The Energy Way

 Running On Empty

When we sit quietly like this, as we often do in Tuning In, as you often do with me, it is not really just meditation. I’m sure you’re all aware of that.

In a sitting meditation like Zazen or Vipassana each person is exploring their inner world and searching for the place that is beyond the habits, the mind, the movements, the link up in the ordinary world which takes us off in all directions. It’s an attempt to get outside that, to not go along with those movements, to become aware of the mind moving - which is the instigator of most of those movements - and to reach a clear space within. But in our sitting together, either here in Tuning In or when it happens in the seminars or anywhere else, I don’t see that as being primary, really, although that is part of it. More important than the individual plumbing of our depths, which happens anyway, is the awakening and the movement of a certain quality of energy. And when we are sitting quietly, meditatively - as opposed to meditating, which is quite different - it is much easier for this energy to reach a person, to work on that person, to awaken that person, and to awaken in that person that place in them where that energy is able to operate and thereby unite them with the one energy that incorporates and embraces and includes everything that is in the universe.

So this movement through the Energy Work is at right angles to the normal movement in life, which is always forwards, and seeking, and looking for growth, for development, for more, for something on the horizon that one wants to reach in order that in reaching it a new horizon opens up and we can go for that. This whole sense of progress.

It is natural enough that we look at things that way, because the whole of Western civilisation has been based for a long time on the image of progress and development. And for most people, when they work in the world, when they enter some kind of profession or job, or join a company, what they look for if they have any ambition at all is a progress in a linear way up some kind of ladder, or getting more knowledge and understanding of what they are doing in order that they become more successful or become known, or if they are with a company, to get promoted and maybe eventually become one of the principals of that business and have a say in the way it’s run. So we grow up with this way of looking at things: that what we want is ahead of us, and we have to take this step in order to be ready to take the next step, in order to be ready to take the one after, and so on.

But with the Work we are involved in, the movement is sideways, not forwards. And I guess the best method I have so far come across to give an indication of the process that I’m talking about is the metaphor of a set of Chinese boxes, with one box inside another, inside another, inside another. Each box constitutes, in a way, a complete world, bounded by the walls and the floor and the ceiling, a cubic space which in some way - to stretch the metaphor, because the metaphor fits - can be made larger, stretched left and right, forwards and backwards, so you get a feeling of more space. But if you create more space in the box, that’s nice, but you still don’t move from being centred in that particular box. You still see things in the same way. You can see further, and you’ve got more room to manoeuvre, but you’re still in the same box. And the movement that I’m talking about is a jumping out of that box, or a movement out of the box, or a realizing that you also exist in the box beyond but have been focused on the box you’re in. Through various processes, which can be either sudden or gradual, you land in the next box - which of course includes the box you were in, so it’s not an either/or situation. You have extended your reality, not just by increasing the size of the box, but by jumping into a new box which gives an entirely new perspective.

What matters on the spiritual path is not what you do, what you achieve, even what experiences you have, but the movement of what can be called, what I call, the centre of gravity, or your operational centre - the place that you look at things from, the place that you act from. And when you move into the next box then that centre shifts, and the way that you see things, the way that you see everything, is different. You may not notice it with the first jump, but in fact it’s true.

To advance this view that everything looks different, I will bring into the discussion the simple fact that we all, here and everywhere, live in the same world, there’s only one world at this moment in time, and we all see it differently. Every one of us in this room sees things differently: what’s important and what’s significant in the room, what’s significant about Freiburg, the world, Germany, Europe, and so on. Every incident that happens to a hundred people is seen in a hundred different ways. So it’s clear that the point of view determines the view; the place you look from determines what you see. Change the place you look from and you will see everything in a new way.

So through the processes of energy - which exist on all planes, they run through all the boxes in this series of Chinese boxes - by switching the level of your energy, your central vibration, then the way that you function - which is determined by your vibration - and the way that you see everything, can change, and again change, and again change as you move from box to box, until you reach the last box of perspective, and then you are out in open space.

And then, as it is said in Zen in particular, but not only in Zen, you see things as they are. In a way, you don’t have a particular perspective anymore that discriminates, that colours what you see, not even a light haze on reality or a very faint patina on what you see, because you’re not bringing in your prejudices anymore. As you move through the boxes, still there is something there which manipulates and distorts the simplicity of what is actually there. And then you can get outside of all the boxes, and in those moments you are seeing things just as they are, without bringing anything in to distort that or influence that.

So that’s the movement that is going on. And of course, it is not just a figment of my imagination, because the people who have been involved in the Work are saying all the time, especially after a powerful group or a longer seminar, or a Training and so on, that indeed everything is different. It may not yet be clear, simple, straightforward, just so, but it is different. And they are discovering that it is not just that they feel different, but that what goes on around them also changes. The way they relate, the way they operate, what they attract, what comes to them, what appears in their lives, how it appears, and the quality of what appears changes - because when you see things differently then you attract the things that resonate with the way that you see things.

