The Real Reason Why We Suffer And How to Change It
Transcript: Non-duality Self-Realisation Satsang Meeting
Yallingup - Margaret River - Western Australia
So, why would we want to feel all of these things?
Wouldn't we want to get away from them?
Why would we want to hang there?
Well, by not feeling the feelings within us we’re denying reality, we're denying truth, we're denying the moment, we're denying now, we're avoiding.
And then, what we might do is crave happiness, contentment, joy, wealth, power (which isn't a feeling), stimuli from food, stimuli from conversation, stimuli from Facebook, social media, etc, etc.
So then, we avoid what's within us in that moment.
For example, recently somebody's grandfather died, there's going to be grief and sadness with that. I mean, if you liked the person there's going to be grief and sadness, isn't there? That's a natural part of life. That's a natural part of us being a human here, having this form. It contains these sensations, it contains these interactive experiences, these relationships.
When somebody dies that we care about, or someone moves away that we care about, or we lose a partner, there is a tearing. There is this deep uncomfortableness that can arise.
And what the vast majority of humanity does is they try to push it away and ignore it.
You know, you see on all the movies, a girl leaves the guy, he runs up: 'let's go
get drunk, let's go party, let's shake this off.' Basically, let's avoid this for as long as we can, get intoxicated so you can forget about it and you can get on with your life.
But what that behaviour does, just using that example, it doesn't heal anything.
This thing is now in the system. And it's collected with all the other stuff in the system related around this. And it will be stored in a certain place in our energy system that matches that frequency, and that's where it lives until something else triggers it. Then it pops, and we relive it again. Over, and over, and over again.
So one incident now can turn into a thousand incidents. If it's really traumatic it can just keep coming back, and coming back, and coming back.
“And so now the past is our present, and our present has therefore disappeared. And then we live in our past pain because we didn’t heal it in that moment.”
The body is an incredible storage mechanism that stores it in the cells in energetic form so the mind can still function, and you don't get eaten by a lion because you're too traumatised to run.
It's a survival mechanism. We store the stuff and get on with things.
You can almost say the vast majority of what makes up a human being, or a human here, or a human not here, is a series of patterns, avoidances and cravings.
A lot of your personality is language and the culture you're raised in; your cultural family, your city, your town, your suburb, even your street. One street’s full of Roughnecks, and the next street’s full of luxury houses. In some places, the street you grew up on will determine a lot of your patterning, your responses.
So we could say it's a series of interactive responses, patterns that we call 'I'.
We wrap it up in a bag and put our first name on it.
But then, these responses change as we evolve or devolve. As we get wiser or dumber; they're transient, they come and go. A lot of these patterns are driven by these past energies within us.
And also, what the mind is capable of doing is imagining futures and dreams, and then craving them, or not wanting them and having worry, or anxiety, setting up expectations or fears. And all these things end up as vibrations through our nervous systems, and they resonate with the stuff that's already stored there.
And suddenly, all these patterns are evolving that then play out in the world.
When you learn to feel what's within you in the moment, and have the courage and the skill set, there is a muscle that gets exercised, it can be difficult.
“You can learn to just feel what’s within you, in the moment.”
Moment to moment, day to day, and not run from it and avoid it- which happens very subtly as people are discovering as they get deeper into this. It happens so slowly you don't even know it's happening.
So, even getting your awareness to a state that you notice these little moves and shifts of the patterns within you that you just consider normal. They may not be normal. They may be just things playing out you're not aware of, that are actually dysfunctional and causing you and others pain.
“When we feel all these things, we heal them in the moment.”
They may express themselves, our complexion may change, we may feel uncomfortable.
You may need to leave the room, or make a note, ‘I'm in the middle of a business meeting', 'I'm in the middle of work, I can't deal with this right now, but later I'm gonna go away and feel this in its entirety, allow it to express itself, allow it to have some air time.' And, guess want? That piece of trauma is now expressing itself. And eventually, it runs out. It's finite. Eventually, it comes to rest. It ends, like smoke coming out of a pot, you turn the heat off and watch and eventually the smoke finishes.
It's like this, a pot with smoke coming out. There's an empty space there now. And the more and more you do this, the more and more you empty within.
You may have heard, first you have to empty before you can be free. It's like this. You have to empty all the smoke out of you. And the only way to do that is to feel. And feel what's in you, now. As it arises.
And life's going to treat you in different ways, and the way we play this game here is you're on a desert island suffering and a ship is sailing past. We actually sometimes go out and look for our wounding. We swim out to the ship, we don't just wait for it to crash on our shore, or see us. You can swim out and meet it. So, the first part is to go out and find what's within our system. And feeling this is the fastest way to heal and get free. Without a doubt. You know, lightning's faster, but your chances of getting hit by lightning and surviving are not very high.
In Tibetan Buddhism, or a lot of Buddhism, this is called the Vajra path; Vajra, and their symbol is a lightning bolt. That's as close as you can get. Or, the tantric path is the energy path.
