How To Trust Life & Stop Resisting Adversity

[00:00:00] A just listening to a talk where a little bit is. [00:00:05] Yeah, trusting life more, even though sometimes it, it appears quite brutal and ruthless and unkind and harsh. [00:00:15] My experience has been, and it's not a unique experience from those that have finding themselves dropping into deeper levels of consciousness, a lot of our suffering and our pain and our difficulty in the world is actually what pivots us in that direction. [00:00:30] I, uh, somebody may know, I had a really bad, uh, injury when I was 15. Snapped my ACL and did a bunch of stuff just riding a bike, doing wheelies as a kid, just a freak accident. [00:00:44] It just got worse and worse over the years. I always had pain in my body for years and years and years and I got used to it and I used to have to be hyper attentive about my knee, 'cause if I was playing sport as you do as a kid, and I wasn't concentrating, somebody bumped me, my whole knee would, my whole leg would go that way. [00:01:00] And they didn't have repairs back then, they didn't have surgeries for it. It was just, that's how it is. And so my whole knee grew in a weird way and then it affected my hips, my back, my shoulders, my neck. [00:01:10] And my leg was a bit shorter than my other one, so everything was out and just ricocheted up the body. And, um, I mean, that's, there's much worse accidents, let's, let's not overemphasize how bad it was, it was just a damaged knee at a young age. [00:01:25] And but it ricocheted through my body for years and years and years and years and years and just a tragedy of the time, right? You're a kid and you can't do what you used to do and, you know, you're, uh, you know, again, there's people much worse off, let's, let's just put that aside for a moment, but, you know, within my experience it was a difficult thing because I was very active and I did get into water sports. I surfed all my life. I was an absolute fanatic. [00:01:54] Everything revolved around it and I got into kiteboarding in Hawaii when I was living there and it when it first began, the first year and, um, I was one of them. [00:02:18] And, uh, just okay, let's do a turn here. See what happens. And you know, we all sort of worked it out with their primitive gear and no safety systems and but it the old and the primitive boards ended up having to make my own boards just so I could get a board that wasn't chattering all the time. [00:02:37] And, um, you know, that was just, I didn't know, it was just pounding my knee to bits, it was just grinding the knee down 'cause it was all loose and it was full of cartilage and basically it was bone to bone. [00:02:50] At some point. And so one day I went to the surgeon in Hawaii and, uh, I was 33, I think. And he says, you know, this is the worst knee for your age I've ever seen, all the knees I've ever seen. It's really bad. You need to stop everything right now and just, um, walking with soft shoes, never jogging, never running, just stop everything. [00:03:12] 'Cause you're only going to get two chances. We can do two surgeries and then that's it because they got to draw your bone out and they're going to get two shots at it. So and each one lasts 10 to 15 years. You're too young, you're going to have no knee when you're older. Not good news, right? [00:03:26] I owned a water sports store. I was teaching it. It was my life. I loved it, you know, I'd be the first in the water and get a few and then come in and I was taking calls on the beach, making a living and it was brilliant. [00:03:40] And, uh, living in the Tropics in Hawaii was awesome. And, um, had the beautiful wife, had the beautiful daughter, had it all. And then frum, rug got pulled. [00:03:54] All over, depression, you know, just ruined, ruined me. [00:04:01] And, um, you know, tragedy, right? Sounds terrible, doesn't it? But in my view now, in the rearview mirror, it's like best thing that ever happened. [00:04:09] Like absolute pivot point in my life. Where I'd still be running around like a lunatic. [00:04:19] Chasing waves, watching the surf reports, planning my life around everything and just doing all these outwardly things just to keep getting my hits and my buzzes and my and my, um, my lifts, let's say, yeah, my lifts. [00:04:31] And, and then, uh, it all crashed down. And, and, uh, within a short period of time I closed the business, my business partner. I just walked out pretty much. I couldn't do it anymore and he just took over and sold everything and walked out and, uh, we came back to Australia. [00:04:54] In 2005. And, um, difficult times. [00:05:02] But as I say, in in the rearview mirror, that was like, okay, well, I can't do that now. What can I do? And, and, you know, I built a house and did all these different things and just took care of them as best I could and got by and lived life as you do. [00:05:16] And, um, and then at some point a next tragedy, like, uh, um, there was a realization I came to at some point that there was a real turning point, kind of a dark point where all the interactions I was having with a lot of people in the world and my, and some of my close friends and family, I realized no one was listening. [00:05:35] And everybody wanted to heard