People’s attitudes, for example, the people you’ve known for a long time - if you change your perspective, if you change your box, once, twice, three times, quite radically, then it’s bound to happen that most of the people you interact with will start interacting with you in a new way, because the old way doesn’t work anymore. Interaction, by definition, is what moves between two people, not just what moves from one person, and if you’re not acting in the same way as you were before, then the interaction between you and another, even if that person has not changed in any way, has not moved their centre of gravity at all, clearly is bound to change. They now have to interact with you when you’re moving and seeing from a new centre.

And as well as there being this movement from box to box, the boxes, of course, are getting larger each time, because Chinese boxes are like that. If you contain all the boxes within, then of course you need a greater box each time. So your perspective all the time is getting larger or more cosmic, and as that is happening there is of course an emptying out going on.

There is one view that would say, sure, but if you somehow complete what is there for you to be done in one box then you will graduate to the next box: you complete something and you jump to the next box, you complete something and then you go to the next box. That, you could say, is the way of karma. According to the karmic view, you have to be whatever you are, and if in this life you are a road-sweeper, or you are a prostitute, or you’re a man selling fruit on the market, the Indian view is that if you do this absolutely totally, without resistance, without longing to be anything else, if you simply accept your fate and become, in a way, identified totally with what you are doing, so you become one with what you are doing, then in your next life, because you have done that so beautifully, you will get a big jump. You have completed the life of a particular box. And I think there is a lot of truth in that.

But it’s also true that if you jump into a box before you’ve completed in its fullness the possibilities of the previous box, then it becomes unnecessary to complete the old box - that you can graduate from it without having known everything that is possible to know for a person centred in that box. So in the sense of being able to leave it behind, you are emptying it out without having to confront it.

Probably if you make that jump from one box to the next box before you’ve really got to terms with the old box, you may get a glimpse of a new perspective, as happens to many spiritual seekers all the time, but you won’t be able to stay in it. This happens to many spiritual seekers - they get a glimpse of a new perspective and then they lose it. The power of the old structures, the pull of the old box, and maybe, I’m saying now, the incompleteness of the life in the old box, is so strong that you have to go back and maybe spend a bit more time in that box before you’re ready, next time you are pulled out of the box, to be able to stay. But for sure there is no need - of this I am absolutely convinced - to complete, in the Indian way, the life of one box, and have to die and be reborn before you can get to the next box, because in some sense time is an illusion.

Time is real, and also time is an illusion. So all the lives that the Indians put in succession, and the Buddhists put in succession, they are in succession, but at the same time they are also simultaneous in the sense that all the boxes can be seen as a succession of jumps and possibilities but that when you jump into a new box that box was already there inside you, waiting. You didn’t go out and earn a box, or create a box, or discover a box, the box was already inside. And the beyondness of all boxes, the direct seeing, is also inside you, inside everybody, all the time. So why is it necessary to die in order to be awoken in the same soul, and then because you’ve done well you go three boxes up nearer to clarity because of your completion of one box, and so on, always having to die in order to make a transition from one box to another?

This is the Indian point of view: not to fight against your fate, but to accept it. This is how the whole rules of the castes came into the Indian religion. If you’re born into a certain caste, then you accept that, you stay in it and say, “Well, this is the result of past karma, but if I do my job fantastically well as a road-sweeper and really accept it, then next time I’m born, maybe I’ll be a Brahmin.” But all these fresh possibilities… (pauses)

If there’s this continuity of lives, as the Indians say there is, then something passes from one life to another, so in a sense it’s the same person or the same soul. Let’s use the word ’soul’ for that. The soul passes and is reborn with a new perspective or a new place in life which it can again be united with and become whole in. But all these new places that the soul goes to after each life is completed are already present in the soul, because it’s the soul that’s making the movement. If the soul moves, then the possibilities of the soul also move. If the soul is always there, from the first life to the last life, until you’re complete, then the possibilities of the soul are also there all the time. So that means all of the lives that might happen in the next fifty lives, a hundred lives, are possible in one life.

So that is another view of the name that I have given to the Work: OneLife. It means one Life - the One Life that we all share - but there is another view of looking at OneLife, since it’s a spiritual action and a spiritual communion, and a spiritual commune, in a way, that we have: that it is also saying, “Well, you have this one life that we all know about right now as we sit here, and in that one life are all the lives that you might have in the future, in the next hundred thousand years or whatever” - I’m looking at it from the Indian perspective still, I’m not saying necessarily it’s mine, but let’s look at this as a metaphor - “and all the lives you might live in the next hundred thousand years, however many that is, can be reached in this one life.”