“The Tantric path is the path of energy, of feeling and experiencing and understanding energy.”
We all experience energy. Who's walked into a room after a really big argument and felt it, even though the argument is over? You weren't there for it, but you can feel it when you walk in. We're all energy sensitive, it's just a matter of how energy sensitive. And it's real, it's legitimate.
It's more real than any thought you've ever had, and it tells the truth, it never lies. It's not able to, it doesn't have that ability. Energy tells the truth.
So, that's why you feel. So you empty, and when you're empty, guess what? I, this thing, this idea that you are, this persona, personality starts to dissipate.
We put personalities up on pedestals, don't we? The great personalities, the great actors, the great this, the great that, it's based in personalities, about how people interact.
The word 'persona' is rooted in the Greek word 'mask'. Persona means mask. So, everyone's upholding masks. Because they're full, and it comes from all these patterns within our system.
It comes from two places, it comes from what we came in here with; two identical twins can have radically different personalities, even though everything they do is the same. They come from the same area, the same street, same everything- but they have radically different personalities, yes? So, what happened there? How does that work? Well, they came in with something, didn't they? They came in with seeds.
Then the second thing is the culture you were raised in, and that includes what order you were born in the family; the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th born, your parents... etc. These two factors determine the personality, the persona, the mask.
And what's it masking?
“It’s masking emptiness. It’s masking vastness. It’s masking bliss, joy, love... the deepest truth of what you are.”
And people think they can self help their way to love. No, you unpeel your way to love. It's already here. There's nothing I can add to you. If anyone's adding stuff you need to leave, or have a good look and see what's up.
It's an undoing. You're already perfect. It's just that there's patterns over the top of the perfection. There's nowhere to go, there's nothing to do except stay inwards. And feel, and feel, and feel... not run, not hide.
And, of course, you will. At times you're going to run, you're gonna hide, you're going to do this, you're gonna screw up. Then, you know, you catch what you're doing, and stop.
You come back to your exact moment, the precise experience of now. And you keep returning there, and you keep returning there. Without judging yourself for failing for the last five minutes, five days, five weeks, five years, a lifetime; and you start fresh again.
The truth is, you've never been the same being two seconds in a row anyway. And, you've never been your identity; it's imagination. It's all rooted in imagination. Separation is imagination. I don't care what you think, that's the truth. And some people here have seen it, and know it.
This is a less trodden path. Thankfully, some countries in the East helped keep this data, this information, this understanding alive.
Humanity may one day understand what it actually is.
“In science they call it the Unified Field; in Eastern traditions, there is Samadhi, Advita, Non-Duality, Awakening, Nirvana...”
And they've known it for thousands of years. Now science has finally got a sentence for it, 'The Unified Field'. And the scientists can learn about it, study it, and know about it, and completely understand with the mind, although they can't. They will never know what it is, truly. This is an experience that you see, that you know. It's not an understanding of the mind.
This is prior to mind. It's the only thing that I found that isn't finite. You know, you go traveling the world and do all these things, and build relationships. They all end up in the same place, boredom and needing more; needing to do more, needing to be more.
The mind never rests; there's no rest for the head of man.
It never ends. Just grasping, more, more, and more.
This is the only thing that I found that doesn't end. It just keeps getting deeper, and deeper, and more profound and more profound.
It's infinite. And it's you. It's the vastness. It doesn't have an end, and it has no beginning.
It doesn't have an end, and it has no beginning. It's here prior to your birth, and after death. It's the paper the words are written on; but all our attention is on the words, and we never see the paper. It's on the image on the screen, but we never see the projector. And the paper's vast; the words are not.
I've tried both. I've lived as an identity, quite a strong one, for quite a long time. The two don't compare. And I found this and lost it for a little while, and I was shocked at how different it was. When I fell out (of awakening) for a little while, for a few hours one night, it was the worst night of my life, and I had some pretty bad nights, I can tell you. But that was by far the worst night of my life, when I realised the difference again.
An arrogance was appearing, so I got a reminder of the preciousness of it.
So now I share it, I try to share it, so others can find what they are.
I'm not giving you anything, it's what you are already.
“Find it. Stay there. Give up the I, before it tortures you anymore.”
Have you not been tortured enough? For such shallow rewards, if you're lucky.
And if it was easy everybody would be doing it, by the way. So understand that this can be a challenging path.
But, if you've seen enough you know there's no option. If you've suffered enough you know there's no option.
But that's just an understanding people come to, or they don't. They’re ready or they're not, there's no getting around that.
There's no circumnavigating that, it's just how it is.
It can't be created. I can't instil it.
Keywords: Why Do We Suffer, Non-Duality Awakening, Why We Struggle, Adyashanti, Why Do Good People Suffer, Spiritual Seeker, Vajra Way, Tantric Path