On The Path

 A Handful of Diamonds

If you want to prepare a special meal for a special occasion, then somewhere you can find a recipe to follow. Or if you invent an entirely new dish, then after you have done it and if it is successful, you can write out the recipe so that other people can follow your instructions and produce more or less the same meal. But nobody has ever found the recipe for change, for real change, transformation in human beings. It seems to just happen mysteriously.

In my work I see many people and a lot of them I see again and again, because a number of people come to a number of seminars. Some I see twenty times a year, sometimes for five days at a time. And I see the people who come here, to where I live, on Tuesdays and Thursdays even more often than that, although only briefly of course compared to the seminars. And sometimes when I look around, I see that a particular person looks just terrible. And next time I see them, they again look terrible, and again and again. Then one evening they look fantastic, and maybe they stay looking fantastic for the next few times I see them, but then again they do not look so good any more. Then again something happens, they make a jump and there is a radiance about them.

It does not seem possible to work out how this erratic process works, what finally leads to a jump, a real shift, the light suddenly shining with intensity. I do not even know how much it has to do with what everybody does in the hope that some transformation will happen. I am sure that if you do not do anything, you will not get transformation, but amongst the many things that everybody does, I really have no idea what the equation is that produces a significant result, even after thirty years of this Work.

I guess this is very aggravating and puzzling. You might commit yourself to doing many things that you have heard work - not only seminars, but meditations, working with yourself with awareness, physical work, bodywork - but except perhaps for a short time immediately after doing these things, you cannot feel if you have really gained anything fundamentally. So maybe for a while you stop doing anything and you feel great. So then you say, “It works better if I don’t do anything,” and you stop doing anything for a longer time. Then you don’t feel great any more, and when that continues you think, “I’d better start to do something about myself again.”

Of course I know the potential of the kinds of processes that I do and what I do can set in motion. I have seen enough results of it to know what it is potentially capable of. But for everybody I have contact with, that remains just an input, and the alchemy requires an interaction of that input with some fitting response within the person. If there is not a fitting response, the alchemy will not work. That fitting response depends on your own individual alchemy and what is going on in the mind, the body, your relationships, your work situation, your emotions, your energy space. All of these are changing all of the time and therefore the mix is also changing all the time. So how can it be brought about that you can arrange to be in a fitting place for some process to be induced in you that will lead to a major jump in your work towards impersonal unity, wholeness and completion?

This process is unknown, and by that I mean not only that I do not know it, but that nobody knows it. And according to the way I see things, it is almost bound to be unknown. I cannot see how it can be known, because you would have to know everything about everything. So if it is not only unknown but unknowable, it is strange that we all spend so much time trying to know it. We spend so much time trying to work out in our minds and our hearts and through communication, sharing, and exchanging experiences with others, what one has to do or not do in order to achieve a certain result. A result which we desire, long for, are attracted to, hope for, or pursue in some way or another, even though we do not know exactly what it is. A great deal of energy, time and effort is spent trying to understand what has to be done, and a lot of frustration, impatience and despair come because of our failure to relate what we think we have to do, what we believe we have to do, to a result.

If what I say is the case or if it is close to the case, is it possible to be a master of one’s own destiny? Even if you feel you have the power to do it, if you do not know what to do or what has to happen or what you have to get from what you are not, then it seems to me that you are impotent to master any kind of spiritual achievement. Well, I won’t say any kind of spiritual achievement, because if you meditate regularly, you will attain a certain kind of quietness, and if you meditate dynamically, you will attain a certain kind of energy flow. So there are certain forces and effects that can be known and practised, and people do of course do certain meditations every day. But I know from my own experience of doing meditations every day that they do not give you a jump. They give you something, but they do not really transform you.

There are many reasons for that, but one reason is that the decision to do a meditation is a decision of the one who is where you are and not the one who is where you want to be. If you could contact the one inside you who is where you want to be, would that one say to you, “Do this meditation every day, or these meditations every day. Or go for a five mile walk every day, or a jog, or do Tai Chi, or Diamond Yoga.” Would that one in you who you want to be say to you that you should do these things? Maybe it would not, because the whole point of the meditation is to get to that place, and if you can get to that place, then you do not have to do the meditation. But the fact is that the one who is deciding to do this in order to reach a certain goal does not really know how to reach that goal or whether what he is doing will bring him there.

Of the people who do really serious meditation and achieve a sense of dynamic aliveness or a sense of peace and stillness, I think that very few of them do the meditations just for that, although ordinary lay people may do them just for that. There are many methods advertised as ways of losing stress, staying calm, not getting caught up in things, keeping connected to your stillness inside, and I guess a certain process can give you those goals. But a real spiritual seeker is not after small goals like that; a real spiritual seeker is after totality, wholeness and completion. So how does the one who is not yet complete really know what to do in order to be complete?

