On The Path

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You look like you have been waiting for this, as if silence is simply not good enough for you, energy work is not good enough for you, you need to hear something. If I say to you guys, “Stand up now,” then slowly you all get up, but if I sit here and say, “I am going to talk,” then phhtt, you all rush forward! (laughter) So what is all the excitement about?

This very morning, today, Thursday, you guys were pulled through two great meditations – and of course the second one was stronger but that was because we had done the first one – and at the end of the meditations you were all in great spaces. So now I want you all to immediately go back to that space, and if you don’t you are out of the X-Run! I am going to count to ten and then you all have to go to exactly the same place as you were in at quarter-to-two this afternoon when we had just finished the Oneness Meditation because I want to continue from there, and I can’t continue from there unless you go back there. So I am going to count to ten – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…

You can’t do it, can you? I want you to realise that you cannot do it. I could have given you time to try, and some of you would have kidded yourselves you were getting back there, but I want you to really see that you can’t do it. But that place you were in earlier this afternoon at quarter-to-two is a possible reality for you. It must be or you couldn’t have gone there, but when I now say, “Go back there,” you cannot do it.

When we met yesterday in the afternoon I wandered around to some people, to nine or ten people, I looked them in the eyes, connected with them, and in all of these cases, in each one of these people, I saw their Original Nature. It just took two or three minutes with each person. I mean what a fucking magician I am! All this rubbish in everybody, all this garbage from all your past lives, and in two or three minutes I can just rip it away, boing, and I can lift out of all that garbage your original nature. Now, am I a genius or am I not? (laughter) I can do that, that is a real possibility for me, but if I say to myself, “Michael, now do it again” – maybe, maybe not. So my message is: Don’t try.

(There are noise disturbances over the speakers while Michael is using the microphone/headset)

What is that? Why is it making funny noises?

Amagiri: I can’t explain it.

You see, that is what I am saying. Thank you very much because this is my whole teaching now, which is that you can’t stop it. You can’t make something happen if it is not happening, and you can’t stop something happening if it is happening. You have some freedom in how you deal with it, but you can’t change anything that is happening.

Now say you have a sister and your sister says, “I want you to meet my new boyfriend.” She introduces her new boyfriend and you think, “What a slob!” But you don’t say, “You’re a slob,” you smile, you greet him, and then maybe you get to know him and you like him, he is a good guy. But the fact was, in that moment what came up was, “What a slob.” So you say, “This is terrible! What a slob I am to think that this man is a slob. I need to wash my mind out. I need to cleanse my heart. In fact I need to become enlightened! This is terrible, here I am, half enlightened, I see a guy and the first thing that comes up is ‘What a slob’.” If you are a Catholic you have to immediately go to the Father, confess and say, “Father, I am terribly sorry. I met this guy, my sister’s beloved, and I thought ‘What a slob’.” “That is really terrible,” he says, “you have to do five thousand Hail Mary’s.”

Don’t feel guilty about such a thing. There is nothing you can do about it. Do you think if you say to yourself, “This is a terrible thing that what comes up is – this man is a slob,” that it won’t happen anymore? The next day when you go to see the bank manager you will still look at him and think, “What a slob!” (laughter) But then he says, “Sure I will lend you the money,” so you think, “What a great guy!” (laughter) But just because you find out he is a great guy, you can’t stop the fact that when you first saw him you thought, “What a slob.” So I am saying to you all: don’t try and interfere with that which cannot be changed. You didn’t decide to think “This man is a slob,” it happened. There is no way that you can stop such things happening.

