The Energy Way

 The Laughing Impossibility

When we sit quietly, as we regularly do, I am often giving a silent talk. I guess I am always giving a kind of silent talk in that I am trying to convey, share, or pass something to you where words are not needed, that is clear, but I am talking about something different. I am actually making a speech in my mind, words are coming and I am talking to you, but I am not opening my mouth. The reason why I retain it in my mind is that I am afraid to give you too much information for you to grasp with your consciousness.

If you find that statement surprising, that simply confirms what I am saying. It means that you think that you need to have an input into your consciousness before any change can happen in you, and if you believe that, my friends, it is what is known in English as a fallacy. A fallacy is a false belief. In fact, the consciousness can actually interfere with the process. Many of you, and sometimes all of you, believe that your consciousness learns and then passes it to the rest of your system, which then goes through certain acts to achieve what the consciousness has pointed to as the goal in life, this week, today, or in the meditation. That’s how most human beings function. To have an idea in the mind about what should happen, where you want to go, and how to get there can in fact be an interference with the natural process.

So I ask you, is your consciousness right there in the centre of your process? If it is, that’s the wrong place for it. It should be on one side and on the other side should be, what I will call for the sake of a label, the unconscious. The conscious mind always wants to control and direct, and what it is trying to control and direct is actually beyond it. It is very important for you all to understand with your consciousness that the thinking consciousness – as opposed to the presence of consciousness – can only deal firstly with that which is within the consciousness and secondly, even beyond that, what it’s capable of holding in it.

That is not the same thing as what we were talking about yesterday – the magical word for what is there when you are not thinking and your mind is there – which was reality. Your mind cannot grasp and contain reality. It can only select what it wants to select, but even going beyond your personal selection, it can only select what the human consciousness is capable of grasping. Of course you can limit your life to that, as a militant Muslim can limit his whole view of life simply within the limitations of what is stated in the Koran and act accordingly with the belief that he is living the truth. This can be the same for any other kind of holy book. You can restrict your life to what is in the Bible, as some people do. There are extremist Christians who constantly refer to the Bible for the truth about existence. Fundamentalism of all sorts is based on a belief that everything is already there, written out by certain people, which informs you about what your life and all life is about. This is like throwing a bottle into the ocean, waiting for it to fill up with sea water, taking the bottle out, and then saying, ‘I have the ocean.’ But you just have a sample. So it’s important that you recognise that you give cognisance to, and recognition of, what your consciousness can do, but you do not put it right there in the middle of your life and live your life through its own content or you will close yourself to that which is beyond its range.

This is why Zen people talk about no-mind. That means an open space. It doesn’t just mean to be open to new thoughts, new impulses, and to the consciousness, but to be open to what is beyond consciousness which can touch us, move us, release us, empower us, and this doesn’t come through the consciousness at all. Actually, this is really obvious but we don’t want to see it. I am sure it must have happened to all of you, if not many times then at least once, that from one instant to the other you get a revelation, a discovery, a movement in you, you arrive somewhere which was not part of what was going on before at all; a complete discontinuity. But then the mind says after this discontinuity, ‘Ah, now I see how it relates to what was going on before.’ This is known as post propter hoc in Latin, which means after the event you decide how it happened according to the rules that you hold, which is the process, development, and understanding of the consciousness. People always want to understand. They say, ‘It’s okay, I am open to your work but I want to understand what is happening and why it is happening,’ and I sigh and do my best.

I am saying that the best and most helpful things in life come from something which is outside the range of your powers of understanding and consciousness, and that’s of tremendous excitement, for me anyway. Then you are open to whatever happens. You are not seeking to find something that would enable you to continue on the line that you are on faster, more expansively, more energetically, or seeking around for what fits, what would enhance your life as you see your life to be right this moment.

Two days before this X-Run started I got a long three page email from Dalai telling me what’s going on in his life, where he’s at, what his problems are, what he would like to happen next, how he would like these problems to dissolve, and hopefully they can happen during the X-Run. I didn’t answer the email. In the first place it came just a day or two before we started, in the second place I’m answering it with a seminar, and verbally I am answering it now.

