I've had a fairly difficult five days,
And it's been challenging at a physical level.
But I didn't want to miss the opportunity to explore with you what's possible in the midst of these difficulties,
So that we might learn something about a very powerful but indistinct feeling that all of us have,
And I say all of us,
I assume those of you who join me regularly,
Is that we all have a sensing that there is another order of being,
That there is something beyond our familiar sense of self that starts and stops as often as it does,
Like a car with a bad carburetor,
And that whatever it is that's required of us to realize this higher order of being,
It's not outside of us.
What we await,
Awaits within us,
But we don't know exactly where it awaits or how to await its appearance.
I think more than anything,
Honestly,
We should always constantly measure,
By the light of our awareness,
What it is that we propose to ourselves,
To others,
What is the nature of the promise that is always just standing behind us when suddenly some unexpected pain turns up.
Because if we can begin as aspirants willing to pay the price of whatever that cost may be for a new order of being,
The realization of it,
Then we have a chance.
But I must add that it is not a path that is for the,
How shall I say,
For those who are unwilling to dive into those moments when everything in them is telling them to run from the shore of those dark waters,
Because nothing is understood about them,
Nothing can be seen within them,
And all there is,
Is uncertainty.
I don't know when this particular author,
The Jean de Lebray,
But this person said,
In simple words,
He said,
Out of our difficulties grow miracles.
Out of our difficulties grow miracles.
Now I would ask you,
What is the nature of that miracle that grows out of difficulties?
And if you'll examine this with me just for a few moments,
If you have reached the point in your life where some completely difficult,
Impossible,
Shadow-filled moment,
The shadow of the valley of death,
In that moment when it appears,
And because something lives within you that understands that within the difficulty lies your deliverance from it,
Then the idea of meeting that difficulty changes on the spot.
Not that you're suddenly happy and cheerful and wanting to understand it,
But your experience in the past with difficulties allows you to understand that in these moments,
Where out of difficulties grow miracles,
Comes something that you couldn't have imagined in the onset of that difficulty.
The real miracle is that there's an understanding that's beyond the understanding that is suddenly facing whatever that darkness may be.
And the extent of that miracle is your understanding that it's only as you let that difficulty reveal the full content of itself,
You experience the difficulty in every last measure of it,
That out of the end of the nature that fought with the difficulty and wanted to get back to what it called square one,
Was a completely different starting place that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything that that nature sitting there so reticent and full of resistance was imagining.
Am I setting the stage well enough for our conversation this morning,
If you will?
So let me ask you a question,
And then I want to read for you the key lesson for today,
As well as the topic.
I might as well read the topic now,
Katie,
If you're ready.
The title of this talk is,
What Lies Beyond the Shadow of Fear?
What lies beyond the shadow of fear?
I have to tell you,
And I hope that you'll at least consider that what I'm saying is so,
Not because I say so,
But because you've had some experience with seeing it,
That most of us have no idea what's beyond the shadow of fear,
Because in the moment where we meet a fear,
In that same split second occurs something that we do not see occurs,
And it is as follows,
And please follow me as closely as you can,
At least in the reasoning.
What is a moment of any fear?
We don't really know.
For us,
Fear is that moment where,
In one way or another,
Something is definitively threatening or interfering with the continuation of whatever it is that I was doing and being the moment before.
For us,
Fear is the onset of an interfering force,
Something that would deny us achieving and moving in the constant direction to deliver us to the freedom that we've imagined.
Now for most of us,
I'll say it more simply,
Fear is the sudden experience that something looks like it's putting me back to square one.
Instantaneous what?
A reaction.
In the instantaneous reaction to the moment seen as unwanted,
Some form of substantial disturbance,
Something is disturbed within me.
And I believe that my reaction proves that what I see—you,
Them,
This,
That,
Tomorrow—that what I see as the disturbance needs to be reconciled,
Needs to be changed,
And I need,
One way or another,
To get to a new square one.
So that when we meet a fear,
The mind immediately comes up with an image,
Something along the line of time,
Where what was lost or stands to be destroyed is summarily put back together like Humpty Dumpty,
And instead of the great discomfort,
The fear of the darkness that has no past,
No way past this collapse of the square one,
In that moment,
Suddenly there's a new square one.