You know, I meet a lot of women in my work and I find many of them fantastically attractive, actually I find many women fantastically attractive, not only you guys. When I was young I also found many women fantastically attractive, but I was a leg man, the legs of a woman were very important to me. I would think, “Ooh, she’s really attractive,” but then I would look down, “Oh, what legs!” and I would immediately turn away. I wouldn’t be interested anymore. I mean so superficial, I am ashamed, but that is what used to happen. Now this doesn’t bother me anymore, I don’t look at the legs so much, but now and again I look at one of my attractive friends and think, “Oh, she’s beautiful. Legs aren’t too good!” (laughter) But I don’t say, “I am not going to work with her anymore,” and I don’t say, “I am not going to hug her,” or anything else that might happen, but in that moment that old thing comes up. What to do, it is coming up! There is nothing I can do to stop it. It could happen again at anytime, so all you girls have to wear trousers! (laughter) This comes up very rarely, I can’t remember the last time such a thing came up, but just last week or so it came up. (laughter) I said to myself, “Michael, you call yourself enlightened and you are troubled by the shape of a woman’s legs!?” No, I didn’t say that, I said, “What, that old thing comes up again?” So things are going to come up and there is nothing you can do about it. So relax, and don’t fight, don’t correct, and don’t try.

Everything we do and have done in the Work often brings you into beautiful spaces, and that means those places are a potentiality for you. It is like one of those balls on a pinball table. The ball goes up and can fall into one of the grooves at anytime and then a flash goes up – five thousand points, ten thousand points, one hundred thousand points, ‘My God, I just got enlightened,’ one million points! And you do get enlightened, I see you all getting enlightened – and then getting unenlightened. So then you can get enlightened again, but if you start feeling despair that you have lost that beautiful space you were in then maybe you will be so busy with that it can’t happen again.

A lot of you are therapists, say you are working with somebody of the opposite sex, you are talking about some serious matter or working on the body or something and suddenly the whole sexual energy comes up. You think, “My God, I would love to screw this guy or this woman.” What do you do? You note that, say that it is true, and you get on with your therapy. But you can’t stop such things coming up. You can’t say to something or other in you, “I am now doing therapy so please restrict your responses to the following… and all these other things, please, for the next hour, don’t allow.” Do you think it will work? I assure you it won’t work. But it comes up, so you say, “Aha, that’s true,” and then you get on with your therapy. So you do have a choice as to whether you do anything about it, but you do not have a choice about what comes up.

Let’s take jealousy, nearly everybody feels jealousy, it comes up. You don’t think you are a jealous person and then suddenly you see your boyfriend or girlfriend in a close embrace at a party with somebody else, boing!, there it is. Now you are all spiritual people, you know that jealousy is out, that jealousy is primitive, that it is for ordinary people, not for spiritual people on the Path towards enlightenment. (laughter) So you feel ashamed, but you can’t stop it. But you can stop blaming anybody for it, that much from your understanding of true nature you can do. You can say, “I feel it coming up but I am not going to put it on him or her, or the friend and so on,” I am going to say, “It is coming up, let it come up.”

The place in you where you would not feel any jealousy in the same situation does exist in you. I have very often been in that place where I don’t have any jealousy at all if my girlfriend is having some intimate connection with somebody else, but then suddenly out of the blue it comes up again. What to do? Have I fallen off the pinnacle of my mountain and plunged down into the depths of jealousy? I have just moved to a different potentiality because feeling jealousy is also a potentiality. I don’t say when that happens, “My God, after all I am a jealous man!” I say, “Oh my God, jealousy came up,” and know that there have been many times where jealousy has not come up and that is also a potentiality. So life will throw you around in all sorts of different places that are potentialities.

For most people the kind of places we went to this morning is not a potentiality for them, and maybe on your side the kind of violence that goes on in the world is no longer a potentiality for you. If you read the papers as I do you see things going on where you think, “Impossible for me. What kind of person would do such a thing?” It could well be that your centre of gravity has shifted so that it is no longer even a potentiality for you under any circumstances, just as the beautiful spaces you find in our Work are not a potentiality for probably ninety-five percent of the world – but if they came in this room and spent the next three days with us then it would be a potentiality, for sure. But how can you make a fixed personality about somebody who is moving through different potentialities? How can you make a fixed personality about someone who is subject to things coming from beyond them?