Of course, you can also go backwards, we know that. Again according to the Indian view, you can pick up bad karma, so you can move back and have an even more difficult life than you had last time or than you had three times ago. Or you can do the work properly, and lead your life properly, and be honourable to your commitments in that life and to those close around you in that life, lead a good life, and then make a jump.

But each of these lives represents, you could say, a certain vibration, a mean vibration or the vibration of your centre of gravity, that attracts not only other people, but a certain kind of life. The vibration of the artist is quite different from the vibration of the man who works on the building site - not just when the artist is painting or writing a poem and the man on the building site is putting bricks together or working a machine, but in ordinary life. It is not a question of better or worse, the vibration is completely different. So the way that you are essentially vibrating, or in an average way vibrating, or that your centre of gravity is vibrating, is going to have an affinity, naturally, with what you are doing in life. And that is why so many people write to me over the years and say, “Well, I’ve got this job, and it doesn’t feel right.”

Now, Ramasari, you were talking to me a few Tunings In ago about how the job that these people were offering you didn’t feel right, and I gave you a personal answer to that, but this can happen because we feel we are vibrating in a certain way, and then when we operate in a job we have to change our vibration in order to fit in with the work and the people who are working with us, and it doesn’t feel right. So of course, ideally, we want a job which seems to resonate with our sense of our own energy vibration. And so a lot of people want to become teachers, or they want to become therapists, they want to work with people, because they feel, “Well, if I’m working with people, I’m working with myself, because I’m also a person, and I’m very much committed to working on myself, so if I work with people then that’s the best way I know…” In a way, never mind the other people. (chuckles)

Of course you mind the other people, but in a way, at the depths, you’re really saying that’s not the main thing. You’re saying, “The main thing is that if I work with people, I work with myself.” And that’s true, absolutely true. My teacher said to me a long, long time ago, “Be grateful for the people who come to your groups and seminars, because it gives you the opportunity to work on yourself in a perfect situation.” And I’ve never felt any reason to disagree with that in my life.

On the other hand, this can be really a test to see if you have consolidated, made firm inside you, a certain vibration; to see whether you can keep that whilst doing a job that is not resonant with you. And that’s what I was saying a few weeks ago to Ramasari - that it can be a test, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do this job. Whilst you are establishing something in you, then it can be good to do a job that is resonant, or even no job at all so you can stay and concentrate on yourself, but once it is established in you, then operating in a part of the world where the new vibration is totally different from yours need not cause you any problem or harm at all, need not pull you off at all. The outer Chinese boxes include all the inner Chinese boxes, so if you’re in an outer box, you can move into one of the other boxes, operate - because you are including that - and then when the work is finished and you are back in your own space you can return to the quality of your own vibration.

Now, to get back to where I started, if in a Tuning In or a seminar the vibration is present in the room that is coming from the universe or the One Life - from outside the boxes - then the effect of that vibration on the centres of gravity of people who are functioning from the various boxes is in itself enough to create a magnetic pull, a gravitational force on everybody, from whatever box they are in towards the freedom of boxlessness. And that’s really the main way the Work works. That, and of course the awakening, through resonance, of that pure vibration, that clear vibration, which is in everybody anyway as I’ve been saying - to awaken that in the depths of each person so that too acts upon the individual to bring them through the series of boxes in them, the series of possibilities of vibrations, towards the pure vibration.

And this is going on everywhere in the Energyfield, because it is not just a question of the person who can be in the beyondness of the boxes influencing everybody. All the people who are connected through their connection with that vibration are working on each other, because, if we follow on with the metaphor, some people are in one box in some ways and in some situations, and some people are in that outside box, or inside box, or narrow box, or wide box, in other situations and other conditions. Some people may have a clear mind and a closed heart, other people may have an open heart and a confused mind. Some people are swept away by jealousy, other people are open and not possessive and can with a minimum of disturbance allow things that will almost destroy some people, because they are somehow cleared up a lot on this level of possessiveness in relationships.

So it’s not that somebody is in this box and somebody is in that box; everybody is to some extent in many boxes. And so just being in an energy situation with people who are clearer than oneself in certain ways and being open to allowing the energies to flow can make this energy move, and everybody then is helping everybody else. Then everybody is giving of their best, and everybody is taking away the worst of others through the simple process of opening on multiple energy levels and not hanging on to an identity or to qualities that they feel are superior and they like because they make them feel above others. Through simply being with oneself and not identifying with any part of oneself, neither that which is clear nor that which is dark, neither that which is blocked nor that which is flowing, everything can flow and influence and contribute to the wave, to the whole tide of energy, that runs through the Energyfield.

From “With It”, 2003