On The Path

 Going Nowhere, Going Everywhere

I hope you’re not going anywhere – I’m not and I hope you’re not; but between going nowhere and going somewhere there may be a gap, and in that gap you may have some questions or something to say. If you have, go ahead.

Vancana: Where does God live – in the things, in us, in between, where they meet each other?

”Where is God?” she asks, but first I have to ask you, ”Who or what is God?” before I can tell you where he or she is.

Vancana: The energy of creation.

Then it’s easy! You’ve answered your own question. If you believe that God is the energy of creation, then you’ve given the answer to where he is, and if he is that, not only have you given the answer to where he is, but you’ve also made it clear that it is possible to meet him.

But you are not sure if that’s true, are you? It was just a guess, but it was as good a guess as anybody else’s. There might be times when I would give a more specific answer than now, but my answer at the moment is that God doesn’t matter to you or anybody else here, what matters is the next step towards something that you could call God.

I believe one knows very well if one has made such a step, which is as much as we can hope for, but to me, that is a much better view of things than to invent something that may or may not be the case. How many millions of answers have been given as to who or what God is, or even if he is? It is clear that even wise people really have no idea, it is just a point of view, and even those who have a point of view often change it as time goes on. If you are really searching for an answer to that question, you could spend your whole lifetime quite worthlessly reading what other people have to say about it, or asking people like me, who or what God is; but taking the next step for yourself is a million times clearer than that.

If you have truly made the next step towards whatever it might be, then you will know it, and it will probably be true, but if you want a little guidance from me, I would say, ”Are you leaving the rubble behind and finding more clarity?” The rubble is hurt, jealousy, resentment, possessiveness, egoism, aggression, violence, hate.

A participant: When I leave hate behind, aren’t I also leaving a special kind of love behind?

I don’t know if it is special, but for sure on the other side of hate, you leave behind a certain kind of love. That love is not worth much, so leave it behind too.

If you look at that very statement, it is clear that that love is dependent upon a certain code of behaviour on the part of the one you love. If love can turn to hate, it must be dependent on something very slight. It is a question of interpretation from one moment to another, and interpretation is always personal. If the same person that you loved a moment ago upsets you, then anger, hurt, resentment, and even hate, can come; so that is not a very significant love if it can disappear so easily. The only love that matters is the love that is independent of the other person’s reaction or response.

If you love somebody, then you are in favour of anything that they might want to do which will bring them happiness or joy, which is inconceivable for ordinary love. It is a kind of contract: ”I love you, therefore you have to respond to me and behave in certain ways. It is the payment you have to make to me for my love.” This is not worth a cent as far as I am concerned.

Once you really have love – for your partner, friends, children, parents, or whoever they might be, you will love them as part of everything, but it doesn’t mean that you have to necessarily love whatever they are doing. In order to be able to contain that contradiction, you have to be in touch with the person’s essence. You have to separate the person, not just in your mind but in your knowingness; you have to separate what the person is, who they really are, and the way they behave. If there is some negativity about the person you love, it doesn’t mean that you have to love the negativity, but your love can be such that you want that negativity to disappear – that is quite different than not loving them anymore because of their negativity.

If you know anything about mathematics, you’ll know that a minus times a minus is a plus; so if you behave in such a way that you negate the other’s negation, that is a positive step, and it can be done in a loving way.

When you say Yes when you feel No, and when you thought that you had invested your soul into the No and that it was absolutely who you were, what you discover, amongst many things, is that the No really wasn’t that important.

The big question – whether you have a partner or not, and whether you are devoted and committed or not – is: are you free to make explorations? You can explore with a partner that you are deeply involved with and committed to, even if you see that by committing to one partner, certain explorations which you would otherwise make become irrelevant. If that works, then it is perfectly good in my eyes. But if the commitment you have made is interfering with a deep wish to explore in certain directions, then this will cripple you.

Most things that we can use in this movement out of the rubble into clarity come from outside us; they come through explorations of all sorts, and going beyond the limits that we have maybe set before. There’s an American Zen master, Bernie Glassman, who sends his students out on to the streets in American cities to live with street people. His students have to go and spend a week on the street, without money and with just a little mat to sleep on, so that they get to feel what it is like to live such a life.

For sure one can learn a great deal from going into such an extreme situation; but the opposite will also teach you something. Living for a week like a prince or a princess will teach you a lot too – you go and stay in the best hotels, you go to the best restaurants, wear the best clothes, mix with the richest people for a while. Taking a trip on some drug like ecstasy, or getting stoned, will also teach you – if you take it as an experiment to see that it will break barriers open for you, and you do not become dependent on that form of exploration.

You put barriers up because of your fear of what is outside, but when you break the barriers down, you open to what is outside, and then something new in you can respond – that will be an extension. But you can also get the same extension by going down deeply with one person. For certain natures, it is best to do it that way, and for other natures, it is best to do it by moving outwards; and, of course, a bit of each is also okay.

If you are a person who would benefit more from exploring out and you commit yourself to one person who is going deep, then you will not be happy – you will not be content and will feel frustrated. If you say, ”Okay, I am going to do this the other way, by exploring out and trying out new things,” and that is not really right for you, then you will feel lost. It is not the same thing as learning and discovering; because the only thing that you will discover is that you feel lost.

