On The Path

 What The ”X” Says (Part I)

I am going to respond to your reports now. Of course I know you wrote these right at the beginning of the seminar and if you did it again now some of you would write different responses, so what I say in response to them maybe you have already understood yourself in these days since. Still, it won’t do any harm to talk about them because even if my answers or responses are not relevant to you, they are sure to be to somebody here. You all kept it pretty brief, as I asked, except for two people who wrote long letters. These two letters were both in German, and although I got translations for them I can’t remember all that they said, so these two guys will probably not get much feedback, if any, and maybe that is deserving since I said no more than half a page and they wrote two or three pages, which is too much. Unless I have something specific to say, I will mostly keep the reports anonymous.

This is a good one to start with:

The X said two words: do nonsense.

This is interesting, but it is better when I don’t say ‘do nonsense’ but say ‘do non-sense’. Nonsense is just rubbish on the whole, which is also okay, but do non-sense means don’t come from the mind.

Nonsense, experienced in sessions – I hope so. I hope it may influence my daily life. In this X-Run something new is happening. One person behaved in a strange way and my mind mechanism began: What is the motivation of this person? What is the meaning? What is the sense of this? But then my mind stopped, I felt neutral and I felt free.

As Buddha said ”The mad mind never stops, and when it stops, it is Bodhi,” and Bodhi means enlightenment. The mind is always very busy with what is going on in you, with what is going on in other people, and with what is going on in the world. This X-Runner says somebody was behaving very strangely and also wonders what they are doing, what they want to get out of it, what is the purpose or motivation of this, and so on – all these interactive questions that come from the mind, and she could ask the same thing about herself, but then she dropped it all and felt neutral and free.

If you ask most people in this world we are in what they understand by ”free” they would say ”Free to do whatever I feel like doing and have everyone cooperate with that,” whereas freedom is quite the opposite of that. Freedom is not freedom of the self but freedom from the self. As Jesus said in one of his greatest statements, ”He who finds himself will lose himself, and he who loses himself for my sake will find himself.” When he says ”for my sake” he is using himself as an example. Of course he knew he was going to die so he doesn’t mean for his sake, but for God’s sake, for Tao’s sake, for Truth’s sake, or for Reality’s sake.

He who stays in the bottle and builds a nest will lose himself when he gets out of the bottle. When one becomes free, one will find himself.

When I sat on my cushion a very bright circle of light appeared. I realised that perhaps when I see I can open, when I don’t force myself and put a must on myself but an okayness, then maybe the circle will close.

A closed circle of light is a very beautiful image.

When I asked my X cushion what needs to happen to become one with it, nothing happened that I was able to perceive. I sat on the cushion and the fine streaming began that I often feel when I sit. The tense state I came to the group with began to relax somewhat, and I began a process of getting into the group and becoming more present, and it has been just wonderful so far.

I like this, he says he didn’t get any words or any information – and there is nothing wrong with this but he didn’t – and he simply sat on the cushion and immediately whatever the cushion represented for him at this time on his Path, which is to more and more feel this streaming and the letting go of the tensions he gets from his life and work, that this simply happened. So he more or less said ”Okay X, I am not so much interested in what you are but interested in being connected with you through being on my Path, and I am interested how you work on me towards reaching you now.” I like that!

Sometimes people get a bit lost in what the read or what the hear about enlightenment, or the end of the journey, completion, or wholeness, and they get a bit tense striving for this and get angry with themselves for not being there, whereas often that is not so relevant. You are still in a process, and a process which will lead to you having a more immediate relationship with the end product, so it is better that you just see what can be done for you now. So be aware of that, not to get tense and give too much power to your ultimate desire.

What do I need this week to realise the X? To be present? To let go? To fall into space? All of the above and none of the above.

All of the above and none of the above, because all of the above, this lady realises, are instructions: do this and do that to get it – and that puts you under pressure, so she says ”Yes, I get it, but forget it.” She goes on to say:

The X cushion gives the answers but forget about them, forget about changing to what seems the perfect experience. If the answer was there in my mind, enlightenment would just happen, so since it has not, it is unknowable.

