I want to spend our time today looking at something that in one way or another I think most of us consider almost constantly,
But that for certain reasons that we're going to look at together,
Our glance,
Our sudden awakening to where it is that we were compromised or something made us do not the good that we would but the evil we wouldn't,
That none of that is necessary once we understand what we are given to do and to be in this world as a human being.
I think enough have joined us.
I'll get going here.
I imagine you wouldn't be sharing this time with me if you weren't at whatever level it is true an aspirant of some kind.
What is an aspirant?
I guess you could say anybody who longs to increase or otherwise widen the depth and breadth of their life.
For a long time,
For most of us,
The idea of aspiring always has to do with trying to become what we've imagined,
What the world has taught us to imagine will make us a whole happy sane human being.
But at a certain point in time,
And I'll trust it's begun for you if not in full stream,
We begin to realize that we can add everything to ourselves that this world has to offer.
And as you've seen in the news almost daily,
People who are at the very top of this carousel call our world,
Leap from it.
I'm interested,
And I trust that you are too,
In being able to for ourselves and from ourselves,
And one day,
God willing,
On a moment to moment basis,
To learn what is true about ourselves.
There is a quote from Henry David Thoreau,
And I just can't help but read it to you because it applies so directly to what we're going to examine together,
Which is how do we get past these fears,
These things that even socially,
Physically hold us back,
Forget spiritually.
He writes,
In quotes,
He will put some things behind,
Will pass an invisible boundary.
New universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.
Old laws will be expanded and interpreted in favor of a more liberal sense,
And he will live with the license of a higher order of being.
And he will live,
She will live with a higher order of being because some things have been put behind him or her.
They have passed an invisible boundary.
God,
I just love that idea,
And I hope that you can at least follow me to some extent so that you recognize where it is that we live inside of these boundaries that we're not even aware of because we're so used to meeting them.
And when we meet the boundary,
To take the boundary as the end of what it is possible for us to do.
You may say,
No,
Not me,
I'm this and I'm that and all the rest of that.
And I'm not talking about your ambition in the world.
I'm talking about what happens when I run into the boundary of worrying that you won't see me the way I want you to see me so that I change my behavior.
I'm talking about the boundary that happens when a person doesn't want to do anything at all in a particular day.
They're just,
Their functions are locked into a kind of laziness.
Sometimes that seems quite natural.
But when there are things that need to be done and we exceed as we do so often to this procrastination,
What about the boundary of I just don't want to experience where I am and what I have to go through to take this next step?
The boundary of being unable to say no to somebody.
How about the boundary that is so ever-present today,
All these new social ideas about who you are and how you're supposed to talk about yourself?
All of this business of constantly struggling to figure out how you can be the least offensive human being on the planet.
How about waking up to the thing that makes us offensive?
Because do you know what makes a human being offensive?
They are forever trying to defend something about themselves that they believe is true.
They are forever trying to hold up some character that they've imagined they should be.
And when life comes along and they run into that boundary that proves they aren't what they've imagined,
Then they run from that boundary.
And how do we run from the boundary?
We just manipulate the image again.
We find some way to live with that moment and explain ourselves in that moment so that we don't begin to live with the license of a higher order of being.
We begin to increasingly find ourselves the captive of a lower order of being.
And in this instance,
At least this morning,
We're talking about fear.
Not physical fear,
Not instinctual fear.
The fear of not being enough.
What do you think ambition is?
If it's not for the love of the thing you do,
It's for the love of the image you hope to cultivate through that ambition.
In the end,
When all is said and done,
There really is only one fear and one fear.
Period.
And it's the last thing that we suspect,
Which is why it's usually the last thing that we deal with on our way to passing this invisible boundary that Thoreau spoke of.
And what do you think that one fear is when all is said and done?
And you must see this for yourself.
Please don't believe a word I say.
Please don't adapt what I say.
Please don't even try to speak what I say until you can see for yourself whether it's true or not.
The one fear that we are forever facing without recognizing is the fear of ourselves.
That's what blame is.
