On The Path

 The Bottom Line

Does anybody have any questions or anything they want to say?

Larinda: I do. I think it is difficult to make a difference or to know what is an emotion or what is a thought.

Not much difference.

Larinda: Thank you. (laughter)

They go together, but I think that one maybe has to distinguish between emotions and feelings. Feelings can come without thought, and emotions are usually coming together with the thought. If you think of something right now that has happened to you which caused you difficulty, then the emotion of that difficulty to some extent will come up. If you think about something that you are looking forward to, a holiday or a trip, then the emotion of excitement or expectation will come up. If you think a situation is going to be difficult, then doubt and fear will come up. So in other words one can induce emotions through thinking. But if you wake up in the morning and look out the window, and you are in a state where immediately you see the beauty that is there and feel your connection with it, then joy will come without a single thought on the matter. This is because it is a spontaneous movement of energy, and I think that area of experience can either go along without thoughts or they can be independent of them. So I am roughly saying that maybe it is not legitimate to call them emotions when those experiences are triggered by the mind or coexist with the mind, that they seem to come quite independent of any thoughts you might be having on the matter. What do you think?

Larinda: It is weird because you use the word ‘feeling’.

I don’t really know whether that is a legitimate distinction I have made but I think the different kinds of say heart responses can be put in quite different categories, and I just use ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ for those categories.

Does anybody else want to verbalise something?

*Bindu: Yes, when I was out in nature I was totally disturbed because I thought, “Oh, it is nice, there is the wind and the sun is getting warmer,” but that feeling went because all feelings have to go, and then I stood there and I thought, “Okay, what is left?” *

What is left after what?

Bindu: When I let go of the emotions.

Yes, I see.

Bindu: And Varuni once said in a session that the energy that you feel, even this you let go of.

So you are wondering what is left when you let all that go.

Bindu: Yes, what is left? And now I am wondering what the sense is of everything that I am doing.

Well, before you can really find the sense of things, you have to find the non-sense.

The true basis of life, human life for sure, precedes everything, all phenomena including all experiences. So there is a ground of being, a basis in space, that we can’t actually stand on but which we can sense is there; where nothing is, where there is nothing to seek, where everything is complete and yet nothing is there, where there are no distinguishing marks, where Buddhahood disappears – because Buddhahood is an attribute of a human being, it is one of the possibilities – and it could be that only when you touch that, realise that, experience that, that you can really see things for what they are.

Under normal circumstances there are always two, there is always the nature you were looking at and the you that was appreciating it, as you were before you dropped it. And so there was an exchange going on which was very beautiful, but then when the beautiful exchange is not beautiful and you are in fact connecting with something you are not getting these great feelings about but maybe getting the opposite, then dropping it seems to be something worth doing. When you are feeling great difficulties, unpleasantness or unhappiness, what are called the ‘negative’ things, then if you can find a way to drop them then you feel a freedom. But then when you find something beautiful and the teacher tells you to drop it, you think, “Well, I was really just enjoying that, and now the work that I have to do is to drop it! But then what is left over?” Then you say, “What is the point? I work and do a meditation, and I get to a place where I can experience things as beautiful, but then the teaching says ‘drop it’ – what is the point?” Well, I am trying to give you some feeling, Bindu, of what the point is, and the point is that if you learn how to drop it, then you can also drop it when it is not so good or when it is terrible, and you can do this because you find something that precedes everything.

I remember twenty-five years ago – I was such a smart guy twenty-five years ago! (laughter) I mean I didn’t know what I was talking about but I knew all the answers, and I didn’t know how I knew but I knew. It felt to be exactly the truth, as if I had heard myself having said it a long time ago and I had it all written out inside of me. Anyway, in the early days in Poona I would say: Normally we divide the world up with a vertical line saying that this is a good thing and this is a bad thing, this is positive and this is negative, this is okay and this is not okay – but this is not really the way things are, the line is really horizontal. Normally on one side of the vertical line is what we call positive and on the other side is what we call negative, and there is love and there is hate, negativity or fear, and there is joy and there is disappointment, and it is quite clear that they are totally different, but I would say that they are not, that they are all coming from the source I am talking about, they are all energy expressions.