So it is quite a brilliant insight that this lady has had – if the mind did know how to complete the job, then it would have happened by now because we are always in the mind trying to work out what to do. If she could work it out in her mind then surely by now, and she is not a young lady anymore, she would have got it. She has done many groups, seen many teachers and done many things, so she says ”If my mind knew how to do it, it would have done it, but since it hasn’t happened it is no good asking it.” So here are the answers, here is the acknowledgment that you know you have to be in the now, you know you have to let go, you know you have to be present, you know you have to let go into space, but don’t make that an order that you have to obey.

Dear Michael, the main thing that the X cushion exercise brought up was worry, worry to be able to reach an answer. All the answers that did come just came from my mind.

So this is an extreme example of what I am saying, that she doesn’t even in a way dare to hear what she should do in case it made her more confused than ever. But still, she should have done it. In one way what she did was very good, not to want to find anything out that would confuse her even more, or make her fight or struggle even more – that is the positive side, but the negative side is, as long as she doesn’t see what is outside the circle, she goes round and round in circles – and she does.

So I am answering a particular person here, not talking so much in general. In the previous case the person said that she heard what the cushion said and she is going to forget it, and that is alright, and then this lady said that she didn’t even want to go into it at all, that she had a pressure to produce an answer on the cushion so didn’t do anything, and then she said all the things that came up were from the mind. So when she sat on the X cushion she was simply just shifting to the cushion that she was sitting on before, but the whole point was to have on the cushion something that was not included on the cushion you were sitting on before. The point was to get it for a moment outside the bottle, and then to talk from there to the one in the bottle, and it is important that from time to time you do that, just to see that you already have a connection with where you are going and that you do know.

As I said this morning before I worked with you, you are all already enlightened but are choosing not to be, but nevertheless that part of you is present in you, and to realise that is really relaxing – and maybe frustrating also! It is no help to simply say that I am in a maze and I don’t even know if there is a way out. Most people don’t believe there is a way out so they do their best to make life comfortable, pleasant, interesting, and so on, and that struggle is endless, so to realise that there is a way out, and that you have this possibility in you to be out, is really important. And not to be able to find it to even say a few words to you is not so positive, so my recommendation to that person is a few more X-Runs!

This is what my X said to me: Don’t do anything, just be. Feel it from within, let it flow, let it shine.

Well, good luck! Sure, that’s it, and hopefully it is enough.

The X cushion communicated with me through the lyrics of the first song you played after the silent questioning, the song says ”Moonlight is bleeding out of your soul.” And it resonated with me so that I will go down to the beach early each morning and give any pain and sadness to the elements, to nature, in the light of the moon. So the idea is to arise in the dark in the morning, go outside and walk alone in a foreign country to a secluded spot. This is not in my comfort zone to do this, to walk in the dark, however I have felt safe doing just this the last two mornings.

Sometimes doing strange things can work very well. To get a hint from somewhere to do something strange which seems to make no sense at all can be just right.

There’s a nice story I used to tell, and I haven’t told it for years so will tell it now: A Westerner was having a lot of trouble with his work and family so he decided to go to India and find some guru, a wise man, to sort himself out. So he wanders around in India and somehow he feels guided towards some master who spends his whole time just sitting by the Ganges. He sits with this guy, tells him his story and all his problems and waits for the answer. After listening to the Westerner the guru says to him ”I want you to swim across the river and fetch me that coconut up on the tree there.” The guy says ”Are you mad? Did you hear what I said? Do you speak English? I told you that my wife and kids…” and he tells the whole story again. The guru nods his head and says ”I heard and understood the first time, and I will tell you what you need to do to solve your problems – just swim over there and fetch me that coconut.”

I was reading this in a book and when I turned the page over the next page was missing, so I don’t know if he did it and it worked, or he didn’t do it and he went back to where he came from. So we are left with the story half way, but one thing is sure: if he did do it and it did work, he would never have thought of doing that himself. He wouldn’t have sat there and said ”I have had enough of all these problems so I am going to swim over there and get that coconut.” But this is just like the Bodyflow story I told you the other day – what has getting up and moving around got to do with my despair?