Blame is the convenient way in which we place what we don't want to meet in ourselves on those that we say bring up those causes,
Those conditions inside of us.
We don't know,
Or I should say we have yet to understand what is true about ourselves.
And when I say what is true about ourselves,
I mean about our present level of consciousness that in turn determines everything that we experience.
All of our relationships rotate around what it is that we understand about ourselves and what we act from.
And if we can begin as we are intended to,
To realize that you and I,
By the grace of the divine,
Are created to be as fearless as we are willing to explore,
As we are willing to explore,
To enter into the depths of our own consciousness.
This is the meaning of true self-discovery.
Self-discovery isn't reading about something and thinking to myself,
I'm going to be a certain kind of person.
Yes,
I mean,
You could say being true to ourselves is everything,
But we have to know what it means to be true to ourselves.
Being true to an opinion,
Being true to a belief,
Being true to some ideal is not being true to ourselves.
It's being true to the image that we have of that quality or characteristic.
Being true to ourselves requires being ourselves.
And as obvious as it should seem,
How can I fear myself?
How is that possible that I can fear myself?
Because it just doesn't occur to us,
We just don't see it.
Have you ever found yourself rushing someplace?
Why am I anxious?
Why do I worry,
Which is my topic tomorrow online at the foundation,
What is all of that about?
We have come to a place collectively,
This consciousness,
Not you,
Not me,
Our consciousness that you and I are the instruments of,
To a place where we meet in a certain moment,
A certain circumstance.
And when we meet that circumstance,
Something in us looks at that circumstance and tells us that in order for us to be a whole,
Happy,
Successful human being,
We are going to have to overcome that circumstance or at least get through it.
So that for us,
We are in a struggle almost all the time to achieve or acquire some condition outside of ourselves that will relieve us from the threat or the fear we felt going into it.
There's is the right to know the truth of anything we meet.
Look,
When the smoke is coming back into the valley here in Oregon a little bit,
But we've had a few spectacular days.
When you look outside and you see something beautiful,
I'm not going to go into this great depth,
But when you see something,
How about the simple idea of hearing some music or seeing something majestic in nature,
In that moment,
If we're properly there,
We don't have to think to ourselves,
What is the nature of this moment?
What we see and experience isn't separate from our consciousness in that moment.
And we are participants in this consciousness so that we know directly the nature that we experience,
Not the t's and the i's,
Meaning not the individual elements that thought always wants to get involved in,
But the actual nature of the beauty,
The nature of the movement.
We experience it because we're experiencing ourselves.
And that means if you could just extrapolate from that one idea,
That that same truth holds true when it comes to any character in my own consciousness.
Like most of us are afraid of our anger.
I use the word our carefully,
But I have to go on.
We are afraid of our appetites.
We're afraid of the depth and breadth of what lives in our consciousness that is so self-centered.
Nor do you think all the attempt to,
In quotes,
Tolerate people and find some way to do all of this business.
It isn't born out of love.
If you have love,
You don't have to try to be kind.
You don't have to try to be nice to people.
If you have love,
You can't hurt people.
You can't judge people if you have love.
Fear has no love.
Fear only has the love of what it says will make it get through that moment.
So we have the right as a human being to know directly the character in our consciousness that appears in any given moment so that the will can't be pulled over our eyes when suddenly some kind of impatience runs up and through us.
And then as a habitual response,
We want to point the finger at somebody and blame them for that pain.
We have the right to know the character of pain,
The right to know the character of any shadow that moves through this consciousness.
It is our right to know it directly and to bring that character,
That quality,
And bring it into ourselves and to know it so thoroughly as to no longer be deceived by the old conditioned relationship we had with that pain,
With that fear.
And I would just add that if we as human beings can understand that,
That if I'm sitting at my office and suddenly I see that man or that woman over there and up inside of me comes this resentment and the resentment is handed off to the reaction that points the finger as it always does at that person for my negativity,
We're given the right to walk into that consciousness,
Into that feature,
That function,
That broken relay in this machinery that always wants to find fault with something outside of ourselves instead of doing the work of freeing ourselves by so completely understanding the quality and character of that level of consciousness that it no longer has the authority over us.
