, From that consciousness. And as we realize the restrictions, Because they are, Of living from that thought-dominated self, Because we see it. People always say, How do you do it? You see it. Imagine a man who spent the last 8, 000 years on this hike, Trying to go up the mountain to find the next level of himself. And finally, After 8, 000 years, He reaches the point and he goes, You know what? I'm pretty sure I've been here before. I'm going to mark this point. And he makes a mark there. And then however long it takes for the next cycle, There he is. He sees the mark. I've been here before. I've been here before. Discovering that I have been in a psychological space caught in the past before again and again, Is the beginning of realizing that anything that tells me how to get out of that space is part of its recreation. And no one will consciously recreate their own unhappiness, Their own repetition of a regretful life. No one would do it. It's all done unconsciously. We have to wake up and realize it. So because part of this new realization is what I just described, That there's always this question, What am I going to do? How do I do that? That question is arising out of the level that produced the problem. And it's there. I'll slow down a little bit. That is, We reach a kind of a threshold, A certain gap in our inner development where, If we've understood what I've spelled out, It's called being between a rock and a hard place, Isn't it? And Dean, To be clear, I am not talking about self-control. This is not self-control. This is the awareness of a self that fears itself and tries to control its own manifestations. Control, The whole idea of control, Belongs to a consciousness that is out of control and trying to assert conditions on itself so that it won't manifest what it imagines it ought not be. Control in consciousness is consciousness in conflict, Because I want to do the things I don't want to do, And I do the things I shouldn't do, But I'm aware that I ought not. So this consciousness sits in turmoil and then calls on the content of itself to help escape itself. And the content of our present consciousness cannot escape itself. It recreates itself. And Brad, It's not the subconscious mind steering the ship, Not the conscious. The whole, This consciousness that we call unconscious is quite aware of itself. It is we who have no awareness of this consciousness. And until we are aware of our own consciousness, Of its foibles, Of the way it's always in conflict, Of the way it's always trying to create for itself a moment where it won't have to relive the content of itself again, Until that we are stuck in that rock in that hard place. And that's an important point, Because it's a place of transition. And it'll seem when you start working with this, And I know many of you are, You go, God, I don't see a way out. I know I can't go back, Meaning I can't go back and take thought and listen to myself, Psychologically save myself. I can listen to the past experience, Tell me, Well, Guy, You know, Just three days ago, The snow was six inches. And when you got down to about four, Your car is geared up, It can make it down. But why is there fear in that? Why is there anxiety? In the natural steps the mind needs to take based on its experience, So that it can establish and affirm what it knows is true? Why is there any sense of I at all, In any of the natural how to do what we do? That's what we're looking at. Because if we understand that this rock in this hard place is a necessity, I can't see the step, Because the consciousness that's sitting there resisting itself, It's blind. So I must learn a certain kind of patience and use my attention in that moment. And maybe this will help a little bit. I'm getting too far behind in my own notes. I've spoken before, At least in the past, How when you, I get into my bed at night, And it's dark. And I have one of those fans, You know, Those, A fan over my bed. When I first get to bed, I can't see that fan. But as I lay there, What happens? My eyes adjust to the darkness. So the whole of the organism begins to adapt to its condition, And it makes the adjustments appropriately, Then I can see. It's very much what it's like to be in this kind of spiritual gap in this darkness between knowing what I can no longer do, How the thinker and the thought are the past. And at the same time, Sitting in that space, Waiting for the new understanding, Waiting for the awareness that is already there in that moment. The fan is there, The eyes can't see, The freedom is there, But this consciousness can't recognize it because it's still struggling with itself. The Lord shall fight for you and you shall hold your peace. Yeah, That, See these, All these beautiful old passages, Old Testament, New Testament, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada, All of these beautiful written works by men and women who've gone before us are trying to explain to something to us that we're invited, Albeit difficultly, To understand. So let's reach this. Every time we reach that moment that I just described, That we're going to call the mental how, M-E-N-T-A-L, Mental how, Every time we reach that moment, We have to understand it goes nowhere. And if we will stay in that moment, Knowing it won't go anywhere and it cannot take us past the condition it's