Try to understand that there is a huge world there, and many possibilities and potentialities in your life, maybe much more than you have yet touched, but they are there, and how you respond to them is entirely up to you. But don’t kid yourself. Don’t tell yourself what is right for you, because your mind is not free enough to tell you what is really right for you. You have your sixth sense inside you which knows; sometimes it is dangerous to listen to it, but that is the one who knows.

At the beginning of this finishing exchange I wrote down the title ‘Going Nowhere’, because that is how I started off, but now I have changed it to ‘Going Nowhere, Going Everywhere’. I first started talking about going nowhere, staying in the space you’re in, but now I say, ”In order to stay in the space you’re in, you have to go through it.”

The whole thing is ungraspable. Everybody wants to grasp: ”What exactly is the right thing for me to do? Who exactly is God and what exactly is my relationship with God? What exactly is my goal, how exactly should I get there, and who exactly should I get to help me get there?” This is what you want; but if it is what you want, you are in for total disappointment!

You have to feel your way into the next right step to take, and then feel your way into another direction if it doesn’t feel right when you take that step. Then you see that you don’t know exactly where you are going, but wherever you are going is further on.

It is exactly what I do when I work with you. I don’t think, ”How can I bring this person to God?” especially Vancana – that is the last thing I’d say to her! That is not exactly true, because sometimes I sit and look around and I do ask myself the question, ”How can I enable this person to taste what it is like to actually take the next step? Can I do some magic to bring this person to take the next step, so that they taste what it is like to be there?” But the whole person has to take the next step.

I can change your energy in an instant – I can walk in the room, I can look at you, smile at you, touch you, and your energy will change. But it is not just the energy that has to change, because if the one who needs to live that energy doesn’t come with the change, it won’t last; the old mind says, ”Oh that was interesting, now where was I in my life?” Sometimes I have to bring that person to the next step a hundred times before they say, ”I can actually make that step as a whole person.”

It is possible afterwards to be absolutely horrified when you look at where you went when you took a big step and fell into bliss. You say, ”I can’t live in that place, for if I was to, my whole life would collapse. I wish I had never even seen that possibility because now it will haunt me. I’ve seen a chance to escape my trips, or at least a certain number of my trips; but my life is a reflection of my trips and I have built it around them. If I am suddenly out of my trips, I will be out of my life. It is too terrifying! I was better off before I had even seen the possibility.”

People can even be angry and resent me because I have shown them this step. Many times people get very angry with me because I disturb their self-satisfaction, complacency, safety, security and accustom-ness to their lives – they were also under the pretence of really searching. But the idea of a step in the mind is quite different from a step in reality. So if I disturb your life, I don’t apologise, and if it is any consolation, I also disturb my own life!

I have this image of catching you all in a big net, walking up to the top of the Alps, opening up the net, and throwing you all over: ”Learn to fly you bastards!”

Risaria: I brought a notebook this time and the only thing I’ve written is: I don’t think it’s right that Michael does all the work, I think it’s time we did.

When I can leave you to work without you fucking everything up, then I will do it, but right now I wouldn’t trust you!

Sataranda: After this week I felt that I could trust you even more than before.

You are a very intelligent man, very sensitive, very open, a star pupil! I am only half-joking, because the thing is, Sataranda has now been in the house for some months, and at first it was not so easy for him; it is not so easy to be in the house, I know, but he found how to be in the house in a good way for him and a good way for the house, and that is a kind of deepening process. When he comes to the X-Run or Enlightenment Circle, which he also did, then all that has moved in him from being in the house day-by-day makes him much more sensitive and able to receive much more here than he otherwise would.

I began this session by saying, ”I hope you are not going anywhere,” but at the same time, I know that this won’t happen – you will all more or less go away from where you’ve been these days; that’s the perennial problem for everybody, I know.

There are a few things you can do to reconnect though – you can close your eyes and bring yourself to some extent back here; you can play some music that we have played; you can listen to some minutes of one of the talks I have given – not just for what I am saying, but for the echo of our time together which comes through. Also, as you know, I do these little energy drawings. I sit here when things are going on and I pictorially draw what I feel is the energy in the room. For some people, they are a key to a door to a little taste back of what we shared.

Sataranda has a bunch of energy drawings, so if you feel interested in getting a flavour that way, see him after we finish. When I tune in to you all as a whole in this stage of the X-Run, on the level that I tune in to you, there are no boundaries, no exceptions, no absences; which means that that level is awake and available in you.

You do not need to search anymore, you just have to fall into it or allow it to move into your being in life. The search would be the wrong tool now. I give you that to take with you. Where I work from, and where we are all one, is really awake and alive in all of you. It’s underneath your feet, metaphorically speaking. You are not yet standing on it, but it is there; so ask yourself, ”If that is true what Michael says, then do I need to search, or do I need to let go, allow, fall?”

When we meet next I hope it is warmer, but it has been warm enough in here, I think. You’ve all worked well, all said Yes, and all been present. I don’t think I could have asked for more from you. Congratulations.

Questions & Answers, X-Run, 16th of December 2007