Release Yourself From The Prison Of Sorrow GF Live 3-15-25

Perhaps our greatest, least understood sorrow in this life – as well as the root of feeling trapped in life – is this: we live within, and have no other place to roam, let alone explore…other than the valley of thought: an unconscious realm where the shadow of things that hid their emptiness by constantly changing their shape to look just like the place we’ve imagined must be reached to make a fresh start!

Transcript

So what we're going to look at together today is a topic that I can't stress the importance of it because what we understand or don't cannot be overestimated when it comes to the insights that are required if we're going to have a different kind of life. The title of the material is Realize and Release Yourself from the Unseen Prison of Sorrow and Regret. People don't like these titles much because we don't think of ourselves as being someone trapped if you will in life because we are seemingly so adept at escaping these traps. But I want to look at this with some fresh eyes. So I'm going to ask Kate to bring up the key lesson. There's two of them. And while she posts it, Please don't post in the middle of it and perhaps even wait a few moments to let it sink in before you post your impressions about the key lesson. I will set the stage with it and then I will close this talk with the same key lesson hoping that you have come to understand some of what it is implied in it. So let's put it up, Kate, Please. Read along with me. One of our greatest, Least understood sorrows in this life, The root cause of an uninspired life is that given our present level of being, We have no other place to explore besides the valley of thought. An unconscious realm where the shadows of things that were hide their emptiness by changing their shape to look like a time to come just ahead where at long last we will reach the time and place where our struggles with life are at last behind us. We have no place to roam, No place to explore beside the valley of thought. An unconscious realm where the shadow of things that were hide their emptiness by changing their shape to look like a time to come just ahead where at long last we will reach the time and place where our struggles with life are at last behind us. Let me bring you into the talk and I will ask quite a few questions as we go through this so that in one way or another we can at least work to be on the same page with this understanding and hopefully the new perception of life that it grants us. First of all, I want to make sure I'm talking to the right group of people. How many of you have some form or another of a daily struggle with life? Yes or no? Raise your hands just ever so quickly. Can't spend a lot of time in this early dialogue, But I want to make sure we all agree that the reason we're here interested in letting go is because there's always so many things that we want to let go of on a daily basis, Like bees lined up at a flower to drink the pollen. So now I want to ask you a question and you can post if you want in the midst of this. When does any painful struggle that we're talking about, When do they begin? When does this struggle suddenly come up and grab us, Whether it's a struggle to resolve what happened 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago? When does that struggle appear other than in the moment where it seems there's this great necessity, A responsibility, And on our part to restore some sense of peace that is at risk in that moment? And why is that sense of peace at risk in that moment? What are we struggling with in these moments? The answer is as simply as it can be put, We're struggling with some perceived threat. You don't struggle with good news. You don't struggle with a fine meal. We struggle and find ourselves trapped in that struggle whenever suddenly appears some threat to who and what we didn't even know we were in that moment. Something is threatening, Something we're identified, So every struggle in essence begins in the same place. An unexpected moment of some kind presents a threat to something we didn't even know that we were identified with the moment before. Think with me now. I get a phone call and my boss wants me to come in early because he wants to have a talk with me. No explanation. Is there not a struggle? Is there not some moment where a thought brings up a memory of someone who hurt me or did something that betrayed me? And in that moment, The thought appears, The struggle comes because I feel threatened by this relationship that, By the way, Is nothing but a memory at that moment. And it is threatening who and what I think I am, So I need to restore to myself whatever it is that I believe this threat has come to take from me. Is this clear? I didn't know I was identified with what happened 22 years ago until I ran into someone who just looks like the person that did the thing to me that was unthinkable. Now I can't drop it. I'm struggling to resolve a moment from my past. So we struggle to change or escape the pain of some moment that is past in which somewhere or another we find ourselves feeling imprisoned by it. An example, I feel imprisoned when I can't get you to see my point of view. I feel trapped by the pain I have when something comes along and threatens some power or possession that I've got. I struggle anytime some moment appears out of the blue where perhaps something that I'm struggling that a diet or some addiction I'm struggling in that moment with a sense of self I didn't even know was laying there in the dark and that sense of self surfaces when it's triggered by some condition and my reaction to it. And I don't know if you see this, But I'll ask you if you do. Do those struggles ever end? Or is there always some new threat? I don't know if you can see it with me, But it's incredible that on any given moment throughout any given day, Week, Month, One passing thought, One simple bit of news, One phone call, One glimpse of a text and a struggle that I didn't even know was yet to be resolved suddenly reaches up for me and pulls me down into it. And I'm caught