created, In that place waiting there is what we will call the spiritual now. So now we're making a distinction. It's a mental distinction, I understand, But we have to try to paint a picture, Don't we? Mental how, Dead in the water, Apart from practical thought. Spiritual how is the place between, And it is what we, And I'll just go through this with you, The spiritual now cannot be thought of as a place. It's more an awareness of a conscious relationship with the essentially endless possibilities that are revealed with every passing moment. Because you see, The mental how, The mind always gravitates and gets stuck in an idea, Stuck in a notion, Stuck in the content, The character of the past, It gets stuck there, And the possibilities are dead. What possibilities are there to fear? Let alone the self that feels that fear. There are no possibilities other than what that fearful self generates to try to rescue itself. And if I'm still afraid, I've not been rescued by that self, Have I? So this spiritual now is a kind of an invisible, Of course, Intelligent field that is filled with the possibility of endless discoveries that can only be realized within it, Within the creative light, Within that life of it, Where there is no end to that consciousness, Nor to the consciousness that explores it. That's the spiritual now. It's always whole. It is always complete. And entering into it, We enter into a relationship with a higher order of ourself that just being in it allows us to see, Without being captured by a reaction to what is witnessed there, All of the things that are unfolding within us due to the corresponding moment and the consciousness it has interacted with. So I'm there, Fully aware of all possibilities, And then that awareness has its own intelligence. It cannot act against itself. And so the best action becomes choiceless. It isn't a prescription of the mind trying to protect itself. It is the perfection of the moment itself, Because we are brought into it through our attention and our ourselves being perfected accordingly. So that whatever the moment is, To summarize that whole thing, Once grounded in that new order of awareness that holds within it the possibilities of, Listen, Not just dealing with the moment, But transcending the consciousness responsible for whatever that painful part is. And then all we need to do, In quotes, Is to recognize that the real solution to the moment may have a practical basis. But if I leave that moment without new understanding, Without having gained some insight into this old thinker-thought consciousness and the futility of it, Right from Ecclesiastes, All who struggle in the field of opposites struggle in vain. If I don't leave the moment having gained some insight into that consciousness, The moment has been wasted, Absolutely wasted. And the purpose of that moment has been thrown away. Whereas the more I can be in that moment, The clearer it becomes to me, The beauty of it, Because I begin to understand some of these things that have been so difficult. You've all heard the expression that truth is a pathless land. I'm describing to you what that pathless land is. It is a place for all intents and purposes that contains all of time, All of the possibilities. And each of those moments, In quotes, And the possibilities revealed are particular to the essence, To the character and quality of what you and I came into this world with, Intended to be developed by that relationship with what is timeless. But without that relationship, There's no development, Because there's no discovery. So the clearer that you can understand the necessity of leaving this mental world, The sooner you can catch yourself being dragged into it. And that's quite important to understand. You, Who you are, You do not start, You are not the one who starts formulating how to save yourself. What formulates how to save you is something that lives in fear all the time of its security now threatened, Being taken from it. In this spiritual now, There is nothing but perfect security, Because there's no one separate from its unfolding possibilities and the perfection of the consciousness in that moment. So I better move along here, Because I've got eight minutes, And I want to go through a couple things with you in particular. Katie is going to put this into the chat box here so that you can see it. And when you relisten, Or when you go to the website, My website, Gfguyfinley. Org, We post these chats, You can get this. First, I'm going to show you differences. Living from the mental how, We often fear what we don't understand. Living from the mental how, We often fear what we can't understand. Everybody get that? Living from the mental how, We often fear, Why are you like that? Why does that have to be that way? So there's fear, Because the mind meeting a moment it can't understand doesn't know what to do other than react to it. While living in the spiritual now, We understand the fear is the mental mistake. While living in the spiritual now, We understand, We're present, We're aware of the fact that the fear we've always counted on to protect us can't protect us. So the fear and the identification with it, That's the mental mistake. And once I understand that looking to fear to tell me how to be fearless or set me free is like asking a shark to take me from the deep