So it is the unexpected things. This lady says ”I got a feeling to go out in the dark in the morning because this moon lyric really hit me, so maybe I can get some healing from this.” And why not? It is very unique and she wouldn’t have thought about it from her own mind, she wouldn’t have said ”I know what I am going to do to stop this, I am going to organise my life and go for a walk on the beach at five o’clock in the morning,” she wouldn’t have done it. So if it is a bit exciting, unusual and surprises you, then it could really work.

The next letter says:

I was told to be wild, wild in the sense of having various forms, endless forms. Being wild means vibrating in every cell of my being and to feel the vibration and live from that.

Well, living from that is difficult. I can think of a thing or two that this lady would well be benefited from, and I think she knows about it but her mind wouldn’t let her do it. So it is alright to have these realisations to let go, be spontaneous, jump into things, and not let the mind come in and see what happens, just to experience, but it is one thing to know that and another thing to actually do it. If the mind really has wild ideas then the best thing is to become a poet or write lyrics for songs, and then you can be wild without doing anything, but to live like that is dangerous, and sometimes the mind doesn’t agree with it at all.

This is quite a long letter but at least it is in English. But I am not going to comment on it, I am going to accept it, so to the person concerned I will read the first line and then that person will know that it is their letter.

What do I need for an authentic self? I saw the obstacles in myself to reach authenticity.

To the writer, I acknowledge what you say very much and I appreciate what you say very much. It shows a good connection with yourself and I don’t want to disturb that by saying anything.

The next letter is in dialogue form – ”I” and ”X”. This is the exchange they had:

I: What exactly are you?

X: It is not important to know in the way that you ask.

I: Should I start to write with my left hand again?

*X: Yes, you can if you like. *

I: Thinking about a new question. (A long break.)

Looking stiff at the X cushion, and then me sitting on the X cushion without a question.

X: Take me with you to your place and feel what is there.

I: No, I cannot do so.

X: Why not?

I: I’m not allowed.

X: Go on, do it, say yes!

I: I would have a heart attack if I did that!

X: Don’t believe this shit. Go on!

I took the X cushion to my place, I sat on it, and a surprise happened.

It doesn’t say what happened, but my guess is she laid an egg.

This lady didn’t actually have an exchange, but just by being in that situation things came up. She felt when she began the lack of loving herself, and when she sat on the X cushion she felt this even more. Then she had an insight that the one reason why she doesn’t love herself is that she feels she is rather forced, and the way she is forced is to be nice to other people when she doesn’t really feel it is true. When she begins to feel into that authenticity not to be so nice then she gets a burning feeling in her belly, and when she tries to put it into practice then she feels strange and also feels lonely that she then loses contact with people.

Well, for a part of your journey it is always very lonely, or really it is aloneness, but if you are not used to aloneness then it feels like loneliness. Everybody around you is relating to a part of your personality, and so as long as you are responding then you are confirming that part of yourself as your personality. These are all strings. Imagine you are joined by strings to all the other people in this room and the way out is via the door over there, now how are you going to get out of that door if you have all these attachments and connections going? It is difficult. The lady who wrote this letter, she has family, daughters, a husband, a big circle of acquaintances and friends, so it is hard to imagine cutting all these ties. That situation is true for many people, but you have to trust. You have to trust firstly yourself, and secondly trust the other people that they will not abandon you just because you are not with them in the way you usually are. And if they do abandon you, then they were just friends of your personality and not of you, so to keep them you have to stay in your personality.

It is like when you are younger, when you get a strong connection or marry someone and you feel totally in love with them. Then you start working on yourself but your husband or wife doesn’t do that. You start to see the whole world differently and then sometimes it is very difficult to honour the relationship that you have because it doesn’t feel fulfilling anymore, it doesn’t seem to be right anymore. So it is really hard to move on the Path when you have these attachments to other people – no, in fact if they are strong it is impossible, it is impossible if you don’t at least give yourself some time. Some people manage it by going to groups, going to meditation sessions, spending time on retreats and so on, and they reconnect with their deeper part and then come back and continue with their normal life – this is possible, but in the end, inside, you really have to feel completely alone, and when you finish the journey alone then you come to oneness.

