2006

 September: In the Garden

Nobody had the courtesy to write me any questions, so what about now? Without the chore of writing it out you can just ask spontaneously, under my direction. Are there any questions or are you leaving it all to me again? I can talk to you, but I am not sure whether you will want to hear what I have to say. If you ask questions, it means that they are what you want me to talk about.

(No questions are asked.)

So, you want me to talk about what has been going on, in case you do not know.

After the last session, Anuradha said, “In that session I was nowhere. I cannot say where I was, but it was like being nowhere, and I would never have thought that half an hour later after the session, I would be sitting here eating a four course meal.” That is the first story.

The second story is that on Friday when Sandipa and I were downstairs in that little room after the second session in which I worked in a circle with you, which was very strong, there were people gathered around some tables outside the room waiting to come up to see a conjurer, an old guy who was performing here. Sandipa said, “My God, when I came out of the room and saw all the people and their energy, it was really such a hit, I was blown away.”

The third story is that yesterday in the third or fourth session there was a very deep silence for a long time, and then I put on some very strong music by Muse called Black Holes and Revelations, and I said, “I think it is wonderful how we can be in a space like that and play such music and it all goes together,” and Justino agreed. However, from what I hear, he was the only one. Some other people said after I had left, “What awful music! How could he play such stuff after such a session?”

In contrast to the opinions expressed, however, for me, there is no difference to being in a deep silence in such a session to eating a four course meal. I also did not feel any reaction or effect of being blown away by those people who were waiting to see that conjurer after coming out of the session yesterday. I also felt that the music of the Muse was simply perfect.

I am reminded of a time long ago in the 80’s when I was giving some interviews – at the time I was still a Rajneesh sannyasin – which we had produced as a little book called Energy and Transformation. I was also reminded of something in there that I said to a guy who was interviewing me for a magazine. I said, “We are pretty fragmented people. It is like we have a series of rooms in us, and we spend a day or night with somebody we have met in one room and then we wake up in a different room and say, ‘My God! How could I have done that? How could I have been like that? How could I have been with that person? How could I have promised that, because today I feel completely different?’”

This happens all the time: we live a life in a room and we feel that is who we are and we make some plans or come to some decision or get into some connection with somebody, but the next day or the next week we think, “This is not true for me at all. What I had agreed to go ahead with in my life does not fit any more.”

What I said twenty-four years ago was that in all those rooms we spend different times in one wall is missing: instead of there being four walls, a ceiling and a floor, there are only three walls, a ceiling and a floor; there are a whole series of rooms like this, but on the side where you are standing there is no wall at all. All the rooms look out onto the garden, and they are all your rooms, you go into one room and you come out, and you go into another room and you come out, and you go into another room and you come out. All the time you never actually leave the garden: you just stay in the garden and then you go and explore. Everything in the garden, however, stays exactly the same.

For me, I go into the room where we had that great session and I come out and there were all those people from a completely different part of society doing something completely different and it was not a shock at all. For me, it is now this and now that, now silence, now great chaotic music.

What happens, for example, in these situations is that if you are in a still and silent place and you identify with it and say, “Ah! This is great, this is who I am,” and then music comes and you think: “But this music is destroying me! This is destroying the quietness that I have become and this quietness I have found in this room. Now you have put me in another room and my quietness is gone; it is back there in the other room.” The quietness you have found in the room is useful to you, to taste it, although you are not to identify with it. It is not you.

None of you can be in that space whenever you like. You come to my seminars and we have found this space over and over again and occasionally you find it on your own, but you cannot say, “Okay, I go into the quietness now.” You cannot do it.

If it is not there all the time, then you are not to identify with it. It is just a passing phase, just one small phase of your life, even if it is beautiful. If you cannot stay in it, then it is not yours. The only way to escape these conflicting experiences is to find your own source and to stay there and then these conflicts simply vanish.

When you go into silence, when you are sitting still, then there is only stillness, there is no action or movement. The movement or the action in your normal life – or the movement that comes if I put on some nice music that you want to dance to – and the silence are two different things.

All the old Wild Geese will know that for the last twenty-three years of the Wild Goose Company, the most common question at this stage of the seminar has been, “Michael, this has been a wonderful seminar, but how can I bring this into my daily life?” Probably everybody in this room has asked this question.