Most of the time you are not choosing; sometimes you can choose but very often you cannot choose because we are all, as we saw in the meditations, connected to everything. And you have no control over all this everything. This morning when I said, “Put your arms up in the air,” I said, “There is universal energy there,” and I also said, “In that universal energy are all energies, and maybe you are fortunate enough to draw out of that universal energy some specific kind of energy which will be very positive for you.” So on a Zero level when I say we are all one and we are all part of the Oneness, that is true, but on a One level we are all subject to the inputs from everybody else. And you are impotent to do anything about that, you can’t control other people and get them to behave towards you in the way that you want.

All this movement, all this impulse, all this energy, that moves into you comes from somewhere that is totally unknown to us all. Everything that ever comes through anybody comes from that unknown place, and everything that comes from you in any direction also comes from that unknown place, so in a way everything has equal validity. That is difficult to accept, but everything has equal validity because everything actually comes from the source of all existence. Your negativity and your positivity come from the same place. Your kindness and your impatience come from the same place. Your friendliness and your hostility come from the same place. Your love and your indifference come from the same place. Speech and silence come from the same place. Light and darkness come from the same place. And if through work on yourself you can shift your centre of gravity then certain potentialities drop off and new potentialities arise. But within that range of possibilities you have to be open to anything happening at any time, inconvenient things, things you are not proud of, but if you say you are not proud of them that means you have a certain image of yourself and that this in fact spoils the image. But if you don’t have an image then sometimes it is like this and sometimes it is like that.

So please don’t manipulate yourselves. When you manipulate yourself then you have a certain idea of how you want to be or how you want to be seen, and then you try to deal negatively with anything that spoils that image. Relax and allow things to happen, and be aware of them for sure, but don’t try to manipulate yourself to be this way or that way. And don’t condemn yourself if stuff comes up because stuff does come up. Just say, “Aha, fancy that,” and walk on.

To follow this teaching you have to really let go of yourself, to let go of your attempts to shape yourself. You have to let go your likes and dislikes, in the sense of going for what you like and trying to avoid what you dislike. In a way you have to be neutral, you have to always come back to neutral. If you are in gear then you are straining, you are trying to get somewhere – or you are trying to get away from somewhere. To be in neutral is to be able to say, “Aha,” to what happens. “Now this, now that. That’s beautiful. That’s not so good. Oh, that’s sad. That makes me unhappy. That makes me angry. That makes me glad. And all these things are potentialities in me.”

I was just reading a book by a guy who went around India interviewing a number of masters, or gurus as they call them there. He is now writing a book on Western masters and he came to Unacho a couple of months ago and interviewed me for that book. So I read this book called ‘Blueprints For Awakening’ right through, all these teachers, and nearly all of them say something different – in a way similar but something different. Each one of them is so sure – and these are great people, no question – and yet the next one thinks differently. Nearly half of the people interviewed are women, and they are all so sure yet all different, so which one to believe? Sometimes he talks to them about anger, “Do you ever get angry?” he asks. “Only when I have to awaken my disciples,” just like me! (laughter) I only get angry when I have to awaken my disciples otherwise I don’t get angry – no, not like me, sometimes I get angry for the most stupid reasons. But what to do, it comes! (laughter) Sometimes I get angry with students to wake them up, for sure. I have always done that, that used to be one of my tools in my early days. I was a master of anger at one time. I used to smash people in my early days, and it worked. Sometimes I used to get angry for trivial reasons, and sometimes today I get angry for trivial reasons, it remains, I confess, a possibility for me. But so what? I have a possibility of looking at somebody and in a few minutes seeing their true nature, and actually seeing their true nature shine back at me. What a skill! Few people can do that. It is the most incredible gift that I can do that. And sometimes I get angry about nothing, and a lot of times I get impatient for no good reason.

