Freedom From Sleep Disorders & Addictions Using Tantra

Using last week's message as a gateway to realizing what things like Zen and Tantra are and how we can use them to overcome sleep disorders and addictions that keep us living at 30 percent instead of 100 percent. So in this audio track, I want you to discover what I mean by living loose and natural.

Transcript

We left off last week with how to have a communion with existence.

Of course,

To me,

The word existence is another word for God,

Or godliness,

Another way of living,

Another way of existing in this world.

But the whole message was basically to try to get you to see others and see things as God would see them.

In a way,

We are all extensions of God.

We are all drops of an en masse ocean,

An ocean bigger than the universe itself,

Something that even is so large it can't even be comprehended or conceived of.

But we are all the drops of this ocean.

And the whole journey is basically leaving the ocean,

Realizing you're a drop of that ocean,

And then one day returning to that ocean.

So life as we know it may be the only place that this can happen,

Where we can have this realization of the drop.

Maybe that's what life is all about in the first place,

Is that it's a training ground.

It's the only place that can make this happen.

We can't prove that anything can happen,

Or this might happen after death.

And to me,

There's no sense in waiting all the way up until you die,

Even though maybe a priest might tell you that it can only happen after you die.

But in a way,

The priest is only half right,

Because in a sense you do die,

But it's a part of you that you don't really need anymore when you become spiritually mature.

A part of you that you disregard or abandon,

You just drop it.

Just like a toddler would drop one of his toys when he grows up and he won't play with the toy anymore.

Maybe it's a bear or something,

But the toddler just puts the bear down and doesn't look anymore because he matures.

He grows and he expands his consciousness and has other things in his eyes and in his sight.

So in the same way,

We ourselves mature by practicing the exercises I suggested last week that you basically look at a flower and you watch the flower and don't try to describe it with your mind.

You just stare at the flower.

Just stare and take away all the adjectives.

Every time some adjective starts to form in your mind,

You just drop it.

You just drop it and let the flower be in its total existence with you.

And you share a moment with this flower.

You share a moment with existence.

And like I said before,

You can also have that same experience with a sunrise or a sunset or anything that you might find alluring or attractive or has some essence about it that's drawing you to it.

The whole key is to basically learn how to not break things down.

And it's a valuable lesson to learn in life because I go throughout my days trying to never break anything down unless it's something I have to break down for work or something like that where we have these big projects come in where I work and I'm the estimator.

My job is to figure out the best cost scenarios and figure out,

You know,

Is the customer going to pay this money for this and then convince the customer then that we're the best choice for them to use and all that jazz.

So,

You know,

I break things down at work because I have to break them down.

But then I also put them back together very beautifully and make a presentation to the customer.

So we use our minds when we have to.

It's very important that in the spiritual journey some people will say no mind or mind is bad or mind will hinder you from experiencing godliness or truthfulness.

When in reality the mind can be used like a thorn,

Pulling another thorn out of your foot.

So you've got one thorn causing you a lot of pain in your feet and you grab it and you pull it out.

But what sometimes happens is people leave the new thorn in the place of the old thorn.

A case of this example would be like somebody using a drug to help them sleep and eventually it becomes habit forming and you rely on the drug and it's starting to cause you more headaches and more side effects than you expected.

You just wanted to get a good night's sleep.

But something can happen to you.

And those of you that have sleep problems as I used to have,

Then you know what I'm talking about.

You know that it's basically a thorn you're putting in to replace the one you're taking out.

The one you're taking out is a sleep problem.

The one you're putting in is the drug.

The drug has to be dropped as well.

It's hard to find the cure and some people even use illegal drugs as a thorn to pull the other thorn out.

But then if you gave up that illegal drug,

If you gave it up and just slept naturally,

Then your foot would heal eventually and you'd be able to walk again normally.

Unfortunately what happens is people use thorns many times and leave them in so that now you have two thorns in your foot.

Some people have the sleep problem and the medication and it's still not working.

Sleep is a mystical thing.

Michael Jackson died just because he just wanted to get some sleep.

He had started taking prescription painkillers and that is a dangerous path to go.

I'm fortunate that I've never had to basically use any prescription painkillers.

But for a lot of people,

They had to because they've had injuries in car wrecks or injuries from spinal deformations and things like that.

Some people are dependent on these drugs and when you get dependent on these drugs,

They're very hard to quit from what I hear.

They're very difficult to let them go and let that thorn eventually get pulled out.

