On The Path

 Hell or Heaven Here, It’s up to You!

You have to understand that if you don’t learn a lesson it will go on and on through this life, the next life and the life after that until you do. The whole point is to learn lessons, because that is the only thing that will take you from one level to another. You are held to the level you are on by the way that you think, what you believe, your own vision, your own perspective, what you think is clear, pure and right, and the error in all that is what keeps you exactly where you are.

Someone who’s recently come here asked Mishka ”Can you give me advice as to how I can get the most out of being here?”. I said to Mishka ”Tell her just to say yes to everything”. Every time you say ”yes” when you feel ”no”, you lose part of your ego. You shake a little the level that you’ve decided to live your life on and that you’ve identified with. Every time you say ”yes” when you feel ”no” you get a chance to shift. Every time you say ”no” and live that ”no”, how can you move from where you are? ”No” says don’t interfere with me. I know what’s best for me. And the ”I” that says this is totally stupid, blind and locked in to what it believes and that’s what you are trusting and getting absolutely nowhere.

Jayatri has just come to the house a little while ago, and she is refusing to clean. She uses an excuse or an explanation that she gets rashes when she touches water. It is completely neurotic if you think that water is harmful to you since we are made up of water. But, if you don’t want to clean, then you can create quite easily, on the negative level that you are on, a situation where you believe you cannot clean. But you have arranged for that to happen. That is the power that you have, to keep yourself exactly where you are. The whole idea is to step out of that self in which you are creating so much trouble, ignorance, blindness and suffering.

What a paradox, that you come here or you go on the path in order to get some freedom, and then when you get a chance to jump out of that which is imprisoning you, you say ”no”! You won’t ever get anywhere, not in a million years that way. All around you there is freedom and light. You have the whole universe right beside you and where are you looking? You are obsessed with yourself and your views, ideas and rightness. Your belief that if someone challenges you then they don’t understand you and therefore are against you. These are the kind of things that we say in order to stay exactly where we are.

We prefer the pain of going on endlessly in the mud, to the different kind of pain that comes from saying ”Ok, I let myself go”. Then the second pain turns into joy and the first pain turns into more pain - it’s your choice. Every moment is your choice.

No teaching is going to work for any of you unless you cooperate with it. No Master is going to take you by the scruff of the neck and throw you into freedom if you don’t cooperate.

You have a choice in this crazy hall of mirrors that you live in called space. That space contains all the possible dimensions that are available to every human being, including the ones that have not yet been discovered. But you can only discover the possibilities if you are free from what you have been identifying with. You can’t go somewhere else if you’re nailed by your feet to your identity, belief system, ego and self-image about who you are. You have no idea, any of you, whatsoever, about who you are.

At the end of the road that runs parallel to this street, there is a big open yard with two fierce dogs. Whenever you walk past the yard, the dogs rush to the iron gate and they stick their heads through and they bark and bark. It’s happened to me a hundred times. Usually I exchange a few words with them and walk by. The other day I stopped and looked at them – these two dogs going bananas. They looked at me for a moment, and then the first one went quiet and the second started to growl. Then the one that went quiet put his foot around the head of the dog that was still growling, turned his face and put his head against the other’s head. The other dog kept growling, but slowly the growl stopped and they were just there, like a couple of lovers. Then, they both lay down together and the one that was growling started to make these beautiful noises of ecstasy, bliss, a kind of moaning, not sexual, just bliss.

A kind of mini-transformation happened. Dogs don’t have self-images to defend. Dogs have an acceptance of themselves as dogs. The dog mind goes with the dog nature. But the human mind doesn’t go with the human nature. They go with some mechanism that they’ve drawn out in their nature and identified with.

If you had the faintest idea of what is possible for you to experience and connect with in your life, then you would give yourself totally towards finding it and drop everything that was an obstacle, one by one. You are betraying yourself if you don’t do that. You are betraying your own possibility to discover and it may be something that no one has ever discovered before. Everything becomes available if you are available, but when you identify with the small self you simply cannot discover anything.

So, if you want to come here and just carry on the way that you have been going, then there is no point in being here. The way to be here, is to say ”yes” to everything, even when you feel ”no”. Take it as an opportunity to let go of this ego which is so powerful and has an iron grip, which justifies itself and can always explain how right it is and how wrong you are; just to preserve itself like a desperate swimmer who has got cramps out in the lonely sea. That’s what you sound like, when you hang on to what you believe is you, as if your going to drown unless you scream, shout and thrash your arms around while you look for rescue.