I go and see a homeopathic doctor down in Locarno. I have been going there since we lived in the Villa, for more than twenty years, and after she has given me the session she always asks, “Do you want to do Bach flowers?” “Okay, let’s do Bach flowers,” I answer. So she puts all the bottles out and you have to flick the ones that you think are right for you by feeling the energy. Then she tests them with a pendulum to see if they are okay – maybe I have picked the wrong one and it is the one next door. I go and see her approximately four times a year, every three months for twenty years, that is eighty times, and only once out of those eighty times have I not chosen Impatiens. (laughter) I don’t know what is in the bottles, they have no name on them – anyway I would avoid it if I could! – flick, flick, flick, she writes them down: Impatiens. On the sixty-fifth time I went there was no Impatiens. “I am healed!” but the next time there it was again. (laughter) What to do, I get Impatiens. I get impatient because I am so fast in everything that I do that compared to me everybody is slow – people take ten minutes and I think if I did it myself it would take two minutes. I am not using this as an excuse but it is a partial explanation. The fact is that it is still part of my set-up that I get impatient. But so what? I am also a genius! (laughter) I can’t complain, can I? None of us can complain because nobody is ever going to be perfect. So the more potentialities you open up through the Work here, or any other kind of work that you do on yourself, then the more likely you are to spend more time in those beautiful places you find and less time in the not so beautiful places. But that whole movement, ideally, I assure you, is effortless. No trying, no striving – it is the wrong energy, you can’t do it.

I was talking over dinner last night with Sandipa and Anuradha about healing and about a Goose who recently died. He died in a Samadhi Tank. He went into the tank to do some exploration and he didn’t come out, not alive anyway. We were talking about how he was always trying to heal himself, and I was saying that if you directly try to heal something in you you are giving it energy. You have to keep it present otherwise the whole healing becomes impossible, and on top of that the healing you are doing is taking place on the same level as the thing you are trying to heal. My whole Work says that is not the way to heal. The way to heal is to actually go to another level entirely where this thing that needs healing can have no presence. That is not always possible, I know, if you have a broken leg then you have to have it mended on the same level as the leg. So I am not a fanatical about this, but in general this is my attitude towards all disturbances, to look for another level. It is the same with any problem you have, the more you try to solve it on the same level the more unlikely it is that you will succeed, and what is more, you have to keep the problem there in order to try and solve it. All your attention to solve it is saying, “Don’t go away because I am working to solve you.” You can spend your whole life working out what to do about the problem of jealousy and you will die being jealous of everybody who is living longer than you are! (laughter) You will still be jealous, but there is a place that is potentially there for human beings in which it simply doesn’t come up.

So all these spaces we explore in the seminars are to open up potentialities, and maybe to stretch in the right direction, in a positive direction, the range of possibilities that are in you so it no longer includes things like violence, cruelty, indifference, and prejudice towards other kinds of people – coloured people, people with different religions, and so on – that these things can get left behind because they are no longer a potentiality.

Occasionally you can move back a bit and suddenly something old comes back again, like a famous football manager who found himself saying, “That black bastard,” even though it turned out he has many, many, black friends. But in that instant ‘that black bastard’ came up. And the whole world press descended on the poor guy for saying such a thing, saying that he was a racist and so on, but it just happened in the moment. I mean we have all sorts of bastards here – Austrian bastards, Danish bastards, many German bastards, we even have a Canadian bastard over there. (laughter) At different times they are all bastards, but it is nothing. Just let it come up and go away again. It doesn’t mean that is who you are. Such a range of possibilities can come through human beings, from the most exquisite to the most hideous, and this has always been so. All we can really do is shift our range so the worst is not so bad and the best is more beautiful and more brilliant. But there is still always this range of possibilities, and sometimes there is the possibility of falling back under extreme circumstances into something you thought you had left behind.

So accept that is the way it is, that is the way it is for human beings, that is the way it is for you, and don’t be the lone ranger who wants to be different from everybody else because you won’t succeed. Relax and just watch it all happening, and when you fall into these great spaces don’t say, “Ah, that’s who I am!” say, “It is great to be here for a while.” Tomorrow it might be different and then you will be ashamed. You will struggle hard to get back to where you were yesterday, but the only way to get back to where you were yesterday is to wait and see if it happens. Of course the more often you do end up there then the potentiality of it happening increases, for sure.