I am not a shop where you come in and look for baked beans, fish, or different varieties of butter, where you say, ‘Michael, can I have two types of that please. I am making this big lunch and there is an empty space here so can you give me the seasoning to liven it up.’ You are looking for something from this open space which is unknown to you, that you can take or be given, and can then add on to this process that you believe is your life and going in the direction that you need to go. But it doesn’t lead anywhere, it goes around in circles, and if something does happen to change it, it is not because of anything that you did to make a continuity of your life.

There is a famous statement by Buddha, a statement of one word. Do you know what it is?

A participant: Stop.

Stop. Buddha has cried halt. Stop, stop, stop. Stop the process, stop your beliefs, stop your ideas, stop your desires, stop your intentions, stop your goals, stop your movements, stop your thoughts, stop your dreams. See what is there, where you are right now.

Nearly all of the time I am working with you, what I am trying to do is draw your energy away from fulfilling the structures of your mind and your energy field that you have organised in the way that you want and believe will take you where you want to go. I try to stream it sideways, downwards and around into the universal energy. To take all the energy down from the tower of your ego, your personality, and your image and belief system about yourself and draw it down and whoosh it out sideways into the space around you, into the environment, into the surrounding reality. And mostly it works, except when you have been out sideways into the great space around you and you then suck it all back into the tower again and put another little bit on top. That is called spiritual materialism. Spiritual materialism is having experiences, discovering things, having revelations through spiritual work and then adding it to the tower of your ego and saying I have experienced this, I have achieved this, I know about this.

If you cannot find a place to go to – or they are no longer available because no one wants to go to them – which is designed to demolish your ego, then you have to do the work yourself. We have a few people in the house we try and work a little bit this way with, but even that is a problem for them. Although, this is not the main thing in the house, we need to run the house and the organisation, so it is not like it was in Energy World, Poona, and places like that. So you have to see what I am saying and you have to work on yourself.

Marisha has been in the house for six or nine months now and she and Mishka have some difficulties with each other. When Mishka says something to Marisha and she has some problem with it, Mishka tells her that Michael’s teaching is to just say yes to everything while you are here. To say yes is to say no to the ego, it is a teaching. Marisha says, ‘Aha, but I don’t agree with that.’ I can understand a lot of people don’t agree with it, it is a dangerous philosophy to say yes, I know it is, but if you find the right person to be with when you are doing it then it does work. To do it for yourself is really difficult; you have to have the master within you. It is not a question of having two parts of your mind otherwise you get into the whole super ego/ego trip which is useless. The super ego wants to squash or define the ego, or tell the ego how to be a bigger, stronger, more conventional, or a customised ego. If you start working on yourself, this kind of thing can happen and that’s useless. You have to undermine yourself, not squash yourself, or you have to see what else is there apart from your ego, your tower, and where else you can live your life.

Most years I go to the Rainbow Festival in Baden Baden and give a talk and some other sessions as well. I remember one year I was talking about getting out of the mind and making it go still, and a woman said, ”Michael, I have managed to do that, but when I’ve done that I don’t know where to go. If I don’t live in my mind then I have no alternative accommodation. I have to live somewhere!” Then I realised that the place I went to was the energy space. I could just fall into the energy space and leave my mind; there isn’t even any room for it there. My mind is irrelevant when I look at the trees and the sky, there is no place for it and I don’t need it. In fact, if I go into my thoughts I will lose what I have when I look out there. So I sent my mind packing. I don’t have to do that now because it doesn’t come anymore, but when it did, I simply told it to go away.

You guys have this; I have shown you it over and over again. When I come down in the mornings you are all sitting in the energy space. Your minds might be busy but you are also in the energy space, so you have an alternative if you stop. That place is already stopped, it is moving, but it is stopped. That is the beauty of the energy space, it is totally dynamic and it is a complete stop as well. That is the nature of timelessness; there is no time and yet time is passing. It is uncanny but true. Everything is the eternal present moment and at the same time the clock is ticking, the birds are singing, and somebody is walking by from A to B which takes time, you are watching them, and you think, ‘But I’m in timelessness?!’ It is an incredible paradox but it is so.

You have to see that what I am saying is the most important thing in the world otherwise it won’t happen. It is not the only thing in the world, not at all, and I don’t want you to become obsessed with the Path; I never was and I don’t want you to be. Even if it just by the side for large parts of your life, it still doesn’t mean that it’s not the most important thing you have. It is the only thing that will save you from negligibility, from wasting your life. Don’t waste your life. You may make the history books, get a beautiful obituary in whatever local newspaper there is, have great things said about you and achieved a lot in the world, but you have wasted your life.

