Freedom From The Past

This is a recoreding of a live Satsang given by Shai in Berlin Germany September 2018. Dive into the sacred realms of the truth beyond thoughts.

Transcript

I can see that there are many people here but with your permission I'm going to dedicate this one satsang to Noga,

The center's manager because tomorrow she's going to have a birthday.

Honestly I don't think that a satsang is a gift you give for a birthday.

Usually you give flowers.

So instead of flowers.

And why am I going to speak about,

Why am I relating this satsang to a birthday because this evening I'm going to talk about true freedom from the past,

The ending of the past and what that means.

And hopefully we can all find together that point of total freedom from the past.

So before I'm going to speak at all,

Let us tune in with a brief meditation.

So that will close our eyes and take one deep breath.

And breathe slowly and deeply,

Letting our body relax more and more with every breath we take.

And this meditation will play a little bit with some visualization.

Let's put before our mind the image of a bubble,

Just like those soap bubbles.

And into this circle like shape,

Let's put all the significant events from our past.

You don't need to necessarily remember every moment in time.

Just put some significant ones that come up immediately.

Perhaps some major shocking events,

If some events that you're particularly nostalgic about,

Some really intense experiences,

Maybe even from your childhood.

It's enough to just bring up four or five events because they all represent one thing.

And whatever comes up,

Just put in the bubble.

This can be even events from three months ago,

One year ago,

And one week ago.

And feel how you're putting inside that bubble the whole of your life story.

From your very birth all the way to a moment ago.

If you want,

You can include your time in the womb.

Now take a look at this bubble where the whole story of your life is.

And slowly begin to zoom out as if you're moving further and further away from this bubble.

Creating more and more space around that bubble.

Letting it become more and more distant as if it's becoming a smaller and smaller dot inside the space of your mind.

Perhaps you can even hardly see it.

And now once again,

Begin to zoom in and move towards that bubble.

Until you get very close to it.

And again you can notice the story of your life,

Your past.

Some difficult memories,

Some great memories.

Some memories you still haven't digested.

Just look into this bubble.

You can represent it by only one of the memories.

That's enough.

And once again zoom out.

Allow more and more space.

And let the bubble become more and more distant.

And you can hardly see it until it's just one dot within a vast sky.

Move away as much as you can.

Allow a maximal spaciousness.

And for the last time,

Zoom in and move quickly towards that bubble.

Return to recognize it.

Now it's again with shapes and figures and colors and feelings.

The closer you get,

The more vivid it becomes.

And for the last time,

Move away,

Let the bubble become so distant.

It does not disappear.

It just becomes a tiny dot in a vast sky that is your mind.

And let the bubble become more and more distant.

This time don't return to the bubble.

Keep this spaciousness.

Just ask yourself,

Who am I when the whole story of my life is just one small dot within my mind?

All right,

Good.

Slowly and gently come out of the meditation but don't let go of this space.

This space is what we wish to hold throughout this entire meeting.

We have an excited participant in the room,

A small dog.

So,

Easy to visualize perhaps,

But not sure that it's that easy to grasp what we were doing in this meditation.

And what it means and is it actually possible to live like that?

Now it's obvious that we all have a story of our life,

Right?

It's obvious.

If somebody asked me,

What did you do when you were 19,

25,

30,

35?

Did you have some defining moments in your life and what were they?

And of course I would be able to answer all that because I thank God have a functional memory.

My functional memory can still remember that there is such a story and from time to time if I want to amuse you,

I will bring up some story which I do sometimes when everyone gets bored.

So we all have a functional story to tell.

But what marks a huge difference between unfree individuals,

Unfree minds,

And deeply profoundly free minds is this point,

How much we are invested in our past.

How much,

And notice that pay attention,

How much psychological meaning we still give to it.

Do we tell it in a way that would be almost like someone else's story?

Or would we be on the other end where just recalling events from our past,

From our childhood,

From certain moments could make us cry right now.

We become so engaged,

So physically identified,

That we speak of it as if it,

Not as if it happened yesterday,

But as if it were happening now.

We can see it,

We can feel it,

We are made of it,

We are shaped by it.

And it never ceases to surprise me,

And I'm not saying that with criticism,

But just as observation,

It never ceases to surprise me how much when we are asked to tell the story of our life,

We begin to become so engaged.

