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.
What you are aware of,
You are in control of.
What you are not aware of is in control of you.
Awareness is a four-step program.
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.
You're not going to be able to deal with a cancer that you haven't detected.
You're not going to get rid of wolves in your farm if you're not aware of their existence.
So the first thing you need is awareness of your negative feeling.
What kind of negative feeling?
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,
Understand that the feelings 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.
Like the guy who said,
Well,
I got a pretty good education and it took me years to get rid of it.
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.
No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy.
Very important.
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.
Only nobody told you this.
They told you the opposite.
That is why you're in the mess that you are in right now.
Rain washes out a picnic.
Who's feeling negative,
The rain or you?
What's causing the negative feeling,
The rain or your reaction?
When you bump your knee against that table,
The table's okay.
It's busy being what it was meant to be,
A table.
The pain is in your knee,
Not in the table.
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 wanna say depression is there,
That's fine.
You wanna 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.
You were trained to react that way.
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.
Hang around,
Won't last,
Never lasts.
Keeps changing.
It's always changing.
Clouds come and clouds go.
Some of them are black.
Some of them are white.
Some of them are large.
Others are small.
You are the sky.
You're observing them all.
It's like,
You know,
You take paint and throw it up in the air and keep throwing paint in the air.
The air is uncontaminated.
You don't color the air and no matter what happens to you,
You remain uncontaminated.
You remain at peace.
There are human beings and you know it who have attained to this.
Fourth step,
Don't interfere.
Don't fix anything.
Watch,
Observe.
The trouble with people is they're busy fixing things they don't even understand.
We're always fixing things,
Aren't we?
Never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed.
They really don't.
This is the great illumination.
They need to be understood.
If you understood them,
They'd change.
They really would if you understood them.
There's always the feeling of,
I feel good because the world is right.
Wrong.
Wrong.
The world is right because I feel good.
That's what all the mystics are saying.
When you awake,
When you understand,
When you see,
The world becomes right.
If you could grasp this,
You've hit upon the secret for awakening.
You would be happy forever.
You would never be unhappy again.
Nothing,
But nothing would have the power to hurt you.
And I mean that,
Nothing.