again. And so taken up am I, Are we, With these, The onset of these sudden struggles that it never dawns on us. Who is it in me that I don't even know is there, That travels with me through my life through time, That at the drop of a hat can find itself not just so easily threatened again but struggling again to resolve what that mind, What I see as the source of that threat. There's always this appearance of some sense of self in these moments that doesn't want whatever it is identified with to get worse, Let alone come to this untimely and greatly feared end of itself. We have become a race of beings whose quality and experience of life is predicated by the number of struggles that we have that appear out of the blue and the seeming open skies that we can create for ourselves when we think we've put that struggle to an end. And let me add, There are times when certain struggles come to an end, But the nature that struggles never comes to an end. It will always have a new struggle and always find something to struggle with depending on the conditions that bring up whatever the content is of its past. Can you see this with me, Yes or no? I mean, If we could pull back far enough to see the whole of these moments that I'm describing, Then we would see these moments must include whatever this nature is that's so deeply involved in the experience of those moments. We would see, Which is the point of this talk, That this struggle with feeling trapped, Back in the prison of some anger or regret, Of some worry, That this struggle with these threats is almost as predictable as the four seasons themselves. It's coming around. And what also comes around with each of these threats and the struggles that they produce is this inevitable fear that, Once again, I have to get through this moment. And unless I struggle to do so, By whatever means, My life, Our life, Our entire sense of self as we know it, Will be under a threat watch. And under a threat watch, If we don't struggle intently, Wisely with it, That sense of self will come to an end and everything connected to it. This is critical that we understand this. How does we get to a place where we, On a daily basis, Feel like we just have to get through one more struggle? And it isn't that life is without struggles of a physical nature. It isn't that life is without the struggle to provide for our family and loved ones. But where is it written that a struggle to be responsible must include feeling trapped and tormented by the condition that, At a practical level, We must do what is in our power to deal with? But that includes the understanding there are certain things that we have no power to over which. And that includes these moments that present to us this sense of ourself, That what is it that we're really trying to get power over? Am I really trying to get power over the moment? Or do I want the power to free myself from what I perceive as the moment and the struggle involved in it? And that's the answer. So identified are we with these moments that we are unable to see. There's never been an end to this fear, To this struggle to get through whatever the next moment is, To get through my next sense of inadequacy, To get through the anger I feel towards you for what you did 20 years ago. And I never know when I'm going to be summoned into that struggle. Because the sense of self that's summoned into that struggle is laying there in the valley of thought, In the darkness of an unconscious nature that has no awareness of itself. Even when something summons that particular identity out of that must. And then all of a sudden, The whole idea of I've got to do something to get through this moment and replace this moment with something that is at least not painful anymore, If pleasurable. And so it goes. And we've been doing this so long. Humanity, This consciousness, Not you. This consciousness has been doing it for so long. It never, It can't even occur to it to ask, Thank God for the truths that are sown into this world. It never asks itself, Get through to what? Get through to what? Because it's a foregone conclusion. If I can get through this moment, I'll get to the end of the pain in it. That's the conclusion. Get through this moment. Think through one more time. Resolve one last great cycle of this conflict. Resolve it. Put it to sleep. Learn to live with whatever it is that you have gotten through. Hope it doesn't appear again. And the task here to see is that it always appears again. We never ask, Get through to what? Because we're so embroiled and identified with the anxious thoughts and feelings that have presented to us this interpretation of a moment, This experience of a certain set of conditions that we go, Uh-oh, Uh-oh, Uh-oh. Here's this pain. I don't want it. How do I get through it? So that we're identified with this struggle and cannot see that in the moment of that struggle that we are identified with this unconscious nature that for whatever reason feels a threat to its identity, That we become identified with an image in time, An image of a time to come where the immediate troubles we face are behind us. So first we're presented with the trouble in front of us because that condition threatens the content of this collective sense of self, This unconscious nature. And the moment that this unconscious nature feels that threat, The same unconscious nature then imagines a time to come where those troubles are finally behind us. And the point of the whole opening of this talk is that we can't see that no sooner do we pass through that struggle than we face the next struggle. No, Ali, We don't have power over our mind. Wanting power over our own mind means that there is something in our mind that we fear. A whole human being does not look for power. They live in a kind of power that they are given to understand that fear is a lie. That the whole idea of struggling with life is an attempt to restore whatever sense of self it is that was momentarily threatened when a memory came up, A response was triggered through a reaction that was so familiar we want to get past that and free again. We can't see that no sooner do we go through a struggle to get through a moment that we will be facing another one. Maybe not the same moment, Not in the same way, But we will face another struggle. And we believe that's what life is about. But that's not what life is about. There is a struggle, There's no question about it. But it isn't to prove that who and what we have been deserved to be treated other than it was or deserves better treatment than it is getting in the moment. The real struggle is to understand that unconscious nature that lives in this valley of thought and that knows no other way to deal with a moment it doesn't want than to go back into the very nature that created it in the first place. 