We tell it,

And we tell it,

And if it were our story that brought us all the way to here,

And that has made us who we are,

And that is also hunting us,

That we can't escape,

That we need to return to,

And return to,

And return to,

And correct,

And heal.

And don't worry,

The picture I'm going to introduce today is going to be very complete,

Because I'm already hearing the questions.

After so much past as a spiritual teacher,

You understand.

So much experience in there.

But it's obvious that we're asking this question,

But what do you mean?

Obviously,

The past is what has brought me here,

What has shaped me,

And for good or worse.

The big question is,

Are we our past?

Or is the past something that we just include as a sort of a peripheral layer of our being?

The reason we did this meditation,

This visualization,

Is to give us,

It was like presenting a metaphor of the reality of our mind.

Our mind is like,

Imagine it like,

You don't need to imagine it,

You have it,

But imagine it for a moment,

Like the vast sky that we see when there is no interruption.

Perhaps when it is not completely cloudy,

Or when we can actually see something up there,

And it's not hindered,

Then we see something so vast without an edge.

At night time,

We see some stars dotting the heavens,

And at daytime,

We sometimes see clouds transforming,

Reshaping all the time.

And basically,

That is the ratio between the story of our life,

Our past,

The self that has been created and shaped as a result of our past,

And the reality of our mind.

There is so much space inside,

But of course,

When we begin to focus our attention continuously on this small bubble,

This bubble,

We get into the habit of looking so closely at the bubble that we see only that.

Then obviously,

We also find it very difficult to liberate ourselves from.

That's why very often therapy can take not one session,

Which ideally it could need only one session.

You come,

You cover a sort of certain experience,

You understand,

You forgive.

If you have no resistance inside you,

It's gone.

If you have no attachment,

No identification,

If you really came to bring an end to the past,

You will realize that your past is very happy to get rid of itself,

You see.

Maybe even to get rid of you.

But of course,

When we are overly identified,

One event in our life can take not one session,

And not two sessions,

And not one year,

And not two years,

But sometimes not even a lifetime.

We met so many people at advanced ages,

Where they are 50,

60,

70,

80,

Who speak so vividly about their past,

And I'm including in the past by the way also,

Nostalgia,

Where we have the wonderful memories of who we were and where we were and what we had.

And the question that we really need to ask ourselves if we are awake is why do we find it so hard to let go of the past?

Why is the past so alive?

Does it have to be like that?

Do we have to enter the sort of the mode of the person that is in therapy,

Or in a process of healing,

Or in a process of working on the past?

Do you see?

There is a huge difference between one who works on his or her past to heal,

To correct,

To make better,

And one who really wishes to let go of the past,

Which means to bring an end to the past itself,

That there will be no more past.

And that's a huge difference.

Because it is possible to be without past as our main experience in life.

I don't know if when we get in touch with nature or with the cosmos or with the morning or with night or with life in general,

We realize,

Yes,

That there are,

Of course,

Cycles of the year.

There is a sort of birth and rebirth.

And obviously there is some kind of an accumulated experience of the universe,

Because it's probably at least 15 billion years.

And still we also realize that there is some different quality of complete newness.

It's like somehow there is freshness in nature.

It doesn't grow old.

And it doesn't remember.

So when we look at nature,

We begin to get in touch with something with a very different experience,

Which is the experience of now.

And we can only get in touch with the now if we disengage even for a moment from the story of our life,

You see,

From the feeling of a chain,

Like we are chained,

Connected by a thread to so many moments in time,

Like that lead us all the way to our birth and and back again all the way to here.

That's pretty heavy,

Right?

It's pretty loaded.

It's what we call the feeling of a baggage that we're carrying within our heart,

Within our mind,

Within our on our shoulders.

But the truth is that in the now you have no past.

For to now begin to think about your past,

You will need a lot of effort,

You see,

You need to to begin to imagine,

Imagine a series of events that probably most of them are also wrongly interpreted or twisted and reshaped by the way we are telling the story.

It's upgrading itself.

It's becoming something else.

So you need to really use your memory to convince yourself,

No,

No,

No,

That is not true.

What he's saying,

It's.

I have come with my entire past and here I am.

And you cannot let go of it so quickly.

That's just plain manipulation.

And this is the thing about about the past that it remains meaningful only if we choose to keep it meaningful.

And I hope you understand I'm not talking here against therapy or the need for for healing.

