Stillness = presence: a state of consciousness that is free of thought, and yet, you’re fully alive, awake, present.
You cannot understand through the mind because the essence is beyond the mind thought activity, mental noise.
The Flowering of Consciousness
The state of stillness: You’re alert, present, open to the aliveness of this moment.
In many ways, plant life is more enlightened than human’s because it doesn’t inhabit the world of problems.
Beyond Thinking to Presence
That’s not a problem. It’s a situation that requires some action.
There is no problem ever in this moment.
In the state of consciousness – presence, there are no problems. Perhaps, challenges, but they never turn into problems.
Celebrating Life
We impose our world view on nature.
Connectedness of being: where life feels good it feels good to be alive.
Connecting with Essence
The world is insane.
What the world is telling you is completely irrelevant because your aliveness has such depth to it.
“I have overcome the world.”
“Your whole body will be filled with light.”
Going into the Now
Circumstances come and go. Life situations continuously fluctuate. On the external level, nothing lasts.
“I don’t like my life’s circumstance,” the minds says, “So I’m going into the now because I don’t want to be in the now. I want to get to the future, and once I get to the future, then I’ll go into the now.”
The quickest way out of your undesirable circumstance is to enter the present moment, and connect to the vast aliveness that is there, just waiting for you to touch it.
Honor This Moment Fully
The resistance to the now is an essential aspect of the condition, human mind.
When the resistance to the now goes, then the life moves freely through you.
Challenges still come, but your respond to them in the now. You become still, and the action arises out of that state.
Whatever you do in that state of non-resistance to the present moment is done with care & love.
If you do not resist what is, the incessant mental noise slows down, subsides.
Session 2
Introduction
Trusting in Life
It’s hard to make yourself trust when your primordial condition is fear, which is a primordial human condition in the mind-identified state.
Trust is the absence of fear.
Trust arises naturally where you don’t need any more affirmations.
Many concepts disappear when the reality to which the concept points arrives, the very mental concept of it is not really necessary any more.
Love arises naturally out of the state of presence.
Patience still means that you’re trying hard to be here. When true patience is there, you don’t even know you’re patient. You’re just present.
There also comes the time when you go beyond affirmations. Cf. a signpost to Rome
Observing the Ego
The ego can creep in at any stage.
Presence is to live free of self-images because that’s mind. It’s conditioning. Free of needing some image telling you who you are.
Animals are more deeply connected to the source than humans in the normal state.
Comparison: an ego device in a subtle way you are feeling better than, or not as good as.
Defensiveness arises when your beliefs are questioned. Who you truly are doesn’t need any defense.
When you observe it, you’re no longer trapped in that unconscious movement.
“Whenever you become defensive about anything, know that you have identified yourself with an illusion.”
Recognize Illusion as Illusion
Knowing is not the illusion. In that knowing, you are free of illusion.
You don’t have to deny whatever arises inside you. You allow it, emotional, mind patterns.
Allowing implies that there is awareness, and the awareness is not a part of the condition, either in your head or in your external behavior pattern.
Automatic Ego Reaction
You can learn about dysfunction by watching people.
Ego defends mental position, mental image.
Through the simple act of observation, you go beyond, and you don’t need defensiveness anymore.
Learn by observing other human beings, and then, observing yourself.
Suffering Is Not Necessary
Are you fed up enough with suffering or would you like to hang on to suffering?
Unhappiness can only cling to mental image sense of little me.
In the now, there are no problems, and there is no unhappiness.
Freedom from pain is possible now.
Pain arises by not being present to this moment, by running away internally from, by fighting, by denying what is.
When you accept what is, the new state of consciousness immediately is present.
You can’t separate acceptance of what is from the new state of thoughtless awareness.
There is an energy field of pain that every human being inherits simply by the fact that you are born into the human condition, into the unenlightened, painful human condition. So, every human being has a share of human pain that comes even from birth.
In you, there lives an energy field of residue of past human pain, on a personal level, pain from childhood that leaves energetic residues + far beyond that in time.
Pain-body: energy field of pain that humans carry inside.
An Energy Field of Pain
Pain-body is sometimes dormant & sometimes active.