2, 000 years ago, I'm sure you're familiar with it, Christ was speaking to his disciples and he said, Which of you, By taking thought, Can add one cubit to his stature? Now, What that means, Simply put, Which of you can raise himself or herself above these moments in which you find yourself anxious again? Which of you can call on thought and release yourself from the struggles and the fear that comes with them that wouldn't exist if you weren't identified with your own thinking? Which of you can take thought and add, Raise yourself above this nature that is always struggling and that believes its thoughts about how to resolve that struggle are the same as escaping the conditions blamed for that pain? It's interesting, I don't have time to go into all of it, But in Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote, For with much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, The more grief. Who can understand these things? Which of you, By thinking about how to get through this moment, Will finally have no more moments to get through where they're filled with fear because of some existential threat to yourself? And Ecclesiastes, For with all of this wisdom comes sorrow. The more knowledge, The more grief. Meaning, The more ideas I have about how to get through the struggle, The more the struggle is engendered inside of me because I'm trying to protect a nature identified with its own thoughts, Its own conditioned ideas. Are you able to connect those two ancient ideas with our present condition? Which is, Why do I always end up back here, Struggling to get through some moment I don't want, As well as wanting to escape the painful sense of self that comes with it? Because that's the fact. It's an inconvenient truth. We grew up watching our parents struggle. They grew up watching their parents struggle. Their parents watched their country struggle. The country never stopped struggling with other countries in order to bring about what it imagines is peace and contentment and freedom. And the more struggles, The more knowledge is required to support, The more laws are required to keep in place that imagined peace, That imagined freedom. And the more laws, The more morality is thrown down into human life so that it can live up to some ideal or iconic structure, The more that human being struggles with the nature that is always set against the very thing that it is trying to live with. Conflict never ends. The truth is, We wouldn't know who we are or what to do with our life if we weren't struggling to restore something that we believe was taken from us or to realize some pleasure that we believe will end all of our struggles at last. Do you see this? Are we communicating? So at some point, And much to the reason for this material, Is that one day a person has to ask themselves, Why do I always find myself sitting in the dark of my room, Paging through my phone, Looking at my phone, Looking at images in order to distract myself and keep myself occupied? Why do I relive all of these conversations that never were resolved and every time I enter back into them, I'm filled with conflict again, Where a dark dialogue seems to promise if I'll just engage in it, I'll be free of whatever it is that was threatened by it to begin with. Why do I always end up back here struggling again? Why can't I authentically start over? Because that's what the mind thinks it's doing. Every time there's a perceived threat, Some sense of self that feels conflicted or trapped by a condition, By what he did or she didn't give me or what I might lose, Every time that happens, All that thinking does what? I'm looking for a safe place to find some sense of safety, To escape or transcend whatever this torment is. So the answer, Why do I always end up back here, Is because I always start in the wrong place. That's unthinkable to us, That we start in the very place that is the source of feeling trapped. What am I talking about? I must've tried. How many times have you tried a thousand different times, A thousand different ways, Even different places to make a fresh start, To get back to what you think you've lost? And the answer is it's endless. And why is it endless? Why is there struggle wherever you go? I don't know if you see this. Why is there always a struggle with everyone else? I may get along pretty well for a long time with people, But in the end, Struggle. In the end, Tension. In the end, Animosity. And I'm always convinced as I think through, How do I get through this struggle, That the end of the struggle comes with changing you. Changing the conditions blamed for the conflict. And if I can just get through to that, Then I'll be done with the torment, The pain, The regret, The worry. And here's the thing. It's not the places that we've reached that are the problem. It's the part of us that believes that there will come a time and place that it reaches for, That is different than the level of consciousness that has created the place it's in. We reach for solutions to feeling trapped into the nature of thought that when we first came up with that thought and identified with it, Believed would rescue us and release us from the feeling of trapped we had before. So the problem isn't the condition. The problem is the level of this consciousness that always measures its own reactions and decides it doesn't want to be where it is with what it is. Isn't that the real thing? I