But there are ways.

The best way I can tell you to help get those thorns out is to learn to meditate,

To experiment like I share in all these audio tracks that I'm making.

You dive into awareness and you dissolve yourself into the universe.

You give the mind a break.

The mind needs a break so much.

You can't get free from an addiction using the mind.

But you can get free from the addiction by expanding your consciousness,

Expanding your awareness,

Expanding your is-ness and your ability to deal with situations becomes so much easier and so much better when you take a break from the mind.

Remember the mind is like a tightrope,

Stretched between two points,

Very tight.

And the tightrope walker has to walk on this tightrope all the time.

And in order for him to cross,

He has to be able to balance left and right,

Left and right continuously.

If he takes a couple steps and he leans to the left,

He has to counterbalance that step to the right and then equalize it in the middle again so he can take another step.

And we do this in life constantly.

And what's so cool is that you can use meditation to take a time outbreak from this stress of always being on the tightrope.

Because the mind,

Anytime you're using the mind,

You're on a tightrope.

And it is a mess.

The mind knows nothing about being calm and still.

That's not its function.

That's not its duty.

Its duty is to help you survive and help you to live a better life if possible.

And like I said earlier,

The mind can be used—other religions say it's bad,

But I say the mind can be used as a thorn to take another thorn out.

We use techniques in meditation by using the mind.

Like the blue sky technique that we've shared before,

You imagine this sky full of clouds,

And you float up into the sky with your eyes closed in meditation.

You float up into the sky,

And you just sit there and you watch these clouds.

And you watch them long enough,

The clouds start disappearing.

And then you become aware of the vast sky that is beyond the clouds,

Something that's always there.

It is,

In a sense,

It's a nothingness.

Because nothingness is the only thing that can be eternal in life.

Nothingness is forever.

Existence itself,

Something has to—if it's a something,

It has to have an end to its life.

But if it's nothing,

It can exist forever.

So that's why Buddha used the words and the terms like,

You know,

Nothingness to describe his religion.

Nirvana is the extinction of the candle into nothingness.

And they use negative terms in Buddhism to describe this essence of this vast sky that exists beyond thoughts.

And thoughts almost are like a noun.

They're like a thing.

A thought can exist,

And it can be caught on by others.

That's exactly how a mob mentality functions,

Too.

If one ant gets enraged by the anthill,

Then he sends that energy and that thought back to the entire anthill,

And then the ants go all crazy and defend their home.

And that's how thoughts work sometimes,

Is they have an is-ness of their own,

An existence of their own.

But you can go beyond this existence.

In Tantra,

They have a beautiful saying.

Instead of being a morale person,

A morale person will basically always do the right thing.

Maybe he will say to a morale person that,

You know,

They will never tell a lie.

Because things happen in life where you have to tell a lie,

Possibly maybe to save another person's life,

Or to stop a horrible thing from happening in existence.

If you have the power,

A tantrika,

An aware person,

Would stay loose and natural.

And by being natural,

Basically,

Would realize that if they said this lie,

Then they're basically doing what's best for existence.

Because they have the consciousness and the understanding to see the outcome of the action of their words.

Whereas,

A morale person basically would always think they're doing the right thing.

So sometimes little lies save lives.

So yeah,

The tantrikas.

And Tantra is a beautiful religion.

I've shared a video,

Or at least an audio track or two,

On the basics of what it means to be a tantrika,

To be a practitioner of tantra.

Because tantra picks up where yoga leaves off.

Yoga is effort.

Yogurt is an assertion.

It's something you can practice,

Something you can do.

Tantra basically says,

Be loose and natural.

So what tantra is trying to express is that if you practice meditation and bring that into your daily lives,

With tantra you can use,

Like I said,

Any of the emotions and transcend a negative emotion and come out on the other side of it.

And the transformation of anger is compassion.

It starts off as anger,

But if you bring awareness into it and you put your energy into awareness instead of the anger,

You'll find you can't be both at the same time.

Not for very long.

And that anger does turn into compassion.

I've seen a lot of bar fights when I was very young,

My parents were into the honky talk scene.

I've seen a lot of bar fights,

And usually after the bar fight was over,

The guys were buying each other drinks and becoming best friends.

So a tantrika uses everything.

Anything can be used.

Any emotion,

Any action,

With awareness applied to it,

Basically allows you to transform it and go beyond it.