Well,
I'll get there.
I'll get through this.
And the way the mind gets through the moment of meeting the collapse of its original square one is by imagining a new square one.
How things will be different two days,
20 years.
How when everything finally comes together,
I'll be released from all of this doubt,
From all of these fears that for all of reimagining square one still seem to trail behind me and always reappear every time the new square one proves itself futile.
This is difficult,
What I'm describing.
Who am I without hope in things,
Seed?
So that whenever I run into a pain,
A problem,
Whenever I come to the end of everything that I've called myself,
All of the vast resources that we imagine we have,
And we find that the cupboards are empty,
So that the moment of that sudden onset of looking at this fear that there's nothing beyond who and what I have made of myself or what I may make of myself,
In that moment,
Instead of staying there in the difficulty of understanding what is the actual nature of this difficulty?
What is the actual nature of this fear?
What's the actual nature of me,
Of this loathing that I have for my life?
All of the judgment,
All of the ways in which something within all of us is so quick to decide that because the square one imagined as a new beginning now proves itself to be incapable of producing what was promised.
So that instead of imagining a new square one,
We do the one thing that Christ was speaking of and every true teacher speaks of when they speak of a new order of being,
Which is what?
We come into a moment where we see beyond the shadow of a doubt,
Because it is right there with us in that moment.
My eyes,
My heart,
My mind,
The comfort of tomorrow is not a day away.
The security I imagine,
Where whatever the insufficiency I suffer is dissolved,
Is not a moment or 10 moments away.
Instead,
In that moment,
There is just the purity of whatever that difficulty is.
And seeing in that moment,
Which is the new order of being,
That there is no new square one that exists without the old square one.
They are dots along the line of time with you and I in the center of it.
Because who would think to themselves,
Well,
You know what,
If I can just get through this,
Right,
And I'll solve this,
I'm smart,
I have spiritual resources,
People like me,
Some people do,
I'll weather this storm,
And you realize that everything that you have ever done to weather the storm of that moment,
Where you find yourself inescapably thrust back into the revelation that as Christ said of myself,
I can do nothing.
So that instead of making something out of that shadow,
You stay where that shadow is being created within your own consciousness.
You remain there.
You see that everything that you have done to rescue yourself has been kicking the can of self-realization down the road.
Because if it is true,
And only you can see this,
I can't convince you of it,
I wouldn't try.
Why?
There is no new square one without an old square one to get off of.
My new square one was I'm going to become this,
And I'm going to get that,
I'm going to resolve these difficulties,
I'll make a little more money,
I'll lose some weight,
And then I'll have this wonderful tomorrow.
That's the new square one.
And as we all know,
And is given to us to do,
We can go out and put together that puzzle,
All these things that need to make square one a reality,
And then we step squarely on to square one.
And it can last for a minute,
Or it can last for 50 years.
And this is the telling tale here.
Does it matter when you see that what you stepped into and onto and derived your sense of self from?
Does it matter when it is that you discovered that that was all imagination?
Or is everything predicated in that moment where suddenly,
And it can be the simplest thing,
You know,
We're not talking about some of these things that are beyond our ability to fathom them.
I want to read something to you.
You know,
You won't be and you will not be the first and last person to look at this shadow of fear and find yourself one more time,
Reaching out,
Reaching out to what you imagine.
What else,
Look,
What else can I reach out to?
I'll speak personally for a moment.
The intensity of the physical discomfort over the last four or five days,
It's unparalleled in my life.
I can see clearly that something wants to keep imagining comfort.
What do I have to do?
What has to happen to get rid of this incessant,
Deep pain?
Now,
This is an experience at a physical level,
But you can't separate psychologically.
You look at your own life.
It's so common to us,
The continuity of this,
Of this,
Of this stream of thought in this valley where,
As I've talked to you before,
Just the week before,
I said that one of the ways in which we remain a captive of this shadow is that the minute it appears,
The nature that created it to begin with simply imagines another shadow.
And then it tells us that if we just get through this unwanted moment,
Just,
Just hang on,
Struggle,
Fight,
Do what you can.
And if it comes up,
You know what?
