On The Path

 The MB Slimming Diet

A participant: How can I transform my stubbornness, and eventually my corporal fullness into mental fullness?

From the way you have written your letter, you are obviously not comfortable with your body the way it is now, but you’re not uncomfortable enough. To become uncomfortable enough to do something about it is not so easy because the body, mind and emotions are in an alliance. At the same time you recognise that you want to change, part of you is in agreement with what is going on in your body, has accepted it, or is resigned to it. The body will not do anything about it itself even though it doesn’t want to be the way it is. The body alone does not have the power to change itself. The body is intelligent but it doesn’t have control over itself. The only way to change the body – which I think you recognise in your question – is to change your mind. If the mind moves to a place beyond the place it’s in now and then looks at the body, which belongs to the old mind, it says, ”Finish. This doesn’t belong to me anymore, it is no longer resonant to me in my new mind,” and then the body will change. It has no choice; it will change because it has no power to continue. It only continues because the mind lets it continue the way it is, but on its own, it has no desire to stay the way it is.

When I gave you your name I told you it had the meaning of happiness, and this is the key to what I am saying. I can see that you have happiness now, from the way you are in the group, your shiny eyes, and in your smile. You often do feel happy but it doesn’t last. Behind the happiness I see fear, uncertainty, heaviness, and as you say, stubbornness to change, but on the other side of all that there is true happiness. So if you can take the mind from this side of the wall to the other side of the wall – the wall being what I outlined: your fears, uncertainty and your lack of power to do something about that – then when you are on the other side and you look over and see your body, you will say that that body doesn’t belong over here and you will change it.

Many people who are overweight make resolutions to change it, but it seldom works because you have to change the mind before you can really change the body. Many people who have been overweight and have come into the work that we do here in OneLife have changed completely because the work we do moves the mind over the wall. So whether it is overweightness, greed, fear, distrust, or lack of power, all of these things can be left behind on the other side of the wall and on this side of the wall they don’t belong anymore. When your body doesn’t fit anymore to your soul, in your sense of yourself, then it cannot stay the way it is. You will not allow it; it is impossible. The new space will produce a new mind, which will produce a new body, which will produce a new experience of feelings. It is like you are living from false roots, as if you have a garden on the windowsill and you think this is your true garden, just a little plot, and you water it and grow things there, but this is not your ground of being. You have to go down the stairs a long way, deep inside you, to the bottom of the house, open the door and there is your true garden.

The situation is in your hands. It can happen; you are not stuck with the situation, but forget about diets and stuff like that because as long as the mind is not changed then it will only be temporary. You won’t even feel comfortable if you do get rid of some weight, it won’t feel right, you have to find it at a deeper part of yourself and then the body that belongs to that will come.

That was the only question I received from you all. Maybe something else has arrived in you and you would like me to say a few words about it. I am not going to give a talk; I am only going to answer questions. If you want me to say more, you have to say something. You only have to say one sentence and I will say fifty sentences. But I need one sentence.

Yes sir?

A participant: I want to talk about yesterday actually. I have a problem with stress, and when I heard the music yesterday it was very loud and I couldn’t bear it. I just kept it in myself.

If you feel pain or suffering when something like music comes, it means that the music is hitting something like a wall in you, and if the wall wasn’t there then the music would pass right through. In thirty years or more of playing loud music – and this is nothing compared to what it was ten or twenty years ago – my experience is that the people who complain, and it’s only a few, about the volume of the music are always the people who are in their head thinking too much. They are more or less saying, ”Please turn the music down because I can’t think.” Whereas the purpose of the music is to stop people from being able to think, so when they say that I smile and say, ”Very good.”

When we were sitting quietly I noticed you were quite restless. We were all sitting quietly – other people of course are used to it and they can sit quietly – but for you, the silence was almost the same thing. It was as if it was hitting something; you were jerking, twisting and so on very often. It seems like there are some structures in you which react to something that comes strongly like music, or something that comes quietly and gently like silence. It’s like you don’t have room for them inside. Your personality or set-up is taking up all the space and resists anything that threatens it or which is trying to change it. Somehow you want to hold on to your own image of how you feel you are.