If you can, my friends, look at it like that then your focus changes. For most people most of the time there is only one focus and that is the self, and all these manipulations I am talking about to try and improve the self is part of that focus on the self. But if you see the response of the self, the way the self acts, what the self does, you see it is usually a product or a result of what comes into you from all around you, so then the focus can change from yourself to what is all around you.

Somebody asked me in Berlin last week when I was there: ‘What to do about always wanting attention?’ I said the antidote of that is to give attention. I talked about the stages that children go through, and there are many parents here so you will know: when the child starts playing it just plays. Everything is new, everything is wonderful. It picks something up, looks at it, puts it on its head, shakes it around, makes funny faces at it – whatever is there the child picks it up, is curious, and explores. That is the first stage, just wonder of the world. There is no special self there, just an awareness, a curiosity, a human being exploring the world, the reality. The second stage is: Mummy, look at me dancing! Mummy, look at my new dress! Daddy, watch me score a goal! Daddy, watch me stand on my hands! (laughter) – parents have to notice what is happening. And the third stage is: if I do this, I will get noticed. I just do it to get attention – and that is where we finish up. So I am talking about getting back to the first stage, instead of asking for attention to give attention – to yourself too, but without analysing, just attention to: ‘Here I am, sitting and talking. My fingers are moving up and down, I have a little bit of tightness in my shoulders, and I can hear my voice speaking.’ I am not making anything of it, I am not judging it, I am not weighing it up, I am just aware that that is going on. And I am also aware of the windows, the curtains, the flowers, and the people – of the things that are in my environment in this moment. And if I was sitting in this room on my own it would be exactly the same. I wouldn’t be talking but I would be sitting here, feeling myself sitting here, looking around at the curtains, the plants and so on, giving attention to my reality.

So if you give attention then you don’t need attention, it is irrelevant. You are totally involved with what is going on, with who you are and where you are. But the obsession with the self is because you really believe that you can make something of yourself in the image that you have, that you desire, and I am saying this project is doomed. The big project is to be open to whatever is there, and as an extra to go to places where you can find possibilities in you which you call fall into when you open to what is there.

So it is very beautiful, my friends, to sit in silence and stillness if silence and stillness is there, not because you decide to force it. When you find yourself in silence and stillness you just wait, without really waiting, and see if the universe moves you, the forces move you, even something deep inside yourself that you are not conscious of moves you. But without a motivation, without a goal, without intentionality, just in a way throwing yourself open to the essential forces in life. But the difficult thing, even if you manage that, is to do it without actually demanding or even expecting a result.

I am not talking about a new way of finding action, though it may in fact turn out sometimes to be the case, it is about somehow being open to non-action, to what they call ‘just being’. And if you can really fall into that as opposed to just experimenting with it, trying it out – which means you are not really in it – you will find that often it is so rewarding that you don’t care whether a movement or action comes or not. But if it does, and when it does, then it will have a different quality from when it comes from you. You will feel that some true force is moving you and that that force has a universal quality, in the sense that it already includes that which you move to and that to whom you move to. So if you come from that place and look at somebody then the look that you are giving is already including the universality of all including the person you are looking at. That person will then feel seen because they can see themselves in you. But then you can’t decide who to look at. You have to look where the look goes because the look is the boss.

Then life becomes unpredictable. What is true this moment for you may not be true the next moment. What the movement is this moment, it will not be repeated maybe ever again because you are not something that is set anymore with certain habits, inclinations, choices, and history. Something can happen totally in relationship to a person or a job and then it could be complete and have no future validity, or the validity changes. That of course can be very upsetting to people who live according to rules and set pieces, and so maybe you can’t always follow that line of spontaneity.

In circles of explorers of human nature in the East and the West, a lot of them arrive at the saying that the highest state is where you live in spontaneity. If you are guarded, protected, cautious, and wanting to preserve an image then you can’t be spontaneous, impossible. But if you have nothing that you have to relate to in order to get approval then it becomes possible, and then you come out of nowhere – which is where everything comes from anyway and that is why it is felt to be the peak.

Talk, X-Run Part II, Stiersbach, 11th of December 2008