If you can get a feeling of what I am saying, that you can really be on that level where everything comes from, then if this negative stuff comes up – what we call negative – then you don’t have to be carried into that negativity and experience it as negativity, because you see it is just a play of energy and you are at the base of that play. As soon as you identify with the good and bad, with the positive and negative, then of course you try to become – what I have called for many years – like the one-way pendulum that just swings to a certain point and stays only on the positive side; whereas life is a pendulum so if it swings up, it is very likely to swing down again, sooner or later. So of course we try to live only on the positive side of life and avoid the negative, and then if someone says, “Drop it,” you think, “No, it is great over here! I am having a great time, everything is beautiful,” because the trouble is if you drop it, maybe you fall to the floor and then you are horizontal, like I have been saying, and then you are not identifying with the positive and you have to see ‘Okay, sometimes it is this way and sometimes it is that way’.

When you are identifying in that way with the positive and the negative, with the vertical line, then of course you try to live everything positive, and then if somebody doesn’t contribute to you feeling positive and in fact contributes to you feeling negative, you get very angry because you have the expectation that life is going to keep you on the positive side of the vertical line. But if you are in this horizontal line, if you are truly in it – and it is not so easy to stay in it, although you can taste it, but if you have a moment in it – you will see that in that level it is impossible to have expectations. You can’t have expectations because there is nobody really there who is preferring one thing over another – which reminds me of the very famous poem by Sosan: Choose one thing over another and Heaven and Earth are set far apart – this is the same sort of thing.

But I am not saying to you guys “Stop preferring,” because then it is a preference, “Now I prefer not to prefer,” so you are stuck again. “No, I am not going to prefer positive feelings to negative feelings,” but that is still a preference. I am saying that when you are on the horizontal level, if you are totally on the horizontal level, you will simply see for a fact that it is impossible to have expectations because you are not in that stream where you are attempting to get something rather than something else. You are open on both sides and so whatever happens happens. And if it happens it is going to happen to you, I am not saying that you don’t feel anything anymore, that you are not touched by anything anymore, you will see that it happens but you will not get caught up in it. You will see that that is the way it is, that sometimes it is like this and sometimes it is like that, sometimes it is something that you would normally regard as positive and sometimes it is something that you would normally regard as negative. But from that place you are not getting thrown around anymore through disappointment, hurt, anger, upsetness, frustration, or impatience – which is my great teacher because I am a terribly impatient person. But I see that from this place I am talking about you can’t be impatient because you are not in time anymore. If you are impatient it means you are in time, you want something to happen in your time in your drama that fits exactly with the time schedule – I am like that often, I have to confess, but I see also that it is partly because I got caught up in the time level. And so that is a great teacher for me, I am reminded that I am not in the timeless, that I am in time because I am impatient, and so then I see if I can do something about it. But I see sometimes that I am in this place where nothing is making me impatient, where normally this particular situation would, and I see very clearly that I don’t care what happens, that everything is equally okay, that nothing is to be preferred over anything else because you are not taking a stand. The moment you prefer it means you are taking a stand and saying, “I would rather have this than that,” so you are taking a stand in all the possibilities of life, and then judging things from that position as good or bad.

If you say that life is a circle, wherever you are if you are inside the circle you are bound to have a perspective. If you stand facing one direction then you can’t see what is behind you, and if you turn around to see what is behind you then you can’t see what was in front of you. So wherever you are there is going to be an angle, a perspective, but if you are out of the circle then you look at the whole circle and can see, “Which part of that circle is better than any other part of that circle?” Even if some parts of the circle are shaded dark, some are grey and some are white, you might say that some are dark, some are grey and some are white, but you are not going to say, “I prefer the ones that are light,” it is just a picture. When you go into an art gallery do you say, “Oh, look at the way this artist has drawn it, this part is dark and I prefer the light part”? You have to look at the whole picture, and the light and the dark are part of the arrangement of the whole picture.