water to the shore, I get it. I cannot let fear formulate questions for me. I cannot let fear prescribe protection. It's impossible. Not because I'm saying it's impossible, But it's impossible because you can use your own intelligent awareness to recognize. Well, Of course. I don't know why I didn't see that before. Fear tempts me into trying to be triumphant over what I'm afraid of, But I don't escape what I'm afraid of, And I never escape the fear. The solution must be to rise above it. That's what the spiritual now is. Number two, Living from the mental how, We look to the past to help guide us to a secure future. Living from the mental how, We look to the past to help guide us to a secure future. What does that mean? Well, It's pretty simple. Somehow or other, Here's a moment and my security is threatened. OMG, Oh no, What's that? This is a threat. This is in one respect a natural reaction of an unconscious nature, A consciousness asleep to itself, Looking at something that seems to be taking from it what it relies on, What it's identified with for its security. So living from the mental how, We look to the past to guide us to secure future. My mind starts telling me, Okay, Yeah, Boy, You better hop on this right away. You better straighten that person out. You better take these actions. And again, I'll just reiterate, The practical side of these things never includes painful thoughts or feelings, Period. And if you are caught up in a painful thought or feeling, As you're trying to figure out how to deal with a moment, It is no longer you dealing with that moment. You have been dealt this, You've been delivered into the hands of a consciousness that can't wait to drag you under. So living from the mental how, We look to the past to guide us to a secure future. While living in the spiritual now, There is freedom from the past and no thought for tomorrow, Because we are living in a fully awakened present moment. In the spiritual now, There's freedom from the past. That's the point, Isn't it? There's no thought for tomorrow in the present moment, Because in the present moment, I can see the nature of the thinker. In the awareness of now, All of the activity of this convoluted, Conflict-filled consciousness just spilling out like a bowl full of bugs, Everything running around, I can see it. I'm not going to get into that. I'm tempted to, But now I understand. The only way that I'm ever going to be free from, Oh my God, What happened, Only way I'm ever going to be free is if I can start living in another order of awareness that recognizes anything that's afraid of being made a captive is a captive of its own content. You're already free. Be you perfect as your Father in heaven. You and I are created. All of our centers, All of the possibilities of their interaction are already whole and complete. It is we who are apart from that possibility, Because we live in the past from a consciousness that keeps trying to produce and prescribe a better time to come. The last of the three comments, Living from the mental how, We spend valuable time looking back in regret over past events. I don't think I need to clarify that. Why didn't I become something more than I am? Why didn't she love me? Why did he have to do that? Why in the name of God is this world like this? Look at that. You're looking not at what is, Although it's true, But what you are looking at is a mental image, A picture, Something, An imagined, And you're looking at what the mind made of a moment no longer present. It took the experience at that moment, Made it into something that it could wrestle with, Try to control and grasp, And then when that same consciousness is triggered by any corresponding a similar event, Then up comes that terrible pain of the past, And then we do what? We try to figure out how we can escape it. Living from the mental how, We spend valuable time looking back in regret over past events. While living in the spiritual now, The past exists only for practical purposes and never as a source of pain or problems. While living in the spiritual now, The past exists only, If I could underline that, I can't get much more adamant than that, The past exists only for practical purposes and never as a source of pain or problem. We all talk about wanting freedom from the past without understanding there is no freedom from the past, Without rising above the consciousness that is the past and that we're fully identified with. A mind that just never stops reacting to anything that doesn't align with what it is identified with and attached to. And then when that challenge takes place as it must, By the grace of God, I might add that these conditions never stop changing. The only thing that consciousness knows to do is to throw its little unconscious hands in the air, Stomp its little unconscious feet on the ground and throw a tantrum. How to rise above the battle ground. That's what I'm describing to you. Nellie, You rise above the battle ground by walking off of it, Because you understand you can't win as long as you stay there. And then you become an observer of all that is unfolding in that consciousness, Instead of unconsciously serving it as we all have done and continue to do. Every time this mind reacts to something that doesn't fulfill its expectations.

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