don't want to be in this moment. Experience myself as a part of this moment. So the solution is to change the conditions I blame for this moment. But the conditions you blame for the moment is not the reason for the moment you don't want. The moment we don't want and the experience of ourself that we don't want is a product of an unconscious nature that first creates a time to come where it'll be free, Then pursues it, Maybe achieves it and then doesn't understand that the very identification with its own thinking is producing the trap of trying to figure out how to escape what's threatening its own conclusions. Starting over is not a function of time or for that matter, The way that we think about it. Do you see, Can you see it for us? Getting out of this trap is a question of time. How long is it going to take to get through this? And I'm telling you that the feeling of being trapped that tempts us into thinking about a time, A place, A set of circumstances in the future, That, That, That, That trap is the future, The thoughts, The time to come imagined when you're trying to escape what you don't want to be experiencing. What's the last thing? Let me simplify this. What's the last thing that we ever notice each time we find ourselves struggling to escape a situation we don't want again. What's the last thing we notice? Here I am. I went out to dinner with friends. I had a jolly old time at a glass of wine. I came home. I turned on the television and I went online and I, I see a text or I accidentally stumble on an old thread and there's some dialogue in it from someone who I thought was a friend or whatever it may be. And the next thing I know, All the jolly old time has been thrown into a dungeon and I'm there with it trying to figure out what, How do I get rid of this struggle that I'm having with these regret filled thoughts and feelings with this blame I'm feeling, How do I get through that? And the moment that I'm caught in that, That reaction, I start looking for what? This mind starts searching the content of itself. It starts looking at ideas about a new place to live. It dredges up images of a new time where I won't be tormented anymore by this person because they'll at last have apologized or I'll finally be free of them because I'm better than them. Yada, Yada, Yada. The mind dredges up from the content of itself. Some new hope, Some new belief calls upon some religious icon so that it can identify with the sense of self vested in that memory rather than realize in that moment, What it's struggling with is one of its own memories. And then it looks to its memory to free itself from the pain of reliving that time and the constant struggle to escape it every time it appears. We look to thought to free us from what thought has created. We look to thought to free us from what thought has created. Do you know that that when God willing, The time comes that you see the truth of that and you'll be sitting there in the dark by yourself on the beach in some pensive position, Thinking about all these things, How to get through all this business. And by the grace of God, By the light that dwells in the darkness that understands it not suddenly that light will reveal to you, Holy mother of peril. I'm in thought again about how to get through a struggle that wouldn't exist. If I weren't thinking about myself and how to keep myself in place in the presence of this threat, A threat that doesn't exist, Save for a nature that's identified with some other thought, The content of my past thought is the past. The thinker is the experience, The sensation of the past that feels present so that if thought is the past, What does that mean? You can't have a thought. There is no knowledge that is part of the unraveling system of images, Beliefs, And hopes that isn't connected to the past. Every thought has the content that it does because it has been given to it through past experience. And the content of that thought is the experience of that thought. So that our experience is that we are always in the Valley of thought looking to get out of that Valley by thinking about why am I here and what do I have to do? How do I struggle to rise above thought by going into thought? This is something that you must see for yourself. No one will ever be able to tap you on the forehead. No one will ever give you a prayer that's going to release you from that constant sense of struggle that appears when some sense of ourself, Oh my God, The continuity. But I have to be this kind of person. That means I have to struggle with the situation that seems like it might prove I'm not because if I can't prove that I'm this kind of person, Then the continuity of that image is going to be shattered. Who will I be? Oh my God, I'm going to come to an end. What did Christ say? One must lose their life in order to find it. We never lose that sense of self. We're always fearful of losing that sense of self and then busy trying to find a way to get to a new one that will release us from that fear. Thought is the past and going into thought. Do we do not see it yet is to call upon the past to find something to get us through. What is this reaction to something that is threatened the past, This nature, And then we don't understand why it is that we so often feel trapped, Caught in this loop that seems to have no end for ever having to prove myself again. And the fear that I won't. I have a saying that's intimately connected with these ideas. The saying is the fear, The fear is real, But the why is a lie. There's no question that when suddenly events produce something that seems greater than our ability to deal with it, Then in that moment, The fear is born out of a lie and the lie is that who and what you are, Who, And what I am needs to continue as it has been so that we can continue to exist. As we imagine ourselves to be. Those moments are the evidence that what we have imagined ourselves as being is a lie. I call these moments, These shocks, A close encounter of the truthful kind. And we don't want close encounters of the truthful kind. We want encounters with moments that prove to