I give many answers, but basically the answer to that question is that they are already together. But someone asks, “Where are they together, Michael?” My answer is, “You had this experience and now you are having another experience. You have been in the seminar, which is you, and in the world it is also you: Y-O-U equals Y-O-U, the same person.” But you are only the same person if in the group you are present and in the world you are present. If you are not, however, then there is a separation, a distance, unless you find the place that is beyond all differences, which is permanent, which is your true nature, then that is that and this is this and all the spokes of the wheel go out into your projects; you can travel them and they all belong to you, but at the centre of the wheel there is no change whatsoever.

Nevertheless, as long as the busyness of the world is taking you into the projects of your life, then even when you go into silence, the action that would come from the silence fails to come because your action-space is filled with your normal ego activity. Of course, when you are in a seminar in silence you are not acting as you normally do. Normally, the space in you is full, because all the active energies in you are so closely related to your normal action in your daily life that they are not available for something else.

Every night you go to sleep and the set lines of activity are not moving, but in the morning you get up and life is there waiting to move into the next day. You can see that very clearly, and when you are sitting in silence, it is the same; those energy lines that you live in your ordinary life are dormant, but they contain so much of the past and the habits in them, that all the energy that would come spontaneously from silence is, in fact, already eaten up by these filled lines of waiting energy.

All the programmes in your life, and all of your dramas in life, are self- created. Everything that goes on in your life, you have created. You have created all particular projects, to get married, to have children, to do a job, to have friends, to play tennis or squash or cards; they are all self-made projects. Whatever you might do, it is what you have set up. You create them and, only if you inwardly let them all go, see that they are simply repeating, which is okay if you want them to, but if you want to find the X, which is what I call your original self, then you have to let go all connections with your projects. It does not mean you can never do them again, but then the past is gone – all the things you used to do – and the future is gone – all the things you are planning to do. What is left? If you drop the past and the future, all that is left is just this moment.

This moment, but also a virgin moment, not dressed up and not already used up, but fresh each moment, just this moment. Out of that emptiness, that nothingness – you are in the world, people are there, and the world is there – a movement can come and will come. Each moment all of it will come just as it comes, and what comes now need have no connection whatsoever with what came this morning. This morning was the pure thing that came from your true self and this afternoon is the pure thing that moves from your true self.

From an ordinary mind this might seem a tremendous contradiction: “This morning you were like this, now you are like that, and this morning you said this and now you are saying that. This morning you were with this person and now you are with that person.” The ordinary mind is responding to what was there this morning, or its response is going to come, but here and now you are in a different situation and another response comes which has no connection with the previous response. For you, there is no contradiction because you are not measuring: “How comes that was this morning and now I am like that this afternoon? That seems like a contradiction.”

That was what happened from the source and now this is what is happening from the source and tomorrow this is what is going to happen from the source, and so on. It is always coming from a place where you are simply still and silent and absolutely present and that is who you are. That is how you were born, just in the moment. You took your first breath and there you were. That moment is every moment; the moment you took your first breath is the breath you are taking right now.

Participant: Do we always create every structure we have every moment?

We recreate the structure every moment. Maybe many of you have had the experience of falling asleep in the middle of the day and waking up and not having the faintest idea where you are, or what you are, what anything is, there is nothing to hold on to at all. There is only emptiness. There is nothing for the mind to say, “Aha, I know who I am and where I am.” For a little while, nothing is there. In that instant all the structures of your life have vanished.

The experience I am talking about is similar but not quite the same, although that is an occasion that many people have which confirms that the structures are not always there, because otherwise you could not have such an experience of nothingness. It is, however, not so much that you annihilate all your life and past experiences; that experience is one of annihilation, it is as if everything has simply been annihilated and just disappeared and you have nothing to get hold of at all, but fortunately it comes back. It is not like that, it is more that you see that all of your projects and all of your habits and all of your styles have been self-created from a certain source within you. You see that as long as you go on playing these programmes that you have created, you are never going to really be in your source because you are always with that which is coming out of the source into a form.

Then you say, “But what is there underneath all these projects? What is this place where they all come from?” If you are really determined and you are really curious and you really want to find that out, then you simply jump out of them and see if you can fall into the place where they all come from. What you then come to is the simple beat of your existence with nothing added. It is a struggle, because the habits die hard, but you do what you can to stay in that place; the projects will keep coming to try and drag you off. You need to simply pull yourself back and see more and more if you can simply rest in that which precedes all the movement into the projects. Then you have to practice staying there.