So when you see the whole picture from this ground place then you don’t have any preference, you don’t say something is better than something else. It sounds awfully unfeeling but it is true. It is not to say that you don’t get involved, but you don’t get involved to the extent that you become the one who is involved and you are thrown about by it. You are just in a way an observer, a detached observer, that can also be involved at the same time as you are detached. Or to put it in symbolic terms – which I have been using for many years – the Zero works through the One.

I was giving a talk recently in Baden Baden in front of a few hundred people, and I was wearing one of these t-shirts with no arms on it so my tattoos were visible. And I don’t like to just stand on the platform so I was moving up and down the aisles, talking to somebody here, then walking and talking to somebody over there, and at the end in the Questions & Answers a guy says, “I have been looking this whole time trying to see what is on your tattoos, and I saw finally that one says ‘emptiness’ and the other says ‘action’. How can there be action out of emptiness?” Because emptiness has potential action of all kinds. It is incredibly dynamic but in that basic state it has yet any form, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t totally dynamic. So ideally I am saying that in your life, or at peak moments in your involvement with life, you can be with that emptiness, at one with that emptiness, nothing in a way is there, all phenomenon has disappeared, and then the world is there, people are there, situations are there, reality is there, and you find in that emptiness a response through you to what is going on.

So there is the response there, a response to something positive and a response to something normally called negative, and that response comes from the Zero level. But you are not identifying with it, you are just watching, you are aware that the movement or the action is happening where you are. And as long as you see yourself as a particular person with particular needs, particular desires, particular preferences, then you will always be in black, white and grey in your life, as colours that always prevail. However much you try and bring the light, as much as you can, the shadow is bound to be there. And even if you are staying in that space and no outward action is happening for you, you are just sitting maybe quietly, then the presence of that basic energy there where you are will effect other people tremendously. That is why people can sit in front of a great master who is in meditation, and a thousand people can have a thousand different things happening to them and the guy is sitting there not doing anything besides sitting. And that is coming about because of the process of resonance. It is not that he is actually through his silences somehow in an invisible way sending out spirals of pointed energy which is digging into everybody making them spin around, it is that he or she is triggering that basic place in other people and that is what is triggering a lot of feelings, responses, and movements of energy in them.

But to hear about it is bound to bring the feeling: “Well, who wants that? Who wants to be out of life?” And as masters have often said, “You are after the place I am in, but if you really knew what place I was in you would run as fast as you could in the opposite direction.” Because it sounds like death, it sounds like annihilation, but you can only find that place by a kind of death happening to you. Even if it is only momentarily disappearing, losing yourself, emptying yourself, becoming nobody, becoming nothing, becoming unreal, becoming a ‘no person’, only then can you really taste that, only then are you out of that picture of good and bad, positive and negative, right and wrong, I like or I don’t like, I want or I don’t want – only then can you be out of it. And as long as you have an ‘I’ that is saying anything it is going to say that, so you have to be out of the ‘I’. It is not just that you as a human being have to drop preferences because you cannot drop preferences as long as you are somebody. The whole point of what ‘somebody’ means is that you have this list of preferences and this somebody has that list of preferences, and that is why you are different people, otherwise we would all be the same. Everybody is an amalgamation of their yeses and nos, and they are all in different relationships to each other and so everybody is different.

