The Energy Way

 Meeting the Prince

We have our first feedback session now. If you have anything to say or ask, now is the time.

A participant: What do the letters TOBAL stand for?

Does anyone know?

Another participant: The Tao of Being and Living.

The questions are the living part, and the sitting is the being part – that you have done now for two days, and in the living part, there is no sign of life!

A participant: You said if you perceive your being with consciousness, you’re in consciousness, but how can you be aware of consciousness? Where do you have to be to be aware of consciousness?

How do you know you’re conscious?

The participant: I do not know, it’s a feeling for me. I perceive the energy space as a movement and consciousness as a non-movement.

But consciousness is still something that you can recognise, that you can identify, and therefore it seems to me that it is a manifestation of some sort. So what is it a manifestation of? You have to look beyond it, of course, to find that. But I guess consciousness is only capable of recognising that which is grosser. All things are grosser than consciousness, so consciousness can recognise them, but can consciousness be aware of something beyond itself? I think it can, but it cannot identify anything beyond itself, although it can recognise that it itself is not the ground of being. Therefore it can recognise, I believe, that where it stands is not the primordial position.

This is how the whole belief or concept of God came into humanity. Human beings looked around and saw the great creation and said, ”Well, there must have been a greater consciousness or greater being that gave rise to all of this that we are part of.” The evolutionists say that’s not true, that everything has come out of the process of evolution itself, that there is nothing beyond it at all – it can account for everything. But, in fact, it cannot account for everything. So whether there is God as defined by one of the religions, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Allah, or whatever, that cannot be settled by us.

What I am saying is that I sense that there is something beyond consciousness that gave rise to consciousness and gave rise to all the things that consciousness can be aware of, something that I call the primordial – almost like the meditation we are doing on the TOBAL Process. The first level is your physical body, that is ordinary reality; the next level is awareness of the energy field, that it is all energy, and I guess the energy field is similar to consciousness; and then I said to go beyond your awareness of the energy space into…I don’t know where, but there is the possibility of going beyond consciousness.

That is what I find most convincing, that there is something beyond consciousness; something that consciousness can be aware of but cannot identify and say, ”Yes, what is beyond consciousness is this, is X, is God, is the One, or is the process itself.” The whole movement of life is itself the beyondness, the pantheism, that says whatever you call God is not separate from the process – the process includes God. That’s pantheism. Many people have come up with different ideas about what is beyond. Some people, like scientists, have come up with ideas that there is nothing beyond, but I am saying that for me there is.

Buddhism says, ”All is mind.” I don’t accept that, but there are many brilliant Buddhists who hold to that. So in a way I am competing against some very learned and aware people, but for me there is something beyond mind, and that’s why one can change one’s mind. There is a very common expression: I changed my mind. Of course it means the content of the mind, but I’m taking it more literally and saying, ”If I can change my mind, then my mind cannot be the final thing because otherwise I could not change it, it would be fixed.”

I don’t know quite how much it matters whether you think mind is the absolute or whether, like me, you feel that there is something beyond it – I am not sure in practice whether it matters very much, but for me it is a great relief. As long as one feels that mind is the absolute ground of being, then if your mind cannot account for something, or is not sufficient to satisfy you in all your questions, or even in how to live, then the feeling that there is something beyond the mind, for me, stops the search to know.

If you accept that there is something beyond the mind, then you know that you cannot know it. You can acknowledge it, open to it, accept it, and relax in response to it, but you cannot know it. There is always this deep desire in us to know, and when I say that there’s something beyond mind, I can say that that’s a guess, a belief, or a tenet – which is something you hold to be true without any proof – or you can simply have a real sense that it is so. It reminds me of a statement by a Christian priest who was asked, ”Do you really believe in God?” He replied, ”Believe in God? I touch Him every day.” He feels he is being touched by what he understands by the Divine. He doesn’t have to renew it each morning when he gets up, ”Yes, today I am going to believe in God because that’s my job.” It is a reality. Of course we know he could be imagining it – the evolutionists will find an explanation for the workings of the mind which gives rise to this belief or trust he has that there is a God. He can’t prove it, but I am very sympathetic to what he says – ”I touch him every day.” I consider that the beyond consciousness, the primordial, is part of my reality, or I am part of its reality.

