GF Live 5-20-23 Catch Worry And Anxiety In The Act

Our consistent wish and work to meet, see through, and transcend any old fear of ours...ensures we will be given the new strength we need to do so. Do you know what a good life is? A good life is a life in which you never have to think about yourself again. Do you know why? Because you can't think about yourself without producing fear.“

Transcript

We have a special subject, As actually always on Saturdays and whenever I speak, I never repeat the same material. I just try to help you see what it is that I have seen and if we can work to see things together then we'll have it in front of us clearly enough, I hope, That we can bring about some changes. It's critical, You know, That whenever we gain some new understanding that we don't just leave that rough jewel laying there but that we pick it up and that we work with it and that we take it with us, That idea, That insight into everything that we do so that we can constantly polish it so that we might see the light more consistently and perfectly reflected through that understanding. I've asked Kate to post a special key lesson that is the summary, Actually, Of all that we're going to look at. So if you don't mind while she posts it, I'll read it. Please let's not post while she puts it up. Nice deep breath. Bring yourself back into not just the awareness of your body but the awareness of everything that is going on around you at the same time. It's critical for our study today. Here is the special key lesson. Upon what the mind dwells, Therein is its heaven or its hell. Upon what the mind dwells, Therein is its heaven or its hell. I would urge you to write that down while we took a moment for it to settle. That means that in one respect, Our experience of any given moment for its light or its darkness, For its contentment or its worry, Depends completely upon where our attention is in that moment. I've covered this one idea many times with all of you, I trust. If you're new, Then you might want to write this down because it's intimately connected with that first key lesson. Upon what the mind dwells, Therein is its heaven or its hell. Is the idea that as our attention, As goes our attention, So comes our experience. As goes our attention, So comes our experience. Now let me perhaps remind you of something, But if not familiarize you with a certain important idea. Just out of curiosity, And you can just give me a quick shout on the chat board here. How many of you are familiar with the story of Narcissus? Just ever so quickly, Yes, Throw a yes or no up there. So I have an idea of how much explanation I have to do. Mostly yeses, Good. Great. I think most of us have some knowledge of it, Although we may not know all the ins and outs. It's not a problem, Kelly or June, Shelby, Anybody not sure. Now there are equal amounts. That's fine. It's not something that perhaps one would run into ordinarily, But I can tell you that these stories, These in this instance, It was a myth. And most of the myths concerned demiurges or the interaction of certain spirits. They talked about them in terms of people, But they weren't really people. These were teaching stories. In short, Narcissus was, We'll just say, Was a person who, As he was passing by this pond, His glance fell into the waters and there upon the still waters, He saw a reflection of himself. And apparently one would have to assume that somehow he had never seen his own reflection because the minute he saw it, The story goes, Narcissus fell in love with the image of himself. And he sat down by those waters and the story goes, Could not take his eyes off of himself. Essentially, He fell in love with the image of himself. Now inherent in this story is the idea that, Well, Clearly I'm not the image I have of myself, But Narcissus didn't know that the reflection in the water, The beauty of that image was not the beauty of himself. And so becoming identified with the image there in the water, He was afraid to leave the water because then he would no longer be able to see this beautiful image of what he thought was himself. But no image of oneself is oneself. And never is that more true than when it comes to our topic of study together today. We have, For all intents and purposes, Because of this consciousness that has fallen, As it has, Into a divided state, We have become a kind of a negative Narcissus. And what is a negative Narcissus? We look at the image of an event. We look at the image that our reaction brings up when it tells us and shows us why this is the way it is. We look at the image, In essence, The thought that describes the event. And we cannot take our eyes off of the torment that that image creates. I look at what you said to me yesterday. I didn't bring it up myself. It was just there in the waters of this mind. And I see what you are and what you did in that reflection, And I can't take my eyes off of it. Surely you must understand this. My mind projects tomorrow, 10 minutes from now, 10 years from now. The mind, Asleep to itself, Creates the image of a time to come. The time to come that it has imagined is filled with fear