but nobody was actually truly listening. And everybody was just waiting for a gap to speak and there was very few people actually really listening. [00:05:46] And I was one of them. And it was just shattering to me. I was just shattered. I was going, oh my God, all I care about is whether people are listening to me or not. And that's all it seems that most people are doing as well. [00:05:59] And it was just, I don't see the point. So I, I recluse, I retreated. [00:06:05] I just didn't do the social environments anymore and it was a kind of a a recalibration time and a inward time. [00:06:14] And, um, that went on for a while. [00:06:19] And then one day I met a person, a friend of mine, who was living at one end of my house, his girlfriend came along and told me about, and I was looking at going deeper and I was in the Mexican tradition of the Toltec tradition. I'd been studying that for a while. I've I've skipped a lot here, but in Hawaii I discovered Carlos Castaneda's book about Don Juan Matus. [00:06:37] And I was just, it was like a gravity had picked me up. I was just, yeah, I'd hit a gravity field, like a beautiful gravity field. And just it's just this weird thing was happening and I couldn't reading it was just almost like I was vibrating and, and so I was really attracted to that. And my partner at the time was right into it as well, so we were just into it and conversing on that and they were just a basically, later I found out they were, I didn't understand all that properly yet, but they were an awakening system. Although I'd read Buddhist stuff and Dalai Lama stuff, I didn't realize this was an awakening system. I was just blown away by it. [00:07:11] Then I once I interpreted all that languaging, it was an awakening system. I was just dove deep into it for probably, I don't know, five to eight years. Just that's all I listened to. All music was gone. Everything, just Don Juan's, specifically, not Castaneda's storytelling, just Don Juan's teachings. [00:07:31] And they're real world teachings, the teachings of how to reconfigure your system for the deepest truth possible while going by your daily activities. [00:07:42] Instead of sitting at home at night or sit getting up in the morning and stretching or whatever you're doing. It's just an ongoing process that you you ease into over time. [00:07:51] And you develop it's a skill set, it's a reprogramming you might say, as in instead of, uh, dysfunctional thought and worry and all the rest of it, you're just mindfulness, basically, if you wanted to simplify it. [00:08:08] And then I found out, you know, there's, I was going to go to Mexico and study with a quite a famous teacher and just it was going to be a week and thousands of dollars, but I was ready to do it. [00:08:21] I just needed that. It was just such a deep yearning at that point. And, um, then I found out there was other teachers around that are awakened. Oh my God. And I found one and started studying under them. That's when the game just completely changed the game, but it went on and I realized, oh, this is the, if I don't have a teacher with me, what I'm doing is I'm reading the texts of all these great masters, but they're going through my filters. [00:08:42] So I'm interpreting these dead words my way. And that was quite a discovery too. Oh my God, if I keep reading this, I'm going to actually start building inventory again. I'm going to start crowding the house again. I'm going to be locked in again in a different way, spiritually. [00:09:00] So I realized I need to actually see these through absolutely no filters. How do you do that? You do that with the teacher. It's already where you're trying to go. [00:09:07] They're at the beach. They're, you know, let's call it Paradise Beach, can we? They, they, they live there and they've come back into the jungle through the trails and up and down and dodged the swamps and gone over the bridges and they know all the where all the crocodiles are and the quicksand is and all the rest of them. And they've come back and they're grabbing you and they're saying come this way and they take you down the trail and they get you to that beach. [00:09:28] Instead of trying to read a map that's in Hebrew. [00:09:32] Written 2000 years ago in a different time and all the terrain's changed. [00:09:40] They're here now doing it and they've done it in, in the modern world. [00:09:56] Or you know, even some of the old true texts, true, true texts, they're still hard to navigate because of the languaging. The language they were written in. [00:10:04] And then you sort of discover discernment, which is like what the Buddha talks about. Instead of judgment, you have discernment, like you're reading a passage, but did you read it how it was spoken, how it was meant to be spoken? Because like Nisargadatta said with his, I Am That, one of the most famous non-duality books ever written. He said I don't like the book. It was one of his students wrote it from his satsangs. They just transcribed his satsangs. He said, yeah, but I was speaking to this person at that time. [00:10:24] In for them. These words may look impressive on the page, but are they for you? Probably not. Because you could ask a question and then you could ask exactly the