You can hate yourself because at least that's something separate from the emptiness of this moment so that we reach without knowing the nature that reaches for it tomorrow.
We reach for rescue.
The mind incapable of resolving or reconciling its suffering,
And this could be in the smallest and one day,
God willing,
I'm going to read this to you in the largest manner.
When it comes to that point,
It cannot bear to see how barren it is.
It cannot stand to see where it is laid down in a bed of lies,
That it has been a past master at producing for itself and instantly drawn to the lies of others,
To the lies of this world.
Don't worry about this.
Don't worry about that.
It'll all get resolved in time.
And here's how it'll get resolved.
And then it feeds you one syrupy solution after another,
Each and every one different,
But appealing to different types.
And now we've got the next square one,
Boy,
This government,
Boy,
The change of this.
When I get rid of this person,
When I move here,
When those people stop doing that,
When I finally get the past settled as I've been unable to do for 50,
000 years,
When all that's done,
And the problem is what?
The problem is that what I called on to rescue me is inseparable from the condition that I am trying to be rescued from.
I call on thought,
Its imagery,
Its deviltry,
Its capacity to deliver in image and sensation and promise.
I call on thought to rescue me from the torment of thoughts about yesterday,
So the thoughts about tomorrow will somehow release me from the pain of the thoughts of yesterday.
And this goes round and round.
Square one.
Yes.
Square one.
Oh,
No,
Not again.
That's okay.
New square one.
Oh,
That's fantastic.
And then things seem that way because the mind and the will of desire,
Not your will,
But a will of desire,
It's capable of fashioning what it requires in order to remediate itself for the moment.
Because as long as there's the promise,
As long as there's the promise of the end of this pain,
As long as there's a promise to the end of this emptiness,
As long as there's the promise to the end of this inadequacy,
As long as there's tomorrow,
I'll be okay because I'll get through today clinging to tomorrow.
And in the long run,
And what I'm attempting to show you is that there must come a time it presents itself every day,
Again,
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
The miracle isn't that you change the difficulty.
The miracle is that you see through the level of consciousness,
Creating the difficulty,
Creating the shadow of fear so that it can project light ahead of you so that you can get to that and find out it wasn't light at all,
But darkness calling itself the light.
A beautiful man,
Thomas Merton,
And I beg of you,
Don't go into imagination.
Do you know why we want teachers and gurus?
Because we believe someone somewhere knows something that we don't,
And that all we have to do is learn their secrets,
But they have no secrets,
Or I'll say it otherwise,
They tell their secrets every day to those who will listen with ears that can hear.
Out of difficulties grow miracles,
But the miracle cannot be imagined.
The miracle cannot be imagined.
The miracle is beyond thought because it's beyond the thinker.
The miracle is beyond the continuity of some comfort because that nature,
The truth of yourself recognizes that everything that you do in order to establish square one with new comforts,
New promises,
New contentment is the old square one right there.
Imagine standing in line.
You're looking ahead of yourselves.
We're always looking ahead.
We don't know that a part of us is always looking behind,
And there's the new square one.
Every time that you find some pain,
A problem,
Your mind immediately looks to a new square one.
What your mind cannot do,
But what you must do is in that moment,
Instead of identifying with the promise,
The rescue of a new square one,
You must stand there long enough to see behind you at the same point that the new square one doesn't exist without the old square one.
The new rescue doesn't exist without what you're being rescued from.
And said more definitively,
The new rescue doesn't exist apart from the nature that you believe would rescue you within yourself.
The world wants you,
Needs you to believe that you're going to save yourself.
Thomas Merton wrote this,
And I'll start when he speaks of this darkness.
This is the darkness I'm talking to you about.
He said,
And it is in this darkness where there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds.
When we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt,
When we seem to be a burden to others,
When we seem to have failed,
When we seem to be destroyed and devoured,
It is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls.
It is in this darkness that we find liberty.
It is in this abandonment that we are made strong.
This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.
Not this light that we imagine,
Some disco ball spinning around on the next square that we'll step onto,
Where at least there's the sensation of hope,
The promise of the end of our pain,
The end of that uncertainty and that constant discomfort that comes any time anyone or everything challenges who and what we imagine ourselves to be.
That's a false light.