So if you have problems sleeping or you have problems with anger or maybe you have an alcohol problem or something like that,

Meditation,

You've got to at least give it a shot.

Give it a try.

The worst that's going to happen is that nothing happens to you.

Meditation has never hurt anybody.

I've never heard of a case where somebody tried meditation and said,

I think I've heard one fellow say he dove into the east a little bit but he saw nothing there.

I felt sorry for the fellow because he's a fellow surfer friend of mine and I'm just the opposite.

I tried meditation and I found everything there.

Everything that was missing in my life,

Everything that was bad in my life went away and all the beautiful things came out and my life became a blessing.

I became loose and natural just through practicing meditation and learning a couple tantrika meditations and transformations to help change my life.

And the greatest part about it all is that meditation is not a thorn.

It is the end of using thorns.

It's the end of using vices to live by.

Many people go throughout their lives and use substances like alcohol or certain drugs or things to help cope with life.

But it's a bad way because it's not healthy.

It's not healthy in the long run.

It's destroyed so many relationships and so many people's essences about them that they could have shined very brightly but they chose to take these shortcuts,

These paths that seemed like a great idea at the time and they do work.

But it's like one of my doctors told me when I decided to stop taking the Ambien that I was taking for sleep.

I told the doctor,

I said,

I'm getting less sleep using this stuff than if I didn't use it.

And the doctor looked at me and said,

Well,

You know,

I mean,

When you make a deal with the devil,

You have to pay the price.

And I'm like,

OK,

I think I understand what you're saying by that because when I quit the Ambien,

There's like a four or five days where my body just totally freaked out,

Just totally tripped out on.

But in that period of those four days where everything was going crazy,

I just centered myself and meditated every day,

Two or three times a day to help take my mind off of the anxiety that was created by this medicine.

And the side effects of quitting the medicine are pretty severe.

But in the back of your mind,

You know you're going to be all right.

You know,

If you make it over the hill,

If you make it past that breaking point where the medicine won't have its effects on you anymore,

Your body will naturally recover.

And your body will help you do everything you can to get back to normal,

To have normal sleeping patterns.

And it was true what they said.

I mean,

After four days,

I started sleeping twice as much than what I did when I was on the Ambien.

My sleeping habits got so much better.

And basically meditation also helped me to realize all the other things that was causing me to have this sleeplessness in the first place.

So it was a double whammy.

It was a double blessing that I found meditation and I got into meditation when I did,

Because if I did not be a freaking mess right now.

So my advice to you is to,

If you're not already meditating,

To pick up meditation.

Learn to have those gaps.

Allow those gaps to happen within the mind.

Just like the blue sky meditation says,

Eventually the clouds will disappear and you'll see the vast sky behind all this stuff.

And that vast sky is so blissful.

It's so peaceful.

And just,

It's the abyss in a sense.

But I know when I say it's a negative term,

It could also be looked at as a positive term.

Because in my eyes,

In my essence,

There really is no nothing.

Nothing is something,

But everything that has like a physical being to it,

Or you could say like a plant,

A rock,

A tree,

A planet,

A sun,

Basically,

Like I said,

Has a life.

It has a time where it will be this certain thing for a certain while.

A rock might be much longer than,

Let's say,

The life of an ant or the life of a fly.

I think mosquitoes live like a week or two or something like that,

And that's their whole life.

The whole time all this is happening,

While everything has a life,

There's this is-ness that is existing that has a constant to it.

It's never-ending.

It's never going to stop.

It's never going to go away.

It is forever.

And meditation helps you to become a part of that forever-ness.

And this is just something that you'll have to take my word for,

Trust me for a few moments,

And give yourself the benefit of doubt of trying and diving into meditation,

Diving into awareness,

Diving into—it's not a life of discipline.

There's discipline to it,

But it's something that you do because it makes you feel good.

It makes you feel better doing it.

And the more that happens,

Then the more abundance happens to you and the better you'll feel.

So anyway,

I hope all this helps you guys maybe who have sleeping problems who listened in on this one.

Maybe I'll title it that just to put it out there for people on Insight Timer who do have sleep problems and stuff like that,

Or chemical dependent problems or anything.

Maybe just hearing my words,

Just maybe hearing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel will help you to get past your addictions or your afflictions and help you to grow and be a loose natural person like I say.

So I guess we'll end it there folks.

I appreciate all your time and namaste and aloha to all my surfing friends.

Take care of yourselves.

Bye bye.