same question but there'll be a different answer. [00:10:37] Because if, if it's, where are you at right now. It's very dynamic. The world's very dynamic. Everything's dynamic. [00:10:48] And this was another discovery you had. We, we, we're interpreting everything through our own filters. We have our own little religion going on. [00:10:59] And if it's true, it means it happens every time. It's like, um, does the sun rise in the east or the west? Right? There's an answer to that. And it doesn't change. So that's a truth. A relative true, not a relative truth. [00:11:17] It's not like, oh, you, uh, we've got this new fangled way of doing things. We think's really cool. No, that's an idea but is it what what's true or not. What's true? What, what, what temperature does water freeze, what temperature does it boil? That's true. [00:11:29] It's the same, you have to hunt that truth within yourself. What's true and what's not true? Just like ice and water and and, uh, boiling water. What's the true of it? [00:11:41] Not what's the latest fad? What's the latest cool thing? What's, what's this gang doing? What's that gang doing? What's the actual truth that's timeless that Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, and everyone would agree on, which they did agree on. Laozi, Bodhidharma. It was a core truth everyone agreed on because they discovered it directly. And some of these people never even knew of each other. [00:12:05] But some of these, these folks all discovered the same thing. And that's happened all through history and it's continuing to happen. [00:12:17] But because like me when before I hurt my knee which turned me inward is, or further inward, I should say, 'cause it was already, that was a rising, the, before, before, what did I say just before that? [00:12:38] Yeah, no. Yeah, yes, thanks, Hugh. [00:12:49] Yeah, well, that's right. Before that it was everything was outward and not inward, see? [00:12:57] It was all out, out, out, out, out. [00:13:02] And then through that I had to, I went in, went in. And what you discovered is, oh my God, that's the finite. This thing just keeps going. It doesn't end. So, you know, the pleasure seeking in kiteboarding and surfing had a limit. And the waves were getting bigger and scarer and more and I was looking at all the really big wave surfers. I knew. [00:13:20] They were kind of, that was this, there was this sense there was nowhere else to go. They were at the end of the limit. They were towing into the biggest waves already and all they were praying for was the next biggest wave. And this is this angst there. [00:13:33] So it just doesn't end, it just keeps going. And everything I did in my life ended up in a dead end and boring and I had to keep putting more energy on it, find bigger, better to make it worth doing anymore. Like a drug addict. [00:13:46] More bigger and bigger doses and then you get, you run out of, you get to the max dose, then you have to change. You get to the max dose, you have to change. And that's how I was living. [00:13:54] And then you discover this inward journey and it doesn't end. It just keeps going and going and going and going and getting better and better and more and more spiritual. It's like taking it on a monument, but it's all right, it's more vibrant and alive and beautiful. [00:14:14] And so that was it. That's what it was, like, what's the truth? And, and the truth is just this inward gaze that just keeps, and everything reveals itself. And life is actually your assistant if you let it be. [00:14:27] And it may not appear to be your assistant, but it is. [00:14:33] And that's the discovery in the mirror too. Oh my God, if that hadn't happened, that wouldn't have happened, that wouldn't have happened, that wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't be here now and living a life that is something I never expected to happen. In my wildest dreams. [00:14:50] And that actually included the dissolution or the dissolving of the fraudulent eye, I thought I was. [00:15:00] So the I couldn't have imagined it. [00:15:04] It wasn't possible. [00:15:08] And what I thought it was and what I read it was and what I got there, it was very different. And I've heard this over and over, it's a lot simpler. It's different to what I thought it was 'cause your mind cannot perceive it, so I can only keep pointing. Anyone teaching or trying to share this, what you are under everything, can only point. [00:15:26] Like, just like I can, you know, as you could say, I can I can describe sugar with a thousand words, 10,000 words, but you won't know it until you taste it. It's like that. [00:15:48] And when you taste it, it's going, oh my goodness, this thing's amazing. [00:15:55] And then it resets your, um, your compass. You're like, oh, that's a different level of being or a different level of of, of contentment and happiness and joy that I've ever experienced. You've got to reset now. You've, you've, something that resets in you, it's like, oh my God. [00:16:10] My life is a little bit of a struggle actually in comparison. If it doesn't hold, if it holds, that's great. But quite often it doesn't, usually it doesn't. So you drop back into our, uh, identified existence with all its trials and