You want to change the world?
How about beginning with yourself?
How about being transformed yourself first?
How do you achieve that?
Through awareness,
Through observation,
Through understanding,
With no interference,
With no judgment,
Because what you judge you cannot understand.
And when there's something within you that moves in this direction,
It creates its own discipline.
Awareness creates its own discipline.
The moment you get bitten by the bug of awareness,
Oh that's so delightful.
The most delightful thing in the world,
The most important and the most delightful.
Because there's nothing so important in the world as coming awake,
Nothing.
And there's nothing so delightful as being aware.
Would you rather live in darkness?
Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions?
Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you're hearing?
Or see things and not be aware of what you're looking at?
The great Socrates who said,
The unaware life is not worth living.
Being aware is a four-step program.
First,
The first thing you need to do is get in touch with those negative feelings.
If you're not even aware of them,
You're not going to drop them.
Lots of people have negative feelings they're not even aware of.
Lots of people are depressed and they're not aware they're depressed.
It's only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they were.
So the first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings.
What kind of negative feelings?
Gloominess for instance.
You're feeling gloomy and moody.
You feel self-dislike and self-hate or guilt.
You feel that life is pointless,
Makes no sense.
You've got hurt feelings.
You're feeling nervous.
You're feeling tense.
Get in touch with those feelings first.
Second step,
This is a four-step program.
Second step,
Understand that the feeling is in you.
It's not in reality.
Now that's such a self-evident thing.
Do you think people know that?
They don't,
Believe me.
They've got PhDs.
They're presidents of universities.
They haven't understood this.
They didn't teach me how to live at school.
They taught me everything else.
That's what spirituality is all about,
You know,
Unlearning.
Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you.
Now,
That negative feeling is in you.
It's not in reality.
So stop trying to change reality and our bosses and our friends and our enemies and everybody else and everything else.
You don't have to change anything.
The negative feeling is in you.
There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you or to hurt you.
No event,
No condition,
No situation,
No person.
Rain washes out a picnic.
What's causing the negative feeling,
The rain or your reaction?
Reality is all right.
Reality is not problematic.
Problems only exist in the human mind.
Understand that the feeling is in you,
Not in reality.
Third step,
Never,
Ever identify with that feeling.
Don't define your essential self in terms of those feelings.
Don't say,
I am depressed.
You want to say,
It is depressed.
That's okay.
You want to say,
Depression is there.
That's fine.
You want to say,
Gloominess is there.
That's fine.
But not,
I am gloomy.
You're defining yourself in terms of that feeling.
That's your illusion.
That's your mistake.
Fourth step,
You watch it.
There is a depression there right now.
There is a hurt feeling there right now.
Let it be.
Leave it alone.
It'll pass.
Everything passes.
But everything.
Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness.
Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with your happiness.
Those are the swings of the pendulum.
One end of the pendulum swings to the other.
This has nothing to do with I.
This has nothing to do with happiness.
This is the me.
You know,
If you remember this,
If you try these steps a thousand times,
Maybe you won't even need to do it three times.
There's no rule for it.
You'll make the biggest discovery in your life.
You don't care anymore about being accepted or rejected.
It makes no difference.
You're a king.
You're a princess.
You're free.
