On The Path

 Living Like Tantra

One of the most important steps on the spiritual path, if not the most important, is the ability, the skill, the possibility, the power, to simply be with your experience. Not just to be with your experience, but to simply be with your experience.

The tendency amongst us all is that when we experience something we have to do something with it: analyse it; explain it; categorise it so that we can put it into our archive, our filing system; make an action; use it as a basis to go somewhere in order to gain something from it, to use it in some way. To add to it rather than to respond to it. And all these things that we do destroy the experience and convert the purity of the experience into another event in the movie.

The moment your mind comes in in order to do something about the experience or with the experience, it will only do so in terms of its own models. It will destroy the experience, because it will relate the experience to the existing set of ‘possibles’ that your mind is guided by. To be able to just taste the experience, stay with the experience without adding anything to it, taking anything away, or taking a step which you might feel is a development of the experience, a utilisation of the experience, this is very important. All these things detract, subtract, reduce the power of the experience.

When you have an experience, it is always from outside you. You meet something or somebody, some event happens: you have an experience. So that is your gift. The universe has given you this gift. And then what we do is to say, “Thank you very much,” wrap it up in paper, put a little ribbon around it, and pass it on to the mind and say, “Undo that and tell me what it’s all about. Just add it to your assemblage of experiences, make sure you put it in the right position, and then I’ve got one more experience in my display of experiences.”

To actually just stay with the experience without describing it, without naming it, without interpreting it, without analysing it, without making anything of it whatsoever, without even saying anything about it in your mind or anybody else’s mind through conversation, gives you a chance that the experience will enlarge you, will shift you, will bring you forward - or backwards (chuckles) - to somewhere where you were not before. But if you capture it and grasp it with your known mind and all its knowledge and experience so far, then the unknown factor in it is lost.

One of my favourite Zen sayings is, ‘Don’t add anything to life.’ But even that is too much, because I’m adding something. (chuckles) Anything other than ‘don’t add anything’ is adding something. But this is the way we function, so it is very hard to stop doing it. Once it starts, you are already almost lost.

The only way, really, to correct this self-destruction of experience is to be present and aware at the instant the experience is there - which means all the time - and watch the movement to interpret it, to do something about it, to act, to add, to escape, and to say no. And not just to say no, because that, in a way, is fighting with it - and if you fight with it, then already again you are lost - but to say, “No, I’m not going to do that. What I am going to do instead of doing that is to stay with this instantaneous feeling of something happening in my being. I will not go with you; I have an alternative to going with you in your interpretations, in your actions, in your escaping, in your running away. I have an alternative, and that is to simply breathe and be with the experience.”

That doesn’t mean that you are simply passive and you are just saying, “Well, I mustn’t do anything, I just have to sit here, breathe, and be with the experience.” Well, yes, you do - that is what you have to do, but…

The mind says, “Yeah, but then nothing ever happens.” But if you stay with the experience without adding anything to it, the alchemical mix of what you are and what has come into you, into the wider experience, will, when it is ready, produce a response which comes from the experience - directly from the experience, and not first to the mind and then the mind attempting to convert it into some action.

That’s the crooked way, going through the mind. The direct way is that you wait for something to happen out of just being with the experience, and then it’s a response and not a reaction.

When we’re in the energy space and people go into great screaming - like some people do sometimes, like someone here did this morning - this is not a response, this is a reaction. This is the mind interpreting whatever is going on and saying something about it and therefore reacting.

For instance, you may be in a situation where you feel fear. Something’s going on and the energy that’s moving is fear, and so you stay with the feeling of fear. Then the mind comes in and says, “I am afraid. I’m afraid of what is going on, and when I’m afraid I scream. What I have been doing since I was a child is that when I am afraid, I scream, so I’m going to scream.” The scream comes from the mind, it does not come from the situation.

There’s nothing happening in this room that could possibly cause anybody to scream in the way that some people here have been screaming. If somebody comes at you and starts to really damage you and hurt you with some instrument, a knife, or starts choking you, then you will scream, and that will be from the experience, but nothing in here is causing the possibility in a genuine way to scream like that.

So I’m not saying don’t scream, you guys, I’m saying just see that this screaming comes from off the centre of the actual experience. The mind looks at the experience and the mind decides, “This is screaming time, this is the place where I scream, this is the experience where I scream, like I did when I was four or five years old. I am afraid: I scream. Help, mummy! Something’s happening and I feel afraid that I’m going to be damaged, destroyed, and I can’t handle it.”

What you discover when you learn not to go off in the mind in response to what is happening to you and to stay with the moment that something strong happens is that you’re not only experiencing when something strong happens, you’re experiencing every instant of your life.

Normally, you don’t know that. When I say that, you say, “Of course, I know that is true!” But normally, I assure you, most of you - some of you some of the time and some of you a lot of the time; all of you some of the time - when your experience is not strong you don’t experience experience at all, because you are thinking, planning, wondering, remembering, discussing, debating, playing. And so the moments of experience of just breathing, the sounds going on, your presence in life, you don’t notice, you’re not there. Then something strong happens, that breaks through the mind, crashes into the mind, and the mind says, “Oh-oh, something strong is happening. What do I think about that?” and then you are back into the mind again. The experience forces its way into the routine movement of your mind and your activity, into the movie. So all the time you are not actually aware of any particular experience, you are in the movie.

When you learn, through the strong experiences that come, to stay with the strong experiences, then you get a taste of what it is like to be there and present without anything added, just with life. And then you see that this is going on all the time. Even if it is not so intense as it is in this moment, even if you’re just sitting quietly, not doing anything, not going anywhere, the essence of presence and being, and knowing about that being through experience, is always available. There is no instant when it is not present. Not one single instant.