tribulations and dramas. [00:16:28] That some it holds. But then you know, now you have a now where you are now and what you've experienced. And then now you've got a problem. [00:16:36] You've got the best problem in the world anyone can have. [00:16:42] What do I do to live in truth because I've just seen how beautiful it is. And it's a it's a it's non-denominational. It's it's it's, um, existential truth. It's it's universal truth because it doesn't vary. [00:17:00] It's it's it's it's discovering that under it all. [00:17:04] So our beautiful waves, I've expressed before, the Toltec system, they say it's infinity. This is the active side of infinity, this interaction. And all of our interactions, all of our relationship, black, white, tall, short, hello, goodbye, everything is in the tonal or the active side of infinity and this is the discovering of the inactive side of infinity, which the active side relies on for it to even exist in the first place. [00:17:34] This is none of this without that. But this is just the animation of that or Shiva dancing or emptiness dancing, however you want to frame it. [00:17:44] Whatever words you want to frame it with. This is what this is. This is the dance of emptiness. [00:17:53] All the fullness is in the emptiness and the emptiness is the is the power source. [00:18:05] And if you are, unfortunately, the bad news is if you don't know that, if you don't have that, well you the you're you're missing a core aspect of your whole existence. You're not understanding something that's primary to you. [00:18:19] You understand? But you, you you're going to have glimpses. You may have had just a deep laughter or just fallen in love with a small baby, or you've had these moments where your pet or a child or something went up and down your life and it's just magical. That's it. In that direction. That's that's that's the direction. It's like love is probably the deepest love and happiness you can feel is is getting close to what you actually are. And now it's residing there. [00:18:45] Residing there. Not as a fleeting thing you keep chasing. [00:18:52] Learning to reside that way. And that takes time. You you're now you're in, you have to get used to a whole new, um, a way of being an energy field that that's almost alien. And, um, it's not alien, but because we're just not used to living in love and deep in our hearts anymore. We've been trained to be in our heads from a small child. [00:19:12] And then from our head we create matrixes. And we live in the matrixes. [00:19:19] Of course, everyone's near, right? But the truth is, most people are in matrixes of thought and beliefs. That's just how it is. Because we were given them and they're unchecked. And they're so, uh, uniform that that just become reality, but they're not reality. You discover that as you drop in. So much of what you've been told isn't true. [00:19:40] Almost everything, in fact. [00:19:49] At best it's relative true, relative truths. [00:19:55] So that, you know, I've covered about 18 topics in that being, so I could just spread off in every direction, but I'm just going to leave it there and hope [00:20:09] So it's just pull it back in now and see what you guys have got going on, huh? But the core message just to just to wrap it up is, you know, life's a beast sometimes, but it's actually your friend all the time you just do. You're paying attention. Are you paying attention? Are you trying to see what's going on? Are you, are you really listening? [00:20:40]

• The Pivot Point
  A moment of intense adversity that mechanically forces a shift in attention from outward, finite pursuits to the inward, infinite path.
• Life as an Assistant
  The recognition that all events, especially challenging ones, are not random obstacles but functional mechanisms designed to guide one toward Direct Realization.
• Spiritual Inventory
  The accumulation of spiritual concepts and beliefs which, when interpreted through personal filters, crowds the mind and becomes another form of imprisonment.
• The Fraudulent 'I'
  The constructed, biographical self-concept that is mistaken for one's true identity and is dissolved through the process of Direct Realization.
• The Inward Gaze
  The sustained, non-conceptual observation of inner space, which reveals itself to be infinite, unlike the dead-ends of outward seeking.
• Direct Realization
  The immediate, non-intellectual recognition of one's true nature, which ends the search for spiritual attainment. It is the 'tasting of sugar,' not the description of it.
• Filters
  The layers of personal conditioning, belief, and past experience that distort the meaning of teachings, turning them into dead data instead of living transmission.
• The Dance of Emptiness
  A non-dual framing of reality where all phenomena (the 'dance') are seen as the dynamic expression of the silent, empty source (Unconditioned Consciousness).
• Matrix of Thought
  A consensus reality built from unchecked beliefs and domestications, which is mistaken for objective truth but is merely a mental construct.
• Discernment
  The capacity to distinguish timeless, verifiable truth from relative, conceptual truth without engaging the Victim-Judge dynamic. It is a technical skill, not a moral judgment.