May 30th, 2006
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Happiness comes from being.
All the things we enjoy (dancing, drinking, drugging, driving cars, watching sports, etc.), the parts of those things that bring joy are the "being" parts. So what this means is that the things we chase don’t bring us joy or bliss. We already have happiness inside us, we just need to learn to listen to it.
Just being is blissful. If you start judging and call a situation bad or good, you’re not being anymore. You’re thinking.
Action that makes us happy does so even when we don’t understand presence because being pours in anyway. How much better could it be if we learned to foster presence? That is the state of awakening that everyone is talking about. One, because you would be able to have more happiness in general. And two because, you become non-dependant on things. Your job doesn’t bring you joy, your money doesn’t bring you joy, your relationships don’t bring you joy because you already have joy. That is true freedom. It’s our mistake thinking joy and happiness are outside us.
This is not to say that we only foster presence and don’t do things anymore. Rather we continue to do many of the things that bring us joy and we learn to foster more joy from them.
We can become fearless because there is no way to take our happiness. There is no way to separate us from bliss once we know where it comes from.
May 1st, 2006
This talk is about the box of language. The main point is that since we are all one, when we create the separate reality (the one to talk about), we are “lying” to ourselves.
Language creates a box of agreement. But we are still separated by perspective. A smaller point but something we tend to miss. Perspective is what language is trying to relate, but we trust memories as if there was little or no perspective. Again, this is a different point than the main theme, but still important.
Language will always be incomplete. You can’t capture things with language, you can only point. The structure of thinking ends up being a detriment because we tend to remember our judgements about things. The language of the situation. We tend to get stuck in the labeling mind rather than the listening mind. The party was “bad”. But not to someone who enjoyed the party.
Language is a descriptor. It is an abstraction of truth. It adds a layer onto truth. So, what’s the point? Why discuss the box of language? Well, as we’re trying to open our minds, we need to learn that we can think differently.
I discuss the need to talk. The need to fill space with commentary. Truth comes from the act of listening, not speaking.
I also mentioned oneness and unity consciousness. Mentioned the book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke, and Ken Wilber’s No Boundary. All the greats had this state of mind, or state of being.
Other interesting points: Math is a language. We use words to define other words.
April 16th, 2006
Worry has become an epidemic. We seem to almost always have a background sense of worry. Worry means to feel uneasy or concerned about something; to be troubled; to cause to feel anxious, or distressed.
All worry is the same thing and we need to learn what it really is: An irrational habit of imagining a future that often doesn’t come. We ruin this moment when we worry. We think we’re helping ourselves by planning for the worst, but it’s a very negative, and unhealthy way to live.
We can see that worry is useless. Once we see it’s uselessness, why would we ever let it affect us again? The next time we are deep within a situation, we tend lose perspective. We think that the new situation is the most important situation ever. "If I don’t get this work done, my boss will be upset." Often our fears are not even true, but even if they are, it often doesn’t matter as much as we think. We end up being irrational about the consequences.
Does your worrying about something help the situation? I bet you work better, faster, and more accurately when you’re calm or in the zone. Worry tends to lead to mistakes. So it’s a very illogical place that we find ourselves: 1) we’ve created a small situation (not an earthquake tsunami, but rather filing papers!) to worry about. 2) We’ve chosen a less effective state of mind to deal with whatever "problem" exists. This is a horrible habit and a huge error for humans.
Examples of worry include things like our safety (staying away from strangers), humiliation (work projects, being bad at something we have to do), etc. When the thing worried about actually happens, the event itself is often no big deal. Yet beforehand we act like the world will end.
The fix: Learn to bring your attention back to your breath. First realize you’re worrying, then drop it. The practice of meditation helps learn to drop the situation. There is no use in holding on to worry. Worry is ALWAYS IN THE FUTURE. It can’t exist here. So bring your attention here to drop it.
April 10th, 2006
What is the definition of form? I’m not sure I’ve seen as many different definitions for a word before. On dictionary.com there are twelve different definitions before moving into forming and other variations of the word. So what I’ll do is try to tell you how I mean it here…
In the total of experience, if we were to leave that as one thing, there would be no forms. Forms then arise out of that oneness. These forms are the things that we separate out, like people, cars, and trees.
So far, they seem to be separate "things" but I want to take that further. They can also be ideas, and anything else we can name and feel separate from. They can be a job. A job has no physical form, but it has an idea form. Anything that is not us and can be named can be called a form for the purposes of this talk.
A feeling is the experience of a situation, the form is the idea of the situation. Another way to think of it is that forms seem external to us, and feeling seems internal to us. All forms are in the thought realm. Something becomes a form when we give value to a separate entity, giving it a name, etc.
Feeling is open and receptive; it is listening. Form is naming, or talking.
Two points to make today:
- There is a literal practice of bringing our attention from the form realm to the experience of feeling realm.
- When we’re not doing that practice, we become very attached and sad unnecessarily.
We get lost in the idea, or form, of something. We stick to it past it’s usefulness:
- salaries – why do we stay in a job when we are unhappy?
- cars – why do we think they’re beautiful? What about them do we find beautiful?
"Attached to the idea about something" is how most of us live, but that’s not what we really want. We want to feel good. When I believe that money will do that for me I make money my entire focus. That’s the error. How many people do you know that are doing jobs they hate because they think they need money? Do they really know how much money they need? Have they spent any time trying to figure out where their happiness really comes from? Wouldn’t that be a better use of their time?
One example of stopping the identification with form can be seen while playing sports. We can begin to realize that playing a sport is done for the fun of it, not the score of it. When we get mad at ourselves for scoring a certain way in a game, we’re stuck in the form world.
Another example is when we look at an expensive car and like it, but don’t know why. We could say we are a little lost in the form world then. Do we like how pretty it is? The power in connotes? Do we know what we like about it?
The fundamental shift is bringing our attention away from forms, beliefs, values, to the feeling of situations, and dancing between those two states. Ultimately. we could realize that the feeling of a situation is what we really want.
Somewhere we’ve gotten lost in the idea of things instead of the feeling of the moment.
March 12th, 2006
What is the human condition? Humanity seems quite insane. What is the root of that insanity?
Our core problem is the fact that we feel separate. We are ego, but we are not only ego. We need to evolve into the realization that we are much more than that.
There are two parts to that evolution. The first part is the realization that we are identified with an ego, time based self, and that we can drop that identity. The second part is the practice of coming back to this moment (leaving ego) over and over again every time you realize you are lost, until it becomes normal. Every problem comes down to this, and is fixed once we realize and act on this.
Discussed lots of the old shows and mentioned briefly how they relate to this core condition.
Lastly, as we learn what our ego is, and that we can drop it, we realize that we can change the human condition. The fact that it is only a “condition” and not an absolute, or permanent, state of being is a wonderful thing.
Referenced: Eckhart Tolle