I'm just saying that first of all,

We we can enter any form of feeling with a very clear intention that changes immediately the process of feeling.

That is,

I'm now not working on my past.

I'm bringing it to an end.

And the second thing is to to understand that the core of our being right now,

We really have no past.

We can just like a child that that is trying to hold on to to a helium balloon desperately.

And then it flies away in the same way.

We are trying to hold on to our memories.

Thank you so very much.

And this is not a process.

It's always really important to remember,

That freedom is not a process.

If you think it's a process,

Then it's not freedom anymore.

One more thing.

But freedom begins with this trust that right now I don't have a past.

And I'm looking into it and seeing why actually the major part of my mind is completely clean,

Completely clear.

Just take a look at it right now without immediately telling your story.

Without saying,

No,

No,

No,

But I must first get rid of this event.

That moment to work on myself.

This is what we need to understand.

Working on myself would never lead to freedom.

Should I say that again?

Working on myself could never lead to freedom.

These are two parallel lines.

They don't meet at all.

Never.

And I can heal myself for 20,

30,

40,

50,

60 years,

Use all the sessions,

All the most powerful forms of healing.

And at the end of the day,

I will be just having myself with a better relationship with the past.

I have forgiven.

I've looked into it.

I have analyzed myself and we analyze ourselves so well.

Thank you,

Freud,

That gave us all this capacity to analyze why we feel what we feel and how our connection with our father did that to us and that we are missing our mother figure and then that created in us this problem in relationship.

All this thing that is just a thing,

It's a story.

It might be wrong.

You might be wrong.

You might be mistaken that this is the cause and effect of your life.

We might be telling the story completely upside down.

Thank you,

업.

And whatever we tell,

No matter how sophisticated our self-analysis becomes,

We cannot,

We cannot really be free.

We can only be improved.

Now,

As I said at the beginning,

We need to understand that it's not bad to work on ourselves therapeutically.

As long as we remember that we're just,

Through that we're taking care of the very specific part of ourselves,

Of our being,

That is not really us.

Just like if you broke your hand in an accident,

You would never think that your,

I hope so,

That your core identity has changed,

Right?

You would not think,

Oh my God,

Now what happened to my sense of self?

Now it's a,

Perhaps.

We could,

We could be that imaginative.

What we do have,

What has remained from the past is a very instinctive layer that is in the body.

It's good to clear it away because it keeps creating instinctive,

Uncontrolled reactions in the present.

And that's why it's good to bring them to an end.

So that eventually these two lines can become closer to each other.

The line of total freedom and the line of self-improvement.

At a certain point,

We're getting closer and closer to a general feeling in our body and mind,

Even in our body that really,

Right now,

We have no past.

And this nowness is not something that you cannot touch.

It's more like a radio station.

It's just that our mind is right now on listening to the wrong radio station.

A huge part of you,

99% statistically accurate,

Scientifically proven,

99% are made of this freedom.

1% is made of this bubble.

A good way to test yourself,

By the way,

To check your level of identification is to sit with yourself one day or with some person who agrees to bear this practice and just tell this person your entire life story,

Focusing on the nostalgia,

Things we are attached to,

And difficult experiences.

And just check while you're telling it how engaged you feel when you're telling it.

Don't try to disassociate.

That's just a bad trick.

It will not help.

Freedom is not disassociation.

It's not detachment.

You see?

The sky is not detached from the clouds,

Right?

Or detached from the stars.

It just holds them.

So tell your story again and again until you suddenly realize that it means nothing,

That it's just a story,

That it becomes empty,

And that you're trying to hold it in your hands and it just dissolves.

This feeling of I was is an illusion.

I was this and I was that and I was this.

Don't let the past enter your identity,

Yourself,

Your being.

Until you reach a point when somebody asks you,

So tell me about yourself.

And your genuine answer,

Perhaps you would be more polite,

But your genuine answer would be me.

I have no story to tell.

And that makes you immensely simple,

Maybe boringly simple.

I'm sorry.

When you're free,

You're very boring.

Every day people ask me,

So how are you today?

And sometimes I tell them,

One day when we will get to know each other very well,

You will know that it's time to stop asking the question.

Because it's just not,

Because in the now there is no how are you.

There are no ups and downs,

Moods and bad day,

Good day,

Sad day,

Happy day.

Just like the sky,

It doesn't have a bad day when there is rain.

We say bad weather.

I don't think nature agrees.