We pass that invisible boundary.
I just love those words because they are invisible boundaries,
Aren't they?
In effect,
We can virtually assume a certain kind of conscious command over any state and in that command over the state,
Meaning in our ability to be fully aware of and enter into it,
Have that state tell us the truth about itself and in learning the truth about that aspect of our consciousness,
We learn something yet deeper about our own consciousness and the more that we learn about our consciousness,
The more integrated our consciousness becomes because now it's no longer divided up into the me that doesn't want this or the me that does and then produces the fear because I may not get what I've imagined.
The question is,
And I must move on,
How do we gain this kind of command?
How do we actualize it?
That's the root of our conversation today is how do we begin this work of learning what it means?
How do we have developed this new relationship with our own consciousness?
So I have a couple stories.
There are small variation on a theme in some respect.
You may have heard something similar.
I use what certain storylines constantly using different characters and qualities,
Always different outcomes,
Yet always pointing to the same thing.
The hero is able to enter into and understand something about himself or herself that makes all the difference in the world in terms of their relationship to what formerly was in command of them.
So here's a reporter.
He's our intrepid reporter.
He represents inside of ourselves this wish to know and to transcend all of these various things that we walk through this life with that we don't know are acting on us and commanding us to do what these characteristics,
What this consciousness commands of us instead of us being in command of it.
Here's about a town where it seems over a period of,
Great period of time,
There are this phenomena of dark shadows.
We'll just call them dark shadows.
And they seemingly appear on their own,
Always coming up out of the ground as meaning from below.
And whenever a human being,
The story goes,
Encounters one of these,
There's a certain interaction,
Person disappears,
Carried off by the shadow.
He wants to know what are these shadows.
So he gets to this town and he sees quickly,
Which I must have go through the story rather quickly,
He sees several times a person,
You know,
Bumps into somebody inadvertently.
A person drops their bag of groceries.
Person picks up their personal device and starts reading some newsfeed or some text or an email.
And in this instance,
He can see the person suddenly is captured and intensely looking.
Obviously something's happened.
And in that same moment,
This shadow appears.
And when the shadow appears,
It has this uncanny,
Especially if you're observing this for the first time,
The shadow can take parts of itself.
And our intrepid reporter,
Watts,
As the shadow begins to kind of morph and like bubbles throw off certain other parts of itself,
Painting very dark pictures that the interpreter,
The interpreter can kind of see that these pictures that are coming out of the shadow are things that everybody recognizes as fearful,
But apparently they must be specific to the person that the shadow has begun to envelop.
And the reporter watches as these shadows take on more and more form,
More definitive pictures and the person that's being enveloped by them becomes completely caught up in them.
Let me explain,
Someone says something to you and you feel it threatens you.
You know what happens in that moment.
The mind begins to paint pictures.
Well,
I can't let him speak like that.
What's going to happen if I don't correct this?
So the mind begins to create images that are in fact the continuation of the initial fear.
And as the images are developed,
It just solidifies the fact that I must do something about these pictures that I'm seeing that may or may not happen.
Because if I don't do something about the pictures,
I'm going to be a prisoner of this fear and the very action of being captured by those images,
The mind throws up what it threatens you with,
What this might mean,
Where it's going is in fact where we are captured because our attention becomes increasingly seized by this state.
And sure enough,
As our reporter watches then these shadows,
Each of them begin to get closer and whisper into the ear of our hero,
Of this man,
This woman,
They disappear.
He watches this happen a bunch of times.
I have to get on with the story.
And then one day as he's walking through town and marveling,
As one day God willing you will,
How many cottage industries,
Some big,
Have grown up in this town teaching people how to deal with the shadows.
Shadow busters,
Special lights that you can shine on the shadow so that special amulets that you can put on your chest or wear on your wrist,
Special colored clothing,
Special political groups set against you,
The whole town,
The economy is actually based on trying to empower people to overcome these fears.
But no one overcomes the fear.
No one overcomes any fear that they try to overcome.