There is a famous statement – which was actually used as a title for one of Osho’s early books but it’s a famous phrase from another teacher – which says ”The flight from the alone to the alone.” We come into the world alone, we die alone, and if you get enlightened in between then you have to also find that aloneness that goes with the life itself. And then you get a tremendous freedom because all these connections I am talking about involve a dependency, and the thought of losing them can feel like disaster, but when you find aloneness then no such thing will be disastrous for you – you may be unhappy, but you will not be destroyed.

The next one:

The response from my cushion was ”Don’t try.” So I sat on my cushion and then realised I was trying not to try.

Hopeless really, aren’t we! Nothing works out.

So the next question I asked my cushion: How do I not try?

This is really funny – how she says, how do I not try. How is a method. You are asking for a method not to try, but she has already learnt that she was trying not to try, so whatever answer she gets she is going to have the same problem. Anyway, fortunately her cushion was not as stupid as she was…

The answer was ”Sit inside very still.” I sat on my cushion again and it still wasn’t enough, so I asked another question ”How do I sit inside very still?” The reply was ”Don’t move, let all the noise come up.” So I sat on my cushion; the noise was terrible! I could hear a voice shouting angrily ”You are not going to win, I am going to fight you! You will not get away with this!” Followed by loud screaming over and over again. Then there was more shouting followed by more screaming. It just came on and on until it diminished a little towards the end of the exercise. The noise is still loud, particularly at night, and I am reluctant to sit with it.

Well I don’t know whether not sitting with it helps in any way, and maybe when she is busy it drowns the noise. I ask this person: have you tried listening to the noise? If the noise seems to get even more and it is there at night-time, then maybe you need to listen to it, maybe you have to listen to it in order to stop it. Sometimes we have to go to the left to go to the right; sometimes we have to go up to go down; sometimes we have to move away from something in order to move towards it. The mind thinks it is all straight forward – you want to go quiet but it gets noisier, so you think that is wrong, but it may not be. Maybe the noise which is so strong is an energy it needs to go into quietness, but first you have to allow it to express itself the way it is already geared up to express itself.

The first enlightenment experience I had in my life, the first really strong one, was in a seminar that I was taking. It was in my Encounter group days, when I was very active, very noisy, very busy, and I used to beat people up, shout at them, wrestle with them on the floor, and all sorts of things like that. I used to sit in front of them and really shout at them ”You stupid idiot!” There was one guy there which was a particularly idiotic idiot, and I sat in front of him and started to shout and shout and scream and scream and it took off like a volcano. I was not in control of it anymore, it was just a huge volcano eruption coming through me – but I managed to put some words to it too, so I wasn’t just screaming, I was saying things to this guy – and the whole thing exploded. I fell down, collapsing, roaring with laughter, and he was roaring with laughter, and we hugged together and rolled all over the floor laughing and hugging. Then we sat up, looked at each other and he said ”Michael, I love you,” and I said ”I love you too. This must be the way to get love into the world, to go around shouting at people!” (laughter) And for the next hours I was completely in bliss. I didn’t allow anything in me to say ”You can’t do this to people; you can’t scream at people like this; you mustn’t do this.” Getting so angry drove me out of my mind, and it drove him out of his mind too – we both had big holes in our heads then like craters! And then there were just two human beings, without any ideas about each other. So maybe this lady has to listen.

I asked my X cushion how I can be one with it and there was no answer. Then I sat on the cushion and after a while a movement started in my body. I felt like I was being drawn down. I stayed for a longer time and that was it.

This is like the letter we had before, where someone sat on the cushion and a certain process started, and that was the X saying ”This is what I give you now.” So this is what the X gave this lady and that is as good as it can be.

Let it be, full of love and a deeper connection.

I guess she knew that already but this was a confirmation, so it is a practice.