Oh,

I'm having a really bad day.

Everything is going wrong.

Where's the sun?

So of course things are happening,

But the question is how are you doing is just meaningless.

And it begins by really letting go of the past.

Always remember the past is not holding onto you.

You hold onto it and you could let go by choice.

Yes.

By wisdom.

When you realize your whole story of life is just a bubble,

You can go and dance on the streets.

You can really celebrate.

Sometimes we can't imagine that we are permitted to declare that we are not our past and in that way be essentially free from it.

Every meditation shows us that we have this tremendous space inside.

It's not every meditation is a reminder.

And every meditation also shows us that if we choose to focus on our story,

It becomes big and then it also,

We get the illusion that it covers the entire space of our mind.

This is what our mind is.

Then what we do,

We begin to want to get rid of our mind.

You know this?

To kill our mind.

My mind is driving me crazy.

But everything is good with your mind.

It's 99% free.

Right now.

And we have no excuses for not being free.

Maybe some of our reactions are still conditioned.

Never mind.

It may always be like that.

Maybe we have a hard time trusting in relationships.

So what?

So what?

So we have a hard time trusting in relationships.

The more we feel that there is a problem,

The greater the sense of something that gets hold of our center of identity and gives us the feeling that I have a problem,

That I cannot be free right now.

I still need to work on myself.

So what do you say?

You can do it right now.

And you can only do it right now.

Yes please.

I'm happy to hear some questions.

Yes?

So the question is,

I'm just repeating for the online viewers,

The question is,

Is it not good to wish to get free,

To be free from all kinds of reactions,

Including bodily reactions.

Let's say I have a stage fright.

And stage fright can hinder my capacity to speak.

And then I wish of course to be free from my stage fright.

Right?

And that makes sense because just like being crippled physically,

We can also be crippled emotionally,

Crippled mentally.

Again,

Because of instinctive accumulated reactions in the body.

That's the problem.

Because we can understand what's,

You know,

I'm just with such a lovely group.

Everyone is so harmless.

Everyone is so cute.

Look at them.

Could anyone,

Any of these people be,

But it's,

Tell that to your body.

You see?

Your body says,

No,

No,

There is danger.

Maybe I'm just giving,

Maybe I'm exaggerating.

So yes,

Of course it's good.

Just as it is good to improve our nutrition.

Just as it is good to make more physical activity.

Just as it is good to sleep better at night.

Just as it is good to have a better choice of career that doesn't destroy us,

But actually,

But really enlivens us and so on and so on.

It's wonderful to improve and correct our life.

This is anyway what we're doing all day long.

It's all the time we're building,

Correcting and improving.

But we mustn't get attached to this process because eventually there comes death and ruins the whole self-improvement project,

You see?

It tells you,

Well done.

You've worked so nicely on yourself and now let me integrate you with one blow.

And that's it.

So just let us not enter the feeling of climbing a mountain,

Having a project of self-improvement.

But rather,

First of all,

Enjoy this process.

Let it be joyful,

Not worried,

Not troubled,

Not with the sense that there is a problem.

You realize when you begin to accept that there are some imperfections,

Then there is more space in the mind to contain them.

You see?

Because the feeling that there is a problem creates a contraction that makes us focus even more on the anxiety,

For example.

So it says I'm feeling the anxiety and then I'm thinking,

Oh my God,

Oh my God,

I need to stop feeling anxious.

This is horrible.

And then it aggravates because whatever you pay attention to,

You become.

That's the law of the mind.

And what is wonderful to realize is that the less we are focused on self-improvement,

Having that only as a,

Let's say,

A hobby.

Like one more thing that we do.

And the more we shift our attention to the fact that right now we have no past.

This has its own self-correcting power.

You see?

Because it's the very feeling that there is a problem that holds us in existential anxiety,

Tension in the body.

And we realize that sometimes when we move our attention away,

Things dissolve by themselves.

They don't necessarily require a tremendous process.

A cry of battle and trying very hard.

Sometimes by just being you,

Connected to the healing power of the now,

Things begin to transform.

Things begin to dissolve.

Not everything.

And it don't have the image of self-perfection.

Do you understand?

It's like the image of that everything will be gone and that I will have no fear and no desire.

And I will be so pure and perfect and I will always be spontaneous and also always be thoughtful.

And I will always be loving,

But also I will set my borders.