Donato: I am reminded of something you said to me before I left for The States. You said to me that it would be difficult for me to find that depth there, of knowing that you can’t know. Both in the experience of this week and in what you say now, it comes back very strongly because I do find that to be the case, that I miss that. The challenge really is this being and living, because the being I can work on in myself, find here, or find with Duija, and yet the cultural challenge, even in the academy where I work, is to live it when so much of the energy of what we understand it to mean to live and do is so strong.

Osho used to talk about the difference between acting and action – action just happens and acting is something that you do. Maybe that is why America is so unpopular, one feels that this is missing. That’s a level where one feels communion, even with someone who has different views than you, and maybe it is hard to feel that level of communion with America.

I think that is also partly to do with its lack of history, and its mixture. It is not the same thing, but when a country has a culture and a history, then somehow each generation, even if people are not living that level, throws something into it, some essence of a point of view, of a history of communal actions, language, and so on, and all this coming together creates a depth. It may not be the same as what we refer to as the X, but still, it gives a depth. America is such a new nation with people coming from everywhere, all with mixed depths which don’t go together, so there is not this feeling of acknowledgement of humanity.

This connects with what I see this TOBAL group to be about, and which is what I spoke about the first day. I spoke about making a direct contact with something that is already there, and not to take steps, explorations, and so on to get nearer and nearer to the goal, but to accept that the goal is already waiting; to see that by not doing and just exploring, looking, and putting our feelers out beyond ourselves, even beyond our energy fields, that somehow we will get a sense of connection with something that is eternal. If we can get that feeling of connecting with something eternal, that means we are in the eternal part of ourselves.

If you can imagine, even for a moment, that there is this unknown, a vast territory beyond your consciousness, beyond your awareness of being here, being who you are now, then ask yourself: How can you contain that in a picture of yourself that is concerned with your everyday reality? If you give all your attention to yourself and your process, progress and ambitions in life, then how are you going to contain that vast, unknown space? How are you going to include it? You can’t take it and put it in your day-by-day existence and identification with this existence, and unless you open to it, it is not going to be included. Of course if it is what I say it is, it will be included because it is the ground of everything, but you won’t know it. You ignore it, and therefore you won’t be able to take advantage of its immensity. Your life will be limited, even, you could say, trivial without it.

It reminds me of something that George Gurdjieff said. He said that your purpose in life is to create a soul, and if you don’t succeed then your energy goes to feed the moon. He was talking about creating a soul, but I think he was pointing at something along the same lines as I am speaking about now – to find that depth, that beyondness, that thing that isn’t included in the activity of life.

I am also reminded of something that some of you have heard me say many times before. It is of my own experience with myself: The moment that I saw that my mind and its activity was never going to bring me what I felt I wanted to find in my life, then its power vanished immediately. Since that moment I don’t have any trouble with my mind. I can just turn away from it, ignore it, quieten it in many ways, but it is no longer the tyrant it used to be, it is no longer dominant.

I guess to actually subscribe to agree with the kind of view that I am putting across this afternoon, you have to want deeply, and be aware of wanting, more than what a progressive human life can bring – the normal kinds of goals, ambitions, desires and hopes.

So I ask you all, what is your orientation? That is really important because whatever your orientation is, then the energy that you can find from yourself and elsewhere will go in the direction of your orientation. As I see it, that is the biggest obstacle to finding who you are. I look at people and I see – let’s call it the soul – their souls, and I see the fullness of potentiality of that. I see that potentiality being pulled into some direction of intention, hope or wish, something that you believe will bring you fulfilment, happiness or satisfaction, and I see that as long as the energy is travelling in that direction, you can’t be in your fullness.

Then people come to seminars, especially a certain seminar like this, and I see that orientation collapse – now and again. It is like on the evening before I left for this seminar. There was Tuning In, and I got a nice box of chocolates from a lady who had been on the Winter Group and came to Tuning In. She said, ”Back from paradise, at least I can give you some chocolates.”

