The Energy Way

 The Names of Reality

If you were to ask me how many spiritual books I have you read in my life, I would say, “At least a thousand.” If you were to ask me how many of those books used the word enlightenment, I would say, “Nine hundred and ninety nine.” If you were then to ask me how many of those books mentioned meditation, I would have to go back and say, “A thousand.”

These are important spiritual topics – enlightenment and meditation – but I want you to know that I am not interested in either. Meditation, as I have come to see it, is the opposite of non-meditation. You are either a person who meditates or you are a person who never meditates. If you are a person who meditates, then sometimes you meditate and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you do an hour in the morning and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you do half an hour after lunch and sometimes you don’t. You may have been meditating in the seminars, and it may look as if I have been meditating, but I haven’t. I never meditate.

Meditation is in duality. It’s something you decide to do, and most spiritual books will say that meditation is good for you. I don’t disagree with that at all – doing meditation is a lot better than not doing any meditation – but nevertheless, I am not interested in it.

Enlightenment is the opposite of un-enlightenment; it is something that an un-enlightened person tries to become. They move closer, and then they fall away. They touch it, have a satori, then lose it again. This is the game that most spiritual people play, as do many spiritual teachers, and I am not interested in playing either of those games.

Why do you meditate? Because you believe meditation is a good thing, and that through meditation you can make your life more relaxed, sweet, open, and so on. You believe, accept and acknowledge that, so you meditate, start to see the benefits, and you do it some more. You are convinced that your life will be vastly improved, and that you are going to become a much better person.

Meditation is something you decide to do, and enlightenment is something you try to make happen. Both meditation and the pursuit of enlightenment keep people very busy – in a much better way than what keeps most people busy – but where do the decisions to carry out these things come from? What in you makes the decision to meditate, to go deeper into meditation, to try different meditations, and to attempt to move towards enlightenment?

All these decisions come from the mind. Your mind looks at the situation of being un-enlightened, full of rubbish, impulses and history, and says, “We don’t want to live like this anymore, we want to live differently. We want to be calmer, quieter, more open and sensitive.” So it goes on a campaign, and it makes more and more ingenious suggestions to help deepen one’s meditation and arrive at the peak human state. What about the sound of the amplifier here? Shall we meditate on that, or shall we meditate first and then listen to the sound? I’ll ask you all a simple question; what has meditation and enlightenment got to do with hearing the sound of the amplifier?

To hear the sound of the amplifier – without any thoughts, comments, or adding anything to it – is to be nothing; is to be. If you are alive and present then you can hear the amplifier and vice versa; if you can hear the amplifier, then you are alive and present. You don’t need to add anything to the simplicity of hearing that sound. If your career is in sound or in machinery, then you might say something about the hum, but to me, it’s simply a sound. It’s different from the birds singing, but in a way the same.

I remember once saying, “The sound of that amplifier is God.” I said that at a Sannyasin centre in Cologne, twenty-five years ago, though I wouldn’t put it quite like that today. I would say, “If you can hear the sound of the amplifier, without adding anything to it, then that sound is the key to the door.” If you can live in that place, where you simply hear that sound, then nothing more is required.

Again, listen to the sound. What is the context, and environment, all around the sound? You may focus on it, but it is not an isolated thing. The sound is in a vast space; waves of sound go out endlessly. We have to be alive to hear that sound. It is one item in a huge theatre of living reality. When you hear that sound, just be with it. I want you to do that now, as far as you can; hear that sound without adding anything to it.

To hear it in the way I am asking you to hear it, you have to be meditative. You have to be relaxed, open, and your mind has to be quiet, not carrying you off in a thousand different directions. You have to be present, awake, and here, but then, you are always here. Wherever you are, that is where you are; it’s a given. Being awake is also a given, because that is the way you were born. You could describe that state as a simple, ordinary, human aliveness fact; you are awake and present.

If you find a way to be in a meditative space, then not only will you hear that sound in the way you can now, but all of life will be like that. Everything will be laid out before you – like the sound of the amplifier – and you will be awake, so you experience and relate to it. If you think about it, then you’ve already missed it. If the mind grabs what I’m saying and thinks, “I really must try for that,” then you are back in the old routine. It is simply one step, from the complicated to the simple, from the individual movie to what I have called the theatre of life. It’s still a theatre, but it includes all life. Everybody who is in that theatre will experience the same thing, whereas in our own movie, everybody experiences different things. In our own movie there is something between the seeing and the seen, the hearer and the heard, and then it’s not so simple.

If you are asleep, you won’t hear that sound. You can be asleep in a thousand different ways, not just what we would normally call ‘asleep’. You could be sitting here thinking about something that is going on with your life while that machine is going, but you won’t hear it because you aren’t present. You are present in body, but you aren’t present where you actually are, which is here.

Everybody – you, me, a mouse, and an ant crawling across the floor – hears the same sound, and that is one relationship. I call this a chair; I call that a table; that is what I call a glass, and over here is a clock. I am present, the clock is present, I see the clock, and I can hear the clock. The water is present, I am present, I see the water, and I can drink the water. As long as I am present, and these items are also present, I will see them. Sometimes the relationship between you and what is there is not so simple. Let’s take the clock, for instance. The alarm goes off at five in the morning, and you have a busy day ahead. You look at the clock, but you don’t look at it in a neutral way; you look at it with hatred. You want to bury it, and scream, “Shut up!” You have a relationship with the clock, so the clock is not neutral.

At the same time as there is this relationship, there is another relationship, and that is the energetic relationship. Sound is energy, the table is energy, the clock is energy, and you are energy. You are awake, you are aware, and you don’t think about anything to do with sound until you actually hear it. But you do more than just hear the sound; that sound is striking you, somewhere. There’s not just the sound that the ears pick up and call the amplifier; that sound is hitting you and this creates a change, a response, a movement, and an activity in you.

So there is also an energetic relationship. You have an energetic relationship with everything that is present; with your neighbour sitting next to you, on the left, on the right, and behind you; with your friends that are here with you in the room, with me, with Suchata, and with the sounds that you can hear. All those connections are happening in the same place, in another theatre of living reality, so there is an energetic theatre too, and that is the one I work in. It is parallel to the relationship that takes place between everything that is present in the moment.

I want you to connect through the energetic relationship and experience that, in order to find the even more straightforward theatre of simple reality. Here I am, here is that, I am awake and I am with it; finished. No campaigns, projects, strategies, tactics, doing, thinking, or mind; just this.

This involves going back to the place within you that existed before the mind ever began to operate. The mind is always adding and subtracting, twisting and turning, but If you don’t do that, and don’t interfere, then everything is as it is, and you are with it.

Italy, Lago d’Orta, Winter Festival, 28th December 2006