2006

 May: Why Am I Here?

Well, I have a Goose marriage to organize, and I don’t know whether I will do it now or at the end…I think at the end – I’ve given myself the answer. I will do the questions now. So if you can be patient – but no touching until tonight!

I have only been given one question and that’s very short. It’s from Parissa, who just got a name. Where are you?

Parissa: Here.

She asks, “Why am I here?” Sometimes I ask myself that question. In the first place my view is that we all have a destiny to fulfill. We are not only moving from where we are taking the next step, seeing what’s best, and then taking the next step; something is drawing us to our destiny. I don’t know how many of you - as opposed to believing that – have a sense of that in your lives? My own personal experience of that is quite strong. A number of times in my life I set my heart on something I really felt I wanted to do, then something interfered and when I was not able to go in that direction I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated. I’d move in one direction and be thrown out of that, then I’d move in another and phht I’d be thrown out of that. So I end up doing this stupid job! But it feels right. So I can only be grateful on looking back that these apparent accidents or sabotage happened to stop me following what I felt was right for me.

For instance, when I was at Cambridge University at first I did Mathematics, believe it or not, then I changed and did Law. I was very good at that. I got a terrific degree out of it, and I was well-known at Cambridge for being a real light in Law. For example, in English Law – unlike German and Austrian Law – everything is done by precedent. That means that once a case is settled then any case like it has to be settled in the same way unless the decision is reversed by the High Court. So if you are going to be in court and act for somebody you have to know many cases and then you can say, “This case is like this, and it’s different from this case which is like that,” so you have to know many, many cases. My teacher – who was a barrister in London – said to me, “Barnett, you know more cases than anybody else in England.” And I hadn’t even started yet! A bit like Goose names, there are five thousand Goose names and I know them all. So I had a tremendous skill at this, but for reasons that I am not going to go into I could not go on, and I had to find a job in business instead.

Just the other day I got a newsletter from my old college, Pembroke – I hadn’t heard from them in years but they found me through my website – and on this list of people who had made donations to the college I saw that three of them who were with me in my college are judges now. So if I had been successful by now I would be a judge. I could have been sitting there going, “Six months! Five years!” Instead I am here saying, “Ten lives until you get enlightened. Fifty lives before you get enlightened! Never! Tomorrow!” It’s a bit the same really.

In the mid-sixties I was living in Sydney, Australia with my wife at the time, and I was asking this question, “Why am I here?” In this apartment there was a big wardrobe and I climbed upon it with a ladder and I sat on it cross-legged and looked up and said, “I am not getting down from here until you tell me what my purpose is in life.” I had my piss pot up there and my wife Pam’s job was to bring me tea and coffee. Then a voice came: I got an answer! It said, “What you have to do in life is not yet on the map, but when I put it on the map then you will know.” I found that answer absolutely satisfactory, so I came down and carried on with my life.

Years later I was in London after travelling around the world for four years. I had a wife, my first child and no job, nothing, I was just doing odd jobs around, a bit of this, and a bit of that. Once I was a messenger boy. I was forty years old, carrying parcels from one building to another in the centre of London.

Then I had a letter from a childhood friend from who had become a millionaire, a bookmaker – all over England there are betting shops with this guy’s name on them – and he said he had been to do an encounter group and it wasn’t for him, but he thought it would suit me, so he enclosed twenty pounds for my first group. So I went to this place, Quesitor, and Paul Lowe was in charge there. There was a group going on and he said I could go down and join in this open group. I went into this room and there were about twenty people doing funny things – like we do funny things, but different funny things – and after one minute a voice came and said to me, “This is it.” And I said, “Aha,” and that was it – I didn’t need to stay any longer, after two or three minutes I left. I did two evening groups and a weekend group and then said, “OK, I am going to start now.” We were living in a small apartment with a small living room and I invited ten people; “Come, Monday evenings one pound each.” Those were the days! At the end of the group I said, “You want to come next week give me a pound now,” so I was sure they’d come the next week.

That’s how it happens. I’d had many jobs, I’d done well in business, I’d been a teacher, and wandered all around the world in Australia, Japan, Thailand, India and then I land up in this basement in London and say, “Right. That’s it.” I didn’t say, “Why am I here?” I knew why I was there, but I knew that at any point in my life, if I’d really been able to see clearly, I would have said the same thing, “This is where I have to be.”

In other words once I had that feeling the ‘this is where I have to be’ I can look back and say, “There is nothing I ever did that I regret.” Nothing happened that shouldn’t have happened. Everything had it’s importance in that movement. Each was a place on the path – however far away it may have seemed from where I was going – and I arrived at some clarity about my destiny.

So, “Why am I here?” Because I am supposed to be. Everywhere you are, that is where you are, and that is where you are supposed to be, even if it doesn’t look as if it’s the right place. In some way that might be true, but through being in the wrong place and finding out how to move from there to the right place, you need that confrontation with the wrong place. It doesn’t have to be obvious that this is the right place for it to be the right place. The truth is hidden. The value is hidden.

We tend to reckon things by whether we think they are a pleasant or an unpleasant experience. All the time we look for things that we can feel good about – in what’s going on and where we are. A lot of people say they want to arrive at a place where they feel peace, or joy, or totally at home. The big mistake that many people make is that they think, “If I move towards that then each step of the way I really should feel a little bit more joy, a little bit more contentment and a little bit more at home.”

But to arrive at a place where you feel at home you may have to go via all sorts of places where you feel terrible, and helpless, and hopeless. You might think, “I must be on the wrong path, I shouldn’t feel so awful, I want to get to joy and here I am lost.” That could well be part of your path to find your true self. It’s hard to trust that – but it’s true.