because it's got what if and how about this, And all of the myriad ways in which something that we become attached to and dependent on, In this instance, The image of tomorrow, Produces this very definitive sense of self. And so my mind creates the image of a time to come or an image of what took place yesterday, A memory. And in that memory, There is a misery, In that tomorrow, There is a fear. And like Narcissus couldn't take his eyes off of the beautiful image of himself that he thought was himself. So it is that this mind and our identification with it, It cannot take its eyes off of that negative image. It cannot take its attention away from what it fears that doesn't exist outside of the image that it itself has created. And so the mind is drawn to the resistance of the image that it has made. And therein we get caught in this dark circle of a false self that first captures itself without knowing it has done so, By creating an image of the past or the future, An image of oneself who failed in the past or who may not pass muster in the future. And there it sits by that pond that is nothing but a reflection and a punishment, Wherein the more I look at it, The more I am captured by it. And the more I'm captured by the image, The more I'm captured by subsequent images of a time to come when I'll no longer be caught that way in that anxiety or that fear or that doubt or that hatred. So let's just pause for a moment. How many of you, Please give me an idea, Can get the gist of what it is that I'm trying to express? How upon what the mind dwells therein is its heaven or its hell? We've just described the nature of hell. The nature of hell is when an unconscious mind creates from the content of itself some form of conflict from the past or that it anticipates in the future. And in that anticipation, In that dwelling upon the pain from what was, The mind dwells in a self-created hell. And there is no other hell. There is no other capture, Nothing that can captivate us other than that attention that is errantly given and then identified with what creates so much pain in our life. Good. I'm glad to see all of this agreement, This understanding. This is understanding. Yeah, Steve, False creation is exhausting because it requires it be continued by the same nature that has created it. Do you remember the Chinese finger puzzle? I looked for one. I used to have some. I used them in class once. It was a tube, A straw tube, And then you would put your two fingers in this tube. You'd push them in. And then the exercise was to pull your fingers apart. But the more you tried to pull your fingers out of that Chinese finger puzzle, The more you tried to pull, What would happen? By its design, Which was created as opposites, The more you struggled against the opposites, The more you struggled against them, The tighter the puzzle pulled on the fingers. Do you remember that? That's exactly what I'm describing to you. The mind in its sleep creates an image of a past that has pain in it or an uncertain future and then not wanting the pain that it has brought up in the image as a memory or the fear that it has imagined might be coming, It struggles against its own machination. And the more it struggles against its own machination, Yes, Like quicksand, The more it struggles against its own imagination, The stronger becomes the pull of that imagination because the more I resist the condition, The more I'm captured by it. This is such a great law, Such a big rule to understand. Resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance. Surely you've heard me speak that before. And yet it happens every day, Doesn't it? Maybe you're sitting at your desk at work, You're at home, An email comes in, And in a split second, And we don't even know it. Everything that I'm sharing with you today that I intend to over the 40 minutes or so is all predicated on an immense glimpse from a couple of days ago, Actually. And as I have done, So should you do when you have a glimpse, Something that is clearly a light that comes into a part of this consciousness that that consciousness had no idea what it was being held by and what it held within it. Suddenly, You see there's an entirely different possibility here in this moment. Let me tell you a quick story to exemplify something that as we are now, We almost are helpless, Almost are helpless for the speed of the reaction. Now the reaction may take place as some spontaneous knee-jerk mechanical, Oh no, What's that? What does that mean? You know, The email, The news, Or, Oh, That's great, It makes no difference, High or low. Because in the end, Whatever image it is that we are identified with will become the source of our pain because no condition can remain in place. So every image that is derived from it will collapse and with it our identity. So that when there's that sudden, Oh no, Or not just the event that takes place, But the residue of something from yesterday or 50 yesterdays ago appears in the mind. In that split second, Our attention, Does it not go to that resistance? Does it not go to that picture? Let's put it that way. Why is my mind drawn to thinking about that