So if you don’t have any yeses and nos anymore then you would be nobody, and that is a terrifying prospect. Then you are not in control anymore, then you are not in charge anymore. As Jesus said, “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” But you say, “Ah, I have found my life and now I really know what I want to do in life, who I am, what my preferences are, and no one is going to change my mind,” and you have found your life but you have lost the truth. But if you realise that the only thing in the way of realisation is yourself and your ideas, your goals, and your sense of your own unique identity, to let that go is to find the Kingdom of God. And as Jesus said, “First find the Kingdom of God and then all else will be added to you.” He said ‘and then’, but then ‘all else’, so it is not just what you had but all else will be added to you when you have lost your life and found the Kingdom of God.

So when you lose it and you get to this neutral place, or empty place, or nothing place, where there is no shape, no person, no form, no attractions, no preferences, then all else will be added to you because you will then attract what the whole universe is giving you because of your membership of the universe. The important thing is to find it and to know it, and then when you find it I guess one can frequently, or occasionally, take holidays from it and join in the usual preferences and choices. You can enjoy your form, which in a way can be put on at any time, and forget all about the Absolute or the Original, but once you have found it it will haunt you. It will always be telling you that everything else is just a play which you can get drawn into and interact with in a normal way, and you have your choices and your flaws but they don’t matter anymore because anyway everybody has them – and then you know that you are actually out of it.

Does anybody want to say anything, ask anything, or comment on what I am saying to you?

*Prasada: I have a question, Michael, and I feel that I am nervous to ask it, and maybe the answer is partly in what you said. It has already been many years that I am looking to open my heart, because if I see people crying around me like my wife, my daughter, and also other people, I feel I cannot cry. You gave me the name ‘clarity and purity’, and I hear from people since I am doing this work quite often that they see love in my eyes. I am always looking to see where the pain is which is the reason why I cannot open my heart, and at the same time I think, “But maybe there is no pain, maybe there are no tears or crying in me.” *

There is.

Prasada: But I can’t find it.

I can answer you theoretically and abstractly but I am answering the person who is talking, and I see that there is.

Prasada: I don’t know how to open it.

There isn’t really a ‘how’, there is not a way to open – well maybe there is but I don’t want to talk about that possibility – something has to trigger it. Let me see what I can say about it…

You said that people often say that they look in your eyes and they can see love – well yeah, I can also see that in your eyes, but the fact that you mention it suggests to me that maybe you are in love with love, with the idea of love, the identification with love, the belief maybe deep down that love is the answer – not only the Beatles said that, many people have said that: ‘Love is the answer’ – but then that gives you a one-way pendulum.

(Prasada smiles) A smile comes. I call that smile ‘the truth smile’. Everybody look, that is the truth smile. When you hit the nail on the head, the smile comes, almost like a relief.

So this is all happening on a level that you are not in touch with, and that is why I am talking about it, to get you in touch with it if it is there. You avoid spoiling the picture of being a loving person, and a lot of that kind of influence on your natural responses takes place because of how you want to look to the world, how you want to come out, how you want to look to yourself, and not wanting to spoil the picture. So you become a bit one-sided. So maybe you let what I have been saying this afternoon sink in, about the vertical line that you may not realise you have drawn but probably you have, with the love on one side and maybe on the other side is sadness, being upset, being disturbed, or anyway collapsing the image that you may have subtly built up inside yourself about who you are. And maybe reorientate inside yourself what I have been saying about the bottom line, the base line, the horizontal line. You have to allow the energies to move in all directions and see that it is pretty arbitrary to call some things positive and some things negative. Some societies call bliss negative and other societies call the very same thing positive, so what is positive and what is negative? A suicide bomber blows himself up and kills other people, and for him it is a positive action, he says “God is great”, and there it is. To do such a thing is completely appalling to most people in our societies, and even to do it and believe you are doing God’s will is absurd, but to them it is the highest achievement, to be a martyr. That is one example and there are millions of examples where different societies completely disagree about what is positive and what is negative. So there is nothing natural about it. It depends upon either the individual ego, the national ego, the party ego, or the religious ego, and that determines whether you becomes this or that. And you have to see things in a certain way; to be part of that you have to see that this is positive and this is negative. If you were a German in the war then you were almost forced to regard the Jews as not human. That was the general rule, everybody had to think that, otherwise they couldn’t possibly accept what was going on with all the massacres and all that, just pointless destruction and murder. But they managed it because they bought into a whole new way of seeing what was right and what was wrong, what was okay and what was not okay. These agreements of good and bad are all cultural, so they don’t stand the test of universality – any of them.