We are always trying to choose something which is pleasant against something that is unpleasant, instead of accepting whatever comes as absolutely right.

Here is one of the teachings from my teacher. Most of my old students here will have heard it before, but it’s useful for them too because it’s one of the most important teachings. I used to ask my teacher, Bhagwan, many questions – I was the question putter at Poona – I said to him, “You are always telling us what bliss your life is and what rubbish our lives are, and you also say ‘don’t prefer’. How do we avoid preferring bliss to rubbish?” A very intelligent question, I was speaking for many people with this! Bhagwan replied, “The moment you prefer bliss to rubbish your bliss is already rubbish.”

That’s what I am saying. You think that it is step by step to bliss, but to get to the state of bliss – as opposed to feeling good for a moment –where you feel blissful under almost any circumstances, you have to go by way of some terrible ordeals and experiences and despairs, and even feelings of complete catastrophe. So you have to trust that there is such a thing drawing you towards your destiny. For me that is a general teaching or view that I have just given.

But here we have the question, “Why am I here?” She doesn’t mean just here in her life, she means here in this room.

Sandipa: You think so?

Yes, and if not then she can correct me afterwards, but right now I will continue as if it is true. I will give a quote from Dogem, a famous Zen master, “It is not for the sake of the self that one becomes enlightened, but for the sake of the Buddha.” That means that after a point the path becomes impersonal. You arrive in the pool of enlightened souls for the sake of everybody.

I was talking about this yesterday, about the Bodhisattva that doesn’t go into Samadhi but turns back to help everybody else to go over with him – until then he won’t go.

Here in this room all of you have the potentiality to become Buddhas, to become what you are; you have this in you, and you are here because everybody else is in the same boat as you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I recognize that – the Buddha in everybody here. When I work in the ways that I have been given then I see what I can contribute to the uncovering of that Buddha in you, so you can see that that’s what you have to become.

You have in you the capacity to be in a state of love. I see the beauty in you all, particularly in some moments; and when you are not looking beautiful then I see your potential to become beautiful, but so often in seminars the work that we do shows people’s beauty – and that is wonderful to see.

Buddhas are not special beings, they are just people who have arrived and revealed what is in all human beings. If you are here, then you are not so far away from that. You may not know of it, but it knows of you. You may have the odd glimpse and think that maybe this is a bit of a story and that you haven’t got it, but when you reach a certain point then that wakes in you; then it is doing all that it can to bring you to itself.

I am like a marriage-maker – not this kind of marriage like they are going to have – but the marriage between where you are right now and who you really are. There are always times in my seminars where I have the good fortune to see that marriage happen, if only for a moment the sun comes up on that person and all is light. The potentiality for that is always present –and that is your destiny. That is what is drawing you towards itself, and this weekend there have been a few days when that movement has passed through here. So that is why you are here in the room. Is that what you are asking?

(Parissa nods)

I thought so. But “Why am I here in the world at all?” which is what Sandipa thought you were asking – which must be Sandipa’s question which I don’t find she’s written down anywhere – for me it’s the same thing. It’s just a game, a very long, problematical, mixed, experiential game to move from where we began to where we end. As a great poet put it, “When we arrive at the end we will find it’s the same place as we began in, only we will know it for the first time.” The poet is T.S. Eliot and the poem is ‘The Four Quartets’; a quartet is a piece of music with four players, so it is four times four. So that’s how I see it – that everything is significant and yet not so important; or the other way round.

That’s the big paradox in life for me: put it under the microscope and it’s really important, but see it in matters of eternity and it doesn’t matter at all. If you can take in what I’m saying – and some of you have already taken it in I know – it can make a big difference to the way you see your life. Everything that happens, however awful or difficult it might seem, is there intentionally for you to deal with.

We draw to us what we need, and everybody draws something different because everybody needs something different. As far as I see it there are no mistakes, there are things to be learnt, and if you fail to learn them the outcome is different to if you succeed in learning them. But if you turn away from a teaching then when you turn the next corner there it is again and it will haunt you until you learn.

I am sure you all know that my teacher, Bhagwan, went to America and began to gather together this extraordinary collection of Rolls-Royce cars. Ninety-two at the last count. One man has ninety-two Rolls-Royces! There was not much mileage on them, but there they were all lined up. When his people said to him, “We really don’t have the money for another one,” he would say to them, “My ship is waiting.”

Sandipa: My ship?

“My ship that is going to take me to Buddhaland. If you want me to stay here then get me another Rolls-Royce!” But I understand what he said. When you get into a certain state of unity if it was up to you, you would just float off. But you are surrounded by hopeless cases like you lot! Because you feel connected to these people, you say, “I am going to stay and play games with them.”

We are all so connected that there isn’t any way anybody can isolate themselves, legitimately, and arrange for an individual destiny independent of everybody else. The existence of energy fields like we have is a confirmation of that.

If we are being influenced by other people all the time, and their state of being is affecting our state of being, then it’s great to have a lot of people in a certain dimension who are also working towards their truth.

Buddha said, “If you can’t be with an enlightened person be with those people who are seeking enlightenment.” Then the unavoidable connection with people around you is going to be positive and not negative. So everybody this weekend has contributed to everybody else. I think a lot of you are perfectly aware of that, because you have met many times, have connections with each other and you know how rich that can be and how it feels to be with such a positive energy. Of course you have your differences, but the overall feeling when you meet these people is the positive input that you get from one another.

Somewhere inside you there is a god or goddess. Sometimes I simply see this, and even when I don’t see it I know it is true. The qualities that the Greeks and Romans put onto their gods, that we project onto others, are in ourselves. Everybody is capable of amazing things, and everybody is full of light. May you all realize it in this lifetime. Why not?

Questions & Answers, Linz, 14th May 2006