I am talking about the place where life and death meet. Everything else is about where life begins, life ends, and death begins.

I use to do a little demonstration about what I am talking about a long time ago in my groups in Poona. In those days I had nice little cassettes which I could use but they are now obsolete.

A participant: We have cassettes under the table.

Cassettes! I need about fifteen. (Someone looks under the table) Great, we have them. This is what I use to show people twenty-five years ago. (Michael makes a demonstration with the cassettes)

I would say, you are born and you move through life. You learn a few things, connect with a few things, and then you hit the wall and you die. You go somewhere or other, get a few tips for next time and you start again. With the tips you get to here, then pow, you die, and so on. I have only done three, but it takes longer.

Then here you are, back again, and you meet Michael Barnett or somebody else and you get to a different place. You begin to fly and to soar, your energy level goes up, there’s the wall, and what happens when you hit the wall? You sail over it.

There’s no collapse, no finish, no end, and that’s the work. That’s where life and death meet, same place. As a great poet named William Wordsworth said in one of his poems, ”Death became a laughing impossibility.”

My friends, my students, please relax your focus of yourself. Instead of looking at the world with me, me, me, what fits, where do I want to go, what do I want to do, who do I like, look with the Goose Look. Then you can recognise that you are not isolated, you are connected with everything around you. You can’t experience the sense of everything yet, but you can experience that you are not separated from what is around you: the space, the people, the town, the country, and the world around you. You are connected all the time and everything is influencing everything all the time.

It is very difficult but also very easy. It’s very easy because you don’t actually have to make the alternative, it is already there. It’s not like building a new self, it is seeing under the old self which somehow got distorted and twisted or been given false ideas. It is not like living in the Tower of Pisa which is going to collapse at any time and so you have to start from scratch to build the foundations again. This is what happens to a lot of people in life as far as careers or marriages are concerned; we so often have to start again because what we have is destroyed or wiped out. People become bankrupt and have to start new businesses; people lose their wives and children and have to start new families, and so on. So many times we have to start again and build something, and that is really hard. But here we don’t have to build anything new, we just have to realise that it’s always there. That’s why, in a way, it is easy. The difficult part is not in the rebuilding, but in the letting go of what you are attached to. ”What is the Buddha?” says a man to a master. The master says, ”Can you hear the sound of the stream?” The man says, ”Yes,” and the master says, ”Enter from there.” The sound of the stream requires no ego. It is just there in space, in emptiness, in the nothingness, in reality. It requires no analysis, no weighing up, no considerations at all, it just is. By experiencing it in the way the master said, which is to experience something and feel its is-ness, means you are in your own is-ness in that moment.

The philosopher Kant says that you can’t experience the thing itself; you can only experience your experience of it. That’s the difference between a philosopher and a master. From the point of view of the mind, you can’t grasp the thing itself; you can only grasp its qualities. It’s loud or soft, strong or weak, cold or hot, wavy or calm; these are the considerations that the mind can weigh up about some phenomenon. You can’t grasp in words or with the mind the essence of something. But if you resonate with it, then you can grasp the essence of it because that’s what resonance is, essence to essence, and that’s why it’s bliss when you find it.

If you experience the space that I talked about, where you are just with what is, then that can last – as it did for me on Thursday – a whole morning without any interruption. When you are in your essence and you experience everything else’s essence – the nature, the floor, the air, the people – it is bliss. It is the universal song; to be in your essence and connect with what else in life is there in its essence. Imagine you are in your most vital, living, original centre and that you are connecting with everything else in its original life which is, in a way, the same quality of life as you have. It doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t have to be another human being, it can be a tree, a bird, a spider, a river, or the sky. When that is what is going to pass as pure life, it’s not surprising that I say it’s blissful. The finest peak of the taste of life is to be with things in its essence. This is the invitation when you step on the Path and this is possible for everyone. Essence is not limited to special people. It’s a quality of life.

(Silence, followed by music, then participants going into the garden for ten minutes to feel their response to what Michael has said.)

X-Run Part IV, 18th of August 2007