It's to the fear is the fear.
Then by some strange grace he sees a woman,
She's walking down the street,
Somebody walks up to her apparently irritated and angry about something.
They begin to have this conversation and as you would imagine when somebody is angry at you,
You know this is what comes up inside of you.
It's a threat to my character,
They question my nature,
Whatever it is.
And now all of these things start to roll around inside of this consciousness trying to figure out how to properly defend or at least make sure that person knows they've done wrong.
And as our hero,
The reporter,
Watches the hero of our story,
The lady,
All of the things that I describe start to take place.
Shadows come up,
Pictures start to form,
Images from her past where she was denigrated or her mom or dad did this,
All these images,
You know like little dark bubbles,
Little pictures floating around and starting to swoop in and carry her away.
And then the reporter sees her sort of kind of come back to herself,
Which by the way do it right now,
Let's all be as present as we can.
And when she comes back to herself he can't hear but he sees that she says something to her.
The shadow,
She speaks to it.
And when she speaks to the shadow,
The minute that she speaks to it,
The shadow trembles.
You can actually see a ripple go through the shadow.
And then whatever it was that she said,
She wasn't done and then she said something else.
And whatever it was that she finished what she started saying with caused the shadow to scream and disappear as all stories like this do,
Back into the ground like Rumpel Stiltskin,
All of these myths,
These fairy tales connected to a human being gaining command over the aspects of their own consciousness,
Which is what all of these various creatures represent aspects of our consciousness we don't know yet.
So the reporter runs over and he wants to interview this woman.
He wants to know the truth for himself.
What is it that gave her command over these aspects,
These shadows,
These emissions from her own consciousness that were trying to capture her in such a way that she would not just remain the same after that moment but would be more reliant on those shadows to tell her who she is and what she needs to do.
He said,
What happened?
That was a miracle if I ever saw one.
What did you say?
I saw you said a couple of things.
She said,
I've been through this.
I can't tell you how many times I've been through it.
She said it and then right in the middle of it I realized I was going through it again.
I'd been there.
I knew I had been there.
I knew I had felt that fear.
And because I knew I had felt that fear and it was repeating itself,
I realized that it was somehow or other.
How shall I say?
She said,
I just knew something about it I didn't know before and it was kind of a shot but I just said right out loud,
You can't scare me anymore.
You can't scare me anymore.
And she said,
I know you didn't hear it but the shadow responded,
What do you mean?
And I said,
I can see through you because for the first time in my life,
She said,
I wasn't just looking at the picture.
I wasn't just looking at the image.
I could actually be aware of the fact that I could see through the image and I could see the town.
I could see everything.
So I knew that what the image was telling me was the whole truth,
Wasn't it?
And the minute that I saw that,
That's when I said the last thing that you saw make the shadow disappear.
He said,
Tell me what it was.
She said,
I just looked at that shadow and I said,
You know what?
I didn't know it before but now I do,
I can see the good in you.
Now the reporter,
Perhaps like yourself,
He said,
How can I see the good in something like a fear?
How is it possible to see the good in any scary moment?
Because for us,
The good in a scary moment is the good we imagine to deal with that scary moment.
But the real good in any moment where we are standing there,
Frightened,
Worried,
Anxious,
Whatever that negative state may be,
Is to gradually,
As our hero did,
To recognize that these moments that we meet that are so habitual and frightening to us,
They are a kind of a momentary doorway,
A window,
If you will,
The opportunity to look into a window,
Into our own unconsciousness.
I'm pausing because I look at some of the messages here.
At first you'll grieve for yourself because you'll see what kind of human being you have been and how you can't let any moment reveal to you the truth of yourself because it's too frightening to the consciousness that believes who and what it is,
Is all of these images it has about the self.
It believes the first reaction is the whole of reality.
That's what fear believes.
The first reaction,
That reaction is the whole of reality.
That you and I were given the gift to be able to look into anyone in all of these moments in such a way that by bringing the light of our attention,
Not onto who said this and what has to happen there,
What this shouldn't be like,
How that ought to be,
All of that is crud.