punishing thing that you said to me 40 years ago? Why is my mind drawn to that? It's drawn to it because the mind that is drawn to the image is the creator of the image it drew. It is a singularity and it finds in there the substance of itself, What it needs to continue itself, Literally what it needs to reincarnate itself. And so our attention goes to the image, The image holds the reaction, Everything in the past is recreated, And in the recreation of that, The fixation, Which is a key word here. And suddenly I'm fixed. I'm fixed on something where the more I am fixed on it, The more I struggle to be free, The more I struggle to be free, The greater fixation it becomes. Now here's the story to exemplify that idea. Let's all take a nice deep breath, Pause for a second, Let the first half of this meeting settle in. A young man, We'll say he's 16 years old, Has been literally caught, Captive of a deep depression, Anger, All of these attending associations that come with any fixation on the image of something painful in our lives. And in this instance, He was a promising, Remains I would add, A promising athlete, But he had a season ending injury. And it was important to him, All of his development to become this fine athlete. And when the season ending injury came, It meant that he would lose that season. He'd only have a senior year left or so to be recruited by a college because he had a passion for whatever the sport might be that he was in. So there he is up in his room and his dad comes up and he says, You know, When are you going to get over this sport? And he gets mad at his dad. How insensitive can you be? Get over this. What are you talking about? His dad says, Can I show you something? Will you come with me? I just, I'm not, I have nothing to, I'm not going to lecture you. I'm not going to try to pull you out of this pain that you're in. All I want to do is just show you one thing. Would you let me show you one thing, Son? Okay. Now it happens that the young man is an avid surfer and they live near a beach town. And his dad knows how much the boy loves to surf and the injury doesn't keep him from surfing. Just can't use his shoulder for a while. So they get in the car and they go down to the favorite spot there at a break, What they call it a break. A break is a particular place along the coastline where for the reasons of the ground being the way it was, It would create swells. And they sit down there on a sand dune and they sit there quietly. And dad says to the boy, He said, Look, Look at it, Look, Look at out there. And he points way to the distance on the horizon of the ocean. Do you see it? And the boy goes, Yeah, I see it. What is that? And the boy knows what he's looking at. There's a swell. A swell is a word for a wave before it begins to crest. As water mounts the rising land, The resistance starts to bring into a swell. It starts to produce the upwelling of the waters. He says, It's a swell. And dad said, Well, That's a big swell, Isn't it, Son? Yes, It is. He says, Let's keep our eye on that swell. Boy still doesn't understand. About 30 seconds later, The dad says, What do you see now? He said, Well, It's getting ready to crest. Is it a left breaker or a right breaker? That means which way is that wave going to move? Son says, It's breaking right. And then another moment, The father says, What's happened now? He said, Well, It's crested and it's starting to break. Look at the tube, Surfing terms. And they're both looking at this thing. Another 10 seconds, 20 seconds goes by and the father says, Well, What happened now? Boy says, What are you getting at? Says, Tell me, Father says. Well, The wave is crested. It's broken. And it's got the white water rushing up to the shore. Surely all of us have seen this. You don't have to be a surfer. Another 10 seconds, Dad goes, What's happening now? What do you mean, What's happened now? What's become of the swell, The crest, The break, The white water? Boy says, Well, It's up on the shore. And now dad says, It's pulling back. Dad says to him, Well, What happened to the wave? What do you mean? Well, It's gone. It came and it's gone. And his father looks at him and he says, So you mean the wave isn't a standing wave? It's not a fixed wave, Is it, Son? No, It's not a fixed wave. And what about the ocean, The father says? Son's getting kind of interested. Is the ocean fixed? Is the wave that comes out of the ocean that's not fixed? From something that's fixed itself? The son says, No, It's not. And dad says, I want you to understand that what happened to you happened to you, But now you are fixed on what happened to you. And if you understood what we just looked at together, That no event in time is fixed, You would understand that the fixation you have is no longer with the event. You're fixed on the reaction you've had to the event, Son. That's the source of your misery. That's the source of your pain. Thinking about how it happened, Why it happened the way it did, What's going to happen, All of that, All of that, Son, You are responsible for the hell of these moments you're living in now. The event is no longer present. It has