I get many remarks, letters and communications from people who are in paradise during the seminars, and then almost as many letters and communications three or four days later asking where has it gone. I will tell you where it has gone, it has gone into daily life. It has gone along the orientation, and the orientation is not going to change just because you spend a few days here. All you are going to do here is to try to get you to go further along the line of orientation.

When I say ”you”, I don’t mean all of you and I don’t mean all of you totally by any means because I know it is not true for some of you – but in general, this is the picture. When it happened to me and I fell in that place, and knew I was in that place, I had a completely new orientation that pulled me. I had probably no greater experience than thousands of other people, but when it happened, my orientation immediately changed. My orientation was to settle in that place, get it to grow more and more, and fuck everything else! Of course I didn’t retire to a little hut in the forest or anything, but essentially that was where my new orientation was. It became the most important thing to me. So then it was a question of seeing to what extent could my life provide for my new orientation, and not the other way around. What could be drawn out of ordinary experiences to fall into this reservoir of energy that I felt was the deepest I could reach? Whereas for almost everyone else it is the other way around: What can I find and use from this beautiful time and these discoveries of new energies in me to improve my orientation in life? That’s how people do it. That’s what we are used to.

It is as if you women are married to some nice guy, maybe not so nice, but fairly nice, and you go to a party and you meet a prince, a prince in every possible way. You are completely overwhelmed by him, you fall in love with him, and you spend the night with him…four nights with him! Then it comes time to say goodbye and he says, ”But I would like to marry you and take you home to my palace which is full of beautiful things – and a beautiful meditation room as well!” All the things you want. And you say, ”Thank you very much, but I’m married. He is not much of a guy but he is the one I am with and I am committed to him for life. So thank you for the offer,” and you go back to your husband and dream sometimes about what it would have been like. I am asking the women in this room, has it ever happened to you? And of course the same applies to the men as well.

I put it in earthly terms like that because it really has the same hold on you as your husband or wife does. To have a husband or wife you are with, where things are nice, you have children, you do many things together, you are used to having them around as a constant companion, to discuss everything and help you when you are not well and so on, has such a hold on you. It is not a question that you have an argument, meet someone else, or whether the marriage becomes impossible. The marriage is okay, and then to simply say, ”Everything is okay but I have to go,” would take tremendous energy, or a great lot of courage if you like, to turn away from something that you have been involved with for maybe decades, and where everything is holding you in a position in that energy field of your life. To be able to pack your bag, put it on your back and walk away is very difficult. But on some level that is what it amounts to. To taste some things and say, ”I don’t want it to be just a taste that I can talk about and remember; I want that to be the taste of my life.”

It reminds me of a name of a group I did thirty years ago: The Tongue Tip Taste Of Tao. Instead of saying, ”Well, that was the best ice cream I’ve had,” you say, ”But that felt like what I want to live with throughout my life.” Of course that doesn’t mean that you withdraw from life, which I far from do. It is not like it used to be, where you change your outer orientation by going to an ashram or a temple, by taking holy orders, or by becoming a monk and shaving your head – that is a declaration, which is what I did for many years by wearing orange all the time. But you don’t need to necessarily make an outer declaration, it is really an inner declaration of what is really significant and what really matters for you. It is asking a lot from you, to embrace this other life, but it won’t run after you, it won’t chase you, it won’t beg you; it will just show itself to you in its glory. It is really an inner decision to make the orientation, and then it can be with you all the time.

Back in the Villa days I used to talk about keeping one eye on the eight ball. In the game of pool all the balls have numbers on them, and the black ball has the number eight on it. If you put the eight ball in the pocket before the last ball then you have lost the game. You can be easily winning against your opponent, but if the eight ball goes into the pocket, you have lost the game. So all the time when you are potting balls and your balls are going around, you have to be careful not to pot the eight ball into the pocket. So that is the minimum requirement, to keep one eye on that space, that reality, that depth in you that you have experienced. Of course you can’t do it all the time, but you can do it as often and as continuously as you can.