What comes out of that ”yes”, can be a freeing of yourself; freeing the energy from your attachment to your ”no’s”. Then maybe you can pick up here what the dogs can pick up when I walk by, and that is the possibility of transformation, without a hint from me that’s verbal, and which I bring into this house through my connection. You are just like me, so you can pick it up too.

In this place where I live, the energy field is intensified, all the time. It doesn’t matter if I am away quite a lot, or you don’t see me because I am in my room working. That is irrelevant. An energy field does not work from just one centre, it is everywhere, but many of you can’t smell it or feel it, because you’re not free. You are only just sort of worming around your egos, expectations, demands and resistances. How are you going to be free when you’re locked up in these structures? It’s impossible.

It’s not like playing with toys – the toys of your mind, your righteousness and your defence system. You have to give up your toys; be adult, be mature and take responsibility for yourself to find what there is to find while you have the power, strength and the health to do so. One day you may not have these anymore and you will have to rely on secret forces. As long as you have these assets, why are you wasting them on rubbish?

Saranatha, what is your native language?

Saranatha: ”English.”

Well, I wouldn’t have believed it after that gibberish you sent me. Completely incomprehensible. I can’t even understand what I was saying. So please find out how to do the job properly and don’t send me any more work like this.

Saranatha: ”Okay.”

Rasya, the letter you sent me about the Diamond Yoga – some of it is completely and utterly not true and not valid. So please speak with Suchata and listen to what she says. She will show you evidence of some of the things that you say do not exist on pieces of paper that you can read and accept.

Just try and be more than you are, or more than you take yourself to be. Try and have an aura around you of lightness, acceptance, modesty and studenthood. Studenthood means someone who knows they still have something to learn in order to enrich their life.

Feel the free space around you, where you will find these energies. Don’t be with the process of your minds, bodies and identities. Be light, soft, and easy. Be like the wind; be acknowledging; go with the tide; say ”yes”; see what there is for you. Let it in and what is relevant to you will work on what is not relevant to you and what is simply in your way. There is no need to fight all the time and struggle, resist and protect, because that which you are protecting, is not worth protecting. It is just the opposite of what it is to be free. You cannot take yourself out of the journey. You cannot take yourself out of the process and get anywhere. You will simply stay exactly where you are.

A revolution does not happen on the level that you are on, it happens by shifting to another level. On the level where you are, you have already manufactured your ego and your identity. That is what you have already done with that level. You can’t go back into these levels and change it, you have made your selection and you would make the same selection if you were born again and had the same life again. You would land up exactly as you are now. All the time you are making the choices on the level that you are connected with. The only way to change that is to move to another level. Then your identity will have to dissolve because it has no reality for you anymore.

Sometimes you can see someone who is on that other level as an enemy because they seem to be against you. But no one on that other level can be against you; they can only be for you, to help you to that other level. Anything or anybody you feel is pulling you into a finer dimension is your closest friend because they will help you out of the prison of yourself. For someone who knows they are in a prison, there will be one thing that they will want above all – that is not a good meal, a nice time, a good relationship or happy dreams, but to get out of prison. For them, nothing will compare to this.

The deepest thing that you long for, whether you know what it is or not, is absolutely, always, right here where you are. Feel it; connect with it; unite with it; embrace, enjoy and dance with it; be grateful, thankful and joyous with it. Don’t be stuck in your belief systems, self-justifications, righteousness, defensiveness and protectiveness. It would be such a shame, such a tragedy. To the extent that you accept this, you have a chance. Each moment is potentially a miracle, but you have to cooperate with it. You have to instigate it, initiate it, even insist upon it. There is so much energy when you commit to saying ”Yes, I will find that which is available to me”. Just that one true decision has so much power. It will take you through all the obstacles that could possibly come your way.

When you prove to yourself that you are right, you are in a very small compartment of life, with just you in it and your self-righteousness. Nobody else is there. That is a prison. When you see how trivial that is, then you won’t feed that anymore. It is your choice to live in that tiny space of life. What are you doing there when there is this whole universe, with a billion potential experiences that are so much more beautiful than that? It is insane. So my friends, please choose well. Be wise, intelligent, sensitive and aware, because your choices regulate your life. You can choose to conserve what you have, or you can choose to open up to what you don’t have and which you can achieve. Life is set up so you can decide. Hell or heaven is up to you.

Darshan, 1st February 2007.