gone through its change. As every event goes through its change, Every moment in time is the expression of something that rises out of the ocean of the divine, Out of the ocean of all that is possible, Out of the ocean of influences and timeless forces. It rises, It crests, It breaks, It flows in and it flows out. And then the next wave is there, The next moment. And to understand that none of that is fixed means that if you could give your attention properly to these things, Instead of getting fixated on something that you don't like about the wave or how it broke or what has left you or what may be coming, You would begin to have a completely different life. The wave of the moment, The wave of the condition. Surely you've had moments where maybe you have to go and do something and you're completely resistant to doing it. Just an example. You need to talk to somebody, Maybe you're at work, You have to do some kind of special presentation or produce a report. What do you think procrastination is? Procrastination is when the mind makes of a moment something that is fixed in all this work that I've got to do. It's too much. I'm not adequate to get the work done. You can see that the event has requested something and now the mind takes the request and rather than moving with the request and completing it as the mind is given to do, The mind stops the thing right where it is, Just like the boy stopped the moment where he got hurt so that he could suffer that over and over and over again. So the mind makes something of a moment, A time to come, A time past. And the minute it makes something out of that moment, Which it can only do in thought, It can only make what happened out of into an image. What happened is gone. What may be isn't here. But the mind in its uncertainty, In its divided state, Ever seeking some kind of constancy creates for itself the very thing that produces its conflict. And no, You don't need to know what part of the mind does that. It's like asking what part of the refrigerator keeps things cold. It's a machine. That's what it does. And when it makes that image, It gets fixated on it. And when it becomes fixated on it, The very fixation in order for that to keep itself present has to do what? Look at this with me, Okay? I have a negative reaction. Now I can't have a negative reaction to a wave unless something in me has told me what that wave is, Where it's going, What it's going to do, And how it's never going to be the same after it comes. Unless the mind makes something out of that movement in life, That movement keeps moving as is the mind intended to move along with it and realize itself through the movement and what the wave reveals of that consciousness through the movement. All of that's meant to happen, But it doesn't. So what we get fixed on turns the wave into a wall. And once the mind has done that through its reaction, What happens? We both know. Now I must know exactly how that happened. I must know how that wave came. Because unless I know how the wave came, I'm never going to know how to deal with the wave. Do you see it? Unless I know why you said that, Why you are the way you are, I'll never know how to deal with you. So now I must know why. So now my mind brings in all of the associations from the past, Which is the only place it can derive these things from. It brings up every possible old bit of content related to that event. And then once it's got that, Then it knows what to do. So that image that is from the past then becomes the future. And I start to think about what to do with what, With what my mind has told me has happened. And my mind doesn't know what has happened. My mind is dwelling on something it says happened so that it can tell me how to be free of it. Yes, Someone said something terrible. Yes, COVID came. Yes, I lost my job. Yes, I have cancer. Yes, I'm going to die. Yes, You betrayed me. There's no end to these things. Yes, There is suffering. But like all things, Like all waves, They have their purpose, Their place, And their time. And then they recede back into the greater ocean from which they've come, Having done their job. Unfortunately for us, When these moments come and the intention they bring, The job they're meant to do, Which is to awaken us, Help us reveal to ourselves what we don't know, And then become a new human being because of the cleansing action, The purging action, Instead of all that, We get caught. And now we're blind. Now we're blind. This is where it's difficult for me to express something to you. The nature of what I want to describe. We're never here. This mind that creates the image of the event cannot create an image of the event without calling on the past in order to produce what it knows about the event. So the moment there is this resistance and this reaction, The mind quite literally, Unconscious of the real purpose of that resistance and reaction, Which ultimately is the revelation of this machinery, The mind makes an image. So now the mind looking at the image is actually looking into the past, Not the real past, The imagined past. The mind is looking into the past. And when the mind looks into