And the truth is that any light within yourself that shows you a new square one is a false light produced by a false god.
And we have to learn to recognize this is true.
I think that it might be a good time to at least bring up the first,
The new key lesson.
Kate,
We won't repeat the old one.
Read along with me,
Everybody,
If you will.
No matter how challenging the condition may be,
Regardless how steep the learning curve or wide the gap between what you desire to do and yet cannot,
The first limitation you meet in these moments is always one and the same as an invitation to transcend it.
The first limitation you meet in these moments is always one and the same as the invitation to transcend it.
The first imperfection is spiritual self-ignorance.
If you can imagine how quickly we take umbrage with anybody that corrects us in the smallest way.
You don't know me.
You don't know what I've been through,
How much I know.
You don't know the depth and breadth of the strength of myself if I just put it into place.
You don't know me.
And so even at the simplest level,
We meet any form of self-ignorance.
Any form of correction with a summary resistance to the disturbance within ourselves that we blame on whatever the source we see as responsible for the disturbance.
What we're working at,
I hope,
To understand is that there must be a completely new relationship with these difficulties in our life.
And by the grace of God,
And I know how this sounds,
Believe me,
Sometimes I think to myself,
You know,
Guy,
You must tread very carefully here.
Because there is,
And always with everyone in every moment with other people,
A certain unconscious attempt to prove,
Even though one is in some deep,
Dark valley of the shadow,
That they understand it and that they can transcend it.
We're talking about these moments where by the grace of God,
They come back and they come back and they come back,
Not with repeated fury,
Not with increased strength,
But with an increased grace that they might,
As Merton said,
Strip away the secret selfishness that's too close to us to see.
Because in that selfishness is this idea that somehow within myself as I am,
I will pull out of the dregs of this moment,
I'll pull out something that saves me.
I will escape.
I've done it before.
I've done it 10,
000 times,
As have you,
Incidentally.
But escaping an unwanted moment is not the same as transcending the nature in time responsible for the continuation of all unwanted moments,
Which are what?
An unwanted moment is any instant in which I am disturbed by something that proves my future and my identification with it to be futile.
And I can't bear the idea of a time when I'm not going to be able to call on myself to save myself when I won't be able to call on something from my past to produce a path that looks strong enough that others can walk it if they just follow what I say and do.
That in all such moments,
I do the thing that I am the least willing to do,
But now find a new will to do it.
Because I understand how everything about my life has been a covert act to keep in place the illusion of this sense of self that first establishes where freedom and security lies in imagination.
And then when the imagined security and freedom proves itself false again,
Simply imagines itself one more time in that valley of thought.
If real miracles are beyond imagination,
And they are,
Please,
God,
That you understand that.
There's no question that you need a miracle,
That I need a miracle,
But there's equally no question that the miracle that you await has awaited you for all of time,
But you are not yet willing to invite it,
The revelation into your life because of the nature in its ignorance that clings in ignorance to everything it imagines will save itself.
I was thinking about this process for most of us.
It's kind of like,
Oh,
Okay,
You know,
I'll start new day,
Start,
Start,
Go,
Go,
Go.
Oh,
Stop.
Not a little,
Okay,
All right.
That's not a problem because I can,
I'll just wind my way around it.
I'll find another way to think about this problem.
Not a big deal.
I've been doing it for a couple of years now.
Millennia,
And I'll just keep going.
And so I start,
And then something says,
Oh,
It looks like this is stopping here.
Not a problem.
There's no stop for me.
And I start again.
And after a hundred thousand years,
And because the depth and breadth of the karmic,
Meaning the justice,
The lessons required in order that an individual might actually awaken and realize something of this Christ consciousness of this other order of being that is not in thought,
That does not have a tomorrow,
That is not reliant on some situation to save itself from because it's already complete and whole in the Father.
And it doesn't look for comfort in those ideas either.
It doesn't look for comfort at all.
Imagine something that doesn't look for comfort.
Who would I be?
The whole of the movement of my life,
Every old square one is the end of what was comforting me.
New square one is the promise of a new comfort.
And it can be as simple as where I'm going,
What I'm going to do,
My vacation,
What I'm going to eat.
Maybe I could just get over this pain in my back.
Have a good night's sleep.