The next question might be: How far is it possible to influence whatever it is that arranges everything that we cannot grasp or know? How far is it possible to influence those forces? If I cannot arrange it myself, can I influence the forces to arrange it for me, by being conscientious, by praying, by being open, by doing regular meditations, by connecting to a teacher, by being a good guy, by being compassionate and loving and caring about other people? If I do some of these things or all of these things, will I influence the forces that can produce for me that which I cannot produce for myself?

I do not know whether we can influence them or not, but for sure many people try and many people believe that they can. It remains mysterious. In fact it remains so mysterious that a number of great teachers have said that you cannot do anything whatsoever to influence whether or not you achieve a state that can be called enlightenment. There are sages who say that it is all decided before you are born. They say that if it is decided before you are born that it will happen, then it will happen whether you do ten thousand things to achieve it or nothing. And if it has been decided before you are born that you will not achieve it, you can do ten times ten thousand things and it will not happen.

That is not a view that I share, but because things are mysterious in the way that I am talking about this evening, it cannot be refuted. It may be so, we do not know. We do know we can do small things to achieve certain small goals, but we do not know whether we can do anything to achieve this state, because we do not know what to do to get it. Even if we think we have the capacity, and the skill, and the perseverance, the stamina, the determination and the power to achieve many, many things - including that, if we knew how - we do not know how. Even if we had the power, we do not know how to use it.

Resonance can happen. It is frequently true that whatever these mysterious processes are they work on somebody, or even a number of people, at any particular moment in a seminar. There is resonance not just with some vibration that is coming from me, but with a vibration that I sense is cosmic, the essence of all vibrations. So I frequently see that people are resonating, but at the same time the incessant movement of their mind about its process and the process going on in the whole person prevents them from really being with that resonant vibration.

The mind of a spiritual person is naturally concerned with trying to solve the mystery that I am talking about tonight. It is bound to be. As long as the mind is active in a spiritual person, it is bound to be concerned with the mysteries I am talking about. “What do I have to do? How to do it? How to be in this moment? How to be not only in a seminar situation or a spiritual exploration situation, but in all situations - with my child, with my partner, with my boss, with my neighbour, with the person sitting opposite me in the train, with the beggar on the street?” A true spiritual person is going to be concerned with what is the right way to be in all these situations.

So, as a great ancient teacher said, for such a person, every moment is a moment of crisis. I agree with that absolutely. There are no special moments when it is important to be aware, to explore, to try to understand, to connect, to sing, to dance within, every moment is such a moment.

So the spiritual mind is always bound to be concerned with such things. In fact the more frequently you are concerned with these things, even silently, the more spiritual you are. Even though the mind has to go before you realise the answer, during the process before the mind goes, the busier it is with such things, the more total the spirituality. The demand to understand, the demand to do whatever one can do to reach the goal that one has set oneself in one’s life has to be very powerful indeed. Only through that totality will you come to the realisation that thought is not going to give you the answer to that, that it is always a distraction.

When I say that to you, it is just information, maybe news at its best, it is not yet the listeners’ perception for themselves. But until it is a person’s perception for himself, I say look at everything, every which way you can. Contradict yourself again and again, transcend what you understand again and again, return to what you were before the transcendence again and again. Be in conflict again and again, let there be friction between one part and another in you again and again.

Keep seeing things anew, keep coming to new conclusions, and then finding that those conclusions are themselves unfinished and that there are deeper conclusions. Then you might even fall back to an old conclusion, and then jump again to a new conclusion. Then you get an incredible insight, and then find out that the insight is fallacious or partial. If you keep doing that, you will come to that moment when you say, “It seems that my mind, which has given me ten thousand answers, all of which I have had to dump for others, is not capable of supplying what I dearly long for.”

When that happens, then for the first time you can really turn elsewhere. You may have turned elsewhere many times before, but if the mind is still in charge when you turn elsewhere, it will simply eat up and fit into its own understanding whatever you discover. It will not grasp what happened at all, but will interpret what happened in terms of its own parameters. It is not until you realise that the mind is not going to give you what you want that you can really turn elsewhere and be with what is there, without expecting from that more artillery, more fodder for the mind. Then you purely experience a reality of which you are part.

Then the whole person is touched by life, instead of just drawing from it a convenient interpretation or maybe even a destructive interpretation, if you are inclined that way. Whatever kind of interpretation your mind wants to make, it can make. And whatever kind of interpretation it is used to making, it will continue to make in order to keep the system going.

When you turn with your whole self towards reality and experience it as a whole person, the mystery begins to live you. When you happen from the mystery and not from the mind or your ego, it is like putting your hand in the earth and bringing up a handful of diamonds. And in playing with the diamonds you take from the earth, you also feel yourself to be a diamond.

From “By the Way”, 2004.