And then out of that awareness you see that although sometimes it’s strong and sometimes it’s not so strong, sometimes a lot is happening and sometimes not very much is happening, always something is happening, and that happening is you. You discover that in fact when something strong is happening and something not so strong is happening, something is always the same, which is just you and your existence. It may be strong, it may be not so strong, it may be hardly there, but underneath all that variation between peaks and plateaux the fact is that it is always the same: just you are alive and in it, and it is in you. And when you can be with it in that way all the time, or more or less all the time, then you have arrived at yourself for the first time.

So do you want dreams and movies, or do you want reality?

Dreams are very fascinating, movies also, because you are the hero or the heroine - everything is happening around you. And when you are just there, you are not the centre of reality at all; you are a centre of one reality, but the power of existence is so intense that when you are in it you have no longing, desire or hope for anything whatsoever. More comes, but you are not demanding it, eager for it, longing for it, because just the simple being, being in livingness, is itself a wonder.

So it is in the opposite direction of getting somewhere, which consciously or unconsciously everybody seems to be trying to do. It is getting nowhere. There is nowhere to go, and there is nowhere you need to go. You are already there.

I know you all know that intellectually, because you must have heard it, and heard it many times, but in this moment I am not just saying it, I’m adding to what I have already said this afternoon that that is not just what I tell you is the truth - that, I’m saying, you will discover is the truth in the direction I am pointing.

When a star collapses it becomes very dense. The gravitational field becomes so strong that nothing can escape from it, not even light, so it is called a black hole. No light can emerge from it. When you look at it, it is black. The light cannot get out. And it gets darker and darker, and deeper and deeper, and then it goes to a point in itself, called a quasar, and then it emerges out into another universe as light. All the light that has been crushed and prevented from experiencing itself builds up and builds up, and then crashes through into a new universe in a great shower of light.

And it is like that on the Path. As you withdraw your essential energy and force - your personal force - as you withdraw your search and desire and longing from the ego star, travelling inwards - which is what the spiritual path is about: going within, looking deeper than anything that happens - you come to your pure being, and from there a whole new universe opens up.

Then you see light, and then you see that everything is paradise. Then you see the kinds of things also that some of you already are experiencing: that everything is a dance, and everything is part of it, and it’s not having to move, it’s being moved. All these kinds of things become clear, apparent. And then there’s a totally different order from our understanding of how things run.

And to make that conversion, this is what has to be grasped - this that I have been telling you. The moment. The experience of the moment, of the reality. And you have to hold hard to that experience.

These were Buddha’s last words: Hold fast to the truth within you. Hold fast to the light within. Work out your own salvation with diligence.

‘Diligence’ means with concentration, with effort, with commitment, with determination, with resolution. To stay with that place inside you, that life which is the centre of your being. And that’s not an abstraction, that is something you find by being with yourself each moment. And that is hard to do when you are used to travelling around all over the place in the mind. But when you get to the point in the experiences, as you can get to here, where something very intense is happening, then this is the opportunity to be with it and to see that you don’t use it to just jump off again and add it as some kind of ginger in the movie.

When we are just thinking, and day-dreaming, and wondering, and remembering, this is tedious in the movie, but we do it. It bores us, but we still do it. And then a great experience happens and we say, “Ah, now I can put some ginger in the movie! Now I can put some real explosions and fireworks in my movie. I’ve just had this experience, so throw it into the movie.”

This is what happens. And it has to be resisted. You have to stay, not just fight it, but stay with it and say, “No, I don’t want to lose this in the movie, I want to just taste how I am in this intense moment. That’s all I need to do - to be with myself and taste how I am in this intense moment.”

This is the whole purpose behind tantra. When we make love we rush with the head: “Oh, that was good! Now what do we do next? Ah, orgasm! Right!” - boom-boom-boom, bye-bye, finish! (laughter) And then again, and then again, and then again. Tantra says, “Well, just being together, just being close, just touching each other in an intimate way, just uniting sexually, this is such an intense moment, why do anything, why add anything to that?” But the mind says, “We have to get somewhere. This is great, but we have to get even greater. Let’s have even more.” But instead, if you just stay with the intensity of just holding and touching and being with, suddenly you see that you have all the intensity that you could possibly ask for in that moment.

And finally, each moment can be a tantric moment. Just sitting here in this room can be like a high, intense, sexual experience, erotic experience, love experience, passionate experience, joy experience, happiness experience, pleasure experience. That which we usually have to do something in order to engender, to make happen, is actually available every moment.

And when you find that place where you are tasting each moment without thinking about it, without adding to it, without analysing, without comparing, where you are able just to be in what you are each moment and take what comes as an expression of That which you are, then you have completed the X-Run (the X-Run being the name of one of the more advanced Trainings offered by Michael, on which this talk was given), because that is the X, and the X-Run is a journey to that place where you are in a tantric union with all that is around you each moment.

So any attitude you have toward your experience is going to spoil it, whether it is, “I have to get something out of it,” or maybe something quite different like, “Well, I’m a cool customer, so I’m not going to let it take me in its charge; I’m going to be an observer of the moment, I’m going to be cool.” All this, too, is adding something to it, because your ego is still in charge, deciding what to do about this experience: “How to use this experience to my benefit, as I think” - quite erroneously, of course - “I need to be benefited?” Because your idea of what you want, of how to benefit from the experience, is based on your movie and your ideas of what is good for you, but you don’t know what is good for you.

Your experience each moment actually does not need a ‘you’ at all. I hope people here at least have had some glimpses of that. You do not need a ‘you’. The experience happens, but you do not need someone called ‘you’ to deal with that experience. The experience doesn’t have to be dealt with, it just has to be allowed.

Talk given during the X-Run, 05.12 2002.