There is a famous Zen saying, which I have to remind myself of quite often, which is ”Enlightenment is practice, and practice is enlightenment.” It is not that you get enlightened and then you relax and can just be any way you like, that you don’t have to lift a finger towards it, you don’t have to do any more meditations, explorations or look at yourself, you are just whole, complete, ripe, and then you just live from then on effortlessly – it is not like that. You are living in a world which is constantly pulling you off. You get a minimal contribution to the state you are in from the world in general and you often have to find your true ground again. Sometimes it just arrives, you don’t have to do anything, you are just there, you live from there and you feel right, and sometimes you feel ”Yes, I have been taken off,” but the difference is that then you know your way back. When you get these satoris early on in your spiritual career, you find yourself there but then you lose it and you don’t know how to get back. For many people it is a tragedy for them when they have this state of enlightenment – they say they are there, they are home, and then lose it and go on for years mourning the loss of it. I have met a lot of people like this, and what is confusing for them is that when they had this experience it just happened, boom, they weren’t actually doing anything when it happened so they look for it to happen like that the next time, which in a way it always does, but you have to prepare the ground in between, you have to make it likely to happen, you have to encourage it to happen, you have to invite it to happen. When you have been there a thousand times and it begins to actually take root there, then if you lose it, you can just, almost like a turn of your hand, get it back, because it becomes part of your reality, but until then it is a strange mixture of doing and not doing.

Every step brings me to the ocean where everything just is – emptiness, love, light, stillness, and peace, and I will it and I say Yes. I am so blessed with these feelings and knowing.

Don’t get attached to these things. You say that you ”will” it – I wouldn’t do that if I was you, that is really spoiling it. Yesterday I saw the person who wrote this report with a working partner, and you were not in any of these things – you were not empty, you were not full of love, you were not full of light, you were not still, and you were certainly not at peace. So if you make this a motto and you will it, then if you are not careful you reject things that don’t fit into this picture, and if you do that then you are rejecting some of your reality.

I realised that to reach the X I have to conquer my fear to exist, to manifest in life, who is paying the bills? The advice came from the X in different stages: first the mental answers, advices etc, but while that was going on my heart opens, the energy flows, and I bring the X cushion to my heart. The ‘I’ and ‘O’ are melting together, non duality. After discovering the inner lightness, my desire is to develop this inner light and love to fulfil my life and work.

That is an okay process, to go for mental answers, and if you get not just answers that are conventional with a touch of wisdom to them but are coming from some deeper part of yourself or beyond yourself, then it can happen that the heart opens and then the energy flows. It is important, you guys, that you recognise that these levels are connected; that the energy that we are working with has a wisdom. We have a Darshan on Thursday evenings at home for the people in the house and for those who come to the house to work during the day. Vandan, a great guy who has been with me now for twenty years and is well into the spaces is doing hospice work, and for one or two evenings a week he goes and sits with dying people. He has told me a few stories about what has happened and I find them fascinating. He was telling me that he was sitting with a woman in hospital last week, an old lady well into her nineties who was dying, and she was fighting against it – her body was kicking, she was gasping for breath, her fists were banging on the bed, she was struggling to stand up, and Vandan said he just took her hand, relaxed into the connection, and gradually she got calmer and calmer until she was completely still, and then she died. She was struggling against dying because death is the enemy for most people. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, rage, against the dying of the light – some lines written by Dylan Thomas. This is the way we see death, but it is not the way Vandan sees death. He was telling me that his feeling when he sits with dying people who then die is that it feels so ordinary, so natural, so unexceptional, he feels like they have gone to have a cup of tea. It feels no more significant to him when someone who he has been sitting with dies than if they have gone off to the café for a cup of tea. So he has this beautiful insight into the passage from life to death. He is holding her hand and you might say ”He is just relaxing, he is a still guy, he has a lot of meditative space in him, he has been sitting for hundreds of hours in my groups so of course he is going to relax her,” but I am saying something more, I am saying that in that energy he passes through holding her hand is the wisdom that he has on the other level; that through it he conveys to her that death is absolutely okay, it is okay just to let go and pass to wherever, that struggling was not the way. She received that, and therefore not only did she relax and die, but she died, I am sure, in a way content, happy, and willing to go wherever.