the past, It does so so it can know how to escape the past that it has created and become identified with. And as the mind, Asleep to itself, Identifies with the past, Then that mind then tries to escape the past by calling upon it to imagine the future. So now I am looking without knowing it into the past. I'm actually an inhabitant of a world of dreams. I'm sitting here in my body. I'm an inhabitant of a dream. I don't know it's a dream because it's so filled with the sensation born of looking at that image of myself that is so completely the past, That it is so familiar and so in some strange way comforting to know what's happened, That it never dawns on me I'm blind as a bat. Oh God, That I should be able to explain these things. I know that I'm one of a lineage of men and women who are trying to help explain things that these eyes that we have can't see, That we might, At least by recognizing the things that we run into, Start to be willing to try and open our eyes to something else. When I sit here in my room, You sit in your office, You're driving your car, We don't see what is. Our mind is in the world of what was, Trying to escape it in the world of what should be. We don't see. Our level of being, The hunger for the sensation of familiarity is so strong that consciousness doesn't care what it brings into itself in order to satisfy that hunger. Bitter or sweet, It's all the same to that consciousness. But by the grace of God, And I do consider it such, For some men and women, And I hope for yourself, Or I assume you wouldn't be joining me here on this talk, At some point we start to realize I have saved myself by struggling to create a future for myself so many times. And so many times a moment comes and the mind goes through its machination again and there I am, A captive of a fear. And I believe the fear is so vital. I believe it's so important to save myself from fear that I never am able to see that there wouldn't be the fear without the mind that has made the image of something to be feared and the loss of myself if it happens the way it's imagined. Jewel, When you ask, So what do we do? We're not going to do anything more, Jewel. We're going to be where we are and see what we are and allow the revelation of this light that can reveal the darkness that acts the way it does so that we begin to lose interest in the continuity of what we call ourselves. And we do that not because we're wise or spiritual or strong or intelligent, None of that's nonsense. What we do is we begin to understand that we are constantly being done in by our own doing. That's what we need to see, Jewel. And it's exacerbated by a longing, You wouldn't be here again. I don't know when it, Here in the Gospel of Thomas, An apocryphal scripture, Christ says, Split a piece of wood, Turn over a stone, There I am. What does that mean? What is Christ, What is any saint, Mystic, Prophet trying to say? Split a piece of wood, Turn over a stone, There I am. In other words, I'm right there. I'm not just right there, I am under that stone, I am in that wood. I am everything that is in that moment, I am. And I am that which dwells in the Father, In the ocean that gives rise to this and that gives rise to you. And if I give rise to you as the vine, The branch, Then so it is that you, Wherever you are, There I am, There we are, There is we, There is the divine. Right here, Right now. And the problem with this, And it's immense, Is that I think the words are the thing. And I think that when the mind makes the image out of that wonderful sense that it gathers, When it makes the image, Then suddenly I'm caught up in that and I'm the image again and I don't know that I'm the image again. And then when the moment changes and the image passes because conditions bring up some other content of the consciousness, Now I hate myself, Now I'm not spiritual, Where did it go, Why am I not with Christ, With Buddha, With what? What's happened to me? And then there's the captivity of self-judgment that wouldn't take place if I hadn't become identified with the image, With the icon. Thou shalt create and have no graven images. Why? What is all that talking about? Because the very temptation to make an image is to create an identity that doesn't exist without the image. And so our God becomes the image. The God of Narcissus became his image. And he died on the bank of that pond, So it said, In love with his own image. We don't see that there is something in us that creates an image it says it hates because it loves to look at it and to derive a sense of self from it. So that the moment I look out and my mind goes over, What's going to happen today? Outside of practical planning and there's never an I in what is practical. Actually there is no I in the word practical, Is there? Bang, An I. And it's looking out, It's measuring all the possibilities in that moment. And it's not looking at the moment, It's not looking at the actual possibilities of the divine as that wave comes out of it and breaks and cleanses and pulls back and does it again. It's not looking at that, It's looking at all the possibilities that it imagines as part of the