So it is a trip to hang on to love. I am thinking of a very strong phrase now by an English writer from the first half of the twentieth century called D.H. Lawrence. He wrote the famous book ‘Women In Love’ which was made into a movie. He was a great writer of his time, and he said: “Love is the most beautiful thing, but to use love as a deliberate principle is an unmitigated evil.” Because it is a force, and then you start forcing it down people’s throats to be like you or to receive your love, or ‘because I am loving therefore you mustn’t do this’. This is what happens in so many relationships: “You mustn’t do this because I love you,” and that is an ugly, ugly, love that says that. It is a very ugly love that says you mustn’t do something because I love you. So love can be extremely distorted and yet people can believe it is still L.O.V.E. when it is far from it; it is greed, selfishness, fear, hurt, and uncertainty that you are afraid to face.

So love is the most beautiful thing, but one must not cultivate it happening – I am not saying you are doing this, I am just talking generally about it. Love is a spontaneous arising and if you are in that place of universality then it is simply the case. If you are in universal space then you embrace the whole universe, so everything you do will be a recognition of the fellowship and the oneness of all beings. And if you are in that purity you cannot harm anybody deliberately; people may not like what you are doing and feel harmed, but you are not doing it to get that result by any means, even if you get a reaction that you are. Then your movement is in a way pure because it is not just considering that this is the way I see it and that is how I am going to behave and this is the best thing for me. It has a breadth to it, which may not be well received by others who are still consumed with their individual selves and want particular acknowledgement for that self.

So don’t try to be this or that, please. Don’t set up ideals and images for yourself or for other people. Don’t say, “That is how I want to be or someone ought to be,” because you will distort your whole life by trying to make everything conform to that, and trying to make other people conform to that too. Things have to find their own way, and actually things are already their own way. That is the thing, you don’t have to make things the way they really are because if that is the way they really are then they are so already. So my view these days, maybe it hasn’t always been so, is: no real effort, no real trying, no manipulating yourself by trying to arrive at some preconceived goal about how you want to be or how other people should be for you, but to recognise that whatever you are after is already the case.

So it is just a question of taking off all the layers that have been layered on top in order to participate in a greedy society, in a selfish society, in a world of individualities without communion, without recognition of universality. You are forced to participate in that and so that is engendered, all these ways of looking at things from a selfish point of view. And as soon as you have a selfish attitude then you can have ideals because a self wants to be the greatest; if you have a self then in some way you want to be the greatest but most modest self there is. If you have a self then you are bound to have goals, to have wishes, to have desires, to have ambitions for yourself, to have expectations of other people – all of these are bound to be so, it is inevitable. But if you get to the bottom line then everything is the way it is, and what comes is what comes, and any response is hopefully as universal as you can allow it to be, and then that is the end of it and there is whatever comes next. You don’t get thrown around in the stratosphere of activity, you stay at the bottom line. And it is not that hard. What makes it hard is our total unwillingness to take that path because the mind and the emotions are simply terrified of that way of being. But right now, right this very moment, if you all close your eyes – I know that this is true – it is possible in this moment for you to imagine, picture, or sense how it would be if you had no such self as I have been describing with desires, preferences, needs, wishes, points of views, and perspectives; where you are simply just alive, present, neutral, open, receptive, empty. You can get a quick click of how it would be in an instant, and if you can you will see what freedom it brings, or would bring. What you would lose would be a lot, but what freedom it would bring!

Talk, Energy Training Part VI, 17th of July 2009