So I am saying that in the energy is not just what the energy does to your body or to your feelings inside, but in the energy is the wisdom of enlightenment; the wisdom that is there is contained when you reach that space of oneness, and it can be conveyed in this way. It looks as if the energy is something special: that is energy, that is talk, that is information, that is feeling, that is love – all the different things, and maybe even more because everything is energy, but the energy we work with which is formless is like the median line, and I am saying it is not just the median line, it includes the whole range of human exchanges and understanding.

The next letter:

My X: honesty with myself, being more courageous in the world, especially in my private relations, scares me to break through my patterns. How do I connect with my power to do this? Being honest, being courageous, is now like undermining…

”Undermining” what he has built up through not being so honest and courageous.

…and my powers sometimes feel desperate and discouraged.

This is a typical crisis for certain kinds of people. He knows the situation, he knows he lacks courage and maybe honesty with himself, and he knows he is not courageous or honest in his private relationships. And then he asks how he can connect with his powers to do this. He is asking me ”How can I connect with my power to do that?” – not your power, can you help me with your power, but how can I connect with my power. So he knows he has the power to do it, and if he can’t connect with something that is his own, then he must be a cripple. If I say to my hand ”Take yourself out of my mouth,” and it says ”Fuck you, I am going to stay there.” ”Come on, put your hand down.” ”No, I am not going to!” – then I am a strange person who has been taken over by my hand.

You have the power so you are connected with the power. I am smoker, how do I stop smoking? Hypnotism? Patches? Always be in places where you are not allowed to smoke? Or you just stop. You say ”Enough.” You say ”I don’t want to smoke anymore so I am going to stop.” I don’t give up smoking because I don’t want to. I am not much of a smoker, at home I smoke maybe one beedie a day because it is pleasant for me to do so in certain situations, so right now I don’t feel any need to stop, I don’t have any motivation to stop, but if someone is really feeling that smoking is destroying them, spoiling them, or it is leading to trouble in their lungs, then they have to say ”Enough is enough, I am going to stop.” And if you don’t have that power in you then you won’t be able to stop, but if you do have that power in you then you can choose to stop or not stop.

So if you have the power in you to be more courageous and more honest, then use it, and if you don’t have the power in yourself then you have to carry on the way you are – and then it is no good hoping for anything else. It is no good hoping to get somewhere when you cannot contribute what you can contribute in order to get there. You need something more than yourself but you have to give everything, you really have to give everything, and then something else will be added. But if you only give a little bit, it will not be there.

Listen to this Jesus phrase, I really love this one: To he who has will be given, and to he who has not it will be taken away even that which he has. The ones who have, they will get more, and the ones who have not, they will take away even that which they have. But of course he is not talking about worldly goods; he is talking about those who are on the Path giving all they can to find their truth for themselves in life, really doing everything that they can do, to them it will be added. And to those who say ”Oh dear, oh dear, things are terrible, what can I do about it? I wish someone would come and help me. I pray to God to please help me,” the little that they have, even that will be taken away.

It is no good dreaming about changing yourself in some way. You have to say ”That’s it! I do it!” Or you have to have the kind of thing I talked about yesterday, where everything stops and something new moves, like with the Bodyflow Meditation and in the Poona groups where I simply stopped for a month or more and just did nothing. And then out of that something came, but I didn’t actually change anything myself but said Yes to that change agent that came. It was not easy to just sit there in this group, with my reputation for doing dynamic groups and do nothing for six days for three of four groups, one after the other, it was not easy, it took tremendous courage and commitment.

So either that happens and you get this help and opportunity, but even then you have to contribute, or you take responsibility for yourself and say ”Right, this much I can do. It is not it but I can do this and I know it is a contribution so I am doing it.”

We have been an hour and a half with that lot; I still have plenty more which will wait for another time, maybe later on this afternoon. All of these have brought up things which are really important for you to see, to hear, to understand, to share, to take in, and then forget! So we will finish that for now and I will put on some music for ten minutes to get out of our heads, and then we will continue on with this later today or tomorrow morning.

Feedback, X-Run, Part VI, 3rd of April 2008