I hope to show you that your attachment to peace.
You're saying unless I'm peaceful,
I won't be happy.
Did it ever occur to you,
You could be happy in your tension?
Before enlightenment,
I used to be depressed.
After enlightenment,
I continued to be depressed.
You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself.
The harder you try to change yourself,
The worse it gets.
You are called upon to be aware.
Get the feel of that telephone.
Get the feel of the ring of the phone,
The jarred nerves.
Get the sensation of that and leave the tension or the calmness to take care of itself.
As a matter of fact,
You will leave it to take care of yourself because you'll be too preoccupied or too occupied getting in touch with reality.
And let whatever happens,
Happens.
You know,
The real change will come about in you when it is brought about not by your ego,
But by reality.
Awareness releases reality to change you.
You change.
In consciousness and awareness,
You change.
But you've got to experience this.
Useless taking my word for it.
But if you've got a plan,
If your ego has drawn up a plan in its own cunning way and trying to push you into that,
You'll meet with resistance.
There'll be trouble.
Is being awake a growing process?
At times you're awake,
At times you go to sleep,
Etc.
You pick up the mild anxiety behind that.
You want to be awake,
Don't you?
You want to find out if you're really awake or not.
It doesn't matter.
How strange that sounds in a culture and a society where we've been trained to achieve goals,
Get somewhere.
There's nowhere to go.
You know why?
Because you're there already.
The Japanese have a nice way of putting it.
The day you cease to travel,
You will arrive.
Now,
If your attitude were,
I want to be aware.
I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen.
If I'm awake,
Fine.
If I'm asleep,
Fine.
But the moment you make a goal out of it and you're attempting to get it,
See what's happening there is you're seeking ego glorification,
Ego promotion.
You want the good feeling that you've made it.
I got news for you.
When you make it,
You won't know.
Your left hand won't know what your right hand is doing.
Charity is never so lovely as when one has no consciousness that one is practicing charity.
You mean I helped you?
I was just enjoying myself.
I was just doing my dance.
It helped you.
That's wonderful.
Congratulations to you.
No credit to me because tell me,
If you're giving Jesus the credit for all the good that happened to people when he spoke,
Hold on to your chairs now,
Why aren't you blaming him for all the evil that happened to people when he spoke?
If I had not come,
They would not have sinned.
Who's to blame?
They are to blame.
And when they benefited,
Who gets the credit?
The rain that is exactly the same in its nature produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden.
That's up to you.
That's up to you.
So when you attain,
When you are aware,
Increasingly you will not be bothered about labels like awake or asleep.
To use an Ignatian phrase,
Getting in through your door,
Arousing your curiosity,
And I'm sorry to say your spiritual greed,
But greed nonetheless.
Let's come awake.
It's going to be wonderful.
Well,
That's for starters.
After a while,
It doesn't matter.
One is aware because one lives.
The unaware life is not worth living and you will leave change to take care of itself.