Get this to one,
Everything,
Everything about our lives is selfish.
Always centered on one little thing.
Get past that.
And then,
And you may have to pray for this,
Or just at least align yourself with the wish to understand it.
A fool looks for ways out of his or her discomfort.
And the reason that a fool looks for ways out of what is discomforting is because a fool doesn't understand that it is the discomfort,
It is the uncomfortable nature that has found itself in that disturbed moment because it is comparing who and what it imagined itself to be in its comfort to a condition that no longer allows that.
And when the conditions allowing the comfort are suddenly brought to a stop,
All that nature does is it starts imagining a new way.
You and I must get to the place of recognizing that when these difficulties come and we seem to come to a stop,
It is not we who have come to a stop.
If you look at any seed,
If you have the faith of a mustard seed,
You've seen a time-lapse photography.
I often speak of this.
That seed struggles,
Stops,
Struggles,
Stops,
Grows,
Stops,
Gets out,
Stops.
It's starting and it's stopping are not separate moments.
It's life is the expression of something that is growing,
Reaching for the light that stimulates all of its action.
You and I,
For us,
Life starts.
Yeah.
And then the smallest thing,
Everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Have you not seen the world?
Seen that in yourself?
It's so evident.
Starts,
Stops.
I make progress.
Now the progress is gone.
Now,
What am I going to do?
What we have to understand is that you and I are the expression of the living incarnation of a fresh start.
And that every fresh start requires a condition in which and out of which it grows so that the growth cannot be separated from what it is outgrowing.
So that your growth cannot be separated from what it is outgrowing.
But you and I don't understand this relationship of rebirth.
Because for us,
When everything seems to come to a stop and my life isn't growing in the right direction anymore,
Then suddenly everything's out the window.
I need to plant a new seed.
And instead of enduring,
As I'm asked to do,
The seeming gulf between this start and that stop so that I can see they don't exist without each other.
If I could see that square one as a new beginning and square one is the one that I have to get away from at all costs.
If I see they don't exist apart from each other,
Then I can't be deceived into stepping into either one.
And we're deceived all the time.
The mind can't wait to escape the difficulty of discovering that the square it imagined would give it a fresh start is now the source of its suffering.
So here is a man,
Here's a woman.
They run into a situation collectively,
Individually.
And every time that man,
That woman runs into that suffering,
The last thing on their mind is to understand the fear that appears with it.
Because they are remanded instantaneously off to something in the same consciousness responsible for the first square that has now proven itself empty.
And they're back and they're walking again.
I'm going someplace.
I have direction.
It's true in this world,
We require direction.
In the spiritual world,
In the kingdom of heaven,
There is no direction because there's nothing outside of the moment and no distance to be covered.
This is the great,
In quote,
Secret,
The one thing that is constantly being spoken to us that we cannot hear.
And we cannot hear because we haven't been tempered enough.
And we haven't been tempered enough by these moments,
Not because they don't come by the grace of God,
But because we don't want to have anything to do with them and we're tempted into saving ourselves from them.
Catch yourself trying to rescue yourself by a new square one,
A time when,
A moment then,
When he or she is,
When they're finally not like that.
When all of that is that way in a time to come,
Then all of my discomfort of finding myself struggling to escape myself will all be gone and I'll be marching along.
You won't be marching along.
You'll be in a parade that leads to more pain because the nature that wants to step out of a difficulty into a difficulty-free time will always find that all it has created for itself is the next square one.
Square one,
My future.
Square one,
My future.
Square one,
My past.
Here I am.
Square one.
Oh,
God.
Oh,
Jesus.
Oh,
This is horrible.
Well,
That's okay.
Don't look there.
Ignore this.
Hate it.
Blame it.
Look here.
Oh,
I see.
There's it.
That's good.
That's ahead of me.
That's so wonderful.
And then one day,
Instead of this divided mind-looking future,
Past,
That didn't work,
New future,
This will.
Instead,
You see at the same time.
Then you stand in the difficulty of that discovery because you have been brought to see it.
Then you will know the miracle of transcending your own thought nature,
The miracle of an end to this self that imagines what it needs to be comforted and in its imagination produces everything that will cause for it the next difficulty.
