The Energy Way

 With & Without

When you are involved in your work at home, whatever you do, and when you are involved in a relationship, which I guess most of you are, and when you are involved in explorations with energy or anything else, when you are involved really with any activity whatsoever, you are not really yourself anymore. You are of course expressing yourself, but you are not at the source of yourself. Then your centre of gravity, which is the thing you are balanced on and which can change all the time, shifts into the duality of you and the other person, or the other people you are with, your activity, your work situation, and so on.

In our world today – and I guess it hasn’t been very different in the past either, just the activities were different – we are always looking for something to do, some distraction, some involvement, and behind that which starts off as a natural response to being in life then continues and becomes quite frantic so that if you don’t have a distraction you feel terrible. It is really hard just to be with whatever is there in you at a particular moment, and then another particular moment, and another particular moment. But unless you explore that presence of yourself and the presence of whatever is there…(a participant starts coughing)…Well, somebody coughing and somebody else making some other noise can indicate what I mean. If you are really with yourself in the moment and you feel a need to cough coming, then you don’t need to cough. The desire to cough is itself still. That realisation, which came clear to me a long time ago, got transferred to something you have probably all done if you have worked with Tiago, the meditation ‘Arms Up in the Air’. The desire to bring the arms down is itself still. You feel the need, the desire, the longing, the pain, everything in you saying, “This is ridiculous, bring the arms down,” but you don’t, or you are asked not to, and almost everybody manages not to. Then you find that suddenly the arms go light, suddenly you can keep them up for one hour. When you do this with Tiago you do it for one hour, usually. You walk around with your arms up, you can chat, sit or dance, and your arms don’t need to come down.

If you are not with yourself in the moment and a cough comes then you can’t stop it, it is already in reflex. But if you are sitting still, aware of yourself, aware of what is going on in you and around you, then when the feeling to cough comes you look at it and say, “There is that feeling to cough, but I am just going to watch the process of wanting to cough.” And if you do that – there may be exceptions to this, but in the main – then you can just wait until the feeling that you have to cough goes away.

So that immediately gave us an example of what I mean when I say that sometimes, and regularly, as you go on with the Work, more and more often you have to just sit. You sit not for meditation, not because it is supposed to be a good thing, but simply because that is who you are.

Who you are in this moment is who you are when nothing is happening, when you are not involved in anything, when there is just you. Of course the rest of the world is also present in you, we are all connected, but your part of the connection, and your lack of true connection, is in whatever is there when you just sit, stand, or walk – a kind of walking which is not an exercise but a way of being with yourself in an easy way, and not looking around, not thinking about things, but just being with what is.

When I came in this afternoon I asked you all just to do whatever you wanted to do. Everybody started to do something, little things – moving around, looking out the window, making contact, making a connection. Then after fifteen minutes everybody stopped, except one or two who were busy, busy – but I asked you to do what you felt like doing so that was okay. But really, without me saying, “First just follow your feelings and do what you want to do. Now stop, just be, and sit,” which is an instruction and you do it because you are told to or asked to, instead it happened absolutely naturally that everybody involved after fifteen or twenty minutes just stopped. When you stopped you were with yourself. Everybody else was around here or there – only one couple was making contact – and that step, to be able to do that, is absolutely vital and necessary in your spiritual path. In fact, a lot of what you do is a way of escaping from that.

Then I put some music on, some meditative music, which was in fact by the Dalai Lama – that was his voice, very beautiful – and a little later on I put on some hectic music, Muse, and most of you didn’t get lost in the music. I am not saying it is wrong to get lost in the music, sometimes it is very beautiful to get lost in the music, but it is also beautiful to stay with yourself and let the music flow through you. It is like waves when you are in the sea – you swim out and the waves come and wash over you and wash over you, and you just keep your stroke going. That is what happened for many of you. I didn’t say to sit still and let the music wash over you. I didn’t say to be still and just be with yourself. What I am talking about actually happened in this space that comes, particularly when I am here, where you find you just naturally fall into being with yourself. You were not contacting other people, you were not rushing off into the music, although often there is nothing wrong that, I do it myself sometimes, but it so happened that only one or two people did that. The rest of you slowly slowed down from moving, you let the music wash over you, and you stayed with what? What was there to stay with? Thought, an idea, a plan of action you were making, or did you simply fall into your base?

Now you may not feel that you are ready for that. Maybe you are still young, you have a lot of projects on and you want to continue to be active, to achieve, I understand that, but sooner or later, in this lifetime or another, you have to find out what it is to be somebody without an involvement in anything outside yourself apart from your breath, your contact with the ground, and your contact with the cosmos. Everything that is there that is not one of those things has to be dissolved so you can do that comfortably – to rest in yourself, connect with the earth, and connect with the cosmos. Then you can really taste yourself. You can taste what it is to be you, what it is to be a human being, what it is to be part of the earth, part of the sky, part of everything.

It is natural in the world that you develop yourself here, there, and everywhere you go. You have your history – your childhood, schooling, examinations, and so on – and you have your hopes for the future – getting a promotion at work, building a set of relationships, developing your skills and capacities – and you spend your life trying to achieve these things and say, “Isn’t this what life is all about?” Well, in a way yes it is, but also not. When you are exploring things – as you are now in seminars and maybe in your life in general when you are a seeker – you have to see that when you are doing that, what you are doing is developing yourself as a person.

A man asked a Zen master, “What do you do?” and he replied, “I work with human beings.” The man then said, “Well, okay, but what are they after you finish working with them?” and the Zen master answered, “No longer human beings.”

He is saying that when he has finished working with them, if the Work has worked, the people are no longer human beings. And a Zen master is supposed to know what he is talking about! Everything one normally does is to develop the person, and I am pointing to the non-person. Every person is different, but what about a non-person, and another non-person, and another non-person? Ramana Maharshi asked one of the visitors to his ashram, “What are you doing here in my ashram?” and the man answered, “I have come here to learn.” Ramana then said, “Well my friend, you have come to the wrong place. Here we deal with unlearning.”

When you find your base and then you act, then you move, and then you involve yourself, when that is the way for you, then while you are also in that movement, in that activity, in that involvement, you are still at your base – the 0 and the 1 come together, and then you have your X.

(The participant who coughed at the beginning of the talk coughs again)

So, that is how far you got with the coughing!

I am going to play you a little bit of music now. It is sung by a guy from Hawaii. He died in nineteen ninety-seven when he was thirty-eight years old. At the time he died he weighed around three hundred and forty-four kilograms – that is four or five times my weight. His voice is very special, he sings beautifully, and when he sings the song it is really an expression. I could see that when he sang he was singing from the Space.

(Michael plays “What a Wonderful World” sung by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole)

Talk, Czech & UK Energy Weekend, 11th of October 2008