content of its own past. So everything that I measure as a possibility in the moment that might happen and that by the way punishes me as I do it, Is nothing but this mind regurgitating the content of its undigested experiences. And then I sit in that squalor and then I try to figure out how to escape the very thing that my own mind has produced. Turn over a stone, Split a piece of wood and there I am. How is that possible? Boy, I just, I went too long, I'm going to run out of time. Let me go through this quickly. Maybe I won't go through it quickly, Maybe I'll take a few extra minutes. Wherever you are, Look around you. You see all these things, Don't you? Here in Southern Oregon, I'm looking at this, All the beautiful newly leaved oaks and the madrones with their polished leaves and the trees and the shadows and the light. It's a gorgeous time here in Southern Oregon. I see all these things. You know what I don't see when I see all these things? What I don't see is the light that reveals all of these things. I look up at the sky and here's a few of these beautiful cumulus nimbus clouds, Clouds passing through. I look up, I see the clouds. I don't see the sky. I see the things that are moving through it. I look at the event. I watch the thoughts. All of that moving through, Creating a time that was and a time that will be. And what is it that the one thing I don't see that were it not for its existence, I would never be aware of the light. I would never be aware of a cloud. I would never be aware of what moves through me. What is it that is always there that is revealing everything in time? And what is always there is what is timeless. We don't see it. If we don't see it, We can't be in it. You can't be a part of what you don't see. I'm now a part of everything I see, Much to my sorrow. I see why you are the way you are. I see why the world is the way it is. I see how things should be. I see what a terrible person I am, Or God help me, I see what a tremendous person I am. All of that's pure garbage. What I'm looking at in that moment doesn't exist apart from a dream that a mind has made up so that it can continue itself moving through the journey of that imagined world. But instead, Split a piece of wood, Turn over a stone, There I am. We are never not without. That which we always feel we are without. But the only reason we feel that we are without the divine, Without what is holy, Without what is pure, Good and true, Pure without love, Only reason we're without it is because this mind is always attending to what it wants to be with so that it can be and see itself as it imagines itself. There's a passage from John, New Testament, Says, Do not say there are yet four months, Then comes the harvest. Look, I tell you, He says, Lift up your eyes and see the fields are white for harvest. Do not say there are yet four months, Then comes the harvest. I tell you, Lift up your eyes. The fields are white for harvest. What was he saying? The harvest is now. The field of the moment is abundant. The ocean is forever bringing into existence that which it takes back from existence. Our eyes are on the waves and fixated on what they are instead of understanding if we're properly attentive, Which we can be. I don't look for myself in what may happen to me. I don't find myself in what was once upon a time. Capture the mind that wants to take you into time. It's subtle. You can do it, Though. Use your attention. Use your attention to attend to the whole of the moment, Which is timeless, So that against that backdrop, You can see all the movement of the mind. You can watch it. It's so subtle, And yet nothing can escape the light. I look out. Why don't I just see purely the beauty of it? Why don't I just see purely what may be the momentary conflict in it? Because in that moment, My eyes are fastened on what it means and what I need to do about it. We must wake up, Understand that we must keep our attention in the now, In this present moment. There is no other place to seek the divine. You will not find God in a thought, In any puja, In any form of prayer. You will not find what is Christlike, What is loving. You will not find it in time. It doesn't exist there. It is here. It is now. It is with us always. And we must become the one who negates the tendency of this mind to forever seek what is unending in that which has ended the moment the mind creates it. 45 minutes, A little longer than usual. Stay tuned. If you can, Come and listen to the talk tomorrow. Sunday, It's free. You can find me. I'll go deeper into this, And we'll explore together these marvelous ideas that are intended to free us from a consciousness that does not know what it does to itself, So that in our awareness of what it keeps doing, We might see and then do something new, See the life, The world, Ourselves, Through new eyes that can never be captured by an image.

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Thank you 🙏

Thank you for your, seemingly magical, enlightenment. I look forward to hearing this again, later today, and many more times. An enormous amount of sacred content in a short amount of time. A true gift. ❤️