This can happen, it’s not your fault, the way that we live and the way that we are taught, educated and brought up brings us to a certain set-up or personality. We have to have this to function in the world, we have to have an identity, we all have to have one. This set-up or personality is always choosing. It chooses a yes to that which fits it and no to that which doesn’t. Everybody goes along like this, selecting friends, occupations, entertainments and places we live. Everything we select feels right to us and what doesn’t seem to be resonant with us we reject, push away, or are indifferent to. So when we do that and we keep selecting what fits, all we do is stay the same, maybe a bit more, but we still stay the same.

The original selection process that grows in us when we are children continues throughout our life and doesn’t change. The truth is, that selection is what we call in English arbitrary, which means that if you live somewhere else, with another family, in another situation, something different would have come up. If you lived in America it would have been different; if you lived in Japan, Australia, or wherever it would have been different. So all these possible personalities have come out of the same basis, but the way that they look depends on all the influences and teachings that you have in your life.

So the work that I do is to try to let go of all that and come back to the original basis of our life, before any selection has been made and be in the pure potentiality of ourselves. There is a famous Zen saying – listen everybody because this is really hard to accept because it goes against the way that we live – which goes, ”If you choose one thing over the other, then Heaven and Earth are set far apart.”

How to live without selecting? How to live without choosing? It means that you have to be open to everything. When I come into a seminar, I look around and say, ”Hmm, I’ll work with her, with her, with him, and the others can go to hell. I might pretend to help them, but I’m not really.” Personal choice is irrelevant to me. Just yes, if it’s alive and breathing, then yes.

It sounds impossible not to choose, but you have to see if you choose, every time you say yes to what you choose, you say no to what you don’t choose. Last night at dinner I picked up the menu and I chose something, and it was terrible. See what happens when you choose! Then I tried my neighbour’s, Raymondo’s, and thought, ”That’s what I should have chosen.” I should have let her choose for me. But of course, sometimes one has to choose, I understand, but you choose out of non-choosing. By non-choosing I mean that you accept that everything that lives and is around has an equal permission and right to be there.

If you want to be part of the universe and be one with it, then you have to be the same, you have to say yes because it’s there. Everybody is formed by their mixtures of yeses and nos. If you put everybody in a computer and make a list of their yeses and nos, that’s their personality. That’s the only way to tell identical twins apart, by their yeses and nos; there will be one or two differences. I have met a few identical twins and I can’t tell them apart. I tell them to write down their yeses and nos and I see this one likes fries and this one likes mashed potatoes, and then I know.

It’s an attitude of mind. The minute you choose and say this is yes and this is no, then you are restricting yourself to a certain point of view. I know that what I said about choicelessness is often a shock for people because it’s hard to even imagine not making choices in life. But all of you just consider what it would be like for a moment to let go of all your selection processes, all your preferences in life, and yet still be there. How would it feel? What would be wrong with it and what would be right with it?

Would anybody like to say what they found when they imagined being choiceless? How would you be? What change would there be?

A participant: Very easy.

Another participant: I would feel like a baby.

Good.

Another participant: I would feel flowing and floating.

Another participant: I would feel free.

The way that I see it, is that you would just be. You would have no personality that’s fixed, out there making the selection yes, no or maybe, none of that. If you would just be open, like a child, then there’s nothing added to just being, receiving and responding to what is there. There is nothing in the way; it’s like a pure receptivity of what is. Reality comes in and we say, ”Yes, throw this out for that.” All the time we are censoring. Reality is coming in and we are saying yes, no or maybe, or change it, alter it, get that person to change; always wanting to change something so it fits. But if we don’t have that selection process then we are just there, not interfering, and not trying to change or manipulate anything so it fits us. That’s want manipulation is, to try to get people to change, to fit with your comfort so you can be comfortable. When you let all that by and just be, then you are there like a tree, a bird, the rain, the stream; just experiencing life as it is. That’s how it is when you don’t select.

A participant: But a bird also chooses what he is eating and what he is not.

Sure, but if someone else eats something different you don’t judge them, or do you?

The participant: No.