ourselves that the continuity of ourselves, As we've imagined ourselves can go on endlessly managing to produce more pleasure and avoiding pain, Failing to see, As I hope I have been able to help you understand, There is an unconscious nature and, And for it and to it, Everything depends upon its continuity. Everything it requires from life and for others support and sustain the sense of self that it, That unconscious nature, Not you, That it developed over time in order to produce a sense of self that was going somewhere. And that would eventually free itself from all struggles. If you were lost in the desert someplace, And after a mighty struggle, Barely getting through, You found yourself right back at the same place where you had started that search and that struggle. How many times would you listen to your own delirious mind tell you that it's so desperate that you escape this, This place that you're in, That you must struggle again to do the same thing that proved itself futile the time before. I know it's terrifying to this nature. It is, It is frightening. It is fearful to think that one day I must see beyond the shadow of a doubt that returning to thought to release me from the condition I don't want is creating the condition I don't want and to which I will return and struggle again because I don't know who I am without thinking. That's why Christ asked, Which of you taking thought can add a cubit to his stature? Which one of you is greater than you are by the amount of thinking that you do by the struggles that you work through? Which of you has made yourself a decent human being other than someone who eventually has to recognize I'm struggling still and in my struggle I'm tense and in my tension I'm unkind and then I blame the unkindness I feel on the conditions that seem to be the source of that suffering when the real source of that suffering is this unconscious nature that believes it can rescue itself by taking thought. There's an old Zen saying, See if you can make the connection in the beginner's mind, There are many possibilities in the experts. There are few in the beginner's mind. There are many possibilities in the experts that are few. What does that mean? That the more of an expert I am on how to free myself, The less possibilities there are because I'm more and more identified with the condition I believe is required in order to release me. But if I'm a new mind, If I'm a beginner, If I really see things as they are new and fresh moment to moment, There's endless possibilities. And those endless possibilities is the discovery of everything that we're talking about. Who would ever imagine that one could actually for himself or herself discover one day that it is useless to take thought in order to bring an end to a torment produced by thought. How would you get there? If it weren't for the grace of God, If it weren't for the light of Christ, By ever, Whatever word you want, How would I ever see that I am in the valley of thought subject to the darkness that dwells there looking at these shadows and believing them to be real. And then in believing the shadows to be real, Believing the sense that's afraid of them to be real. And that I must struggle to escape that Valley that is goes deeper and darker with every failed attempt that I make. Let's bring up the key lesson one more time that I started with because it is a summary. Read along with me one more time and see if this doesn't make a lot more sense in the second reading. When you're ready, Kate, I'll just go ahead. There it is. One of our greatest least understood sorrows in this life, The root cause of an uninspired life is that given our present level of being, We have no other place to explore beside the Valley of thought, An unconscious realm where the shadow of things that were hide their emptiness by changing their shape to look like a time to come just ahead, Where at long last, We will reach the time and place where our struggles with life are at last behind us. The struggle that we have with life ends when we die to the nature that believes it can escape its struggles by going into thought. The last key lesson, Please, Kate. Knowledge doesn't exist without the past. While wisdom has no past, It is timeless. Knowledge doesn't exist without the past. While wisdom has no past, It is timeless. Looking to thought to bring an end to our struggle with an unwanted condition is looking to the past to free us from the past that has continued itself into this moment and now threatened by conditions that seem to take from it its identity. Wisdom has no past awareness, Has no past. It is timeless. It is the light in which and by which we see that looking to thought as a starting place is returning to who and what we have been and the explanation for why there seems to be no end to our struggles. To see all of this, To understand it, Not think through it. To see all of this is the beginning of a completely new action, A radical truth. You know what the radical truth is? Before we can start doing what is genuinely new, Before we can hope to bring an end to our struggles, We must stop doing what is obviously old. We must see through and withdraw our attention from the mechanical continuity of an unconscious nature that says it wants to come and bring an end to this struggle when all it's doing is seeding the nature, Feeding the nature responsible for that struggle. You have to see this to understand it and as you see it and understand it, You will begin in small ways and that's all you can do. To realize, You know what? I'm struggling with fear again. I'm struggling with anger again. I'm struggling with this sense of being lied to or betrayed again. I'm struggling with an enemy again. Of course you're struggling with these conditions again because that consciousness requires them in order to keep that sense of self in place. You see that and that's the beginning of the end of that sense of self. You lose your life that way, But you find it at the same time and you find it was always there in that light revealing to you the truth of yourself that when understood sets you free.