And everything will be so much in place.

Forget about it.

It's endless.

And then there is no sense of the self-image of I need to be perfect.

And then there is no self-judgment.

And when you don't have that,

You don't have also anxiety in the presence of people because you're just you.

Do you understand how this can lead to that?

Because if I don't have self-image,

If I don't need to be perfect,

If I relax into this endless process,

Then my anxiety is always the way people judge me,

The way people look at me.

But if I don't look at myself constantly,

Suddenly I realize that nobody is looking at me.

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares what you are looking at me right now.

No.

You are busy with yourself right now.

It's I'm just I just happen to sit on this chair.

Everyone is too busy judging themselves.

You see,

They don't have time for you.

So let's hear more questions,

Please.

And also people who watch,

You are also most welcome to send a question.

Oh,

Wow.

Okay.

First and second.

Yes,

Please.

I think it's hard to let the past go because we are always reminded of the past.

We have to do that.

So the question is why we are that we are a society that culture that that obviously preserve preserves a lot the past and creates monuments and a lot of reminders and holidays.

Why do we do that?

Is it to hinder our freedom?

Well,

No.

First of all,

There is no big brother that is sitting there and saying let's feed them with the past endlessly.

So because everyone is doing that,

You see.

The reason the reason society and culture are doing it is because because of identification.

I did identification gets you closer to your nation,

To your religion,

To your family.

Sometimes we say that we use the past in order to avoid making mistakes.

I question if that is true.

It's not,

Again,

It's not bad to honor the past,

To remember the past.

Even when I'm teaching,

I often refer to yogic knowledge,

For example.

Yogic knowledge is preserved in books,

Preserved in monuments,

Preserved in many ways.

But again,

The only question is the question of identity.

Are you now or are you the result of the past?

Are you made of the past?

People say of course our cells are made of the past.

Everything is made of the past.

But your mind is not.

And that's the big,

Big story.

And that's why there is at all freedom and there is at all liberation and what we call awakening.

Of course past experiences can develop in us a sort of wisdom of life,

Knowing how to be more cautious,

More awake,

And so on and so on.

But then this means that the past is only a tool.

Do you understand the difference?

Then it means that you use the past in order to learn about how to improve the present and the future.

But that's not identity.

Your past may tell you you're German,

You're Christian,

And that you have all this lineage because we don't have only our past.

We have endless.

We call it our connection with our ancestors and their endless lineages.

What don't we put on our shoulders?

Your mind is made of limitless space.

And it truly has no beginning.

It didn't start when you were born.

It didn't start when your parents were born and it didn't start when the Big Bang was born.

So it's very important to live in a culture and never let culture fool you.

Never let culture make you its own.

People say that they are individuals but you begin to be individual only when you are free,

When you don't belong to any culture,

Including not the culture of yourself.

Yes,

Please.

Why is it still important to be on the path of self-therapy and that improves a lot?

It doesn't matter that much.

Why can't I just go then on the way of self-destroying or something else?

That's not really the point.

Why do I still go to the.

.

.

Why do we have to go through at all?

Because we said that there are two parallel lines,

Right?

One is the line of self-improvement.

The other line is the line of freedom.

And we hopefully try to make them more similar but we can never do that completely.

So the question is why do we need at all to go through the self-therapy?

Well,

We don't have to.

We don't have to.

Yogis in India who got fully liberated definitely didn't go to a therapist.

As far as I know,

Around the Himalayan caves,

There are no good therapists for yogis.

But the yogi wanders and comes to the therapist in one cave and says,

Look,

I really need to solve my relationship with my mother.

We really need to understand that this narrative of self-healing is a conditioning of a certain culture.

We got so used to it,

It became a part of us as if it's obvious that this is what one should do.

Just like it's obvious that everyone needs to have a smartphone and walk with them and be unable to live without them.

You see?

And some time ago there were no smartphones.

Reviews

By interesting and encouraging! Thank you!

Take a long walk in nature and listen to this satsang. I loved to listen to Shai and laughed a lot. It’s so true that we cling to ideas that are a part of our culture, not per se being true. I saw the bubble with my stories going with the wind in the sky and feeling relieved.

Such exciting concepts as instantaneous freedom, that working on oneself doesn’t bring freedom only an improved relationship with the past and that we upgrade our story when we tell it —I am intrigued. I plan to listen again. Thank you.

Fun to listen to