So you are open to all and you take in what fits. You’re not rejecting, in a way, what you don’t eat. You’re not saying, ”I take this,” as some people do, and have judgements about people who do different. People who don’t smoke can have big judgements against people who smoke, even though we know that they may have good reasons for it. The thing is, when you are open in the way I am describing you simply say, ”Aha.” This guy likes to eat horse meat, that’s fine. This guy likes to smoke dope, that’s okay; I don’t want to do it but he does it. So you just allow things to be the way they are without judgements. I am talking about when the choice involves saying this but not that. It may not be for you but it is part of what is, and we all want to change what is to fit in with our ideas of what is comfortable and acceptable for us, and that is what I am talking about, not small details like which movie to watch tonight, what to eat or which city to live in. That’s not denying that other places are also nice for other people.

When you set up a target – which of course we all do – and you go for it, then it’s important that you keep all distractions away and you reach the target. You select the target and then you select what is going to help you to reach the target. You can select enlightenment as your target, and you can find ten thousand things to do that will help you towards enlightenment, but you will never reach enlightenment. You may achieve many things, but you won’t reach enlightenment because enlightenment comes when you drop all that entirely; when you drop not only the goal but the one who wants the goal and is after the goal. When all ideas of changing yourself to get to a goal simply drop, then you fall back to square one, your nature. So it has the same principle in it, that you don’t choose what to do in order to get to your goal. Many goals you have to do that, I know and that’s okay, but for the supreme goal, it’s effortless; that’s the way. You may have to make a lot of effort in order to see the truth of what I am saying and that’s okay, but in the end it is only effortless that will drop you into your true nature.

I live what I am saying. How much effort have I made in this seminar this weekend? I just wandered around the room really and allowed myself to be drawn here and pulled there; it has been completely effortless for me. And what effort have you made? I hope very little, perhaps to keep your minds quiet you might be making an effort, but as far as doing anything, you haven’t done anything. We didn’t even do the SHEM Meditation this weekend! I wanted you to be free of all effort. Just sit around, fall asleep, collapse and then maybe something new comes in. If there’s effort, what can come in? Something can come out but what can come in? When I relax, let go, open to what is around me, everything comes in, and I just…sigh.

So, did I answer your question?

The participant: No, not yet.

Then what?

The participant: What I wanted to say was that I don’t mean all kinds of music. I love the slow music and I can feel all the details, even if it’s love. But some of the fast music you play, can you explain it? I want to ask you what I can do because I can’t come out of my feeling. If I want to do something, then I just have to shut down or go my way because I couldn’t keep it in myself. I was irritated with my movement because I have pain in my back. So what do you think? What can I do?

You sound completely innocent to me. You can’t help moving because of your back and you can’t help getting cross because of the music. It must all be my fault! You know, life is like that sometimes. When I go to the airport the noise of the aeroplanes is terrible, waiting in queues to put my luggage through, I could scream, but I don’t. Every week I go to some airport somewhere or other, sitting in these stupid planes, the noise driving me crazy, all the hustle and bustle, which is nothing compared to what some people have to put up with, and it’s all a drag for me. Sometimes things simply don’t harmonise. Maybe I have to write to people who are coming to the group asking them for their personal selection of music, but actually, I play the music because it turns me on. If it turns the group on then I’m happy, if it doesn’t then it’s tough. The rule is, whoever sits in this chair decides on the music. So, start your own seminars, get your own chair, play your choice of music, and if I come and I don’t like it then I’ll have the same problem as you have. Then I’ll have to get up and walk out, complain, or ask a question at the end, ”What can I do, please sir, because I don’t like the music that you play? It just stinks.”

I don’t think it’s something that requires a deep spiritual answer. If you don’t like some of the music, I can also tell you that there’s a lot of music that I don’t like. I can’t stand rap music. For fifty years I have been keeping up with kid’s music – I am still a kid inside with music and I can really dig all the new stuff my kids play – but rap I can’t stand. If I walked into a seminar where they were playing rap, what would I do? I don’t know. I could look at it as an endurance test, I could go into my deepest meditation place and pretend it wasn’t happening, or I could just walk out. I don’t know what I would do but it would be a problem. (laughter) There’s not always a general answer to life’s problems, it has to be an individual answer. You are asking me what you should do and I am saying I don’t know.

Where are you from?

The participant: I live in Denmark but actually I am from Iraq.

Well, as an Iraqi, if you are only complaining about the music in this room compared to what your countrymen are enduring back there, consider yourself in Heaven. Consider yourself in paradise.

Questions & Answers, Hamburg, 09th of September 2007