All of that is a consciousness deflecting in the moment the possibility the human being in that moment has to take their attention and to bring that awareness that they are given in that moment by the appearance of the condition.
It is the actual appearance of the fear that empowers us to enter into its character because prior to that we're not aware of the fact that a fear lives in us.
We don't know that we live with the fear of someone disapproving us.
We only know the fear of being disapproved when that moment comes and it happens.
So we don't know this unconsciousness and because of the way that unconscious nature has divided itself up into what it sees that it doesn't want and the thing that doesn't want to see it,
We're never aware of the fact that our right as a human being,
In fact the purpose of our existence on this planet is to enter into this unconsciousness with the light of the awareness that we're given by the divine in the moment we're aware of that unconscious nature of its movements.
I don't know how to express that to you because the way we are now we have exactly two options in any unwanted moment and every unwanted moment basically is a moment that threatens something we believe is true about ourselves or in this world and what is true cannot be threatened.
Go shout at a mountain,
Go yell at the sun,
Call it some evil name.
It means nothing.
It's a dog barking at the heel of an elephant.
One day these qualities and characteristics that remain in this unconscious nature,
I tell you this is true.
One day you will see them appear in you because they must.
That's what the conditions that come into this world are intended to do is to stir the content of this consciousness so that it can begin to become conscious of itself,
Aware of itself and aware of itself means integrated and integration is atonement so that we become fearless because we know the truth about ourselves and the truth is we fear,
Need fear nothing about ourselves at all.
What if you and I forget about the rest of the world?
What if you and I understand the world is the way it is because it is a reflection of an unconscious nature that you and I are presently participating in and that this unconscious nature within which lives the entire gamut of all that ever has been or ever will be created all of the opposites that are already by the way reconciled inside of that consciousness that we without understanding live as the captive of those things that we don't see and understand and that the life is intended to bring up in us that which we can begin to become aware of and in the awareness of these characters,
These qualities.
Think of the worst thing.
I can think you would be a liar if you said there wasn't something inside of yourself that you keep buried and hidden but it isn't you keeping it buried and hidden and that's the point.
The point is that we can begin to understand this punishing relationship we have with these parts of ourselves and in understanding the unconscious punishing relationship we have with these parts of ourselves part way with them.
Move past that invisible boundary.
So let's get to in the last seven minutes here.
I have to do this.
How do we do that?
How do we begin to deliberately step into and through that doorway?
Here's the moment up comes the anxiety.
Here comes the fear of being misunderstood.
Here comes the defensiveness and that split second the doorway opens and if we don't walk through it in that second by the way it closes but it's okay because we're given an infinite number of opportunities.
Here it comes suddenly I'm aware of something going on in myself.
What's my responsibility?
What do I do?
Let me tell you a story that I will predicate with a special key lesson.
I don't know if it'll get up on the board maybe when they post this talk it can.
Here's the special key lesson.
There's no such thing as any moment to be feared that can't be transformed on the spot by the awakening of a higher consciousness that transforms that old fear into a new order of freedom an order of awareness that transforms that old fear into a new order of freedom a new level of being.
Here's the story.
It's one of my favorite stories.
I'm changing the theme a little bit.