It needs feeding temporarily on the experience of further pain. This happens when relatively insignificant trigger produces an incredible outburst reaction of pain.
It feeds on your thoughts when it’s ready to rise up. Will control your thinking, rise into the mind, and the mind, your thought activity becomes aligned with the pain-body. Every thought you think is destructive & painful.
When the pain-body has taken you over, and has succeeded in pretending that that’s who you are, all your thinking is completely aligned with it. At that very moment, the last thing you want is to be free of the pain. At that moment, you are the pain-body.
Feeds on your negative & destructive thinking.
Feeding the Pain-Body
Pain-body feeds on your thinking; pain-body on the feedback from the emotional pain from other people, their reaction.
Pain-body loves the drama. This is why drama is an essential part of most relationships.
Unhappy sense of self becomes amplified. Unhappy sense of me becomes dreadfully unhappy, and loves its unhappiness.
Even the pain-body is live energy stuck somewhere. When energy gets stuck, cannot flow freely, pain arises.
Recognition is a beginning of freedom from it.
Allow the pain that is there in you also to be. Bring the acceptance to the old pain. Watch it, feel it, allow it. Bring presence into it. You cut the link between the pain-body and your thought processes. It’s not feeding on your thinking anymore. You’re watching it.
The Transmutation of Pain
The best time to catch & watch it is as it first arises in you.
The more you watch, the less it can feed. It loses its energy charge.
The egotistic state is one big contraption.
You’ll have to do it many times. Next time you’ll catch it…
The more often it comes, the better it is. If you have a strong pain-body, you’re lucky. It’s good for your practice. It can become a great teacher.
Session 3
Introduction
The Dissolving of Karma
Karma: all the conditioning from the past including the past pain that you mistakenly believed as who you are. To be identified with all past conditioning, and to be condemned to relive and act out continuously your past conditioning.
Use your relationships in your practice. Realize no matter who you choose as your partner, they will have a pain-body. Don’t look for an ideal partner without a pain-body. And, use the relationship because it’s so much easier to become aware of your own pain-body than if you live alone.
Stay present when the pain-body arises in the other person instead of going into reactivity. Allow it. If your partner doesn’t want to cooperate, do it for yourself.
Pain-body is not a personal problem. It’s a human condition. Every pain that you have in your life is your share of human condition manifesting in a particular form.
A Gentle Embracing of What Is
The state of presence is always a gentle embracing of what is.
Your acceptance of pain is complete, and that’s where your spiritual power lies.
Men are more entrenched in their mind structures. Predominant for men is identification with their head.
Make your pain-body into your ally. Forget about getting rid of it. Just watch it. That does it.
When Pain-Bodies Collide
Anger has fiery quality to it. It arises like explosion.
If you lose the witness, your partner becomes the witness for you.
Aloofness is not presence. Presence is to open completely and allow your partner to be the way he/she is. Embrace either your own or his/her pain, and remain in the state of love.
Children and the Pain-Body
Children absorb their parents’ pain-body.
Bring consciousness to your own pain-body.
Ask “Who was that monster?” afterwards.
If your own pain-body has taken you over, admit it openly.
Completely accept what’s irritating; allow it totally. Anything that you allow totally takes you into the state of great peace.
Unconsciousness at Work and at Home
Do not expect others to be conscious.
Relinquish the reactivity of the little me; allow unconsciousness in the other person.
Most of the world still lives in unconsciousness. Don’t expect it to be otherwise.
Relinquish the need to be understood by your parents.
They did what they could do according to their level of consciousness. It was unconsciousness playing itself out. Forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
No matter what pain was inflicted on you in your childhood, as presence emerges, you realize that there is a dimension in you that was never touched. You don’t have to try to forgive. Forgiveness happens naturally as presence arises & you feel the vastness of who you truly are beyond the little me.
The most transformation happens through allowing everyone to be who they are and the present moment to be as it is. Allow it to be. Your relationship with your parents improves dramatically when you give up the desire to be understood.
“If you think you’re so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.”
The Pain of Great Loss
1st level of surrender: surrender to what is; 2nd level of surrender: surrender to what you feel.
All is well. There is no death.
Anything you cannot accept externally & pain arises, surrender to what you feel.