There is a famous statement by a great Japanese Zen master called Dogen which goes: Enlightenment is Practice and Practice is Enlightenment. It is not that you just get enlightened and then you are going to be enlightened every moment and everything is over, because the world is there, and the parts that have been in the world and respond to the world and your fellow beings are all the time going to be affected and influenced by what is around you. All the time there is a pull, it is not so much a push any more because you have given it up, in all directions to fit into other people’s structures and set ups; so, all the time you have to say, “No, I am going to stay with my source.”

At the very fundamental basis of your life is where you want to rest. The more you can do that, the more the energy grows there, and then you find that action in the world, just like it used to be, comes, but in a way that you feel is really truly who you are and not according to some lessons that you have learnt, or some rules that you are following, or some habits that you have developed.

Participant: So I have to jump and then I can practice to stay there. But how do I jump out?

I can tell you what has to be done, which I have just done. I can also tell you how to do it, but no one can tell you to do it. You simply see that your life consists of your projects, and you see that you are defined by your projects, not just your action in the world, but within that part of you that slides in and fits into the projects in the world. If you explore yourself within, you can feel the mind and the whole energy system we work with is prepared to rush into the already moving projects of your life. If you really see that your energy is rushing into your projects and that stops you from tasting who you really are without your projects, your pure existence as a living being, you can then say, “I am going to turn away from all those forces and I am going turn back towards myself and I am going to rest in the moment and just taste the hum of my existence, the beat of my life.”

That is not so difficult, but to stay with it and to see that it is a true thing in you, and to hold yourself and struggle against all the temptation and persuasion to hurl you into your projects again energetically, mentally and emotionally, that is difficult.

Suddenly, however, you feel that you connect with existence itself, not just your existence, because everything is also in that moment, all life is there in that moment, and you feel yourself part of that. You rest in that more and more, you struggle to rest in it, and the more you rest in it the more the energy that you have dissipated in your projects comes back and rests with you and then you turn towards life and suddenly one thing happens and then another thing happens.

When I feel that I have connected with existence itself, my energy moves out to connect with other people. For somebody else it might be making music, it might be building something, it might be writing a poem, it might be just sitting quietly in the garden or doing some gardening. It could be anything, but when it comes, it feels like, “This is happening by itself. This is who I am. Everything I am doing is who I am, but this is the essential me.” It is what would have happened if you had had no education and no one had ever told you anything about how you were meant to be. At the same time, you had to know all those things, but you let go of all of that and you go back to being like a child again: a child just moves spontaneously in response to what is around it. You get back to that place, but then it is not the same as being an infant at all, because you are mature enough to see that it is a new way in which you can be who you are.

Actually, if you let go of all your identification with all the things that have drawn you out of yourself in your life, then you have no alternative but to be enlightened. There is a process where you say, “Not this, not this,” you push everything away and you land. Alternatively, you simply see that it is nothing, or it is just a habit, or it is just something you got caught up in, or that it is just something that you used to do. You are not really in it any more; you have let go of your projects and then you think, “Phew! What is left?” What is left is that you are enlightened because that is what enlightenment is: it is to be back in the basis of your nature.

We are bound to think that enlightenment is something up there in life’s activity, but we have not found the right activity. So, instead of looking behind us and under us, and where it all comes from, for enlightenment, we are looking at the ending of our actions and our activities and our meditations for our enlightenment; however, it will never be true. You may get tastes of it from doing beautiful meditations, but the very fact that you have done something out in that world of action to get something that is before all the action, you may never actually reach it that way.

I am not giving you anything when I come from my source when I come to you for these days. You might think I am, but what I am actually doing is taking something away. I am trying to take away what I see, feel or sense, that there is something strong in you which is in the way from you seeing that you have to return to your source. By being in that place myself, I can create a resonance of the same place in everyone here.

In case you did not know it, I am not here to please you, although I know I please many of you at different times. I am here to help you to go through and to put you through what you have to go through to get to your source, and music is one of my allies in this work. One last thing I am going to say is that to do this work with so many people I love is a real treat on top. I enjoy my work, and I have to do it anyway, and it is part of my life, but when I can do it with so many old friends, so many beautiful people that I really love, it is a real bonus for me.

Let us hope that the next time we meet you all get it: I have explained the whole thing exactly and what you have to do to explore darkest Africa: “You go down here, you turn left and you go over a bridge and down into a valley and up here and around the corner there, and then you have arrived.” I have just explained all that, so all you have to do next time is to walk it. Okay?

Questions & Answers, Linz, 24th September 2006