Two boys William and Christian they live in a town somewhere in the southwest part of Texas along with their friends we'll make them 12,
13,
14 years old full of themselves and yet in this particular story the boys and their friends where they live in that particular part of town they always have to take this long way around to get to school because in their direct path should they take a straight line is this old haunted set of woods and a cap an old home on this property a big piece of property and it's reputed that people go in these woods you know these stories and never come out and strange noises are all the time coming from the property and from the sound and everybody there even the adults kid around but they don't go no one goes in there since something happened so many years ago meaning that there is a memory of a certain experience not even your own but it's terrifying so one day Christian William they're getting ready to take this long way around and William looks at Christian says you know aren't you tired of having to leave for school 20 minutes early I mean we could we could we got to school we could play we could have fun on the we could throw the ball around we could do I'm so tired of this well yeah I get it well the Christian says it but you know consider the alternative he says but what do we really know I mean I know what everybody tells us what do we really know about this place that we avoid that boundary that we go around so the two of them kind of make a pact and the next morning when all the gang gathers there William Christian Samantha Charlie Bill Bob everybody starts to go around and William and Chris say we're not going around today we're gonna go we're gonna go through oh yeah right here's the point William and Christian because they are tired of the boundary of a fear that they have begun to suspect exists in their imagination decide to take one step one step past the place where they always go around it one step they go one step past and because of the nature of the way the mind works believe me suddenly they they think they hear something they see a shadow in the woods and the minute they think they hear or see something they run can't help it fight or flight that's his consciousness but the next day when they're getting ready to go they say to themselves you know what we failed miserably we don't know anything more than we did prior let's take one more step only this time Mark Williams says let's let's mark the spot let's take a little bit of like some powder or some flour and just put a bit there on the ground so that we know we got that far and nothing happened to us so they agreed and then every day they would take one step because that's all they could sometimes it'd be two or three and then sure as shoot something would happen but they kept marking the spot and after time if you can follow the story they began to realize that they were in fact taking further and further steps into the thing that the first time they tried to go into it they got nowhere and that began to build in them a certain faith-borne of experience that whatever it was that was scaring them didn't do anything to them and because they knew it didn't do anything other than scare them they began to become unafraid of the moment of being scared they began to no longer be afraid of those moments when that threat seemed to appear that sound that creaking noise the shadow in the window of the old house and step by step marking it each way so they knew that I had come that far and nothing happened they actually got to the point where they walked through those woods and into the house and what happened do you think when they got to that and they walked in and they could see the wind causes the wooing and the clanging of the doors caused by shifting and the foundation that everything that they were afraid of had nothing to do with what their fear was telling them was true they could see in a manner of speaking that what that haunted house was filled with was the ghosts of their own past the ghosts of their own negative assumptions this is the best way I know how to tell you to deal with those things that come up in you when let's say you need to have a conversation maybe you're a supervisor maybe you're a husband or a wife maybe you work with somebody and there's a problem you and I both know that we will avoid what we call unpleasant interactions at all cost because we blame the other person for the unpleasantness no we avoid the unpleasant encounters and I'm not talking about dangerous ones we avoid those because we fear what will come up inside of us because we don't want to be negative which means we're afraid of experiencing that character or consciousness that's always in conflict with someone or something and instead of saying to ourselves I'm tired of being afraid of myself tired of walking on my tiptoes which doesn't mean to walk around angry anger is just the opposite of fear it means I'm going to step moment by moment as deliberately as I can into whatever that character is that it's appearing I'm not going to try to overcome it I just want to become increasingly conscious of it that's it I understand I have to abstain from the appearance of these pictures these descriptive thoughts and feelings because I've seen that when they get my attention that I become the captive of what it is that they're convincing me will happen I must enter into it and stand there as best I can each time a little bit more aware of the character of my own consciousness instead of being carried off by my fear of it that's it and another step and another step and another step because if you do there will be fewer and fewer invisible boundaries I'll end with this thought have you ever seen a at least a documentary maybe you've never been fortunate in the wild to see a mother lion when she has cubs and anything seems to threaten it you part of what's so alluring about that is you can feel come up in that mother lion this fierceness it's unwavering fierceness you have in you all of us do an unwavering fierceness that is meant to be awakened so that the more it is awakened the less and less willing we are to agree to accept the presence of anything that threatens our identity who we think we are and we grow in that fierceness because the truth that we discover about that consciousness about this unconscious nature that we have been in an unconscious relationship with the more that's integrated the more fierce we become because truth has set us free and there is no greater fierce fierceness than what truth provides a human being knowing that he or she can only discover the truth never be dragged off by it about themselves step by step do your work do your work this is meaningless if you don't do your work hope you'll join me on sunday you can find out go to my profile find me online let's change this unconscious nature of ours into something that has compassion and that above all is guided by conscience then we'll have done something meaningful not just with our lives but done something truly helpful to this world bye you