You go to see your bank manager, you are sitting down talking, having a very normal exchange with him, as you do in ordinary reality, and you think, ”Now I am doing that, and then afterwards maybe I go and meditate.” That is what I am pointing out is not enough – not to have the sequence of world and meditation, of doing and being, but to see if you can find a way to get this beingness, openness, and connection to the universal place continuously there.

You are walking down the High Street, shopping, doing this, doing that, and you are feeling your connection to the One, but then someone bumps into you and knocks you over. You lose your connection with it, ”Bloody idiot!” – and that’s okay, there are times when it is difficult, but you get the point: to remember, remember and remember.

Gurdjieff used to talk about self-remembering – that was one of his main teachings. He meant being aware of yourself. He used to draw this picture of subject and object, and then the one up above that was looking down and seeing both. It is an awareness of yourself, no matter what you are doing, no matter what situation you are in. For me now it is to be aware of the fact that I am sitting here, I am talking, my eyes are half closed, my hands are moving around, and to go on doing it, but at the same time, from a neutral place, to be aware of it.

I am talking about beyond remembering – not beyond remembering, but beyond remembering. To be in touch with that which is beyond everything that you can, in a way, touch, know, feel and connect with. Beyond that world there is something that is not in the world, yet is very, very present – always. Of course it is difficult if it is just an idea to do that. You can have the idea that you believe, like you believe in God, but if you have no experience of it and it is just something you have been brought up to believe, then it does not have any reality, and I don’t mean that. What I mean is something that at least I know I make real for everybody, apart from a very few, who ever come to a seminar with me. I make real for them, at least momentarily or for a little while, this sense of being in a space that includes you but is not limited to you; this feeling of being part of something that has no limits. You are still yourself but at the same time you are connecting to everything, and that’s what I ask you to remember at all times.

Amapiri: Michael, when I was at the Enlightenment Circle and when I am here, I have a sense of very strong support to be in that space. It seems to me that through the inertia that comes up – of course it comes up here but it comes up very strongly when I am not here – that when I go through it, I come into that space again. But it is much, much stronger out in the world, also because the support is not so present. It reminds me of something you used to say, something that I read a long time ago about having the knack, and that for me means not to go through the inertia when you are not in a field to support that somehow.

Well, Amapiri, I must confess I have forgotten what it is like to be faced with such inertia, so that influences the way I speak now. I speak about something that is second nature to me now. What you have said reminds me of a time when it was far from that, when it was a struggle, when it was hard work to connect and I had to remind myself, ”C’mon now, you’ve lost it. You have been lost in your life now for an hour, a day, a week.” You used the word ‘inertia’, and I already feel the power of that inertia – inertia means not wanting to do anything but go along with the way you are right now – and I guess the biggest help or characteristic for me in the situation of inertia was that I never gave up. It is not like the myth of Sisyphus, where he pushes a rock up to the top of the hill and just when he gets to the top it falls down again, and he has to go up and down, and up and down. That is what ordinary life is like – you can never really achieve satisfaction. But this particular stone that I am talking about, you only have to do it once. Sometimes it is hard to hold it in position when it is on its way down, but you are helped by the fact that this stone, in essence, is already at the top.

Imagine you are going up the hill, you can see and are near the top, and then you let go and the stone rolls down. The fact is you don’t have to go after it. You can close your eyes and find a new stone because the stone is already in you. Instead of thinking, ”Where the hell was I? I haven’t done any meditation for three months now. I have forgotten to do my mantra, and, my God, I haven’t done the SHEM now for however long – I have to start all over again!” You don’t have to do that. You stop, close your eyes, ”Ah, hello,” and then you’re with it again.

What a great help that is! You never have to despair. You never have to say that it is impossible, or I missed my chance. That is a common thing that teachers say to their students and disciples, ”You missed.” I got told in my days, ”Somendra, you missed.” I didn’t miss because I had another chance immediately. It is always possible to uncover it and start again. You never lose it. You may turn away from it, but you actually never lose it because it is present inside you. That is fantastic! Aren’t you lucky!

Thank you for your great question that set us off, thank you for your intelligent follow-up, and thank you for putting the icing on the cake. I will put some music on now to clear our minds.

Feedback, TOBAL, Stiersbach, 25th of January 2008